Facts on File Companion to the American Novel (Companion to Literature) 3-Volume Set

T H E FA C T S O N F I L E COMPANION TO THE

AMERICAN NOVEL VOLUME I A–F

CD EDITED BY ABBY H. P. WERLOCK ASSISTANT EDITOR: JAMES P. WERLOCK

To my father, Thomas Kennedy Potter, Jr. (1917–2003)

The Facts On File Companion to the American Novel Copyright © 2006 by Abby H. P. Werlock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Facts on File companion to the American novel / [edited by] Abby H. P. Werlock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-4528-3 (set: hardcover: alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Encyclopedias. 2. American fiction—Bio-bibliography. 3. American fiction— Stories, plots, etc. I. Title: Companion to the American novel. II. Werlock, Abby H. P. III. Facts On File, Inc. IV. Title. PS371.F33 2005 813′.003—dc22

2005012437

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design adapted by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Cathy Rincon Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS CD VOLUME I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION vi ENTRIES A TO F 1 VOLUME II ENTRIES G TO O 473 VOLUME III ENTRIES P TO Z 1013 SUBJECT ENTRIES THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL THE LATINO NOVEL THE DETECTIVE NOVEL THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL APPENDICES I. LIST OF MAJOR PRIZEWINNERS 1441 II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1449 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 1553 INDEX 1555

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CD College; Helen Pike Bauer, Iona College; and Michael J. Meyer, DePaul University, all of whom helped me to match qualified scholars with particular American novels. Mickey Pearlman’s PowerPunch, a women’s empowerment group in New Jersey consisting of talented women in all fields, provided both encouragement and professional contributions. Thanks also to Kelly Flanagan and the National Council for Teachers of English; The American Literature Association Web site; and the University of Pennsylvania Call for Papers Mailing List, all of which proved to be valuable resources. Librarians and libraries make all research and scholarship possible, and I particularly wish to thank Sue Wolfe, librarian, Allen F. Pierce Free Library in Troy, Pennsylvania, for acquisitions and access that smoothed the way for this book. At Mansfield University Library, Larry Nesbit, director of communications; Karen LeMasters, head of interlibrary loan; and Beth Williams, head of circulation, provided invaluable access and assistance with databases and interlibrary loan. Professor Laurie Hime of the Miami Dade Community College Library provided specialized assistance on numerous occasions. Of the many databases and reference books helpful in compiling this book, three in particular we found useful for background information: the Gale Group’s Contemporary Authors and Dictionary of Literary Biography and Greenwood Publishing’s BioBibliographical Sourcebooks. I wish to pay special tribute to Matt Strange of Autograph Systems in Mansfield,

A book of this scope owes its success to a stunning array of experts in myriad areas. Anne Savarese, former senior editor with Facts On File, conceived the work as the natural offspring of The Facts On File Companion to the American Short Story, published in 2000. Since then the manuscript has been shepherded by three highly gifted and dedicated editors: the multitalented Facts On File executive editor Jeff Soloway has overseen the work from beginning to end; author, editor, literary critic, and friend Mickey Pearlman focused her impeccable editorial expertise on hundreds of author entries; and my husband and assistant editor, Jim Werlock, concentrated his editorial and bibliographical skills on both author and novel entries. Additionally, Facts On File assistant editor Cameron Dufty provided excellent feedback on the manuscript. To the gifted scholars who contributed lively, original and jargon-free essays on American novels, I owe a huge debt of gratitude, not only for their expertise, but also for the time they stole from full-time jobs and busy lives in order to enhance the quality of this book. Their names appear after each entry, and their names and affiliations appear on the contributors list. For their longterm support of this undertaking, I am grateful to my agent, Diana Finch, formerly of the Ellen Levine Literary Agency, and to Laurie Likoff, editorial director of Facts On File. Thanks, too, go to Professors Robert DeMott, Ohio University; Rocio Davis, University of Navarre, Spain; Susan Goodman, University of Delaware; Michael J. Kiskis, Elmira College; Anna Leahy, North Central

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v

Pennsylvania, for repeatedly responding to computer crises both large and small, for explaining the vagaries as well as the values of computers and cyberspace, and for providing Internet backup assistance. Finally, I thank family and friends who consistently gave of their time and supported this project through discussion, suggestion, proofreading, and just plain encouragement: Marcia Case; Sally Case; Carole De

Lauro; Jill and Wade Fluck; Susan Hamerski; June Jacoby; Kate Kerr; Johnnie and Heinz Luebkemann; Melinda Neese; Abby Holmes Potter; Thomas K. Potter, Jr.; Dewey Potter; and John and Jennifer Winton. And, as with the Companion to the Short Story, I thank Marshall Case (1918–2005) for his standing offer of his 18th-century log house whenever I needed a quiet retreat.

INTRODUCTION CD The novel—from the French word nouvelle, meaning “new”—had its antecedents in Europe. Working its way across the channel to Britain, it took a variety of forms in the hands of such British practitioners as Sir Walter Scott (the historical novel), Mary Shelley (the gothic novel), Samuel Richardson (the epistolary novel). From its early appearance, the novel—loosely defined as any lengthy prose fiction work—was accessible to many, particularly the middle class, both in terms of themes and language and its availability through libraries. It addressed a broad number of social issues and classes and was available to immigrants as well as the native-born. By the time the American Revolution had ended and independence from Britain had been achieved, the fledgling country had new Americans who had no novels of their own, so these early American readers—middle-class colonists—would read English novelists. Because books were expensive (a good-size library consisted of 25 books), many relied on the serialized novels appearing in the more than 60 colonial newspapers and on public libraries, which charged only a few dollars a year for borrowing privileges. In 1789 William Wells Brown wrote The Power of Sympathy, now generally regarded as the first American novel. Then, as now, women constituted a large percentage of the reading public; moreover, it was women who wrote the two best-selling novels of the time: Even then there was the “damn mob of scribbling women” of whom Hawthorne complained. Susanna Haswell Rowson wrote Charlotte:

THE AMERICAN NOVEL “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?” asked the Englishman Sydney Smith in 1820. Although the American novel has now been with us for more than 200 years, its reputation has undergone a sea change over the last half-century. It weathered the dire predictions of its own death in the mid-1960s and continues to be a world-class genre. From today’s perspective it is difficult to recall that the American novel was once considered a sort of awkward younger sister of the English novel. Forty years ago, at Oxford University for summer study, a young Cambridge student admitted he had never read an American novel and asked me to name some famous American writers. When I mentioned Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, his response was, “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of them—but I thought they were English.” In my early years of teaching and graduate study—in the United States, Spain, Britain, and Thailand—because of a dearth in and growing need for expertise in American fiction, I was called on for various assignments and positions (for instance, in the early 1970s I gave a number of talks on William Faulkner, who had just been added to the A-level examinations in England). Still, just as the American novel appeared to be gaining respectability both within and outside the United States, no one could have predicted the explosion of talent that today characterizes writers of American novels. In contemporary parlance, who knew how significant the American novel would become?

vi

INTRODUCTION vii

a Tale of Truth in 1791 (later called Charlotte Temple), and Hannah Webster Foster wrote The Coquette in 1797. Not surprisingly, American attitudes as expressed in literature were inherited from those popular in Europe and Britain and, initially, found an outlet in the romantic traditions that exalted the individual over society as a whole. These revolts from older, more established doctrines blended with the prevailing interests of the new Americans, who saw infinite possibility in the New Eden for which they had abandoned their roots in the old countries. James Fenimore Cooper, the first American novelist to achieve international popularity and acclaim, took the romantic love of nature and the individual and created from them a number of distinctly American novels, particularly the Leatherstocking Tales, in which the white Natty Bumppo teams up with the Native American Chincachgook and gradually moves across the continent from New York State to the Western prairies. In Cooper are found the seeds of major issues with which Americans and American novelists would grapple, particularly the clash of the Edenic new world and individual optimism with the national sins against Indians, African Americans, and the land. Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed the darkness he perceived at the heart of the American experience through romantic novels infused with symbolism, a technique that became peculiarly identified with American literature. Herman Melville, too, expressed this pessimism in his great novels, as did Edgar Allan Poe in his writings. The concerns expressed by our earliest writers reached a crescendo in the Civil War waged in the United States between 1861 and 1865. The end of the Civil War ushered in a reaction against a romantic attitude and a tendency, reflected in American novels, to examine the human heart and the national character in the bright light of reality. The major novelists of the last half of the 19th century followed the lead of William Dean Howells, who encouraged writers to describe the reality of the United States as they saw it. Realism, better than romanticism, they felt, could respond to the social, economic, and political changes rapidly overtaking the county as it moved from the rural to the urban. Henry James wrote realistic portraits of the inner workings of American minds, and Mark Twain reproduced the sounds and ungram-

matical aspects of American speech as they depicted the late 19th-century American. This realism found supporters in such writers as the African Americans Charles W. Chesnutt and Frances Harper and the New York Jewish writer Abraham Cahan, along with such women as Mary Wilkins Freeman and Kate Chopin, Rebecca Harding Davis, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Edith Wharton. In the early 20th century their ranks were swelled by exposé writer Upton Sinclair, Hamlin Garland, and Edward Bellamy. Realism was stretched further by Jack London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser, whose naturalistic views— influenced by the teachings of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin—saw individual life subsumed to the greater forces of nature and fate. The cataclysmic effects of World War I, from 1914 to 1918, produced a generation of writers who believed in the credo “make it new,” and who became immensely popular. Emerging on the scene were such modernists as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, whose laconic, terse style still influences American writers, and William Faulkner, who transposed the southern experience into a universal one. Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer and others emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. Equally successful were Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, Ellen Glasgow, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, who continued to use realistic techniques to dissect the American psyche, as did the Native American Mourning Dove. As the United States entered the Great Depression, proletarian or social protest writers such as Meridel LeSueur, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos emerged as well. World War II produced some notable novelists: James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Irwin Shaw, for instance. Emerging to win the Nobel Prize, as had his predecessors Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, was Saul Bellow. Other writers influenced by their Jewish heritage include Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer. African Americans Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin were read widely, along with Ann Petry, Chester Himes, and Frank Yerby. Pennsylvanian John O’Hara and New

viii INTRODUCTION

Englander John Cheever achieved acclaim for their tales of suburbia, as did J. D. Salinger, and John Updike. Emerging in the late 1940s and early 1950s were the Beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. In the 1950s and 1960s self-reflective fiction became popular, headed by Vladimir Nabokov and followed by John Hawkes, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. The second half of the century featured such writers as Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, Gail Godwin, E. L. Doctorow, William Kennedy, and Ann Beattie, northeasterners whose fiction ranged from the realistic to the black comedy of the absurd. Southern writers continued to contribute through the work of Walker Percy, Reynolds Price, Lee Smith, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Jayne Anne Phillips. The Vietnam War produced notable writers Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone, and realistic and naturalistic fiction continued in the novels of Larry McMurtry, to name only one. Ethnically diverse and talented writers energized the novels of the last part of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st. Asian Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston helped lead the way, as did African Americans Toni Morrison (who won the Nobel Prize), Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, Ishmael Reed, and Paule Marshall; Native Americans Leslie Marmon Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and James Welch; and Latina writers Julia Alvarez and Sandra Benítez. In short, most of the old forms survive, given new twists or blended with one or more older forms: bildungsroman, Kunstlerroman, domestic fiction, and the epistolary novel, along with the gothic, historical, minimalist, mystery and detective, romance, science fiction, war, sentimental, and working class novels. The American novel not only survives but flourishes, as it continues to examine the individual experience, the westward moving tendency, the hero—male or female—the American Dream, the Protestant work ethic, the vanishing wilderness theme, and the continuing revitalization of the genre through the contributions of America’s innumerable voices.

ABOUT THIS BOOK Compiling and writing the entries for The Facts On File Companion to the American Novel has been both a heady

experience and a challenge. The book contains two kinds of entries: objective biographical overviews of some 450 authors and detailed, original essays on approximately 500 novels, mixed together and arranged alphabetically. Given the scope of the project, we understood from the beginning that, although we could not include every American novelist, we could with very few exceptions include all those who have won wide acclaim for their literary appeal or historical significance or have received significant literary awards, such as the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. In selecting novels, we selected those that are read most often in high school and college classrooms, as well as others that seemed particularly significant both historically and artistically, and some that have simply attracted a large following of devotees. In terms of genre, we followed the leads of numerous high school and college instructors and included a number of short novels or novellas. We also included several autobiographies and other nonfictional works that are presented via literary or novelistic techniques; these works are also frequently taught and read alongside novels. Finally, in addition to choosing a significant number of women writers, we selected a large number of writers from various regional and ethnic backgrounds, including writers whose work has attracted significant critical attention but in some cases has not reached the wider audience that it deserves. Although we planned from the outset to include a large number of contemporary novelists and their work—a priority that distinguishes The Facts On File Companion to the American Novel from numerous other reference works—we did not wish to do so at the expense of older writers and their novels. In fact, we wanted to pay tribute to the earlier, so-called classic writers, and, therefore, in many cases included alongside their famous novels some less well-known ones that deserve a broader readership. That said, we have included an unusually large component of prize-winning and critically acclaimed contemporary novelists and their work. The result is an expanded and inclusive reference work that swelled from its initial two volumes to three, resulting in an even better book than we had envisioned.

C

AD story through a series of conversations with interlocutors including an old woman named Rosa Coldfield, his father, and his Canadian roommate at Harvard, Shrevlin McCannon. For the most part these characters become the narrators of the story, though what they know is occasionally filtered through an authorial narrative voice. Not only do the characters remember different details of the Sutpen story, but they also differ frequently in their interpretations of characters and events. At times, they encounter gaps in the narrative or inexplicable actions, and they often remedy those gaps by supplying their own imaginative reconstructions of events and motivations. This is especially true of the conversations between Quentin and Shreve in their Harvard sitting room, which dominate the novel’s final chapters. Much of the enormously complex story of Sutpen himself is provided by Faulkner in a chronology and genealogy that appear at the end of the book. Sutpen is born in the West Virginia mountains in 1807 to a poor white family of Scottish-English descent, and 10 years later his family moves to the Tidewater region of Virginia. When he is 14, Sutpen is sent to a plantation house with a message but is turned away by a black servant, who considers him to be white trash. This event appears to be the turning point for Sutpen that prompts him to implement the “design” the novel speaks of and to run off to Haiti to make his fortune on a sugar plantation. There he meets and marries his first

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! WILLIAM FAULKNER (1936) Absalom, Absalom! was William FAULKNER’s eighth novel and the first to include a map of its setting, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In many respects it is Faulkner’s most ambitious work, and it caused him more trouble to write than any novel other than his SOUND AND THE FURY (1929). He was working on early versions of Absalom even before writing Pylon (1935), though the bulk of the work was done between early spring 1935 and winter 1936. This was an especially difficult period for Faulkner, as his attention was divided between work on his manuscript and work on shorter pieces, which he needed to publish to maintain financial stability. Work on his novel was also frequently interrupted by trips to Hollywood to write screenplays, another indispensable source of income. To make matters worse, in November 1935 his brother Dean was killed in a plane crash, and the combined stress of all these events created an additional obstacle in the form of some of Faulkner’s worst drinking bouts. The novel contains two parallel narratives, one involving the rise and fall of the Thomas Sutpen family, and the other involving 21-year-old Quentin Compson’s reconstruction of that saga. Quentin Compson first appeared in The Sound and the Fury, but in fictional time, his activities in Absalom, Absalom! occur less than a year before his suicide in the earlier book. Quentin gradually learns the details of Sutpen’s

1

2 ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

wife, the daughter of a plantation owner, and helps to suppress a slave revolt. Upon the birth of his son, Charles Bon, Sutpen learns of his wife’s Negro blood and repudiates her; he then strikes out for Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County. He arrives in Jefferson in 1833, bringing with him from the West Indies a horde of “wild Negroes” and a captive French architect. This strange group immediately begins to clear swampland on which to build his plantation, Sutpen’s Hundred. Despite his shady origins and uncouth behavior—which includes late-night “raree shows” featuring brawls with and among his slaves—Sutpen gains the town’s grudging respect by marrying Ellen Coldfield, a local merchant’s daughter, and accumulating a fortune in the cotton business. A son, Henry, and a daughter, Judith, are born to Sutpen and Ellen, but not before Sutpen also fathers a daughter, Clytemnestra or “Clytie,” with a slave. Henry meets Charles Bon at the University of Mississippi and introduces him to Judith, and they become engaged. On Christmas Eve, 1860, virtually the eve of the Civil War, Sutpen tells Henry about Bon’s origins, but Henry refuses to listen, repudiates his birthright, and runs off with Bon to enlist in the Confederate army. During the war, in which Sutpen also participates, Ellen dies, and Henry, upon his return, murders Bon at the gates of Sutpen’s Hundred, then disappears. Rosa Coldfield, Ellen’s sister, moves to Sutpen’s Hundred and soon becomes engaged to Sutpen. He insults her, however, by proposing that they have a child first and marry only if it is a boy—an heir to replace Henry. Utterly mortified, she leaves him. In his quest to find an heir, Sutpen turns to Milly Jones, the granddaughter of Wash Jones, an admirer of Sutpen’s who has come to live in an abandoned fishing camp on the property. But when Sutpen’s child by Milly turns out to be a daughter, he insults her as well, and Wash kills him with a scythe. At this point, Charles Etienne (de) Saint-Valery Bon arrives at Sutpen’s Hundred. He turns out to be Charles Bon’s child by an octoroon “wife” he had kept in New Orleans before coming to Mississippi. On separate trips to New Orleans, both Sutpen and Henry apparently had discovered Bon’s secret. Bon’s son comes to live at Sutpen’s Hundred under the care of Judith and Clytie, and after disap-

pearing for a number of years he returns with an extremely dark-skinned wife. They have an “idiot” son named Jim Bond, but a few years later malaria claims Charles’s life, as well as that of Judith Sutpen. This is the point at which the novel’s past finally merges with its present. In September 1909, after the conversations in which Rosa has been recounting the Sutpen story to Quentin, the two of them go out to Sutpen’s Hundred to investigate Rosa’s claim that someone—or “something,” as she puts it—has been living in the decaying house for the past four years. In an upstairs room they find an emaciated, 70-year-old Henry, still hiding from the authorities. When Rosa returns in December to bring Henry back to town, Clytie sets fire to the house, leaving Jim Bond to howl in the smoldering ruins. The key questions raised by this narrative and explored by various narrators involve the nature and motivation of Sutpen’s “design” and Henry’s motives for killing Charles Bon. The former appear to derive from the 14-year-old Sutpen’s experience at the Tidewater plantation, which crystallized for him a southern class structure that placed even African Americans above his “white trash” status. Sutpen reacts by attempting to raise himself to the level of the plantation owners who rejected him. This explains most of his actions, from his experience in Haiti to his search for a male heir. For both Rosa and Mr. Compson, this “design” is inimical to southern tradition. Rosa portrays Sutpen as the demon in a fable about the destruction of the southern way of life, which she also celebrates during the war by writing poems about fallen Confederate heroes. The more detached, ironic Mr. Compson finds Sutpen’s flaw to be his “innocence,” an innocence that makes him aspire to create an aristocratic heritage into which one can only be born, as Mr. Compson’s own father had been. Sutpen’s story is certainly, at some level, an allegory of southern history. The climax of Quentin’s efforts to get to the bottom of it occurs when Shreve asks him, “Why do you hate the South?” and the novel ends with Quentin protesting, somewhat disingenuously, “I don’t hate it!” (303). The critic Robert Dale Parker observes that Mississippi had no long history of plantation culture but saw the emergence of plantations only when poor

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! 3

whites migrated west to plant cotton in the 1830s and 1840s—about the time Sutpen arrived in Jefferson. This historical fact makes Sutpen’s story typical, not anomalous, and it suggests that in the novel, Faulkner is not endorsing but exposing the myths of southern heritage that inform Rosa’s and Mr. Compson’s narratives. As for Henry’s motives, a number of hypotheses are offered and rejected in the course of the novel, and they center on the unknown “trump card” that Sutpen supposedly played in that fateful Christmas Eve conversation with Henry. The first possibility is that the decisive revelation was the identity of Bon’s father, and that Henry murdered Bon to prevent incest between half brother and half sister. Next, Mr. Compson proposes that Sutpen, who had traveled to New Orleans to investigate Bon, told Henry of Bon’s octoroon wife. On this theory, Henry murdered Bon to prevent bigamy. The final hypothesis, and the one Faulkner’s text seems to endorse, is that Sutpen told Henry of Bon’s African blood, so Henry murdered Bon to prevent (further) miscegenation. This reading is borne out by the novel’s conclusion, in which Sutpen’s mixed-race progeny preside over the final destruction of his “design.” Many critics have seen in the novel Faulkner’s characteristic ambivalence about race as well as larger issues about the role of race in southern culture and American culture in general. One such study is that of Thadious Davis, who finds simultaneous attitudes of antipathy toward and dependence upon African Americans in the characters’ obsessive need to define themselves in opposition to the category of the “Negro.” The most prevalent attitude in criticism on the novel, however, focuses on the way its narrative structure makes the act of fiction-making or storytelling itself a central theme. For Robert Dale Parker, the novel casts suspicion on its various narrators and the stories they tell in order to critique compulsively repeated myths like those about the South, and Myra Jehlen takes this reading one step further. In her view, with the discovery of Henry in the decaying Sutpen mansion near the end of the book, the story moves from the realm of myth to the realm of history, from the realm of fantasy wish-fulfillment to the realm of objective existence. This move coincides with the ascendance of the theory that miscegenation was Henry’s

true motive, which for Jehlen represents the historical truth that all the novel’s characters try to deny. An opposed reading of the novel is that of James L. Guetti, who considers it the radical culmination of a tradition of skepticism that runs through Herman MELVILLE and Joseph Conrad. For Guetti, the failures of the various narrators to make sense of Sutpen’s story show the inevitable failure of language to make sense of the world or to represent an objective truth. Most important, Guetti sees this idea as the link between the novel’s two parallel narratives. While some critics, including Parker, have found Sutpen to be completely lacking in imagination, Guetti sees his pursuit of his “design” as itself an imaginative act, one that parallels the various attempts of Quentin, his father, Rosa Coldfield, and Shreve, to reconstruct it imaginatively. Just as Sutpen’s attempt to make meaning out of his life as a southerner are thwarted by his life’s essential meaninglessness, so the narrators’ attempts to make sense of his story are thwarted by the meaninglessness that haunts language. A comment Faulkner made to his publisher when he first conceived the novel sheds further light on the parallels between its two narratives. He said, “The story is of a man who wanted a son through pride, and got too many of them and they destroyed him” (Blotner, 334). Having repudiated his heritage, Sutpen pursues his design to recreate his own identity, and as Guetti notes, the culmination of his imaginative act of self-creation is the creation of a son: “Sutpen’s conception of fatherhood, as his conception of the entire world, is founded upon the conviction that the begetting of a son is not a physical or a literal act, but an imaginative and metaphorical achievement; fatherhood is the creation of the essential element in a design, in a structure that will endure” (Guetti, 91). But as Faulkner suggested in his own description of the novel, the creation of sons is the success that will also be the failure of his design: it is the sons who will destroy the father. Specifically, it is Sutpen’s mixed-race descendants who ultimately destroy his design. First Charles Bon, and then Charles Etienne Saint-Valery Bon, appear out of nowhere at the door of Sutpen’s Hundred, just as the 14-year-old Sutpen had appeared at the door of the Tidewater plantation house, and their appearance suggest an inversion of the scene

4 ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, THE

in which Sutpen is turned away by the slave. Their rejection becomes the “flaw” or unintended consequence of his design that rises up to destroy it for good when Clytie burns down the house, destroying Henry, the surviving “legitimate” heir, and leaving only Jim Bond to howl among the ashes. This struggle of the narrators to impose their identities on Sutpen’s story is clearly what Rosa Coldfield has in mind when she mentions “the raging and incredulous recounting (which enables man to bear with living).” Rosa herself is a poetess, and she admits that this struggle lies behind her reasoning for telling her story to Quentin: “So maybe you will enter the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now and maybe some day you will remember this and write about it.” But like Sutpen’s mixed-race children, Quentin has his own designs on the narrative he has inherited from Rosa and his father, designs that are in some ways opposed to those of the older generation. Quentin’s revisions of the narrative are the products of his ambivalence toward the South, as well as the more personal family conflicts that lead to his suicide in The Sound and the Fury. More important, Quentin’s own narrative is fated to be rewritten by other writers and listeners, a process we already glimpse at the end of the novel in his conversations with Shreve. Perhaps, then, the novel’s conception of the inevitable failure of fiction-making is based not on the inaccessibility of objective truth, but instead on the fact of mortality, which ensures the mortality of narratives in the sense that it dooms them to misreading and rewriting.

SOURCES Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Vintage, 1990. Davis, Thadious. Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1990. Guetti, James L. The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967. Gwin, Minrose C. The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner’s South. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Parker, Robert Dale. “Absalom, Absalom!” In The Questioning of Fictions. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 76. New York: Twayne, 1991. Pearce, Richard. The Politics of Narration: James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Bryan Vescio

ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, THE ANNE TYLER (1985) The Accidental Tourist, Anne TYLER’s 10th novel, won the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a Warner Brothers feature-length film starring William Hurt as protagonist Macon Leary, Kathleen Turner as his wife, Sarah, and Geena Davis as his lover, Muriel Pritchett. Like the majority of Tyler’s work, The Accidental Tourist is a domestic novel set in Baltimore and focusing on family tragedy and conflict. In coping with the violent and random death of their son Ethan, the tensions between Macon Leary and Sarah rise to the surface: she is warm, loving, and emotional; he is dispassionate, conventional, and undemonstrative. By the end of chapter 1 Sarah has left her husband of 20 years, determined to obtain a divorce. Alice Hall Petry has noted similarities between Tyler’s work and that of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, pointing out that the works of both writers demonstrate the often paralyzing and immobilizing nature of the past (Petry, 8). One year after Ethan’s senseless death, Macon Leary functions, but only in an almost mechanical way, and Sarah’s departure devastates him. Tyler’s psychological portrait of Macon is thoroughly convincing, detailed, and alternately comic and sympathetic. He is “leery” of an existence that has robbed him of both son and wife. Overcome by loneliness, Macon behaves in neurotic and obsessive ways, closeting himself in his house and adopting a rigid and unvarying schedule. He shops for groceries only on Tuesdays; he

ACKER, KATHY 5

wears sweat suits to avoid making choices and ensuring he will have no daytime clothes or pajamas to launder. Finally, after he breaks his leg, Macon moves in with his unmarried sister Rose and his two divorced brothers, Porter and Charles. The four aging “children” live together in their grandparents’ house, barricaded against the rest of the world, compulsively labeling their groceries alphabetically and playing “Vaccination,” their own complicated card game that metaphorically inoculates them against the hardship and sorrow beyond their walls (Petry, 215). Perhaps fortunately for Macon, he has the responsibility for Ethan’s dog Edward. The dog’s temperamental behavior reflects Macon’s own, and Macon decides to seek professional help for him. The compassionate dog trainer’s name is Muriel; she also appeals to Macon, and within a very short time he moves into her home and becomes a “surrogate father” to Muriel’s son Alexander, instilling in him a sense of self-confidence that Macon himself lacks at this point (Bail). Macon, who has made a living by writing tourism guidebooks for travelers who do not like to venture beyond the safe zone of home and neighborhood, is devastated by his new insights into the human condition. Yet he overcomes his fear of traveling in order to acquire material for his books. Tyler is suggesting that he has come some distance on his own journey. Unlike his brothers who have chosen to work in the secure but stultifying family business, a factory that manufactures obsolete cork-lined bottle caps, Macon’s travels signal his latent ability to evoke and accept change. Moreover, he learns from the unconventional Muriel, a free spirit and a madcap as well as a woman of unmistakably strong will, that behavior modification is possible. Edward the dog learns the same lesson. The novel ends in Paris, not Baltimore, where Macon is traveling on business. When he is unexpectedly joined by both his wife Sarah and his lover Muriel, Macon realizes that he must choose one of the two women. He knows that he will always feel romantic love for Sarah, but enjoys the spirit of adventure and feeling of joie de vivre that Muriel engenders in him. Macon, a man who, at his worst, is fastidious, pedantic, and hypochondriacal, has learned to be

merry and tolerant and adventurous. As in most of Anne Tyler’s novels, the journey has taught him that he does not have the power to eliminate his past or to deny life’s pain; however, he can make choices in his life and his traveling companion, and live with the most happiness possible under the circumstances, even if he is helpless to eliminate the residue of a painful past.

SOURCES Bail, Paul. Anne Tyler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Greenwood Electronic Media. Available online by subscription. URL: http://gw2.scbbs.com/cc/cc.jsp?bk= tyler&id=1-1. Accessed August 21, 2005. Evans, Elizabeth. Anne Tyler. New York: Twayne, 1993. Gilbert, Susan. “Private Lives and Public Issues: Anne Tyler’s Prize-Winning Novels.” In The Fiction of Anne Tyler, edited by C. Ralph Stephens, 136–145. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Petry, Alice Hall. Understanding Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York: Berkley Books, 1986. Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989.

ACKER, KATHY (1948–1997)

Kathy Acker, an iconic figure in the punk movement of the 1970s, became the female enfant terrible of the postmodern writing community, shocking readers and critics alike with her radically unconventional style and sexually explicit subject matter. Substituting chaos, immorality, and pornography for order, convention, and romantic love, Acker’s writings appear intentionally fragmented and disordered, but they are in fact a demonstration of society’s view of women as sexual objects. Consequently, she is both critically acclaimed for her talent and virtuosity and condemned for the radical nature of her themes. Acker, a native New Yorker, was born in 1948 to affluent German-Jewish parents. Her father deserted her mother before she was born, and Acker’s relationship with her mother (who committed suicide in the mid-1970s) was at best troubled. After attending college in Boston, Acker graduated with a bachelor

6 ACKER, KATHY

of arts degree from the University of California at San Diego in 1968. During the 1970s, she lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and in London in the 1980s, and authored several novels under the name “the Black Tarantula.” She first drew significant public attention with Blood and Guts in High School, published in 1984. Unconventional and shocking, the novel, featuring a diseased sex addict, reflects the pornographic and violent subject matter that became her trademarks. In such early novels as The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses (by the Black Tarantula) (1973), Acker intentionally uses characters, circumstances, and even entire passages from books by other writers, including Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. The first of Acker’s novels to attract serious attention from reviewers and critics, also called Great Expectations, opens with a passage from the Dickens novel and—to the surprise of those readers familiar with the original—suddenly features a modern reading of tarot cards and the not very Dickensian depiction of blunt sexuality. As poet and critic Robert Lort suggests, Acker derives a great deal of her technique from film and music, and thus readers might best understand her writing by identifying such strategies as montage, dubbing, and nonlinear concept of time. Like so many other post-Beat, postmodern writers, Acker sought to disrupt the conventionalities of fiction, particularly the separate relationships among writer, character, and reader: her aim was to have the “writer become character and the character the writer, so that the reader is no longer disconnected, sidelined from the text, but physically immersed in the text” (Lort). Acker’s experimental writing, she has said, owes a debt to both Jean Genet and William S. BURROUGHS. Acker’s work reflects Burroughs’s frank depiction of sex and violence as well as his so-called cut-up method, which randomly rearranges and inserts into his own writing numerous words, sentences, and even lengthy passages from William Shakespeare and Jack KEROUAC. Acker has also been inspired by French novelists Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras and radical philosophers Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari and, earlier in her career, by the Black Mountain School of poets. In DON QUIXOTE, Acker updates the 17th-century Spanish literary classic by replacing Cervantes’s male protagonist with a postmodern female (and her talking dog) who understands the fictitious nature of identity and chivalry. Empire of the Senseless, Acker’s 1988 novel, is set in a postmodern decaying Paris, a city sick with violence, patriarchy, and terrorism. IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY examines the life of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, while Pussy, King of the Pirates, is Acker’s updating of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. It features two prostitutes on a treasure hunt and a band of women pirates. The novel is characterized by a surreal fusion of influences as disparate as Hindu myths, pornography, and Treasure Island. Acker also wrote the text for The Birth of the Poet, the opera by her husband, composer Peter Gordon, as well as the screenplay for the film Variety, directed in 1985 by Betty Gordon. Kathy Acker was adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1991 until her death from breast cancer on November 30, 1997, in Tijuana, Mexico.

NOVELS The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec. New York: TVRT Press, 1978. Algeria. London: Aloes, 1985. Blood and Guts in High School. New York: Grove Press, 1984; as Blood and Guts in High School Plus Two (includes Great Expectations, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s My Life My Death). London: Picador, 1984. The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula; Some Lives of Murderesses (Black Tarantula, pseud.). New York: Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press, 1975. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove Press, and London: Paladin, 1986. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press; London: Picador, 1988. Great Expectations. San Francisco: Re/Search Productions, 1982. Hello, I’m Erica Long. New York: Contact II, 1984. In Memoriam to Identity. New York: Grove Press, and London: Pandora Press, 1990. Kathy Goes to Haiti. New York: Rumour Publications, 1978; in Young Lust, London: Pandora Press, 1989. My Mother: Demonology. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

ADAMS, ALICE 7

Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Young Lust. London: Pandora, 1989.

SOURCES Friedman, Ellen G. “A Conversation with Kathy Acker,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9, no. 3 (1989): 12–22. Pitchford, Nicola. Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Special Kathy Acker Issue. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9 (Fall 1989).

OTHER Acker, Kathy. “Kathy Acker (1947–1997).” Bohemian Ink. Available online. URL: http://www.levity.com/corduroy/ acker.htm. Accessed May 15, 2005. Acker, Kathy. “Kathy Acker: Where Does She Get Off?” Interview by R. U. Sirius. io magazine. Available online. URL: http://www.altx.com/io/acker.html. Accessed May 15, 2005.

ADAMS, ALICE (1926–1999)

Alice Adams, one of those rare writers admired equally for her achievements in the novel and the short story, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1975 for her novel Families and Survivors (1974). Her novel Superior Women (1984) was a best-seller. In 1982, after her work appeared for the 12th consecutive year in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, Adams joined Joyce Carol OATES and John UPDIKE as winners of awards for continuing achievement. Her novels have earned praise from reviewers and such fellow writers as Anne TYLER and Updike and have been alternate selections in both the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild. Love, in all its forms, is Adams’s subject. Her female characters must overcome difficult circumstances to carve a niche for themselves in a sometimes hostile world. Although men play important roles in Adams’s novels, the protagonists are usually women seeking self-definition, often through channeling their talents into work outside the home in a post–World War II world. Adams’s work, compared often to the southern essence of Flannery O’CONNOR and the sophisticated style of F. Scott FITZGERALD, is also similar thematically to that of her British contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Anita Brookner. They also write about love in its myr-

iad forms, although Adams is clearly more optimistic than Brookner. Born in 1926 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Adams grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1946. Married that same year, Adams divorced her husband in 1958, published her first short story in 1959, and supported herself and her son through clerical and secretarial work. Although she was 30 when she published that first short story, Adams did not actually make a living through her writing until she was more than 40. The settings of her novels echo those of her life: the South, New England, and the Bay Area of California. Her first novel, Careless Love (1966), details protagonist Daisy Duke’s successful quest for happiness with a new lover. With him she can forget her disappointments with both her husband and a previous lover. The three novels that followed, Families and Survivors (1974), Listening to Billie (1978), and Rich Rewards (1980), established her reputation as a talented and serious novelist. Families and Survivors focuses on three decades in the life of Louisa Calloway, a privileged southern woman, and her friendships with men (a psychiatrist and a failed writer who becomes an English professor) and women who see her through various crises. Deriving its title from reminiscences of a Billie Holiday performance, Listening to Billie follows selected moments in the lives of half sisters Daria and Eliza Hamilton Quarles, the former a widow and the latter a divorcee. Rich Rewards ends on a note of hope when Daphne Matthiessen reunites with Jean-Paul, the Frenchman she had loved 20 years earlier. Discussions of Superior Women invite comparison with Mary McCARTHY’s The GROUP, although McCarthy’s novel focuses on the lives of eight Vassar women in the 1930s, and Adams’s describes the situations of four Radcliffe women from the 1940s through the Civil Rights movement and Watergate. When Adams published Second Chances in 1988, turning her attention to 60-year-old characters facing the prospect of old age, worsening health, and precarious futures, she earned praise for her complex plotting, timing, and seamlessly artistic style. The characters are lonely, even though none lacks kind and supportive friends and lovers.

8 ADAMS, HENRY

With Caroline’s Daughters (1991), Adams created a large and complicated cast of characters: the protagonist Caroline and her third husband, Ralph, return to San Francisco from a five-year stay in Lisbon. Caroline immediately becomes immersed in the lives of her five daughters, most of whom were 1960s radicals who have become selfish and spoiled, and she endures and survives the death of Ralph. As many critics have noted, the novel richly details 1990s San Francisco: from its trendy restaurants to its AIDS victims and homeless people. Almost Perfect (1993), another San Francisco novel, focuses on the seemingly perfect romance between Stella Blake and Richard Fallon, a good-looking and considerate man who likes to cook. As Stella’s journalism career takes off, however, the dark side of Richard quickly emerges, and Stella realizes that he is an alcoholic on the edge of insanity. In A Southern Exposure (1995), Harry and Cynthia Baird leave their Connecticut home, beset with debt, social obligations, and ennui, and relocate in the 1930s to Pinehill, North Carolina, a southern university town. This is an unfamiliar culture for the Bairds, and Adams subtly evokes the racism, sexism, and religious prejudices in this community. Her talent for replicating both dialect and character is obvious here. Her next novel, considered controversial, was Medicine Men (1997), an account of two women, Molly Bonner, widowed and diagnosed with a brain tumor, and her friend Felicia, both of whom become romantically involved with arrogant and self-absorbed doctors. This novel is based on the author’s own experiences with cancer; Molly, like Adams, recovers, but not before learning some unpleasant lessons about the practitioners of medicine. Adams died on May 27, 1999, in San Francisco. Her final novel, After the War, was published posthumously in 2000. It is the sequel to A Southern Exposure, and takes place in the last months of World War II and the early years of the Cold War. Harry Baird, now a navy captain, returns from the war, and both Cynthia and Harry confess that they have committed adultery. The Bairds’ daughter Abigail and her friend Melanctha go off to college, ready to challenge racism and anti-Semitism, and to flirt with communism. This novel prompted numerous critics to lament still further the

passing of Alice Adams, who, they and her readers hoped, would follow her characters into yet another Pinehill sequel.

NOVELS After the War. New York: Knopf, 2000. Almost Perfect. New York: Knopf, 1993. Careless Love. New York: New American Library, 1966. Caroline’s Daughters. New York: Knopf, 1991. Families and Survivors. New York: Knopf, 1974. Listening to Billie. New York: Knopf, 1978. Medicine Men: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1997. Rich Rewards. New York: Knopf, 1980. Second Chances. New York: Knopf, 1988. A Southern Exposure. New York: Knopf, 1995. Superior Women. New York: Knopf, 1984.

SOURCES Flora, Joseph M., and Robert Bain, eds. Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

OTHER Gaitskill, Mary. “Alice Adams.” Salon Obituary (June 9, 1999). Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://salon.com/people/obit/1999/06/09/adams/index.ht ml. Accessed August 21, 2005. Sherwin, Elisabeth. “Adams Gives a Reading, Encourages Others to Write.” Printed Matter (July 14, 1996). Available online. URL: http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/gizmo/ alice.html. Accessed August 21, 2005.

ADAMS, HENRY (BROOKS) (1838–1918) Adams was born into one of the best-connected of American families. His maternal grandfather was a successful businessman; his paternal great-grandfather was John Adams (second president of the United States); his paternal grandfather was John Quincy Adams (sixth president); and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was a diplomat. After graduating from Harvard University and making the requisite tour of Europe, Henry Adams worked successively as secretary to his father, freelance journalist, and assistant professor of medieval history at Harvard. In 1872 he married Marian Hooper, daughter of a wealthy Boston surgeon, and, five years later, he decided on a writing career and moved with Marian to Washington, D.C. Adams wrote the nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of

ADAMS, HENRY 9

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–91), still considered a classic text on the era, and his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), winner of a Pulitzer Prize. The name Henry Adams is practically synonymous with his famous autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, yet before devoting himself to histories and biographies, Adams wrote two novels during the early 1880s. The first, DEMOCRACY: AN AMERICAN NOVEL (1880), focuses on politics, reflecting Adams’s lifetime interest in political reform, and the second, Esther: A Novel (1884), on religion. Both works—the first published anonymously, the second pseudonymously— feature chaste ethical women protagonists at odds with the moral and social strictures of their worlds. Various critics have speculated that both protagonists—Madeline Lee in Democracy and Esther Dudley in Esther— were modeled on Marian, who committed suicide in December 1885, apparently depressed over the death of her father and perhaps also because of the oppressive restrictions on the women of that time. In Democracy, Madeleine Lee, an attractive widow, goes to Washington, D.C., to experience firsthand the lessons of democracy. Pursued by suitors who represent the American West and South, Lee rejects their proposals, for she believes that marrying a politician would compromise her personal principles, which Adams presents as morally superior to those of the men. Lee confronts the men about their dubious and often nefarious plotting and maneuvering, but with little effect, although the author ends the novel on an optimistic note by offering hope of future reform. Esther was published under the name of Frances Snow Compton. Adams was unhappy with the speculation about the author of Democracy. Since his long-range goal was to make his name as a historian, he did not want the public to associate him with novel writing. The fictitious Esther’s name owes its origins to another fictitious Esther: Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s story, “Old Esther Dudley,” tells the tale of an old woman who, despite the American Revolution, clings to her allegiance to England and the king. Adams’s Esther is similar to Madeleine Lee in that she seeks meaning and purpose in life, although Esther hopes to find it in religion rather than in politics. Like Madeleine Lee, Esther Dudley is

wooed by men who make appealing offers, and, again like Lee, Dudley rejects the suitors and the lives they represent. Finding no satisfactory answers in marriage, technology, or religion, Esther withdraws and disappears. Not surprisingly, then, critics have noted that the unsatisfactory denouements for the women in both novels suggest Adams’s increasing fascination with the role and status of women in society. Earl N. Harbert sees both these novels as Adams’s initial attempts to develop a “theory of feminine force,” a theory that would see fruition in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, a book of medieval studies that celebrates the Virgin (Bishop, 37). Romulus Linney adapted Democracy and Esther into a play, published by Harcourt in 1973. Despite Adams’s conviction that he had made little impact on the fiction of the United States, contemporary critics agree on his unique and well-deserved place in American literary history.

NOVELS Democracy: An American Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1880. Reprint, New York: New American Library, 1988. Esther: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1884. Novels, Mont-Saint-Michel, The Education (contains Democracy, Esther, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and The Education of Henry Adams). Edited by Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels. New York: Library of America, 1983.

SOURCES Bishop, Ferman. Henry Adams. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Blackmur, Richard Press. Henry Adams. New York: Harcourt, 1980. Bloom, Harold. Henry Adams. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Chalfant, Edward. Better in Darkness: A Biography of Henry Adams: His Second Life. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1994. Conder, John J. A Formula of His Own: Henry Adams’s Literary Experiment. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Contosta, David R. Henry Adams and the American Experiment. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Decker, William Merrill. The Literary Vocation of Henry Adams. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Harbert, Earl N. Henry Adams: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978.

10 ADLER, RENATA

———, ed. Critical Essays on Henry Adams. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Hochfield, George. Henry Adams: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962. Levenson, J. C. The Mind and Art of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton, 1957. Lyon, Melvin. Symbol and Idea in Henry Adams. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Rowe, John Carlos. Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. Sayre, Robert F. The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Stevenson, Elizabeth. Henry Adams: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1955.

OTHER Henry Adams (1838–1918): Classroom Issues and Strategies. Available online. URL: http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/ adamsh.html. Accessed August 21, 2005.

ADLER, RENATA (1938– )

As an outspoken critic of the hypocrisy, posturing, and pretension that for her characterize many postmodern writers, Renata Adler—journalist, essayist, and short-story writer—turned to novel writing herself. Speedboat (1976), her first novel, was a runner-up for the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and winner of the 1976 Ernest Hemingway Prize for best first novel, although some critics argue over whether Speedboat’s apparently arbitrary structure and plot, and its randomly organized grouping of stories, does in fact constitute a novel. Together with her second novel, the critically acclaimed Pitch Dark (1983), Adler has staked out a position along the edge of the bleak, disjunctive, and disturbing modern world she portrays. Both novels, however, avoid the sometimes apocalyptic shrieks of despair and victimhood associated with postmodernism. Although critics have continued to align Adler with the postmodernist movement, she resists such identification, believing that her own fictional methods—unlike modernist and postmodernist approaches—manage to convey real feeling and compelling emotion. Adler portrays her contemporary urban environment through a relatively dispassionate lens, implying

that there are equally possible outcomes: optimism and despair. Like the American poet Emily Dickinson, Adler tries to “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” and to transfer the burden of deduction and comprehension from author to reader. In this regard, one might compare Adler with Edith Wharton, who wrote poignantly about strong passion and emotion while exhorting her readers to fill in the gaps. In Speedboat, for instance, the 35-year-old protagonist, Jen Fain, attempts to impose order and discipline on the seemingly unrelated discrete incidents of her life, including a fast-paced speedboat ride that ends with a jarring bounce that breaks the young woman’s back. Critics note that Jen Fain shares a number of autobiographical similarities with Adler herself, including age and era. Fain uses storytelling as a means of imposing discipline and order on, and instilling meaning into, her life. A solitary first-person narrator also relates the events of Adler’s second novel, Pitch Dark. Here Adler narrows the focus to the feelings of Kate Ennis, whose recently ended love affair has cast her into her own personal realm of darkness. Like Jen Fain of Speedboat, Kate Ennis has been compared to her creator; critics note the similarities between the pseudonyms Kate briefly adopts (Hadley, Alder) and the name Adler. They find her propensity to tell a story through fragments and peripheral images, for instance the fate of a dying racoon, to be both compelling and effective. And despite the pain of Kate’s loss and the indirect slant in telling her story, the Adlerian point of view remains: rather than stay trapped, her character is attempting to better her life despite the fragmented condition of postmodern existence. By the time she published Pitch Dark, Adler had earned her law degree (a J.D. from Yale in 1972), and she turned from fiction to nonfiction as she battled the untruths and unethical behavior of powerful institutions. Her controversial but frequently praised works include Reckless Disregard (1986), an analysis of lawsuits against the media; Politics and Media: Essays (1988), a collection of political and cultural criticism; Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker (1999), a critical history of that magazine; and Private Capacity (2000), a portrait of the international Bilderberg Group. Born on October 19, 1938, in Milan, Italy, to Frederick L. and Erna (Straus) Adler, Adler earned an A.B.

ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, THE 11

in 1959 from Bryn Mawr College; le diplôme d’études supérieures in 1961 from the Sorbonne; and an M.A. from Harvard University in 1962. Adler was a New York Times film critic from 1968 to 1969 and worked intermittently as a writer and reporter for the New Yorker over a 20-year period. After publishing articles and stories with such magazines as Vanity Fair, Atlantic, and Harper’s Bazaar, Adler won the 1974 O. Henry Award before publishing Speedboat. In 1987 she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

NOVELS Pitch Dark. New York: Knopf, 1983. Speedboat. New York: Random House, 1976.

SOURCES Corliss, Richard. “Perils of Renata, Pearls of Pauline.” National Review, 7 April 1970, pp. 369–370. Shattuck, Roger. Review of “Quanta,” New York Review of Books, 15 March 1984, p. 3. Sheed, Wilfrid. “Radical Middle,” New York Times Book Review. 29 March 1970, pp. 12, 14. Towers, Robert. Review of Speedboat. New York Times Book Review, 26 September 1976, pp. BR2, 1.

ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, THE SAUL BELLOW (1953) Saul BELLOW’s third novel and winner of the National Book Award, The Adventures of Augie March, came easily to him. Indeed, says Bellow, he began the novel in Paris, writing in trains and in cafés, then moving to Rome: “The great pleasure of the book was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it. That’s why the form is so loose” (Breit, 3). Yet Augie March remains, especially for Bellow scholars, a significant turning point in his fictional techniques. Whereas his earlier novels Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) embrace, in the words of scholar and critic Robert F. Kiernan, “the cerebral style and Europeanized weltschmerz” of a more formal modernism (Kiernan, 40), The Adventures of Augie March seems by comparison an unrestrained, expansive, exuberant novel in the picaresque tradition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). Yet it has unmistakable ties with 20th-century naturalism, particularly in its evocation of the grim poverty in which the young Chicago-born Augie March is raised, evoking the work

of Theodore DREISER, Frank NORRIS, Nelson ALGREN and James T. FARRELL. Bellow’s character, however, is no pawn of a deterministic world view: Throughout his odyssey and his adventures, the highly intelligent and rebellious Augie (scholar Frederick Karl calls him a “quasi-picaresque” [141]) is aware of the manipulative nature of the many acquaintances he meets along the way, and ultimately he refuses to succumb to either social convention or individual attempts to mold him into another’s image. The novel opens in Chicago, and moves through Michigan, Mexico, and the sea off Africa, concluding in Paris. On one level Augie, the first-person narrator, may be viewed as the colorful rogue or picaro: early in life he becomes proficient at feigning innocence and telling glib falsehoods in order to achieve his shortrange goals; he also becomes adept at finding ways to make easy money and to attract a variety of women. On another level, however, Augie refuses to be compromised in the ways that matter in the long haul and remains an optimist who puts weakness and failure behind him. Those readers who subscribe to this view differ from those who see Augie as an antihero, an ultimately pathetic individual whose philosophy is meaningless and whose existence is therefore without worth or purpose. Viewing the novel as a bildungsroman, the reader quickly sees that Augie’s education occurs through a series of meetings and relationships with a varied group of characters, each of whom would like to see Augie in his or her own image. Augie’s first mentor is Grandma Lausch, an elderly Jewish immigrant from Odessa, Russia, who boards with Augie’s family. She introduces Augie to the Horatio ALGER ideal, underscores the fluidity of American society, and advises him on ways to survive on the street. From the beginning, Augie proves resistant to the easy ways of climbing the social ladder as a path to prosperity, unlike his brother Simon, who learns Grandma’s lessons with alacrity and thus earns wealth and social respectability. To Augie, the “handsome and assertive” Simon, valedictorian of his class, is like a proud Iroquois, a Cincinnatus, the kind “who became the king of corporations” (29). From the perspective of scholar Gloria Cronin, however, Augie recognizes in Simon the composite of

12 ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, THE

“romantic models of masculinity” that are ultimately doomed to failure (Cronin, 92). In his last years of high school, Augie falls under the influence of William Einhorn, a man of great intellectual, business, and sexual energy: although his arms and legs are crippled, he manages several successful business ventures and has no trouble finding women proficient at satisfying his sexual needs. After high school graduation, Augie briefly attends college, but falls under the influence of Mr. and Mrs. Renling, who not only employ him in their fashionable saddle shop but also teach him the dress and behavior of the wealthier classes. When Mrs. Renling tries to adopt him, however, Augie flees. In Detroit, he joins the gangster Joe Gorman in illegal immigrant smuggling and, back in Chicago, with his new friend Padilla, he engages in petty book theft. Cronin suggests that, although at this point he has not yet discovered his elusive, true identity, Augie has at least recognized one of the most significant facts about himself: “he is the product of entirely new social forces that have forged a different kind of American masculinity” (Cronin, 93). In this next Chicago phase, during the Great Depression, Augie is hired by his brother Simon, who has married into the wealthy Magnus family. Simon provides a job for Augie in the coal plant given to him by his new father-in-law. Augie once again dismisses someone else’s plans for him—this time his brother’s plan to have Augie marry into the Magnus family. Instead, Augie scandalizes the Magnuses by helping Mimi Villars, a fellow boarder, find an abortionist after her lover abandons her. When Simon fires him, Augie becomes involved with the wealthy Thea Fenchel, who is in the process of obtaining a divorce. He falls in love with her and moves into her house in Mexico; at her insistence, he hunts with a trained eagle named Caligula who clearly functions as a symbol of Augie himself. Thea believes Caligula is a “cowardly” bird because, like Augie, he balks at killing or hurting even the tiniest of creatures. Augie, however—perhaps because he has not yet rid himself of romantic illusions—interprets the eagle’s behavior as emblematic not of cowardice but of love. Augie extricates himself from this relationship by initiating an involvement with Stella Chesney, the mistress of an old friend.

Although initially hurt and disoriented by Stella’s subsequent angry abandonment of him, he returns to Chicago for the final chapters of his journey. Once again evading his brother Simon’s efforts to take over his life, Augie takes on several other jobs and, with the outbreak of World War II, enlists in the merchant marine. He finds that he has now fallen in love with Stella, and they marry on his first leave. When his ship is torpedoed, Augie finds himself trapped in a lifeboat with Basteshaw, a mad scientist who attempts to force Augie to become his research assistant in the Canary Islands. Rescued by a British tanker, Augie ends up, in the last chapter of the novel, residing in Paris with Stella and working for a black marketer named Mintouchian. He is still in love with Stella, despite her weaknesses, one of which, Augie discovers, is her involvement with yet another lover from her past. Determined to have a family, however, Augie is able to forgive Stella, able to laugh, ready to resume his quest, and is openly optimistic about his future: “Look at me, going everywhere! Why, I am a sort of Columbus,” he observes. “I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in his chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America” (536). Readers will determine for themselves whether they accept Augie as one who has profited from his life’s journey and, having seen the worst of the world, is at ease with himself, or whether, like some critics, they detect a note of anxiety in his account that undermines the apparently positive denouement. After all, one’s interpretation of Augie and his opportunities has much to do with one’s own vision of the American future. Bellow’s ending allows readers to struggle with their own interpretation.

SOURCES Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953. Reprint, with introduction by Lionel Trilling, New York: Modern Library, 1965. Braham, Jeanne. A Sort of Columbus: The American Voyages of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Breit, Harvey. “A Talk with Saul Bellow.” In Conversations with Saul Bellow, edited by Gloria Cronin and Ben Siegel, 3–5. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN 13

Cronin, Gloria. A Room of His Own: In Search of the Feminine in the Novels of Saul Bellow. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Cronin, Gloria, and Ben Siegel, eds. Conversations with Saul Bellow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Dutton, Robert R. Saul Bellow. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Gerson, Steven M. “The New American Adam in The Adventures of Augie March,” Modern Fiction Studies 25, no. 1 (1979): 117–128. Goldman, Liela H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington, 1983. Hyland, Peter. Saul Bellow. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940–1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Kiernan, Robert F. Saul Bellow. New York: Continuum, 1989. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. Quest for the Human: An Exploration of Saul Bellow’s Fiction. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Earl Rovit. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975.

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN MARK TWAIN (1885) Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark TWAIN) began writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876 immediately after he completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mightily attracted to the character of Huck, who becomes a more complete and complex character in the final chapters of Tom Sawyer, Clemens wrote the first 18 chapters fairly quickly. The writing stalled in 1876: Clemens returned to Huck in 1880 and 1883 before completing the novel in 1884. His work on the novel was energized by his return to the Mississippi Valley during 1883. Though hailed for its humor (at times slapstick, at times biting satire), the book today is often banned in the United States because of its spotlight on race. Clemens presents a profoundly affective tale of institutionalized abuse and the psychological damage inflicted on a poor white boy and a black man by a society that endorses prejudice and violence. Race, however, is not the only issue worth examining. The story is set in the 1840s and is told from Huck’s point of view; his is the central consciousness, shaped by his various experiences within antebellum society. Huck is a deadpan narrator: He presents what he sees without judgment and analysis. The novel begins as a

continuation of the picaresque adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn: The early chapters focus on Tom Sawyer’s gang and various escapades, from a plot to ransom hostages to a raid on a treasure-laden caravan, which Huck sees in its reality as a Sunday school picnic. Pap Finn appears and threatens his son to gain the treasure Huck and Tom share and to reassert his control over his son’s life. However comfortable Huck becomes when he is back with his father and free of the Widow Douglas, he also knows too well the stress of physical and emotional abuse and is, at one point, willing to contemplate patricide to stop Pap’s alcoholic tantrums. The story changes direction after Huck flees from Pap and joins up with the runaway slave Jim. Once the two unite in an attempt to find some kind of freedom, the tale focuses on the state of race relations and the possibility for redemption in personal relationships. Jim watches over Huck, at one point keeping from him the fact of Pap’s death, and the two forge a relationship based on mutual protection and need. The question for readers becomes whether the white child who has been shaped by a virulently racist father and a social system that enforces inequality is able to form a genuine and lasting relationship with a black man. Conversely, there is also the question of whether a black man, schooled in the power of whites over blacks and in the ideology that argues for his inherent inferiority, is able to break the cycle of abuse that keeps him wary of society’s constraints. Neither Huck nor Jim has much experience with freedom, and both are continually at risk as their journey takes them further south and into the heart of slave territory. Huck’s and Jim’s isolation, first on Jackson’s Island and later during their time on the raft, is ultimately artificial and untenable. They are not able to sustain their existence separate from society. Huck’s extended time with the Grangerfords teaches him the futility of his hope to find peace amid human feuds. He is witness to the death of Buck Grangerford and sees a family wiped out because of a jealousy that no one quite understands. Later, with the arrival of the duke and the king, two con men in search of an easy mark, Huck is again witness to a killing (this time of old Boggs by Sherburn) and becomes involved in a plot to bilk the

14 ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, THE

Wilkes sisters of their inheritance. As the novel moves into its final third, Huck is powerless to prevent the duke and the king from selling Jim back into slavery. Each episode underscores the prevalence of physical and emotional violence and reinforces for Huck the value of being quiet and invisible when faced with adults more powerful and assured than he. His affection for Buck and Mary Jane Wilkes fails to help him find a voice. Even with the long time spent with Jim, Huck fails to assert himself when Tom Sawyer arrives at the Phelps farm and puts Jim through a painful and humiliating series of fictions in a vain and misguided attempt to release him from captivity. The final section of the novel, known as the evasion section, continues to cause readers pain and confusion. Why is Huck complicit in Jim’s humiliation? How is it that Huck so readily sets aside his relation with Jim to assuage Tom Sawyer? Why does he still hold Tom in high regard even when he finds out that Miss Watson has manumitted Jim and that Tom disregarded Jim’s free status to work one more practical joke? And what lessons should readers take from the story regarding racial and social justice or familial affection and friendship? In the end, Clemens tells a tale set during antebellum years but embedded within the social context of the post-Reconstruction 1880s. The tale is still relevant today. It is a book that vibrates with a concern for the disenfranchised and marginal. Jim, who has lasting moments of humanity, remains powerless to complete his dream of reuniting his family. Huck, seared by the ranting of Pap and familiar with justice as it is defined by a society that condones and is deeply complicit in the system of slavery, resorts to a fantasy of escape. His intention to “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” in the book’s final paragraph underscores his inability to form lasting and complex emotional attachments. His sharp description of the social moment leaves readers shaking their heads. They want Huck to be better than he is able to be. And that hope may be at the heart of Clemens’s sense of our own inability to face the reality of the world.

SOURCES Chadwick-Joshua, Jocelyn. The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

Doyno, Victor A. Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain’s Creative Process. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Leonard, James S., Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, eds. Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Sattelmeyer, Robert, and J. Donald Crowley, eds. One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. ———. Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Huck & Tom. Edited by Walter Blair. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Michael Kiskis

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, THE MARK TWAIN (1876) Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark TWAIN) published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. The novel was Clemens’s sixth book, but only his second novel: Clemens’s earlier books were two collections of stories and sketches and two travel books, Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872); his first novel, The Gilded Age (1873) was written with Charles Dudley Warner, Clemens’s Hartford neighbor. Tom Sawyer marks Clemens’s first extended creative use of his memories of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri. In the preface to the novel, Clemens wrote, “Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.” The novel is still popular with both children and adults. Though it is often considered to be children’s literature, there is an undercurrent of satire in the story that is often unrecognized. The novel is also among those most often banned by school libraries in the United States. A case may be made that Clemens uses the novel to explore themes he introduced in earlier sketches, especially “The Christmas Fireside for Good Little Boys and Girls” (1865), “The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper” (1870), and “Poor Little Stephen

ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, THE 15

Girard” (1873) all of which offer tales in which allegiance to social expectations is punished and immorality is rewarded. Clemens’s Tom, like the bad boys that populate the typical Sunday school fictions of the 1870s, is notorious for seeming to challenge community/adult moral expectations. The novel records the summer escapades of Tom Sawyer and his two friends, Joe Harper and Huckleberry Finn. Pivotal events include the murder of Dr. Robinson by Injun Joe, the trial of Muff Potter for that murder, and a search for buried treasure. Companion plot lines focus on Tom’s home life under the watchful eye of his Aunt Polly, the sister of his dead mother, which includes the episode of Tom’s hoodwinking local boys into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence as well as Tom’s transgressions at school; the boys’ adventure on Jackson’s Island, which results in the town’s belief that the boys have been drowned, and the boys’ return to interrupt their own funerals; and Tom’s courtship of Becky Thatcher and his rescuing Becky after they are lost in a cave during an outing. Perhaps most important of these is the exploration of Tom’s relationship with Huck Finn, the outcast son of St. Petersburgh’s town drunk, which both introduces Huck into the pantheon of Clemens’s primary characters and sets the stage for the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). The novel is episodic. The story opens with an exchange between Tom and another boy from the town that establishes Tom’s standing within the children’s community. Tom’s attentions are diverted to the newly arrived Becky Thatcher and the need to capture her attention and affection. What follows is a twisting tale that allows Clemens to use the children’s escapades to mark the economic, ethnic, and social tensions present in adult society. Clemens very astutely uses the children’s world to mirror adult society: Like the adults, the children are concerned with class markers, set by categories of economic status and levels of literacy. Tom occupies the most prominent spot in the children’s hierarchy: His ability to gain material wealth in the fencepainting episode is reminiscent of an adult financial con game, and his ability to read and recall the plotlines of romantic stories allows him to keep an upper hand in his games with Joe Harper and sets the stage for his friendly dominance over an illiterate Huck Finn.

What at first seems to be a celebration of Tom’s rebellious streak is, by the novel’s conclusion, a more ambivalent description of a boy’s full induction into an adult world that prizes careful attention to social conformity. Tom is no rebel. He is mischievous, but he is also clearly committed to the overarching moral standards the town and the adult world use to gauge success. In the course of the novel, he steps up to identify Injun Joe as the real murderer of Dr. Robinson. This frees Muff Potter and makes Tom a hero in the town. But his fame depends on betraying his oath to Huckleberry Finn to protect their secret. The various acts that call attention to the foolishness of school or the paucity of church services do not undermine the basic authority of the adult world; instead, Tom is complicit in the work of reinforcing the town’s moral standards. At the end of the novel, he is rewarded for his actions to protect Becky when Judge Thatcher assures him of a position at a military academy and at law school. What better avenue toward power within the adult world! Most astounding is Tom’s treatment of Huckleberry Finn. At the close of the novel, Huck, who has shown his own heroism by saving the Widow Douglas from the wrath of Injun Joe, has run away from the Widow’s home because of her attempts to civilize him. Tom is sent after Huck. Rather than support Huck in his quest for freedom, Tom threatens Huck with exile if he does not return to the Widow’s home. While it is possible to read Tom’s actions as motivated by his concern for Huck’s welfare, the way Tom threatens and intimidates Huck demonstrates that he has learned adult lessons. He is more interested in forcing Huck to conform to adult society than he is in listening to the worries and concerns of a friend. Clemens, in the end, presents Tom as the bad boy who prospers by being complicit in a system that forces conformity: the adventures of Tow Sawyer are fully endorsed by the community; the boy becomes a full participant in the adult world.

SOURCES Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Scharnhorst, Gary. Critical Essays on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1992.

16 AGEE, JAMES RUFUS

Twain, Mark. Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890. Edited by Louis J. Budd. New York: Library of America, 1992. Michael Kiskis

AGEE, JAMES RUFUS (1909–1955) In his relatively short life James Agee, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (1957) and the short novel The Morning Watch (1951), demonstrated remarkable talent as a novelist, poet, journalist, film critic, and screenwriter. Critics have recently shown renewed interest in his film essays and his screenplays, which include The African Queen, written with director John Huston, The Night of the Hunter, and adaptations of two Stephen CRANE stories. Agee remains best known, however, for A Death in the Family and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his nonfictional but literary documentation of the grinding poverty of Alabama tenant families during the Great Depression. Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909. His father’s accidental death in 1916 profoundly affected him; this traumatic event is at the heart of Agee’s novel, A Death in the Family. Young Agee was sent to St. Andrews, an Episcopalian boarding school, where Father James Harold Flye made a lifelong impression on Agee’s spiritual and moral beliefs by convincing him that writers had a duty to reveal “truth.” Until his death, Agee attempted to do just that. Agee began to write seriously while attending Phillips Exeter Academy. During his years at Harvard, while studying with the literary scholar and critic I. A. Richards, he developed his commitment to crisp language and the use of active, first-person narrators. These literary and moral commitments are clearly evident in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, while The Morning Watch, as critic Victor A. Kramer points out, demonstrates Agee’s apparent desire to recreate artistically “an earlier time of felt emotion” (Kramer, 141). The Morning Watch, a novella-length bildungsroman, has often invited comparison with James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man. For months, Richard, the 12-year-old protagonist, has looked forward to spending the nighttime hours of Maundy Thursday and the early morning hours of Good Friday at the

boarding school chapel, hoping to prove himself devout and worthy through long hours of prayer. Although Richard’s religious emotions are genuine, secular preoccupations distract him during prayer, and, after leaving the chapel, Richard and two classmates disobey school rules and go swimming. In The Morning Watch, Agee poignantly demonstrates two realities within one adolescent: religious fervor and its inevitable diminishment. Agee’s finest popular and critical achievement remains the autobiographical A Death in the Family, a longer and more complicated novel than The Morning Watch, but one that apparently builds on many of the same techniques used in the earlier novel. Seven years in the writing and unpublished at the time of Agee’s death from a heart attack in 1955, A Death in the Family, with its story of a boy’s loss of a father and his journey to manhood, seems secure in its place in the 20th-century American canon. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, researched with photographer Walker Evans of Fortune Magazine, for which Agee also worked from 1932 to 1948, is not a novel. It is, however, particularly notable for its experimental use of techniques borrowed from poetry, drama, music, and religion, and for the searing revelations of poverty that it brought before the American reading public.

NOVELS A Death in the Family. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957; London: Gollancz, 1958. The Morning Watch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. Reprint, London: Secker & Warburg, 1952.

SOURCES Barson, Alfred T. A Way of Seeing: A Critical Study of James Agee. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Bergreen, Lawrence. James Agee: A Life. New York: Dutton, 1984. Kramer, Victor A. James Agee. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Larsen, Erling. James Agee. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Lofaro, Michael A., ed. James Agee: Reconsiderations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Lowe, James. The Creative Process of James Agee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Madden, David, ed. Remembering James Agee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.

AGE OF INNOCENCE, THE 17

Moreau, Genevieve. The Restless Journey of James Agee. New York: Morrow, 1977. Ohlin, Peter H. Agee. New York: Obolensky, 1966. Seib, Kenneth. James Agee: Promise and Fulfillment. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968.

AGE OF INNOCENCE, THE EDITH WHAR(1920) Edith WHARTON’s The Age of Innocence continues to invite a wide range of analyses. The novel examines the triangle between Ellen Olenska, her cousin May Welland, and May’s husband, Newland Archer, against the background of upper-class society in 1870s New York. It considers not only the nature of love and the emotions of its central characters but also the late 19th-century social conditions and rigid conventions that operate so powerfully in their private lives. The 1921 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel starts with May’s engagement to the eligible Newland Archer and with Ellen’s return to her childhood environment in order to begin divorce proceedings against her European husband, Count Olenska. Although the Welland and Archer families ostensibly support Ellen’s decision to be independent, the family strongly advises her against an embarrassing and financially unwise divorce. Ellen endears herself to the nonconformists in her family such as Granny Mingott and Aunt Medora, but polite New York society disapproves of her. Her childhood playmate, Newland, becomes her legal adviser and admirer; he falls in love with her, but the inexorable pressure of convention compels him to follow through on his promise to marry May. When Newland considers leaving his young wife, May tells Ellen that she is pregnant, and Ellen arranges to return to Europe so that Newland will no longer be tempted by her. Many years later, Newland’s adult son persuades his father, now widowed, to go to Paris with him. When they arrive for a meeting with Ellen, Newland chooses to remain on a park bench gazing up at her apartment window. Wharton thus closes the novel by projecting Ellen as the powerful eternal woman, a vision that appears above the dreaming, immovable man. Wharton’s contemporaneous critics judged the novel outstanding for its characterization, setting, and treatment of cultural innocence. Carl Van Doren perceptively recognizes the conventions that bind Ellen

TON

Olenska, May Welland, and Newland Archer and concludes from the novel that “the unimaginative not only miss the flower of life themselves but they shut others from it as well” (quoted in Tuttleton, 287). William Lyon Phelps draws attention to the novel’s use of Wharton’s background in landscape gardening and interior decorating and points to the “absolute imprisonment” in which the “characters stagnate” (quoted in Tuttleton, 284–285). Henry Seidel Canby praises the novel’s portrayal of society and declares that Wharton “lets us formulate inductively the code of America” (quoted in Tuttleton, 287–288). Later formalist assumptions of the New Criticism disconnect The Age of Innocence from its historical precedents and analyze its structure and form as a well-made novel. For example, Charles Clay Doyle traces the novel’s floral motifs, while Elizabeth Evans explores the musical allusions; and Viola Hopkins analyzes the syntax, diction, and imagery. More recent scholars look to the societal influences and potential biographical links. Some scholars regard the novel as a longing remembrance of a better time, while feminist criticism examines Wharton’s narrative strategy. Wharton’s biographer, R. W. B. Lewis, surmises that Wharton was disturbed by postwar America and that “the impression grew in her that something crucially valuable had been lost,” and therefore she “went in search, imaginatively, of the America that was gone” (424). Cynthia Griffin Woolf describes the novel as “a nostalgic act” (310). Elizabeth Ammons, however, concludes that it is a novel of “fear.” She argues that Newland and his fellow old New Yorkers are “so afraid of Ellen Olenska, a sophisticated, sexually exciting woman, that they end up literally banishing her from New York” (143). Other critics see the novel as emerging from Wharton’s response to a cultural network that denied women freedom of expression. Carol Singley points to the tension between the world views of staid traditionbound New Yorkers and those “in the dynamic life of Ellen Olenska” (165). Similarly, Shari Benstock evaluates the novel as “perhaps the most brilliant portrait of expatriated womanhood” (159). In contrast to the critics who focus on Ellen, Susan Goodman judges May to be the “novel’s true heroine” because she is caught in a

18

AGE OF INNOCENCE, THE

world of deception; further, Goodman argues that May and Ellen provide another example of Wharton’s “paired heroines” (100–101). Finally, Carol Wershoven observes that May is “the childbride, a product of an economic system become secret religion” (155). As important as these and other recent insights may be, The Age of Innocence also demonstrates both Wharton’s literary and scientific authority and her awareness of and response to general intellectual history. Its examination of individual will and cultural determinism portrays the economic and political conditions that Wharton observed around her after World War I. Women’s roles were beginning to change, the doctrine of their subordination was being more widely questioned, and there was a growing consciousness of the way in which social and economic forces offset individuals. The novel focuses on the principles of economic activity that underlie the social order as well as the complexities of moral decision making. It argues that Old New York uses women as another medium of exchange and that this cold reality undergirds society’s structure. Because of Ellen’s specific difference, her ancestors and atypical childhood, she is able to act as she chooses. To the clan, this aberration becomes a case, an illegality that must be adjudicated by Archer, the lawyer. When Ellen resists the doctrines that subordinate women, she disrupts the patriarchal assembly line; she interrupts the economy. The novel offers a tale of Old New York written through the author’s post–World War I consciousness. It challenges the supposed high morality of her late 19th-century predecessors and shows that their world was actually fraught with conflicts and discontent. Wharton notably set the novel in the 1870s, a time when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) still stirred interest. Wharton, however, moves away from the gender hierarchy that Darwin perpetuates. The opening scene describes the real cultural attitudes, “a playful allusion” to democratic principles that conflict with Ellen’s and Newland’s belief that “women ought to be free” (42). Newland explains to Mrs. Welland that Ellen returned to America believing that she “would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom” (145). Ironically Ellen experiences a

sense of being the “other” when she returns home to New York, and Newland feels “like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp . . . and guess[es] at the inexorableness of his captors” (335). Underscoring the complexities inherent in moral situations, however, Wharton does not indicate whether Ellen has broken a moral code or if she is merely the witness to and victim of her husband’s immorality. Furthermore, Ellen acts as a moral agent of change who has a favorable impact on individuals and thus strengthens the society.

SOURCES Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance. New York: Scribner, 1994. Doyle, Charles Clay. “Emblems of Innocence: Imagery Patterns in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence,” Xavier University Studies 10, no. 2 (1971): 19–25. Evans, Elizabeth. “Musical Allusions in The Age of Innocence,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 4, no. 3 (1974): 4–7. Gargano, James W. “Tableaux of Renunciation: Wharton’s Use of the Shaughran in The Age of Innocence,” Studies in American Fiction 15, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 1–11. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Hopkins, Viola. “The Ordering Style of The Age of Innocence,” American Literature 30 (November 1958): 345–357. Joslin, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Lauer, Kristin O., and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1975. Olin-Ammentorp, Julie. “Edith Wharton’s Challenge to Feminist Criticism,” Studies in American Fiction 16, no. 2 (Autumn 1988): 237–244. Raphael, Lev. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Shame. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Schriber, Mary Suzanne. “Convention in the Fiction of Edith Wharton,” Studies in American Fiction 11, no. 2 (Autumn 1983): 189–201. Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Singley, Carol J., and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY 19

Women. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Wershoven, Carol. The Female Intruder in the Novels of Edith Wharton. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Appleton, 1920; Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1970. Woolf, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Worby, Diana. “The Ambiguity of Edith Wharton’s Lurking Feminism,” Mid-Hudson Language Studies 5 (1982): 81–90. Sandra Chrystal Hayes

ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY (1832–1888) Louisa May Alcott was born on November 29, 1832, and reared during the “American Renaissance,” an era identified with such influential authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, and changed forever by such significant women as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, who worked for women’s rights. Although Alcott published LITTLE WOMEN, an instant classic, in 1868–69, and subsequently wrote a variety of popular stories and novels for both adults and children, she appeals to contemporary readers because of the feminist context—often subversive in nature—in which we now read her work. Alcott’s “Little Women” books (eight in all) were highly autobiographical, inspired by her own unconventional New England childhood as the second of four sisters, the daughter of Abigail (Abba) May and Amos Bronson Alcott, the transcendentalist and educational philosopher and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Her characters were drawn from Alcott’s own family members and friends. Alcott, whose realistic children’s novels are noted for their perceptive and highly entertaining accounts of childhood, is regarded as a pioneer because her fictional children are multidimensional, thinking individuals, a notion that seems self-evident to readers in the 21st century. Even Alcott’s melodramas, Civil War fiction, detective fiction, and feminist tracts have recently been reinter-

preted; they are now viewed as having a more adult and often rebellious subtext that covertly criticizes social codes for women. Alcott’s family resided primarily in Concord, Massachusetts, but her most vivid childhood experiences happened at Fruitlands, site of her father’s failed utopian experiment in communal living. His many causes kept the Alcott girls on the edge of poverty but were responsible as well for their good, if unconventional, educations. Louisa Alcott tutored Emerson’s daughter, Ellen, spent many hours in Emerson’s library, studied botany with Thoreau, and was exposed to new ideas including women’s suffrage, coeducation, and the abolition of slavery. When Alcott was 16, the family moved to Boston where jobs were plentiful. She supplemented her income by writing sentimental and sensational stories for such magazines as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and The Flag of Our Union, and became a regular contributor to several periodicals, often writing under the pseudonym of A. M. Barnard. In 1858, Alcott’s sister Elizabeth died, her older sister, May, married, and the family moved into Orchard House in Concord, where they would live for the rest of their lives. When the Civil War broke out, Alcott, lonely and seeking an outlet for her “pent-up energy” (quoted in Keyser, 8) signed up as one of Dorothea Dix’s nurses at Union Hospital in Washington, D.C. She caught typhoid fever and returned home only six weeks later, but her experiences, published in the form of letters to her family in Hospital Sketches (1863), earned her both critical and popular success. She then published her first novel, Moods, in 1865, to mixed reviews because therein Alcott forthrightly raises the issues of divorce and its consequences. It is memorable principally because its protagonist, Sylvia Yule, is the forerunner of the tomboyish and rebellious Jo March of Little Women (Keyser, 11, 9). In six weeks during 1868, Alcott wrote the first volume of Little Women, transforming Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May Alcott into Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March, and Bronson and Abba Alcott into Mr. and Mrs. March (Marmee). Amazed by the overnight sensation of the novel, Alcott wrote a second volume in two months and published it as Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, Part Second. Subsequently published as

20 ALCOTT, LOUISA MAY

one volume entitled Little Women, Alcott’s novel follows the four March sisters as they strive to improve upon their characters and become “good girls,” a recurring phrase in the novel. Frankly structured and influenced by John Bunyan’s allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress, the novel opened up a new scope for the traditional “family” novel, with children seen as human beings rather than as stereotyped examples of good and bad behavior and depicts a warmer, less restricted family life. The most dramatically interesting character is “rambunctious” Jo, whom Alcott’s depicts as initially rebelling against and later reconciling to her role as a woman. Little Women is Alcott’s masterpiece, but she followed its success with numerous popular stories and novels. She wrote three more novels specifically about the March family—Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871), and Jo’s Boys (1886). Five additional novels are often grouped with Little Women as part of the “Little Women” series: An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1880). Here Alcott traces the lives of the March sisters, their families, and their friends, but they also deal with alternative educational techniques, women and marriage, the emergence of professional women, the mother-daughter bond, and the role of the husband and father. Alcott was also a prolific author of short stories for children, many of which were collected in a series of books entitled Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag. Her success as a writer brought her unwanted fame but desired financial security; for 20 years she continued to write and to provide for her mother, who no longer had “debt or troubles,” and other members of her family. A lifelong feminist, she was the first woman to register in Concord when Massachusetts gave women limited suffrage in 1879. Alcott never married, once remarking that writing seemed to be her intended companion for life. She died on March 6, 1888, leaving as her legacy four fictional daughters, beloved by her readers more than 100 years after her death. All the Alcott family papers are collected at the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

NOVELS Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Madeleine B. Stern. New York: Morrow, 1975.

Diana and Persis. Edited by Sarah Elbert. New York: Arno Press, 1978. A Double Life: Newly Discovered Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Madeleine Stern. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Eight Cousins; or, The Aunt-Hill. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1875. A Garland for Girls. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887. Good Wives. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869. Jo’s Boys, and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to “Little Men.” Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1886. Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871. Little Women or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, 2 vol. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868–69; vol. 2 republished as Little Women Wedded. London: Low, 1872, as Little Women Married. London: Routledge, 1873, and as Nice Wives. London: Weldon, 1875; both volumes republished as Little Women and Good Wives. London: Nisbet, 1895; vol. 1 republished as Little Women: Four Funny Sisters, edited by Kathryn Lindskoog. Sisters, Oreg.: Multnomah Press, 1991. Meadow Blossoms. Boston: Crowell, 1879. A Modern Mephistopheles [published anonymously]. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1877. A Modern Mephistopheles [and] A Whisper in the Dark. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889. Moods. Boston: Loring, 1864. An Old-Fashioned Girl. [A. M. Barnard pseud.]. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870. Plots and Counterplots: More Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Madeleine Stern. New York: Morrow, 1976. Rose in Bloom: A Sequel to “Eight Cousins.” Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876. Silver Pitchers [and] Independence, a Centennial Love Story. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1876. Under the Lilacs. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878. V.V.; or, Plots and Counterplots. Boston: Thomes & Talbot, 1870. Water Cresses. Boston: Crowell, 1879. Work: A Story of Experience. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873.

SOURCES Alcott, Louisa May. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987. Anthony, Katharine S. Louisa May Alcott. New York: Knopf, 1938. Arbuthnot, May Hill, and Zena Sutherland. Children and Books, 4th ed. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1972, p. 100. Bedell, Madelon. The Alcotts. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1981.

ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY 21

Cheney, Ednah D. Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters and Journals. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889. Elbert, Sarah. A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and “Little Women.” Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. Fisher, Aileen, and Olive Rabe. We Alcotts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott’s Family as Seen through the Eyes of “Marmee,” Mother of “Little Women.” Boston: Atheneum, 1968. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar, eds. “Louisa May Alcott.” In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, 936. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. Keyser, Elizabeth Lennox. Little Women: A Family Romance. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999. MacDonald, Ruth K. Louisa May Alcott. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Meigs, Cornelia. The Story of the Author of “Little Women”: Invincible Louisa. Boston: Little, Brown, 1933; reprinted with new introduction as Invincible Louisa: The Story of the Author of “Little Women,” 1968. Stern, Madeleine B. Introduction to Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, vii–xxxiii. New York: Morrow, 1975. ———. Louisa May Alcott. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.

OTHER Louisa May Alcott: Teacher Resource File. Internet School Library Media Center. Available online. URL: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/alcott.htm. Accessed July 2005.

ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY (1836–1907) Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a poet, editor, and novelist of the late 19th century, who is today best remembered for a short story, “Marjorie Daw” (1873), and a novel, The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), based on his own childhood in New Hampshire. Aldrich’s sympathetic portrayals of youth invite comparison to those of such writers as Louisa May ALCOTT. Aldrich began his career as a poet, and by age 16 he had submitted and published poetry in the Portsmouth Journal. Aldrich had hoped to attend Harvard, but his family could not afford to send him to college, so he moved to New York City where an uncle offered him work as a clerk. Influenced by the New York literary bohemians, by age 19 he published his first collection of poetry, The Bells: A Collection of Chimes (1855), and in 1858, sold his first poem to the Atlantic Monthly. In quick succession he moved from a position as junior

literary critic of the Evening Mirror, to sub-editor of the New York Home Journal, to associate editor of the short-lived but much admired literary journal the Saturday Press, beginning a 35-year career as an editor. During the Civil War, Aldrich served briefly as a war correspondent for the New York Tribune, but by the end of the war his life changed directions: he moved to Boston, Massachusetts, became editor of Every Saturday, and married Lilian Woodman in 1865. In Boston, Aldrich became friendly with some of the leading authors of the day, including Longfellow and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, and in 1868 he published his most famous novel, The Story of a Bad Boy, initially serialized in Our Young Folks, a magazine for children, and later appearing as a book. This influential novel helped shape the genre of young people’s fiction, was praised by William Dean HOWELLS, and influenced his friend Mark TWAIN. As Twain did in THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER and ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Aldrich depicted young adventurous boys as they actually behaved. The semiautobiographical hero of The Story of a Bad Boy, Tom Bailey, for example, is realistically depicted as a boy with a tendency to get into trouble, and a precursor of Twain’s character, Tom Sawyer. Although Aldrich did not think of himself as a realist, his writing was influential in the development of the genre of realism in American fiction. His other novels include Daisy’s Necklace (1857), Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880). Aldrich continued to write and publish fiction until he succeeded Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, America’s most influential literary journal, in 1881. From that point onward his duties took him down an editorial rather than a creative fictional path. He stopped writing after the death of his adored son Charles in 1904, and died in Boston in 1907.

NOVELS Daisy’s Necklace and What Came of It: A Literary Episode. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1857. Out of His Head: A Romance. New York: Carleton, 1862. Prudence Palfrey. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1874. The Queen of Sheba. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877. A Sea Turn and Other Matters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902.

22 ALEXIE, SHERMAN

The Second Son. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. The Stillwater Tragedy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880. The Story of a Bad Boy. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870.

SOURCES Greenslet, Ferris. The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Samuels, Charles E. Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Boston: Twayne, 1965.

OTHER Arthur’s Classic Novels. “Writings of Thomas Bailey Aldrich.” Available online. URL: http://www.unityspot. com/arthurs/aldrich.html. Accessed July 2005.

ALEXIE, SHERMAN (1966– ) Sherman Alexie, winner of numerous poetry fellowships and awards, has garnered high praise for his fictional treatment of contemporary Native American reservation life. Equally renowned for his short stories and novels, Alexie also wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals, the award-winning film based on his 1993 story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. His novel Reservation Blues won an American Book Award in 1996. Alexie, born on October 7, 1966, to Sherman Joseph and Lillian Agnes (Cox) Alexie is a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian reared on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington. He writes from his awareness of the poverty, alcoholism, and despondency suffered by many Native Americans. Much of this awareness springs from his own experience. Alexie’s usually absent father, an alcoholic, left him to be reared by his mother, who supported the family through the sale of her handmade quilts. Many of Alexie’s earliest years were spent reading every book in the Wellpinit school library, and in the eighth grade he decided to attend Reardan High School, located 32 miles outside the reservation. In 1985 he entered Spokane’s Jesuit Gonzaga University, where pressure to succeed drove him to his own problems with alcohol. Alexie transferred to Washington State University in 1987 to be with his high-school girlfriend, and there he began writing poetry and short fiction. In 1990 Alexie began to publish in Hanging Loose Magazine, and these achievements encouraged him to quit drinking and to

earn his bachelor of arts degree from Washington State University. He achieved both goals that same year. One of Alexie’s strengths is his ability to create vivid characters, several of whom appear first in his poetry and later resurface in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Reservation Blues. These include a direct first-person narrator who is a young storyteller, Thomas Builds-the-Fire; Thomas’s friends Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin; and Aunt Nezzy, whose heavy headdress symbolizes the woman’s ability to help her people by bearing a large part of their pain. In Reservation Blues the young friends, now in their 30s, acquire long-dead blues singer Robert Johnson’s magical guitar. With the guitar of the singer, the group forms a rock band and travels from Seattle to New York in search of both adventure and personal identity. In Indian Killer (1998), a murder mystery, Alexie’s central character prefers to kill by scalping his victims and leaving behind a pair of owl feathers. The story takes place in Seattle. After each murder, the Seattle citizens explode into violence, and racial prejudices are exacerbated. The Indian characters, on the other hand, represent different facets of Native American culture, and the novel is steeped in historical fact and Indian myths. Though the novel belongs to the mystery genre, it is marked—like most of Alexie’s writing—by the irony that surfaces in his characteristic if bleak humor, a traditional Native American cure for pain. Smoke Signals, Alexie’s first film, was a critical and a popular success, winning both the Audience Award and Filmmakers Trophy in 1998, and causing some critics to view Alexie as the Indian “Spike Lee” (Williams, Salon.com). Alexie wrote and directed the film The Business of Fancydancing, released by FallsApart Productions, which premiered in New York in 2002. It is based on his collection of short stories and poetry of the same name, published in 1992. With plans for making more films as well as writing more fiction, Alexie lives with his wife, Diane, a member of the Hidatsa tribe of North Dakota, on the Spokane reservation.

NOVELS Indian Killer, New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996. Reservation Blues. New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1994.

ALGER, HORATIO 23

SOURCES Alexie, Sherman. “An Interview With: Sherman Alexie,” by Renfreu Neff. Creative Screenwriting 5, no. 4 (1998): 18–19, 59. ———. “Sending Cinematic Smoke Signals: An Interview with Sherman Alexie,” by Dennis West and Joan West. Cineaste 23, no. 4 (1998): 28–31, 59. Cox, James. “Muting White Noise: The Subversion of Popular Culture in Narratives of Conquest in Sherman Alexie’s Fiction,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 52–70. de Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill. “Fancy Dancer: A Profile of Sherman Alexie,” Poets & Writers 27, no. 1 (1999): 54–59. Donahue, Peter. “New Warriors, New Legends: Basketball in Three Native American Works of Fiction,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 21, no. 2 (1997): 43–60. Gillian, Jennifer. “Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie’s Poetry,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (1996): 91–110. Hafen, Jane. “Rock and Roll, Redskins, and Blues in Sherman Alexie’s Work,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 71–78. Jorgensen, Karen. “White Shadows: The Use of Doppelgangers in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 19–25. Marx, Doug. “Sherman Alexie: A Reservation of the Mind,” Publishers Weekly (September 16, 1996): 39–40. McFarland, Ron. “Sherman Alexie’s Polemical Stories,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 27–38. Myers, Kelly. “Reservation Stories with Author Sherman Alexie,” Tonic (May 11, 1995): 8–9. Purdy, John. “Crossroads: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 1–18. Richardson, Janine. “Magic and Memory in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9, no. 4 (1997): 39–51.

OTHER The Academy of American Poets Poetry Exhibits: Sherman Alexie. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/ search.php/fs/1/prmAuthor/sherman+alexie. Accessed August 21, 2005. Shermanalexie.com: The Official Sherman Alexie Homepage. Available online. URL: http://www.fallsapart.com/. Accessed May 17, 2005. Unofficial Sherman Alexie Fan Club. Available online. URL: http://members.aol.com/ptrleblanc/alexie.html. Accessed July 14, 2005.

Shermanalexie.com. “Official Sherman Alexie Biography.” Available online. URL: http://www.fallsapart.com/biography.html. Accessed May 17, 2005. “Without Reservations: Interview with Sherman Alexie,” by Mary Elizabeth Williams. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://archive.salon.com/ent/movies/int/1998/07/ 02int.html. Accessed August 19, 2005.

ALGER, HORATIO (1834–1899) Horatio Alger’s more than 100 juvenile books told and retold the rags-to-riches stories that appealed so strongly to the American reader in the 19th century; they are responsible for his reputation as the best-known writer of boys stories in the field of American fiction. The term “Horatio Alger hero” has long been a metaphor for the ordinary citizen who, by dint of effort and will, achieves success in the United States, the land of opportunity and the home of the American Dream. Alger also wrote two adult novels, The New Schoolma’am; or, A Summer in North Sparta (1877) and The Disagreeable Woman, A Social Mystery (1895), as well as an unpublished novel-length manuscript discovered after his death (Scharnhorst, Horatio Alger, Jr., 59). At various times in his career, Alger used the pseudonyms of Arthur Hamilton, Arthur Lee Putnam, Carl Cantab, Julian Starr, and Charles F. Preston. Born in Revere, Massachusetts, to Olive Fenno Alger and Unitarian clergyman Reverend Horatio Alger, Alger graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1852. After graduating in 1860 from Harvard Divinity School, Alger spent a year in Paris and worked as a private tutor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On three separate occasions during the Civil War he volunteered to join the Union army but failed the induction physical because of his asthma and short stature. He became a Unitarian minister in 1864 but in 1866, faced with charges of pederasty, he resigned from the Unitarian ministry of Brewster, Massachusetts, and relocated to New York, where he would earn his living as a writer for the next three decades. He lived in New York until 1896, establishing his reputation through such books as Ragged Dick (1868), Luck and Pluck (1869), and Tattered Tom (1871). These individual novels led to three series of boys’ books with those same names, all published by the

24 ALGER, HORATIO

Boston publisher A. K. Loring. Ragged Dick, first serialized in Oliver Optic’s magazine, Student and Schoolmate, in 1867, attained almost instant popularity. Dick Hunter, the youthful protagonist, is a New York bootblack whose ambition and hard work propel him up both the social and financial ladders of New York City. The details of Alger’s characters were supplied through his interest in the Newsboys’ Lodging House, founded by Charles Loring Brace: Alger formed a close friendship with the superintendent, Charles O’Connor, and subsequently interviewed a number of the boys on the intricacies of life on the street. Between 1880 and 1890, Alger informally adopted three boys who became models for characters in his novels: Charlie Davis (The Young Circus Rider [1883]), John Downie (Mark Mason’s Mission [1886]), and Edward J. (Tommy) Downie (The Odds Against Him [1889]). Alger wrote 119 books, including among the profusion of novels a collection of verse entitled Grand’ther Baldwin’s Thanksgiving with Other Ballads and Poems (1875), and biographies of such American statesmen as Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln, the Backwoods Boy [1883]) and Daniel Webster (From Farm Boy to Senator [1882]). Female characters seldom appear in Alger’s work, and only two of his novels have female protagonists: Helen Ford (1866) and Tattered Tom, whose title character is actually a girl dressing and living as a boy. Alger never married. When his health began to decline, he left New York to live with his sister Augusta in Maine and selected Edward Stratemeyer, a young editor at Munsey Magazine, to complete the 11 novels he had not yet finished. Stratemeyer was to form the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which published, among many others, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series. Although Alger’s work influenced many young people to believe they could rise above their stations, since his death in 1899, as Gary Scharnhorst points out, he has been variously interpreted as moralist, capitalist ideologue, or economic mythmaker (Scharnhorst, 65), depending on the era and political inclinations of the critics. Since his death in Maine in 1899, Alger’s papers have been housed at 10 public and university libraries, including the Library of Congress; Founders Library at Northern Illinois University is the official repository

for the archives and other papers of the Horatio Alger Society and includes more than 2,000 books and periodicals by and about Alger. Five separate Alger organizations have Web sites, and electronic versions of 11 of Alger’s novels are available on the Internet. In 2003 scores of his novels were being reissued in both hard and soft cover and listed for sale in bookstores and on numerous Web sites. The reading public continues to be fascinated with Alger’s success formula, which has been compared to that of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard. Ultimately, however, Alger’s code seems more responsible, less selfish, and more altruistic than Poor Richard’s.

SELECTED NOVELS Adrift in New York; or, Dodger and Florence Braving the World, abridged ed. New York: Street & Smith, 1903; complete edition published as Adrift in New York; or, Tom and Florence Braving the World. New York: Street & Smith, 1904. Ben, the Luggage Boy; or, Among the Wharves. Boston: Loring, 1870. Bertha’s Christmas Vision: An Autumn Sheaf. Boston: Brown, Bazin, 1856. Brave and Bold; or, The Fortunes of a Factory Boy. Boston: Loring, 1874; republished as Brave and Bold or The Fortunes of Robert Rushton. London: Aldine, 1887. Cast upon the Breakers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Charlie Codman’s Cruise. A Story for Boys. Boston: Loring, 1866; republished as Bill Sturdy; or, The Cruise of Kidnapped Charlie. London: Aldine, 1887. The Cooper’s Ward. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. The Disagreeable Woman. A Social Mystery. (Julian Starr, pseud.). New York: Dillingham, 1895. The Discarded Son. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Fame and Fortune; or, The Progress of Richard Hunter. Boston: Loring, 1868. $500; or Jacob Marlowe’s Secret. New York: United States Book Company, 1890. Republished as Uncle Jacob’s Secret or The Boy Who Cleared His Father’s Name. London: Aldine, 1890. Frank’s Campaign; or, What Boys Can Do on the Farm for the Camp. Boston: Loring, 1864. Republished as Frank’s Campaign. A Story of the Farm and the Camp. London: Aldine, 1887. The Gipsy Nurse. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Herbert Selden. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Hugo, the Deformed. Des Plaines, Ill.: Gilbert K. Westgard II, 1978.

ALGERINE CAPTIVE, THE 25

Luck and Pluck; or, John Oakley’s Inheritance. Boston: Loring, 1869; London: Aldine, 1887. The Mad Heiress. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Madeline, the Temptress. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Manson, the Miser. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Marie Bertrand: Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Mark, the Match Boy; or, Richard Hunter’s Ward. Boston: Loring, 1869. The New Schoolma’am; or, A Summer in North Sparta. (anonymous). Boston: Loring, 1877. A New York Boy. (Arthur Lee Putnam, pseud.). New York: United States Book Company, 1890. Phil, the Fiddler; or, The Story of a Young Street Musician. Boston: Loring, 1872. Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks. Boston: Loring, 1868. Republished as Ragged Dick! or, The Early Life of Richard Hunter, ESQ. London: Aldine, 1887. Rough and Ready; or, Life among the New York Newsboys. Boston: Loring, 1869. Republished with Rufus and Rose, 1870, as Rough and Ready: His Fortunes and Adventures. London: Aldine, 1887. Rufus and Rose; or, The Fortunes of Rough and Ready. Boston: Loring, 1870. Republished with Rough and Ready, 1869, as Rough and Ready: His Fortunes and Adventures. London: Aldine, 1887. The Secret Drawer. Gahanna, Ohio: Bob Sawyer, 1981. Silas Snobden’s Office Boy. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Strive and Succeed; or, The Progress of Walter Conrad. Boston: Loring, 1872; London: Aldine, 1887. Tattered Tom; or, The Story of a Street Arab. Boston: Loring, 1871. Republished as Tattered Tom, London: Aldine, 1887. The Young Miner; or, Tom Nelson in California. Boston: Loring, 1879. Republished as The Young Adventurer or Tom Nelson in California. London: Aldine, 1887.

SOURCES Bennett, B. Horatio Alger, Jr.: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Mt. Pleasant, Mich.: Flying Eagle Publishing, 1980. Nackenoff, C. The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Scharnhorst, Gary. Horatio Alger, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Scharnhorst, Gary, and Jack Bales. Horatio Alger, Jr.: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981. ———. The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

OTHER Horatio Alger, Jr.: Frequently Asked Questions. Available online. URL: http://www.washburn.edu/sobu/broach/ algerFAQ.html. Accessed August 21, 2005. Welcome to the Horatio Alger Society. Available online. URL: http://www.ihot.com/~has/. Accessed August 21, 2005.

ALGERINE CAPTIVE, THE ROYALL TYLER (1797) A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall TYLER (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a literary standpoint, however, his lone novel, The Algerine Captive, is a much more intriguing work. Tyler’s apparent intention in writing the book was to warn America’s democratic citizens of their dangerous capacity for ignorance and hypocrisy. In pursuing that goal, he produced an intriguing literary hybrid, blending the genres of picaresque satire, captivity narrative, and philosophical novel. The Algerine Captive recounts the travels of a fictional, first-person narrator, Doctor Updike Underhill, a well-meaning but naive and provincial Yankee. Tracing his heritage back to the Puritan migration and the founding of the colonies, Underhill stands as an American everyman, and Tyler uses him in the first volume of the novel to satirize both the pretentiousness of the emergent professional classes and the vulnerability and gullibility of the masses. Eventually, Underhill’s travels in volume 1 bring him into contact with some of the intellectual luminaries of the age. This device allows Tyler to comment, indirectly, on a range of political topics. Benjamin Franklin proves to be an admirable example of Enlightenment rationality and political pragmatism, for example, but the radical Thomas Paine is exposed as a shallow thinker whose ideas are driven as much by drink as by principle. Through all of these early episodes, Tyler’s humor remains broad and the tone of the book relatively lighthearted. The tone changes abruptly at the end of volume 1, however, when Underhill’s search for a stable living draws him into the trans-Atlantic slave

26 ALGREN, NELSON

system as physician on a slave ship. Recognizing the massive contradictions inherent in the new American republic’s support of slavery, Tyler places his narrator in an equally compromised position, thus raising the moral stakes of the book. Charged with keeping as many of the slaves alive as possible during the horrific middle passage, Underhill, along with the reader, is forced to confront the hypocrisy of American political idealism. This painful moment of self-recognition sets the stage for the second volume of the novel. In the final chapter of volume 1, Barbary pirates attack Underhill’s vessel, and he finds himself taken to Algeria. The beginning of the second half of The Algerine Captive is marked by a clear shift in genre; we leave behind the lightly comic world of Underhill’s picaresque wanderings to enter into the stark literary landscape of the Barbary captivity narrative. Written during the 1790s and first decade of the 1800s, the Barbary slave narratives ostensibly deal with the enslavement of Christians by Muslims in North Africa. At the same time, these works (which include texts such as Susanna ROWSON’S 1794 opera Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for Freedom) provided American writers with a safer, more indirect way of critiquing the slave system at home. In volume 2 of The Algerine Captive, Tyler fuses this specific form of captivity narrative with another 18th-century literary genre—the philosophical novel—adding yet another layer of critical distance. One of the texts Tyler had in mind as a model was probably the Persian Letters of Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher and jurist. That work centers on two Persian visitors to Europe, whose letters home provide a wide-ranging commentary on Western society, morals, and politics. In much the same vein, Underhill’s reflections on his captivity in Algeria provide an opportunity for Tyler to reflect on the institution of slavery and to comment on American society. Underhill becomes the centerpiece of such a critique in a series of heavily ironic episodes. Though he is unable to recognize his own intellectual and moral failures, the doctor’s naive sense of cultural supremacy is demolished in a series of debates with an Algerian mullah. Consequently, his critical commentary on Algerian history comes across to the reader as an implicit critique of European politics. Underhill’s

discussion of an Algerian lawsuit can be read as a lamentation about the influence of money and power in the American system of justice. Finally, his acknowledgment of the rapid breaking of his spirit in captivity offers a direct rebuttal to those apologists for American slavery who held up slave docility as evidence of natural subservience. By displacing some of the most controversial elements of his social commentary to North Africa, Tyler is able to offer a remarkably wide-ranging satire in the second half of The Algerine Captive. Though its lack of formal unity may trouble some contemporary readers, the novel should be understood as a sophisticated piece of comic writing. Clearly the work of an 18th-century mind, The Algerine Captive nevertheless raises issues of great importance both for 19th-century Americans (the problem of slavery) and for contemporary Americans (the dangers of ignorance and self-deception in a democratic society).

SOURCES Baepler, Paul. “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in Early America,” Early American Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 95–120. ———. White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Dennis, Larry R. “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature 9, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 71–80. Engell, John. “Narrative Irony and National Character in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Studies in American Fiction 17, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 19–32. Snader, Joe. “The Oriental Captivity Narrative and Early English Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9, no. 3 (April 1997): 267–298. Tanselle, G. Thomas. Royall Tyler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Tyler, Royall. The Algerine Captive. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1970. David J. Carlson

ALGREN, NELSON (1909–1981) Nelson Algren adopted as his subject the impoverished and the down-and-out of the Chicago slums. Although he wrote of other locales as well, his National Book Award–winning novel THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1949), as well as Somebody in Boots (1935), Never

ALGREN, NELSON 27

Come Morning (1942), and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) have firmly established him as the chronicler of drug addicts, swindlers, drifters, prostitutes, derelicts, and of the emotionally and physically handicapped. In the words of French writer Simone de Beauvoir, with whom he had a long and well-chronicled love affair, Algren was the “Division Street Dostoyevsky,” the realistic chronicler of the gritty Chicago streets where many of his fictitious scenes are placed. Algren believed that the vast American middle class had an obligation to pay attention to the unfortunate and the disadvantaged, and in The Man with the Golden Arm he gave eloquent expression to this idea. Born in Detroit and raised in Chicago from the age of three, Algren was able to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana because his older sister Bernice loaned him the tuition money from her teacher’s salary. After graduating with a B.S. in 1931, Algren hitchhiked and “rode freight” (jumped on a freight train for a free ride) from Minnesota to Florida to Texas, where he was jailed for several months for stealing a typewriter. Before being drafted into the army during World War II, Algren published Somebody in Boots, usually thought of as a Great Depression–era novel, and Never Come Morning, the first of his Chicago novels. Drawing largely on Algren’s youthful travels, Somebody in Boots features protagonist Cass McKay, last descendant of a family of Kentucky hunters. Cass wanders the country, observing and interacting with the whores, pimps, prisoners, dance-hall girls, communists, and socialists he meets on his travels from Texas to Chicago and back, always looking for his own place in the societal mix. At the end of the novel Cass is poised again to follow the open road, to find where it leads. Critics Martha Heasley Cox and Wayne Chatterton observe that Somebody in Boots belongs in the “road novel” tradition beginning in the late 19th century, continuing through the railways of Jack LONDON’s The Road (1907), John DOS PASSOS’s The 42nd Parallel (1930), and the highways of Jack KEROUAC’s ON THE ROAD and DHARMA BUMS (Cox and Chatterton, 61). The tradition continues into the contemporary era with such novels as Charles FRAZIER’s Cold Mountain, to name only one example. Never Come Morning, much admired by HEMINGWAY as a morally and psychologically complex “Chicago

Novel,” earned Algren the title of “Poet of the Chicago Slums.” Algren uses prizefighter Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, the Polish-American protagonist, to explore the condition of first- and second-generation immigrants, and to examine the plights and frustrations of similar young men and women who expect to die before age 21, victims of their urban environment. Although Algren’s last well-known novel, A Walk on the Wild Side, reiterates the themes of Somebody in Boots, here the protagonist, Dove Linkhorn, manages to prevail, despite the overwhelming odds. Without the Marxist rhetoric of the earlier novel, and with the addition of Algren’s characteristic dark humor, A Walk on the Wild Side helped seal Algren’s reputation as the chronicler of the Chicago dispossessed. Like the award-winning The Man with the Golden Arm, A Walk on the Wild Side was made into a feature-length film. Algren’s contributions to American fiction—and to the artistic use of naturalism and realism to evoke the plight of the poor—seem firmly established. He remains the heir of American writers like Carl Sandburg, Theodore DREISER, Upton SINCLAIR, and James T. FARRELL, usually called the “Chicago School.” Two years after his death on Long Island, New York, in 1981, the PEN American Center established the PEN/Nelson Algren Fiction Award. Algren was twice married—to Amanda Kontowicz from 1936 to 1939, and to Betty Ann Jones from 1965 to 1967. His love affair with Simone de Beauvoir lasted longer than either marriage.

NOVELS The Man with the Golden Arm. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949. Never Come Morning. New York: Harper, 1942. Somebody in Boots. New York: Vanguard, 1935. A Walk on the Wild Side. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956.

SOURCES Algren, Nelson, Who Lost an American? New York: Macmillan, 1963. ———. Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way. New York: Putnam, 1965. ———. The Last Carousel. New York: Putnam, 1973. Beauvoir, Simone de. America Day by Day. London: Duckworth, 1952; New York: Grove, 1953. ———. The Force of Circumstance. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Putnam, 1965.

28 ALICE ADAMS

———. A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren. Compiled and annotated by Sylvie LeBon de Beauvoir, translations from the French by Ellen Gordon Reeves. New York: The New Press, 1998. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews. New York: Viking, 1958. Cox, Martha H., and Wayne Chatterton. Nelson Algren, Boston: Twayne, 1975. Donohue, H. E. F. Conversations with Nelson Algren. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964. Drew, Bettina. Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side. New York: Putnam, 1989. Giles, James Richard. Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. Saccani, Jean-Pierre. Nelson et Simone. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994. Shay, Arthur. Nelson Algren’s Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

ALICE ADAMS BOOTH TARKINGTON (1921) Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth TARKINGTON’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to the upper-crust Palmer and Lamb families in the novel than he did to the would-be Adamses. Alice Adams first appeared in serial form in the Pictorial Review, a monthly aimed primarily toward women. Alice Adams exemplifies the literary realism movement of the 1920s, where characters’ aspirations did not always fulfill the American dream’s promise, their circumstances often influencing outcomes. However, characters might progress in alternative directions. Stylistically skillful, light, and facile, Alice Adams takes place in the early 20th century in a small industrializing town, typical of one in Tarkington’s native Indiana. Twenty-two-year-old Alice, proud and vain, attempts to improve her prospects through creative social climbing. Her accomplice, a domineering mother, manipulates her passive-aggressive invalid husband, only to undermine her mission to help snare Alice a husband whose social standing might elevate her own. Alice attempts to maintain her loyalty to her ridiculous sycophant of a father—whom Tarkington parodies—and appease her mother.

With charm, frivolous fabrications, and enigmatic statements, Alice captures, for a time, the attentions of Arthur Russell, a man of independent means and position. Meanwhile, her brother Walter rebels. Mingling with society’s marginal crowd, he finds the “colored people” more interesting than the “frozen faces” his sister and mother idolize. Where Alice and her mother see glamour, Walter observes artifice and boredom. Alice’s mother—whose first name Tarkington never reveals—lives through her daughter, who busily incubates their aspirations. It’s a no-win situation; Alice must deny “who she is”—that is, her family. Mrs. Adams barks, “Now you listen to me, Virgil Adams: the way the world is now, money is family. Alice would have just as much ‘family’ as any of ’em—every single bit—if you hadn’t fallen behind in the race” (210). But Tarkington beautifully describes a great equalizer: “Over the pictures, the vases, the old brown plush rocking chairs and the stool,—over the three gilt chairs, over the new chintz-covered easy chair and the gray velure sofa—over everything everywhere, was the familiar coating of smoke grime. . . . Yet here was no fault of housewifery; the curse could not be lifted . . .” (34). This “particular ugliness” is an equal-opportunity affliction. Alice “knew that she was unlikely to find anything better within a thousand miles, so long as she kept to the cities, and that none of her friends, however opulent, had any advantage over her” (35). Therefore, cleanliness was, at least in these parts, a virtue that money could not buy. Although no one dies, goes crazy, or commits suicide and although even the loose ends neatly tie, Alice Adams is, in a sense, a tragedy. It is not that life will not go on; it is that the characters may never realize their dreams (Broun). But the book has its humorous moments. Arthur Russell’s dinner visit is a comedy of errors. Hot soup, a plethora of etiquette faux pas, an incompetent servant hired solely for the occasion but instructed as regular help, and the sweltering evening keep things interesting. In 1935 George Stevens adapted Alice Adams into a film starring Katharine Hepburn. Therein, in the manner typical of depression-era Hollywood romances, Alice Adams manages to secure Arthur Russell. The novel demonstrated that social barriers permitted no

ALLEN, PAULA GUNN 29

such conclusion. Denied the verity of her situation and the chance to face it, Hollywood’s Alice is less dynamic than Tarkington’s original. (Ms. Hepburn, in a later interview, reveals that she favored the novel’s original ending for the film but was overruled.) Among various motifs, flowers appear throughout Alice Adams. Unable to afford a corsage from a florist, Alice is determined to pick hundreds of violets for her bouquet to attend the party of socialite Mildred Palmer. The violets expire, “betraying her,” prompting Alice to do what she could to conceal them (90). Anticipating a visit from Arthur Russell, Alice arranges carnations. (Only when the flowers are completely exhausted, does he show up.) Roses provided for the Adamses’ ill-fated dinner for Arthur not only droop, the brussels sprouts’ powerful odor obliterates their scent. Other girls’ flowers never wilt; only Alice’s do. Russell’s lunchtime visit with the Palmers yielded a “fine rose” in his buttonhole after a garden stroll with Mildred, whom everyone expects Russell to marry (345). But as flowers wither, Alice rebounds. Just as flowers spring anew, so does her hope and resolve. Even when forced to choose her own path—after abandoning the idea of finding an eligible suitor—she sees reason to go on. Born in a world where a father’s or a husband’s status almost surely determined a woman’s fate, perhaps Alice emerges as a proto-feminist character. (The Nineteenth Amendment became law in 1920.) The women seem trapped in this model. Desperation forces them to lie and manipulate, but Alice sees other options. Alice’s gift is her resilience and a talent for continually reinventing herself.

SOURCES Broun, Heywood. “A Group of Books Worth Reading: ‘Alice Adams,’ ” The Bookman 54, no. 4 (December 1921): 394–395. Tarkington, Booth. Alice Adams. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Jill Arnel

ALLEN, PAULA GUNN (1939– )

A scholar and critic respected across the literary community, Paula Gunn Allen is also well known as a poet and

editor of Native American anthologies. She is, additionally, a writer heralded among Native people for her recording of Native stories and as a spokesperson for both gays and lesbians in contemporary society. Her influential novel, The WOMAN WHO OWNED THE SHADOWS (1983), validates the lesbianism of the young Native American woman who dominates the book. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1939, to E. Lee Francis, of Lebanese origin, and Ethel Francis, of Laguna Pueblo, Sioux, and Scots origin, Allen (then known as Paula Marie Francis) was reared in Cubero, New Mexico. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English (1966) and her master of fine arts degree in creative writing (1968) from the University of Oregon, then received her doctorate in American Studies in 1975 from the University of New Mexico. Three other writers from Laguna Pueblo are related to Allen—her sister, Carol Lee Sanchez, her cousin, Leslie Marmon SILKO, and Silko’s brother, Lee Francis. In The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Ephanie Ataencio, the mentally ill main character, journeys toward a Native American spiritual tradition with the aid of Laguna Pueblo healing ceremonies, modern psychotherapy, the Iroquois story of Sky Woman, and the aid of a psychic white American woman. What really saves her is her acceptance of her tribal heritage and of her place in her tribe’s tradition. The novel parallels in part Silko’s CEREMONY, where the troubled protagonist, Tayo, also becomes reintegrated with his tribe after encounters with Native wise people, including Spiderwoman or Thought Woman. Allen’s other works include Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (1989), which won an American Book Award, and Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book (1991). Divorced from her husband, she teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles.

NOVELS The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco, Calif: Spinsters Ink, 1983.

SOURCES Allen, Paula Gunn. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book. New York: Women’s Press, 1991. ———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

30 ALL I ASKING FOR IS MY BODY

———. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. ———. Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1900–1970. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Bruchac, Joseph. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Tucson: Sun Tracks: University of Arizona Press, 1987. Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Hanson, Elizabeth I. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1990. Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interviews. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Smith, Lucinda Irwin. Women Who Write, vol. 2. New York: J. Messner, 1994. TallMountain, Mary. “You Can Go Home Again.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

OTHER Storytellers: Native American Authors Online. “Paula Gunn Allen.” Available online. URL: http://www.hanksville.org/ storytellers/paula/. Accessed May 18, 2005. Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color. “Paula Gunn Allen.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ newsite/authors/ALLENpaulagunn.htm. Accessed May 18, 2005.

ALL I ASKING FOR IS MY BODY MILTON MURAYAMA (1975) Almost every scholar of AsianAmerican literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton MURAYAMA’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian-American literature. When All I Asking for Is My Body was first published it soon became an underground classic and later won an American Book Award. The first novel in Murayama’s planned tetralogy (which also includes Five Years on a Rock, 1994, and Plantation Boy, 1998), All I Asking for Is My Body is narrated by

Kiyo Oyama, the youngest son of a working-class Japanese immigrant family. The novel opens with eight-year-old Kiyo living in Pepelau during the early 1930s and ends with Kiyo volunteering for the allNisei regiment in Hawaii to fight in World War II. Part 1, entitled “I’ll Crack Your Head Kotsun,” introduces readers to the dynamics of the Oyama family: the tradition-bound Japanese immigrant parents, the rebellious older son, Tosh, the introspective and inquisitive Kiyo, and the slew of younger (and marginalized) Oyama daughters. The opening chapter focuses on the story of Kiyo’s friendship with an older boy, Makot. The Oyamas try to dissuade Kiyo from pursuing this friendship. Makot’s family is the only Japanese household in the Filipino section of the local sugar plantation, and he is deemed undesirable by the elder Oyamas, a mystery that is explained when Kiyo learns that his friend’s mother works as a prostitute. The parents’ insistence on Kiyo’s dissolution of his friendship with Makot demonstrates both the distinctions of status that they adhere to and introduces the theme of filial piety into the novel. In part 2, “The Substitute,” Murayama continues the history of the Oyama family: Kiyo’s father struggles to earn a living as a fisherman in Pepelau, while his mother sews kimonos to help supplement their meager income. Believing that the Oyama family is cursed and that she is doomed to die young unless she can find a substitute to take over the family’s bad luck, Kiyo’s mother reveals to her son the origins of the $6,000 debt that the family must pay off in order to save face and to retain their pride and dignity. This debt, first incurred by grandfather Oyama, symbolizes the tension in the novel between the older generation of Japanese immigrants who hold fast to the traditions of Japan and the generation of local Japanese Hawaiians who are growing up speaking three languages: standard Japanese, standard English, and pidgin English. In part 3, “All I Asking for Is My Body,” Kiyo comes to maturity. As his family moves from Pepelau to Kahana, Kiyo’s father finally gives up his fisherman’s life and goes back to working in the cane fields of the Mill Camp plantation. However, the family’s change of location only increases their debt, forcing Tosh and Kiyo to leave school after the eighth grade so that they can work in the cane fields. The politics of race, eth-

ALLISON, DOROTHY E. 31

nicity, and class merge and play out against the backdrop of the plantation system. The Oyama family is oppressed financially, first under the system of Japanese custom that dictates filial piety toward the father and his family, (which is the reason they feel forced to take over grandfather Oyama’s debt), and then under the system of plantation hierarchy (which divides the workers by race and ethnicity from uniting together for better wages). Tosh, as the rebellious eldest son, continually questions his parents’ values and their subservience to both Japanese customs and the plantation system. Kiyo, influenced by the radical teachings of his junior high school teacher, Snooky, also begins to understand that until he leaves the plantation, he will never be free from the cycle of poverty and debt that has plagued his family. As the novel ends, the bombing of Pearl Harbor paralyzes the Japanese Hawaiian community; despite his mother’s pleas for Kiyo to remain with the family, he volunteers as a way to serve his country and prove his loyalty and as a means of escape from the stifling plantation system. A deus ex machina in the form of a pair of dice allows him to win $6,130 dollars in a craps game, finally freeing the family from their filial obligation—and more important, freeing himself to pursue a life outside the islands, as he sets out for the European theater of war.

SOURCES Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988. ———. “Bamboo Ridge Letter to the Editor,” Bamboo Ridge 5 (1979): 6–7. ———. “Problems of Writing in Dialect and Mixed Languages,” Bamboo Ridge 5 (1979): 8–10. Odo, Franklin. Afterword, “The Hawaii Nisei: Tough Talk and Sweet Sugar,” to All I Asking for Is My Body, 105–110. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988. Palomino, Harue. “Japanese Americans in Books or in Reality? Three Writers for Young Adults Who Tell a Different Story.” In How Much Truth Do We Tell Children? The Politics of Children’s Literature, edited by Betty Bacon, 125–134. Minneapolis, Minn.: MEP Publications, 1988. Romaine, Suzanne. “Hau fo rait pijin: Writing in Hawai’i Creole English,” English Today 10 (1994): 20–24. Sumida, Stephen. “Hawaii’s Complex Idyll: All I Asking for Is My Body and Waimea Summer.” In And the View from the

Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i, edited by Stephen H. Sumida, 110–163. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. Jennifer Ho

ALLISON,

DOROTHY

E. (1949– )

Dorothy Allison has made a name for herself by writing about the impoverished white southerners among whom she was reared. After attracting favorable attention with Trash (1988), her short-story collection, and The Women Who Hate Me (1991, a poetry collection aimed particularly at the gay and lesbian community, Allison published the novel, BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA (1992), a finalist for a National Book Award. Since then she has been compared with William FAULKNER, Flannery O’CONNOR, and Harper LEE and has written Skin: Talking About Sex, Class, and Literature (1994), an acclaimed essay collection; Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995), a brief memoir; and the ambitious novel Cavedweller (1998). An avowed champion of working-class southerners, Allison hopes to depict them with as much talent and insight as those middle-class characters made famous by Flannery O’Connor, a writer she admires. Born in 1949 and reared in and around Greenville, South Carolina, to a 15-year-old unwed mother, Allison was raised in poverty. Despite being physically and sexually abused by her stepfather, Allison not only survived but persevered. Encouraged by her mother, Allison earned her bachelor of arts degree from Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College), and in 1971 received a master of arts degree from the New School for Social Research (now New School University). Not surprisingly, her fiction is heavily autobiographical, and, says Allison, using the details in her writing and storytelling has helped her face the truth about her own life. Perhaps as important, her characters and their unsentimental stories have illuminated many sad facts of life previously unfamiliar to many of her mainstream readers. The novel Bastard Out of Carolina, set in 1950s rural South Carolina, presents its young protagonist, Bone, who was born to an unmarried mother who subsequently marries a man who sexually abuses her daughter. Like her creator, Bone learns that her very survival is somehow linked to lying and storytelling, at which

32 ALL THE KING’S MEN

she proves extremely adept, entertaining her friends for hours on end. The more serious power of storytelling becomes apparent when Bone finally tells her mother the truth about Daddy Glenn. Similarly, Delia Bird, the protagonist of Cavedweller, learns that survival means facing the truth and accepting responsibility for past difficulties and mistakes. As a young woman in the 1980s, Delia is married to Clint Windsor, a Cayro, Georgia, alcoholic who beats her. She escapes her marriage by running off with Randall, a rock music star with whom she lives and performs in glitzy nightclubs in Los Angeles. She pays a huge price, however, for she leaves behind her two baby daughters, Amanda and Dede. Although Delia and Randall have another daughter, Cissy, she cannot escape her guilt and, when Randall dies in a motorcycle accident, Delia and Cissy return to Cayro; she hopes to win back the custody of her first two daughters. Delia nurses Clint, now dying of cancer, and in exchange, he allows her to reunite with Amanda and Dede. Although the actual cave exploration scenes focus on Cissy, who is preoccupied with these Southern Georgia landmarks, Delia, too, can be understood through the metaphor of the cave dweller: She must finally come to terms with her past, reenvision herself, and emerge into the light. Then she can begin a new life with her three daughters. Both Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller were awarded the Lambda Award for Lesbian Fiction.

NOVELS Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Dutton, 1992. Cavedweller. New York: Dutton, 1998.

SOURCES Moore, Lisa. “Dorothy Allison.” In Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Sandra Pollack and Denise Knight. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

OTHER Penguin Readers Guides. “An Interview with Dorothy Allison.” Available online. URL: http://www.penguinputnam. com/static/rguides/us/cavedweller.html. Accessed Aug. 21, 2005. Sherwin, Elizabeth. “Patron Saint of Battered Women Writes, Forgives.” Printed Matter. Available online. URL: http:// virtual-markets.net/~gizmo/1998/dorothy.html. Accessed July 14, 2005.

ALL THE KING’S MEN ROBERT PENN WAR(1946) America’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn WARREN, was best known during his life as a Pulitzer prize–winning poet. However, his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, has become his most recognized work since his death in 1987. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1947, establishing Warren as a master of fiction as well as poetry. In 1949 Columbia Pictures released a film version of All the King’s Men, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor for Broderick Crawford’s portrayal of Willie Stark, and Best Supporting Actress for Mercedes McCambridge’s portrayal of Sadie Burke. As Noel Polk observed in the afterword to his restored edition of All the King’s Men in 2001, “By common consent it is Robert Penn Warren’s best novel and also his most popular and enduring work” (631). While many readers consider All the King’s Men a political novel, it is far more than just that. Warren acknowledged in conversations and interviews that Huey Long in Louisiana was an inspiration for the novel, but he also said that Julius Caesar had inspired it as well. The issues it examines are much more complex than those of a single, corrupt politician. Told from the point of view of Jack Burden, a young southern journalist with his own issues about morality and justice, All the King’s Men follows the rise of Willie Stark to the position of governor in a southern state resembling Louisiana. Willie is completely open concerning his questionable means of accomplishing whatever he wants. As John Burt describes him, he is “a man willing to break the law to serve justice,” a man who “asserts himself in immoral ways in order to prove to himself that he has a self” (142). Willie’s rise is meteoric but not without difficulties. Willie is a womanizer, cheating on his wife throughout most of the novel, but even in these relationships he manages to hold to his own sense of equality, sleeping with the lower-class Sadie Burke as well as the upper-class Anne Stanton. Willie is thus an enigma, whom William Bedford Clark describes as wearing “the mask of an uncouth and unabashed populist demagogue, wielding like a weapon an inflammatory rhetoric in which holy writ and earthy humor combine,” while at the same time he is “a reforming idealist trying to assert himself against the shifting, but REN

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES 33

always constrictive and reductive, roles the modern American politician seems fated to play” (90). As mentioned before, though, All the King’s Men is not just a political novel. It is also a novel of a young man’s struggle with the past and the present, with morality and justice. Because Jack Burden is the narrator of the novel, the themes concern him as much as they do Willie Stark. James Justus suggests, “All the King’s Men concerns the moral education of its narrator and it is Warren’s first extended fictional statement on the idea of complicity that lies at the core of that work” (Justus, 39). Indeed, Jack’s struggles with the morality of his ancestor, Cass Mastern; of his father, the socalled scholarly attorney; and of his substitute father, Judge Irwin, become touchstones for Jack in assessing his own morality in his relationships with Willie and with Anne Stanton. John Burt says that “Jack’s chief rhetorical effort is to show that all moral claims originate in pretense” (Burt, 155). Yet Jack’s rhetoric is often idealistic, and as with Willie, idealism cannot prevail in a world of moral ambiguity. When circumstances do not live up to Jack’s expectations, he struggles to adjust and situate himself within a changed world. How Jack reacts to the failure of his idealistic visions is perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of All the King’s Men. When Jack learns of Willie’s affair with Anne Stanton, which he views as the biggest betrayal, Jack’s reaction is telling. Rather than fighting with Willie or with Anne, he flees, and he flees west, a typical American response to bad circumstances that comes down to him from the founding of the country. Hugh Ruppersburg suggests, “Travel west is movement toward unreality. It is in this sense the pursuit of a dream, an unattainable ideal. It is thus a metaphor for American history, as it was for . . . Jack Burden in All the King’s Men. . . .” (Ruppersburg, 112). For Jack, the West is a place of refuge; it nurtures him and soothes him when his world turns chaotic. Jack says the West is “where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age” (377). In his discovery of Anne Stanton’s affair with Willie, it is where Jack goes to recover from the shock of his destroyed fantasy of the virginal Anne. In fact, Jack says he “drowned West,” his “body having drifted down to lie there in the comfort-

ing, subliminal ooze on the sea-floor of History” (431) and he finds “innocence and a new start in the West” (434) that allows him to return to the South and face Anne in her new persona and the morally ambiguous world that did not meet his expectations. Whether All the King’s Men is Jack’s story or Willie’s, it is a complex novel, one that Marshall Walker calls, “a novel of ideas . . . without being philosophically over-insistent” (Walker, 99). The main characters represent particular types or ideas that all come together within the single narrator, Jack Burden. With this novel, it seems that Robert Penn Warren was able to successfully accomplish what Jack Burden describes in the final lines of the novel; he was able to “go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history and into history and the awful responsibility of Time” (609).

SOURCES Burt, John. Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. Clark, William Bedford. The American Vision of Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Ruppersburg, Hugh. Robert Penn Warren and the American Imagination. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. Walker, Marshall. Robert Penn Warren: A Vision Earned. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1979. Warren, Robert Penn. All the King’s Men. Restored ed. Edited by Noel Polk. New York: Harcourt, 2001. Watkins, Floyd, John T. Hiers, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. Keri Overall

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES CORMAC MCCARTHY (1992) The publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 vaulted Cormac McCARTHY into the spotlight of the American literary mainstream. Though his five previous novels had garnered consistently positive reviews and a number of awards, McCarthy had endured poor sales and toiled in relative obscurity. However, Random House’s ardent promotion and the book’s romantic western qualities helped make All the

34 ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

Pretty Horses a national best-seller. Director Mike Nichols optioned the movie rights (Billy Bob Thornton would eventually direct the disappointing film version) and the novel won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Such success had a snowball effect on McCarthy’s career. Vintage rereleased his previous works in new paperback editions, and The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), the subsequent installments of the Border Trilogy, also became best-sellers. Meanwhile, McCarthy’s career received increasing scholarly scrutiny. Because it subverts the genre’s investment in heroic individualism, critics have labeled the novel a postmodern western. While helpful, this designation obscures the work’s conventional plotting and characterization. All the Pretty Horses tells the story of 16year-old John Grady Cole’s journey from southwest Texas into Mexico and back. Along the way he performs deeds of high valor as he struggles to live out his romantic cowboy code. The story opens in 1949 in San Angelo, Texas, with the funeral of John Grady’s maternal grandfather, the tutelary spirit on whose ranch John Grady has been raised. The grandfather’s passing and John Grady’s desire to keep the unprofitable ranch against his mother’s wishes marks the hero as a belated figure. Like the culture of the Comanches who once roamed this land, the cowboy way of life will soon be lost to history as the postwar boom in the Texas oil industry displaces ranching as southwest Texas’s economic engine. Unable to sustain his dream of the Old West, John Grady sets off on horseback for a larky ride into Mexico with his more pragmatic friend, Lacey Rawlins, who plays Sancho Panza to the novel’s quixotic hero. McCarthy’s writing, varied and intoxicating, seduces the reader to buy into John Grady’s western fantasy. His prose shifts effortlessly from direct accounts of the journey to terse, comic dialogue, then careens into exhilarating descriptions of the landscape that locate the boys in an almost mythological relation to the universe. In contrast to the “picture book” horses John Grady admires but has been told do not exist, in the early sections of All the Pretty Horses the storybook cowboy life indeed appears attainable. The boys imagine themselves as desperadoes on the run, legends in the mak-

ing, and the book’s seamless integration of western male bravado with Faulknerian rhetorical flourishes tempts us to see them so as well. McCarthy’s language, however, undercuts this response by quietly intimating that this is all playacting, and when the boys are joined by a 13-year-old runaway on a magnificent horse they presume he’s stolen, they begin to lose control over the fantasy narrative they so confidently act out. Critics have suggested that Jimmy Blevins, as their new comrade calls himself, is one of a number of characters who represents the Evil that John Grady’s Adamic American innocence fails to heed. Despite Rawlins’s warnings, John Grady remains foolishly tolerant of Blevins, who loses not only his horse but also his clothes in a thunderstorm. Soon after, in one of the book’s most comically adventurous moments, in the town of Encantada while dressed only in undershorts, Blevins boldly steals the horse back. John Grady and Rawlins separate from Blevins and journey to the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, where they are hired on as ranch hands. Here John Grady becomes embroiled in a torrid affair with Alejandra, the beautiful daughter of the hacendado, Don Hector. Seeing Alejandra riding, John Grady thinks, “real horse, real land and sky and yet a dream withal,” and for a brief moment the ideal of romantic love coincides with his idyllic vision of ranch life. The novel’s revisionary inclinations emerge most clearly in the second half. Here the journey is reversed and the dream of retreat from the modern world shattered. First, the familial codes of Mexican aristocracy make Alejandra’s affair unacceptable to her father. Having gotten wind of the events that transpired in Encantada, as well as the fact that Blevins later killed three men in yet another effort to regain his horse, Don Hector relinquishes the boys to the Mexican authorities. Having been handed over to the Encantada police, the boys are forced to stand helplessly by as the town’s ruthless police captain executes Blevins. From there they are sent a prison in Saltillo, where their stubborn refusal to bribe their way out nearly costs them their lives. John Grady and Rawlins manage to survive only because Dueña Alfonsa, Alejandra’s great aunt, has bought their release in exchange for Alejandra’s promise to end the relationship to John Grady.

ALVAREZ, JULIA 35

While Rawlins returns to Texas, John Grady pursues Alejandra. However, Dueña Alfonsa explains the arrangement she has made with Alejandra and justifies her interference by telling of her own similarly ill-fated romance. The rigorously realistic outlook she has gained from such experience compels her to protect Alejandra from dreamers like John Grady, the kind of men “to whom things happen.” Thwarted in his pursuit of Alejandra, on his return home through Encantada John Grady decides to reclaim his horse, and in a spectacular single-handed raid, he retrieves Blevins’s horse as well, takes the police captain hostage, and suffers a bullet wound to the leg, which he later cauterizes with the scalded barrel of his gun. While John Grady’s experience strips him of his western American naïveté, his exploits, as well as the novel’s concluding scenes, remain perplexing. His “grace under pressure” verges on the superheroic and seems almost parodic at times. Nevertheless, Dianne Luce, like others, construes John Grady’s final actions as a more mature form of heroism, arguing that he forgoes a quest for dominance (of nature, women, and others) in favor of a quest for truth. Indeed, upon returning to San Angelo after having failed in his noble mission to return Blevins’s horse to its rightful owner, John Grady appears at novel’s end shorn of his romantic illusions yet relatively uncorrupted. Still, because the novel concludes with an ambiguous image of the hero vanishing into the landscape, a mere shadow in the blood-red sunset in the west, it remains unclear whether his journey has led to a new understanding of the world or has simply rendered his alienation complete.

SOURCES Alarcon, Daniel Cooper. “All the Pretty Mexicos: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Representations.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, 141–152. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Lilley, James D. “ ‘The Hands of Yet Other Puppets’: Figuring Freedom and Reading Repetition in All the Pretty Horses.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 272–287. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Luce, Dianne C. “ ‘When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism in All the Pretty Horses.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 57–70. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Random House, 1992. Morrison, Gail Moore. “All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole’s Expulsion from Paradise.” In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, rev. ed, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 175–194. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Wallach, Rick. “Theater, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy,” Southwestern American Literature 1 (Fall 2001): 159–177. Kevin Quirk

ALVAREZ, JULIA (1950– ) Julia Alvarez, novelist and poet, has managed in little over a decade to attract a “crossover” (or mainstream) audience while chronicling the experience of the Latina in the United States. She has already achieved critical approval and attracted a large number of non-Hispanic readers. In this she is similar to Isabel Allende, Sandra CISNEROS, Cristina GARCIA, Ana Castillo, Esmeralda Santiago, and the American Book Award Winner, Sandra BENÍTEZ. Alvarez remains best known for HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS (1991), winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award, and for IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES, a historical novel and 1995 nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award. These were followed by ¡YO! (1996), a sequel to García Girls, and In the Name of Salomé, another historical novel. All her novels take place in the United States and in the Dominican Republic, Alvarez’s birthplace. Born in 1950, Alvarez, her parents, and three sisters, moved to the United States when she was 10 years old. Her father, a medical doctor, was fortunate to get out of the Dominican Republic alive; indeed, the family’s dramatic leave-taking is at the core of both García Girls and ¡YO!. Because Alvarez and her sisters did not speak English and were “foreigners” in their Queens, New York, neighborhood, it is obvious why her loosely autobiographical novels depict the way immigrant

36 AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, THE

families exist with one foot in their countries of origin and another in the eternally and repeatedly new American home. Each novel features the character Yolanda, or Yo, a clearly recognizable alter ego for the author. Alvarez herself bridged this gap so completely that today she actually speaks Spanish with an American accent (Sirias, 2). Although both García Girls and In the Time of the Butterflies have been translated from English into Spanish, Alvarez says she would not dream of trying to write fiction in her native language (Sirias, 2). Influenced by the central place of storytelling in the Dominican culture, Alvarez knew from an early age that she wanted to become a writer. After attending Connecticut College for two years, she transferred to Middlebury College, earning a B.A. in English, summa cum laude, in 1971, and an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1975. She counts numerous American writers among her favorites, including Sandra Cisneros, Louise ERDRICH, Toni MORRISON, Leslie Marmon SILKO, and Alice WALKER, as well as the Chilean Pablo Neruda and the Russian Leo Tolstoy. It is, however, the popularity of Maxine Hong KINGSTON’s memoir, The WOMAN WARRIOR, which made clear to her that the memories and insights of a writer from a minority community could resonate with a mainstream audience (Sirias, 6). In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé are historical novels. In the former, “butterflies” refers to “las mariposas,” the name ascribed to the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were murdered during the regime of Rafael Trujillo, the longest one-man dictatorship in the history of the Dominican Republic. In the Name of Salomé, according to scholar and critic Silvio Sirias, is Alvarez’s most ambitious work to date (Sirias, 119), as it focuses on Salomé Ureña, the Dominican National Poet and mother of the famous historical poet Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Max Henríquez Ureña, literary critic, historian, and diplomat during the Trujillo regime. Although nearly lost to history, Salomé Camila Henríquez Ureña was the daughter of Salomé Ureña and the sister of Pedro and Max. In this experimental novel, Alvarez devotes eight chapters, moving forward, to Salomé’s story and four to Camila’s, moving backward in time, covering the period 1850 to 1973. Although Alvarez considers herself an American writer who happens to be Latina, she shares with other

Latina and Latino writers such cultural interests as the centrality and influence of religion (usually Catholicism), family, machismo, and superstition. She remains the only Dominican writer of note in the United States, and she continues to experiment with unconventional plotting and structure. Alvarez is married and lives and works in Vermont.

NOVELS How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991. In the Name of Salomé. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2000. In the Time of the Butterflies. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994. ¡Yo!. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1996.

SOURCES Miller, Susan. “Family Spats,” Newsweek, 17 October 1994, 77. Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

OTHER Alvarez, Julia. “Something to Declare.” Interview with Dwight Garner. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http:// archive.Salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/09/25feature.html. Accessed August 15, 2005. Emory University Web site. “Julia Alvarez.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Alvarez.html. Julia Alvarez Web site. Available online. URL: http://www. alvarezjulia.com. Accessed August 10, 2005.

AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, THE MICHAEL CHABON (2000) Michael CHABON’S Pulitzer Prize–winning novel focuses on Josef (Joe) Kavalier and Sammy Clay (né Klayman), two artistically gifted cousins who create the masked comic-book hero, The Escapist, modeled on Superman, in New York City just before, during, and after World War II. Both subject matter and language celebrate the triumph of creativity and human relationships in the face of the evils and Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. Chabon, frequently compared to such writers as John CHEEVER and Vladimir NABOKOV, has been praised for his lyrical use of language, his historical accuracy, and his ebul-

AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY, THE 37

lient characters. Like those of Horatio ALGER, they overcome anguish and tragedy to become successful immigrant achievers of the American dream. The originality of the novel lies not only in the vibrant, sympathetic protagonists but also in Chabon’s use of the Golden Age of Comics in mid-20th-century American history and myth. The Escapist becomes metaphoric not only of individual freedom but the liberation of victims of tyranny everywhere. The novel opens in Brooklyn, New York, as Ethel Klayman, Sammy’s mother, awakens him to announce the arrival of his cousin Josef from Prague, Czechoslovakia. With the help of magician and escape artist Bernard Kornblum, a mentor inspired by Harry Houdini, Joe has escaped Czechoslovakia by hiding in a box with the Jewish golem bound for Lithuania. The golem, mystical symbol of Jewish faith, a sort of superman fashioned of earth and clay (which Sammy’s surname is surely intended to recall), becomes symbolically affiliated with the American comic-book heroes (Batman, Spiderman, and, of course, Superman) so admired by Joe and Sammy. Chabon told journalist David Colton that he sees Superman as an immigrant who achieved success in America, and Colton agrees: “Substitute warshattered Europe for exploded Krypton, and Superman is just another refugee. Except, of course, he can fly” (Colton). As numerous critics and readers point out, the theme of escape is significant to this novel. Even the golem who helped with Joe’s European escape seems awakened from dormancy each time a character needs to transform his life. Sammy, who has “the usual Brooklyn dreams of transformation and escape” (Kavalier and Clay, 12), decides to leave behind his stockroom job at Empire Novelty Company, collaborate with Joe, and create their own masked hero. With Sammy as writer and Joe as artist, Sammy’s boss agrees to give them their chance (without a pay increase). In a New York vivified by period detail, they invent The Escapist, and, in their first issue, the hero “delivers a powerhouse punch to Hitler’s bloody jaw” (Merritt) and continues to be the vehicle through which Joe and Sammy fight the Nazis and try to persuade the United States to enter the war. Joe, who never rests from his efforts to bring his brother, Tommy, to the United States, finds a small

measure of comfort in their Nazi-fighting Escapist. In an interview with Dave Welch, Chabon explicitly states, “There was something about the golem which tied in with Superman and the superhero figure, the messianic figure who would redeem the suffering and helpless of the world”; moreover, “the creators of all these golden age comic books, many of them were Jewish kids” (Welch). For a time, the pair enjoys their newfound fame and fortune, mingling with such luminaries as Spanish artist Salvador Dalí and British film director Orson Welles. Joe falls in love with Rosa Luxembourg Sax, a talented artist, while Sammy takes on a gay lover, Tracy Bacon. Rosa, in fact, inspires Joe to invent the comic-book superwoman Luna Moth, “with the legs of Dolores Del Rio, black witchy hair and breasts each the size of her head” (Kavalier and Klay, 132). These days are abruptly halted, however, by the Nazi sinking of the Ark of Miriam, the ship carrying Tommy Kavalier. With the death of his last remaining family member, Joe gives up Rosa (pregnant with their child, although Joe does not know), Sammy, and their comic empire to join the navy. He is stationed in Antarctica, where he kills the last remaining Nazi, is wounded in the fight, is awarded the Navy’s highest medal, and returns to New York a genuine hero. For some dozen years he resists returning to Bloomburg (the fictitious Levittown) on Long Island and his friend Sammy (who married the pregnant Rosa) or to Rosa and his son, Tommy, named after Joe’s brother. Atop the Empire State Building, in a complex blending of the novel’s major themes and settings— magic, heroism, escapism, liberation, love, friendship—Joe reveals himself to his son, Tommy, and realizes that he still loves Rosa, while Sammy, now free to admit openly his preference for men, heads for Los Angeles. In a final act of generosity, Joe, who learns that an overlooked savings account has earned more than $1 million, rescues Sammy from poverty by buying him the Empire comic-book company. Chabon, who seems to embrace rather than resist labels, told interviewer Stuart Eskinazi in 2003 that he considers himself “an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a Jewish-American writer,” as well as a postmodernist; when he was mistakenly identified as a gay writer as well, he quietly corrected the mistake, but

38 AMBASSADORS, THE

pronounced himself happy with the loyal following of gay readers. Among the novel’s concerns are numerous grim facts of 20th-century history, including bigotry against Jews, gays, and women. Rising above it all, however, are the brave modern heroes who insist on their freedom of expression and individuality. Against the accusations of “escapism” aimed at comic books, Chabon successfully illuminates the positive meanings of escape and liberation in both art and real life.

SOURCE Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. New York: Random House, 2000.

OTHER Buzbee, Lewis. “Michael Chabon: Comics Came First.” The New York Times on the Web (September 24, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/ 00/09/24/reviews/000924.24buz.html. Accessed October 25, 2005. Colton, David. “Comics history ‘Unmasked’.” USA Today (6/23/03). Available online. URL: http://www.usatoday. com/life/television/reviews/2003-06-22-comic-roots_x. htm. Accessed October 23, 2005. Eskinazi, Stuart. “Nextbook: Insights into the Jewish Soul through Literature.” Seattle Times (11/11/1003). Available online. URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ html/artsentertainment/2001787791_nextbook110.html. Accessed October 22, 2005. Merritt, Byron. Review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Available online. URL: http://www.fwomp.com/ rev-kavalier.htm. Accessed October 19, 2005. Kalfus, Ken. “The Golem Knows.” The New York Times on the Web (September 24, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/09/24/reviews/ 000924kalfust.html. Accessed October 20, 2005. Siciliano, Jana. Review of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay. Available online. URL: http://www.bookreporter. com/reviews/0312282990. Accessed October 13, 2005. Welch, Dave. “Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.” Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/ chabon.html. Accessed October 16, 2005.

AMBASSADORS, THE HENRY JAMES (1903) With The Wings of the Dove and The GOLDEN BOWL, The Ambassadors is considered one of Henry JAMES’s major phase novels, marked like the other two books by James’s late, elaborate and elliptical syntactic style. The Ambassadors was written in 1901 but not published

until 1903 because of its being serialized in The North American Review. Thus it was composed before The Wings of the Dove although it was published afterward. James later slightly revised the novel for the New York edition in 1909. Although F. R. Leavis discounted the novel in his The Great Tradition and in recent years its presence in the critical literature has lessened as novels such as The Sacred Fount, WHAT MAISIE KNEW, and The Princess Casamassima have moved to the forefront of James studies, it has been central to James criticism for the past 100 years. James himself remarked that The Ambassadors was “frankly, quite the best, ‘all round’, of all my productions.” Often described as a novel of manners superimposed on a quest myth, The Ambassadors is a refinement of the “international” theme that James utilized in earlier works such as DAISY MILLER, PORTRAIT OF A LADY, and The AMERICAN. The novel recounts the story of Lambert Strether, an idealistic middle-aged American magazine editor, who is sent by his wealthy fiancée, the widowed Mrs. Newsome, to Paris to retrieve her 28-year-old son, Chad. Chad Newsome has been in Europe for several years but is expected to return and take over the family business in Woollett, Massachusetts. Along the way, Strether meets the American Waymarsh and the expatriate Maria Gostrey who act as guides to Paris. Strether finds Chad positively changed by the Old World environment and delays his mission as he contemplates his own wasted life and associates with Chad and Marie de Vionnet, whose relation is characterized to Strether as a “virtuous attachment.” When Strether fails to return with Chad, Mrs. Newsome sends another delegation of “ambassadors,” consisting of her daughter, her son-in-law Jim Pocock and his sister Mamie, whom Chad is expected to marry. Strether discovers the truth of Chad and Marie de Vionnet’s relationship when he sees them together in the French countryside. Chad decides to return to Massachusetts to capitalize on new ideas in advertising and Strether returns to America but not to Woollett. The idea of advertising runs as a metaphor through the novel and reinforces the nature of “the real thing” in the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Strether purchases a collected edition of Victor Hugo, “seventy bound volumes, a miracle of cheapness, parted with,

AMERICA IS IN THE HEART 39

he was assured by the shopman, at the price of the redand-gold alone.” Likewise, a Lambinet picture is offered to Strether at a price the dealer assured him was the lowest ever offered for a Lambinet. Chad and Strether’s difference of opinion as to the effect of advertising at the end of the novel runs along similar lines. Chad states that advertising “really does the thing,” but Strether corrects him that it only affects the sale, that it, in other words, emphasizes the commodity nature of the art, not the art object itself. The distinction between the real thing and the illusion of advertising illustrates the change, or lack of change, in Strether and Chad. The novel can also be considered a bildungsroman, although James alters the form by having his protagonist be middle-aged instead of youthful; the contrast is further developed in the pairing of Strether with the younger Chad. The growth experienced by Strether is summarized by his speech to little Bilham, the artist, to “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, as long you have your life.” The theme of perception is also played along these lines as it is Strether’s perception of his life, of Chad and Marie’s relationship, and of the difference between Paris and Woollett that influences his final decision. That this perception is not as clear-cut as it may seem is exemplified by the William James-influenced description of Paris: “It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next.” Most critics have praised The Ambassadors for its structural integrity. The symmetry of paired elements—Woollett, dominated by material concerns and a business ethos, and Paris, associated with high culture and the life of art; the paired sets of ambassadors; and the characters Strether and Chad, and Maria Gostrey and Marie de Vionnet—reinforces the international theme of the novel. In addition James utilizes a series of balcony scenes in which characters see or are seen and a series of garden scenes to tighten the novel’s structure. Likewise, James uses a series of recurring metaphors in the novel, including trains, boats, and jewels, to create an almost poetic aesthetic to the novel. A great deal of critical attention, especially after Wayne Booth’s analysis of the novel in The Rhetoric of

Fiction, has been given to the narrative as it is focalized through Strether. The novel is told neither from a firstperson point view (what James called “the darkest abyss of romance”) nor from an omniscient narrator; instead, the reader is limited to Strether’s point of view. In this novel James challenges the limitations of the single point of view and effectively conveys the nuances of human consciousness, because all the reader encounters is Strether’s thought processes and observations. James uses what he calls in the New York edition preface the ficelle character—in this case, characters like Maria Gostrey, Waymarsh, and little Bilham—to provide necessary information to the reader. One of the highlights of James’s success in this respect is his ability to create a far-reaching presence for Mrs. Newsome strictly through the thoughts of Strether although she is never directly seen in the novel.

SOURCES Armstrong, Paul B. “Reality and/or Interpretation in The Ambassadors.” In The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford, 63–106. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. Bellringer, Alan W. The Ambassadors. London: Allen & Unwin, 1984. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Griffin, Susan. “The Selfish Eye: Strether’s Principle of Psychology.” In The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James, 33–56. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Hocks, Richard A. The Ambassadors: A Readers Guide. Boston: Twayne, 1993. James, Henry. The Ambassadors. New York: Penguin, 1977. Krook, Dorothea. Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”: A Critical Study. New York: AMS Press, 1996. Matthiessen, F. O. Henry James: The Major Phase. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Rivkin, Julie. “The Logic of Delegation in The Ambassadors,” PMLA 101 (1986): 819–831. Watt, Ian. “The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication,” Essays in Criticism 10 (1960): 250–274. Eric Leuschner

AMERICA IS IN THE HEART CARLOS BULOSAN (1946) Carlos BULOSAN’s America is in the Heart, first published in 1943 and then in 1946,

40 AMERICA IS IN THE HEART

details the memories and experiences of a young immigrant from the Philippines. Bulosan’s travel narrative recounts the difficulties of his childhood in provincial Philippines, the causes of his immigration to the United States, and finally the hardships and violence Filipino migrant workers encountered there. The novel is candid in its descriptions and discussion of poverty, violence, and death. However, the narrator contrasts these images with an abiding sense of hope and a belief in the American Dream. The result is a “semi-autobiographical” novel that is strong in its imagery, its commentary on racism, class differences, and the tensions between various immigrant groups that still resonate today. Part 1 of the novel is first set in the barrio of Mangusmana, in the town of Binalonan, in the province of Pangasinan (Northern Luzon). The first-person narrator, Carlos, nicknamed Allos, sees his brother Leon coming home from fighting World War I in Europe. The family, happy for Leon’s safe return, helps him prepare for his wedding. All goes well until the wedding night, when everyone in the barrio finds out that Leon’s new wife is not a virgin. Violence ensues, setting a tone for the poverty, misery, and tragedy Allos witnesses throughout his life. He and his family eke out a meager existence as subsistence farmers, selling what little they can at market. Allos comments on the exploitation of these farmers by wealthier landlords, or hacienderos, and large corporations. He knows of revolts that take place against the richer entities, and the bloody suppression of these revolts. Allos’s father’s struggles to keep his land and eventually loses it to one of the faceless entities in Manila. Allos is acutely aware of his father’s humiliation at first losing his land and then having to hire himself out as a laborer. The struggle for land rights, both in the Philippines and in the United States, is a large theme in Bulosan’s novel. Attempting to find more work, Allos travels between Mangusmana and Baguio City, a larger, more cosmopolitan city. Here, he gains exposure to affluent Europeans and Americans. Allos meets an American librarian named Mary Strandon, who introduces the young man to library books and to Abraham Lincoln, a poor boy who eventually becomes president of the

United States. Lincoln becomes the role model for whom Allos has been looking. He also refers to writer Richard WRIGHT, noting that as a Negro, Wright was barred from borrowing books from the library. As a brown man, Allos also knows his access to a library could be restricted at any time, so he reads the books voraciously. Because of his family’s toil, Allos finally makes the decision to go to the United States to pursue what he hopes will be a better life. He journeys to Manila, waiting, like many Filipinos, for passage to Honolulu. In Manila, he is exposed to the violence and victimization resulting from abject poverty, from bloody cock fights to prostitution. His last image of the big city is of a woman prostituting her daughter for money. He sails from Manila with a heavy heart, already missing his family and his good recollections of home. As Allos departs for the United States, he seeks out other Filipinos to feel unity and comfort against the harsh racism that awaits them in the new country. Bulosan’s narrative style is episodic, showing how Allos meets many different women and men, some who disappear from his life, never to be seen again, and others who enter and reenter his life periodically. He travels all over the West Coast picking fruit and vegetables, and working as a dishwasher and fish canner. The work is hard, yet Allos observes that the money he earns is more than what he earned in the Philippines. As he travels, he runs into many of his compatriots, and learns very quickly of the insidious division and infighting that make all the Filipinos’ lives precarious in the United States. He observes other immigrant groups, for example, some of the Chinese, taking advantage of newly arrived immigrants. Other immigrants are hospitable, giving food and shelter whenever they can. Allos learns the dark side of survival: At times he is ruthless, at other times he is empathetic, trying to keep his humanity as both victim and witness to disease, accidents, and criminal activity. Because of the exploitation, several of the migrant workers, including Allos, try to organize unions. The socialist actions are at times successful and at other times suppressed by those who own the fields, orchards, and companies. Allos uses his talent for writing as a way of fighting for worker dignity. He participates in the social struggle that began with the

AMERICAN, THE 41

injustices he experienced as a farm boy in the Philippines. In part 2, Bulosan shows how literature functions for social change. Allos writes articles for various magazines, emphasizing the existance of fragile unions like the Filipino Workers’ Association. He also experiences conflict among the different nationalities as Mexican and Filipino workers compete. He tells of the infiltration and betrayal of spies who attempt to weaken the young unions. One in particular, Helen, is exposed by Allos and his fellow union organizers, but only after she foils various strikes. Soon after, Allos discovers he has tuberculosis. Undaunted by illness, Allos (Carlos) continues to write and to cultivate his relationships with other writers and editors who contribute their knowledge and experiences to help not only the migrant workers, but to improve the lot of all the poor. He discovers that other writers across the world are impassioned by the same social forces that drive him to write. His literary influences include Russian writers, Nikolay Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and other Europeans such as Sean O’Casey and Federico Garcia Lorca. He also mentions their American counterparts: Jack LONDON, Mark TWAIN, and William SAROYAN, who write about the struggles of the poor and outcast against natural and societal oppressors. Allos fights for unionization and Filipino rights through emergent fascism in Europe and later, through the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and World War II. Critics often discuss the importance of land and social reform in America is in the Heart. Other topics include gender politics in the novel. Articles on the novel discuss both emasculation and “hyper-sexual” stereotypes of Filipino men and the “threat” felt by white men of “taking” away white women. Other critics analyze rape, other types of victimization, and idealization of women characters in the novel. The novel’s study of Allos’s experiences of poverty, racism within and outside of cultural groups, and violence is detailed and often bleak, but it shows hope thriving in a young man who continues to educate himself and writes for what he believes.

SOURCES Cheung, Kingkok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, 312–337. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Chu, Patricia P. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Morantte, P. C. Remembering Carlos Bulosan. Quezon City, the Philippines: New Day, 1984. Patricia J. Nebrida

AMERICAN, THE HENRY JAMES (1877) Henry JAMES wrote The American in 1875 while he was living in Paris, and much of the material in the novel draws on his experiences there. Initially rejected by The Galaxy, The American was serialized in W. D. HOWELLS’s Atlantic Monthly before it was published as a book in 1877. James significantly revised the novel for the complete New York edition of his works in 1907. James’s revisions for the New York edition are probably the most extensive of all his novels; he altered the style of the novel to match the later complex, syntactic style characteristic of The AMBASSADORS and The Wings of the Dove, and he removed much of the comic aspect of the original version. The nuances of various passages, including the ending, were changed. Critics have debated the merits of the various versions, and many prefer the original. Christopher Newman, the American of the title, is a wealthy self-made man who is traveling through Europe to become cultured and to find a wife, “the best article on the market” (35). He meets the widowed Claire de Cintre in Paris, but when he goes to visit her at her home, he is rebuffed by her aristocratic family, the Bellegardes, including her mother, the marquise, and brother Urbaine de Bellegarde. Only her younger brother Count Valentin becomes friends with Newman and encourages him to continue his suit. Claire has survived a harrowing first marriage to a morally degenerate but socially suitable aristocrat, and she is not eager to remarry, but Newman’s gentleness and eager love win her over, and the two become engaged. Later, however, Claire is pressured by the rest of her family, who simply cannot accept Newman’s lack of culture and plebeian origin; she breaks the engagement and announces her intention of becoming a nun. Meanwhile, Newman has introduced Noemie Nioche, the social-climbing daughter of his French teacher, to

42 AMERICAN APPETITES

Valentin who is mortally wounded in a duel over her. On his deathbed, Valentin tells Newman of his disgust for his family and informs him that the maid, Mrs. Bread, knows of a family secret. Mrs. Bread supplies Newman with a letter that proves the marquise was responsible for her husband’s death. Newman threatens to expose the family but, in the end, forsakes revenge and destroys the evidence. The American is the first of James’s novels to deal with the “International Theme,” the confrontation of New World and Old World sensibilities that James took up again in DAISY MILLER, The PORTRAIT OF A LADY, and The AMBASSADORS. Newman is the prototypical American Yankee, independent and assured, straightforward and naive, yet boisterous and gauche; he is “a powerful specimen of an American. . . . [and] physically a fine man” (6). His origins are somewhat mysterious; he has made his new wealth in the West. The arrogant Bellegardes, on the other hand, living in a crumbling, castle-like estate, represent the old order of Europe and are described in terms of age and moral degeneracy. The ending of The American has vexed readers and critics from the original publication. Contemporary readers expected a happy ending, and Howells pleaded with James to provide a new ending in which Newman and Claire are married. When James dramatized the novel in 1890, he did give it a happy ending, but he retained the primary situation of the ending in the New York edition. Each ending, however, can be read differently. In the original ending, Newman appears to think twice about destroying the letter: “Newman instinctively turned to see if the little paper was in fact consumed; but there was nothing left of it” (325). In the 1907 revision, Newman’s instinctive reaction is removed and the focus is placed on Claire’s loss. Mrs. Tristam, one of Newman’s confidantes, listens sympathetically to his story: “ ‘Ah, poor Claire!’ she sighed as she went back to her place. It drew from him, while his flushed face followed her, a strange inarticulate sound, and this made her but say again: ‘Yes, a thousand times—poor, poor Claire!’ ” One of the main criticisms of the novel has been what some scholars describe as its dual nature. The first half of the novel, which recounts Newman’s stay in Paris and

develops the contrast between the American and the Bellegardes, has generally been valued for its realistic nature and social comedy. The second half, on the other hand, is criticized for its romantic, melodramatic tone, which is marked by staples of popular romances and thrillers such as duels, gloomy estates, family secrets, and murder. James himself draws attention to this problem in the preface to the New York edition. He defines the real as “the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another,” and the romantic as the things “we never can directly know” (xvi). The image of the novel is described in terms of a balloon and he asserts that the author of a romance cuts the balloon’s tether: “The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length, in the more or less commodious car of the imagination; but it is by the rope we know where we are, and from the moment that cable is cut, we are at large and unrelated” (xvii–xviii). James notes that the problem of the novel stemmed from his determining beforehand that the Bellegardes would not have acted in the end in life as they did in the novel; it was more likely, James admitted, that a decaying aristocratic family in Europe would have been only too happy to take Newman’s money.

SOURCES Banta, Martha, ed. New Essays on The American. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Horne, Philip. Henry James and Revision. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. James, Henry. The American. 1877. New York: Signet, 1980. ———. The American. 1907. New York: Scribner, 1935. Long, Robert Emmet. Henry James: The Early Novels. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Eric Leuschner

AMERICAN APPETITES JOYCE CAROL OATES (1989) Before the film American Beauty, before Columbine, even before the Menendez brothers or JonBenet Ramsey became symbols of American suburban culture, Joyce Carol OATES had, in her fluid style, already shown the “dark side” of suburbia in American Appetites. Indeed, Greg Johnson, in his book Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, simplifies Oates’s message and overall writing style, not only in American

AMERICAN APPETITES 43

Appetites, but in her writing as a whole: “the phenomenon of contemporary America: its colliding social and economic forces, its philosophical contradictions, its wayward, often violent energies” (Johnson, 8). Oates took the McCullough family, Ian, Glynnis, and daughter, Bianca, and showed readers the potentially deep flaws just beneath the surface of suburbia. Outwardly perfect, all appearances are crisp and clean, yet boiling underneath this very thin surface is a tendency towards violence, infidelity, greed, and dishonesty. The American dream, a quest for the perfect family, profession, and home and a life free of monetary concern, has been a popular topic for literature since F. Scott FITZGERALD graced the literary world with The GREAT GATSBY. In American Appetites, Joyce Carol Oates shows the American dream as a conclusion rather than a quest. Although limited in number, critical analyses of American Appetites point to Oates’s commentary on suburbia as well as the “brittle fragility of the structures and institutions that shape the typical American life-style” (Creighton, 95). In addition to this viewpoint, American Appetites can also be read as Oates’s challenge of the meaning of truth, redefining it as shifting perception rather than an absolute certainty. Ian and Glynnis McCullough, a successful, wealthy, and beautiful couple, truly have everything. The only apparent flaw in their picturesque world is the death of an infant son, Jonathan, many years prior to the opening of the novel. Ian is a successful senior fellow at the Institute for Independent Research in the Social Sciences. Glynnis is a published author and chef, currently working on a new cookbook entitled “American Appetites.” Their daughter Bianca, enrolled in a prestigious college, appears throughout the novel but does not live at home. Oates quickly establishes the success and storybook life of the McCullough family. Just as readers are wondering what this perfect family will do for the next 300 pages, Ian receives a call from a young woman named Sigrid Hunt—a friend of Glynnis— sobbing and in desperate need of help. “She began sobbing, panting harshly into the receiver, a warm moist desperate breath Ian could virtually feel” (10). Her cryptic message draws Ian to her home in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she greets him in hysterics. She

needs money. Ian is clearly sexually drawn to her, although he alternates repeatedly between denying and confirming his attraction. He writes her a check for $1,000 and leaves with the satisfaction that his money has helped someone less fortunate than himself. “Ian McCullough drove back to Hazelton-on-Hudson in a trance that was both erotic and rueful: guessing that what he’d done might be a mistake but quite satisfied with himself that, against the grain of his natural caution, he had done it. He thought of himself, that February afternoon—to be specific, the afternoon of February 20, 1987—with satisfaction and, even, a measure of pride” (30). When Glynnis finds the check receipt, however, the McCullough family begins to unravel. Glynnis attacks Ian with accusations, and their fight escalates from verbal to physical. In an attempt to protect himself from a knife-wielding Glynnis, Ian accidentally pushes her through a plate-glass window. Her death following an 18-day hospital stay prompts an extensive police investigation, and Ian is charged with the murder of his wife. Although he is eventually acquitted of the charges, he spends the duration of the novel attempting not only to maintain the appearance of his perfect family, now missing a substantial third, but to determine if, in fact, he did kill his wife. As a commentary on suburbia, American Appetites works as a near caricature. “The suburban life the McCulloughs have been living is another game. What appear to be solid, respectable lives and faithful, happy marriages are only the civil trappings of a much different reality full of rage, infidelity, and desperation” (Creighton, 97). Oates’s overemphasis of Glynnis as a professional woman, very successful in her career, a solid wife and mother who lives for her family yet is also able to put together the perfect dinner party for 20 of their “close” friends, belies the imperfection boiling underneath. Ian, too, fits the stereotype of the perfect man to a degree, even while standing trial for his wife’s murder. Ian is seen as quite introspective, largely due to the point of view Oates selected. Through the trial, Ian constantly questions his own guilt, as any “good” person would. “My success is my problem, he said, and his friends laughed with him and agree, for many of them were burdened with the same problem: they were, like

44 AMERICAN BRAT, AN

Ian McCullough, successes ‘in their fields,’ well into middle age yet ‘still youthful,’ comfortably well off beyond all dreams and expectations of graduate-student days yet still ‘ambitious’—though ambitious for what, none could have said” (7). However, with the realization that affairs happen, money is lost, and people die, American Appetites “is also about the other side of the looking glass, the ‘photographic negative,’ the dark other in the self and in others, which Ian encounters as a result of this experience” (Creighton, 95). An unanalyzed yet equally significant message of American Appetites is the redefinition of truth Oates presents. Truth, as a concept, is considered reality in a relatively constant state. Oates amends the concept and suggests that reality itself shifts continuously. Both Ian and Glynnis explore the concept of truth versus perception at many points throughout the novel. Glynnis thinks, while recollecting an affair from her past, “She had known, then, that absolute trust in another human being is an error. We believe, not what is true, but what we wish to perceive as true” (57). Ian mirrors this through a piece of artwork that hangs in his office as a constant reminder: “Not what the eye sees but what the mind imagines the eye must see” (8). Through these two parallel viewpoints, Oates challenges readers to consider what is truth, fact, and what is perception, what our minds imagine our eyes see. Throughout the trial Ian revisits this concept as he questions his role in Glynnis’s death. American Appetites is still a relatively un-critiqued piece of literature. Through presenting the picture of a stereotyped “American Dream” family and redefining one of life’s basic accepted facts, the definition of truth, Joyce Carol Oates has once again demonstrated her ability to not only tell a story, but to give a telling analysis of society and humanity as well.

SOURCES Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992. Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Oates, Joyce Carol. American Appetites. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Kelly Flanagan

AMERICAN BRAT, AN BAPSI SIDHWA (1993) Bapsi SIDHWA, a Parsee (Zoroastrian) writer of Pakistani descent, was born in Karachi, then part of pre-partition India, and all her early fiction is set in Pakistan or India. She immigrated to the United States in the 1980s, and An American Brat is her only novel set in the United States. The novel is narrated from the point of view of a young Parsee Pakistani girl who belongs to the Junglewalla clan featured in Sidhwa’s earlier novel The Crow Eaters (1978). Feroza Ginwalla, the teenage protagonist, is sent by her mother, Zareen, to visit her uncle Manek in the United States. Zareen wishes to dissuade Feroza from following the edicts of the increasingly fundamentalist Islamic society in Pakistan under General Zia in the late 1970s, and she hopes a vacation in America will cure her daughter’s conservatism. In the first half of the novel, Manek, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is Feroza’s tour guide through New York and Boston, and he initiates the privileged upper-class Pakistani girl into American life. He teaches her basic skills such as how to use deodorant, tear open plastic wrappers, and eventually to come out of her sheltered existence to become independent and responsible for herself. Feroza attends college, first in Idaho and then in Colorado. She learns about becoming American through her roommates and classmates—Jo, whose father owns a diner and whose siblings live on welfare; Gwen, an African-American woman, who climbs out of extreme poverty through a wealthy WASP boyfriend, and inexplicably vanishes (perhaps murdered) by the novel’s end; Shashi, Feroza’s Indian boyfriend who is an expert at benefiting from the allegedly exploitative capitalist “system”; and finally, David Press, her shy, Jewish boyfriend to whom she becomes engaged. By the novel’s end, Feroza has adapted so thoroughly to American life that when her mother visits the United States to break off her imminent marriage with David, Feroza refuses to do so, and instead faces the wrath of her family and ostracism by the Parsee community. The once sexually repressed Feroza also learns to take control of her body and to express desires that are forbidden by her own traditional society. An American Brat is a novel of manners. Sidhwa’s strength lies in her social realism and acute observation of details of the characters’ first impressions of America

AMERICAN DREAM, AN 45

and the differences between Pakistani, Parsee, and American attitudes, values, and ways of life. The depiction of the Parsee cultural mores, the multiple well-rounded comic characters of Feroza and Manek’s extended family, the religious rituals before Feroza’s departure for the United States, the elaborate preparations for Manek’s wedding, the tragicomic drama of the Junglewallas’ “family conference” (268) and “formidable think tank” (272) in response to Feroza’s wish to marry a non-Parsee or “parjat,” are all hilarious. The comic novel does at times seem a bit superficial, and, as one reviewer suggests, it reads like a travelogue of an international student’s first impressions and stereotypical perceptions of America and Americans, including a focus on sex, drugs, violence, materialism, urban poverty and homelessness, and impermanent relationships. Nevertheless, Sidhwa’s style, “boisterous, slightly ribald, and ingenuously irreverent” (69) continues to engage the reader. The novel is also a bildungsroman, a genre that, according to critic Feroza Jussawalla, is characteristic of the postcolonial novel. According to Jussawalla, “The bildungsroman journey seems to be the basis of every so-called postcolonial . . . novel. It is the initiation process that leads not just to a general self-awakening process, but to an awakening into one’s culture, one’s nationalism and to an understanding of one’s self as located in a particular place and in a particular cultural-political framework” (80). But the journey of the awakening in An American Brat is specifically feminine. Sidhwa’s works are informed by feminism, and on the treatment of women in patriarchal societies. An American Brat ends with Feroza’s full Americanization: after David breaks up with her, she realizes “she could only do the healing right here in America. . . . She knew that there was no going back for her” (311), as she values her privacy, individualism, space, and First World luxuries too much to relinquish them.

SOURCES Allen, Diane S. “Reading the Body Politic in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Novels: The Crow Eaters, Ice-Candy Man, and An American Brat,” South Asian Review 18, no. 15 (December 1994): 69–80. Jussawalla, Feroza. “Interview with Bapsi Sidhwa.” In Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, 197–221. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

Kapadia, Novy, “Expatriate Experience and Theme of Marriage in An American Brat.” In The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa, edited by R. K. Dhawan and Novy Kapadia, 187–199. New Delhi: Prestige, 1996. Powers, Janet M. “Bapsi Sidhwa.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 350–356. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Sidhwa, Bapsi. An American Brat. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 1993. Lavina D. Shankar

AMERICAN DREAM, AN NORMAN MAILER (1965) When Norman Mailer released his serialized novel An American Dream in 1965, critics either praised him for his work or dismissed the novel as a failure. In this controversial novel, Mailer tells the story of Stephen Richards Rojack, a former congressman and current television celebrity and professor of existential psychology. The text chronicles 32 hours of Rojack’s life, concentrating on those hours after he murders his wife—Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly—by strangling her and disposing of her body by tossing her out the window of a 10th floor apartment. Once Rojack disposes of Deborah’s body, he then has a series of quests to complete before being absolved of the crime. Mailer takes us through several sexual encounters, beatings, incest, and suicidal thoughts before Stephen is exonerated by Deborah’s father, Barney Oswald Kelly. And if this seems somewhat far-fetched, it is (many critics dismissed the novel for its lack of realistic portrayal). But here lies the beauty in Mailer’s work; this text is a radical departure from his previous novels where Mailer concentrates on the realistic. In An American Dream, Mailer develops a text that relies on the romantic, the mystical. On the surface, the text pushes the boundary of realistic fiction; however, a closer reading reveals the novel’s true focus on mystical elements such as magic, death, and the supernatural—all elements central to appreciating and understanding Mailer’s attempt at the romantic. As readers, we first see Rojack’s preoccupation with mysticism in his fascination with the moon. Early in chapter 1, “The Harbors of the Moon,” Mailer depicts Rojack’s reliance on this mystical element:

46 AMERICAN PASTORAL

So I stood on the balcony by myself and stared at the moon which was full and very low. I had a moment then. For the moon spoke back to me. By which I do not mean that I heard voices, or Luna and I indulged in the whimsy of a dialogue, no, truly it was worse than that. Something in the deep of that full moon, some tender and not so innocent radiance traveled fast as the thought of lightning across our night sky, out from the depths of the dead in those caverns of the moon, out and a leap through space and into me (11). Here, we see Rojack’s obvious belief in the romantic— this sense of another world beyond that of reality. Clearly, Rojack is immersed in this subculture where imagination rules. For Rojack, the moon guides his actions. Rojack does not decide his course; he waits for guidance from the moon. For critic Robert Begiebing, Mailer guides us through Rojack’s life by portraying it as a symbolic dream. Begiebing believes that the text operates within this dreamlike state to further Mailer’s purpose of depicting Rojack in a world that defies reality. Just as Rojack walks Kelly’s parapet balancing life and death, so too does Mailer balance his protagonist’s life between reality and fantasy. According to Robert Ehrlich, this break from realism and the delicate balancing act serve to promote Mailer’s vision: While much of the melodrama and coincidence are effects of Mailer’s attempt to write a novel beyond the confines of realism, supernatural forces not only contribute to the symbolic heightening of experience, but exist, independent of the form of the novel, as part of Mailer’s developing cosmological vision (Ehrlich, 69). Therefore, these abnormal occurrences that appear throughout the text supply Mailer’s need to view the world beyond the scope of reality. The plot promotes Mailer’s ideas about both magic and supernatural forces. According to Tony Tanner, Rojack enters the world of the mystical after he kills Deborah: “Having left the political world, Rojack finds himself in a demonised

[sic] world of invisible powers and strange portents, of rampant superstition and accurate magics” (Tanner, 43). Since Deborah’s murder occurs early in the text, Tanner suggests that Rojack survives in this world of magic for most of the novel. Accordingly, Mailer’s break with the reality in the fiction of his previous works requires it. When reading An American Dream, it is crucial to realize that this novel is a departure from the style found in Mailer’s previous works. Their focus was the truth at the hearts of his characters. In An American Dream, however, Mailer opts for the romantic; his focus becomes the mystical, the romantic. As readers, we cannot presuppose his loyalty to the realistic—we must open our minds and allow our thoughts to follow Mailer’s guide. In doing so, we are better able to appreciate and understand Mailer’s purpose—to promote his own sense of the universe.

SOURCES Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Ehrlich, Robert. Norman Mailer: The Radical as Hipster. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Fetterley, Judith. “An American Dream: ‘Hula, Hula,’ Said the Witches.” In Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon, 136–144. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Mailer, Norman. An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, 1965. Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Tanner, Tony. “On the Parapet.” In Modern Critical Views: Norman Mailer, edited by Harold Bloom, 33–49. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Christopher Lee Massey

AMERICAN PASTORAL PHILIP ROTH (1997) Although it was written first, Philip ROTH’s Pulitzer Prize–winning American Pastoral is chronologically the second novel in his AMERICAN TRILOGY about postwar America, beginning with I Married a Communist (1998) and ending with The Human Stain (2000). Covering the period from the end of World War II to the Watergate hearings, the novel focuses on the 1960s, characterizing its turbulence in terms of paradise lost. Like many pre-

AMERICAN PASTORAL 47

vious Roth novels, American Pastoral is concerned with the assimilation of American Jews and the transition from urban Jewish enclaves to dispersed and mainstreamed households in suburbia, as well as with daughters’ and sons’ acceptance or rejection of their fathers. The novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, was the hero of Roth’s earlier Zuckerman trilogy of novels, collected in 1985 as Zuckerman Bound. Zuckerman has long served as Roth’s alter ego, and in American Pastoral we find him grappling with his own mortality. The main character of the novel is Seymour Irving Levov, known as “the Swede,” an unusually Nordiclooking and athletically gifted boy from Zuckerman’s neighborhood, who grows up to be a successful businessman and the husband of a former Miss New Jersey. In short, he is the perfectly assimilated subject. Zuckerman, having withdrawn from the world after a bout with prostate cancer that has left him impotent and incontinent, is horrified to learn that the demigod of his childhood—whom he never stopped idolizing— has actually proven more vulnerable to prostate cancer than he. He also learns that two decades before his death, the Swede’s life was blown apart when his 16year-old daughter, Merry, in protest against the Vietnam War, bombed the local general store and killed a neighborhood resident. In this rendition of paradise lost, Merry is Eve, and the novel reflects as much disgust for women’s bodies and disobedience as the original versions of the Fall. Overweight and a stutterer, Merry is a problem child long before her political leanings develop. When the Swede finally finds her five years after the bombing living in a downtown Newark that has been gutted by rioting, she is an emaciated adherent of the Indian religion known as Jainism, and she carries her religious principles to such a morbid extreme that she does not bathe for fear of harming the microorganisms that reside on her skin. She is so revolting that the Swede vomits when he sees her, and her extreme nonviolence, following the revelation that she has been involved in several bombings that killed four people, reeks of hypocrisy. The Swede is hardly valorized for his assimilation, however. As others, including his brother Jerry, repeatedly try to tell him, Merry’s extremism is born of his extreme commitment to being perfect and to pleasing

everybody around him, especially his father. When he finds Merry in her Jain incarnation, he accedes to her request to leave her in the squalor of her situation in part because he never has been able to bring himself to force her to do anything she does not want to do, and in part because he is hosting a dinner party and he cannot imagine reconciling his daughter in her current state with his parents and his WASP neighbors. His love for his daughter is flawed by his love for the American dream, which he naively believed he had achieved. Considering the failures of Merry and the Swede, the novel ends on the lamenting question, “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” (423). The ambiguity of the novel’s message is compounded by Nathan Zuckerman’s narration of it. In the long first section of the novel, which focuses on the nostalgia he feels for the Swede and for the era of his childhood, after attending his 45th high school reunion, Zuckerman makes it clear that his knowledge of the Swede’s life is limited to Jerry’s brief summary. Although the final two sections of the novel are narrated sometimes omnisciently and sometimes from the Swede’s first-person perspective, we already know that this is Zuckerman’s mind at work—and from previous novels narrated by Zuckerman, we know his mind fairly well. This raises the possibility that American Pastoral is less about the Swede and the 1960s than it is about Zuckerman and his failing health. Seeking insight into the failures of his own body and shocked to learn that the Swede, too, is mortal, Zuckerman sees the loss of the forties and fifties to the Dionysian excesses of the sixties as paradise lost simply in terms of his own progress toward death.

SOURCES Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 74–83. Milowitz, Steven. Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Garland, 2000. Parrish, Timothy. “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 84–99. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Monika Hogan

48 AMERICAN PSYCHO

AMERICAN PSYCHO BRET EASTON ELLIS (1991) Ellis’s first-person account of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street type who kills between binges of good grooming, was a scandal even before its publication because its first contracted publisher refused to print it. Its horrific, some would say pornographic, depiction of sexual violence continues to raise the question of its value, or more precisely, what the exact nature of its value might be. The book is a tour de force, a virtuoso permutation of the premise that serial killing (particularly dismemberment) and commodity fetishism are alike in being forms of repetition compulsion characterized by the addictive accumulation of part-objects that are unconsciously intended to substitute for an undeveloped unitary self but can only provide a momentary satisfaction that must be sought again and again (Seltzer, 65). Self-administered facials and other essentially masturbatory acts of body pampering are implicitly equated with the carving and gouging of victims’ bodies, not merely because they too are indulgences, but also because both constitute the fetishization of part over whole. Fetishized brands displace the body: “I’m able to compose myself by simply staring at my feet, actually at the A. Testoni loafers. . . .” (151). Bateman monotonously recounts each ritualized stage of his grooming regime, all the while reciting the specs and capacities of the products he applies: “Then I use the Probright tooth polisher and next the Interplak tooth polisher . . . which has a speed of 4200 rpm and reverses direction forty-six times per second” (26). There is a grisly comic aspect to the idea of a cannibal concerned with whitening his teeth. But the constant referencing of accessories and mechanical apparatus does more than illustrate the fascination with phallic mechanisms so often ascribed to serial killers; nor does it merely foreshadow the later application of drills to the bodies of others in the attempt to lay claim to their mysteries. The function of branding is to bestow an implied affiliation. It is as if the narrator, by naming product brands—which are already fetishized by advertising that designates them as the supplement of a deficient or inadequate self— might somehow provide himself with an identity. Indeed the operative analogy may be between serial killing and advertising itself, insofar as consumption

practices could not be as they are were it not for the fact that conventional advertising imagery has already acclimated a materialistic populace to the power and provocation of part-objects: the fetishized body parts of women that are in turn linked to the product, the part-object writ large. “I place a camel-hair coat from Ralph Lauren over her head. . . . I keep shooting nails into her hands until they’re covered” (245). For all the sadism, there is something of the carnivalesque as well: The abject grandeur that the mutilated body has in pulp fiction is degraded by the branded accessories, rather than glorified. The bland yet insistent way that Bateman habitually catalogues his designer apparel, even as he is torturing some woman, can be seen as the consequence of the mutual dependency and ultimate conflation of obsession and triviality that has been strategically designed by consumerist capitalism. This alteration and eventual conflation of emotional vacuity and sensation, of nonchalance and sensationalism, is perhaps best encapsulated by the way Ellis segues from Bateman’s horrific description of his consumption of body parts to a banal conversation about the relative merits of different bottled waters (250ff). Bateman’s uncannily flattened tone conveys a detachment and general absence of affect that is more disquieting than any amount of heavy breathing and slavering. He occasionally displays contemptuous indifference: “I don’t want to ruin this particular Alexander Julian suit by having the bitch spray her blood all over it” (77); but his heart is not in it: I “touch my chest—expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there’s nothing there, not even a beat” (116). In the latter third of the book, Bateman’s increasingly frequent anxiety attacks do produce a heightening of disgust: “I start stuffing handfuls of the ham into my mouth, scooping . . . getting it stuck beneath my nails . . . throwing up . . . leaning against a poster for Les Miserables . . . I kiss the drawing . . . leaving brown streaks of bile smeared across [the] soft, unassuming face” (150). But he is upset by pieces of rabbit smeared with salsa, which “looks like one big gunshot wound” (123), in a way he is never disgusted by the human “meat” he cooks and eats. After poking at the rabbit in “disbelief,” he wipes his finger off on the thigh of his girlfriend (who seems not to notice).

AMERICAN PSYCHO 49

Inattention is a motif and insistent theme of the novel. A friend remains “unfazed” as Bateman “belch[es] into his face . . . greenish bile dripping in strings from . . . bared fangs” (151). Bateman coos at a baby in the arms of its mother, “ ‘Yes I’m a total psychopathic murderer, oh yes I am, I like to kill people, oh yes I do honey . . . yes I do’ ”; but the baby only grabs at his credit card. The cleaners never question his bloody sheets, nor the maid his smeared walls. Unlike Les Miserables, this is no story of the implacable attentions of the law. His confession to friends that on seeing a “hardbody” he wonders “[w]hat her head would look like on a stick’ ” (92) is laughed off, as conversation turns to dinner. However grotesque, this is comedy of manners, and indeed one of the book’s three epigraphs explicitly refers to a “mannerly” way of doing things and the need for restraint. To suggest that serial killing is a manifestation of the lack of good manners is not as comically outrageous as it might seem, since the absence of civility, that is, barbarity, is linked to inattentiveness (the subject of the third epigraph), which is in turn associated with lack of affect, the inability to feel appropriately—“the point when your reaction to the times is one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned into the insanity” (5–6). But the question is, is this insanity intended to shock the reader into recognizing something, or even to shock the reader out of something? Is the book a satire? Insofar as Bateman is never censured by his colleagues, the novel might be read as a satiric diagnosis of general socioeconomic tendencies that he personifies to an exaggerated degree. This would seem to be supported by the book’s first epigraph, which is from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, a first-person confession of an alienated sadomasochist who “represents a generation” in his thoroughgoing nihilism and desire to be acknowledged by those he despises. However, there is little, if any, textual evidence to support the contention that the book expresses moral indignation, as some wishful thinkers have pretended in the hope of legitimating it. If it is a satire on the self produced by capitalism, it is a postmodern one in which the recognizable objects of satiric degradation are present but displayed with a self-conscious awareness that

is always gesturing toward precedent texts. Dostoyevsky’s underground man did not have the intertextual benefit of a Madonna song as a soundtrack (“life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone. . . .” [150, 371, 373]). This is by way of saying that Ellis’s narrator is not subterranean but all surface insofar as he is postmodern, just as the scenes at his aptly named club and café (Chernoble [sic], Nowheres) provide a postmodern take on urban anomie (disorientation due to the absence of traditional value-communities). The urban postmodern is conceived as performance even when it is not: “people pass, oblivious, no one pays attention, they don’t even pretend to not pay attention” (150). Bateman performs the serial killer role; he enhances his monstrous self-image by having himself witnessed on video by his victims, thereby becoming a performer of monstrosity like the guests on the talk show he habitually watches. Ellis makes no attempt to produce the impression of interiority or depth. Bateman does not narcissistically confuse himself with others, nor does he seek to fill the void with the victims he consumes, as (Ellis knows) serial killers are supposed to do. He is nothing but surface. After forthrightly telling a masseuse that he fantasizes transfusing the blood of a dog into a girl, she tells him, “ ‘Oh Mr. Bateman, your face is so clean and smooth. . . .’ ” (117). More (or, rather, less) than this, Bateman is sheer textuality, as much as his designer clothes are. “[T]here is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. . . . Myself is fabricated, an aberration” (376–377). But if he could be said to come by an identity through acts of identification, it is identification with texts. Even his name identifies him as a monster of intertextual reference (during a restaurant conversation Bateman refers to Eddie Gein, the real-life prototype for Psycho’s Norman Bates). The textuality of identity is one of the many significations of the ongoing competition regarding who has the most impressively designed business card (Bateman’s are “bone-colored”). Immediately after trying to strangle a homosexual (who misreads the attack as rough sex), the narrator is asked to arbitrate a question of style. He responds in a manner that parodies style magazines, though it is not clear whether this is intentional: “While a tie holder is by no

50 AMERICAN SON

means required businesswear, it adds to a clean, neat overall appearance. . . .” (160). This exemplifies how his consciousness is a construct produced by what the literary theorist and Dostoyevsky expert Mikhail Bakhtin terms polyphonic discourse—a clamoring of competing voices and texts: TV talk shows, pop songs, horror videos, tabloid newspapers, fashion, cuisine, technology, celebrity culture, exercise regimes, money markets, hair mousse—each claiming, but all failing, to hold the self in place. If it is nihilism for Bateman to claim “[e]ach model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity” (377), it is a distinctly postmodern type: “Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . .” (375).

SOURCES Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. Basingstoke/Oxford, England: Picador, 1991. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 1998. Simpson, Philip. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. David Brottman

AMERICAN SON BRIAN ASCALON ROLEY (2001) A New York Times 2001 Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001, American Son presents a grim view of immigrant status and violence in Southern California in the 1990s. This coming-of-age novel tells the story of the Sullivan brothers, sons of a long-gone American father and a devoted Filipina mother. The story is narrated by the younger son, Gabe, who is caught between his desire to please his mother, Ika, and the pull of his rebellious older brother, Tomas. Ika finds herself out of her depth in American society and helpless to control her sons’ increasingly violent behavior. The novel is about the fluidity of racial affiliation in California, and the insidiousness of this category: Tomas, who trains attack dogs to sell to Hollywood celebrities, chooses to pose as a Mexican, wearing a gold cross and flaunting a huge Virgin of Guadalupe

tattoo. Ika’s brown skin and accented English determine the way she is treated by shopkeepers and other school mothers. Gabe, the “good” son who tries to help his mother, can pass for white. All the characters undergo a personal itinerary of adaptation that arises from their sense of themselves as outsiders in society, and their determination to carve their place in it. Tomas finds release in increasing brutality, drug use, and abuse of his family. The mother places her hope in her younger son, and in his staying in school and doing well. Gabe runs away to escape his brother’s fury and to find a racially neutral place for himself. His encounter with a tow-truck driver who mistakes him for a white boy makes him aware of the dangerous consequences of specific affiliations. When they meet up with his mother, who comes to take him home, Gabe tells the driver that she is the maid. This cruel disowning of his mother reflects the boy’s desperate attempt to detach himself from the markers of difference. Gabe returns home to dire consequences. In reparation for having stolen his brother’s car and selling his favorite dog, he must now serve as Tomas’s accomplice in theft, drug dealing, and physical attacks. Though the boy’s body initially rejects these acts—he throws up every time he accompanies his brother on his forays—Gabe actively participates in the beating of Ben Feinstein in revenge for Ika’s humiliation by Ben’s mother. Roley manages to convey the boy’s growing bitterness and disillusionment through an increasingly unemotional prose. Gabe’s voice, tentative and insecure at first, acquires decision and a steely edge to it by the end of the novel. The boys’ relationship with their mother is curiously ambivalent. They love her and are fiercely protective of her, but they also abhor the image she projects of foreignness and a failure to assimilate. Her helplessness, deference toward white Americans, and inability to stand up for herself make them despise her. Gabe remains unaware of the contradiction inherent in his violent defense of her at the end: to “save” his mother, he condemns himself, an act that will almost certainly destroy her. Ika’s story is that of the immigrant’s defeat—she works at two jobs to make ends meet, cannot pay for

AMERICAN TRAGEDY, AN 51

car insurance, and understands she has lost her sons to an American world that remains alien to her. Gabe’s narrative alternates with letters from his uncle Betino to Ika. As Betino suggests solutions to the boys’ problems, urging her to enroll them in strict Catholic schools, he stresses his sister’s inability to deal with her sons, who are becoming an embarrassment to the family name. In a manner of speaking, Ika is caught between two narratives—her brother’s letters, which outline a life of tradition and privilege that she has rejected in favor of her American dream, and her son’s bildungsroman, which chronicles his initiation into a world of violence and consequent separation from her. Too American to return to the Philippines and too obviously a foreigner in the United States, Ika no longer belongs anywhere. This liminal position is one occupied by all the characters in this powerful and painful account of immigrants and biracial children trying to survive in America.

SOURCES Roley, Brian Ascalon. American Son. New York: Norton, 2001. ———. “American Son: A Novel.” Available online. URL: http://www.brianascalonroley.com. Accessed May 21, 2005. Rocio G. Davis

AMERICAN

TRAGEDY,

DREISER (1925) Literary

AN THEODORE

naturalists, such as Theodore DREISER, often depicted characters in urban, working-class settings. A scathing indictment of the American success myth, An American Tragedy describes two unequal Americas in unceasing struggle. The poor suffer, while the rich insist “how difficult it is to come into money,” when they have, in fact, benefited by exploiting “inferior” individuals. Born poor in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dreiser’s youth provided him experience from which to draw his protagonist. In later life, he championed several left-leaning causes, scorning the hypocritical social system and its religious, moralistic explanations. An American Tragedy is almost a carbon copy of the actual murder case of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown, a farmer’s daughter. Both worked at a factory in Cortland, New York, owned by Chester’s uncle. Grace’s

pregnancy threatened their clandestine relationship. At Big Moose Lake, Herkimer County, Chester rented a boat and rowed Grace to a secluded location. Her body was found the next day in the lake; Chester was arrested nearby two days later. Chester sought to extricate himself from the relationship, insisting her death was an accident. Like Clyde Griffiths, Dreiser’s character, Chester was seeing other women besides Grace, whose identities were kept secret. In a sensational monthlong trial, based entirely on circumstantial evidence, Chester was convicted. In An American Tragedy’s 874 pages, the American Dream careens horribly out of control. Griffiths, a poor, weak-willed son of wandering midwestern evangelists, nurses loftier dreams, especially after a bellhop job at a fancy hotel earns him money for the first time. Following an ill-fated escapade with his coworkers, typical of Jazz Age antics, he flees to Chicago. There he meets his rich uncle, who employs him in his collar factory in upstate New York. Soon he falls in love with a pretty factory worker, Roberta Alden. She becomes pregnant and demands that he marry her. Meanwhile, Clyde has fallen for Sondra Finchley, a socialite who represents everything he craves. Clyde plans to drown Roberta on a boat trip, but his resolve diminishes. However, when she accidentally falls from the boat, he lets her drown. Convicted of murder, he dies by electrocution. Dreiser analyzes each step leading to Clyde’s demise: merely a clueless creature in a cruel world where uncontrollable forces determine outcomes, he flounders. Ironically, people consider Clyde either privileged or poor according to how they perceive their own social positions. His lack of self-control nearly always skews these encounters to his detriment, leaving him powerless over his fate. Horatio ALGER’s popular but unrealistic rags-toriches tales depicted cheerful penniless orphans, who, through “luck, pluck, and hard work,” prospered. As America industrialized and cities grew, society became increasingly stratified. Had he been Alger’s protagonist, Clyde would have gone from bellhop to hotel magnate. Once at his uncle’s factory, Clyde is powerfully drawn to Roberta Alden. At first his idealized “dream,” she is physically attracted to him and to his “superior”

52 AMERICAN TRAGEDY, AN

position. Both have believed that poverty discourages obtaining an attractive lover. But pleasure will destroy their bond. As several scholars, Susan L. Mizruchi, for example, suggest, false values and illusion render them too much the realization of each other’s dream for their relationship to survive. To Sondra, Clyde is a charming trifle because she can use him to goad his cousin, Gilbert, whose feelings toward Clyde are hostile. But society offers Clyde no honorable way out of his association with Roberta. A doctor uses moral arguments to refuse Roberta an abortion, although he has waived these scruples to “protect the reputations of wealthy girls.” As for the poor, he believes they deserve to suffer for their careless actions. Sondra’s letters are affected; Roberta’s are sensitive, only later to be exploited as displays of pathos for the public, to indict another member of her class. Her reputation is not worth saving, for she succumbed to carnal desires. Sondra, later spared negative publicity in Clyde’s trial as “Miss X”—has the influence to “erase” any consequences of her actions; and Clyde, like an aborted fetus, can be expelled from her life. Dreiser liberally uses foreshadowing. As Clyde’s sister Esta runs off with an actor, Roberta will later surrender to Clyde’s sexual demands. Clyde’s bellhop job at the Hotel Green-Davidson hints at the insignificantbut-opulent glamour of Lycurgus society. Again, he is on the outside looking in. Hobnobbing with the rich guests was forbidden, just as socializing with the factory girls would be forbidden. Both affairs with Hortense in Kansas City and with Sondra in Lycurgus end sadly. For both, Clyde is willing to make the devil’s bargain. Although likely legally blameless, Clyde’s indiscretion of riding with his associates in the “borrowed car” dogs him to the end, whereas Clyde’s distorted perceptions cause him to simply ruminate about his guilt for deserting a drowning Roberta. Visitors to his parents’ makeshift ministry find salvation themselves but do not save others. Clyde’s own trancelike mental state “saves” him but not Roberta. Alas, fundamentalist extremism provides no real survival tools in an indifferent world. On the battlefield of Clyde’s soul, “religion” picks a fight with his libido. A corrupt legal system, determined less by facts than by perceptions, supports the prosecutor Mason. Resent-

ful because of his identification with the lower class, he views Clyde as one of the idle rich. His prosecution becomes personal, justifying exploiting a jury predisposed towards family, church, and morality. Ironically, he thinks nothing of using Roberta’s painful epistles to advance his vendetta. Clyde never gets a fair trial. Like Kansas City and Lycurgus, the prison houses a cross section of society—the prisoners represent a variety of ethnic types. A Catholic Italian gone mad, a Jew, a Chinese man, and a lawyer await execution. Fellow doomed prisoner Miller Nicholson, the (secular) lawyer, bequeaths Clyde two books, Robinson Crusoe and The Arabian Nights, but his absence leaves a void. Clyde is both the lonely dreamer (like Crusoe) and the romantic. Like America, Clyde has roots in Puritanical fundamentalism but craves temporal happiness despite its spurious promise. For a time, Pastor McMillan’s prison visits provide Clyde with comfort and a sense of the divine. Still, by forsaking Clyde, the pastor believes he is saving his own soul. Motifs figure prominently. Much about Sondra Finchley hints at electricity, which turns out to be Clyde’s final fate. “Indeed, his effect on her was electric—thrilling—arousing a sense of what it was to want and not to have—to wish not win and yet to feel. . . . It tortured and flustered him” (242–243). Clyde even perceives her baby talk to have “an almost electric if sweetly tormenting effect.” Even if no one died or suffered, and Sondra and Clyde married, tragedy would have followed as Clyde was only capable of desiring what was out of reach. In the end, Mrs. Griffiths gives young Russell (Esta’s son, who resembles Clyde) a dime for ice cream, determined that her grandson will not repeat his uncle’s fate. Would this small gesture extend him a chance at the American dream?

SOURCES Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Robert Bentley, 1978. Lydenberg, John, ed. and comp. Introduction to Dreiser. A Collection of Critical Essays, 2. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. Mizruchi, Susan L. The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988.

AMERICAN TRILOGY, THE 53

OTHER Davies, Jude. “Naturalism, 1893–1914.” The Literary Encyclopedia. Available online. URL: http://www.litencyc.com/ php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=764. Accessed May 21, 2005. The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York. “The Murder Trial of Chester Gillette.” Available online. URL: http://www.courts.state.ny.us/history/gillette. htm. Accessed May 21, 2005. Jill Arnel

AMERICAN TRILOGY, THE (AMERICAN PASTORAL, 1997; I MARRIED A COMMUNIST, 1998; THE HUMAN STAIN, 2000) PHILIP ROTH During the last third of the 1990s, something curious occurred in Philip ROTH’s writing. After an autobiographical tetralogy—The Facts, Deception, Patrimony, and Operation Shylock,— where the author explored the textual relationship between fact and fiction, and SABBATH’S THEATER, an outrageously offensive masterpiece, à la PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, Roth did something few of his readers would have expected. He shifted his narrative gaze from the labyrinthine mirror games of self-reflexivity to the larger American historical landscape. What is more, he did so by bringing back his perennial artist hero, Nathan Zuckerman, a character upon which much of his earlier fiction was based. Through a series of three novels, Philip Roth revisited many of the key historical moments that defined much of post–World War II America: the turbulent 1960s in AMERICAN PASTORAL, the McCarthyite 1950s in I Married a Communist, and the Monica Lewinski–based political witch hunt of the 1990s in The Human Stain. Taken separately, each book reads as a fascinating case study of the ways in which an individual must negotiate his (the subject is usually male in Roth’s fiction) life in the face of historical forces beyond his control, or, to use Philip Roth’s own words, the processes by which an individual becomes “history’s hostage” (Roth, Remnick interview). Together, the American Trilogy stands as one of Roth’s most ambitious achievements, earning him several literary awards (the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral, the Ambassador Book Award for I Married a Communist, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain) and marking

what is now being seen by many as the high point in his career. The emphasis on history, especially recent American history, is nothing new in Philip Roth’s fiction. In fact, one can read much of his earlier writings as an indirect engagement with this topic. For instance, there is the critique on suburbia in his novella “Goodbye, Columbus,” the wild send-up of America’s communist paranoia in The Great American Novel, and the exploration of the Jewish diaspora in The Counterlife. Yet in the past 10 years, Roth has attempted to write the individual subject into the fabric of history, and in doing so he illustrates that identity is not an isolated construct, but a composition saturated by the many social, political, and cultural forces that surround it. This is a striking departure from the kind of writing found in such novels as My Life as a Man, The Anatomy Lesson, and Deception, works that by 1990 were being criticized by many as solipsistic exercises in belly-button gazing. Each of the three novels chronicles the efforts of a man who tries to escape, or transform, the ethnic, economic, and political constraints into which he is born. American Pastoral explores the life of Seymour “Swede” Levov, Weequahic, New Jersey’s former star athlete and idolized “household Apollo” (4), a man who represented to his Jewish community the hopes and dreams of advancement and assimilation into the greater, and largely gentile, America. The Swede, nicknamed for his outstanding Nordic features, attempts to live a Norman Rockwellesque existence by marrying a former Miss New Jersey beauty queen, taking over his father’s successful glove-making business, and settling down in the rural countryside, in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, with his wife and young daughter. His efforts to achieve a “pastoral” life are thwarted when his malcontent teenage daughter, ironically named Merry, becomes involved with anti-Vietnam War radicals and blows up their small community’s local post office, killing the town’s beloved doctor, bringing the war’s violence home to peaceful Old Rimrock, and ultimately causing the breakdown of the Levov family. Most of the narrative in American Pastoral is devoted to the Swede’s attempts to make sense of his daughter’s actions and keep his family from disintegrating, tasks he finds himself ill-equipped to perform.

54 AMERICAN TRILOGY, THE

The second novel in the trilogy, I Married a Communist, centers on Ira Ringold, a working-class American Jew who becomes a successful radio star. Performing under the name Iron Rinn, he works as a voice on several successful radio dramas, all reflecting in one way or another the communist-leaning ideology that he picked up from a fellow soldier during World War II. His life is a series of contradictions, for as he espouses a working-class ethic to his radio audience, he becomes involved with and eventually marries the former silent movie starlet and now successful radio actress, Eve Frame, nee Chava Fromkin, a self-hating Jew who denies her lower-class ethnic roots and pretentiously assumes an aristocratic (and gentile) lifestyle. Ira’s world comes crashing down when he angers the McCarthyite element in the radio industry and is caught in an extramarital affair, causing his wife (with a little help from her red-baiting friends) to write a scathing expose, bearing the same title as Roth’s novel, denouncing Ira as a communist bent on undermining the American way of life. In The Human Stain, published in 2000, Roth approaches the late 1990s, with its politically correct zeitgeist and its much-maligned president, in ways that are similar to his writing in the previous two novels. He found that the current events of the time produced tendencies that were analogous to those found in the narratives of Swede Levov and Ira Ringold: an atmosphere of persecution, the propensity for betrayal, and a sense that societal forces could undermine the best intentions of the individual. Roth embodied this cultural spirit in the figure of Coleman Silk, a former dean and now classics professor at Athena College, a small New England college. Coleman comes under attack when he refers to two of his students—individuals whom he has never seen and who never attend his class—as “spooks.” Unbeknownst to him, the two students are African-American, and they, along with the many of his colleagues who hold personal grudges against the former dean, accuse Coleman of racial insensitivity. This politically correct witch hunt, as Coleman sees it, ruins his life, causing him to leave Athena College and ultimately contributing to his wife’s sudden aneurysm and eventual death. The irony behind all of this is that Coleman is actually an African

American passing as a dark-skinned Jew, and that he has assumed this persona in order to escape the very racism that denied him personhood as a young man. Most of The Human Stain is a chronicle, via a series of recollections and flashbacks—his experience as a formidable young boxer, his unsatisfying student days at Howard University, his stint in the navy, and his bohemian days in 1950s Greenwich Village—of the ways in which Coleman passes as a white and how the decision to deny his heritage causes his own downfall, a tale reminiscent of the tragic Greek dramas that as a professor, Coleman Silk teaches in the classroom. What make these three novels so intriguing are not only the overt stories of each man, but the ways in which those stories are told. In all three books the events are narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, the artisthero of earlier novels such as The GHOST WRITER, Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Counterlife. However, the Zuckerman in the American Trilogy is not the young provocateur we see in the previous books. In the American Trilogy, Zuckerman is now a much older man, a survivor of prostate cancer, both impotent and incontinent, and a bit of a recluse. In the series, Zuckerman narrates to the reader the stories of the Swede, Ira, and Coleman, and does so by pulling together the facts of their lives. At the same time, he commingles those historical events with suppositions or reimaginings (mentally “making up” what could have happened) of his own, so that the stories of these three tragic figures—at least the stories that the reader receives—are a mixture of fact and (probable) fiction. This is especially the case in American Pastoral and The Human Stain, where there are clear indications that Zuckerman cannot possibly know everything about the lives of Swede Levov and Coleman Silk. In fact, “not knowing” is a central leitmotif that works its way throughout the American Trilogy. In one of the most significant (and oft-quoted) passages from The Human Stain, Zuckerman describes interpersonal knowledge as nothing more than a facade masquerading as certainty: “ ‘Everyone knows’ is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience. . . . What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. . . . All that we

AMERICAN TRILOGY, THE 55

don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing” (209). But whereas the reader may be tempted to view the “not knowing” in a nihilistic light, Roth, on the other hand, uses it as a lifeaffirming condition of existence. As Zuckerman reminds us early in American Pastoral, “getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living. . . . That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride” (35). In addition to recalling, reimagining, or “making up” the various events of these tragic figures, Zuckerman presents his information (and Roth structures his narrative) through a disjointed chronology and in ways that emphasize the considerable links between memory and storytelling. Again, this is especially the case with American Pastoral and The Human Stain. I Married a Communist, usually considered the weakest of the three novels (but nonetheless a central work in Roth’s late fiction), is different from its companions in that the story of Ira Ringold is more or less told in chronological order with little discontinuity and even fewer episodic reimaginings. Murray Ringold, Ira’s older brother and Zuckerman’s former high school English teacher, recalls the events in his brother’s life in a fairly straightforward manner, at times passing off the narrative to Zuckerman, who then turns Ira’s story back over to Murray, the primary speaker throughout most of the novel. In fact, there are moments when Nathan Zuckerman seems completely absent from I Married a Communist, long involved passages where Murray’s recounting of Ira’s life is barely framed by the presence of his listener. However, much like the other two novels in the American Trilogy, the emphasis is on storytelling and the ways in which narratives—and identities—are constructed. As a result, Roth’s style in the American Trilogy is very Faulknerian, reminiscent of the kind of narrative style found in such works as “A Rose for Emily” and ABSALOM, ABSALOM!. It is curious to note that in almost all of the reviews of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married a Communist, critics tended to focus on the tragedy of the novels’ overt protagonists—the Swede, Ira, and Coleman—and rarely commented on the centrality of

each novel’s narrator, Nathan Zuckerman. Yet the fact that Zuckerman, an artist figure deeply concerned with the ways in which fiction integrates into and in many ways influences our lived experiences, returns to Philip Roth’s work after a 10-year hiatus (last seen in The Counterlife) and becomes our sole narrative conduit, is not an insignificant matter. His presence should remind the reader that narrative game-playing and the deconstruction of unified identity are major themes in Roth’s fiction. Each of the three novels in the American Trilogy is not only an account of the individual “held hostage” by the forces of history but also the story of Zuckerman himself as he relates these stories. Or, put another way, through the narrative choices he makes—how he structures the story, what to include or exclude, what to “dream up,” what to leave incomplete—Nathan Zuckerman reveals just as much about himself, if not more, than he does the subjects of his stories. Read in this manner, the American Trilogy is not only a sweeping epic of late 20th-century America, but also a continuation of a theme that runs throughout much of Philip Roth’s oeuvre: the ways in which the subject, especially the artist figure, attempts to define himself in a fragmented and uncentered postmodern world.

SOURCES Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 74–83. Johnson, Gary. “The Presence of Allegory: The Case of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Narrative 12, no. 3 (2004): 233–248. Levy, Ellen. “Non-Genetic Genealogies in I Married a Communist.” In Profils Americains: Philip Roth, edited by Paule Levy and Ada Savin, 169–179. Montpellier, France: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, CERCLA, 2002. Messmer, Marietta. “Beyond Ethnicity?: Reading Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.” In American Vistas and Beyond: A Festschrift for Roland Hagenbüchle, edited by Marietta Messmer and Josef Raab, 285–300. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “ ‘A Stranger in the House’: Assimilation, Madness, and Passing in Roth’s Figure of the Pariah Jew in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000).” In Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth, 234–266. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2002.

56 ANAYA, RUDOLFO A.

Parrish, Timothy L. “The End of Identity: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 84–99. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. ———. I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. ———. “Philip Roth at 70.” Interview by David Remnick. Audio interviews: Listen to Writers. London, BBC4. March 19, 2003. Royal, Derek Parker. “Fictional Realms of Possibility: Reimagining the Ethnic Subject in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 20 (2001): 1–16. ———, ed. Philip Roth’s America: The Later Novels. Spec. issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature 23 (2004): 1–181. Safer, Elaine B. “Tragedy and Farce in Roth’s The Human Stain,” Critique 43 (2002): 211–227. Savin, Ada. “Exposure and Concealment in The Human Stain.” In Profils Americains: Philip Roth, edited by Paule Levy and Ada Savin, 181–197. Montpellier, France: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, CERCLA, 2002. Shechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Shostak, Debra. Philip Roth—Countertexts, Counterlives. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Derek Royal

ANAYA,

RUDOLFO A. (1937– ) An award-winning author known for his groundbreaking first novel, BLESS ME, ULTIMA (1972), Rudolfo Anaya has succeeded in illuminating the Chicano heritage through his novels, stories, poetry, essays, and plays. He derives his ideas and inspiration from the culture and folklore of the American Southwest. By blending fantasy and realism, and by interweaving the magic of Mexican myth, tradition, and symbol, Anaya creates characters who ultimately discover their identities and understand themselves to be individuals within communities. Anaya’s novels are also about faith and the loss of faith, reflecting his own youthful spiritual crises, and they employ bilingualism to illuminate the dual heritage of his characters. Born October 30, 1937, in Pastura, New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya was raised by his father, Martin Anaya, a rancher and vaquero (cattle herder), and his mother, Rafaelita Mares. Anaya’s mother, a farmer’s daughter,

was a great teller of stories and legends. She also employed a curandera (variously a healer, a wise woman, a shaman) and recalls that, even as an infant, Anaya foreshadowed his destiny by crawling toward a pencil and paper (Olmos). Educated at the University of New Mexico, he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1963, and master’s degrees in English in 1968 and in guidance and counseling in 1972. The 1972 publication of Bless Me, Ultima not only established Anaya as one of the major founders of the Chicano literary movement, but also elicited an invitation to join the faculty of the University of New Mexico, where he remained until his retirement in 1993. Bless Me, Ultima, winner of the Premio Quinto Sol national Chicano literary award, has sold more than 400,000 copies and remains perhaps the most studied Chicano novel in American literary history. Antonio Juan Marez y Luna, the protagonist of this bildungsroman, learns valuable lessons from Ultima, the shaman, who guides him toward a harmonious relationship with his land and his culture. Marez y Luna refuses to become a vaquero to please his father or a farmer to satisfy his mother, and instead chooses a writing career. He may be usefully compared to Tayo, the Native American protagonist of Leslie Marmon SILKO’s CEREMONY. Bless Me, Ultima is the first of Anaya’s novels in a socalled identity trilogy. The second novel, Heart of Aztlán (1976), features Jason Chávez, the young friend from Bless Me, Ultima, who introduces Antonio to the mystical aspects of nature. Heart of Aztlán, like its predecessor, features Crispin, a curandera who guides both Jason and his father, Clemente, but the setting changes when the Chávez family moves from rural Guadalupe to the Albuquerque barrio of Barelas. The family structure disintegrates in these unfamiliar surroundings when they are pressured by the usual urban problems. To guide the family through this microcosm of the post–World War II Chicano experience, Crispin (the mystical poet who carries a magical blue guitar) encourages Jason and his father to work with the unemployed Chicanos of the barrio. Tortuga (1979), the third novel in the New Mexico trilogy, also blends the worlds of realism and myth. The 16-year-old protagonist, Tortuga (turtle), wears a

ANAYA, RUDOLFO A. 57

shell-like full body cast. Tortuga also refers to Tortuga Mountain, the “magic mountain” (a clear allusion to The Magic Mountain, a novel by the 20th-century German author Thomas Mann) that looms above the children’s hospital for victims of paralysis where Tortuga is a patient. The novel traces Tortuga’s yearlong emotional, physical, and spiritual recovery; he is aided by Saloman, the wise shaman who introduces Tortuga to the magic mountain and gives him Crispin’s magic blue guitar. Tortuga is destined to become an artist who will sing the history and truth about his people. Although each novel in the trilogy focuses on a different protagonist, the scholar Margarite Olmos suggests that they may be viewed as a “composite or combined protagonist,” Antonio, Jason and Clemente, and Tortuga each representing different phases of the Chicano story. In the 1990s, Anaya wrote five urban novels—Albuquerque (this is the original spelling of the city) (1992); Zia Summer (1995); Rio Grande Fall (1996), Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert (1996), and Shaman Winter (1999)—all of which focus on Chicano protagonists who must accept their separation from the land and fashion strong communal bonds within their urban environments. Albuquerque features González, a young boxer of both Mexican and Anglo parentage; Jalamanta traces the efforts of Jalamanta, who, after wandering in the desert for 30 years, returns to convey his message of harmony and unity to city dwellers. In Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, and Shaman Winter, however, Anaya employs the methods of the detective fiction genre. Having briefly introduced the detective Sonny Baca in Albuquerque, in Zia Summer Sonny becomes the protagonist who must solve the murder of his cousin and reveal the connected elements of political corruption. In Rio Grande Fall, Sonny is transmogrified into one of the shamanic seers familiar to Anaya readers, and in Shaman Winter Anaya pits Sonny against Raven, the evil brujo (sorcerer) first encountered in Zia Summer. Anaya’s detective novels have frequently been likened to those of Tony HILLERMAN, who writes in a similar vein of his Native American detectives and protagonists. Although now professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico, Anaya continues to write fiction and

nonfiction, seeking innovative ways to tell his version of the Chicano story.

NOVELS Albuquerque. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Bless Me, Ultima. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972. Heart of Aztlán. Berkeley, Calif.: Editorial Justa, 1976. Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert. New York: Warner Books, 1996. The Legend of La Llorona. Berkeley, Calif.: Tonatiuh/Quinto Sol Publications, 1984. Lord of the Dawn: The Legend of Quetzalcóatl. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Rio Grande Fall. New York: Warner Books, 1996. Shaman Winter. New York: Warner Books, 1999. Tortuga. Berkeley, Calif.: Editorial Justa, 1979. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Zia Summer. New York: Warner Books, 1995.

SOURCES Baeza, Abelardo. Keep Blessing Us, Ultima: A Teaching Guide for “Bless Me, Ultima” by Rudolfo Anaya. Austin, Tex.: Easkin Press, 1997. Bruce-Novoa, Juan D. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980, 183–202. ———. Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature. Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Candelaria, Cordelia. “Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya (1937– ).” In Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide, edited by Julio A. Martínez and Francisco A. Lomelí, 34–51. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Dick, Bruce, and Silvio Sirias. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. González-T., César A., ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya: Focus on Criticism. La Jolla, Calif.: Lalo Press, 1990. Lattin, Vernon E., ed. Contemporary Chicano Fiction: A Critical Survey. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1986. Saldívar, Ramón. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Sommers, Joseph, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1979. Tatum, Charles. Chicano Literature. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Vassallo, Paul, ed. The Magic of Words: Rudolfo A. Anaya and His Writings. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

58 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD

OTHER “Rudolfo Anaya.” Time Warner Bookmark. Available online. URL: twbookmark.com/authors/45/936/index.html. Accessed August 19, 2005. Olmos, Margarite Fernández. Rudolfo A. Anaya. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Online (2002). Greenwood Electronic Media. Available online by subscription. URL: http://gw2.scbbs.com/cc/cc.jsp?bk=anaya&id= 1-1. Accessed August 20, 2005.

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD (1876–1941) Sherwood Anderson is best remembered for Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a short-story cycle that had an enormous influence on individual writers in particular and on American literary history in general. In 1925, literary critic H. L. Mencken praised Anderson as a significant, original novelist. He wrote seven novels and two fictionalized autobiographies, A Story-Teller’s Story (1924) and Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926) as well as Memoirs (1942). Anderson is still admired for his sympathetic portrayals of the isolated, “grotesque” (a word he used frequently), and the lonely, sexually repressed characters of his fictional Midwest, a place changing rapidly in an increasingly technological and materialistic world. His influence is evident in comments made by such literary giants as William FAULKNER, who has said that Anderson was the “father” of Faulkner’s generation of writers and of the American modernist movement itself. Anderson, who always helped other writers (Faulkner, Ernest HEMINGWAY, and Thomas WOLFE, for instance), was one of the very first to incorporate Freud’s theories and to understand the significance of sexuality in people’s lives. He joins Washington Irving, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, and Edgar Allan POE as an innovator in the short-story form. Sherwood Anderson was born on September 13, 1876, in Camden, Ohio, to Irwin M. Anderson, a harness maker, and Emma Smith Anderson. Because of his responsibilities to his family, Anderson completed only one year of high school. He served in the U.S. Army in Cuba in 1899, married Cornelia Lane in 1904, and became a prosperous businessman. Much has been written about how he deserted his family during a now legendary midlife crisis. He moved to Chicago during its “little renaissance,” was influenced by such early

modernists as Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters, and published his first novel, Windy McPherson’s Son, in 1916, two years before he divorced his first wife. He married Tennessee Mitchell; that marriage lasted eight years. Much of his autobiography surfaces in Sam McPherson, who rises from humble beginnings in Caxton, Iowa, to a prosperous career and marriage to the boss’s daughter. He abandons it all for love, returning at the end to a bleak future. His second novel, Marching Men (1917), likewise used the heroic plot in which an impoverished youth, through a grand desire to achieve power and to redress economic ills, attempts to organize the American labor movement. He miscalculates the needs of his fellow humans, as well as his own. When Anderson began to focus on more modest people as he did in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), he found his métier. Each of the “grotesques,” as he called them, was a misfit with odd habits and predilections, but Anderson reveals to the reader the sweetness at the core of each inhabitant of Winesburg, Ohio. Critics are divided over whether Poor White (1920) or DARK LAUGHTER (1925) is Anderson’s best novel. They do agree that Poor White succeeds much better than the earlier novels at depicting the rise of its central character, Hugh McVey, to a position of prominence, as an inventor. As many critics have noted, in his depiction of this character, Anderson drew on fellow midwesterner Mark TWAIN and his poor white character, Huckleberry Finn. Many Marriages (1923) depicts John Webster, rebelling against the hypocritical and puritanical dictates of conventional society; he abandons his family for life with his secretary, Natalie. Again in Dark Laughter (1925), (his most popular novel and only best-seller), Anderson celebrates sexuality and satirizes the intellectuals who deny its importance. Beyond Desire (1932) was written out of sympathy for southern mill workers and their tenuous position against the powerful mill owners during the Great Depression. Anderson’s last novel, Kit Brandon (1936), was published after his 1932 divorce from Elizabeth Prall and his marriage to Eleanor Copenhaver in 1933. Anderson’s only novel about bootlegging, it is set in the Appalachian mountains and features Kit Brandon, a mountain woman who

ANGELOU, MAYA 59

becomes a wealthy bootlegger after the failure of her marriage. She is much like Sam McPherson in desire and direction. Sherwood Anderson lived out his final years in an apparently happy marriage with his fourth wife, publishing four nonfiction books, and journalistic pieces. His memoirs were published the year after his death. A growing number of writers had acknowledged their debt to him: besides Faulkner, Hemingway, and Wolfe, John STEINBECK, William SAROYAN, and Raymond Carver, among others, have noted Anderson’s influence. Anderson died of peritonitis on March 8, 1941, in Panama.

NOVELS Beyond Desire. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1932. Dark Laughter. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Kit Brandon. New York: Scribner, 1936. Many Marriages. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1923. Marching Men. New York: John Lane, 1917. Poor White. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920. Windy McPherson’s Son. New York: John Lane, 1916. Rev. ed. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922.

SOURCES Anderson, David D. Sherwood Anderson: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, 1967. ———, ed. Sherwood Anderson: Dimensions of His Literary Art. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1976. ———, ed. Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Bridgman, Richard. The Colloquial Style in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Burbank, Rex. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1951. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. Rideout, Walter B., ed. Sherwood Anderson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. Schevill, James. Sherwood Anderson: His Life and Work. Denver, Colo.: University of Denver Press, 1951. Small, Judy Jo. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Sherwood Anderson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1994. Sutton, William A. Exit to Elsinore. Muncie, Ind.: Ball State University Press, 1967. ———. The Road to Winesburg: A Mosaic of the Imaginative Life of Sherwood Anderson. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1972.

Taylor, Welford Dunaway. Sherwood Anderson. New York: Ungar, 1977. Townsend, Kim. Sherwood Anderson. Boston: Houghton, 1988. Walcutt, Charles C. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Weber, Brom. Sherwood Anderson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964. White, Ray Lewis, ed. The Achievement of Sherwood Anderson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966.

ANGELOU, MAYA (1928– ) Maya Angelou became a national figure after President Bill Clinton asked her to read her poetry at his inaugural in 1993. She had been known and admired widely, however, among readers for the past two decades. Angelou had already published five autobiographical works that charted her life from age three to her mid-30s. The first of these, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), became an immediate best-seller and was made into a CBS made-for-television movie. As scholars Lyman B. Hagen and Ernece B. Kelly and others point out, however, Angelou’s works, particularly Caged Bird, are more properly called “autobiographical novels” (Hagen, 55) rather than autobiographies. Angelou, whose writing has earned her nominations for a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award, is also known for her versatility in the creative arts, having filled the roles of actress, dancer, playwright, producer, and director, as well as author, poet, and civil rights activist. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey Johnson, Sr., a doorman, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a nurse and card dealer. After her parents divorced when she was three years old, Angelou was reared in Stamps, Arkansas, and Southern California. She adopted the name Maya Angelou in her early 20s while a dancer at the Purple Onion in San Francisco. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published when she was 42 years old, takes its title from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy,” and uses numerous novelistic devices to tell Marguerite’s story. It is a coming-of-age-story, complete with a disturbing description of her rape by one of her mother’s boyfriends when she was eight years old. This specific ordeal occurs against the backdrop of poverty, discrimination, and white racism. The technique Angelou uses to describe

60 ANGLE OF REPOSE

her survival resembles slave narrative, a significant genre in African-American literature. In Gather Together in My Name (1974) Angelou continues the story. Marguerite (Ritie), now a young mother, succumbs to, and ultimately surmounts, the roadblocks of prostitution and drugs, and her tendency to romanticize the men in her life. In Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) Angelou marries a white sailor, Tosh Angelos, and travels throughout Europe with a role in the musical Porgy and Bess. She feels guilty about leaving her son, returns to the United States and to motherhood and serious pursuit of her career. In the fourth volume, The Heart of a Woman (1981), most critics see a psychological depth reminiscent of that achieved in Caged Bird. The Heart of a Woman blends her commitment to becoming a writer, encouraged by Paule MARSHALL and others, with her commitment to the Civil Rights movement, encouraged by her meeting with Dr. Martin Luther King. She also briefly marries, then divorces, Vusuzmi Make, a South African freedom fighter, and lives in South Africa until she realizes that she is an African American not an African. In the final volume, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), Angelou travels throughout Africa where she feels free of the tyranny of color and gender: in Africa she finds herself judged on the basis of her merits. Maya Angelou has been Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University since 1981. Assured of a place in American literary history, she continues to be accessible to young audiences through her frequent appearances on the university lecture circuit.

NOVELS All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. New York: Random House, 1986. Gather Together in My Name. New York: Random House, 1974. The Heart of a Woman. New York: Random House, 1981. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1970. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas. New York: Random House, 1976.

SOURCES Arensberg, Liliane K. “Death as a Metaphor of Self in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” College Language Association Journal 20 (December 1976): 273–291.

“The Black Scholar Interviews Maya Angelou,” Black Scholar 8 (January–February 1977): 44–53. Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. “The Metaphysics of Matrilinearism in Women’s Autobiography.” In Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek, 180–205. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Eliot, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Hagen, Lyman B. Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer, and Soul of a Poet: A Critical Analysis of the Writings of Maya Angelou. Lanham, N.Y.: University Press of America, 1997. Kent, George E. “Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Black Autobiographical Tradition,” Kansas Quarterly 7 (Summer 1975): 72–78. Lupton, Mary Jane. Maya Angelou. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Online. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. McMurry, Myra K. “Role Playing as Art in Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird,” South Atlantic Bulletin 41 (May 1976): 106–111. Smith, Sidonie A. “The Song of a Caged Bird: Maya Angelou’s Quest after Self-Acceptance,” Southern Humanities Review 7 (Fall 1973): 365–375. Stepto, R. B. “The Phenomenal Woman and the Severed Daughter,” review of And Still I Rise and Audre Lorde’s The Black Unicorn, Parnassus: Poetry in Review 8 (Fall/Winter 1979): 312–320.

ANGLE OF REPOSE WALLACE STEGNER (1972) Angle of Repose, for which Wallace STEGNER won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, was written from 1968 to 1970, a turbulent period in U.S. history. Without directly discussing the Vietnam War, the cause for much of the turbulence, Stegner addresses the unrest of the times by weaving together a complicated web of social and political history, geography, and personal experience. His narrator, Lyman Ward, is a retired historian with a degenerative bone disease, which has led to the amputation of his leg. He is separated from his wife and estranged from his son, Rodman. Seeking truths for his own life in his family history, Lyman sorts through letters and documents left by his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a genteel eastern lady who settled in the American West at the end of the 19th century. Ada Hawkes, faithful family employee, cares for Lyman’s physical needs; her daughter Shelly, in the midst of a marital crisis herself, becomes Lyman’s secretary and sometime psychologist.

ANGLE OF REPOSE 61

The plot is straightforward, but the structure is complex. The novel is marked by a double narrative, with Lyman’s story interrupting Susan’s story, three marriage plots, and the constant shifting between the epistolary and first-person formats. It addresses themes concerning the mythology versus the reality of the West, the influences of the East and West Coasts upon one another, and the necessity of finding the proper balance between individualism and cooperation, freedom and domestic happiness, art and life, and justice and mercy. The overlay of modern structural complexity and postmodern alternative readings upon the Victorian material may disturb the casual reader; but Angle of Repose merits more than a casual read. Classism and many other elitist attitudes, including race prejudice, follow Susan Burling to the West, where she meets and marries Oliver Ward, an adventurer and inventor who is charmed by her eastern airs. In fact, Lyman believes that his grandmother’s snobbishness—her dedication to the Hudson River School of art, her devotion to wealthy eastern friends and their styles of dress and conversation, and her frequent denigration of her husband’s practical talents—is the key to her personality and to her later fall from grace. The West, the narrator insists, was settled by easterners such as she, who depended on eastern capital and brought with them eastern values. Not all of those values were destructive. Lyman sympathizes with his grandmother’s desire to make a home. Stegner’s biographer, Jackson Benson, points out that “the boomer husband and the nesting wife” were staples of the author’s fiction (Benson, 48), noting that Stegner drew on his own childhood with a restless bootlegger father and a nurturing mother for this material. Yet while “nesting” civilized the Wild West, it sometimes also prevented society from moving forward. Oliver Ward is by nature a visionary, but Susan, always wanting stability for her children, keeps him from reaching his full potential. She also continually apologizes to her eastern friend Augusta about what she perceives as Oliver’s inadequacies. She confesses to a “failure of faith” in her husband and his projects. A nonverbal, pragmatic man who works as a mining and irrigation engineer, Oliver believes he is inferior to his wife, and he eventually begins to drink.

Susan supports the family with her artwork and sentimental stories about the West, which she sends to eastern literary magazines. She is Stegner’s model, in many ways, for the liberated woman. However, she suffers from too much confidence in language. With the modernist’s self-reflexive doubt, Stegner portrays Susan as substituting art for life. Remaining aloof from her community, the narrator says, “She mined and irrigated every slightest incident, she wrote and drew her life instead of living it” (399). Susan also flirts with Frank Sargent, Oliver’s assistant. Her isolation from family and community has caused her to rely on him for protection and companionship. Tragedy results when the two begin to meet secretly, violating Oliver’s trust. Susan and Oliver’s third child, Agnes, drowns in the irrigation ditch built by her father when Susan and Frank let her roam near its banks while they converse. Frank commits suicide, Oliver never forgives Susan, who suffers extreme guilt, and the couple’s son Ollie refuses to see his mother for 10 years. When Lyman discovers (or imagines) this tragedy, he realizes why his grandparents lived in “an angle of repose” with each other. They propped one another up, he believes, but he never saw them touch. An “angle of repose” is the slant required in construction to avoid a cave-in. The banks in this case did not cave in, but they destroyed a child, a friend and a marriage. Lyman, heretofore “a justice man, not a mercy man” (443), hopes now to be “a bigger man than [his] grandfather” and considers forgiving his own wife, who left him after he lost his leg (569). Since Stegner disdained Americans’ “contempt for all history, including our own” (“Twilight,” 191), he bases Angle of Repose upon actual historical documents: the letters, drawings, and fiction of Mary Hallock Foote. (Note: See Benson for a discussion of the controversy surrounding Stegner’s use of her family history, for which he assumed he had permission.) But the “angle” whose possibilities of “repose” he explores in Lyman’s dream at the end of that novel exceeds by several degrees the width of the “angle” for which his grandparents settle. Stegner addresses future possibilities for change with his characteristic western “optimism about the possible”(“Twilight,” 212). In doing so he also seeks to offer “repose”

62 ANNIE JOHN

to a society troubled by the discord of the 1960s and to provide a vision of the American identity interpreted through the artist’s imagination.

SOURCES Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Penguin, 1996. Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. New York: Penguin, 1971. ———. “The Twilight of Self-Reliance.” In Marking the Sparrow’s Fall, edited by Page Stegner. New York: Holt, 1998. Gwen Neary

ANNIE JOHN JAMAICA KINCAID (1985) In this autobiographical bildungsroman set in the colonial Antigua of Jamaica KINCAID’s own childhood, adolescence is figured as loss: loss of the protagonist’s irreplaceable bond with her mother, loss of friends that she outgrows, and finally loss of home, as, having come of age, Annie John strikes out on her own and embarks for England. Yet the novel also shows adolescence as a time of spirited rebellion: like Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Annie John rails against injustice, forging an independent identity in spite of the forces that oppress her (in Annie’s case, these are racial, cultural, and patriarchal). The novel’s open-ended conclusion leaves unresolved this tension between the pathos of separation and the triumph of hard-won autonomy. Originally published as a series of short stories in the New Yorker, the novel is episodic. The first sections of the novel depict 10-year-old Annie’s relationship with her mother as a paradise of shared experience: they share the same name, wear the same clothes, bathe together, and go to market together, with Annie following “ever in her [mother’s] wake” (17). That Annie is the center of her mother’s world is symbolized by the hope chest in which her mother has stored everything associated with Annie’s life: no artifact is too trivial, and each becomes the subject of an anecdote that is a piece of the larger narrative. The inspiration for the hope chest and its stories is autobiographical: Calling her mother “the fertile soil” of her “creative life,” Kincaid muses, “Clearly the way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me” (O’Conner, 6). The growing estrangement between mother and daughter with

which the rest of the novel (and much of Kincaid’s work) is concerned is also rooted in the author’s experience. In interviews, Kincaid candidly describes how her “love affair” with her mother abruptly came to an end when her brother was born. It is Annie’s mother who initiates the estrangement between the two, and not, as in Kincaid’s life, because another child is born, but rather because she seems to have suddenly decided it is time for Annie to grow up. As she somewhat callously tells her daughter, “you can’t be a little me” (26). Annie perceives her mother’s growing distance as abandonment, and a betrayal of their intimacy. Annie ’s sense of abandonment is converted into a vehement rejection of her mother. This repudiation embroils Annie in a battle of deceit and secrecy, as she combats her mother’s perceived treachery with her own actual treachery—lying, stealing, and sneaking out after school. Annie’s rising adolescent rebellion merges with the anticolonial subtext of the novel, as Annie comes to reject the authority of not only her mother but also her English school mistresses. Much as Kincaid reportedly refused to sing “Rule Britannia!” in school—objecting to the line “Britons never shall be slaves” on the grounds that “we weren’t Britons and we were slaves” (Cudjoe, 397)—Annie rejects the colonial values she is being taught, writing graffiti beneath a picture of Christopher Columbus in her history book. Her punishment takes the shape of being forced to honor the English canon by copying the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. As Annie struggles to form an independent identity, she must confront the legacy of colonial domination, which is a privileging of all things English. Annie’s rebellion serves to strand her in an adolescent wonderland, with her body undergoing confusing changes, and a conspiracy of social and political values that are bewildering at best. The two temporarily sustaining friendships she forges mark the poles of imaginable feminine behavior. The one with Gwen embodies the code of polite womanhood celebrated at school and at home, and the other with the “Red Girl,” who refuses to bathe, plays marbles, and climbs trees, defies supposed feminine propriety. Eventually reject-

ANNIE KILBURN 63

ing both models, Annie is left trying to navigate her way through adolescence without a map or a rudder. Despite Annie’s apparent independence, her separation from her mother on the one hand and her friends on the other leaves her dangerously alienated and ultimately prompts a nervous breakdown. In this impressionistic and intriguing section of the novel, the wonderland of adolescence shows its terrifying side, as Annie alternately feels that she is disappearing, levitating, or being torn to pieces. Overcome by a profound malaise that descends upon her like a mist, she stops eating and retreats into an infantile state, spending the day in bed, while her parents care for her as though she were a baby. Though she is estranged from her mother, Annie is in effect “rescued” by her maternal grandmother, Ma Chess, who uses obeah, an Africanbased practice of exercising power over the spirit world. According to both Simone Alexander and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, the role of Ma Chess is to show a redemptive female-female family relationship, and to affirm the tenacious power of African-derived tradition in a colonial setting. The novel ends ambivalently as Annie embarks on a sea journey to England, where she intends to study to become a nurse. This may be interpreted as a final step toward independence, although Annie’s destination, the colonial “motherland,” in its inconsistency with the novel’s critique of colonialism, seems to undercut the theme of independence. Nonetheless, critics tend to read the ending with qualified optimism. Donna Perry focuses on the implication that ahead of Annie is a new life for which “her apprenticeship in Antigua has prepared her” (247). Antonia MacDonald-Smythe points out that in the classic, male bildungsroman, the protagonist is reabsorbed into a society that, though deficient, can accommodate him, whereas in the “creolized” form, the resolution is less triumphant, since the protagonist may be absorbed by the wrong society. Kincaid’s openendedness, though, may reflect the process of constructing female subjectivity. Finally, we may read Kincaid’s tentative ending as representing Annie’s “fragile victory” of separation from her mother and her homeland (Cudjoe, 407). In this light, we can interpret the voyage with which the novel ends as another

beginning, in which Annie sets off on the next journey in an ongoing quest for independence.

SOURCES Alexander, Simone James. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Jamaica Kincaid. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1998. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview,” Callaloo 12 (Spring 1989): 396–411. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. MacDonald-Smythe, Antonia. Making Homes in the West Indies: Constructions of Subjectivity in the Writings of Michelle Cliff and Jamaica Kincaid. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 2001. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Perry, Donna. “Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 245–253. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990. Phillips, Caryl. Review of Island in the Dark: ‘A Small Place.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 17, 1988, p. 1. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994. Tapping, Craig. “Children and History in the Caribbean Novel: George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John,” Kunapipi 9 (1989): 51–59. Timothy, Helen Pyne. “Adolescent Rebellion and Gender Relations in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 233–242. Wellesley, Mass.: Calaloux Publications, 1990. Carey Snyder

ANNIE KILBURN WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1888) Often overshadowed by The RISE

OF SILAS LAPHAM (1885) and A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (1890), William Dean HOWELLS’s Annie Kilburn (1888) is an important novel for understanding Howells’s development as a novelist and a social critic. More than 100 years after its publication, it stands as one of Howells’s strongest fictional stances against social inequities in American capitalism and its treatment of

64 ANNIE KILBURN

the poor and working classes. In an era of “red” states and “blue” states, an age in which the plight of workers is diminished in favor of corporate interests, Howells’s description of the conflict over American identity is also remarkably resonant. The battle today, as in this novel, is framed as a battle for the identity and character of the nation, over what version of America will survive. The novel opens with Annie Kilburn returning from Europe to her hometown of Dorchester Farms— now called Hatboro, after its primary economic product, straw hats—to “try to be of some use to the world—[to] try to do some good—and in Hatboro I think I shall know how” (645). Her confidence is shaken, however, upon seeing the class segregation, the industrially altered landscape, and the bustling commercial activity in the sleepy rural town of her memory. She is particularly appalled when she is taken to a local factory to see industrial America firsthand. There, she witnesses a type of modern slavery in which “tireless machines march[ing] back and forth” are the masters of the “men who watched them with suicidal intensity.” In one of Howells’s most direct representations of the dehumanization of industrial capitalism, Annie cannot help but think of “the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest” (741). Conversing with some of the prominent townspeople, Annie is drawn into their attempt to start a “Social Union” to break down the barriers between the rich and the poor. Hatboro’s elite envision producing plays (starting, ironically, with Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy grounded in irreconcilable feuds between countrymen) in order to raise money for the town’s working poor, as well as organizing lectures and concerts “to show them that the best people in the community have their interests at heart, and wish to get on common ground with them” (672). Their patronizing attitudes are revealed further as Annie learns that a dinner planned for after the play does not include the workers, “the socially objectionable element” who are the supposed beneficiaries of this largesse (672). Annie has mixed emotions, and she confronts her own complicity in these condescending attitudes toward the working poor. She is forced to wonder “how her own life was in any wise different from that of those people. . . .

She too was idle and vapid, like the society of which her whole past had made her a part” (716). As many of his biographers note, Howells expressed similar selfscrutiny as he finished this novel. In an 1888 letter to Henry JAMES, he admits, “after fifty years of optimistic contention with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it and feel that it is coming out all wrong . . . unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat and live in all the luxury my money can buy” (Howells 1979, 3:268). Like Annie, he struggles with the recognition that social and economic circumstances needed to change but that he was somehow complicit in the very class system that obstructed the poor and was powerless to enact any meaningful change. The strongest voice for the needs of the poor comes from the town’s new minister, Reverend Peck. As many critics and biographers have noted, Peck is a representation of Leo Tolstoy’s ideas of Christian Socialism, which Howells was reading deeply and thoughtfully during this time. Tolstoy’s call to give up one’s wealth and status to live and work among the peasants struck a chord with Howells as he turned his attention to what he saw as fundamental contradictions between American Christianity, the practices of industrial capitalism, and the basic principles of democracy (see Cady, 7–10, and Alexander, 61–100). Annie Kilburn, like a great deal of Howells’s work from this period, wrestles with Tolstoy’s altruistic ideas and whether they could actually change the deeprooted problems of America’s economic imbalances. Peck sees through the shallow intentions and hypocrisies of the Social Union and his sermons challenge the cultural authority of Hatboro’s leaders. After Annie asks for his participation in planning the event, Peck refuses, explaining that the cultural elite “proceed on the assumption that working people can neither see nor feel a slight. . . . good is from the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose” (682–83). Annie counters Peck’s argument by quoting her father’s idea that true social equality as a “principle could never govern society, and that . . . to try to mix the different classes would be un-American” (683). Peck’s response rejects Kilburn’s fixed notions of American identity, claiming, “We don’t know what is or will be American

ANNIE KILBURN 65

yet” (684). In fact, he maintains that America is fighting another, silent civil war: “The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled” (804). He explains that a false sense of “Americanism” has perpetuated the barbarism of the industrial age; that the individual with social or economic power has been “forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success is built” (805). Indeed, the entire novel provides a spectrum of late19th-century interpretations of “America” and “American.” Adherence to tradition, Emersonian selfreliance, benevolent patronage, and Christian socialism all contend for cultural authority in the novel. William Gerrish, one of the newer citizens who runs Hatboro’s first department store, is the voice of American business in the Gilded Age. Talking about the workers and his role as a boss, Gerrish proclaims, “You’ve got to put your foot down, as Mr. [Abraham] Lincoln said; and as I say, you’ve got to keep it down” (696). Gerrish, proud of his rags-to-riches background, does not condone what he perceives as “pampering those who have not risen, or have made no effort to rise” and believes in rigid class structures: “I will not allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose—whose—whose idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country where— where everybody stands on an equality” (699). Gerrish, contradicting Jesus’s words in the Sermon on the Mount, also makes sure everyone recognizes his beneficence, his contributions to improve the moral and economic benefit of the town, everything “from the drinking fountain in front of this store to the soldiers’ monument on the village green” (697). Gerrish’s selective memory of his own rise (as well as the historical proclamations of Lincoln, twisted to fit his own ideals) is weakly contested by Squire Putney, a remnant of the old power structure of Dorchester Farms, who is unable to effect any prolonged significant change because he is an alcoholic. Though he sees through the bombast of Gerrish and the way American history and Christian ideals are manipulated to the benefit of those in power, he is powerless to confront the social problems brought on in industrial America. The days of the intellectual aristocracy

are past, an idea Howells reinforces by giving Putney’s son Winthrop a handicap; his “white face had the eager purity and the waxen translucence which we see in sufferers of hip-disease” (717). The mental and physical diseases of the Putneys represent the inability of America’s fading genteel class to effect positive, progressive change. Peck’s ideals do not escape Howells’s scrutiny, either. Reminding the citizens of Hatboro that they “have been guilty of forgetting [their] brother’s weakness,” his behavior reveals its own mnemonic shortcomings. On several occasions he forgets about his daughter, leaving her behind after lecturing about social reform and brotherhood, a sign that Howells was not entirely comfortable about those who adhere only to a doctrine of ideals. Peck’s strong words to Annie—“sympathy— common feeling—the sense of fraternity—can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these”—are diminished by the fact that he leaves his daughter sleeping in Annie’s arms and comes for her only when reminded by Annie’s housekeeper Mrs. Bolton (684). Thus, while Gerrish and Peck have wildly different beliefs of how society should be organized, their respective idealism reveals lapses in memory. In the end, though, men like Gerrish seem to triumph, as Peck, the spokesman for Tolstoy’s humanitarian Christianity, is killed by a train, an iron symbol of progress and speed. Yet Annie has changed, since she realizes, as Kenneth Eble notes, that “the particular ills that fall upon the lower classes are the result of a social system which will not be remedied by charitable gestures from a well-meaning aristocracy or by appeal to past traditions of morality or power” (104). Altering her initial plans, Annie no longer desires to change the world, but to do what good she can do in her community to ease adversity. Howells, though, continued to explore America’s social and economic problems, despite his ambivalence about whether or not his fiction could stimulate meaningful change when he himself lived in luxury and comfort. In typical Howellsian fashion, Annie Kilburn poses no solutions, but it does remain somewhat optimistic that social change, however slow in coming, was possible, and that fiction could play a role in the transition.

66 ANSA, TINA McELROY

SOURCES Alexander, William. William Dean Howells: The Realist as Humanist. New York: Bert Franklin, 1981. Cady, Edwin H. The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Eble, Kenneth. William Dean Howells. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Howells, William Dean. Annie Kilburn, 1888. In William Dean Howells: Novels, 1886–1888, edited by Don L. Cook, 641–865. New York: Library of America, 1989. ———. Selected Letters. Edited by George Arms et al. 6 vols. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Nettles, Elsa. Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Lance Rubin

ANSA, TINA McELROY (1949– ) Tina McElroy Ansa takes for her subject the lives of middleand upper-middle class African Americans in the post1960s Civil Rights movement era. She is the author of Baby of the Family (1989), Ugly Ways (1993), The Hand I Fan With (1996), and You Know Better (2002). All four novels are both popular and critical successes, and the first three are award winners. Tina McElroy Ansa was born on November 18, 1949, in Macon, Georgia, to Walter J. McElroy, a businessman, and Nellie Lee McElroy, a teacher’s assistant. She was educated at Spelman College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1971. After nearly eight years as a journalist with the Atlanta Constitution and the Charlotte Observer, she married filmmaker Jonée Ansa on May 1, 1978. In 1984, they moved to St. Simons Island, one of Georgia’s Sea Islands, home of a former plantation still inhabited in part by the descendants of slaves. When Ansa wrote her first novel, Baby of the Family, in 1989, she drew on the folklore of St. Simons midwives as well as on her knowledge of Macon, the town she fictionalizes as Mulberry in all her novels. The novel focuses on Lena, a young girl who was born with a caul (a membrane enclosing a fetus in the womb; if part of this is found on a child’s head at birth, it is thought to be a charm against drowning). Endowing Lena with special gifts, such as the ability to see ghosts, Ansa creates an unusual coming-of-age story. It ends with a meeting

between Lena and her grandmother’s ghost. The ghosts assure her of her spiritual powers. A cinematic version of Baby of the Family is being filmed in Macon as well as in south Georgia. Ugly Ways, set in the same Georgia town, is narrated from the perspectives of four sisters, Betty, Annie, Ruth, and Emily, all of whom have something to say about what mothering means in the AfricanAmerican community: The mother of the sisters, Esther Lovejoy, known as Mudear, has raised them to be selfreliant, perhaps to a fault: The reader must decide. The Hand I Fan With, Ansa’s third novel, again set in Mulberry, is the sequel to Baby of the Family. Here, Lena reminisces about her childhood and her tendency to be “the hand that everyone fans with.” She falls in love with Herman, a sexy ghost, who teaches her not to give away too much of herself. Ansa’s most recent novel, You Know Better, (also with some visiting ghosts), is set in Mulberry during the Peach Blossom Festival. It features three generations of women: LaShawndra Pines, who is running around unsupervised; her mother, Sandra, busy pursuing her real estate career and a possible love affair with a minister, and her grandmother, Lily Paine Pines, a former schoolteacher and principal who looks out for LaShawndra. Ansa and her husband still live on St. Simons Island.

NOVELS Baby of the Family. New York: Harcourt, 1989. The Hand I Fan With. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Ugly Ways. New York: Harcourt, 1993. You Know Better. New York: Morrow, 2002.

SOURCES Cherry, Joyce L. “Tina McElroy Ansa.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 1–5. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

OTHER African American Literature Book Club. “Tina McElroy Ansa.” Available online. URL: http://authors.aalbc.com/ tina.htm. Accessed May 23, 2005. Tina McElroy Ansa’s Homepage. Available online. URL: http://www.tinamcelroyansa.com/. Accessed May 23, 2005. Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. “Tina McElroy Ansa.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn. edu/Bios/entries/ansa_tina_mcelroy.html. Accessed May 23, 2005.

THE ANTELOPE WIFE 67

THE ANTELOPE WIFE LOUISE ERDRICH (1998) This novel diverts the saga started in LOVE MEDICINE with the Morriseys, Lamartines and Kashpaws by introducing new families and therefore, different realities and conflicts: For the difficulties resulting from assimilation conflicts and annihilation present in ERDRICH’s earlier novels, Erdrich substitutes problems of identity, searches for roots, and attempts to come to terms with one’s ancestry. The natives of The Antelope Wife are Christian Indians assimilated to Western culture trying to make sense of their backgrounds by confronting issues of adultery, family, names, war, and the realm of the supernatural. Duplicity, duplicate identities through sets of twins, and multiple visions of motherhood complicate these questions. In her attempt to return to a lost past, Erdrich revives the indigenous name of her tribe, calling her people “Anishinabe,” as they call themselves, instead of “Chippewa,” a name imposed by the colonizers, and therefore the official name for U.S. governmental purposes, or “Ojibwa,” the popular name by which their enemies addressed the tribe. Apart from duplicity and motherhood, Erdrich also deals with the question of miscegenation through a peculiar scene: Scranton Roy, a German soldier, breastfeeds Matilda, an Indian baby, whom he finds, wearing a blue necklace, in the middle of the forest. This event takes place, paradoxically, after the soldier has bayoneted an ancient Indian woman who, the reader learns later on, was an ancestor of Matilda’s mother, Blue Prairie Woman. At the same time, Matilda’s mother soothes the pain in her breasts, giving her milk to a puppy whose descendants, as a consequence, start showing human attributes. Milk proves to be the link that joins both lineages, whose descendants will meet in the figures of Rozina Roy and Frank Shawano when they become lovers. Upon growing up, Matilda takes the reins of her destiny: She goes in search of her mother, whom she finds in the forest on the verge of death from a European disease. Matilda still has time to take her name, thus abandoning Scranton Roy and the family he had created to settle in the forest with the antelopes. Animals behave like human beings, dogs talk, and antelopes couple with women, a match that gives birth to a new species

and affirms the existing bond between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Erdrich’s stories always involve the whole community. Her studies of individual characters focus strongly on the conflict of belonging to two different cultures: European and Native American like herself, from both German and Anishinabe traditions. Lineages find their meeting point in food preparation: Klaus Shawano, the embodiment of the urban Indian, gets his name from Klaus, the German soldier who saves his own life by cooking “the blitzkuchen” with the special ingredient revealed to his descendant only at the end of the novel. The urban Indian Klaus confronts the native of the wilderness Sweetheart Calico, whom he kidnaps, giving her a new name and forcing her to be his wife. Cally, deprived of a voice of her own, remains silent throughout the novel until she reveals at the end that she has been hiding the blue necklace. Meanwhile the question of heritage, along with the practice of storytelling, proves crucial to disentangling the mysteries hidden generation after generation. As the recipient of tradition, Cally becomes enchanted with the past and begins a new life that will cure the sufferings she endured after her twin’s and her father’s deaths. The narrative is structured around family ties and the ceremony of naming, the meaning of which Cally understands when she receives her ancestral inheritance from both grandmothers: Cally is “Magizha,” the namer, the one who receives the names. Marie Shawano and Zosie Roy, twins and mothers of Rozina Roy, are the progeny of the antelopes cohabiting with Indian women. By telling their own life stories, these women start the task of reconstructing the forgotten memory of the tribe, protected and kept secret by them for years. In the figures of Zosie and Marie from the Shawano clan, Erdrich rescues a typical figure of Ojibwa folklore: the windigo, a monstrous figure of the forest whose inner beast inhabits a human form, and under whose influence humans eat human flesh. Life and death, and the thin veil that joins and separates both realities, seem omnipresent in the novel through several interrelated events that take place: the accidental death of Deanna, Cally’s twin sister; the suicide of Richard Whiteheart Beads, Rozina’s husband; the rescue of Matilda as a baby from a sure death; and the

68 APPLE, MAX

birth of Augustus Roy, among others. The transcendent meaning of the afterlife and the supernatural for the Anishinabe people provides the context for Erdrich’s writings. Deanna and Richard come back from death, unable to cross the line between one reality and the other, and the old woman whom Scranton Roy kills haunts him and his descendants until her story is rescued and told to Cally. Erdrich weaves stories with a fine thread—as, when the novel opens, the twins sew the beads—to create the pattern of life. Beadwork, the art of sewing beads into pieces of clothing, is an ancient tradition in Ojibwa culture. The pattern and the sewing do not start or end, like the round necklace of blue beads that Matilda wears when she’s found by Scranton Roy. They symbolize the circularity of Native time, a continuum with cycles, in contrast to linear Western time, giving Native American reality its distinct perspective.

SOURCES Jacobs, Connie A. The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Larson, Sidner. Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Imelda Martin-Junquera

APPLE, MAX (ISAAC) (1941– ) Max Apple, postmodern novelist and short-story writer, is often compared to John BARTH and Robert COOVER, for his mining of popular American culture, to Bernard MALAMUD and Saul BELLOW, for his use of Jewish dialect and humor, and to Nathanael WEST, for his adaptation of the “wild simile” (Weisenburger). Although Apple is known for the short fiction in The Oranging of America and Other Stories (1976) and for his memoirs about his grandfather (Roommates [1994]) and grandmother (I Love Gootie [1998]), he has also written Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right (1978), a comic view of pop culture, and The Propheteers (1987), a satire on the foibles of wealthy Americans. Apple’s fiction incorporates the fragmentary nature of contemporary culture, including the visual impact of the cartoon. Critic David Foster Wallace associates him with “image-fiction,” a post-

1960s technique that uses pop-culture images to suggest the unknown details in the lives of public figures like Walt Disney or Howard Johnson (Wallace). Max Apple was born on October 22, 1941, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to Samuel Apple, a baker, and Betty Goodstein Apple. He was educated at the University of Michigan, where he received his bachelor’s degree (1963) and his doctoral degree (1970). In his first novel, Zip, critics see a parody of traditional, serious Jewish-American novels. Apple uses the liberal Jane Fonda, and the conservative J. Edgar Hoover, in a comic rendition of modern life that blends the various strands of American culture. For instance, a character named Jesus Goldstein represents the Judeo-Christian heritage and, because he is Puerto Rican, adds a Hispanic strand to the mix. The Propheteers focuses on wealthy people in Florida—real public figures imagined by Apple in fictional renderings of greed and materialism: Howard Johnson seeks sites for new motels and plans theme parks for senior citizens; Walt Disney wants to purchase land from Marjorie Merriweather Post, who has just bought Clarence Birdseye’s frozen food concept to add to her cereal fortune. Critic Wallace sees The Propheteers in the new tradition of Jay Cantor, Robert Coover, William T. Vollman, Stephen DIXON, and Don DELILLO. Max Apple continues to writes essays and stories. He is divorced, and lives and works in Houston, Texas, where he has taught at Rice University since 1972.

NOVELS The Propheteers: A Novel. New York: Perennial Library, 1987. Zip: A Novel of the Left and the Right. New York: Viking, 1978.

OTHER Time Warner Bookmark. “Mark Apple.” Available online. URL: http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/8/8/. Accessed July 14, 2005. Campbell, Geeslin. Review of The Propheteers. People Weekly (March 21, 1987). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:4684035. Accessed May 23, 2005. Wallace, David Foster. “E unibus pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction (June 22, 1993). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:13952319. Accessed August 22, 2005.

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA 69

Weisenburger, Steven. “Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subjects in Contemporary American Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (June 22, 1993). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:14421352. Accessed August 22, 2005.

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA JOHN O’HARA (1934) John O’Hara derived the title of his first novel from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey, which features Death glibly describing the fate of a man who had tried to elude her: “I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.” O’Hara chose the title based on his conviction that Maugham’s Samarra legend perfectly communicated the inevitability of his own protagonist’s demise (Bruccoli, 99). But while the damned man in Maugham’s work attempts to flee Death, O’Hara’s main character, Julian English, races recklessly toward it. Julian’s perennial overindulgence, selfishness, and immaturity culminates in his own self-destruction three days after the Christmas Eve country club party at which he throws a drink in the face of Harry Reilly, the owner of Julian’s Cadillac agency and a man to whom Julian owes $20,000. The lengths to which Julian goes to poison his social existence before he finally poisons himself (with carbon monoxide) reinforce the novel’s reliance on naturalistic determinism with respect to the inevitability of Julian’s death. But it also reflects O’Hara’s concerns about social conditions in America in the Great Depression, as it is Julian’s fear of ostracism—combined with his underlying desire to revolt against his community of socialites—that ultimately leads to his loss of control, and thus to the loss of his life. Appointment in Samarra takes place in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, a town O’Hara based on his own hometown of Pottsville. O’Hara’s disdain for Pottsville is well known, and we might assume that his decision to coat Gibbsville in snow is meant to convey the town’s icy nature. The harsh weather certainly reinforces the notion that the book’s characters appear frozen in their existences, and there is a fitting irony in O’Hara’s choice to juxtapose the Christmas season—typically a time of year that engenders warmth between human

beings—and the frigid air of a northeastern winter, which manifests itself both literally and in the town’s collective snobbery. Indeed, Gibbsvillians, and in particular the residents of Lantenengo Street, are by and large a despicable lot. Beneath the town’s thin veneer of social respectability resides a gang of racketeers, such as Ed Charney, whose profound influence in Gibbsville the novel’s narrator makes clear early on: The worst could happen to you [if you didn’t agree with Ed] was you would get held by a couple of the boys while a couple of others kicked you till they got tired kicking you, and then they would put a couple of slugs in you and that was that. (18) Bootlegging constitutes Ed Charney’s principal interest in Gibbsville, and it is the townspeople’s dependence on him to provide the necessary alcoholic complements to their numerous social engagements at the Lantenengo Country Club that put them in his debt; this forms the basis of their social hypocrisy. The Gibbsville elite turn a blind eye to the criminality permeating their town on the grounds that it enables societal standards to remain unencumbered. The tension that exists between the townspeople’s investment in upholding social graces and Ed Charney’s clandestine business ventures lies at the heart of Julian English’s unfortunate decision to toss his highball into the face of Harry Reilly on Christmas Eve, 1930. Clearly, Reilly is no angel. As the narrator explains, “the sheer force of the money everyone knew [Reilly] had” (12) had brought him a good deal of influence in Gibbsville. Julian both desires and disdains this influence, because of the pressures of putting on airs, and of knowing that, in the depression, his Cadillac agency (and thus his livelihood) would disappear where it not for Ed Charney, with whom he does a good business selling getaway cars (Bier, 139). But what Julian fails to see is that, as the agency’s part owner, Reilly, too, is beholden to the mob. While Reilly may be a wealthy socialite, the novel does not suggest that his financial dealings put him in league with the likes of Ed Charney. Julian, on the other hand, is in fact very well acquainted with Charney, and he typically

70 ARNOW, HARRIETTE SIMPSON

benefits from Charney’s charity when others in Gibbsville remain at his mercy. Thus, Julian’s weakness lies in his inability to recognize his own hypocrisy, and therefore he remains torn between his desire to acquire greater social power and respectability, and his desire to rebel against Lantenengo Street in its entirety. Julian locates in Harry Reilly the center of his frustration, for if he were more like Reilly (Julian thinks, but will not admit), he would have power and not simply covet it. Throwing his drink in Reilly’s face constitutes a monumental error in judgment, especially considering that Reilly had recently lent Julian $20,000 ($10,000 of which Julian simply squandered). But Julian’s foolishness does not surpass recoverability. That Julian overreads the severity of his situation, however, plays into the naturalistic determinism that ultimately sends him into a tailspin. It is perhaps Julian’s sense of his own failure to disentangle himself from the egocentrism of his social wants that propels him toward suicide—that, and the fact that hereditary factors have already sealed his fate. Julian’s grandfather George English had, like himself, gotten into trouble over money, and also like Julian, his grandfather had committed suicide. Considering that Julian’s father, William Dilworth English, amounts to little more than “a dismal if avid surgeon,” it seems clear that “all told, a family incompetence” exists among the Englishes (Bier, 141). The naturalism at work in O’Hara’s novel is such that the circumstances that Julian’s misdirected act sets in motion conform to the terms of his destiny. Within the logic of O’Hara’s tale, Julian is meant to die by his own hand, and as a result of his own incompetence. But as an indictment of the American moneyed class, Julian’s death does more than simply fulfill the expectations of O’Hara’s naturalism. Appointment in Samarra depicts post–World War America as a land destined for tragedy, as the novel’s sordid array of self-serving socialites and racketeers ensure the production of more men like Julian English.

SOURCES Bier, Jesse. “O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra: His First and Only Real Novel.” In Critical Essays on John O’Hara, edited by Philip B. Eppard, 137–144. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. The O’Hara Concern: A Biography of John O’Hara. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. O’Hara, John. Appointment in Samarra. 1934. Introduction by John Updike. New York: Vintage, 2003. David Tomkins

ARNOW, HARRIETTE (LOUISA) SIMPSON (1908–1986) Kentucky-born Harriette Simpson Arnow is a writer whose work stands on its own: Readers can understood and appreciate her novels without any recourse to background information. As scholar and critic Wilton Eckley points out, however, the pleasure of reading her novels is enhanced by knowing about Arnow’s kinship with both the beauty and the hardship of Appalachia, the mountains and the Cumberland River. Although she has been called a regionalist and a local-color writer because she portrays her part of Kentucky with such detail, the majority of critics and reviewers understand her universal appeal in the past and now. When she was alive, her books sold well and earned admiring reviews, both Hunter’s Horn (1949) and The DOLLMAKER (1954), in particular, reaching best-seller status. Hunter’s Horn won the Saturday Review Best Novel of 1949 award and came in second only to William FAULKNER’s A Fable for the 1955 National Book Award. Recently, such critics and writers as Joyce Carol OATES have rediscovered The Dollmaker and recognize it for the “American masterpiece” that it is (Oates, Rediscoveries). Arnow’s Kentucky Trilogy begins with Mountain Path (1936), a bildungsroman, continues with Hunter’s Horn, an adventure story featuring a strong woman protagonist, and culminates in The Dollmaker, about another strong woman who faces the dissolution of her family when they leave rural Kentucky for Detroit during World War II. Here Arnow’s themes emerge: the devastating effects of adapting to unfamiliar, especially urban environments and cultures, the importance of place, the strength of women. Harriette Louise Simpson was born on July 7, 1908, in rural Wayne County, Kentucky, the daughter of two teachers. She earned her bachelor of science degree in 1930 from the University of Louisville. After teaching in a Louisville school for a few months, Simpson fell

ARROWSMITH 71

ill, went to a resort in northern Michigan, and wrote her first novel, Mountain Path. Subsequently, she wrote for the Federal Writers Project (FWP), and met Harold Arnow, a Chicago newspaperman. They married in 1939, living first in the Kentucky hills but moving later to Detroit where jobs were available during World War II. The diverse population in the housing development where they lived was, in Wilton Eckley’s words, a “boiling cauldron of life in a wartime city” (Eckley, 42). It provided Arnow with the material she needed to write The Dollmaker. Shortly afterward, Arnow and her husband moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they remained for the rest of their lives. Mountain Path relates the coming-of-age tale of a young teacher who agonizes over a dilemma: Should she remain in the mountains with the man and the neighbors she has come to love, or move to a more urban, intellectual environment for which she is now educationally prepared. Hunter’s Horn tells the compelling story of Nunn Ballew. Nearly every reader recognizes Ballew as Arnow’s Kentucky Captain Ahab who, like the protagonist of Herman MELVILLE’s MOBYDICK, is similarly obsessed, in this case with an elusive red fox named King Devil. Ballew has spent his daughter Suse’s education money on hunting dogs, so when he discovers her pregnancy, he orders her to marry the father. The strong, proud, independent Suse has no other options and, as numerous critics and readers have noted, without Arnow’s talent, we might have disliked Ballew for forcing Suse into this marriage. Instead, we respond to Arnow’s sympathetic characterization of this complicated man who, despite his own rebellious nature, lives by the dictates of the communal mores. The Dollmaker depicts the Kentucky hillswoman, Gertie Nevels, who relinquishes her hope for a farm in order to follow her husband to Detroit. Arnow describes at length Gertie’s efforts to stem the disintegration of her family in an alien, mechanistic world. In the 1960s Arnow returned to the issues she addressed in the 1930s while writing for the FWP and published two books about the Cumberland area of Kentucky: Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and Flowering of the Cumberland (1963). In 1970, Arnow published The Weedkiller’s Daughter, her only novel that contains no reference to Kentucky. The protagonist,

15-year-old Susie Schnitzer, however, echoes Arnow’s previous strong women who prevail when they remain true to themselves. Through her depictions of these vividly drawn characters, Arnow brought rural Kentucky alive for readers all over the United States.

NOVELS The Dollmaker. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Hunter’s Horn. New York: Macmillan, 1949. The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1974. Mountain Path, as Harriette Simpson. New York: CoviciFriede, 1936. Old Burnside. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977. The Weedkiller’s Daughter. New York: Knopf, 1970.

SOURCES Chung, Haeja K. Harriet Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Eckley, Wilton. Harriette Arnow. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Joyce Carol Oates on Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker.” In Rediscoveries, edited by David Madden, 57–67. New York: Crown, 1971. Reprinted as “The Nightmare of Naturalism.” In Oates’s New Heaven, New Earth: Visionary Experience in Literature, 99–110. New York: Vanguard, 1974.

OTHER Allameh, Catherine Jaleh. “Harriette Arnow.” KYLIT—A Site Devoted to Kentucky Writers. Available online. URL: http:// www.english.eku.edu/SERVICES/KYLIT/ARNOW.HTM. Accessed May 23, 2005.

ARROWSMITH SINCLAIR LEWIS (1925)

Arrowsmith was one of five major novels that Sinclair LEWIS wrote in the 1920s and the one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. It was turned into a popular movie in 1931 starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes. A best-seller, like his MAIN STREET (1920) and BABBITT (1922), Arrowsmith critiqued a privileged sector of American society: medicine. Because both Main Street and Babbitt had been recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the Pulitzer Prize Committee and overruled by the trustees of Columbia University, and because he said he did not believe in contests for writers, Lewis turned the prize down, an action that brought him much publicity and increased sales of his novel. As he wrote to Alfred

72 ARROWSMITH

Harcourt, his publisher, shortly before the award was made public, “I hope they do award me the Pulitzer prize on Arrowsmith—but you know, don’t you, that ever since the Main Street burglary, I have planned that if they ever did award it to me, I would refuse it, with a polite but firm letter which I shall let the press have, and which ought to make it impossible for any one ever to accept the novel prize (not the play or history prize) thereafter without acknowledging themselves as willing to sell out” (quoted in Smith, 203). Lewis was ever the iconoclast, willing to take on such aspects of American society as business, religion, and medicine, and hold them up to intense scrutiny, both infuriating and delighting his readers with his blistering criticism. He is praised by many, including his biographers Mark Schorer and Richard Lingeman, for his intense research into the topics for his novels. That he was the son of a doctor gave him insight into the story of a young man who becomes a doctor and must later choose between being a practicing physician and a researcher. Lewis saw himself in the idealist character of Arrowsmith, having written an obituary in 1941, 10 years before his death, called “The Death of Arrowsmith.” For the novel, Paul De Kruif, a young research scientist who eventually became a popular science writer with his book Microbe Hunters, helped Lewis. They even traveled to the Caribbean to research the people and climate there, something that became important in the novel when Martin Arrowsmith must balance fighting the plague with researching the efficacy of a new vaccine. James Hutchisson sees De Kruif’s contribution as important because he not only helped with research but related his experiences, supplied prototypes for characters, and from his “personal philosophy Lewis extracted the basis for Arrowsmith’s idealism,” contributing to the creation of this “heroic novel” (Hutchisson, 97). During the course of the novel, Arrowsmith goes from general practitioner and part-time veterinarian to a public health official to a researcher at a prominent medical facility. Lewis seems to be proposing a spectrum for the medical profession from pure research to pure business and each of Martin’s experiences place him somewhere along that continuum. When young Martin first becomes interested in medicine, he helps

Doc Vickerson, an alcoholic old general practitioner in his hometown. At medical school he is caught between the austere teachings of the Jewish Dr. Max Gottlieb, professor of bacteriology, and dedicated researcher, and Dr. Lloyd Davidson, a popular professor whose main contribution to Martin’s education is to teach “the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you cannot discover what is the matter with him” (Lewis, 41). His stint as assistant director of public health sees him helping a man whose idea of health advocacy is to write poems about fly-swatters and spitting. When Martin becomes a researcher at the famous McGurk Institute and is able to concentrate on scientific investigation rather than patients, he should be happy. Yet despite his seeming success, Martin becomes miserable as he is urged to develop practical results for his experiments in order to bring renown and research dollars to the institute. Because of an inability to simultaneously maintain serious personal relationships and a career, at the end he retreats to the New England woods to stay true to his mistress of research, telling his baby son, “Come to me when you grow up, old man” (Lewis, 443). Arrowsmith still speaks to contemporary concerns about how medicine is practiced and paid for. In our current era, when doctors and medical researchers feel as though they are being forced to choose between proper scientific controls and compassion for AIDS sufferers, the problems of Lewis’s Martin Arrowsmith have a significant resonance. His ethical dilemma arises from the conflict between the scientific objectivity required of him by the medical research industry and the real pain and suffering of the sick. This conflict is actualized for him when he and his colleagues are invited to a Caribbean island nation to test an antidote for plague. “He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though still he resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation to give up the possible saving of millions for the immediate saving of thousands” (Lewis, 374). But because of his scientific objectivity, he and a dedicated black doctor divide all the inhabitants into two groups: one group will be given an experimental vaccine and the control group will receive nothing. The rational constructions that the scientists have built up between themselves and their feelings are destroyed for Arrow-

AS I LAY DYING 73

smith when his beloved wife, Leora, catches the plague and dies while he is still dividing the population into the saved and the condemned. In response to this emotional and psychological pain, he gives vaccine to all the sick, bringing on the wrath of his colleagues, but receiving the acclaim of the public. Later his medical institute praises him because the sale of the plague vaccine brings them millions in profits. The hypocrisy that Arrowsmith faces causes him to redefine himself in relation to his profession and his feelings. Through Arrowsmith’s problems, Lewis exposes the discourse of the medical profession and the ideology it supports.

SOURCES Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. ———. “The Death of Arrowsmith.” Coronet, July 1941. Reprinted in The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane, 104–107. New York: Random House, 1953. Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002. Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Smith, Harrison, ed. From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. Sally E. Parry

AS I LAY DYING WILLIAM FAULKNER (1930) As I Lay Dying, William FAULKNER’s fifth novel, is the third set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and the first that identifies Yoknapatawpha County by name. The novel was written immediately after—although published before—SANCTUARY, the sensational “potboiler” Faulkner had written to recoup losses after the commercial failure of the more experimental The SOUND AND THE FURY (1929). As I Lay Dying marks a return to the formal experiments of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner claimed to have written the novel in six weeks without any revisions. While The Sound and the Fury always remained his favorite among his works, Faulkner said that in As I Lay Dying he deliberately set out to write his masterpiece, and many critics believe he succeeded.

Like The Sound and the Fury and other novels in the Yoknapatawpha cycle, As I Lay Dying explores the dynamic of a particular family, but unlike most of the other Yoknapatawpha novels, it is about neither a family of dissipated Old South aristocrats like the Compsons nor a family of ambitious New South scoundrels like the Snopeses. Instead, the novel focuses on the Bundrens, a poor, white rural family eking out a meager existence in the dwindling Mississippi cotton market. The family consists of Anse, a chronically lazy farmer who appears to have married to create a supply of slave labor; his wife Addie, a strong-willed former schoolteacher; their relentlessly pragmatic oldest son Cash, a skilled carpenter in his late twenties or early thirties; the next oldest son, Darl, whose poetic temperament is perceived by some as madness; Jewel, a boy of 18 who seems both physically distinct and emotionally alienated from the rest of the family; the only daughter Dewey Dell, 16 and secretly pregnant; and Vardaman, still a child. As the novel begins, Addie is on her deathbed, and Cash methodically builds her coffin just beneath her bedroom window. When she dies the Bundrens prepare for a long journey. Anse has promised to bury her with her family in Jefferson, a distance of 40 miles on the back roads of rural Mississippi. On the grueling journey, the Bundrens’ mule-drawn wagon is escorted by buzzards attracted by the stench of the body. A flood washes out a key bridge, and when Anse’s seemingly obsessive drive to fulfill his promise leads him to cross the raging river anyway, the mules drown and Cash’s leg is broken. After trading Jewel’s beloved horse for a new team of mules, the family continues, stopping at various farms overnight, and sleeping in barns. At the Gillespie farm, the barn catches fire during the night, but the journey continues when Addie’s coffin is rescued from the fire, just as it had been rescued from the flood. It gradually becomes clear that each member of the family has an ulterior, selfish motive for wanting to get to Jefferson. Dewey Dell wants to get an abortion before her pregnancy is discovered. Vardaman wants to buy a toy train that he once saw in a store window. Cash, though he sacrifices much for the journey, is also intent on buying a “graphophone” in Jefferson. Anse makes it

74 AS I LAY DYING

clear that he is more interested in buying a set of false teeth in Jefferson than he is in fulfilling any promise. Darl’s motives are perhaps the most difficult to discern, but it is clear that they involve escaping from the family altogether, particularly from Addie’s influence: He purposely tries to lose Addie’s coffin at the bottom of the river, and he is the one who sets fire to Gillespie’s barn in an effort to destroy the coffin. Only Jewel, who is revealed to be the illegitimate product of Addie’s affair with the Reverend Whitfield, appears to be undertaking the trip out of genuine devotion to his mother. Addie herself, it turns out, had her own ulterior motive for making her family undertake the journey. Faulkner reveals that she married so she could produce children who, unlike her pupils, would be entirely her possessions, entirely extensions of her own will. She found, however, that her children were at least as much Anse’s as her own, and were finally as alien to her as he is. She had the affair with Whitfield in a desperate attempt to gain autonomy over some part of her life, and the result was Jewel, who she told her friend Cora Tull “is my cross and—will be my salvation. He will save me from the water and from the fire. Even though I have laid down my life, he will save me” (133). Her words prove prophetic, as Jewel indeed rescues Addie’s coffin from both the overflowing river and the fire in Gillespie’s barn. Her request to be buried in Jefferson, then, is both a declaration of independence from the Bundren family and a last attempt to make her own influence felt beyond the grave. When the Bundrens arrive in Jefferson, however, most of these motives are thwarted. Partly because Anse appropriates all the family’s money, Dewey Dell does not get her abortion and Vardaman does not get his train. Darl’s attempts at escape lead only to a more profound confinement, as the family has him committed to an asylum in Jackson to avoid liability for Gillespie’s barn. Only Anse gets everything he wants: not only his false teeth, but a brand new Mrs. Bundren a well. Cash gets his graphophone and Jewel gets his mother buried, but both ultimately serve the ends of Anse and the newly reconstituted Bundren family. The novel ends with the image of the remaining family members gathered together around the graphophone—Jewel

included, indicating that Addie’s version of life after death has itself proved mortal. What is most original in this story is the radically experimental form in which it is told. The novel is composed of 59 interior monologues, each of which is headed by the name of one of the 15 characters whose thoughts are being transcribed. The style of each monologue reflects both the point of view and the degree of sophistication of its narrator, so that different sections recount different pieces of the narrative and provide conflicting interpretations of characters and events. Critics such as Michael Millgate and Donald M. Kartiganer have agreed that one purpose of such experiments is to demonstrate the degree to which characters’ selfish purposes color their perceptions of reality. But the novel’s form also resembles one of its most prominent recurring images, that of vessels within vessels, or Chinese boxes. The meanings of the surviving Bundrens’ lives are largely contained within Addie’s coffin, which lies at their feet in the wagon, and within her one and only monologue, which unaccountably appears long after the death. The reader must peel back layer upon layer of the Bundrens’ story in order to find its dark emotional heart and the answers to the riddles within Addie’s fierce monologue. Irving Howe has pointed out that the novel’s central theme is the tension between individual self-definition and the contingency of selfhood upon others, particularly parents and family. Nowhere is this more evident than in the pregnant bodies of Addie and Dewey Dell, both of whom conceive of themselves as inhabited by alien presences. This is, of course, the condition Addie rages against in her monologue, rebelling against wifehood and motherhood and repudiating the children who are also Anse’s. Feminist critics have sometimes interpreted this struggle as Addie’s heroic revolt against patriarchy, but Faulkner also seems to be attributing darker and more selfish motives to her. In marrying and bearing children, Addie hopes to extend her personality and will to action even beyond the grave, but she finds that, ironically, she must sacrifice too much of her identity to do so. Darl faces a problem complementary to Addie’s, the difficulty of defining oneself as an individual when one is also the product of a family. Addie is the powerful parental influence Darl resists in

ASIMOV, ISAAC 75

his struggle for autonomy, and this struggle is represented by his constant efforts to thwart the fulfillment of Addie’s wish to be buried in Jefferson. Neither Darl nor Addie, however, gets the last word in the novel. The final monologue belongs to Cash, who has not played much of a role in the family’s emotional struggles. Cash is the only character who seems to have worked out a practical compromise between autonomy and contingency, words and deeds, and these issues increasingly become the themes of his final monologues. While both Addie’s and Darl’s quests for autonomy end in confinement—Addie within a coffin surrounded by her ancestors and Darl imprisoned in a cell in Jackson by his immediate family—only Cash, sitting around the graphophone with his family, seems to have found a way to fulfill his individual ambitions within the context of family life. As in all his Yoknapatawpha novels, the fate of the South also becomes a key theme in As I Lay Dying. Faulkner repeatedly contrasts the poor rural family with the “town folk” of the New South. Cleanth Brooks has observed a heroism in the Bundrens’ quest, and their stubborn endurance. In a somewhat different vein, Myra Jehlen sees the class dynamic in this and other Faulkner novels as an attempt to critique the prevailing myths of the South. While the novel’s conclusion seems tragic, even apocalyptic, many critics have found in this novel signs of Faulkner’s darkly comic sensibility. In an early, important study of Faulkner’s achievement, Olga Vickery explains that the juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy is important to the book’s structure. Harold Bloom discerns in Anse’s triumph an anticipation of the more overt comedy of the Snopes trilogy, which Faulkner would begin a decade later, but for Bloom the dark irony of As I Lay Dying remains Faulkner’s finest achievement.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. William Faulkner. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study. New York: Random House, 1951. Rev. ed., New York: Vintage, 1952. Jehlen, Myra. Class and Character in Faulkner’s South. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Kartiganer, Donald M. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1963. Vickery, Olga. The Novels of William Faulkner. 2d ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Bryan Vescio

ASIMOV, ISAAC (1920–1992) Isaac Asimov is considered to be one of the most significant science fiction writers of the 20th century, along with Ray BRADBURY, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert HEINLEIN. Such novels as The Gods Themselves (1972) and Foundation’s Edge (1982), and the stories “Nightfall” and “The Bicentennial Man” have received numerous honors. His most important contribution—defining “robotics” (a word he coined) and writing about robots—began with I, Robot in 1950. There Asimov decreed that robots could never harm humans, must obey humans in almost all ways, and must safeguard themselves whenever possible. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics influenced both written and filmed science fiction of the 20th century. These laws define robots as subservient to and protective of their human creators. One of the most acclaimed of the Robot series is Robots of Dawn, published decades later (1983). Even more famous are the books in his Foundation series. The first, Foundation, appeared in 1951. Asimov bases his Foundation series on “psychohistory,” a tool used for predicting mass behavior and thus the future of galactic empires. Once the psychohistorical prediction is made, government and scientists together can work to change the predicted outcome. For instance, using psychohistory, the character Seldon can predict the demise of the current empire which will be followed by 30,000 years of anarchy. With this knowledge, he works with the government to try to shorten the 30,000 years to 1,000. The unknown factor, of course, which remains unpredictable, is the independent actions of a given individual who can change history.

76 ASIMOV, ISAAC

Isaac Asimov was born on January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, in the former Soviet Union, to Judah Asimov, who became a New York City candy-store owner, and Anna Rachel Berman Asimov. They emigrated to the United States in 1923. Isaac Asimov became a naturalized citizen in 1928. Asimov attended Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor of science degree in 1939, his master’s degree in 1941, and his doctoral degree in 1948. After marrying Gertrude Blugerman in 1942, he worked from 1942 to 1945 as a civilian chemist at the United States Navy Air Experimental Station in Philadelphia. When the war ended, he published his award-winning Lucky Starr books for boys. In 1973 Asimov divorced his first wife and married Opal Jeppson, a psychiatrist, that same year. Although his Ph.D. was in biochemistry, he was varied both in his reading and writing; in his later years he wrote about Shakespeare and events in American history. This probably influenced the increasing complexity of his science fiction characters and plot. Some critics point out that he considered fiction to be a tool for introducing ideas, rather than an art form in itself. Asimov died of heart and kidney failure on April 6, 1992; his work, however, remains intriguing to a new generation. In addition to his considerable contributions to science fiction, Asimov published nearly 500 books, including mysteries, short-story collections, and numerous nonfiction books and essays, as well as textbooks in the fields of chemistry, astronomy, and physics.

NOVELS The Alternative Asimovs (contains The End of Eternity). New York: Doubleday, 1986. The Asimov Chronicles. New York: Dell, 1991. Azazel. New York: Doubleday, 1988. The Caves of Steel. New York: Doubleday, 1954. The Currents of Space. New York: Doubleday, 1952. The End of Eternity. New York: Doubleday, 1955. Fantastic Voyage. Boston: Houghton, 1966. Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Foundation. Hicksville, N.Y.: Gnome Press, 1951. Published as The 1,000 Year Plan with No World of Their Own by Paul Anderson. New York: Ace Books, 1955. Foundation and Earth. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Foundation and Empire. Hicksville, N.Y.: Gnome Press, 1952.

The Foundation Trilogy: Three Classics of Science Fiction (contains Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation). New York: Doubleday, 1963. Foundation’s Edge. New York: Doubleday, 1982. The Gods Themselves. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Have You Seen These? Framingham, Mass.: NESFA Press, 1974. Invasions. New York: New American Library, 1990. Isaac Asimov’s I-Bots: History of I-Botics: An Illustrated Novel. New York: HarperPrism, 1997. The Naked Sun. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Nemesis. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Pebble in the Sky. New York: Doubleday, 1950. The Positronic Man (with Robert Silverberg). New York: Doubleday, 1993. Prelude to Foundation. New York: Doubleday, 1988. The Robot Novels (contains The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun). New York: Doubleday, 1957. Robot Visions. New York: New American Library, 1991. Robots and Empire. New York: Doubleday, 1985. The Robots of Dawn. New York: Doubleday, 1983. Second Foundation. Hicksville, N.Y.: Gnome Press, 1953. The Stars, Like Dust. New York: Doubleday, 1951. Published as The Rebellious Stars with an Earth Gone Mad by R. D. Aycock. New York: Ace Books, 1954. The Third Isaac Asimov Double. New York: New English Library/Times Mirror, 1973. Through a Glass Clearly. New York: New English Library, 1967.

SOURCES Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920–1954. New York: Doubleday, 1979. ———. In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1979. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Boerst, William J. Isaac Asimov: Writer of the Future. Greensboro, N.C.: Morgan Reynolds, 1998. Fiedler, Jean, and Jim Mele. Isaac Asimov. New York: Ungar, 1982. Greenberg, Martin H., and Joseph D. Olander, eds. Isaac Asimov. New York: Taplinger, 1977. Gunn, James. Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Judson, Karen. Isaac Asimov: Master of Science Fiction. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow Publishers, 1998. Patrouch, Joseph F., Jr. The Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Platt, Charles. Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction. New York: Berkley Publishing, 1980.

THE ASPERN PAPERS 77

Slusser, George E. Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of His Science Fiction. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1979. Wollheim, Donald A. The Universe Makers. New York: Harper, 1971.

THE ASPERN PAPERS HENRY JAMES (1888) Few writers of fiction have produced a volume of work equal to that of Henry JAMES, and few authors rival James’s literary significance within the canon of the novel. Bridging the two major centuries of the American novel’s existence, as well as fusing significant literary movements in his prose, James remains a seminal figure in the growth and development of American letters. Written in 1888, the short novel The Aspern Papers is an examination of a familiar subject for James, the would-be literary professional. In The Aspern Papers, James creates a protagonist who is an academic scholar himself: an unnamed critic trying to recover the priceless personal letters of the deceased poet Jeffrey Aspern, written to his mistress many years earlier. To the narrator these letters hold an inestimable value, even if their current owner, and the rest of the world, do not seem to recognize their worth. The novel takes place in Venice, where the narrator has found the aged former lover of Aspern, the reclusive Miss Juliana Bordereau. Meeting Miss Bordereau exhilarates the narrator, as he finds himself face to face with “the Juliana of some of Aspern’s most exquisite and most renowned lyrics” (167). The narrator schemes his way into Miss Juliana’s grand but dilapidated house as a lodger and begins to stealthily gain information about the location of the papers from Juliana’s niece, Miss Tita. The niece is not old, but James describes her as “still more helpless [than her aunt], because her inefficiency was spiritual” (173). This fact, coupled with the girl’s prolonged isolation from the world damages the narrator’s conventional plan, “to make love to the niece” (161) as a means of obtaining the desired papers. When his alternate strategy of flowers and flattery meets with delay, the narrator ultimately decides on outright thievery, entering the old woman’s bedchamber by night. The narrator is discovered by the piercing blue eyes of Aspern’s former muse and branded a “publishing scoundrel” (233), just the type of person the old woman has guarded her

treasure from for so many years. The narrator makes a final desperate attempt to procure the documents by agreeing to marry the unattractive Miss Tita, after her aunt’s death, but this plan also fails. He is unable to obtain the ultimate prize and enlarge his reputation as the world’s most prominent Aspern scholar, and he is further humiliated in the process by losing out to such naive and inexperienced women. James was always fond of the foray into the autobiographical with his male protagonists, but in The Aspern Papers he delves even further into this area of self-examination, as the plot revolves around the question of academic publication and scholarship in a world apparently more concerned with financial gain. Susan V. Donaldson asserts that the narrator “sees himself charged with the responsibility of retrieving from the unworthy hands of unknowledgeable and untrained women a treasure that properly belongs in the literary realm” (Donaldson, 3). Even the narrator, however, realizes the monetary value of both the letters and his own literary reputation, as he spends a large sum of lire in his numerous attempts to obtain Aspern’s papers. James, along with others such as William Dean HOWELLS, saw it as their duty in the late 19th century to wrest the mantle of literary publication, particularly in the genre of the novel, away from female writers, who up to that point in America had been highly successful. For both James and Howells, though, these women were amateurs who needed to leave such important matters to men. James’s narrator can often be read as a stand-in for the author, since he is engaging in a strikingly similar project. The narrator’s ultimate failure, however, does not seem to reconcile with James’s success in establishing his own literary reputation. The esoteric nature of the object of desire and the languid pace can make The Aspern Papers seem anything but a “short novel,” but the concluding scenes are memorable. The narrator involuntarily shows his disgust at Miss Tita’s initial suggestion of marriage and departs empty-handed. After thinking it over, though, he realizes that the letters are worth any sacrifice, and he returns with the intention of agreeing to the union out of necessity. Miss Tita in the meantime has had a change of heart as well, and she informs him, “I have

78 AS WE ARE NOW

done a great thing. I have destroyed the papers” (250). Then to add to the narrator’s horror, she confesses, “It took a long time—there were so many” (251). At the end of the novel, the narrator reluctantly admits, “When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable” (251).

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Henry James’s “Daisy Miller,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and Other Tales. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Donaldson, Susan V. Competing Voices: The American Novel 1865–1914. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. James, Henry. “The Aspern Papers,” “The Turn of the Screw” and Other Short Novels, 153–251. New York: Signet Classic, 1995. Powers, Lyall H. Henry James: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970. Randy Jasmine

AS WE ARE NOW MAY SARTON (1973)

In World of Light, a 1979 documentary featuring May SARTON, the author frankly discusses many pressing concerns: attitudes toward the aged in the United States, being true to oneself, writing as self-realization, passionate relationships between women (sexual or otherwise), and the overarching importance of love. Not surprisingly, many of these themes emerge in her novels, poems, and memoirs. One of her most important novels, As We Are Now (1973), set in a Dickensian nursing home in New Hampshire, touches on all these issues, as well as others important to the writer, such as the comfort provided by animals. The jacket copy of the first edition of As We Are Now calls the book “This short swift blow of a novel.” The narrative is somewhat loosely based on the experience of a male friend, Perley Cole, about whom Sarton wrote several poems and essays. A farmer who worked with a scythe and had an angry and poetic soul, Perley died in an ambulance en route to the hospital. In As We Are Now, the protagonist is Caro Spencer, 76 and never married. After her brother and his younger wife can no longer care for her, Caro is put into a rural nursing facility, Twin Elms Nursing Home, only to discover that she is a prisoner—treated rudely and not able to continue to be herself. She labels the

home “a concentration camp for the old.” Cut off from all that is important to her, she is humiliated at every turn. She even believes they put tranquilizers in the coffee. The only signs of life around the place are some noisy geese and a sweet cat named Pansy. Like Sarton, Caro keeps a journal, which she calls “The Book of the Dead.” She looks at the end of life as a journey and intends to keep notes. She also knows that writing about one’s life is a way of holding on to sanity. “If I can draw it accurately, I shall know where I am,” writes Caro. Sarton looked forward to being old. She had several older mentors. One in particular, the Belgian poet, Jean Dominique, taught her to memorize, love, and write poetry. When she went to England, she was introduced to Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, and Julian and Juliette Huxley. Many of her everyday friends and lovers were older; she always respected the life experience and admired the grace and wisdom attained at “a certain age.” In “World of Light,” Sarton admitted that finally, at 67, she is content “not to write a book a year.” She enjoyed the slowed-down pace, knowing herself better. Yet Sarton did continue to produce almost a book a year. At her death in 1995, she had published more than 50 books of prose and poetry. She also had finally acquired enough money to be treated well wherever she ended her days. Not all elderly are so fortunate. In As We Are Now, Caro Spencer, a retired schoolteacher, is decidedly not. Only one person Caro meets during her “incarceration” gives her anything close to affection and kind treatment. Anna Close is an aide who fills in while the owners are away for two weeks. Anna’s and Caro’s friendship is instant and passionate; Caro feels a renewed spark of life when Anna is there. Critic Jane S. Bakerman writes, “One of her [Sarton’s] most brilliant achievements is her ability to picture friendship as a redeeming, sustaining force, and she is one of very few American writers to present a vivid picture of the importance and nourishment of friendships between women.” But the owners, of course, come back, ill tempers and cruelty intact, and Anna, a married woman, cannot take Caro to live at her home. When Caro writes an intense letter of affection to Anna, the owners confiscate it, call her a “queer” and threaten to send her to the state hospital if

ATHERTON, GERTRUDE 79

she is not a “good” girl. The novel ends brilliantly as Caro takes revenge on those who have abused her and denied her kindness. In a final grand act of heroism, she burns down the Twin Elms Nursing Home. In an afterword, the reader learns that Caro’s much loved journal was found and published, with her brother’s permission, hence this work. As We are Now remains one of Sarton’s best novels, along with Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, A Reckoning, Kinds of Love, The Small Room, and Birth of a Grandfather. Most of her work, including this novella, is still in print. All of Sarton’s novels were passionately written, the way she lived her life, but these particular volumes were perhaps the most brave. Sarton wrote novels to find out where she stood; she tackled issues many writers in the mid- to late-20th century wouldn’t have dared discuss. Sarton’s work has changed many people’s lives. One of her favorite awards was one received for Ministry to Women, awarded by the Unitarian Universalist Society. The novels, As We Are Now and A Reckoning, and After the Stroke, a journal, continue to be used in medical schools and hospice classes.

SOURCES Sarton, May. As We Are Now, 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. World of Light, A Portrait of May Sarton. New York: Ishtar Films, 1979. 30-minute documentary film. Bakerman, Jane S. “Patterns of Love and Friendship: Five Novels by May Sarton.” In May Sarton, Woman and Poet, edited by Constance Hunting. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1982. Deborah Straw

ATHERTON, GERTRUDE (GERTRUDE FRANKLIN HORN ATHERTON) (1857– 1948) Known primarily as a novelist, Gertrude Atherton published 34 novels and seven short fiction collections, as well as books and magazine articles on American history, culture, and nature in the late 19th century. The majority of her novels feature unconventional western women heroes who chafe at the social constrictions inhibiting their freedom. Often compared to novels of Mark TWAIN, Ambrose BIERCE and Bret HARTE, Atherton’s California novels, including The Californians (1898), Ancestors (1907), and Perch of the

Devil (1914), examine the issues surrounding romance and matrimony. Of particular interest are The Doomswoman (1893) and A Daughter of the Vine (1899), where, for instance, the hero, Diego Estenega, realizes that both California’s Mexican culture and the Mexicans themselves seem doomed to marginalization. Atherton is also credited with inventing the idea of a novel, based on biography, that blends reality and romance; The Conqueror, for instance, features Alexander Hamilton. Atherton’s fiction as a whole invites comparisons with that of Willa CATHER, Ellen GLASGOW, Mary Wilkins FREEMAN, and Edith WHARTON. Atherton was born on October 30, 1857, to Thomas Ludovich Horn and Gertrude Franklin, in San Francisco, California. Unusual for her era, Atherton’s mother divorced two husbands, including Horn, and Atherton herself, who married George Henry Bowen Atherton, lived apart from him for several years before his death. According to scholar and biographer Charlotte S. McClure, Atherton became a novelist to lessen her financial dependence on her husband. She replicates this desire for independence in her fiction. In Patience Sparhawk (1897), for instance, Patience ultimately leaves her socially elite husband because she cannot find happiness in this milieu. In BLACK OXEN (1923), Atherton’s best-selling novel, the Countess Zattiany, although an admirable and vital figure, understands that society discriminates against its beautiful but aging women. Atherton’s place in American literature is significant. In addition to her substantial body of work, Atherton was employed for a time in Hollywood by the Eminent Authors program, and in 1940 was the first to be named one of California’s Most Distinguished Woman. After a lifetime of travel and residence in both Europe and the United States, and a 50-year career, Atherton spent her last 16 years in San Francisco, where she died on June 15, 1948.

SELECTED NOVELS Adventures of a Novelist. New York: Liveright, 1932. American Wives and English Husbands, A Novel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898. Ancestors. New York and London: Harper, 1907. Black Oxen. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923. The Californians. London: Lane, 1898. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1898.

80 ATLAS SHRUGGED

Can Women Be Gentlemen?. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Conqueror, Being the True and Romantic Story of Alexander Hamilton. New York and London: Macmillan, 1902. A Daughter of the Vine. New York and London: Lane/Bodley Head, 1899. Dido, Queen of Hearts. New York: Liveright, 1929. The Doomswoman. New York: Tait, 1893. Heart of Hyacinth. New York: Harper, 1903. His Fortunate Grace. New York: Appleton, 1897. The Horn of Life. New York: Appleton-Century, 1942. The House of Lee. New York and London: Appleton-Century, 1940. The Immortal Marriage. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. New York: Macmillan, 1912. The Jealous Gods, A Processional Novel of the Fifth Century B.C. Concerning One Alcibiades. New York: Liveright, 1928. The Living Present. New York: Stokes, 1917. Los Cerritos, A Romance of the Modern Time. New York: Lovell, 1890. Mrs. Balfame, A Novel. New York: Stokes, 1916. Mrs. Pendleton’s Four-in-Hand. New York and London: Macmillan, 1903. Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, A Novel. London and New York: Lane, 1897. Perch of the Devil. New York: Stokes, 1914. A Question of Time. New York: Lovell, 1891. Rezánov. New York and London: Authors and Newspapers Association, 1906. Rezánov and Doa Concha. New York: Stokes, 1937. Rulers of Kings, A Novel. New York and London: Harper, 1904. Senator North. New York and London: Lane/Bodley Head, 1900. The Sophisticates. New York: Liveright, 1931. Tower of Ivory, A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Vengeful Gods. Life in the War Zone. New York: Systems Printing Company, 1916. The White Morning, A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime. New York: Stokes, 1918.

SOURCES Atherton, Gertrude. My San Francisco, A Wayward Biography. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1946. ———. California, An Intimate History. New York and London: Harper, 1914. Cucinella, Catherine. “Gertrude Atherton.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Leider, Emily Wortis. California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. McClure, Charlotte S. “A Checklist of the Writing of and about Gertrude Atherton,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 9 (1976): 103–162. ———. Gertrude Atherton. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1976. ———. Gertrude Atherton. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Starr, Kevin. “Gertrude Atherton, Daughter of the Elite.” In Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915, 345–364. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

ATLAS SHRUGGED AYN RAND (1957)

Who is John Galt? This question opens Ayn RAND’s acclaimed novel, Atlas Shrugged. At first just a joke, this query begins a serious investigation on the part of protagonist Dagny Taggart to discover the identity of this man. She discovers Galt’s motor, a motor that would have revolutionized the power industry; however, the motor is left in a factory, unfinished. The motor spurs a quest because Dagny cannot fathom leaving such a monumental invention to rust in an empty factory. Through her own struggles to keep Taggart Transcontinental, her business, operating, she discovers what John Galt has already learned: To deprive a person of the products of his mind is theft. During the novel, Dagny strives to safeguard her business from the monopolizing regulations the government imposes. She lives in a world in which the majority of people want the community to succeed instead of the individual. The conformists are ashamed they do not think; that is, they believe thought is dead, and it no longer exists. Since all ideas have already been thought, they believe no one should claim sole ownership of what she believes to be her own thoughts. In Ayn Rand’s For the New Intellectual, guilt and fear over not thinking destroy both the consciousness of the “non-thinkers” and the capitalistic culture—socialism arises as a protector against reality and insists that a person’s work belongs to society because no person has the right to live for herself (47–49). Rather than force their minds to work, the non-thinkers demolish the institution that requires them to do so. Hiding behind a state that makes people equal, the non-thinkers hope they will not appear cognitively inadequate. Their commu-

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD 81

nistic mentality is apparent in the anti-dog-eat-dog rule, which eliminates competition and creates monopolies: “The Rule provided that the members of the National Alliance of Railroads were forbidden to engage in practices defined as ‘destructive competition’ ” (76). So, the most efficient railroad is not permitted to operate. Only the one with seniority is allowed to function. Once Dagny realizes she can no longer allow the government to control her, she breaks with the world by uttering the mantra of John Galt, which she hears him speak on the radio: “I swear—by my life and by my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (1,047). Unable to work under the communist ideals of the Washington men, she learns that she cannot continue to sacrifice herself for a society that not only takes all she has invented but also gives her nothing in return. Nothing she does is ever enough, and no one thanks her for solving Taggart Transcontinental’s problems and keeping the trains on schedule. Just as a child cannot rely upon its parents forever, the world cannot depend on Dagny for its survival: “Man’s mind is the basic tool for survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch— or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think.” (930) Propelling the world, the individual acts as a god to society. Without that special person who decides to change a chemical formula or test a hypothesis, there would be no growth. If the caveman never discovered fire, humans would still reside in the cave. Dagny learns that her mind is her most valuable weapon, and without her mind, she would be reduced to an animal, little more than a hair-covered, instinct-following beast. Stripped of her mind, she too will perish. After Dagny breaks her ties with the non-thinkers, she feels relieved. Freed from the restricting mentality

these men imposed, the world opens itself to new ideas, ideas with which to help humanity, not with which to hinder its development. “She knew what Nat Taggart [her grandfather] had felt at his start and that now, for the first time, she was following him in full loyalty: the confident sense of facing a void and of knowing that one has a continent to build” (1,065). Although her railroad is ravaged by men who do not know how to operate it, Dagny no longer expresses anger. Unobstructed by the men who formerly stood in her way, she can invent new creations exempt from the fear they will be usurped. Those who recently held authority have no power because Dagny, with a productive mind, will refuse to concede to their dictates. Without the inhibitions of thoughtless individuals, Dagny can exert all her mental power, not in dealing with those who want to restrain her achievements, but in soaring to even greater intellectual heights than she ever before thought possible.

SOURCES Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Signet, 1957. ———. For the New Intellectual. New York: Random House, 1961. Erin Moore

AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD PETER MATTHIESSEN (1965) Set near the source of the Amazon River in the Peruvian Andes, MATTHIESSEN’s novel begins in the last outpost of civilization, a ramshackle mission town. Here, the missionaries Leslie and Andy Huben meet the newly arrived missionaries Martin and Hazel Quarrier and their son Billy. The other major characters are introduced as counterpoints to each other: Padre Xantes, the Catholic prefect, and Commandante Guzman represent the local authorities, and Wolfie and Merriwether Lewis Moon represent the many transients who come to the Amazon to dissipate themselves or to disappear. Moon is the novel’s protagonist. Part Cheyenne, part Choctaw, and part African-American, he is the only adult non-native to have some genuine interest in and empathy for the culture of the local tribe, the Niaruna. The tribe has been much reduced by exposure to Western diseases against which they have had no immunity.

82 AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD

In the aftermath of this cultural catastrophe, some of the remaining Niaruna have lost some of their resistance to Christianity and have become nominal converts. But the case of one of these converts, whose given name is Uyuyu but who is called Yoyo—with unintended irony—by the missionaries, demonstrates that what might appear to be a workable compromise between the two cultures is only an arbitrary mixture of their most superficial aspects, with no sustaining core of meaning. To further exacerbate the Niaruna’s predicament, they get caught in the middle of denominational conflicts among the missionaries. Moreover, these conflicts are themselves exacerbated by the missionaries’, and especially Hazel Quarrier’s, inability to adjust to the natural environment of the rain forest. In fact, they are so clearly as much out of their element as the Niaruna are in their element that their efforts to convert the Niaruna to a new way of life quickly begin to seem stubbornly and even preposterously wrong-headed. Ultimately, the missionaries are more interested in demonstrating the power of their own religious convictions than in meeting the needs, spiritual or otherwise, of the Niaruna. All of these tensions come to a head when Martin Quarrier is savagely killed by Uyuyu. The Europeans interpret Quarrier’s death as a martyrdom, but it is actually just a further demonstration of his incompetence as a missionary. In retaliation for the killing, Guzman hires Moon to fly a plane over the forest and drop some bombs on a native village. Instead Moon parachutes from the plane, leaving it to crash into the trackless forest. Misinterpreting his fall from the sky, the local Niaruna treat him as a god. At first he feels as though he has recovered something of what his ancestors had lost in North America. But eventually he recognizes that he can never recover the Niaruna’s contented obliviousness to the broader world nor be completely at ease with their equal capacities for great generosity and terrible savagery. Fleeing ahead of Guzman’s pursuit, Moon travels downriver in a malarial, hallucinatory quest for some sustaining spiritual truth. And, at least for a moment, as a solitary soul “lost” in a vast wilderness, he seems to achieve it. Even including novels in the action-adventure genre, At Play in the Fields of the Lord is one of the rela-

tively few American novels to be set in the Amazon basin. Some critics have complained about Matthiessen’s radical bias against Western culture and, in particular, about his very negative characterization of Christian missionaries, a characterization that seems to ignore completely the hardships that missionaries have endured and the good that they have done in many regions of the world. Yet, despite its exotic setting and the perception of a rather heavy-handed radical bias, the novel explores many traditional American themes: the notion of the frontier as a defining and transforming phenomenon— specifically, the paradoxical American notion that escape into the wilderness can represent a search for one’s defining “place” in the world; the tensions between the primitive and the civilized, the innocent and the corrupt; the narrow boundaries between righteousness and self-righteousness and between self-exploration and self-indulgence; the dangers to the self posed by both community and isolation; and the initiation of the American abroad, although in most instances this has involved an American’s immersion into a more civilized, rather than more primitive, environment. Matthiessen, of course, challenges the conventional Western assumptions about civilization and progress. His novel belongs to that tradition of Western novels questioning the efficacy and morality of colonialism, a tradition including such novelists as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary, and Graham Greene. But while many postcolonial critics have complained about the negative stereotyping of “natives” even in the work of Western critics of colonialism, Matthiessen seems to have transcended that underlying bias. The influence of Matthiessen’s novel can be seen in such subsequent, noteworthy novels as Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise and Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. Moreover, the adaptation of the novel to film by director Hector Babenco (Saul Zaentz/MCA Universal, 1991), after a quarter-century of false starts chronicled in C. Brown’s Esquire article, gave the novel something of a second life.

SOURCES Brown, C. “At Play in the Fields of Hollywood.” Esquire, July 1991, pp. 110–118.

AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES 83

Caesar, Terry. “ ‘So That’s the Flag’: The Representation of Brazil and the Politics of Nation in American Literature,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 41 (Summer 1999): 365–384. Cooley, John. “Matthiessen’s Voyages on the River Styx: Deathly Waters, Endangered Peoples.” In Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, edited by John Cooley, 167–192. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Escorel, L. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: Confronting the Mythic—and the Not So Mythic.” Omni (December 1991): 10. Matthiessen, Peter. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. New York: Random House, 1965. Patteson, Richard F. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: The Imperialist Idea and the Discovery of Self,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 21, no. 2 (1979): 5–14. Rendleman, Todd. “ ‘Evil’ Images in At Play in the Fields of the Lord: Evangelicals and Representations of Sexuality in Contemporary Film,” Velvet Light Trap 46 (Fall 2000): 26–39. Martin Kich

AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES ALICE MCDERMOTT (1992) Alice McDermott’s third novel, At Weddings and Wakes is set in the early 1960s, soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. It is the story of the four Irish Catholic Towne sisters and their complicated relationship with their “Momma,” as seen through the eyes of one sister’s three children. Twice a week, in every week of the summer (except for the last week of July and the first week of August), Lucy takes her children (who are unnamed, until late in the novel) from their suburban Long Island home back to the family apartment in Brooklyn where the sisters and “Momma” live, mother and daughters in a figurative if not literal sense. The daughters are actually Momma’s nieces, for “Momma,” an Irish immigrant, married their father in a “marriage of convenience” immediately after her sister, their real mother, died in childbirth. Then, the girls’ father died suddenly, of an aneurism. If not for “Momma,” who was widowed when she was pregnant with John, her only child, the girls would have been orphans, wards of the state. Out of a sense of obligation to her beloved sister, and because it had taken eight years of hard work in Ireland to get to

America in the first place, Momma married a man she hadn’t chosen, nor particularly loved. When he died, she became a single parent to five children, four of whom she hadn’t borne, and the children were raised in the Brooklyn apartment where their mother had died in the bedroom, and their father on the landing right outside the front door. Nothing, it seems, can tear “Momma” and the women out of the Brooklyn apartment, though Bob, Lucy’s husband, tries: for the last week of July and the first week of August, Bob takes Lucy and their three children for a vacation, alternating cottages year after year to keep his family from becoming, like their mother, overly attached to any one place. John early on made his escape—but the girls never do. John is her natural child but the girls owe Momma too much. The only way they can try to repay her is to live depressed, unhappy, resentful lives of their own. It would be disloyal to Momma to be happy. “Lucy’s children (Margaret, Bobby, Maryann) sit at the windowsill in Momma’s bedroom and listen to their mother in the livingroom, complaining in a stifled and frustrated tone she used only here” (18) that their father “is not the man I married” (25). Agnes is the pretentious “career woman” who sets herself up as an authority on most everything, and is resentful that she has no husband, and has to make her own way in the world. Then there is Veronica, her skin ruined by a medical mistake, who turned out to be most aptly named by her dead mother for the biblical Veronica, who “had offered (her) veil without hesitation to comfort the face of our suffering Lord” (90). Like her half-brother, the ne’er-do-well adult John, Veronica is an alcoholic, and hides her suffering not only in the bottle, but in the gloom of her dark bedroom. Though “what about me?” is the question that Lucy, Agnes, and Veronica continually ask, May never does. It is May who left the convent because she thought she’d become complacent, May who has come home to care for Momma, May who is determined to forget their tragic history (“all that is past” [107] is her reply to her sisters’ laments) and be as happy as possible. And it is May, to Momma’s and the other girls’ great annoyance and jealousy, who unexpectedly, and so late in life, falls in love with Fred, the mailman, an Irish bachelor who’s just lost his own

84 AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS

mother, and is quite alone in the world. May wonders if “God was not sometimes as foolish, as childish, in His love for us, as we are when we first discover our love for one another” (70). It’s May’s wedding to Fred that is at the heart of the novel. For a brief time, the children see that “Momma” and their aunts, and even their mysterious Uncle John, whom they usually see only in the Brooklyn apartment at Christmas, are happy in each other’s company. And it amazes Lucy’s children that Uncle John has a wife and children too, cousins that Lucy’s brood has never met. It is as if in getting out of that apartment, the whole family has been given a new opportunity to get to know each other. But it hardly lasts for, four days after May and Fred’s wonderful wedding, May dies—of an aneurism. The happy family, dancing at the wedding, came together once again, at May’s wake. It would be nice to think that May’s sudden death made the children realize the futility of rehashing the past, that they’d appreciate May’s wisdom in enjoying every minute of the life that was lent to her, that they’d reject the notion of their family as cursed. Nice—but doubtful.

SOURCES McDermott, Alice. At Weddings And Wakes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. Christine O’Hagan

AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS (STANTON) (1917– ) Known throughout his prolific writing career (nearly 30 novels and over 100 short stories) as an heir to Edith WHARTON and Henry JAMES, Auchincloss has also taken as his subject the privileged men and women of New York society. He is particularly noted for his fine craftsmanship and psychologically penetrating insights into male and female characters who face personal dilemmas and crises as do we all. Auchincloss’s characters, however, often harbor a sense of inferiority or insecurity, despite their apparent wealth and privilege. Under close Auchinclossian scrutiny are the conflicts between marriage and sex, particularly those generated by the demands of a socially elite but closed society; institutions—banking, the law, education—also come under the lens of the author, as does the institution of

the family, often examined through one family’s history over several generations. Auchincloss’s abundant publication record is all the more notable since for most of his adult life, he has practiced law full time in a New York firm, while still writing novels and stories, as well as biographies, literary criticism, essays, and plays. His legal specialties include trusts, estates, marriages and divorces, providing abundant material for the business and social ventures that featured in his works. His interest in New York society comes naturally to Auchincloss, who was born September 27, 1917, in Lawrence, Long Island, New York, to Joseph Howland Auchincloss, a corporate lawyer, and Priscilla Stanton Auchincloss. He attended Yale University from 1935 to 1939, but when his first novel was rejected by Scribner, he left Yale without graduating and entered the University of Virginia Law School, earning his LL.B. in 1941. When the United States entered World War II, Auchincloss joined the U.S. Navy, serving as a gunnery officer and a naval intelligence officer, from 1941 until 1945. He spent much of his spare time reading, but his tours of duty in the Canal Zone, England, and the Pacific theater provided material for his subsequent satiric treatments of military bureaucracy in The Indifferent Children (1947), Venus in Sparta (1958), and numerous short stories collected in The Romantic Egoists (1954) (Parsell, 14). After the war, Auchincloss continued to agonize over whether to commit himself to a career in writing or the law. Using the pseudonym Andrew Lee, he published his first novel, The Indifferent Children, a tale of a returning World War II soldier, before beginning work with a Wall Street law firm. Two subsequent novels, Sybil (1952) and A Law for the Lion (1953), concern dissatisfied upper-class New York women in search of self-fulfillment and a sense of identity. After taking a two-year break to devote himself to writing and to sessions in psychotherapy—valuable to himself and to the complex depiction of characters in his later fiction—Auchincloss decided that he could manage his double careers and was hired by another law firm, becoming a full partner in 1958. In 1957, Auchincloss married Adele Simpson, a Rockefeller descendant. Three of his early novels were well received: The Great

AUCHINCLOSS, LOUIS 85

World and Timothy Colt (1956), Venus in Sparta (1958), and Pursuit of the Prodigal (1959). Timothy Colt, a lawyer, rebels against social expectations and must face punishment for professional misconduct. In Venus in Sparta, Michael Farish rebels against both the banking profession and his marriage, fleeing to Mexico before finally committing suicide. Rees Parmalee, the lawyer protagonist in Pursuit of the Prodigal, vainly rebels against the upper-class social forces that have produced him. Despite their critical and popular success, scholar and critic David B. Parsell says that these novels do not have the “stamp of greatness or near-greatness that would mark the author’s major efforts of the 1960s” (Parsell, 17). Portrait in Brownstone (1962), an early multigenerational novel considered one of Auchincloss’s finest achievements, traces the Denison family through a period of 50 years, recounting the emergence of Ida Denison Trask as the major force in the gradually disintegrating family. The RECTOR OF JUSTIN (1964), almost universally hailed as Auchincloss’s masterpiece, focuses on Francis Prescott, recently deceased headmaster of Justin Martyr Academy, an elite New England boys’ boarding school. Using the technique of multiple unreliable narrators, Auchincloss demonstrates the impossibility of knowing the truth about any character. Similarly, he creates three points of view about one crime in The Embezzler (1966), and in such later novels as The Book Class (1984), when parts of the deceased founder’s life are revealed through the multiple perspectives of the book club members and filtered through the dead woman’s son’s narration. Auchincloss’s prolific literary talents continue to manifest themselves in such relatively recent novels as The Lady of Situations (1990), The Education of Oscar Fairfax (1995), and Her Infinite Variety (2000). Indeed, it is this abundance of work (including historical, biographical, and critical studies of such subjects as the Gilded Age, Edith Wharton, Ellen GLASGOW, and Henry James) that tends to divide critics, some of whom find fault with any writer who publishes so much. The question is in fact whether Auchincloss focuses too narrowly on one upper-class segment of American society, or whether, by so focusing, he pres-

ents us with some of the most searingly accurate portraits of the human psyche in the United States during the 20th and 21st centuries.

NOVELS The Book Class. Boston: Houghton, 1984. The Cat and the King. Boston: Houghton, 1981. The Country Cousin. Boston: Houghton, 1978. The Dark Lady. Boston: Houghton, 1977. Diary of a Yuppie. Boston: Houghton, 1987. The Education of Oscar Fairfax. Boston: Houghton, 1995. The Embezzler. Boston: Houghton, 1966. Exit Lady Masham. Boston: Houghton, 1983. Fellow Passengers: A Novel in Portraits. Boston: Houghton, 1989. The Golden Calves. Boston: Houghton, 1988. The Great World and Timothy Colt. Boston: Houghton, 1956. Her Infinite Variety. Boston: Houghton, 2000. Honourable Men. Boston: Houghton, 1986. The House of Five Talents. Boston: Houghton, 1960. The House of the Prophet. Boston: Houghton, 1980; New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1991. I Come as a Thief. Boston: Houghton, 1972. The Indifferent Children. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1947. The Lady of Situations. Boston: Houghton, 1990. A Law for the Lion. Boston: Houghton, 1953. Portrait in Brownstone. Boston: Houghton, 1962. Pursuit of the Prodigal. Boston: Houghton, 1959. The Rector of Justin. Boston: Houghton, 1964. Sybil. Boston: Houghton, 1952. Three Lives. Boston: Houghton, 1993. Venus in Sparta. Boston: Houghton, 1958. Watchfires. Boston: Houghton, 1982. A World of Profit (Under pseudonym Andrew Lee). Boston: Houghton, 1968. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1947.

SOURCES Eisinger, Chester E., and Sandra Ray. “Louis Auchincloss: Overview.” In Contemporary Novelists, 6th ed., edited by Susan Windisch Brown. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1996. Milne, Gordon. “Louis Auchincloss.” In The Sense of Society: A History of the American Novel of Manners, 235–253. London: Associated University Presses, 1977. Parsell, David B. Louis Auchincloss. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988. Plimpton, George. “Louis Auchincloss: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 36, no. 132 (Fall 1994): 73–94.

86 AUSTER, PAUL

OTHER Wired for Books. Audio Interview with Louis Auchincloss. Don Swain. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks. org/louisauchincloss/. Accessed August 25, 2005.

AUSTER, PAUL (1947– )

Paul Auster is one of the most respected experimental novelists to emerge in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He moved into the critical limelight with The City of Glass (1985), the first novel in his NEW YORK TRILOGY; the other two novels, Ghosts and The Locked Room, appeared in 1986 and 1987. In 1987 he also published In the Country of Last Things, an unusual science fiction novel that focuses on the here and now rather than the future. To date, Auster has published 11 novels, including The MUSIC OF CHANCE, nominated for a PEN Faulkner award. Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey, to Samuel Auster and Queenie Bogat Auster; he grew up in Newark and was educated at Columbia University, earning bachelor’s (1969) and master’s (1970) degrees. He married Lydia Davis in 1974; they were divorced in 1979. In 1981, he married Minnesota-born novelist Siri Husvedt. Although he began his writing career as a poet and essayist, his reputation changed with the publication of City of Glass, outwardly a mystery novel. His character, Quinn, who writes books and works as a detective, begins to work on a case that becomes a postmodern quest into madness, language, identity, fact and fiction. The linguist character is, ironically, named Stillman, and a man named Auster is the actual detective. The quest continues in Ghost, but here Auster uses a protagonist detective called Blue who is hired by a client named White to follow Black, a writer. The reader feels that Black and Blue are one and the same. The Locked Room, the Trilogy’s highly acclaimed third novel, features the obviously Hawthornesque dead writer Fanshawe, whose identity is appropriated by the narrator who marries Fanshawe’s wife and publishes his books. In the Country of Lost Things (1987) borrows from science fiction, but as most critics note, the novel is set firmly in the present, as Anna Blume confronts the amoral and cultural chaos of the 20th century. Similarly, in The Music of Chance, the protagonist, Jim Nash, is imprisoned in a rural rather than an urban environ-

ment by the gamblers to whom he has sold his soul. Moon Palace (1989), a favorite of book clubs, features the orphaned Fogg, who seeks clues to his identity by examining his past, while in Mr. Vertigo (1994), the young Walter Rawley learns to levitate on a Kansas farm while lusting after a career on Broadway. Leviathan (1992) opens with the bizarre death of New York writer Benjamin Sachs; writer Peter Aaron attempts to unravel the mysteries involved in Sachs’s life and death. The Music of Chance was adapted into the 1993 film of the same title, directed by Philip Haas and starring James Spader and Mandy Patinkin, and, in 1994, Miramax bought the film rights to Mr. Vertigo. In 1994 both Smoke and Blue in the Face were filmed: Smoke starred Harvey Keitel and William Hurt and was directed by Wayne Wang; and Blue in the Face, directed by Wang and Auster, starred Keitel, Michael J. Fox, Madonna, Lou Reed, and Roseanne Barr. That same year, City of Glass was adapted into a comic book by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. Paul Auster also wrote the award-winning screenplay Smoke. He and his wife continue to live in Brooklyn, New York.

NOVELS City of Glass. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun & Moon Press, 1985. Double Game. New York: Violette, 2000. Facing the Music. London: Station Hill, 1980. Ghosts. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun & Moon Press, 1986. In the Country of Last Things. New York: Viking, 1987. Leviathan. New York: Viking, 1992. The Locked Room. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sun & Moon Press, 1987. Moon Palace. New York: Viking, 1989. Mr. Vertigo. New York: Viking, 1994. The Music of Chance. New York: Viking, 1990. Timbuktu. New York: Holt, 1999.

SOURCES Barone, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Handler, Nina. Drawn into the Circle of Its Repetitions: Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. Edited by Dal Salwak. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Holzapfel, Anne M. The New York Trilogy: Whodunit?: Tracking the Structure of Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1996.

AUSTIN, MARY HUNTER 87

AUSTIN, MARY HUNTER (1868–1934) Scholars in the 21st century have reawakened interest in Mary Hunter Austin after a half century of obscurity. Austin, known especially as a feminist and nature writer, wrote nine novels and a novella, and numerous stories, sketches, poetry, and plays. She is particularly remembered as an author who loved the land and respected Native Americans, especially those in the land of “little rain,” parts of California and Nevada, home to the Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. The author of several feminist novels, Austin is remembered particularly for the avant garde novel, A WOMAN OF GENIUS (1912). Friend and colleague of numerous writers of her time, including Willa CATHER, Charlotte Perkins GILMAN, Jack LONDON, Lincoln Steffens, and Mabel Dodge LUHAN, Austin is finally establishing her place in American literature of the early 20th century. Austin was born in Carlinville, Illinois, on September 9, 1868, to George Hunter, an English lawyer, and Susanna Savilla Graham Hunter, whose teaching career ended with Mary’s birth. She graduated from Blackburn College in 1888 and moved to California with her mother. Married in 1891 to Stafford Wallace Austin, an unsuccessful engineer and teacher with whom she quickly became disillusioned, and pregnant within a year, Austin began to write as a way to support the couple’s retarded daughter. The precarious relationships between women and men would become one of Austin’s major novelistic themes. In Isidro (1905), for instance, and later in Santa Lucia (1908) and The Lovely Lady (1913), Austin writes about marriages without any romantic trappings. Similarly Love and the Soul Maker (1914) and No. 26 Jayne Street (1920), both set in New York, depict women who recognize that their lovers are hypocrites; the novella Cactus Thorn (1988), written in 1927 but unpublished in her lifetime, features a woman who learns of her lover’s deception. She kills him. Austin separated from her husband in 1899, dividing her time between California and New York City and divorced him in 1914. After a nervous breakdown in 1923, she settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she became an advocate for Native American and Hispanic art and culture.

Although most critics agree that A Woman of Genius is Austin’s best novel, her place in early 20th-century literature may depend on Starry Adventure (1931), set in New Mexico and presenting a reformed sort of man who eventually chooses to marry a woman of intellect, and The Land of Little Rain (1903), which some critics believe to be the impetus for a new southwestern regional literature. Shortly after completing her autobiography, Earth Horizons, Mary Hunter Austin died on August 13, 1934, of a heart attack.

NOVELS AND NOVELLA Cactus Thorn. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1988. The Ford. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917. Isidro. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. Love and the Soul Maker. New York: Appleton, 1914. The Lovely Lady. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Page, 1913. No. 26 Jayne Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. Outland. [George Stairs, pseud.] London: Murray, 1910; [as Mary Austin] New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919. Santa Lucia: A Common Story. New York: Harper, 1908. Starry Adventure. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931. Contributor. The Study Oak: A Composite Novel by Fourteen American Authors. Edited by Elizabeth Jordan. New York: Holt, 1917. A Woman of Genius. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Page, 1912.

SOURCES Austin, Mary. Earth Horizon: An Autobiography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932. ———. Literary America 1903–1934: The Mary Austin Letters. Edited by T. M. Pearce. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. Graulich, Melody, and Elizabeth Klingasmith, eds. Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999. Hoyer, Mark T. Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin’s Work. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998. O’Grady, John P. Pilgrims to the Wild: Everett Ruess, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Clarence King, Mary Austin. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993. Pearce, T. M. Mary Hunter Austin. Boston: Twayne Publishing, 1956. Stineman, Esther Lanigan. Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Wright, Elizabeth. “Mary Hunter Austin.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical

88 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, THE

Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 12–19. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, THE GERTRUDE STEIN (1933) The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is not an autobiography and not by Alice B. Toklas. Rather, it is a fictional text written by Gertrude STEIN and populated by colorful characters that happen to share the names of real people, such as Alice Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest HEMINGWAY (Rabin, 105). Its status as an American novel has been debated because of presumed categorical mutual exclusivity: novel (fiction) versus autobiography (nonfiction). Additionally the text is set in Paris and its author had not lived in America (or even visited) in the 30 years prior to its publication. And yet the Autobiography made Stein immensely popular among American readers, and it also holds an important place in the development of the modernist novel. It is a brilliant experiment in which Stein takes on the narrative voice of her beloved in order to occupy the discursive space of self and other simultaneously, exploring timelessly relevant questions about relationships, reality, identity, self-knowledge, and communication. Covering the period between 1903 and 1932, the Autobiography adopts “Alice’s” chatty voice to describe the travels, social milieu, and artistic development of Gertrude Stein, in the context of Stein and Toklas’s long-term domestic partnership. The text reads like a virtual Who’s Who of the literary and artistic expatriate scene in Paris’s Left Bank (including Ernest Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, and Mabel Dodge) and the international artistic scene (for example, Picasso, Matisse, Juan Gris). From a literary perspective, perhaps the most important aspect of the text is its relationship to and portrayal of time: The chronological overlay of chapter divisions is coupled with cyclical organization within each section. Such internal structuring devices include dinner parties, European travels, and social configurations, particularly the comings and goings of artists’ wives and mistresses. The text divides nearly everyone into geniuses and wives, with Stein an exemplar of the former and Alice of the latter. These devices create a “circular pattern

of meaning” (Abraham, 96) that both complements and subverts the expected chronology. Even the chapter divisions themselves are neither consistently divided nor strictly chronological: “Before I Came to Paris,” “My Arrival in Paris,” “Gertrude Stein in Paris, 1903–1907,” “Gertrude Stein Before She Came to Paris,” “1907–1914,” “The War,” and “After the War, 1919–1932.” Although some argue that the text is more properly characterized as a narrative or a story as opposed to a novel (Abraham, 108; Rabin, 109), the Autobiography defies simple categorization. In contrast to the expectations set up by the title, namely that the text will be “a biography written by the subject about himself or herself [ . . . and focusing] on the author’s developing self,” the Autobiography seems more like a memoir, a text “in which the emphasis is not on the author’s developing self but on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed” (Abrams, 15). And yet it is fictional in content (and includes events that neither happened to “Alice” nor were witnessed by her), literary in form, and philosophical in purpose. Stein’s writing style—expansive, repetitive, and filled with run-on sentences—clearly displays the novelist’s willingness to abandon the “linguistic decorum” of earlier literature in favor of compelling content (Watt, 29). Stein’s text also conforms to other criteria of novels: It offers realistic portrayals of plausible characters representing a range of experiences, focuses on an individual’s subjectivity, and rejects conventional plots (Watt, 10, 13, 32). Hence “Alice’s” avowal that Stein prefers to concentrate on everyday situations fits nicely with the defining focus of the genre: “she always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting” (83). Further, and in true modernist form, Stein takes the mimetic aspect of novels to the highest possible degree. Instead of merely presenting a correspondence between art and life, the Autobiography provides an intimate glimpse into the life of art(ists). Pushing the boundaries of autobiography and memoir, the Autobiography claims its novelistic birthright: “[literary] imperialism . . . [the] ability to take over features from other species and assimilate them into a new form” (Hunter, 58). In constituting a new variety of

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN, THE 89

modernist novel, Stein’s Autobiography simultaneously reworks the spiritual autobiography made most famous by Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Rabin, 107–108). Stein herself instructs her readers (albeit belatedly) to read her text in the context of Defoe’s, claiming that she writes Alice’s autobiography “as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe” (252), a text that “created an angry sensation, catalyzing fierce debates over truth and fiction, author and protagonist,” as would Stein’s (Wagner-Martin, 202). Hence Stein subverts her own title, as if to show that expectations of unitary truth are not realistic in the modern age: “The Autobiography does lie. What packaging does not?” (Stimpson, 153–154). Certainly critics discuss the Autobiography as a work of fiction, praising Stein’s characterization, for example, in a way that would not be appropriate for a nonfictional portrayal. For example, the Gertrude Stein character is called one of author Stein’s “most successful heroines,” comparable to the equally fictional Melanctha Herbert of Three Lives (Dearborn, 178). Thematically, the Autobiography questions the nature of the self (Chessman, 62); structurally, it offers an image of the self through an outsider’s view (Breslin, 152). In keeping with the novel genre’s fundamental didacticism (Hunter, 54), the Autobiography espouses the purpose of “tell[ing the reader] how two americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing” (28), a subject of particular interest for “Gertrude Stein” who “always was, . . . always is, tormented by the problem of the external and the internal” (119). Contrary to what some angered contemporaries believed, Stein’s purpose was neither self-aggrandizement nor gossip-mongering. Rather, Stein uses the lens of the beloved other to explore the growth of the self, and the voice of the beloved other to place the self within its social context. At the same time, Stein manages to transcend the very individual experience she portrays: Typical of modernism’s emphasis on the microcosmic (Cantor, 6), the Autobiography implicitly offers the development of the individual artist as a synecdoche for the development of modern art. That she does so in a way that is immensely readable and entertaining is all to her credit.

SOURCES Abraham, Julie. Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories. New York: Routledge, 1996. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 6th ed. Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993. Breslin, James E. “Gertrude Stein and the Problems of Autobiography,” in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein, edited by Michael J. Hoffman, 149–159. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986. Cantor, Norman. Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Chessman, Harriet Scott. The Public Is Invited to Dance: Representation, the Body, and Dialogue in Gertrude Stein. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989. Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Defoe, Daniel. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Hunter, J. Paul. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. Rabin, Jessica G. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. New York: Routledge, 2004. Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. 1933. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. Stimpson, Catherine R. “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” in American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, 152–166. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Jessica Rabin

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN, THE JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1912) This fictional autobiography and narrative achieved belated critical and commercial success during the Harlem Renaissance. The novel’s first audience took it to be a straight autobiography, much to the surprise of JOHNSON, who noted that it was no “human document.” He had written a novel about a black man passing for white that itself passed as autobiography, but he fully intended

90 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN, THE

it to be outed. Eventually he wrote a real autobiography to set the record straight. Far from being a straight “human document,” the novel is intensely parodic. It borrows from the genre of slave narrative, complete with familiar features like an authenticating preface, a cottage where the narrator’s white father installs his black mother, a trip south in a linen closet, and an escape north. But Johnson’s imitation is repetition with a difference. He writes the preface himself, imitating white publishers; imbeds the memory of slave auctions in the scene where the narrator’s white father puts a keepsake coin around his neck; complicates his hero’s relationship with his mother beyond the expected veneration of the slave mother. He also parodies the digressions of 19th-century fiction, and of the 20th-century African-American immersion ritual, as outlined by the critic Robert Stepto, who himself recognizes in Johnson’s Autobiography what he terms an “aborted immersion ritual.” Johnson maintains an ironic distance from his narrator, whose decision to pass he condemns. The anonymous “ex-colored man,” antihero of a novel that Johnson almost titled “The Chameleon,” moves from persona to persona toward ultimate blankness and ends his narrative on a note of high tragedy, having sold his “birthright for a mess of pottage.” He is often incapable of self-analysis, noting only a “vague feeling of unsatisfaction, of regret, or almost remorse,” and acknowledging that it would be “a curious study . . . to analyse the motives which prompt me.” He is a man of mixed emotions throughout, and uses the word half repeatedly, almost desperately, in an attempt to communicate internal division. He is, for example, “divided between a desire to weep and a desire to curse,” prone to experience life as a series of clumsy paradoxes, such as his “little tragedies,” on the first page. When he discovers ragtime, with its syncopated melody line played against a straight or routine accompaniment, we see that he has finally found a potentially positive metaphor for his selfhood: a bundle of conflicting motifs that are somehow harmonious. But he persistently demonstrates too extreme an interest in style over substance, believing that “eloquence consists more in the manner of saying than

what is said.” His lack of self-awareness and the numerous textual evasions and elisions undermine his very attempt at autobiography, and so go beyond the rhythms of ragtime, which did maintain a straight line alongside syncopation. His narrative also serves the opposite purpose to that of the slave narratives, which traditionally narrated a Self into existence; this unreliable narrator, with a void past and numerous shifting identities, in fact syncopates himself off the page, and narrates himself out of existence. Early in the novel, in a symbolic destruction of his heritage and roots, he digs up the African glass bottles in his yard and then repeats this gesture later when he tries to “mine” the slave songs of the South. Johnson, writing against the passing of slave culture, makes a claim for the value of historical memory, and so his alienated narrator seems often to be Johnson’s alter ego, exorcised in fiction. The narrator, in turn, identifies his alter ego, his black self, in the victim of a lynching; the violent incident prompts his flight from the South and his decision to let the world believe him to be white. Witnessing the death of his past self, he leaves that self behind. This tragedy of blankness and lost identity is the result, however, of the situation in America that W. E. B. DuBois called “the problem of the color-line.” Johnson’s ex-colored man is DuBois’s famous “double selfconsciousness,” or “second-sight in this American world,” made flesh. The narrator views the “coloured man” as “an adaptable creature,” as he explains, with a “dual personality.” He bemoans the “literary concept of the American Negro” that has made it “almost impossible to get the reading public to recognize him.” His double consciousness means that he looks at the “fine specimens of young manhood” at Atlanta University and sees the “patriarchal ‘uncles’ of the old slave regime”: the students seem to have a double existence, straddling two moments. Later, when we realize that the man who lets the narrator ride in his porter’s closet to Jacksonville has probably made this imprisonment necessary by stealing his money and clothes, we reread “doubled up in the porter’s basket” with new attention: Like the Atlanta students, the narrator has a double existence at this moment, for he is both himself and a slave in a

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN, THE 91

slave ship, transported by the man who took away his means of traveling freely. Then, through the repeated use of sudden plot twists, we feel the presence of several parallel lives: He writes “so changed the whole course of my life,” or later, “another course of my life brought these dreams to an end,” and again, “another decided turn was brought about in my life”— approaching and denying possibility after possibility, he demands that we imagine his life had he attended Atlanta University, or married a young schoolteacher and remained in Jacksonville, or continued as a gambler at a “Club.” We feel not just a “dual personality” but a multiple one. Blacks are “a mystery to the whites,” the narrator realizes, and eventually to themselves too, for, as DuBois puts it in The Souls of Black Folk, they possess the sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

SOURCES DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago, Ill.: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Boston: Sherman, French, 1912. Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Goellnicht, Donald C. “Passing as Autobiography,” in Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson, edited by Kenneth M. Price and Lawrence J. Oliver, 17–33. New York: G. K. Hall; London: Prentice Hall International, 1997. Kostelanetz, Richard. “James Weldon Johnson,” in Politics in the African-American Novel: James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. DuBois, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Sundquist, Eric J. “These Old Slave Songs: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” in The Hammers of Creation: Folk Culture in Modern African-American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Zoe Trodd

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN, THE ERNEST GAINES (1971) Although Ernest GAINES has lived in California since he was 15, all of his stories and novels are deeply rooted in the black culture and storytelling traditions of his native home state of Louisiana. Gaines was born on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, near Oscar, Louisiana, the area he calls Bayonne in his fic-

tion. In 1963, having decided to write about his home, he returned there for six months, looking up and interviewing old neighbors and friends, doing research into the history of the area, and taking photographs of the locations in which most of his fiction is set. Since 1963, Gaines has returned to Louisiana annually; and since 1981, he has been teaching creative writing each fall term at the University of Southwestern Louisiana at Lafayette. He is the author of numerous essays, short stories, and novels. His well-known novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, for which he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973–74, was made into an Emmy Award–winning television movie in 1974. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) chronicles the personal quest of a 110-year-old exslave for freedom and equality, and the struggle of an entire race of people who daily contend with, and strive to overcome, insufferable oppression in their environment. Set in rural Louisiana and divided into four parts—“The War Years,” “Reconstruction,” “The Plantation,” and “The Quarters”—the book is framed as a series of tape-recorded interviews held with Jane by a young history teacher. During a critical time in American history, from the early 1860s to the onset of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, Jane witnesses and confronts a number of injustices and personal tragedies, including the loss of her husband and adopted son. Though she is not the only central character in the novel, it is important that Gaines empowers her as an illiterate black female first-person narrator, someone who is “a living repository” (Carmean, 61) of the lives of others. Therefore, by granting Jane an authentic voice, which unifies the episodic structure of the novel, her life story, like those of Sojourner Truth, Harriet JACOBS and Harriet WILSON, gives great insight into their slave experience, and clearly identifies her as the spokesperson for, and a leader of the African-American race. Moreover, by imbuing Jane with his Aunt Augustine Jefferson’s characteristics of courage, fortitude, and determination, Gaines allows us to examine in some depth the various ways he represents gender roles, especially of women such as Miss Jane Pittman, who find it virtually impossible to accept restrictions imposed on them by a racist society.

92 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN, THE

Throughout the novel, Jane attempts to define her own identity and make herself as free as possible. As a young slave, working as both a domestic and a field servant, she is rebellious, stubborn, sassy, courageous, curious, and, at times, physically aggressive. She is even perceived as disrespectful and ungrateful, but much of the way she behaves is due to the tremendous impact that being denied freedom has on her life. Viewed from a historical perspective, readers can understand Jane’s daring motivation to resist this oppressive system, designed exclusively to keep her— and all black people—physically and mentally enslaved. When the young Jane tells her mistress, “ . . . My name ain’t no Ticey no more, it’s Miss Jane Brown” (9), a name suggested by Corporal Brown, she is beaten severely for saying it and finally sent to the fields. However, Jane’s ability to choose her own name with the title “Miss” represents her first significant step in defining herself as a free person instead of as a slave. Jane’s persistent attitude and spunk is what drives her through the many years and hardships, and defines her as a leader in her community. As Jane ages, she becomes the matriarch, the leader of the entire black community because of her strength, wisdom, and character. She states, “ . . . these old bones is tired, . . . but they ain’t ready to lay down for good, yet” (207). Ironically, Jane is free but lives on a plantation, where she commands much respect, though she lives in a larger society that degrades her as a black woman. By repositioning Jane from the cook’s house to “down in the quarters,” Gaines allows her to be closer to her people, so that she can share her numerous experiences and offer them love and constant support. She is a surrogate mother to Ned, whom she fostered in the days after slavery, the stepmother to Joe Pittman’s two daughters, and she plays a key role to many of the youths on the Samson plantation. After the death of her husband, Joe Pittman, who was a brave man, skilled at breaking horses, Jane takes on a much larger role as the mother of the church until her title is rescinded because she refuses to hold her tongue or to give up her love for sports and cartoons. Yet, despite the change in her status and age, she is still looked upon as a spiritual force, the moral backbone of the community.

For the black men striving to achieve respect, as well as economic and political equality, Jane is a steady influence. Young Jimmy Aaron, whom they all thought was “the One,” visits Jane to elicit her support to partake in his protest, and she suggests that he must “talk” to “wake up” the people. At a time when the black community particularly needs to claim its rights, Jane may be looked upon as too passive, or having too little influence, but the community believes her “mere presence will bring forth multitudes” (229) and lead them to victory. By the end of the novel Jane’s role as a community leader is fully realized when she hears of Jimmy’s violent death and confronts Robert Samson, the plantation owner who represents the old southern social order, and courageously, even audaciously, walks by him to march the crowd toward Bayonne to drink from the for-whites-only fountain. As a black woman, Jane’s triumph over Robert Samson is critical. When she asserts, “Me and Robert looked at each other there a long time, then I went by him” (246), it suggests an equal social status, one without fear of harm or any of the earlier threats in her life of being beaten, killed, or sold. Samson no longer has power over her, and her courage and her leadership speak volumes for black women, and by extension black Americans, who are unafraid to challenge an archaic system in much need of recognizing the civil and social rights of black people. By depicting Jane as a spirited woman, a leader and crusader for much of her life, whose defiant attitude and resilience help her persist throughout her journey, Gaines seems to suggest there is hope for a better future. However, a closer reading of the novel suggests that class and gender inequalities, which have kept women of color from making significant progress from the mid1960s to the present, still exist and that the long personal battle for freedom and equality is far from over.

SOURCES Byerman, Keith E. Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam, 1972.

AWAKENING, THE 93

Gaudet, Marcia. “Miss Jane and Personal Experience Narrative: Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” Western Folklore 51 (1992): 23–32. Loretta G. Woodard

AWAKENING, THE KATE CHOPIN (1899) Critically attacked and dubbed scandalous in its own time, Kate CHOPIN’s The Awakening (1899) is one of the earliest American novels that openly confronts the subject of female sexual desire. The novel’s main character, Edna Pontellier, rejects the traditional roles of wife and mother, which she believes have been forced upon her by society. Instead, she chooses to lead an unconventional life by moving out of her husband’s home and engaging in an extramarital affair. Edna’s “awakening,” then, is of a sexual nature. During the course of the novel she becomes aware of her physical desire for other men and decides to act on her impulses. Edna’s impulsive behavior, which prompts her to flout the conventions of 19th-century Louisiana’s conservative French Creole society, culminates in her suicide at the end of the novel. Crucial to understanding Chopin’s novel is an understanding of the context in which it was written. Many other writers during the period, such as Henry JAMES and William Dean HOWELLS, were involved in a literary debate over the implications of Charles Darwin’s theories of sexual selection on human love relationships. This debate produced several novels focused on courtship and marriage at the turn of the 20th century. Chopin’s novel is an important contribution to this debate, since it provides a woman’s perspective on the issue of female sexual choice and argues that women, too, experience instinctual sexual desire. The novel opens with Edna’s experiencing “an indescribable oppression” (8). As she embarks on her awakening, mainly inspired by her growing sexual desire for the attractive bachelor Robert Lebrun, Edna begins to realize that the oppression she feels results from lifelong repression of her natural desires. Later, after Edna has decided to rely solely on her instincts as a guide to living, Dr. Mandelet makes an important comment that reveals much insight into her character. While observing her at a dinner party, he notices that Edna “seemed palpitant with the forces of life. . . .

There was no repression in her glance or gesture. She reminded him of some beautiful, sleek animal waking up in the sun” (67). Edna has become poignantly aware that she, too, experiences and is compelled to act on her sexual desires. Repeatedly, Edna is characterized as “impulsive” (19). Chopin writes that she “was blindly following whatever impulse moved her” (32) and “lending herself to any passing caprice” (54). This decision to ignore the conventions of her society and follow her natural instincts arouses the ire of some in her social circle. Her husband is particularly disturbed by the change in her behavior, though he remains unaware of her extramarital affairs. Besides her sexual indiscretions, Edna’s complete rejection of motherhood has drawn much fire from critics. Reviewers have labeled Edna as selfish and even childlike. Perhaps this is easily justifiable when she makes such comments as, “But I don’t want anything but my own way” (105), and when she admits that she would never sacrifice herself for her children. In her defense, however, Chopin reveals that Edna was not a “mother-woman” (9). Unlike the epitome of motherhood in the novel, Madame Ratignolle, Edna did not willingly choose to adopt the role of mother. Rather, she feels she was forced into it by the dictates of her society. The Awakening argues that motherhood is not a natural instinct in all women, an argument that was shocking in its time but that is widely accepted in the early 21st century. After Robert Lebrun decides not to reject the conventions of his society and participate in an affair with a married woman, Edna comes to see that she cannot have everything her own way. This realization brings Edna to her ambiguous suicide at the end of the novel. Edna’s death has been viewed in two distinct ways. Some have argued that Edna can find the complete freedom she is looking for only in death. Edna embraces the “seductive” voice of the sea that calls her “to swim far out, where no woman had swum before”—so far out that she is incapable of returning to shore (27). Her death, then, is the ultimate release from the imprisonment of a society that cannot accept a woman who is completely in tune with her own instinctual nature. Others, however, have argued that Edna’s death is a punishment for her utter selfishness. Since she cannot have her own way, Edna, in despair, ends her life. Some

94 AWAKENING, THE

readers have difficulty imagining that Chopin is simply punishing Edna, who comes much closer than anyone else in the novel to realizing her true nature, unless, as others have argued, Chopin felt compelled to punish this unruly woman by using the strictures of her own society. Whatever the case, The Awakening remains an important text that explores significant changes in

modern conceptions of female sexuality already underway at the end of the 19th century.

SOURCE Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Edited by Margo Culley. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. Kathleen Hicks

C

BD his “Portrait of an American Citizen,” writes that Babbitt, as a representative of American culture, lacks any originality. Stephen S. Conroy summarizes Babbitt as a person of “conformity” and “adjustment” who has a “vague hope for a freer future” (in Bloom, 76). In a review for the Nation, Ludwig Lewisohn noted that “the future historian of American civilization will turn to [Babbitt] with infinite profit, with mingled amusement, astonishment, and pity” (284). The conformist adventurer’s tragic experience points to the characteristics of the national business culture. The mechanical business life has reduced individuals to machines good at producing profits yet poor at expressing their emotions. The writer, in recounting the protagonistís adventures, does, however, offer healing sources: work, vacation, and love affairs, all of which are effective only briefly. By the end, the protagonist’s pathetic lamentation over the meaninglessness of his life provokes the complacent reader into asking vital questions: How can a person stick to something that he or she dislikes? What are the elements of true individuality? Since society and individuals are never separate, individuals remain imprisoned as long as the society imposes upon them rigid beliefs about the nature of success. The agents of such a culture range from the successful to the unsuccessful, from men to women, from the young to the old. Paul’s tragedy illustrates the destructive consequences of imposing the ideal of material success on an individual. His shooting of his wife can be interpreted as a protest against the dominant business

BABBITT SINCLAIR LEWIS (1922) Published in 1922, Babbitt won praise from contemporary critics for Sinclair Lewis’s use of photographic realism, believable American dialogue, and satirical portrayal of smalltown America. The novel relates the experience of businessman George Folansbee Babbitt in the typical Midwestern city of Zenith. Though he has been used to middle-class conventions and believes in the virtues of home life, he suddenly feels tired of his life and takes a vacation with Paul Riesling, who finds it difficult to live as a busy man with a nagging wife. Paul has also been largely interpreted as a sensitive artist figure and, occasionally, as object of Babbitt’s unacknowledged homosexual leanings. Babbitt finds it impossible to escape from the conventional business life, but he soon discovers pleasure in campaigning for a friend running for mayor, in negotiating several profitable real-estate deals, in holding the vice presidency of the Boosters’ Club, and in giving speeches on important social occasions. Paul’s imprisonment for shooting his wife Zilla gives Babbitt a deep shock. Burdened with business engagements and bored with conventions, Babbitt finds an outlet from Zenith standards by having an affair with a widow, Mrs. Tanis Judique, during his wife’s absence. He then turns to liberalism until he is threatened with losing his chances for making profits. He is able to embrace the Zenith standards when his wife Myra is suddenly taken ill, but he is disillusioned with a life in which he has never done anything he likes, and he expects his son to live a better life. H. L. Mencken, in 95

96 BACHO, PETER

culture. It is the ceaseless gaining and purchasing that drives individuals to the brink of madness. Men are expected to increase their earnings so that they can maintain their masculine pride. Women and children yearn for more luxuries so that they might be envied. Social status is established according to the luxury items each family owns. The richness of material life, therefore, forms a glaring contrast to the poverty of emotional life. No wonder domestic harmony is threatened and spiritual death becomes a distinct possibility. The novel as a whole examines not only American marriages but also the poverty of the working class, the influence of fringe religious groups, and the nature of politics and government. Indeed, critic George H. Douglas, writing in 1972, claims that the novel still has something to teach us. He maintains that Lewis remains an important writer “because he grappled doggedly with some elemental qualities of our experience,” qualities that are “as persistent today as they were in the 1920s” (661). What qualities, then, should an ideal citizen possess? With the fluid boundaries between work and life, it is possible to think that work is a kind of life and vice versa. The quality that counts is perhaps this: The fortunate individual chooses between conventionality and individualism. Certainly the United States is home to millions of Babbitts and Pauls, yet how many happy individuals does it contain? In Douglas’s words, Lewis’s genius lay in his ability to perceive that, within the 20th century’s social and moral complexities, the “great American dream was often nothing but a faint and powerless shadow, consigned to the dark recesses of the mind” (662).

SOURCES Bloom, Harold. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Douglas, George H. “Babbitt at Fifty—The Truth Still Hurts.” Nation, 22 May 1972, pp. 661–662. Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. 1922. Reprint, New York: Signet Classic, 1950. Lewisohn, Ludwig. Review of Babbitt. Nation, 20 September 1922, pp. 284–285. Li Jin

BACHO, PETER (1950– )

Peter Bacho won the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for his debut novel, CEBU (1991). He followed

Cebu with the short-story collections entitled Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories (1997) and Boxing in Black and White (1999). All his works, including his second novel, Nelson’s Run (2002), focus on contemporary Filipino Americans. Like the protagonists in both his novels, Peter Bacho is a Filipino American, the son of immigrant parents from Cebu in the Philippines. Born in 1950, Bacho graduated summa cum laude from Seattle University in 1971, and earned a law degree from the University of Washington in 1976. He worked as an attorney and a journalist before becoming a professor of law and Philippine history at the University of Seattle. He is married to a Native American from Tacoma, Washington. Bacho’s award-winning novel Cebu, a provocative, haunting tale set in both Seattle and the Philippines, takes its title from the Philippine city near Manila where Ben Lucero, the protagonist, travels with his mother’s coffin at the opening of the novel. Lucero, a Catholic priest in a Seattle parish, confronts issues of identity, ethnicity, and spirituality in the home of his ancestors as well as in his American home. He has a reunion with his childhood friend Teddy and interacts with three women central to his life: his mother, Remedios, who was incarcerated in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and vowed that her son would become a priest; Clara, her best friend from prison camp days who, unlike Remedios, rejected religion; and Clara’s assistant Ellen, a young woman who seduces Lucero and becomes pregnant with his child. The originality, realistically depicted characters, and “disturbing” quality of Cebu (a word recurring frequently in reviews of the novel) are responsible for its appearance on the required reading lists of many university Asian-American literature courses. In Bacho’s most recent novel, Nelson’s Run (2002), Nelson, the Filipino-American protagonist, travels to the Philippine island of Samar after his father’s death. A dark, sometimes humorous, political and sexual satire in which Nelson divides his time between the wealthy Anita and the politically radical Marta, the novel evokes issues of Filipino Americans, neocolonialism, and their conflicted relationships with white America and the Philippines of their immigrant parents.

BAKER, NICHOLSON 97

NOVELS Cebu. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. Nelson’s Run. Holliston, Mass.: Willowgate Press, 2002.

SOURCES Campomanes, Oscar. “Filipinos in the U.S. and Their Literature of Exile.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 49–78. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Pisares, Elizabeth H. “Payback Time: Neocolonial Discourses in Peter Bacho’s Cebu,” MELUS (March 22, 2004): 79–98. Tizon, Alex. “Peter Bacho Writes for the Same Reason He Fights—To Keep a Connection to His Past.” Seattle Times Living, 1 March 1998. Unsigned review of Cebu, Publishers Weekly 238, no. 43 (September 27, 1991): 42.

OTHER Kessler, Rachel. “Sexy and Scary: Peter Bacho.” The Stranger. Available online. URL: http://www.thestranger. com/2002-04-11/books.html. Accessed July 14, 2005.

BAKER, NICHOLSON (1957– ) Nicholson Baker, with five novels to his credit, is concerned with stretching the limits of postmodernism. He is particularly known for his obsession with the detail of everyday living. He elevates the meaning of this trivia to a philosophical level, and, in addition, scrutinizes and describes the details of sexual experience. In the words of novelist David Shields, Baker “is a kind of literary Statue of Liberty—give him our wretched refuse and he’ll turn it into poetry” (Shields, 8). Always writing to mixed reviews, Baker has been called vulgar and pornographic by some critics, and artistically erotic by others. Nicholson Baker was born on January 7, 1957, in Rochester, New York, to Douglas Baker, an advertising executive, and Ann Nicholson Baker. After one year at the Eastman School of Music, Baker transferred to Haverford College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1980. He moved to Berkeley, California, married Margaret Brentano, and enrolled in a writing workshop with author Donald BARTHELME at the University of California at Berkeley. By 1987 he was publishing short stories and writing full time, and in 1988 he published his first novel, The Mezzanine. An early example of Baker’s indifference to plot, it features Howie, a youthful office worker, during his hour-long

lunch break; Howie’s simple lunch of hot dogs, cookies, and milk, along with his purchase of a pair of shoelaces is juxtaposed to his reading of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Baker followed with Room Temperature (1990), a novel in which the protagonist, Mike, during the 20 minutes he takes to feed a bottle to his infant daughter, reflects on his life from childhood to fatherhood. As early novels, both were praised for their technical virtuosity and melding of commonplace details with intellectually satisfying analyses of the cultural debris of our era. His next two novels, Vox (1992) and The Fermata (1994), are concerned with the pornographic images of his characters’ thoughts and behavior. In Vox, Jim and Abby engage in extended phone sex, exchanging explicit sexual fantasies. The Fermata focuses on Arno Strine, who argues that he is respectable and well educated, although he fondles and exploits women and writes pornography while masturbating. The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998), Baker’s most recent novel, uses the longer time frame of one year and the perspective of Nory, a nine-year-old girl, whose family moves from California to a small town in England. Whether writing of shoelaces or pornographic relationships, Baker seems to have a secure niche in contemporary fiction. To his fans, in the words of scholar Arthur Saltzman, he has the “patience and meticulousness” to “tweeze poetry out of a seemingly prosaic environment” (Saltzman, 1). He lives with his wife in Berkeley, where he continues to write.

NOVELS The Everlasting Story of Nory. New York: Random House, 1998. The Fermata. New York: Random House, 1994. The Mezzanine. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. Room Temperature. New York: Grove-Weidenfeld, 1990. Vox. New York: Random House, 1992.

SOURCES Chambers, Ross. “Meditation and the Escalator Principle,” Modern Fiction Studies 40 (Winter 1994): 765–806. Darling, Lynn. “The Highbrow Smut of Nicholson Baker.” Esquire, February 1994, pp. 76–80. Dodd, David. “Requiem for the Discarded,” Library Journal 121 (May 15, 1996): 31–32. Hall, Dennis. “Nicholson Baker’s Vox: An Exercise in the Literature of Sensibility,” Connecticut Review 17 (Spring 1995): 35–40.

98 BALDWIN, JAMES

Harris, Michael. Review of Room Temperature. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 1 April 1990, p. 6. Kaplan, James. “Hot Vox.” Vanity Fair, January 1992, pp. 118–121, 125–127. Mallon, Thomas. “The Fabulous Baker Boy.” Gentleman’s Quarterly, May 1996, pp. 82–85. Saltzman, Arthur. “To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Expanding Literary Minimalism,” Contemporary Literature 31 (Winter 1990): 423–433. ———. Understanding Nicholson Baker. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Shields, David. “Ludd’s Labor’s Lost,” Voice Literary Supplement 41 (May 1996): 8. Simmons, Philip E. “Toward the Postmodern Historical Imagination: Mass Culture in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer and Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine,” Contemporary Literature 33 (Winter 1992): 601–624. States, Bert O. “On First Looking into Baker’s Index,” Salmagundi 109–110 (Winter–Spring 1996): 153–162.

OTHER Alexander, Laurence, and David Strauss. “An Interview with Nicholson Baker.” Alternative-X. Available online. URL: http://www.altx.com/interviews/nicholson.baker.html. Accessed August 22, 2005. Miller, Laura. “Lifting Up the Madonna.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/10/features/baker1. html. Accessed May 26, 2005.

BALDWIN, JAMES (ARTHUR) (1924–1987) One of the most significant and influential 20th-century American authors, James Baldwin gained renown as an essayist, a novelist, a story writer, a playwright, as well as a civil rights activist and a tireless public speaker. The grandson of a slave, Baldwin, who lived on the racial, sexual, and cultural margins of the United States, “literally wrote his way into the very center of his nation’s cultural life and into the heart of his country’s conscience” (Nelson, 6). He published six novels. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN (1953), his first, now classic, novel, is a fictionalized autobiographical account of a young man growing up black in white-dominated America. His second, Giovanni’s Room (1956), tells a tale of interracial and homosexual love, as does his third, Another Country (1962), a best-selling protest novel in which, for the first time, Baldwin combines both racial and sexual themes, arguing implicitly for a country that can transcend prejudice of all kinds. His fourth novel, Tell Me How Long the

Train’s Been Gone (1968) is a thoughtful examination of the life of a bisexual black artist, while the fifth, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), focuses on heterosexuality and the racist nature of the justice system. In his final novel, Just above My Head (1979), Baldwin features a gay black artist whose death prompts Baldwin to examine racism, homophobia, art, and love. James Arthur Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, in New York City’s Harlem, to Emma Berdis Jones. Three years later, his mother married David Baldwin, a Baptist minister whose abusive behavior is chronicled in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Although Baldwin’s conversion at age 14 lasted only three years, the rhetorical rhythms and cadences of the pulpit are clearly embedded in Baldwin’s strongly affective, poetic prose. After graduating from De Witt Clinton High School, Baldwin worked odd jobs and wrote, but his frequent encounters with racism fueled his decision, at age 24, to move to Paris and live as an expatriate, a choice he would indulge intermittently throughout his life. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published five years later, is at once a classic bildungsroman and an examination of the social, religious, and sexual hindrances that face a young black American. While in France, Baldwin formed a relationship, one of the most significant in his life, with Lucien Happersberger, and wrote two other works that established him as a major American writer: Notes of a Native Son (1955), an essay collection focusing on American racial problems, and Giovanni’s Room. Numerous critics see Notes, along with Go Tell It on the Mountain, as Baldwin’s masterpieces. Given its explicitly homosexual theme, Giovanni’s Room, on the other hand, initially had trouble finding a publisher. The novel was a then daring exploration of white sexual identity, the Jamesian tale of David, an American expatriate who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian, and is ultimately tried for the murder of Guillaume, his abusive employer, and sentenced to death. Baldwin followed this tale with one more sharply focused on racial bigotry and protest, Another Country, comprising four narratives about interracial sexual relationships: the black jazz musician Rufus Scott loves Leona, a poor southern white woman; Rufus’s sister, Ida, a blues singer, loves the Irish-Italian bisexual Vivaldo, an aspiring writer; the Polish-American Richard, a novelist,

BALDWIN, JAMES 99

is married to the wealthy upper-class Cass; and the white southern Eric Jones loves Yves, a Parisian prostitute. As critics have noted, these eight characters constitute a microcosm of American society, and give Baldwin a springboard for exploring tension and conflict and for offering his own vision of a different country. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone and If Beale Street Could Talk both explore the lives of American artists. In the former, Leo Proudhammer looks back on his rise from an impoverished life in Harlem to the highly successful actor he has become; he has also suffered because of his love affairs with Barbara, a white actress, and with Christopher, a black militant. In the latter, a young sculptor, Fonny Hunt, loves Clementine, the young Harlem woman who is pregnant with his baby, but he is jailed on false rape charges. Baldwin structures the story as a blues lament. His final novel, Just above My Head, begins with the death of Arthur Montana, a black gay gospel singer, and explores his life through the reminiscences of his brother, Hall Montana, an advertising executive, who learns to comprehend several forms of love. James Baldwin is assured of a prominent spot in the annals of American fiction. Go Tell It on the Mountain was dramatized under the same title for the Public Broadcasting System’s American Playhouse series on January 14, 1985. A musical play based on Baldwin’s life, A Prophet among Them, was written by Wesley Brown and first produced in 2001.

NOVELS Another Country. New York: Dial, 1962. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Dial, 1956. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Knopf, 1953. If Beale Street Could Talk. New York: Dial, 1974. Just above My Head. New York: Dial, 1979. Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. New York: Dial, 1968.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Campbell, James. Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking, 1991. Chametzky, Jules, ed. Black Writers Redefine Struggle: A Tribute to James Baldwin. Amherst, Mass.: Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, 1989.

Champion, Ernest A. Mr. Baldwin, I Presume: James Baldwin—Chinua Achebe: A Meeting of the Minds. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995. Eckman, Fern Marja. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. New York: Evans, 1966. Gibson, Donald B., ed. Five Black Writers: Essays on Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes, and LeRoi Jones. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Gottfried, Ted. James Baldwin: Voice from Harlem. New York: F. Watts, 1997. Harris, Trudier. Black Women in the Fiction of James Baldwin. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. ———. New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Jothiprakash, R. Commitment as a Theme in African American Literature: A Study of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Bristol, Ind.: Wyndham Hall Press, 1994. Kenan, Randall. James Baldwin. New York: Chelsea House, 1994. Kinnamon, Kenneth, ed. James Baldwin: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. Leeming, David Adams. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Macebuh, Stanley. James Baldwin: A Critical Study. New York: Third Press, 1973. Nelson, Emmanuel S. “James Baldwin.” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 6–24. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. O’Daniel, Therman B. James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1977. Porter, Horace. Stealing the Fire: The Art and Protest of James Baldwin. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989. Pratt, Louis Hill. James Baldwin. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Standley, Fred, and Louis Pratt. Conversations with James Baldwin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Standley, Fred and Nancy Burt. Critical Essays on James Baldwin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. James Baldwin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Tachach, James. James Baldwin. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 1996. Trope, Quincy, ed. James Baldwin: The Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Washington, Bryan R. The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Weatherby, William J. James Baldwin: Artist on Fire. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989.

100 THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ CARSON MCCULLERS (1951) Carson McCULLERS’s short novel, The Ballad of the Sad Café, brings the uncanny to the fore. Three bizarre main characters populate the dreary southern landscape to advance McCullers’s recurrent themes of isolation and loss. The female Amazon figure, Miss Amelia Evans; ex-convict and Miss Amelia’s ex-husband, Marvin Macy; and the hunchbacked dwarf Cousin Lymon, come together in a chaotic and grotesque depiction of male domination that, in the end, leaves Miss Amelia “sprawled on the floor, her arms flung outward and motionless” (454). McCullers demonstrates male incursion in the text through the unusual alliance of Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon—despite Marvin Macy’s cruel treatment of the disfigured stranger and Miss Amelia’s generosity toward him. The reader learns that women who transgress typical gender roles are put in their place by a strict southern patriarchal system that resists change— especially change that shifts the social hierarchy to support women. Although Miss Amelia enjoys financial independence, doctors the townspeople with folk medicine, and distills the best whiskey in the county, in the end she pays dearly for having entered stereotypically male arenas. While Miss Amelia is an imposing figure and feared by many townspeople, she loses her commanding presence after Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon join forces against her. The men demonstrate the freedom with which they move about in the world— despite their shortcomings—while Miss Amelia is criticized and beaten down despite her strength. McCullers initially presents a world with an inverted hierarchy in which a strong woman prevails, having embraced traditionally male roles. But the men reject this role reversal, and Miss Amelia gets her comeuppance before the eyes of her community. As we often see in McCullers’s novels, the text opens with a focus on the local community. “The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long” (397). The reader gets an immediate sense of the desperation of the landscape, which, as we witness, extends to its

inhabitants. Miss Amelia’s house, located in the center of the town, is the town’s largest building. But, like its owner, it is misshapen and peculiar-looking; it “leans so far to the right that it seems bound to collapse at any minute” (397), foreshadowing Miss Amelia’s collapse at the end of the story. Also, “[t]here is about [the house] a curious, cracked look that is very puzzling until you suddenly realize that at one time, and long ago, the right side of the front porch had been painted, and part of the wall—but the painting was left unfinished and one portion of the house is darker and dingier than the other” (397). The lack of symmetry and the overall peculiarity of the house are analogous to the grotesque bodies that loom large in the characterization of both Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon. Further, gender traits are inverted; Miss Amelia’s physique takes on stereotypically masculine qualities. She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead, and there was about her sunburned face a tense, haggard quality. She might have been a handsome woman if, even then, she was not slightly cross-eyed. . . . Often she spent whole nights back in her shed in the swamp, dressed in overalls and gum boots, silently guarding the low fire of the still (398). Clearly, Miss Amelia not only resembles a man in her outward appearance but also enjoys activities that are typically reserved for men. McCullers hints at the grotesque here by the reference to Miss Amelia’s crossed eyes. But Miss Amelia pays heavily for crossing over to male territory. Like McCullers’s tomboy, Frankie Addams, from The Member of the Wedding, Miss Amelia is male-identified in that she is motherless and was raised alone by her father. While older than Frankie, and having been married to Marvin Macy for 10 days, Miss Amelia resembles Frankie in her rejection of all things sexual. When Frankie accidentally witnesses her family’s boarders, Mr. and Mrs. Marlowe, having intercourse, she tells the housekeeper, Berenice, that she thinks Mr. Marlowe is having a fit. And when the red-haired soldier tries to take Frankie to bed, she hits him over the head with a glass pitcher.

BAND OF ANGELS 101

Similarly, Miss Amelia never allows her marriage to Marvin Macy to be consummated. Instead, on her wedding night, dressed in pants and a khaki jacket, she relocates to a downstairs room, reads the Farmer’s Almanac, and smokes her father’s pipe. Even Miss Amelia’s healing methods remind the reader that she rejects female sexuality, and, by extension, female reproduction. “If a patient came with a female complaint she could do nothing. Indeed at the mere mention of the words her face would slowly darken with shame, and she would stand there craning her neck against the collar of her shirt, or rubbing her swamp boots together, for all the world like a great, shamed, dumb-tongued child” (409). Having set herself outside the plot of female romance, Miss Amelia welcomes Cousin Lymon into her home, shares her hospitality with him, and opens a café to the townspeople at his insistence. Cousin Lymon’s childlike body poses no sexual threat to Miss Amelia (Westling, 123). But Miss Amelia’s deviation from the typical domestic script assigned to women in the south leaves her disembodied and bereft at the end of the story. How is the reader to interpret the coda that McCullers includes to close the novel? The 12 mortal men on the chain gang form their own community and, like Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy, are regarded as socially peripheral. But the 12 mortal men remind us of the types of prisons that exist and the ways we struggle to escape them.

tions Gorilla My Love (1972) and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), Bambara, a professor and community activist, wrote essays about civil rights and the women’s movement that are collected in The Black Woman (1970), and a collection of folktales entitled Tales and Stories for Black Folk (1971). Bambara was born on March 25, 1939, in New York City, to Helen Cade. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Queens College in 1959 and a master’s degree from the City College of New York in 1964, where her talent was recognized and honed. She began her writing career while teaching at various universities. The Salt Eaters examines a theme already prominent in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive, the rifts among various groups in the black community, especially those between men and women. The Salt Eaters focuses on Velma Henry, a social activist, and Minnie Ransom, a woman who believes in the old healing traditions and folkways. By the end of the novel, both women, to some degree, accept the inevitability of change and learn to live with the insecurities accompanying this force. Also the author of the novel If Blessing Comes (1987), Bambara wrote screenplays and created videos later in her career, including a biography of W. E. B. DuBois. She died of colon cancer on December 9, 1995, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but is still widely read and valued as one of the creators of the current AfricanAmerican literary aesthetic.

SOURCES

NOVELS

McCullers, Carson. Complete Novels. New York: The Library of America, 2001. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

If Blessing Comes. New York: Random House, 1987. The Salt Eaters. New York: Random House, 1980.

Carla Lee Verderame

BAMBARA, TONI CADE (1939–1995)

Best known as a talented writer of short fiction, Toni Cade Bambara is also the author of The SALT EATERS (1980), a complex novel with multiple voices that won the American Book Award. In addition to the short-story collec-

SOURCES Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Parker, Bell, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. New York: Doubleday, 1979. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983.

BAND OF ANGELS ROBERT PENN WARREN (1955) When Robert Penn WARREN published Band of Angels in 1955, the most frequent critical response was

102 BAND OF ANGELS

to compare the novel with Margaret MITCHELL’s 1936 blockbuster GONE WITH THE WIND. Such comparisons spoke volumes about the indelibility of Mitchell’s single novelistic success, which after two decades was still the pattern for fictional treatments of the Civil War and the Reconstruction South, but they did little to help seriousminded readers understand Warren’s novel. To be fair to the reviewers, Warren’s protagonist, Amantha Starr, does share superficial qualities with that ubiquitous southern beauty Scarlett O’Hara: both are the pampered daughters of rich plantation owners, and both see the privileged lives to which they have become accustomed disintegrate along with the South’s fortunes during the Civil War. For Scarlett, the exigencies of a war to preserve the South’s “peculiar institution” result in her choosing a series of loveless marriages and pragmatically assuming tradesperson status in order to preserve Tara, the romantic symbol of her regional heritage. For Manty, however, the loss of her antebellum way of life proves more costly when her supposed identity is revealed as a sham: she discovers, at her father’s death, that her parents had never married—nor could they, since her mother had been one of the enslaved black women on her father’s plantation. Overnight she finds herself transformed from belle to chattel, sold on the slave block to pay her father’s debts. Given the potential for sensationalism in Warren’s plot, critical misreadings of his novel were numerous, and the possibility of further misreading proved inevitable after Yvonne de Carlo and Clark Gable were cast to star in the 1957 film adaptation of Band of Angels. Indeed, it seemed that Warren’s story of Amantha Starr was only, as one reviewer characterized it, “an old-fashioned, three-decker melodramatic romance.” For all that Band of Angels includes characters typical of melodrama—a beautiful and helpless heroine, her several intense male counterparts, a lush Louisiana setting, and the requisite romantic time period—one critic was willing to consider that Warren was not writing in the tradition of Gone with the Wind, but against that tradition, albeit on Margaret Mitchell’s “own grounds and without subterfuge” (Fiedler, 29). According to that critic, Leslie Fiedler, Amantha is an essentially passive character, unwilling to accept her black heritage but unable to return to the easy assump-

tion of white selfhood that ignorance of her real identity had permitted her. As a result, her story becomes only a small part of the broader stories of the equally conflicted men who love her, own her, marry her, or otherwise seek to control her. Seth Parton is infatuated with her, but renounces her for the sake of his soul and his utopian abolitionist vision; Hamish Bond, even as he seeks to escape the guilt of his occupation as a slave trader, buys her and becomes her first lover; Tobias Sears, earnestly fulfilling his role in the postwar Reconstruction government but little suspecting that the woman he loves had once been enslaved, marries her; finally, Rau-Ru, who is enslaved with Manty by Bond and, like her, is the bitter beneficiary of Bond’s ambivalent gestures toward expiation, threatens her—first with exposure and ultimately with an activist agenda she repudiates as steadily as she repudiates her own true identity. And thus Warren repudiates the simplistic labels readers had thought to affix to Band of Angels. Certainly, Warren’s story has many of the earmarks of 19th-century sentimental novels, but with a difference: tears, sighs, and cries of “Poor Manty” to the contrary, Amantha Starr’s secure future is not sealed with a happily-ever-after marriage, as in the fashion of Frances E. W. HARPER’s Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted (1892), wherein an earlier “tragic mulatta” confirms her true identity through marriage, but only after weighing the costs and benefits of denying her racial heritage. If anything, Warren’s novel subverts the classic sentimental form by showing, as did Harriet JACOBS’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), how antebellum slave women were systematically deprived of the very demonstrations of purity and piety that qualified their white counterparts for membership in the “cult of true womanhood.” Perhaps, however, Manty’s story can be most profitably read through its comparison with William Wells BROWN’s Clotel: or The President’s Daughter (1853), a novel purporting to tell the story of Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, whose mother had been one of Jefferson’s slaves. The similarities between Clotel and Manty are significant in that they question the complicity of the “father”—both the actual and the symbolic figure—in allowing the tragedy of enslavement to continue. Only two years earlier, the ghost of Thomas Jefferson had

BANKS, RUSSELL 103

made an appearance in Warren’s Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (1953), posthumously answering to very similar charges of complicity in the evils of enslavement. In the year after Band of Angels appeared, Warren would publish Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South (1956). True to his time, the racially conflicted era of the 1950s, Warren addressed the issue in multiple discourses, as few writers are empowered to: in poetry, in fiction, and in social commentary. Viewed then in the context of Warren’s writings on race in the 1950s, Amantha Starr becomes a metaphor for American society, which only at great risk to itself denies the elements, both black and white, that give it identity.

SOURCES Ferriss, Lucy. Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Fiedler, Leslie A. Review of Band of Angels, New Republic 26 (September 1955): 28–30. Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Warren, Robert Penn. Band of Angels. New York: Random House, 1955. Patricia Bradley

BANKS, RUSSELL (1940– ) Praised for his honest and insightful portrayals of complex workingclass characters, usually native New Englanders, Russell Banks is a multitalented novelist, short-fiction writer, and poet who has won awards for the tales in his five story collections. Of special note are his American Book Award–winning The Book of Jamaica (1980), and The Continental Drift (1985) and CLOUDSPLITTER (1998), both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Banks’s characters endure drug addiction, spousal abuse, alcoholism, bad father-son relationships, infidelity, racism, hopelessness, and the exigencies of working-class life as he sees it. Although his early work was experimental, since 1990 Banks’s gritty and realistic novels have been compared with those of his contemporaries William KENNEDY and Andre DUBUS. Russell Banks was born on March 28, 1940, in Newton, Massachusetts, to Earl Banks, a plumber, and Florence Banks, who became a bookkeeper after her husband deserted her when Banks was 12 years old. After attending Colgate University, marrying Darlene

Bennett in June 1960 (divorced 1962), and marrying Mary Gunst, a poet, also in 1962, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina in 1967. During this time he cofounded Lillabulero Press with William Matthews and produced a magazine that published the proletarian writer Nelson ALGREN—who tutored Banks at a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in August 1962—and critic Malcolm Cowley, as well as Beat poets Gary Snyder and Diane Wakoski. After his divorce from Gunst in 1977, two more marriages followed—to Kathy Walton, an editor, from 1982 to 1988, and to Chase Twitchell, a poet, in 1989. Meanwhile, in the decade between 1975 and 1985, Banks published two short-story collections and five novels. The first, Family Life (1975), set in New Hampshire, features characters living in trailers and on the margins. In a satiric reversal of traditional family novels, Banks transforms the roles of Ruth, the mother, Egress, the father, and their three sons with those of king, queen, and princes. In Hamilton Stark (1978), also set in New Hampshire, the main character appears as a brutal alcoholic at one moment and as a kindly, sympathetic man at another. The varied perspectives are those of his daughter, his wives, and an author who refers to himself as “A.” The Relation of My Imprisonment (1984) is Banks’s experiment with a Puritan genre called “Relation”; in his 20th-century version, a prisoner publicly lists the sins that sent him to jail. Narrated in four sections, The Book of Jamaica features a young New Hampshire college professor who moves to Jamaica to write a novel, becomes mesmerized with the island and its people, befriends the maroons, a group descended from runaway slaves and dedicated to maintaining their customs and traditions. Continental Drift, one of his most critically acclaimed novels, features two widely diverent characters: another New Hampshireite, oil-burner repairman Bob Dubois, who escapes his blue-collar life by relocating to Florida; and a Haitian woman, Vanise Dorsinville, who escapes her destitute, abusive, hopeless life in Haiti, emigrates to the United States, meets Bob on her way to Florida, and is cheated and betrayed at the hands of unscrupulous Americans. In Affliction (1990) Banks returns to the New Hampshire setting; highschool teacher Rolfe Whitehouse grapples with the disappearance of his older brother Wade. The

104 BARBARIANS ARE COMING, THE

middle-aged Rolfe examines the devastating effects of his and his brother’s childhood abuse at the hands of a violent and alcoholic father. The Sweet Hereafter (1991) is set in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Using four narrators—school bus driver Delores Druscoll, garage owner Billy Ansel, New York attorney Mitchell Stevens, and teenager Nicole Burnell—the novel recreates the tragic school bus accident that killed 14 schoolchildren and changed the lives of the town’s survivors and inhabitants; each narrator examines his or her role in the tragedy. The Rule of the Bone (1995) has been described as a picaresque bildungsroman, a late-20th-century counterpart to Mark TWAIN’s Huck Finn and J. D. SALINGER’s Holden Caulfield. Like Huck, Chapman Dorset, called Chappie, leaves a miserable home and an abusive stepfather. He selects a skull-and-bones tattoo, renames himself Bone, and meets a homeless Rastafarian named I-Man. Together, like Huck and Jim, the two friends embark on a journey that ends up in a Jamaican commune. As Bone understands that he is marginalized in both countries, he turns his attention to his loved ones, and to the future, which may even include college. Russell Banks lives and writes in Princeton, New Jersey, where he taught at Princeton University until his retirement in 1998. His most recent novel is The Darling (2004). Two of Banks’s novels have been filmed, both in 1997: The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan; and Affliction, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Nick Nolte, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek, and James Coburn. He is currently at work on a screenplay of Jack KEROUAC’s ON THE ROAD, to be directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

NOVELS Affliction. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. The Book of Jamaica. Boston: Houghton, 1980. Cloudsplitter. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Continental Drift. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. The Darling. New York: Ecco, 2004. Family Life. New York: Avon, 1975. Hamilton Stark. Boston: Houghton, 1978. The Relation of My Imprisonment. College Park, Md.: Sun & Moon, 1984. Rule of the Bone. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. The Sweet Hereafter. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

SOURCES Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry,” Times Literary Supplement no. 4964, 22 May 1998, p.7. Baker, Phil. “A Small-Town Kid,” Times Literary Supplement no. 4813, 30 June 1995, p. 22. Benvenuto, Christine. “Mapping the Imagination: A Profile of Russell Banks.” Poets and Writers Magazine 26, no. 2 (March–April 1998): 20–27. Cotter, James Finn. Review of The Sweet Hereafter. America 116, no. 4157 (May 2, 1992): 391. Danziger, Jeff. “Small Town Tragedy,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 September 1991, p. 15. Eder, Richard. “Into the Night Sky: The Tale of a ModernDay Huck Finn,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 21 May 1995, pp. 3, 7. Herron, Jerry. “American Anger and the Lost Art of Liking,” Georgia Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 609–615. Hill, Lawrence. “Gory, Gory, Hallelujah,” Maclean’s 111, no. 15 (April 13, 1998): 64. Hulbert, Ann. “Life on the Run.” New Republic, 29 May 1995, pp. 40–42. Kazin, Alfred. “God’s Own Terrorist.” New York Review of Books, 9 April 1998, pp. 8–9. Leckie, Ross. “Plot-Resistant Narrative and Russell Banks’s ‘Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 407–413. McPherson, James M. “A Fictional Portrait of John Brown,” Atlantic Monthly 281, no. 5 (May 1998): 124–129. Mesic, Penelope. “Adolescent Adrift: Russell Banks’ Remarkable Portrait of a Modern-Day Huck Finn,” Chicago Tribune Books, 11 June 1995, sec. 14, p. 3. Mosher, Howard Frank. “The Lost Children,” Washington Post Book World, 8 September 1991, pp. 3, 14. Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. New York: Twayne, 1997. Peaco, Ed. Review of Rule of the Bone, by Russell Banks. Antioch Review 53, no. 4 (Fall 1995): 497–498. Rifkind, Donna. “A Town Divided,” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4646, 17 April 1992, p. 20.

OTHER HarperCollins. “Russell Banks Biography.” Available online. URL: http://www.harpercollins.com. Accessed May 27, 2005.

BARBARIANS ARE COMING, THE DAVID WONG LOUIE (2000) Following the highly acclaimed short-story collection, Pangs of Love (1991), this debut novel by David Wong Louie represents an in-depth

BARNES, DJUNA 105

exploration of the theme of cultural assimilation. Critical opinion of The Barbarians Are Coming is generally very positive, praising Louie’s wit, humor, sensitivity, and insight. There is also, however, the sense that the superb narrative powers Louie exhibited in his short stories are somewhat strained under the weight of the extended form of the novel. Still, The Barbarians Are Coming is far from another typical story of the East-meets-West type of cultural conflict. Yes, it is that, but it promises much more: as David Wong Louie tells us on the Acknowledgments page, “[M]ore than anything else, this book is about family and love.” Its title taken from the name of a poem by Marilyn Chin, The Barbarians Are Coming is a story about fatherly love and its transformational powers. The firstperson narrative of Sterling Lung, a 26-year-old Chinese-American chef of French haute cuisine, is one filled with irreconcilable contradictions and disappointments. While his parents want him to be a doctor, he chooses to become a chef. “In their eyes I was a scoundrel, a dumb-as-dirt ingrate,” relates the narrator. “This was the reward for their sacrifice, leaving home for America, for lean lives among the barbarians, so I might enjoy penicillin and daily beef and be spared Mao and dreary collectivism” (28). Another rift between father and son is that as the sole male heir, Sterling is expected to preserve family tradition and ethnic identity by marrying Yuk, his picture bride from Hong Kong. Yet he is forced to marry his wealthy Jewish girlfriend after she becomes pregnant. Sterling’s father, sick and weary from a lifetime of backbreaking laundry work, is temporarily rejuvenated by the birth of a grandson who, though half “barbarian,” takes after him. Although the novel ends on a somber note with the death of Sterling’s father, precipitated by the loss of a second grandson, it promises new hopes for love and understanding between Sterling and his son. Despite the melancholy ending, The Barbarians Are Coming is also a work of boisterous humor, biting sarcasm, and dazzling verbal ingenuity. Sterling’s earthy, unassimilating parents are referred to throughout as Genius and Zsa Zsa, names mockingly conferred upon them by a mysterious white woman of Lung senior’s past. One of the funniest moments in the novel features a scene in which Sterling’s parents refuse to

believe that their son is a chef; they prefer to see in their son a doctor, dressed in his white uniform, supplemented by apron, side towel, and a full set of chef’s knives. We can get a glimpse of the bitter irony of Sterling’s Chinese-American life from the title of his Chinese cooking show on TV, The Peeking Duck. Trained as a French chef at America’s leading culinary school, Sterling is never fully accepted as the artiste that he is. Instead, his blooming career relies on his co-opting the personality of Hop Sing, the Chinese houseboy in Bonanza: “Evvy week I peek into you lifes!” (296). His empirical optimism aside—“One moment you’re blinded by heavy rain or snow, and in the next you can see again—each swipe an epiphany” (114), the view Sterling sees through the windshield of life may be forever clouded by visions of the castrated rooster he has cooked, “a nice capon” (5).

SOURCES Cacho, Lisa Marie. “Hunger and The Barbarians Are Coming,” Journal of Asian American Studies 3 (2000): 378–382. Chin, Marilyn. “The Barbarians Are Coming,” Ploughshares 16 (1990): 104. Eder, Richard. “Now We’re Cooking,” New York Times Book Review, 2 April 2000, pp. 8–9. Gogola, Tom. “Talking with David Wong Louie: Fictional Fusion Cuisine,” Newsday, 1 April 2000, p. B11. Sucher, Cheryl Pearl. “David Wong Louie: Traveling the Distance between Fathers and Sons,” Poets & Writers 28, no. 4 (2000): 48–53. Whiting, Sam. “Louie Spices Up the Mix in Barbarians,” San Francisco Chronicle, 30 March 2000, p. E1. Wiegand, David. “Sweet and Sour: Chinese American Chef’s Travails Serve as Rich Family Saga,” San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Review, 5 March 2000, p. 1. “Wong Deftly Uses Comedy to Tell Immigrant Family’s Sad Story,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 11 March 2000, p. C2. Wenxin Li

BARNES, DJUNA (1892–1982) Djuna Barnes was one of many expatriate writers during the interwar years who crossed sexual, national, and artistic boundaries. Along with Gertrude STEIN, Anaïs NIN, H. D., and others, she lived in Paris in the 1920s. There she wrote two experimental novels, RYDER (1928) and NIGHTWOOD (1936), her best-known work, a stylistically intriguing account of a sexually mysterious woman and a transves-

106 BARRACKS THIEF, THE

tite, and an indictment of puritanical values. T. S. Eliot wrote the introduction to the first edition, and the novel found support among James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. In the last few decades Barnes’s novels, poems, and plays have attracted increasing scholarly attention, particularly for their remappings of conventional gender representations. Barnes was born on June 12, 1892, in Cornwall-onHudson, New York, to the eccentric, rich, and promiscuous Wald Barnes and his English wife, Elizabeth Chappell Barnes. She died on June 18, 1982, on Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she had lived as a recluse for four decades. When Barnes was five years old, Fanny Faulkner, her father’s mistress, moved in with the family; when Barnes was 18, she married Percy, Fanny Faulkner’s brother, but the marriage lasted only two months and she returned home to the Long Island farm. In 1912 the entire family, sans mistress, moved to New York City, and Barnes began to write in order to help support her mother and three brothers. In 1921, after a marriage to Courtenay Lemon in 1917 and a divorce in 1919, Barnes became McCall’s correspondent in Paris. Her famed affair with the sculptor Thelma Wood became the basis for Nightwood with its protagonist, Robin Vote, the fictionalized version of Wood. Ryder is a thinly veiled novelistic account—although highly experimental in nature—of her own unorthodox family: Wendell Ryder, like Barnes’s father Wald, is sexually active and good at little else, including supporting the family. The novel satirizes middle-class hypocrisy and conventionality while it ridicules the thoughtless promiscuity of its protagonist. Ryder excited much controversy at the time of its publication, and included a foreword by Barnes herself that attacked censorship for the damage it inflicted on creativity and art. Barnes ceased writing after returning to New York and was supported largely by Natalie Clifford Barney, a lesbian and writer, and the art patron Peggy Guggenheim (Esposito, 21). Scholars continue to debate her place in the contexts of modernist, feminist, and lesbian American fiction, while writers as different as John HAWKES and Anaïs Nin claim her as a significant influence on their work (Esposito, 23). Barnes’s subjects were estrangement, female sexuality, the victim-

ization of females, and the isolation to which she herself succumbed. Her papers are housed in the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland.

NOVELS Nightwood. London: Faber, 1936; New York: Harcourt, 1937. Ryder. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928.

SOURCES Allen, Carolyn. Following Djuna: Women Lovers and the Erotics of Loss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Barnes, Djuna. I Could Never Be Lonely without a Husband. Edited by Alyce Barry. New York: Virago, 1987. Interviews conducted by Barnes. Barnes, Djuna. Interviews. Edited by Alyce Barry. Washington, D.C.: Sun Moon, 1985. Interviews conducted by Barnes. Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Broe, Mary Lynn, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Esposito, Carmen. “Djuna Barnes (Lydia Steptoe).” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 20–24. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Field, Andrew. Djuna: The Life and Times of Djuna Barnes. New York: Putnam, 1983. Rev. ed. published as Djuna: The Formidable Miss Barnes. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Galvin, Mary E. Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Greenwich, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Herring, Philip. Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Viking Press, 1995. Kannestine, Louis B. The Art of Djuna Barnes: Duality and Damnation. New York: New York University Press, 1977. O’Neal, Hank. “Life Is Painful, Nasty, and Short—In My Case It Has Only Been Painful and Nasty”: Djuna Barnes, 1978–1981: An Informal Memoir. New York: Paragon House, 1990. Plumb, Cheryl. Fancy’s Craft: Art and Identity in the Early Works of Djuna Barnes. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1987. Scott, James. Djuna Barnes. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

BARRACKS THIEF, THE TOBIAS WOLFF (1984) Recognized for his memoir This Boy’s Life, Tobias WOLFF has written one novella, The Barracks

BARRACKS THIEF, THE 107

Thief, which won the prestigious PEN Faulkner Prize as the most distinguished work of fiction in 1985. A Vietnam story set entirely in the United States, The Barracks Thief is a compelling drama that explores themes of isolation and conformity. Its protagonist is Philip Bishop, a young army recruit who is undergoing his military training. The Barracks Thief is notable for its changes in point of view. It begins with an omniscient narrative in which Philip’s father is introduced first. The father is about to leave the family due to an extramarital affair, and Wolff suggests a cause-and-effect relationship between his departure and subsequent events that affect Philip’s home life and his life in the service. A few pages into the novel, Wolff shifts the narrative and establishes Philip, the older of two brothers, as the point-of-view character. Crushed that his father would abandon his family and frustrated by his own lack of identity, Philip decides to leave his mother and brother and their home in Washington State to enlist in the army. Chapters 2 to 4 are narrated in the first person, using Philip’s voice. After paratrooper training in Georgia, Philip is dispatched to an army base in North Carolina. There he finds many soldiers who have already returned from tours in Vietnam, soldiers who treat Philip and the other new enlistees, Hubbard and Lewis, with contempt. Although Philip seeks Hubbard’s friendship, he is more wary of Lewis, a braggart with a low IQ. When the three greenhorns are assigned to guard an ammunition dump 30 miles from the base on the Fourth of July, a near disaster becomes a pivotal moment. Ordered by their sergeant to shoot trespassers and remain at their post regardless of circumstances, the three soon face a dilemma. Errant fireworks have ignited a forest fire that threatens to envelop the ammo dump. Sirens wail and local sheriffs soon arrive to implore the men to vacate the site. Lewis is the first to cock and aim his rifle at the sheriff, followed by the normally mild-mannered Hubbard, as Philip hangs back and observes the incident until the sheriff leaves the scene. Only through a last-minute change in the wind is a catastrophe avoided. The incident serves to bond the three new soldiers. The bond lasts only a short while, however. A few days after the July 4 incident, while Lewis is on KP

(kitchen patrol) duty, Philip and Hubbard join other platoon members in guarding the base during a war protest. At first the demonstration is peaceful, but soon the protestors begin to taunt the soldiers. Under orders to remain calm, some soldiers begin to yell back. One soldier moves forward from his formation, a menacing gesture that threatens to provoke a bloody altercation. Then, just as quickly, their superiors restore order, and local police disperse the crowd. Like the incident at the ammunition dump, the confrontation allows Philip to feel a sense of unity with the other men in the platoon. That night at dinner when Lewis asks Philip to see a Bob Hope movie with him, Philip turns him down, and Lewis decides to head into town by himself. Soon after that night, the barracks is hit by a mysterious string of thefts. At this point, the beginning of chapter 5, in a daring move, Wolff begins to tell the story from Lewis’s point of view. Due to Lewis’s limited intelligence, Wolff employs a third-person omniscient narrative. To emphasize that Lewis is more sensual than intellectual and that he lives in the moment, Wolff also changes from past-to present-tense narration. Although Lewis has bragged of his past sexual conquests, he is actually a virgin, and the reader follows him as he makes trips to town in search of a woman before finding a past-herprime prostitute. To pay the prostitute Lewis begins to steal money from men in his platoon, most notably Hubbard, his former friend. This chapter ends when Lewis is exposed as the thief during a routine inspection. By changing perspective, Wolff succeeds in winning empathy for an ignorant, unsympathetic character. In the final two chapters Philip’s first-person narration resumes. Chapter 6 begins with a replay of the inspection scene when Lewis is caught and excoriated, because, the first sergeant has told them, an infantry company is like family, and they can’t turn their backs on their own kind. Before being discharged, Lewis is attacked and severely beaten late one night by others in his platoon. In typical fashion, Philip resists the urge to participate in the assault, but watches the incident and then fails to alert his superiors. Appearing after two successful collections of stories—In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World—The Barracks Thief reflects many of Wolff’s strengths as a short-story writer: vivid characters,

108 BARRETT, ANDREA

authentic dialogue, and simplicity of language. Wolff is eloquent in pinpointing and reporting the revealing detail, which he uses to illuminate setting and character. His dextrous manipulation of point of view and his examination of the moral dilemmas of military life and male friendship make The Barracks Thief powerful and compelling despite its brevity.

SOURCES Hornby, Nick. “Tobias Wolff.” In Contemporary American Fiction, 133–150. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Kendrick, Walter. “Men with Rifles,” New York Times, 2 June 1985, pp. 42–43. Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. “An Interview with Tobias Wolff,” Contemporary Literature 31 (1990): 1–16. Scofield, Martin. “Winging It: Realism and Invention in the Stories of Tobias Wolff.” In Yearbook of English Studies: North American Short Stories and Short Fictions 31 (2001): 93–108. Wolff, Tobias. The Barracks Thief. New York: Ecco Press, 1984. Bill Grattan

BARRETT, ANDREA (ANDREA BARRETT FULLER) (1964– ) Andrea Barrett is admired for the way that she unites art and science. Winner of the 1996 National Book Award for Ship Fever, and Other Stories, and a 2003 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her collection Servants of the Map: Stories (2002), Barrett has also written five critically well-received novels, including The VOYAGE OF THE NARWHAL (1998). Although her four earlier novels are concerned with the complexity and fragility of family relationships, it is, interestingly, the last—The Voyage of the Narwhal— that successfully reflects Barrett’s scientific background. Andrea Barrett was born on November 16, 1964, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Walter Barrett and Jacquelyn Knifong. She was educated at Union College where she earned a bachelor of science degree in biology in 1985. Biology, along with Barrett’s graduate studies in zoology and medieval and Renaissance theological history, provided her with much of her subject matter. Her first novel, Lucid Stars (1988), chronicles the dissolution of a family; it focuses on Penny Webb, whose marriage to her sequentially adulterous husband, Benjamin Day, ends in divorce.

Webb is a student of astronomy and views her extended family as astronomical bodies shifting in space. In Secret Harmonies (1989) Reba Dwyer escapes life with her docile, submissive brother Hank and her handicapped sister Tonia, only to find that neither the women’s conservatory she briefly entered nor the marriage that quickly bored her, provide answers to her elusive quest for happiness. Similarly, in The Middle Kingdom (1991), the unhappy Grace Hoffmeier moves to Beijing, China, where her husband finds a new mistress as Hoffmeier lies ill with pneumonia in a hospital. Grace recovers, finds a job and a new lover, and decides to remain in Beijing. In The Forms of Water (1993), Barrett uses the Faulknerian device of an aging patriarch, Brendon Auberon, and his nephew, Henry; they ride off in a stolen wheelchair to revisit the monastery where Brendon lived during his days as a monk. The family tries to capture Brendon, as they recall the events that led to the breakdown of their family. The Voyage of the Narwhal (1998) follows botanist Erasmus Darwin Wells and his sister’s inexperienced and reckless fiancé on a polar expedition to recover the bodies of explorers lost on a previous trek to the North Pole. When they return to Philadelphia, the hardships of the polar drama are juxtaposed against the sometimes engulfing publicity they face. As Peter Kurth has noted, the success of the “eloquent” and “thoughtful” Voyage of the Narwhal contradicted the notion that “serious fiction” could not exist “outside the realm of mass appeal” (Kurth interview). Andrea Barrett continues to write in Rochester, New York, where she lives with her husband, Barry Goldstein, three cats, and a dog. She teaches in the master of fine arts program at Warren Wilson College.

NOVELS The Forms of Water. New York: Pocket Books, 1993. Lucid Stars. New York: Dell, 1988. The Middle Kingdom. New York: Pocket Books, 1991. Secret Harmonies. New York: Delacorte, 1989. The Voyage of the Narwhal. New York: Norton, 1998.

SOURCES Balée, Susan. “Victorian Voyages and Other Mind Trips,” Hudson Review 52, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 167–172.

BARTH, JOHN 109

McGraw, Erin. “Nor Good Red Herring: Novellas and Stories,” Georgia Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 808–818.

OTHER Birnbaum, Robert. “Interview: Andrea Barrett.” identitytheory.com. Available online. URL: http://www.identitytheory. com/people/birnbaum35.html. Accessed May 27, 2005. Kurth, Peter. [The Salon Interview] Andrea Barrett. Salon. com. Available online. URL: http://archive.salon.com/ books/int/1998/12/cov_02inta.html. Accessed August 22, 2005.

BARTH, JOHN (SIMMONS) (1930– ) John Barth, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and theorist, first appeared on the literary scene with the 1956 publication of The Floating Opera, followed two years later by The End of the Road. His fascination with the paradoxes, inadequacies, and comic possibilities of language is apparent in his innovative approach to writing fiction. Barth, considered the major voice of postmodern fiction, uses the language of myth and allegory, of history and comedy, to convey his own reality—a reality that fluctuates according to the way he uses his words. The irrationality of the world is demonstrated in his longer and increasingly postmodern novels—The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Giles GoatBoy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (1966), and Letters (1979)—all of which reflect Barth’s intense awareness of the artificial nature of fiction. As a fabulator (a name bestowed on Barth by critic Robert Scholes in The Fabulators, his 1967 study of contemporary writers), Barth believes that writers cannot return to the methods of traditional fiction, that is, plot, theme, and so on; instead, he uses his love of the epistolary novel, Western mythology, and early American literature, to create his innovative departures, parodies, and self-reflexive questions about the ways to tell a tale. Barth is famously associated with his August 1967, Atlantic Monthly article, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” which announces the death of the older forms of fiction and the impossibility of achieving novelty through any of those techniques. Barth was born on May 27, 1930, in Cambridge, Maryland, to John Jacob and Georgia Simmons Barth. Reared in the Tidewater region, Barth has an affinity with Maryland that is noticeable in all his fiction. He

married Harriete Anne Strickland on January 11, 1950, then earned both his B.A., in 1951, and M.A. in creative writing, in 1952, from Johns Hopkins University. Although he embarked on a professorial career that included posts at the Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and the Johns Hopkins University, Barth wrote both The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in one year, 1955. The Floating Opera, a first-person narrative of Todd Andrews about a day in 1937 when he decides not to commit suicide, was nominated for the National Book Award. The narrator of The End of the Road, Jacob Horner, has been involved in a sexual triangle and must choose one of a variety of unappealing options. Like Todd Andrews, who ultimately sees no reason for dying—but no reason for living, either—Jacob Horner comprehends that neither the rational nor the pessimistic view can explain an unpredictable world. With The Sot-Weed Factor, Barth delved deeper into his postmodern concerns, parodying an 18th-century novel. He writes fiction about Ebenezer Cook, a colonial Maryland poet who actually lived. Barth undermines and satirizes a good deal of American history, a history that he believes was often distorted, if not actually fictionalized. He continues to play with language and reality in his next novel, an allegory, Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus, and this time the objects of his satire are components of Western culture—the Bible, Sophocles, and the cold war. Here, the university is a metaphor for the world. The comic Goat-Boy (who was born of a computer and a virgin) and his attempts to educate himself appealed to the public, and Barth enjoyed his first popular success. Barth’s next work, Chimera (1972), consisting of three novellas, won the 1973 National Book Award. Each novella focuses on a different classic: Scheherazade of A Thousand and One Nights, and Perseus and Bellerophon, both from Greek mythology, and Barth successfully demonstrates that, despite the “exhaustion” of traditional forms, the postmodern writer can still use a new perspective on old stories to create meaningful new ones. Chimera was followed in 1979 by Letters, a book that most critics agree is his “longest and most demanding” (Fogel and Slethaug, 4). An epistolary novel divided into seven sections, it reintroduces themes and characters

110 BARTHELME, DONALD

from his earlier work, including Todd Andrews, Jacob Horner, Ebenezer Cook, and others, who write letters not only to each other but to Barth himself, who is also a character. His next two paired novels, Sabbatical: A Romance (1982) and The Tidewater Tales: A Novel (1987), contain some of the same characters and themes. In Sabbatical, Fenwick Turner, a novelist, and his wife, Susan Seckler, a professor, sail to the Caribbean and back to Chesapeake Bay, pondering literary topics and worrying about such organizations as the C.I.A. In Tidewater Tales, Peter and Katherine Sherritt Sagamore sail on their boat named “Story,” telling tales to each other. In both novels we find the Barth approach: create the story and invent the fiction that is always aware that the story is only a story. Stan Fogel and Gordon Slethaug have pointed out that Barth divides contemporary writers into two camps: in the traditional group are Saul BELLOW, John UPDIKE, and Joseph HELLER, while he himself is firmly planted in the postmodern camp along with William GASS, John HAWKES, and Donald BARTHELME. With his insistence that readers dislodge themselves from old perspectives and focus on both the teller and the tale, his experimentation has contributed enormously to the postmodern canon. Now retired from teaching, he lives in Maryland with his second wife, Shelly Rosenberg, whom he married in 1971 after his 1969 divorce from his first wife. His manuscript collection is housed at the Library of Congress.

NOVELS Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972. The End of the Road. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Rev. ed., New York: Doubleday, 1967. The Floating Opera. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts, 1956. Rev. ed., New York: Doubleday, 1967. Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus. New York, Doubleday, 1966. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Letters. New York: Putnam, 1979. Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Sabbatical: A Romance. New York: Putnam, 1982. The Sot-Weed Factor. New York: Doubleday, 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Doubleday, 1967. The Tidewater Tales: A Novel. New York: Putnam, 1987.

SOURCES Bowen, Zack. A Reader’s Guide to John Barth. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Fogel, Stan, and Gordon Slethaug. Understanding John Barth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Harris, Charles B. Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Joseph, Gerhard. John Barth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970. Morrell, David. John Barth: An Introduction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stark, John O. The Literature of Exhaustion: Borges, Nabokov, and Barth. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974. Tharpe, Jac. John Barth: The Comic Sublimity of Paradox. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. Waldmeir, Joseph J., ed. Critical Essays on John Barth. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Walkiewicz, E. P. John Barth. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Ziegler, Heide. John Barth. London: Methuen, 1987.

OTHER John Barth: The Information Center. Available online. URL: http://www.dave-edelman.com/barth/index.cfm. Accessed July 15, 2005. Mahoney, Blair. “John Barth.” The Modern Word: Scriptorium. Available online. URL: http://www.themodernword. com/scriptorium/barth.html. Accessed July 15, 2005. New York Times Books. Featured Author: John Barth. Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/ 21/specials/barth.html. Accessed July 15, 2005.

BARTHELME, DONALD (1931–1989) Donald Barthelme, one of the foremost postmodernist writers of the 20th century, made his name primarily as the author of more than 100 short stories, many of which first appeared in the New Yorker before their publication in many collections of short fiction. He won both the PEN/Faulkner Award (1982) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Sixty Stories (1981). He also wrote novels, including SNOW WHITE (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), and won a National Book Award for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine; or, The Hithering Thithering Djinn (1971), a book for children. Central to Barthelme’s short and long fiction is the almost despairing sense of the shabby, desiccated, superficial

BARTHELME, DONALD 111

modern world; always, however, the despair is softened by the humor and absurdity that Barthelme sees in 20th-century urban life. Using bits, scraps, and fragments from the detritus of contemporary culture, Barthelme writes innovative fiction, deliberately deemphasizing theme, plot, and character. Although he clearly addresses our need to communicate, Barthelme plays with and mocks language: Scholar and critic Lois Gordon points out that Snow White “runs the gamut of styles from the prose of social science and philosophy to that of comic books, cartoons, and film, from the language of business and technology to that of advertising and hip lingo, from flat, vulgar street talk to inflated political, academic, and even church diction” (Gordon, 26). Donald Barthelme was born on April 7, 1931, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Donald Barthelme, an architect who became a professor at the University of Houston, and Helen Bechtold Barthelme. When he was two years old, the family moved to Houston, Texas. Barthelme briefly attended the University of Houston, worked as a Houston Post reporter, and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1953 to serve at Fort Polk, Louisiana, and in Korea and Japan. His move to New York City in 1962 signaled a complete change for Barthelme: he published his first short story, “L’Lapse,” in the New Yorker in 1963 and remained in the city for the rest of his life. But it was in Snow White that Barthelme made one of his most frequently quoted comments about the “trash” of modern culture—that it “may very well soon reach a point where it’s 100 percent” (139). In this parody of the Grimms’ fairy tale, Snow White tries desperately to redefine herself and realize her potential. She is an archetypal Barthelme character: a college-educated, black pajama-wearing 1960s parody who cooks, cleans, and provides regular sex for seven men. In The Dead Father, Barthelme again uses popular song lyrics and advertising slogans to exaggerate a burial march where the sons carry their father’s dead body. The corpse can still speak, chase women, and exercise powerful control over his sons. The King, a novel that presents the King Arthur legend as a World War II farcical quest for the atomic bomb, instead of the Holy Grail, was posthumously published in 1990.

Although Barthelme died of cancer in Houston in 1989, his reputation as a postmodernist, minimalist, metafictionalist, humorist, and social critic, continues to rise. Scholarly books and articles on his works encourage a new generation of readers to discover the often sly humor Barthelme used to unmask the vacuity of our daily lives.

NOVELS The Dead Father. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975. The King. New York: Harper, 1990. Snow White. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

SOURCES Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Couturier, Maurice, and Regis Durand. Donald Barthelme. New York: Methuen Press, 1982. Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Gilman, Richard. The Confusion of Realms. New York: Random House, 1969. Gordon, Lois. Donald Barthelme. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Hicks, Jack. In the Singer’s Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Story Tellers from Hemingway to Mailer. New York: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1973. Klinkowitz, Jerome. The American 1960s: Imaginative Arts in a Decade of Change. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. ———. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. 2d ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1980. ———. The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. ———. Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. Molesworth, Charles. Donald Barthelme’s Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

112 BASS, RICK

Patteson, Richard F., ed. Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1971. Stengel, Wayne B. The Shape of Art in the Short Stories of Donald Barthelme. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

BASS, RICK (1958– ) A short-story, novella, and nature writer who passionately combines art and activism, Rick Bass published his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in 1998. A petroleum geologist by training, Bass began writing stories and tales that earned him the PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation in 1988. He has produced 17 books in 18 years, including two volumes of novellas, two collections of short stories and both fiction and nonfiction tales and essays. He has also published scores of articles, the majority of them about Montana, his adopted home. Born on March 7, 1958, in Fort Worth, Texas, Rick Bass is the son of C. R. Bass, an oil geologist, and Mary Lucy Robson Bass, a schoolteacher. Although reared in Texas, Bass studied at Utah State University, earned his bachelor of science degree in 1979, and worked as a geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, before he discovered the pristine majesty of the Yaak Valley in Montana. As he read and admired the works of Edward Abbey, Jim HARRISON, Tom McGuane, Barry HANNAH, and Eudora WELTY, Bass became interested in writing himself, publishing The Deer Pasture in 1985. Platte River, a volume of three novellas that chronicle and celebrate men at various phases in their lives, has earned Bass comparisons with Jack LONDON and Ernest HEMINGWAY. In Mahatma Joe, for instance, set in Alaska, an outsider enters the valley with the intent of converting the residents who celebrate “Naked Days” every summer, but, in the end, one wonders who has changed more significantly, the valley folk or the evangelist. The title story contains a Nick Adams-like protagonist who becomes more self-aware through fishing in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest. The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness (1997) contains three more novellas, all of which examine and celebrate the mysteries of the human relationship to animals and the land.

With his novel Where the Sea Used to Be, Bass uses Montana as a stage on which his geologist, oil driller, wolf tracker, and naturalist characters have opposite mindsets—capitalism versus preservationism, and the need to control versus the wish to live and let live. Bass continues to live in the Yaak Valley with his wife, artist Elizabeth Hughes, whom he married in 1991. His collected papers, including manuscripts and notebooks, are housed in the Lubbock Southwest Collection at the Special Collections Library, Southwest Texas State University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Platte River. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1994. The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997. Where the Sea Used to Be. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1998.

SOURCES Thomas J. Lyon. “Teaching and Learning: An Appreciation of Rick Bass and His Writing.” In The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass, edited by Alan O. Weltzien, 19–23. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001. Weltzien, Alan O. Rick Bass. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1998. ———, ed. The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2001.

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA DOROTHY ALLISON (1992) During a Penguin Online Auditorium conversation with college students in 1999, Dorothy ALLISON described her novel Bastard Out of Carolina as a “story about a working class family, people who are trying very hard to take loving care of each other and who are failing again and again.” Living in rural Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1950s, this family consists of Anney Boatwright; her second husband, Glen Waddell; her two daughters, Ruth Anne and Reese; and a host of beer-drinking, shotgun-toting uncles and aunts who marry young, have many children, and age before their time. Allison’s focus in this mix of characters is Ruth Anne, nicknamed Bone, and “certified a Bastard by the State of Carolina” (Penguin Online, 3). Bone narrates incidents about her family with an observant eye and an understanding of human behavior beyond her years, as she struggles to discover the way her mother’s upbringing affects her own role as

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA 113

a Boatwright. “Family is family, but even love can’t keep people from eating at each other,” Bone says. Despite her understanding of her family history, Bone has trouble placing herself within it because she “didn’t look like anybody at all” (30). Her search for a stronger sense of identity becomes a significant theme of the novel as Bone increasingly yearns for a different, less oppressive future than her mother’s. She hopes to rise above the poverty that causes much of the instability in her family, and she wants choices for her future. Bone’s future happiness is curtailed, however, by her stepfather, “Daddy Glen.” Glen is obsessive over Bone’s mother, Anney, and jealous of the attention she pays her girls. One aunt says of Glen, “He loves [Anney] like a gambler loves a fast racehorse or a desperate man loves whiskey. That kind of love eats a man up” (41). While there is plenty of evidence to suggest to Bone (and readers) that Glen is trouble, Anney can see no wrong in him. Bone says of her mother, who lost her first husband in an accident, “She wanted someone strong to love her like she loved her girls” (10). Anney gets her man, but at a severe cost when Glen begins to take out his aggressions on Bone. Being told by others that she lacks the beauty of her mother and other Boatwright women in their youth, Bone already feels ugly and uncomfortable in her skin when Daddy Glen routinely abuses her physically and sexually. Critic Brenda Boudreau explains that Bone’s body “reflects various cultural attitudes and values about the body, as well as being constructed by them; her body becomes a literal battlefield, the target for, and a means of, humiliation and control, particularly by men” (Boudreau, 45). Glen first molests Bone in his truck outside the hospital while Anney is having his child. When the baby boy dies, Glen turns to drinking and tries to isolate Anney and the girls from the rest of the family. He becomes steadily more abusive toward Bone as he moves the family from one house to the next, just ahead of the bill collectors. Feeling that the abuse she receives is her fault because she is ugly, or because “there was something I was doing wrong, something terrible,” Bone does not tell Anney about her increasingly more violent and more sexual encounters with Glen. Instead, she waits patiently for her

mother’s love and loyalty toward her to win out over her feelings for Glen. While Anney does leave Glen on a number of occasions, she always returns to him, providing a limited model for Bone, Boudreau says, that shows she is “destined to be used by the men around her” (52). With each passing year, Bone’s resentment toward Glen and, increasingly, toward Anney continues to build, and her feelings are further complicated by her changing body. For Bone, adolescence is especially painful emotionally, a place of shame instead of wonder because of the more frequent abuse she suffers from Glen. During this time, Bone repeatedly masturbates to fantasies of death and violence. She imagines Glen beating her while others look on, and she is ashamed of the rush of sexual excitement these images bring. Bone also finds relief from the horrors of her home life through telling gruesome, made-up stories to the neighborhood children, living with various aunts for months at a time, and escaping into the soothing sounds of gospel music and the attention she gains for wanting to be saved in the 14 different Baptist churches she attends. She cannot, however, escape the evidence of Glen’s abuse, nor Anney’s protection of him, forever. When Bone’s Aunt Raylene discovers the girl’s bruises from a recent beating, Anney insists Glen loves Bone and would never hurt her. Wanting to please her mother, Bone agrees that this latest round of abuse was her fault, that she made Glen mad. After this incident, Anney goes with Bone to live with her Aunt Alma who has just lost a baby, but she begins to retreat emotionally from Bone. Sensing once and for all where her mother’s loyalties lie, Bone decides she will not return to Daddy Glen’s house should Anney choose to return there, as she soon does. When Bone finally stands up to Glen at age 13, her actions lead to a final, violent and shocking confrontation. The scene becomes an ultimate test of family love and loyalty when Anney witnesses Glen’s brutality and sees him as the abuser Bone has known all along. The choice Anney next makes is not surprising, considering a family history of women who always return to their men, but in the moment of abandonment, Bone discovers the identity she has been seeking: “I was who

114 BAUSCH, RICHARD

I was going to be, someone like her, like Mama, a Boatwright woman” (309). While the novel ends with Bone’s new sense of identity, one can argue that Bone embraces her identity throughout the novel. Critic Renee R. Curry suggests that Bone claims her identity, her “I,” by simply telling her story. As an incest survivor, Bone’s perspective is an important one in our society. She is evidence that, as Curry says, “Girls do not live innocently, and they do not narrate the world innocently when they are allowed to narrate. Furthermore, they will point to the lack of innocence in others” (103). In discussing Bone as a narrator, Allison adds that she is “a particular kind of wise adolescent narrator. She’s not a trustworthy narrator. She genuinely doesn’t understand some of the things that happen; she’s secretive, she deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents some of what she can’t stand” (Penguin Online). What emerges from this narration, however, is a treatment of incest and family violence that Allison says she had never seen expressed in other novels. “The people I most want to read this book are adolescents in crisis,” Allison explains (Penguin Online), people who can relate to Bone’s “enormous anger and contempt for herself” and come to realize that what happens to Bone is not her fault.

SOURCES Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina. New York: Plume, 1992. Baker, Moira Press. “The Politics of They: Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina as Critique of Class, Gender, and Sexual Ideologies.” In The World Is Our Culture: Society and Culture in Contemporary Southern Writing, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and Nancy Summers, 117–141. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Boudreau, Brenda. “The Battleground of the Adolescent Girl’s Body.” In The Girl: Construction of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, edited by Ruth O. Saxton, 43–56. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Curry, Renee R. “ ‘I Ain’t No Friggin’ Little Wimp’: The Girl Narrator in Contemporary Fiction.” In The Girl: Construction of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, edited by Ruth O. Saxton, 95–105. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Gwin, Minrose. “Nonfelicitous Space and Survivor Discourse: Reading the Incest Story in Southern Women’s Fiction.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, 416–440. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Penguin Online Auditorium. “Chat with Dorothy Allison.” November 9, 1999. (Web site restricted to members.) Sandell, Jillian. “Telling Stories of ‘Queer White Trash’: Race, Class, and Sexuality in the Work of Dorothy Allison.” In White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz, 211–230. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hayley Mitchell Haugen

BAUSCH, RICHARD (CARL) (1945– ) Richard Bausch is the author of nine novels, two of which were nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and two short-story collections. He writes of American families experiencing problems with alcohol and aging, dashed hopes and desperation, turmoil and tragedy. He writes from neither an autobiographical nor a regional perspective; unlike a number of novelists identified with a specific place, Bausch focuses on story and character. His novels include Take Me Back (1981) and Violence (1992). Richard Bausch, one of twin boys, was born on April 18, 1945, at Fort Benning, Georgia, to Robert Carl Bausch and Helen Simmons Bausch. He and his twin Robert grew up in the Washington, D.C., area, and enlisted in the air force from 1965 to 1969. They eventually became the only identical twin novelists in the United States. Bausch married Karen Miller, a photographer, in 1969, and, having decided to become a writer, earned a bachelor’s degree from George Mason University in 1974, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1975. He published his first novel, The Real Presence, in 1980, the story of an aging priest, Monsignor Vincent Shepherd, in a new parish in West Virginia. There he ministers to an impoverished couple, Duck and Elizabeth Bexley, and their children. When Duck dies, the monsignor realizes that he wishes to become the father to the Bexley children, so he decides to leave the priesthood. Take Me Back (1981) uses alternating perspectives to convey

BAXTER, CHARLES 115

disintegrating alliances, which result in adultery and attempted suicide. Among the characters are Gordon Brinhart, an alcoholic insurance salesman, his wife, Katherine, and her son, Alex, born of a previous relationship. Bausch’s third novel, The Last Good Time (1984), focuses on 75-year-old Edward Cakes and 89year-old hospitalized Arthur Hagood, whose friendship ruptures over Edward’s affair with 24-year-old Mary Virginia Bellini. Edward ends up with an elderly woman in his apartment building. Similarly Mr. Field’s Daughter (1989) dramatizes the upheaval in a peaceful extended family when James Field’s granddaughter’s husband, Cole Gilbertson, disturbs the status quo with a .22 pistol and the cocaine that he habitually uses. Violence, Bausch’s fifth novel, focuses on Charles Connally, who becomes a hero after interceding during a holdup in a Chicago convenience store; in the aftermath of the violence, Charles loses his grip on his identity, drops out of college and leaves his wife. Rebel Powers (1993) continues to examine marital relationships, focusing on Connie’s deteriorating marriage to Vietnam veteran Daniel Boudreaux, and Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea: A Novel (1996) focuses on the disenchantment of 19-year-old Wyoming resident Walter Marshall after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the Night Season: A Novel (1998) is a chilling study of evil; the sympathetic relationship between recently widowed Nora Michaelson, who is white, and Edward Bishop, who is black, spirals out of control into bigotry, hatred, and murder. In Hello to the Cannibals (2002), Bausch’s most recent novel, the author entwines the fictional story of Lily, a strong 20th-century American woman mired in a hopelessly depressing marriage, and the historically factual Mary Kingsley, the 19th-century British explorer, social anthropologist, and writer. In her review of Hello to the Cannibals, novelist Janet Burroway suggests that the cannibals of the title “are not so much the dignified exotics Mary Kingsley encounters in Gabon, as our familiar siblings, lovers, parents and children in their devouring attachment” (Burroway, 27). Richard Bausch, a professor at George Mason University, lives with his wife in Broad Run, Virginia. He and his brother, a professor at North Virginia Community College as well as a novelist, occasionally hold public readings together.

NOVELS Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Hello to the Cannibals. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. In the Night Season. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. The Last Good Time. New York: Dial, 1984. Mr. Field’s Daughter. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1989. The Real Presence. New York: Dial, 1980. Rebel Powers. New York: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1993. Take Me Back. New York: Dial, 1981. Violence. New York: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992.

SOURCES Burroway, Janet. “In Mary’s footsteps: Richard Bausch’s heroine falls under the spell of a 19th-century traveler,” New York Times Book Review, 8 September 2002, p. 27. Matuz, Roger, ed. Contemporary Southern Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1999.

BAXTER, CHARLES (MORLEY) (1947– ) Charles Baxter, whom critics have hailed as an heir to such Midwest novelists as Willa CATHER, has published four short-story collections and four critically acclaimed novels, First Light (1987), Shadow Play (1993), The Feast of Love (2000), and Saul and Patsy (2003), as well as the novella in the collection entitled Believers (1997). Speaking of the “blandness” of the midwestern landscape and the “reticence of its inhabitants,” Baxter said that he “would put Midwestern writers such as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather against those of almost any area—except maybe the South—for the depth of their writing. If you write about the Midwest, you have to dig in order to find what motivates the characters you’re writing about, the people you observe” (Atlantic Unbound interview). Charles Baxter was born on May 13, 1947, in Minneapolis, to John Thomas Baxter and Mary Barber Eaton Baxter. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Macalester College in 1969, Baxter earned a doctoral degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1974, and married Martha Ann Hauser, a teacher, in 1976. He combined a long career as a college professor with writing fiction, and created the fictional town of

116 BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE, THE

Five Oaks in Michigan, the state he has called home for more than a quarter of a century. First Light, Baxter’s debut novel, attracted attention because of its unique structure: Beginning with a well-known dictum of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—that “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” the novel begins on the Fourth of July with the uneasy relationship between Hugh Welch and his sister Dorothy, and progresses backward to reveal the earlier, formative events in their lives. In Shadow Play, a novel frequently compared to Shirley JACKSON’s “The Lottery,” Wyatt Palmer’s arrested emotional development grows from his childhood experiences, a panoply of shadowy evils that lurk on the outskirts of sunlit America. Baxter’s finely honed stylistic precision has been the source of much approbation from readers and critics alike. The Feast of Love is a highly praised study of the various forms of love offered up to a character named Charles Baxter as material for a novel: The novel explores the humanity of the neighbor character and of the wives of his two marriages. Charles Baxter retired from the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of English, and has been adjunct professor of creative writing since then. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has just published Saul and Patsy, his fourth novel. His literary achievements have been celebrated by the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1997; in 2000, Baxter was a finalist for the National Book Award.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Believers. New York: Pantheon, 1997. The Feast of Love. New York: Pantheon, 2000. First Light. New York: Viking, 1987. Saul and Patsy. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Shadow Play. New York: Norton, 1993.

SOURCES Kiser, Michael. “Interview with Charles Baxter,” Sycamore Review 4 (Winter 1992): 1–15.

OTHER Atlantic Unbound. “Interview with Charles Baxter.” Available online to subscribers. URL: http://www.theatlantic. com/unbound/bookauth/baxtint.htm. Accessed August 21, 2005.

University of Michigan. “A Son of the Middle Border.” Available online. URL: http://www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/ MT/97/Spr97/mta7s97.html. Accessed May 28, 2005.

BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE, THE CAROLYN CHUTE (1985) Carolyn CHUTE’s The Beans of Egypt, Maine tells the story of a rural working-class community crumbling apart as big industry and corporate incursions leave its people having to survive by making money instead of supporting each other through farming, barter, and shared work. While many working-class novels feature a central character whom the reader is supposed to root for as she or he climbs out and away from the home community, this novel focuses on the community that is left. Their world becomes a smaller, ghostly place as their land is eaten up and turned into suburbs, strip malls, highways, and prisons. Those who had lived modestly and in the traditional ways of rural American culture find themselves pushed to subsistence living, depression, and desperation. Where once farming life made a big family a desirable and respected foundation for the community, now these large families have fathers and sons in jail or in dangerous, low-paying jobs where a lack of affordable health care drives them deeper into debt and frustration. The men in the story, particularly Reuben Bean and his nephew, try to live according to models of masculinity that are dated and increasingly considered outlaw—working hard, drinking hard, ruling the roost, and creating a large family to carry on one’s name. Middle-class culture has not bothered to offer them the niceties or the leisure to “uplift” themselves to particular sets of manners and customs, like having a nice lawn in front of an immaculate house, and so they are seen by the middle class as barbarians who must be dismissed as human beings and corralled to be working machines, since that is all they are deemed good for. The working-class men in the novel end up dead or caged, leaving the women finding either no work, with the shame of welfare and food stamps, or grueling factory work that affords a living standard less healthy than that with government assistance. The novel embodies the impossibility of the happy melding of the classes in the thwarted romance of

BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE, THE 117

Roberta Bean, a poor mother of many, and March Goodspeed, a realtor who is snapping up the lands to increase his own wealth. Unlike many working-class protagonists, Roberta Bean does not want any of the middle-class trappings of success; therefore, her relationship with middle-class March Goodspeed never really gets going. No middle-class person would want to be Roberta, even though she is independent and full of integrity. Roberta supports herself and her children by dint of her own resourcefulness and determination. She is capable with cars and people. She is compassionate but does not let herself be taken advantage of. Roberta is no tragic figure, but in a just world her virtues would entitle her to much, much more than she has in terms of respect and material things: Across the road, the tall woman, Roberta Bean, is dressed in a man’s ribbed undershirt and green wool pants. She is circling a piece of bare ground with an axe, her babies in yellow raincoats. The babies ornament her ankles, dangle from her pant legs. Thwank! Thwank! Thwank! Her axe beats upon the chopping block. . . . Out of the openings of the undershirt, Roberta Bean’s assiduous, straining, bony neck and scarry long arms work the axe on the stringy wood. Faster. Faster. Now and then one of her dark eyes turns onto the Lincoln Continental. . . . The tall woman moves all over the Lincoln’s rearview mirror as a prizefighter moves around the ring. The white wood is spewed into the pile . . . faster, faster. Her back is to March now. She seems to ignore him. (94–95) In this depiction of Roberta, we see her as a middleclass man, March Goodspeed, sees her. She is strong, capable, in control. Her children love and admire her unquestionably, and she is not anxious about her motherhood, nor beleaguered by it. She goes on to help March jump-start his car (much to his embarrassment and pleasure). Initially, he thinks she will go to get men to help him, and he is mortified by this, but Roberta does it herself with her truck. March’s own wife is enfeebled by paraplegia, so to him, Roberta’s strength and competence are a revelation—he soon

finds himself enamored of her. March’s perspective allows the reader to see how transcendent Roberta’s self-possession is: she is not just strong and capable for a woman or a poor person—she is impressive to people who have much greater means at their disposal. March Goodspeed would have her for a mistress, but he fundamentally misunderstands her. In a very funny passage where Roberta anonymously leaves him her own brand of love token on his home’s doorknob—a plastic bag of rabbit meat she killed and cleaned herself—he perceives it as a threat from the hostile locals who resent his move to town. For a person like March, meat comes in tidy plastic-covered styrofoam squares, and is just something to pick up at the megamarket. From Roberta, rabbit meat is a gift out of her limited resources: labor and food. It almost literally comes out of the mouths of her children. But it is a true generous gift, not a groveling, pitiful offering. Roberta, again taking over a manlike role, is a provider in a real sense, where March only has income: She tapes a note to March Goodspeed’s front door . . . a childlike scrawl: WELCOME TO EGYPT HERES A LITTLE PRESENT. Then she ties the bag of bunnies to the doorknob. She is silent out there in the fog, careful not to scuff against the hot top so she won’t wake the man who wears the shiny shoes, her consideration bordering on love. Then she strides away. (100) The vast gulf between Roberta and March ensures that they can never really have a relationship that more than “border[s] on love.” What Roberta does out of her capabilities is perceived unintentionally by March as a threat—he does not deal with the death that comes with eating meat in his middle-class life. To his credit, he tries to express his love in kind: he shows up at her house regularly with edible treats for the kids. But Roberta does not simper after his interest. She remains aloof and in control. She does not let her heart destroy her with alliances that are a bad idea. To some readers March may seem Roberta’s ticket out—a financial and romantic solution to her problems—but Chute understands that Roberta’s self-control and integrity are all she has to take care of herself in the world, and she

118 BEAN TREES, THE

won’t sacrifice them for expediency. March fades away from Roberta, goes back to his new house on the newly developed land without a murmur. But around them, the consuming class wants what Roberta has for their own uses, and there will be no simple walking away if the working class refuses corporate encroachment.

SOURCE Chute, Carolyn. The Beans of Egypt, Maine. New York: Warner Books, 1985. Carolyn Whitsun

BEAN TREES, THE BARBARA KINGSOLVER (1988) In many ways, Barbara KINGSOLVER’s first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence. Kingsolver’s heroine, Taylor Greer, does resemble Huck Finn in her courage, honesty and adaptability. But in one important way, she departs: Taylor is a woman, and that fact defines much of what occurs in this remarkable story. Born Marietta Greer (one can understand the name change, Marietta being entirely too feminine for this sassy character) in Pittman, Kentucky, Taylor early feels an outsider, aware of those who shun her and her mother because of their low class and lack of wealth, but unwilling to join the ranks of poor teenage mothers. At the first opportunity, despite her great love for her mother, Taylor starts west in her ramshackle VW bug, unconsciously retracing the Trail of Tears that led the Cherokee tribe (of which her grandmother was one) to Oklahoma. There, at a desolate roadside bar, a woman worriedly foists a gift upon her: an infant girl, a Cherokee. Leaving Oklahoma, Taylor writes her mother that she has “found my head rights [to the Cherokee land]. . . . They’re coming with me.” Taylor and her new child, whom she names “Turtle” for her proclivity to cling like the mud turtles of Kentucky, hobble into Tucson, Arizona, where the VW bug fortuitously breaks down at “Jesus is Lord Used Tires.” Here, Taylor encounters Mattie, the generous woman who will give her a job and introduce her to Estevan and Esperanza, two Guatemalan refugees for whom she is

providing sanctuary. Taylor soon sets up house with another single mother, Lou Ann, also from Kentucky, and with their obvious care and good humor, this quartet redefines what it means to be a family. All is not easy: Taylor, an inexperienced mother, must figure out how to raise a daughter who she discovers has been physically and sexually abused, and Lou Ann must learn to let go of a husband who cannot commit to staying in one place. Each of the female characters finds within her a strength that she did not know she possessed. Lou Ann secures a job and learns to live independently. Taylor, who has been strongly attracted to Estevan, agrees to drive him and Esperanza to Oklahoma so that they might find a secure home. In a triumphant act of giving, the refugee couple, who have lost their own child, risk their freedom to pose as Turtle’s parents and give her up so that Taylor might adopt her from the Cherokee tribe. Ultimately, this band of disconnected and wayward travelers becomes a more vital and caring community than most nuclear families. Single parenting, child abuse, Central American refugees—Kingsolver seems to leave no contemporary issue untouched. Yet, though she proudly bears the mantle of a “political novelist,” she never comes across as preachy or stridently sectarian. The Bean Trees, though it gently coerces us into addressing such issues, involves us instead much more deeply on the personal level, as we wonder what will become of the endearingly real characters about whom we have come to care so tenderly. And though Turtle’s and Taylor’s story will continue to unfold in Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, we are still ultimately rewarded here in the end, to find that love does conquer all and that humans will, given half a chance, act nobly and courageously.

SOURCES DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Murrey, Loretta Martin. “The Loner and the Matriarchal Community in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 5, no. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1994): 155–164. Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 77–82. Patricia Lee

BEATTIE, ANN 119

BEATTIE, ANN (1947– )

Ann Beattie has been repeatedly called the chronicler of her generation, those who came of age in the late 1960s. Author of six novels and six short-story collections to date, Beattie, a lightning rod for the professional critics, has been both faulted and hailed as a minimalist who is the equal of Raymond Carver and Donald BARTHELME. Some critics complain that her work lacks a moral center and that her usually white, apathetic characters lack intensity and humanity. Despite the critics, Beattie has a loyal following of readers who identify with her presentation of fragile identities and failed relationships in a culturally changing world. Ann Beattie was born on September 8, 1947, in Washington, D.C., to James A. Beattie, a government official, and Charlotte Crosby Beattie. She earned a bachelor’s degree (1969) in English from the American University and a master’s degree, also in English (1970), from the University of Connecticut in 1970. She married David Gates, a musician, in 1973, and published her first New Yorker short story in 1974. Her first collection of short fiction, Distortions, and her first novel, CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER, both appeared in 1976 and together they made Ann Beattie a name to notice in contemporary literature. More than any other novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter focuses on the so-called Woodstock generation. Charles, a 27-year-old, hopes to win back his lover, Laura, who has returned to her husband. It was made into a moderately successful film entitled Head over Heels in 1979, then rereleased as Chilly Scenes of Winter in 1982 and, in the New England area where it is set, became a cult film (Murphy, 4). Falling in Place (1980), Beattie’s second novel, uses multiple points of view to chronicle the crumbling marriage of John and Louise Knapp. Louise lives in Connecticut with two of their children, and John lives with his mother and youngest son in Rye, New York, and carries on an affair with Nina, a Lord and Taylor sales clerk. Despite an accidental shooting, Beattie’s second novel ends, like her first, with a reasonably optimistic resolution. The reader, however, senses a bleak future for these characters. Love Always (1985), a tragicomic novel, features a group of wealthy young people who all knew each

other during their college days and now work together in the Green Mountains of Vermont for Country Daze, a magazine that has taken New York by storm. Nicole has been sent to spend the summer with her aunt Lucy, who writes an advice column for Country Daze. The superficiality and amorality of the characters is highlighted by the death of Jane, Nicole’s mother in California, in an accident and by the failure of any of the characters to communicate with, much less love, each other. Picturing Will (1990), set in Charlottesville, Virginia, seems more optimistic to numerous readers and critics than Beattie’s earlier novels. Here Beattie is concerned with two adults who weigh their own needs against those of their child, Will. Will, unfortunately, witnesses many of the worst behaviors of Wayne, his father, Jody, his photographer mother, and Mel, who becomes his stepfather. Another You (1995) is a complicated and disturbing tale of infidelity, sexual abuse, and dark surprises. Much is disturbing in the family background of Marshall Lockhard, college professor and central character, yet it is a powerful, if depressing, evocation of contemporary characters in the 1980s. Beattie’s 1997 novel, My Life, Starring Dara Falcon, features the orphaned and traumatized Jean Warner, and an out-of-work actress, Dara Falcon. Jean leaves her husband and enrolls at the University of Connecticut before she realizes that she must purge her life of the aggressive and self-centered Dara. In 2000, Beattie was awarded the PEN/Bernard Malamud prize for her storytelling abilities. Her most recent novel is The Doctor’s House (2000), a subtle unfolding of the unhappy and dysfunctional childhoods of Andrew and Nina, brother and sister. Beattie and her husband live in Maine and Key West.

NOVELS Another You. New York: Knopf, 1995. Chilly Scenes of Winter. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Falling in Place. New York: Random House, 1980. Love Always. New York: Random House, and London: Michael Joseph, 1985. My Life, Starring Dara Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1997. Picturing Will. New York: Random House, 1990.

SOURCES Lee, Don. “About Ann Beattie,” Ploughshares 21 (Fall 1995): 231–235.

120 BEE SEASON

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. “A Conversation with Ann Beattie,” Literary Review 27 (1984): 165–177. Montresor, Jaye Berman, ed. The Critical Response to Ann Beattie. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Murphy, Christina. Ann Beattie. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Plath, James. “Counternarrative: An Interview with Ann Beattie,” Michigan Quarterly Review 32 (Summer 1993): 359–379.

OTHER Ann Beattie Opens Up: An interview by Chris Wright. Available online. URL: http://weeklywire.com/ww/08-2498/boston_books2.html. Accessed August 24, 2005. Featured Author: Ann Beattie. Available online. URL: http:// www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/28/specials/beattie.html. Accessed August 24, 2005. www.readings.org. “Ann Beattie.” Available online. URL: http:// www.readings.org/ifoa97/beattie.html. Accessed May 28, 2005. Wired for Books. “Audio Interview with Anne Beattie.” Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/annbeattie/. Accessed May 28, 2005.

BEE SEASON MYLA GOLDBERG (2000)

With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla GOLDBERG explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one is who he or she seems. All of the family members have secret agendas that lead them to embark on their own spiritual quests for fulfillment and order. Nine-year-old Eliza, stuck in a remedial fifth-grade class, knows she is a “student from whom great things should not be expected.” No one is more surprised than she when she wins her school spelling bee and advances to the district level. Her father, Saul, a Jewish scholar and cantor with a deep interest in the Kabbalah, decides to take Eliza under his tutelage. This means that 16-year-old Aaron is suddenly replaced in his father’s favor. Saul no longer has time to continue Aaron’s Torah study and guitar lessons. In response, Aaron seeks solace with the Hare Krishnas, a decision that enrages Saul when he eventually discovers his son’s actions. Eliza’s mother, Miriam, a brilliant but distant lawyer, pays little attention to events taking place in the household. She is too busy leading a double life that keeps her barely hanging onto the edge of sanity.

When Eliza qualifies for the national spelling bee, Saul realizes that Eliza’s gift with words runs much deeper than her good spelling abilities. He senses in her a potential to reach the ultimate heights of Jewish mysticism, an accomplishment he had found, to his frustration, that he was unable to achieve. Thrilled to have her father’s attention and admiration, Eliza begins to study the patterns in letters and words. As a result, she enters a state of awareness in which words reveal themselves to her on a deep, spiritual level. She can envision a word dividing into all the other words contained within it. With her father’s coaching, she becomes obsessed with following the ancient Kabbalist teachings. When she finally achieves her goal, the terrifying and enrapturing experience changes her forever. In Bee Season, Goldberg shows the way a family can fall apart from neglect and lack of communication. The characters must lose themselves in order to find themselves, some of them doing so more successfully than others. By the end, they have each crossed a line from which, for better or for worse, they can never step back. The ultimate goal of each character can be found in Professor Yechiel Goldberg’s explanation of the fundamental tenet of the Kabbalah: “Human beings are partners with God in maintaining and perfecting this world, and in maintaining and perfecting the unity of God.” Saul and Eliza attempt to attain this relationship through Jewish mysticism and numerology. Aaron attempts to establish this partnership with God through the freedom he finds in an ancient religion he refuses to see as a cult. Miriam’s method of organizing and “fixing” the world is, arguably, more bizarre than her son’s, eventually leading to her arrest and incarceration in a mental institution.

SOURCES Goldberg, Myla. Bee Season. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ———. “Juan Williams Talks with Myla Goldberg.” National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation (June 1, 2000). Gray, Paul. “The Power of the Word,” Time (July 3, 2000): 62.

OTHER Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Seeking Transcendence through Proper Spelling,” The New York Times on the Web (12 June 2000). Available online. URL:

BEET QUEEN, THE 121

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/061200goldbergbook-review.html. Accessed August 21, 2005. Weeks, Jerome. “Quirky New Novel Delves into the Mysteries of Kabbalah.” The Dallas Morning News (29 November 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http:// www.highbeamresearch.com library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:67437983&num=4. Accessed August 21, 2005. Wendy Mass

BEET QUEEN, THE LOUISE ERDRICH (1986) “There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight” (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section of Louise ERDRICH’s novel. Dot is, in fact, the last of a line of unique women and men and has gathered the qualities of all those who came before her. Dot has many fathers and mothers, and it is through them that she becomes Beet Queen—but on the day of her celebration she decides that her true identity is not that of a beet queen. And since The Beet Queen is more about the journey than the destination, in this context the novel’s open ending emphasizes that the process is far from over for Dot. Travel—the constant moving away from or toward places and people—is a central theme of this novel. And perhaps because of this endless motion, we sometimes feel as if this tale contains no single protagonist. It is certainly not Dot, since her real transformation begins in the final pages of the book. If, however, we were to pick one still point within the novel’s complex cast, it should be Mary Adare. On a cold day, the orphaned Mary and Karl Adare jump from a cold boxcar into the town of Argus. Their mother has literally flown away with a new lover at the aerial show of a fair, and their baby brother was lovingly abducted by a desperate couple. Their life in general seems to have dispersed, disintegrated in front of their eyes. Karl leaves Argus as soon as he arrives, when the next train rolls through town; the rest of his life seems determined by that moment, since he will spend his days as a traveling salesman, stopping only for brief affairs with both men and women. Mary, however, decides to settle down, seeking shelter with her aunt and uncle: “I planned to be essential to

them all, so depended upon that they could never send me off. I did this on purpose, because I soon found out that I had nothing else to offer” (19). She had spent the previous months moving from one town to another with her mother and Karl; during this time, she watched the way Adelaide’s wanderlust—only in part provoked by their poverty—was destroying the family, and the way Karl had come to resemble her. As if to emphasize her decision, she grows into a stout woman whose decisions, likes, and dislikes are usually final. At first an outsider, she takes over the family’s butcher shop when her aunt and uncle move to Florida. Her cousin Sita, who admired Mary’s mother for her elegance and love of traveling, also leaves Argus to become a fashion model. It is Mary’s refusal to move or change that turns her into a point of reference for the other characters. In a story where dispersion and flight are key elements, Mary seems reliable, predictable. Karl travels briefly to Argus and leaves Mary’s friend Celestine pregnant; his previous affair had been with Wallace Pfef, an eminent Argus town leader he met at a convention. Once Karl disappears, Mary takes the reluctant Celestine and her baby under her protection. Wallace, sensing that he, too, is part of the family tree—after all, he has helped deliver the baby—also acts as guardian to baby Wallacette/Dot. Thus an eclectic family is created out of necessity, adding its members gradually and not always willingly: Sita, mentally ill in her later years, refuses to have any contact with Mary and Celestine. Entrenched in her upscale suburban home, she wears Adelaide’s pawned garnet necklace and laments her own loss of beauty and sanity. Mary’s stubborn, forceful nature gradually alienates her from even Celestine and Dot, who as a child looks up to her aunt. Perhaps as a legacy of her chaotic early childhood, Mary has become a dictatorial figure in her family and community. She treats the customers at her failing shop as harshly as she does her family. Her instinct to survive through action and calculated decisions is understandable but does not sit well with the children who must obediently play the games she designs for Dot’s parties. However, even Mary cannot escape a magical vein that runs in the family. Upon their arrival in Argus as children, Karl had made a branch of flower blossoms

122 BEET QUEEN, THE

linger as perfume long after he jumped back on the train. A few years later, Mary herself performed a minor miracle—at least according to the nuns who ran her school—by sliding face first into the icy ground and leaving an imprint of what appeared to be the face of Christ (although Mary herself was convinced that it was Karl’s face). Another mythical occurrence is her mother’s fairy-tale disappearance. As the years go by, Mary develops a strong affinity for esoteric arts and the afterlife. A practical woman, she is certainly not skilled in these areas and therefore seems to others a fake and an eccentric. And she herself recognizes this shortcoming: “Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person” (203). Not surprisingly, Mary’s exaggerated sense of selfrighteousness and desire to control others unites the rest of the family in several attempts to evade her influence. As Dot grows into her teens, her childhood admiration for her aunt will also fade, although Celestine’s daughter will inherit Mary’s forceful ways and herself become an outcast among her peers. The culminating scene of the novel is the Beet Festival organized by Wallace, who has also fixed the votes for Beet Queen so that Dot may win. He thus hopes to make up for his failure as surrogate father. When Dot discovers what he has done, she reacts not with gratitude but with fury: having inherited Mary’s and Celestine’s solid builds and unladylike ways, she knows that nobody will believe she could have legitimately been voted Beet Queen. In The Beet Queen, people, places, events, and even time periods, all seem to mutate and fall apart, only to surprise readers by coming back together at various points. At the festival, the entire circle of family and acquaintances is finally united, albeit in a strange, disjointed manner. Following an overdose of pills, Sita’s body is picked up from her suburban garden and parked under a tree until the festival ends. Karl returns to seek a reconciliation with Wallace. Jude Miller, the baby brother taken from Mary when her mother disappeared, makes his way back to Argus to witness the events. Now a priest, he is known to Karl through a chance meeting, but the rest of the family remains unaware of his existence. At the end of the novel, he seems to have made no contact with Mary and Karl. Russell, Celestine’s brother

and a war veteran whose many wounds have caused his body to deteriorate and become unrecognizable, rides a parade float as a town hero. In this final section, the first-person narration— which had shifted mainly among Celestine, Mary, Karl, Sita, and Wallace—finally belongs to Dot. We hear her voice and sense her perceptions instead of reading her through the eyes of others. In a stunt that echoes her grandmother Adelaide’s escape, Dot flies off in the plane that was to write her name in the sky, pronouncing her Queen of the Beet Festival. Doubling as a skyseeder for the drought-parched town, the plane nevertheless makes a quick return after fulfilling both duties. At this point, Dot realizes that she must handle the “thread of flight” she has inherited with more responsibility than did some of her predecessors, namely Karl and Adelaide. In the end, Dot creates her own miracle, as the town sees rain for the first time in months. Louise Erdrich has thus woven a complex network of characters whose lives are not always as much their own as they would like to believe. In the end, the prevailing message is that we cannot escape heritage. Sita tries, and ends up losing her mind and her life. Adelaide’s own attempt leads her to a life of barely suppressed rage eerily similar to Sita’s. After a lifetime of flight, Karl yearns to settle down and come to know his daughter. And in the novel’s open ending, we can only hope that Dot will mix the traits she has inherited— flight and groundedness, sensitivity and hard pragmatism—into a stable combination of yet another unique character.

SOURCES Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. New York: Routledge, 1989. Beidler, Peter G., and Gay Barton. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Erdrich, Louise. The Beet Queen. New York: Perennial, 2001. Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Peck, David, ed. “Louise Erdrich.” In American Ethnic Writers, Vol. 1, 159–162. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2000.

BEGLEY, LOUIS 123

Stookey, Lorena L. Louise Erdrich: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999. Maria Luisa Antonaya

BEGLEY, LOUIS (1933– )

Louis Begley has published seven novels, several of which have been nominated for literary prizes: Wartime Lies (1991) received the PEN/Ernest Hemingway First Fiction Award and was nominated for a National Book Award and a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Like his famous predecessors, Edith WHARTON and Louis AUCHINCLOSS, Begley writes mostly about the elite community of very wealthy New Yorkers. Louis Begley was born Ludwik Begleiter, on October 6, 1933, in Stryj, Poland, to Edward David Begleiter, a physician, and Frances Hauser Begleiter. He immigrated to the United States with his family in 1948 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1953. Begley was educated at Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) in 1954, served in the U.S. Army from 1954 to 1956, married Sally Higginson in 1956 (the marriage ended in divorce in 1970), then returned to Harvard to complete his doctor of laws degree (magna cum laude) in 1959. Although he did not publish his first novel until he was in his late 50s, Begley, as a well-known New York lawyer, is uniquely qualified to write of the very rich (his law practice naturally included privileged financial information). As a Jewish refugee from Poland, he understands the pessimism felt by those buffeted about by a random fate. His first novel, Wartime Lies, features Maciek, the narrator, who recalls himself as a six-yearold orphan boy, and Tania, his aunt, who adopted false identities to avoid the Nazi persecution of the Jews and to survive World War II. He followed with The Man Who Was Late (1993), again about a European Jew, Ben, who survived the war only to become wealthy in the United States; his passionate involvement with Veronique, cousin to his best friend, along with his guilty feelings and suicidal impulses, are reminiscent of Stingo’s in William STYRON’s SOPHIE’S CHOICE. As Max Saw It (1994) features a Harvard Law School professor who feels guilty for befriending two gay men, Charlie Swan and his lover Toby; he cannot help Toby, who dies from AIDS. In About Schmidt (1996), Begley’s

main character is a wealthy WASP, Albert Schmidt, who lives in the Hamptons and displays his bias against Jews when his daughter Dorothy becomes engaged to a Jew. Mistler’s Exit (1998) also has a somewhat unsympathetic protagonist who resembles Schmidt; the very wealthy Mistler, who is dying of cancer, goes to Venice and has relationships with two very different women; he realizes that he has sacrificed his humanity on the altar of his successful advertising agency, but the knowledge seems to make no difference to the way he prepares to die. Schmidt Delivered (2000) continues the presentation of Schmidt and his daughter and her husband (who has indeed turned out to be a ne’er-do-well). Schmidt’s Puerto Rican mistress, introduced in the earlier novel, rejects Schmidt’s offer of marriage and in fact Schmidt himself. Begley’s most recently published novel is Shipwreck (2003). He lives in New York City with Anne Muhlstein Dujarric de la Riviere, a writer whom he married in 1974, and continues with his second career as a novelist. In 1995 he was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature.

NOVELS About Schmidt. New York: Knopf, 1996. As Max Saw It. New York: Knopf, 1994. The Man Who Was Late. New York: Knopf, 1993. Mistler’s Exit. New York: Knopf, 1998. Schmidt Delivered. New York: Knopf, 2000. Shipwreck. New York: Knopf, 2003. Wartime Lies. New York: Knopf, 1991.

SOURCES Flowers, Charles. Review of About Schmidt, BookPage Online (September 1998). Available online. URL: http://www. bookpage.com/9609bp/fiction/aboutschmidt.html. Accessed August 21, 2005. ———. Review of Mistler’s Exit. BookPage Online. (September 1996). Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage. com/9809bp/fiction/mistlers_exit.html. Accessed August 21, 2005. Kafka-Gibbons, Paul. Review of Mistler’s Exit, Denver Post (September 13, 1998). Available online. URL: http:// extras.denverpost.com/books/book368.htm. Accessed August 21, 2005. Mallick, Heather. “In Praise of Older Men: Louis Begley’s Startling New Novel Shows Us the Humanity beneath the Pinstriped Suit.” Canoe (November 3, 1996). Available

124 BEING THERE

online. URL: http://www.canoe.ca/JamBooksReviewsA/ aboutschmidt_begley.html. Accessed August 21, 2005.

BEING THERE JERZY KOSINSKI (1971) Neither of KOSINSKI’s first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The PAINTED BIRD (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy’s survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically, The Painted Bird is a vigorous synthesis of elements of the panoramic realist novel and of the folktale. STEPS (1968), a thin novel with very little chronology or other narrative structure, presents incidents in the existential life of a young eastern European exile in the postwar period. Stylistically, Steps is as spare and as restrained as its protagonist is undemonstrative and self-contained. Although the two novels do share some thematic concerns, just about the only surface similarities between them are that both protagonists remain unnamed and many of the events that are depicted are horrifically ironic. Some critics have suggested that although Kosinski won a National Book Award for Steps, he should have won it for The Painted Bird and the judges were, to some degree, compensating for their earlier oversight. Compared to these first two novels, Being There seems a slight book, a contemporary fable, a secular parable, a light satire on the nature of celebrity, influence, truth, and understanding in American politics and high society. Indeed, viewed in the context of Kosinski’s whole corpus, Being There remains his most anomalous work. Ironically, because of the success of the highly regarded film adaptation starring Peter Sellers, Being There may now be Kosinski’s most widely known work. The novel’s main character is an amiable cipher named Chance. For reasons that are never explained, Chance was raised and continued to live entirely cut off from the rest of the world within a walled property in a large city. He has filled his days and years tending the estate’s gardens. His only human contacts have been the owner of the estate (presumably his grandfather but referred to simply as the “Old Man”) and a maid, both of whom treat him as if he is simpleminded or emotionally damaged. His only exposure to

the outside world has been through the television shows that he watches but for which he has developed no context for understanding. Chance is imperturbably contented with this existence but seemingly unprepared for anything else. Then, when the “Old Man” dies, the lawyers serving as the executors of his estate have no choice but to evict Chance from the premises. Not only has the Old Man not mentioned Chance in his will, but there is no documentation of their relationship and, in fact, no documentation whatsoever of Chance’s existence. Chance is put out into the street wearing one of the Old Man’s suits and carrying a single suitcase. It contains more of the expensive but outdated suits and shirts that the Old Man had kept pristinely stored in the attic and that would have been disposed of or donated to charity. In a very ironic turn of events, these suits will mark Chance as a well-bred person of means and serve as his pass into the broader world of wealth, privilege, and power. Chance has barely left the walled estate in which he has spent his whole life when he is struck by the chauffeured limousine of E. E. Rand, the wife of the industrialist Benjamin Rand. Chance’s leg is injured, and she insists on taking him back to her estate, where her ailing husband is receiving around-the-clock medical attention. When she asks Chance his name, he responds, “Chance, the gardener,” which she hears as “Chauncey Gardiner.” And thus begins the process by which the Rands and their circle construct a new identity for Chance. In conversation, he talks literally about gardening and television because those are the only things about which he has any knowledge, and everyone accepts his remarks as profoundly metaphoric. Rand is an informal adviser to the president of the United States and is so impressed by what he interprets as Chance’s very carefully expressed insights that he introduces him to the president. Like Rand, the president is taken by Chance’s pithy, seemingly figurative observations about the current economic situation, and soon after their meeting, he credits Chance in public with having seen and expressed what other experts, in the president’s view, had missed in their economic analyses. Overnight, there is much speculation in the media about this mysterious figure who has suddenly

BEING THERE 125

emerged as a major new “player” on the Washington political scene. Chance is even invited to appear on several television news programs. When he is asked questions about current events and about his own background to which he has no answers, he simply sits there silently and sedately, and his behavior is interpreted as unshakable self-assurance and an extraordinary ability to maintain his composure. When it becomes widely known that Chance has no personal history that any investigative agency can uncover, there is initially a great deal of suspicion about who has insinuated him into a position of influence. Then, when no sinister connections can be substantiated, some begin to see his combination of personal anonymity and public celebrity as a tremendous political asset, and there is even talk of a vice presidential nomination. As Benjamin Rand nears death, he guesses the truth about Chance, but he also recognizes his inherent goodness—or his Edenic absence of evil—and his wife’s attraction to Chance. Despite Chance’s simplicity, he sees enough in him to put him at peace with dying. In one of the novel’s most notorious scenes, E. E. Rand tries to seduce Chance, who is asexual, and when he becomes transfixed with the television and states that he likes to watch, she interprets this to mean that he wants to watch her masturbate. In a hilarious irony, she has one of the most satisfying sexual experiences of her life. Nonetheless, most of the novel is more flatly than hilariously ironic, understated rather than pointedly comical. Interestingly, when the novel was adapted to film, the director chose to include a series of outtakes among the closing credits. These outtakes demonstrated how difficult it had been for Sellers to play Chance as a placid cipher for whom all things pleasant and unpleasant are equally ambiguous or amorphous. The outtakes are hilarious where the film is not. Likewise, in the novel, Kosinski prevents us from dismissing Chance as an absurdity but never permits us to take him very seriously. The novel seems to be told from a third-person-limited point of view, but for the sake of clarity and of continuity in the narrative voice, there are sections in which the narrator is forced to reveal a little more than what Chance is capable of understanding. If Being There is

a parable, it is a postmodern parable in which the reader is left with the conundrum of explaining just how the experiences of an almost completely weightless character might embody some substantive and meaningful insight into contemporary life. In effect, the reader is left to construct a meaning for the novel just as the characters around Chance construct an identity for him as Chauncey Gardiner. And just as Chance does not seem to care one way or the other about what that identity might entail, Kosinski seems ultimately not to care what “moral” might be assigned to his narrative.

SOURCES Bolling, Douglass. “The Precarious Self in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There,” Greyfriar: Siena Studies in Literature 16 (1975): 41–46. Carter, Steven. “ ‘Plants Were Like People’: Kosinski’s Being There,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 28 (November 1998): 6–9. Griffiths, Gareth. “Being There; Being There: Kosinski and Malouf.” In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, edited by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, 153–166. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1990. Grigsby, John L. “A Mirroring of America and Russia: Reflections of Tolstoy in Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 17 (September 1987): 6–8. Holstad, Scott C. “The Dialectics of Getting There: Kosinski’s Being There and the Existential Anti-Hero,” Arkansas Review: A Journal of Criticism 4 (Fall 1995): 220–228. Lazar, Mary. “Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance,” College Literature 31 (Spring 2004): 99–116. Lupack, Barbara Tepa. “Chance Encounters: Bringing Being There to the Screen.” In Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, 208–220. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. ———. “Hit or Myth: Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There,” New Orleans Review 13 (Summer 1986): 58–68. Murray, Raymond B. “ ‘That Certain Krylovian Touch’: An Insight into Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 19 (March 1989): 6–8. Tepa, Barbara J. “Jerzy Kosinski’s Polish Contexts: A Study of Being There,” Polish Review 22, no. 2 (1977): 52–61. Wood, Dave. “Censors ‘Who Like to Watch’ Curricula: Jerzy Kosinski and the Banning of Being There.” In Censored Books, II: Critical Viewpoints, 1985–2000, edited by

126 BELL, MADISON SMARTT

Nicholas J. Karolides, 51–57. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002. Ziegler, Robert. “Electing the Video Self: A Note on Being There,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 19 (March 1989): 2–3. Martin Kich

BELL, MADISON SMARTT (1957– ) Novelist and short-story writer Madison Smartt Bell has published 12 novels and two short-story collections. By the time he was 35, he was considered by numerous critics to be a prodigy who wrote about social outcasts and used a technique that blended traditional narrative structure with postmodern minimalism. Madison Smartt Bell was born on August 1, 1957, in rural Williamson County, near Nashville, Tennessee, to Henry Denmark Bell, a lawyer and later a circuit judge, and Georgia Allen Wigginston, an equestrian who gave riding lessons, ran a summer camp, and managed the family’s 96-acre farm. Bell was educated at Princeton University, earning his bachelor’s degree (1979) in English, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. At Hollins College he earned his master’s degree in 1981 and wrote his first novel, The Washington Square Ensemble, published in 1983. He began teaching at Goucher College in 1984, then met and married the poet Elizabeth Spires on June 15, 1985. Beginning and ending in New York’s Washington Square, The Washington Square Ensemble resembles a jazz piece; it uses five different voices to describe one day in the life of Johnny B. Goode, a street-smart heroin dealer. One character from The Washington Square Ensemble, Porco, reappears in Bell’s next novel, Waiting for the End of the World. This novel, brimming with random violence and planned chaos, depicts New York at the mercy of revolutionaries; the central character, Clarence Larkin, along with an assortment of Vietnam veterans, former drug addicts, and alcoholics, is involved in a plot to blow up Times Square. The Year of Silence is set in Europe as Thomas Larkin, brother of Clarence Larkin of Waiting for the End of the World, mourns his brother, who has apparently died of radiation sickness. He also describes his reaction to the death from a drug overdose of a young woman named Marion Weber. These three novels constitute Bell’s New York trilogy.

Scholar R. Reed Sanderlin believes that Bell, who had just written an essay criticizing postmodernism and defending literary realism and the familiar literary approaches that appeal to wider audiences, followed his own prescription with his next novel Straight Cut (1987). It is more narrowly focused on the protagonist and narrator Tracy Bateman, a film editor and reader of Kierkegaard, who becomes involved in writing a mystery story about a drug smuggling scheme. With Soldier’s Joy (1987), Bell wrote his first novel with a southern setting. The plot, too, seems slightly more traditional, and involves two returned Vietnam veterans, Thomas Laidlaw, who is white, and Rodney Redman, who is black; they overcome a Ku Klux Klan plot against Laidlaw and rescue a preacher from an assassination attempt. His next novel, set in contemporary London, was Doctor Sleep (1992). Adrian Strother, an American hypnotherapist, is searching for a cure for his insomnia, and becomes entranced with the gnostic hermeticism of the 16th-century monk Giordano Bruno and in the physicality of the martial arts. Bell, who writes about one novel per year, published Save Me, Joe Louis in 1993, the tale of two drifters, Charlie and Macrae, who rob cash machines until the practice becomes too dangerous. Then they retreat to Macrae’s family farm, with a compatriot named Porter and Macrae’s cousin Lacy, and work the farm and care for Macrae’s aged father. Bell’s increasing concern with racism in the New South led to the critically acclaimed All Souls’ Rising (1996), set during the 18th-century Haitian fight for independence. The panorama of plantation owners, slaves, voodoo, and violence is presented through the eyes of Dr. Antoine Hébert; he has been compared to Marlowe in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The book was both a PEN/Faulkner and National Book Award finalist. Bell followed this success with Ten Indians (1996), focusing again on racism and its solution through the protagonist, a child named Michael Devlin, who opens up a tae kwon do class in a crime-ridden area of Baltimore. Four years later, in 2000, Master of the Crossroads, the second novel in the Haiti trilogy appeared. It begins where All Souls’ Rising ended, and uses some of the same characters. Bell’s latest novel, Anything

BELLAMY, EDWARD 127

Goes, features members of a band with that name, particularly Jesse Melungeon, the bass-player narrator addicted to painkillers and in competition with his father for a woman named Stella. Madison Smartt Bell currently teaches at Goucher College, where he holds the Goucher Chair of Distinguished Achievement. He is working on the third book in the Haitian trilogy.

NOVELS All Souls’ Rising. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Anything Goes. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Doctor Sleep. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991. Master of the Crossroads. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Save Me, Joe Louis. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993. Soldier’s Joy. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. Straight Cut. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1986. Ten Indians. New York: Pantheon, 1996. Waiting for the End of the World. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985. The Washington Square Ensemble. New York: Viking, 1983. The Year of Silence. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1987.

SOURCES Bell, Madison Smartt. “Literature and Pleasure: Bridging the Gap,” Antaeus (Autumn 1987): 127–134. Birkerts, Sven. “Madison Smartt Bell/Debra Spark.” In American Energies: Essays on Fiction, 380–385. New York: Morrow & Co., 1992. Cronin, Justin. “A Conversation with Madison Smartt Bell,” Four Quarters 9 (Spring 1995): 13–24. Shelnutt, Eve, ed. My Poor Elephant: 27 Male Writers at Work. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet Press, 1992. Stephens, Jack. “Madison Smartt Bell,” Bomb 73 (Fall 2000): 36–42. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Bodies and Souls: The Haitian Revolution and Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls Rising.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past, and Each Other, edited by Mark C. Carnes, 184–197. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Weaks, Mary Louise. “An Interview with Madison Smartt Bell,” Southern Review 30 (Winter 1994): 1–12. Winchell, Mark Royden. “Other Voices, Other Runes,” Sewanee Review 92, no. 2 (Spring 1989): xliii–xliv.

OTHER Madison Smartt Bell. Available online. URL: http://faculty.goucher.edu/mbell/Welcome.htm. Accessed August 21, 2005.

BELLAMY, EDWARD (1850–1898)

After Edward Bellamy published his utopian novel LOOKING BACKWARD: 2000–1887 (1888), for the rest of the century it remained second in sales only to Harriet Beecher STOWE’s best-seller UNCLE TOM’S CABIN; selling nearly a million copies in 10 years, the novel was also popular with socialist groups in European and Asian countries. Bellamy, whose ancestors were all ministers, was a social reformer who had no enemies. The socialist utopia he proposed in Looking Backward was palatable to his audiences because of the imaginative fictional technique he used. In contrast, Equality (1897), the sequel to Looking Backward, contained far less creativity and was more didactic. Edward Bellamy was born on March 26, 1850, in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, to Rufus King Bellamy, a New England Baptist minister, and Maria Putnam Bellamy, a Calvinist. As he grew up, Bellamy was angered by the abusive mill owners and the cruelties exacted on working children; when he visited Europe with his brother, he also became concerned about the terrible conditions in which employees were forced to work. Rather than becoming a minister, Bellamy opted instead for the law, and, after apprenticing himself to a Springfield, Massachusetts, attorney, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1871. After a few years as a journalist, Bellamy became a full-time writer, publishing Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl (1878) about the romance between an infirm newspaper editor and the young woman who connects with him both romantically and spiritually. The Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays’ Rebellion, was published serially the following year and in book form in 1900; it demonstrated Bellamy’s unshakable sympathy with the post-Revolutionary War working villagers and small farmers rather than with the landowners and merchants. In the Hawthornesque Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (1880) and Miss Ludington’s Sister: A Romance of Immortality (1884), Bellamy looks at man’s propensity for guilt and acknowledges humanity’s constant need to recall the past. In Miss Ludington’s Sister, particularly, Bellamy presents the aging Ida Ludington alone with bitter memories of her lost youth; through dialogues with her nephew Paul, she begins to let go of the past and accept the inevitability of the aging

128 BELL FOR ADANO, A

process. Looking Backward, Bellamy’s fictional utopia, lays out his belief in communal living and its success through the goodness and hard work of the individual. Bellamy has garnered admiration and praise for his humanitarian intentions. He has also drawn criticism for his naïveté and his blindness to the tyrannical possibilities inherent in a powerful group. Contemporary scholars raise questions, too, about the role of women in Bellamy’s utopias, suggesting that he had little regard for women’s capabilities. While writing his last novel, Equality, Bellamy contracted tuberculosis and died of the disease the year following publication. His ideas still attract writers and readers interested in utopias, and scholars are still writing articles on his work.

NOVELS Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process. New York: Appleton, 1880. The Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays’ Rebellion. New York, Boston, & Chicago: Silver, Burdett, 1900. Equality. New York: Appleton, 1897. Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Boston: Ticknor, 1888. Miss Ludington’s Sister: A Romance of Immortality. Boston: Osgood, 1884. Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl. New York: Putnam’s, 1878.

SOURCES Bowman, Sylvia E. Edward Bellamy. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Halewood, W. H. “Catching up with Edward Bellamy,” University of Toronto Quarterly 63, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 451–461. Jehmlich, Reimer. “Cog-Work: The Organization of Labor in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and in Later Utopian Fiction.” In Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in Science Fiction, edited by Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn, 27–46. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Morgan, Arthur E. Edward Bellamy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1944. Patai, Daphne. “Utopia for Whom,” Aphra 5, no. 3 (Summer 1974): 2–16. Samuels, Warren J. “A Centenary Reconsideration of Bellamy’s Looking Backward,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 43, no. 2 (April 1984): 129–148. Widdicombe, Richard Toby. “ ‘Dynamite in Disguise’: A Deconstructive Reading of Bellamy’s Utopian Novels,” ATO 3, no. 1 (March 1989): 69–84.

BELL FOR ADANO, A JOHN HERSEY (1944) A Bell for Adano was John HERSEY’s first novel, written after publishing two books based upon his experience as a World War II correspondent covering battles in the Pacific for Life and Time magazines. Hersey received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this novel, significantly on V-E Day, celebrating the end of the fighting in Europe on May 8, 1945, with his own celebration for this recognition of his highly readable writing skills. In 1945 the book was turned into a movie that was directed by Henry King. This story about a bell evolved from an article Hersey wrote in July 1943 for Life about the real-life work of the Allied Military Government Occupied Territory (AMGOT) in Licata, Sicily. Hersey fictionalized the people mentioned in the article and the events to create a tale filled with characters and situations reminiscent of those that would appear 30 years later in the M.A.S.H. television series, which dealt overtly with a later war. Major Victor Joppolo, the son of Italian immigrants, is the AMGOT representative charged with bringing order to the town of Adano. He achieves this goal using democratic principles, thereby endearing himself to the townspeople in the process—they even arrange to have his portrait painted for display in the city hall as a surprise for him. He also manages to replace the centuriesold town bell of the title, which the Fascists had confiscated to turn into armaments one month before the Americans arrived to liberate the town. The bell arrives just as the major is being reassigned to another post for defying the arbitrary orders of a crazy general, which, if followed, would not have allowed the townspeople to function in their liberated world. When the novel first appeared, it received mixed reviews. Edward Weeks described it for Atlantic Monthly as “a morality tale with oversimplified characters to make points about the battle between good and evil” (cited in Huse, 12). Conversely, in a review for the New York Herald Tribune, Virginia Sapieha saw the novel as “underscor[ing] the traditional good will toward men which characterizes American occupation forces at their best” (cited in Huse, 11), which certainly reflects the image that politicians are trying to portray of the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Understanding the successes achieved during the

BELL JAR, THE 129

American occupation of towns in Europe during World War II by reading a fictionalized account of the experience, such as is found here in A Bell for Adano, could help people today understand why America seems to be so certain this country can help other countries achieve democracy—it worked in Europe in the 1940s; it should work again (although, of course, history has proven in the interim that these occupations are not always successful). The real lesson to be learned from reading the novel, however, maybe the one noted by history professors such as Edward Beardsley of the University of South Carolina, who have included novels such as A Bell for Adano in their curriculum because they reflect “the efforts of a perceptive contemporary to make sense of his/her own time and give it the sort of imaginative shading and emotional depth necessarily absent from textbooks” (Beardsley, 161), thereby providing students with a better understanding of the human beings who comprised the communities being studied in the classroom.

SOURCES Beardsley, Edward H. “New Sources for an Old Story: The Use of Novel, Memoir, and Essay in the History Classroom,” International Social Science Review 68, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 161–169. Hersey, John. A Bell for Adano. New York: A. Knopf, 1944. ———. “AMGOT at Work.” Life, 23 August 1943, pp. 29–31. Huse, Nancy Lyman. John Hersey and James Agee: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Internet Movie Data Base. Bell for Adano, A. Available online. URL: http://us.imdb.com. Accessed May 29, 2005. Sanders, David. John Hersey. Boston: Twayne, 1967. ———. John Hersey Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ———. “John Hersey: War Correspondent into Novelist.” In New Voices in American Studies, edited by Ray B. Browne, Donald M. Winkelman, and Allen Hayman. Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1966. Sapieha, Virginia. “With the Americans in a Sicilian Village,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 6 February 1944, p. 1. Weeks, Edward. Review of A Bell for Adano, Atlantic 173 (April 1944): 127. Peggy J. Huey

BELL JAR, THE SYLVIA PLATH (1963)

The Bell Jar, like so much of PLATH’s writing, is loosely based

on her own experiences; the novel was, in fact, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because Plath feared it might anger or hurt the people in her life on whom she modeled her characters. As with much of her poetic work, though it is based in part on her life, The Bell Jar is a complex social critique moving far beyond the conventions of memoir. In The Bell Jar, Plath uses her own experiences as a way to explore, in part, the tremendous challenges and difficulties faced by smart, ambitious young women in the social culture of America in the 1950s, a culture in which there were few, if any, roles available to women beyond those of dutiful wife and mother. A metaphor for the main character’s emotional state as she attempts to develop and define a fulfilling identity amid rigid societal restrictions, the bell jar of the novel’s title refers both to a bell-shaped glass used to protect delicate objects and to a similarly shaped glass used in scientific experiments to create a vacuum. The Bell Jar is an example of bildungsroman, and as such it has been favorably compared to other major works of the genre including The CATCHER IN THE RYE by J. D. SALINGER and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The novel’s main character, Esther Greenwood, is an extremely intelligent 19-year-old who wants to be a poet. Her mother and other figures of authority encourage her to adopt more “socially appropriate” ambitions. Esther’s deep internal conflict and fractured identity lead ultimately to an emotional breakdown and suicide attempt, and finally to Esther’s hospitalization and fraught recovery. Throughout the novel, Esther struggles to piece together an identity from all the conflicting roles she feel she must adopt—those of perfect daughter, virginal sweetheart/future wife and homemaker, savvy and sexually experienced woman— as well as those she personally strives for, such as poet, artist, and intellectual. When Esther wins a writing contest held by Ladies’ Day magazine, and she, along with several other winners from around the country, is awarded a summer job with the magazine as a guest editor, these conflicting identities become increasingly unmanageable. Esther and the other guest editors are brought to New York City, where they are endlessly photographed and treated to fancy meals by the magazine. Among the

130 BELLOW, SAUL

other guest editors, Esther encounters Doreen, the sexy and sexually assertive girl with whom she shares a room. She finds Doreen’s opposite in Betty, another guest editor whose sweet manner and air of innocence stand in stark contrast to Doreen’s personality and behavior. These two extremes reflect two of the possible identities Esther feels pressured to take on, although she can see no way to assume and balance the desirable traits from each. She agrees to go on illicit (and ultimately disastrous) double dates with Doreen, but she hides behind a fake name (Elly Higginbottom) when she does so. At other moments, she assumes a Betty-like naive and virginal persona. As the summer in New York progresses, Esther feels increasingly anxious and troubled. After enduring an attempted rape on one of the dates set up by Doreen, she leaves New York feeling more alienated and conflicted than ever. When she returns from New York, Esther is again bombarded by pressure to conform to the social and sexual models those around her deem suitable for her. She is increasingly aware of the societal double standard that values sexual experience for young men but insists on purity for young women. When she learns that she has not been accepted into an important writing class at Harvard, Esther falls more deeply into depression. She agrees to see a psychiatrist, but it is soon clear to Esther that he will merely try to make her give up her intellectual and artistic ambitions and conform to a conventional ideal of womanhood. After suffering a botched electro-shock treatment at the doctor’s hands, Esther stops her treatment with him. Feeling increasingly helpless, Esther contemplates suicide. After considering several methods (and trying and failing in several darkly comic scenes), she takes an overdose of sleeping pills and hides in the basement. She is found and revived three days later. (It is noteworthy that this suicide attempt replicates Plath’s own suicide attempt as a young woman.) Esther is hospitalized and begins to receive psychological treatment from a sympathetic female psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan. Under Dr. Nolan’s treatment, Esther finally begins to achieve a complete sense of self and her future begins to seem brighter. Nevertheless, she faces still more challenges, including the suicide of a fellow patient and her disastrous first sexual experience.

The Bell Jar provides a startling portrait of the repressive social environment of the 1950s and, in Esther Greenwood, demonstrates the fracture of identity and stifled growth that were often the result of living within such rigid societal rules, especially for a woman of intellect and ambition. The novel has also been widely praised for its fine writing and for Plath’s lyrical and imagistic prose style.

SOURCES Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Viking, 1991. Macpherson, Pat. Reflecting on The Bell Jar. New York: Routledge, 1991. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. (Victoria Lucas, pseud.). London: Heinemann, 1963. ———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil. London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago, 1991. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Nancy Kuhl

BELLOW, SAUL (1915–2005) Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, Saul Bellow continues to fascinate readers with his absurd, alienated, and marginal characters who nonetheless manage to affirm the values of dignity, courage, and the irrepressible human spirit. As scholar Ellen Pifer concludes, Bellow’s heroes, “riddled” as they are “with contrary emotions,” tend to “waver uneasily between alternate commitments—to action, fellowship and worldly self-assertion on the one hand and to stillness, contemplation and solitude on the other” (Pifer, 1). Since his initial appearance in the canon of American literature along with Bernard MALAMUD, Norman MAILER, and others, Bellow has been widely admired for his stylistic diversity, his comic vision, his sympathetic portrayal of the wandering American, and his moral and spiritual seriousness. In a writing career that spanned six decades, he produced a score of novels and novellas, two volumes of short fiction, five plays, and several works of nonfiction. Bellow was the recipient of three National Book Awards, in 1954 for The ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH, in 1965 for HERZOG, and in 1971 for MR. SAMM-

BELLOW, SAUL 131

LER’S PLANET. He also won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Humbold’s Gift. In addition to numerous honorary degrees, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988, for his outstanding contributions to American literature, and the National Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990. Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows on June 10, 1915, in Lachine, Canada, to Russian immigrant parents Abraham Bellows, a businessman, and Liza Gordon Bellows. The Bellows family emigrated to the United States when Bellow was nine; he was reared in Chicago and educated at Northwestern University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1937. After serving in the merchant marine during World War II (1944–45) and abandoning graduate school to become a writer, he worked for a time for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). His first novel, Dangling Man (1944), is a sensitive portrait of Joseph, the modern man whose limbolike existence, caused by the bureaucratic ineptitude of the draft board, ends with his decision to rush into the U.S. Army. In The Victim (1947) Asa Leventhal unwittingly causes the firing of an acquaintance, Kirby Albee, and then becomes the victim of Kirby’s rage and anti-Semitism. The Adventures of Augie March (1953) is Bellow’s first picaresque novel. Here Augie learns the value of a lifelong journey while simultaneously transcending illegal business. SEIZE THE DAY (1956) is an almost quintessential American novel. The character of Tommy Wilhelm, jobless, estranged from his wife and children, and, in the course of the novel, the hapless victim of his own unwise stock market investments, finally learns to follow the carpe diem message suggested by Bellow’s title. Generally conceded to be Bellow’s most exuberant novel, HENDERSON THE RAIN KING (1959) traces the wealthy and arrogant title character on his journey to Africa, where he confronts his own restlessness and the reality of death; Bellow is writing here about the almost biblical ideas of humility and love. In Herzog (1964), the title character, a history professor without a clear understanding of his own past, survives his wife’s affair with his best friend, but a rapprochement with reality is a bigger challenge. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970), a grimmer novel, a Nazi death-camp survivor literally

sees outward with one eye and inward with the other. He uses these abilities to comment on life after the Holocaust. Charlie Citrine, a Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist and biographer, and the protagonist of Humboldt’s Gift (1975), battles with both artistic and rational forces, represented by the poet Humboldt and the Mafia capitalist Rinaldo Cantabile. They battle Faust-like for his soul. Humboldt wins; Citrine realizes that he can maintain his commitment to art by rejecting the allure of materialism. The Dean’s December (1982) is a somber novel, set in Chicago and Bucharest, Romania, that demonstrates the injustice and power inherent in urban crime and life and the ways in which it dehumanizes those individuals who are opting for humanistic values. The message comes to readers through the inner musings of Dean Albert Corde, a former journalist. More Die of Heartbreak (1987), set in a Chicago-like city, once again features intellectuals trying to survive amid materialism and urban sprawl. Kenneth Tractenberg, a Russian literature professor at a Midwest university, narrates the tale as he reports on Benn Crader, a botanist who is being used as a pawn by his fiancée and her surgeon father. The Bellarosa Connection (1989) examines the function of memory and identity in Harry Fonstein, a Russian Jew who was rescued from Nazi Germany by a group called the Bellarosa Society. A Theft (1989) focuses on the relationship between a stolen emerald ring and the identity of its owner, Clara Velde, a thrice-divorced midwestern writer based in New York. Ravelstein (2000), perhaps misunderstood as a fictionalized account of Bellow’s friendship with University of Chicago friend and literature professor Allan Bloom, tells the story of Ravelstein, who asks his close friend Chick to write his biography. After Ravelstein, a closeted gay, dies of AIDS, and Chick himself falls seriously ill, Chick writes a moving account of their friendship. Saul Bellow was married five times—to Anita Goshkin, a social worker, in 1937; Alexandra Tschacbasov, in 1956; Susan Glassman, a teacher, in 1961; Alexandra Ionesco Tuleca, a mathematician, in 1974; and Janis Freedman, a professor, in 1989. Since 1963 he has been a permanent member of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought. A television adaptation of Seize the Day, starring Robin Williams and featuring a cameo appearance by Bellow

132 BELOVED

himself, aired on PBS on May 1, 1987. Bellow died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. Most of Bellow’s manuscripts and correspondence are housed at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. Several manuscripts of Seize the Day are held in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Actual. New York: Viking, 1997. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Viking, 1953. The Bellarosa Connection. New York: Penguin, 1989. Dangling Man. New York: Vanguard, 1944. The Dean’s December. New York: Harper, 1982. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking, 1959. Herzog. New York: Viking, 1964. Humboldt’s Gift. New York: Viking, 1975. More Die of Heartbreak. New York: Morrow, 1987. Mr. Sammler’s Planet. New York: Viking, 1970. Ravelstein. New York: Viking, 2000. Seize the Day. New York: Viking, 1956. Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales. New York: Viking, 1991. A Theft. New York: Penguin, 1989. The Victim. New York: Vanguard, 1947.

SOURCES Bach, Gerhard. The Critical Response to Saul Bellow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Bigler, Walter. Figures of Madness in Saul Bellow’s Longer Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Bloom, Harold, ed. Saul Bellow. New York: Chelsea House, 1982. Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. New York: Methuen, 1982. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laughter. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Detweiler, Robert. Saul Bellow: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1967. Dutton, Robert R. Saul Bellow. Boston: Twayne, 1971, rev. ed., 1982. Goldman, L. H. Saul Bellow’s Moral Vision: A Critical Study of the Jewish Experience. New York: Irvington, 1983. Klug, M. A. “Saul Bellow: The Hero in the Middle.” In The Flight from Women in the Fiction of Saul Bellow, edited by Joseph F. McCadden. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980. Pifer, Ellen. Saul Bellow against the Grain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Rovit, Earl, ed. Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975.

Scheer-Schaezler, Brigitte. Saul Bellow. New York: Ungar, 1972. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. Three American Moralists: Mailer, Bellow, Trilling. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Tanner, Tony. Saul Bellow. Edinburgh, Scotland: Oliver & Boyd, 1965. Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. Critical Essays on Saul Bellow. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Wasserman, Harriet. Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, A Memoir. New York: Fromm International, 1997.

OTHER Nobel Prize Internet Archive. “Saul Bellow.” Available online. URL: http://nobelprizes.com/nobel/literature/1976a.html. Accessed May 29, 2005.

BELOVED TONI MORRISON (1987)

Published in 1987 to almost universal critical acclaim, Beloved was passed over for the National Book Award that same year. In response to the “predictable . . . marginalisation and neglect of black writing by a predominantly white literary establishment” (Plasa, 14) that this oversight represented, 48 prominent AfricanAmerican authors, artists, and intellectuals signed a letter that was published in January 1988 in the New York Times Review of Books celebrating MORRISON’s body of work and protesting the fact that she had been awarded neither the National Book Award nor the Pulitzer, despite her extraordinary literary achievements. Two months later, Beloved won the Pulitzer; five years after that, in October 1993, Morrison, “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality” (Nobelprize.org.), was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Part of a trilogy that includes Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998), Beloved is set in 1873 outside Cincinnati, Ohio, but includes numerous and extensive flashbacks that focus on various aspects of the slave era of American history: the horrors of the Middle Passage, the lives of slaves on a plantation, and the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act. The central character is Sethe, a former slave who escaped from Sweet Home, a Kentucky plantation, while pregnant and gave birth to her daughter, Denver, in the woods before crossing the

BELOVED 133

Ohio River into (temporary) freedom to be reunited with her other three children, two sons and a “crawling already?” baby girl, whom she had sent ahead to wait with her husband Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs. When slavecatchers come looking for them, Sethe flees to a woodshed where she intends to kill her children in order to prevent them from having to live as slaves. She succeeds in killing only one before the slavecatchers find her; her beloved crawling already? baby daughter. Once freed from jail, Sethe trades 10 minutes of sex for one word on her daughter’s tombstone, Beloved, and returns to 124 Bluestone, which is haunted by her dead child’s ghost. After the death of Baby Suggs from despair and the flight of Sethe’s sons, Buglar and Howard, Sethe and Denver live peacefully if somewhat claustrophobically with the ghost. The arrival of Paul D, a former Sweet Home slave, upsets the balance of the household as he initiates Sethe’s recollection of the past. He banishes the ghost, only to be later forced out in return by the presence of a strange and uncanny young woman named Beloved, who appears suddenly in the yard of Sethe’s home and proceeds to take over her life, forcing Denver to engage with the outside world for the first time as she turns to the community for help in keeping her mother alive in the face of Beloved’s powerful pull, and finally in banishing her. Like memory, the text defies linearity: multiple narrators, moving back and forward in time, give voice to a wide range of experiences, speaking in fragments, in poetry, into and out of Euro-American and AfricanAmerican traditions of literature, folklore, and song. Because of its complexity, “its richness and texture . . . Beloved can and should generate many and various, even contending, interpretations” (Christian, 5). Though critical interpretations and approaches to the novel vary widely, and a number of issues, such as who or what Beloved actually is (a ghost? a repressed memory? an actual person? a witch or succubus?) are disputed, all would agree that it is a text primarily concerned with the trope of memory and the past, particularly of African-Americans. Critics have seen in Beloved the literary influence of slave narratives, and Morrison has stated the importance of slave narratives and other historical documents to her project, but also

of HAWTHORNE and FAULKNER. Morrison has been reticent to allow for the insertion of her novel into the Euro-American literary tradition, observing that criticism that justifies itself by trying to identify black writers with accepted white writers is essentially dishonest and ignores the merits of the work per se (Morrison quoted in Tate, 122). It might be fair to say instead that Beloved dialogues with canonical works of American literature, taking up the stories excluded from those works and giving voice to those long silenced by American literature and history. Morrison, in a sense, speaks into the gaps of American literature and so restores unique and significant perspectives. But even as Beloved speaks into gaps, it also creates them. It is filled with fragmented narratives, broken families, and broken sequences, such as the house number 124 (1, 2, _, 4). Important lines such as the one repeated near the end of the novel, “this is not a story to pass on,” contain multiple meanings. Is this a story not to be passed on, as in passed over? Or a story not to be passed on, as in told again? Both meanings are equally valid in a novel filled with such paradoxes. A love story, a ghost story. A story of mother-love under conditions that rendered mothering impossible. A story of memory and desire, re-memories and erasures, Beloved is a text that frames absence even as it recovers stories missing from American literary and historical discourses. Ultimately, what Sethe comes to learn is that the past cannot be refused but instead must be re-fused: recognized, claimed, and pieced back together. There are spaces that cannot be filled again, losses that are not to be forgotten or gotten over. Memory, like love, lives on, and Morrison’s characters must embrace as best they can the love and life left to them in the aftermath of terrible loss. This is not a story to pass on.

SOURCES Andrews, William, and Nellie McKay, eds. Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: A Case Book. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Burnett, Pamela. “Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved,” PMLA 112 (1997): 418–427. Christian, Barbara. “Fixing Methodologies: Beloved,” Cultural Critique 24 (Spring 1993): 5–15. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

134 BENÍTEZ, SANDRA

Horvitz, Deborah. “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 157–167. Lawrence, David. “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved,” Studies in American Fiction 19 (1991): 189–201. Plasa, Carl, ed. Toni Morrison, ‘Beloved’. Columbia Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1984.

OTHER Nobelprize.org. “Toni Morrison—Nobel Lecture.” Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/ 1993/morrison-lecture.html. Accessed May 29, 2005. Aimee Berger

BENÍTEZ, SANDRA (SONDRA BENÍTEZ ABLES) (1941– ) Sandra Benítez, author of four critically acclaimed novels set in Mexico and El Salvador, owes much of her appeal to her simple yet elegant style, although she writes about complicated human beings with stunning insight. Readers have been captivated by Benítez’s depictions of both the working class and the wealthy, and by her ability to evoke the places and events that shape their lives against complex social, political, and geographic backdrops. She is adept, too, at interjecting cultural ambiance through judiciously selected Spanish phrases. Benítez’s numerous awards include a 1999 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Bitter Grounds. Sandra Benítez was born on March 26, 1941, in Washington, D.C., to James Q. Ables, a diplomat and writer originally from Missouri, and Marta A. Benítez, a secretary and translator originally from Puerto Rico. She was educated in El Salvador, where she lived until she was 14 years old, and at Truman State University, where she earned a bachelor of science degree (1962) and a master of arts degree (1974). After divorcing her first husband, Benítez married James F. Kondrick, a writer and game inventor, in 1980. Her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers, was published in 1993 when Benítez was 52 years old. Set in Santiago, a Mexican fishing village, it features a waiter named Candelario who loses his job and learns that his wife Chayo is pregnant with their first child; they must decide whether to break their promise to adopt the unborn

child of Chayo’s sister Marta, a rape victim. In the words of a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer, this moving first novel presents the lives of a variety of women in their “mystical, fatalistic world” filled with tragedy and death as well as humor and birth (236). Her second novel, Bitter Grounds (1997), grounded in the historical and political milieu of upheaval and uncertainty, explores the lives of three generations of Salvadoran women, both the wealthy (grandmother Elena Contrera, daughter Magda, granddaughter Flor) and the servant class (Maria Mercedes and Jacinta). Benítez also counterpoints the events of the Latin American soap opera, or radio novela, to the real-life actions of her characters. Benítez’s third novel, The Weight of All Things, takes place during the 1980s civil war in El Salvador. It presents the devastating effects of war through the eyes of nine-year-old Nicolas Veras, who, when his mother is killed while protecting him, trudges to his grandfather’s hill farm only to find the village razed and the farmhouse occupied by guerrillas. In Night of the Radishes (2004), her most recent novel, Benítez returns to Mexico. Set initially in Minnesota, it features Annie Hart Rush (many of whose family members die), who embarks on a quest for her brother Hub, who has not been seen since he ran away from home at age 17 nearly two decades ago. On her journey to Oaxaca, Annie meets Joe Cruz, a Berkeley professor, and sees her present and past converge on December 23, the “Night of the Radishes.” Benitez lives with her husband in Edina, Minnesota, and is working on an unusual memoir about illness.

NOVELS Bitter Grounds. New York: Hyperion, 1997. Night of the Radishes. New York: Hyperion, 2004. A Place Where the Sea Remembers. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 1993. The Weight of All Things. New York: Hyperion, 2001.

SOURCES Belejack, Barbara, Review of Bitter Grounds, The Women’s Review of Books 15, no. 9 (June 1998): 24. Benítez, Sandra. “Home Views.” In A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 7–20. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Caron, Andrea. Review of The Weight of All Things, Library Journal 125, no. 20 (Dec 2000): 184.

BENITO CERENO 135

Fill, Grace. Review of Bitter Grounds, Booklist 94, no. 2 (September 15, 1997): 207–208. Review of A Place Where the Sea Remembers, Publishers Weekly 240, no. 29 (July 19, 1993), p. 236.

OTHER Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. “Sandra Benítez.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/ entries//benitez_sandra.html. Accessed May 29, 2005.

BENITO CERENO HERMAN MELVILLE (1855) The grim novella Benito Cereno, written in 1855 during a transitional period in MELVILLE’s career, represents a remarkable fusion of the themes and techniques that characterize his art. F. O. Mathiesson calls it “one of the most sensitively poised pieces of writing” Melville ever wrote (373). His early sea-adventure novels had been relatively well received by the critics, but his later novels explored philosophical ideas in long, Shakespearean passages. His masterpiece MOBY-DICK (1851) combined these additions with the sea-adventure, while PIERRE (1852) was in the form of the gothic novel. Critics and book buyers either could not or would not follow Melville into these new waters, and when Melville began publishing his short stories in Putnam’s (1853), he was trying once again to gain the ear of the reading public. Along with “The Encantadas,” critics considered Benito Cereno a return to Melville’s gift for writing tales about the sea. Stung by the failure of Moby-Dick, Melville moved away from the autobiographical elements of his earlier novels and drew on the travel narrative published in 1817 by real-life Amaso Delano, which he freely adapted to meet the demands of his art. Touches of the gothic abound in the gloomy tone of the descriptions, and Shakespeare echoes throughout the tale, notably in the moral ambiguities of the ending. Melville also turned to abolitionist literature for ways to treat the question of race (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was serialized in 1851). The narrative begins off St. Maria, an island near the southern tip of Chile, when Amaso Delano, captain of the Bachelor’s Delight, encounters an unknown ship. Delano, “a man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony” (184), epitomizes 19th-century American attitudes: optimistic and full of goodwill

and faith in human progress, he is nevertheless racist, anti-intellectual, and naive. Melville subtly but unmistakably satirizes him throughout the story, underscoring each instance where Delano misreads or oversimplifies the world, which, like the seascape itself, is “gray” and “fixed” like fate, dominated by a chiaroscuro of “shadows present, foreshadowing shadows to come” (161). Delano cannot make out the other ship through this murk, and despite the “lawlessness and loneliness of the spot” (161), refuses to take precautions against possible treachery. Though observant, detached, and rational, Delano misperceives and misjudges nearly every detail of the other ship; the grays of the atmosphere cloud his judgment as well as his vision. The appearance of the other ship unsettles him immediately, and this vague foreboding casts shadows across his mind, causing him to imagine the ship, on the one hand, as a “whitewashed monastery” in the Pyrenees populated by “Black Friars” (163), and on the other, as a vessel whose “keel seemed laid . . . and she launched, from Ezekiel’s Valley of Dry Bones” (164). Melville exploits these two images—of the multicultural Christianity that had once flourished on the border between Catholic France and Muslim Spain, and of the cultural upheaval and spiritual isolation found in the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible—to isolate Delano in the ambiguous moral atmosphere of the story. Delano banishes his misgivings as irrational and boards the other ship to offer assistance. Once aboard, he meets the ship’s ostensible captain, a frail Spaniard named Cereno, and his ostensible servant, the wiry and officious Babo, who relate the story of the strange “fever” that decimated the ship’s company. Babo had fabricated this tale to conceal the slave revolt, in which he, seconded by the muscular giant Atufal, had taken control of the ship. During this tale, many details of life onboard the other ship continue to unsettle Delano: the spectacle of mute Atufal in chains, the slave who strikes a sailor without punishment, the curious incident with the knot, the hidden meanings behind the glances of sailor and slave alike. Yet he continues to rationalize away each instance as signs confirming the weakness and irregularity of Cereno. Delano likewise profits nothing from the name of the other ship, the San Dominik, which suggests both

136 BERGER, THOMAS LOUIS

the medieval Catholic saint who founded the order of monks known as Black Friars, and the Caribbean island of San Domingo, site of a recent slave revolt. Either suggestion might have warned him of his mistakes: St. Dominic preached human frailty to heretics who thought they were morally superior to the world (as Delano does), while the slave revolt clearly indicated how untenable was the racism (like Delano’s) being used to underwrite slavery. But Delano cannot hear these warnings, and finds himself forced into a series of desperate actions as Cereno abandons his own ship to seek refuge with Delano, who is forced to overpower the slave ship and return with it to Spanish territory. The authorities who conduct the investigation at first think that Cereno exaggerates the events of the revolt but are forced to believe him after other sailors confirm even the most fantastic details (239). Melville believes the deposition is the key that opens all the secrets of the matter, and he gives it in its original form. But he turns back to narrative for his conclusion, which admits that the nature of the events themselves have made him choose this unorthodox method of telling the story (255). This method, which anticipates certain postmodern ideas about narrative, hides something unspoken and unspeakable in the tale, something even Melville cannot find words for: Atufal remains mute about the revolt, which Cereno describes as “past all speech” (209), while the severed head of Babo plainly communicates, “since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words” (258). Too late, Delano discovers the reality behind his comment: “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man” (216). The cannons of Delano rescue Cereno from the medieval gloom of his cabin, but his logic cannot force the fatalism from his heart; his cutlasses, likewise, might have deterred Babo from standing over Cereno like an inquisitor in that cabin and holding a straight razor to his throat, but the racism of Delano ensures that others like Babo will rise up against an unjust system. By forcing the reader to infer and piece together these conclusions, Melville dramatizes the difficulties of speaking about the manifold evils of slavery; even Melville cannot resolve these tensions into proper literary form. Melville cannot find a way to make revolt against the slave system into a triumphant discovery

and revelation of the self, as it was in the 10th chapter of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative a mere decade earlier. Babo and Atufal end the story exiled and divided not just from their homeland, but from themselves, and this tragic anticlimax anticipates the responses of 20thcentury literature toward problems of race and culture.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Herman Melville: Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers. New York: Chelsea House, 1999. Matthieson, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Melville, Herman. Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1986. Pahl, Dennis. Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Christopher Vilmar

BERGER, THOMAS LOUIS (1924– ) Thomas Berger, according to scholar and critic Brooks Landon, is America’s “most undercelebrated writer,” and a novelist and playwright of “stunning achievements” (Landon, “A Secret Too Good to Keep”). Best known for his magnum opus of the old West, Little Big Man (1964), Berger was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his 1983 novel, The Feud. Some of Berger’s protagonists reappear in more than one novel, and he is adept at depicting spies, seduction, feuds, survival, the future, murders, and detectives. According to Landon, Berger’s characters are “almost never in control” over their situations, and “consistently find themselves outmaneuvered, outsmarted, insulted, and imposed upon” (Landon, “A Secret Too Good to Keep”). That Berger creates so many fictional scenarios to portray his darkly absurd views of contemporary Americans is a tribute to his abundant talent. Thomas Berger was born on July 20, 1924, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to Thomas Charles Berger, a public school business manager, and Mildred Bubbe Berger. He was educated at the University of Cincinnati, earning his bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1948. Berger served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, and married Jeanne Redpath, an artist, in 1950. The couple met at a writer’s workshop at the New School for Social

BERGER, THOMAS LOUIS 137

Research, where Berger’s fellow students included Jack KEROUAC, Mario PUZO, and William STYRON. His first novel, the mock-heroic Crazy in Berlin (1958), based on Berger’s army experiences, describes Carlo Reinhart’s comic adventures in Germany and his disoriented return to a changed, pragmatic, and complacent America. The second book in the Reinhart quartet, Reinhart in Love (1962) continues to show the protagonist as a disoriented and disillusioned middle-class citizen who even bungles his own suicide attempt. In the novel Vital Parts (1970), Reinhart trades his freedom, individuality, and self-esteem for a corporate position in a firm that claims to freeze dead humans until their ailments can be cured sometime in the future. Reinhart’s Women (1981) completes the quartet; taken together, critics view the novels as a four-decade-long perspective on the sociology of 20th-century America. One of Berger’s most intriguing novelistic accomplishments is the way he parodies literary genres: Little Big Man is a satire on the American western, and many critics believe it to be the finest western novel of the 1960s, some say of the entire 20th century. Jack Crabb, the hero, frequently compared to James Fenimore COOPER’s Natty Bumppo, is a scout, hunter, marksman and intimate friend to the Cheyenne, Old Lodge Skins; the novel ridicules the racist view of whites toward Native Americans. Opening with three gruesome murders on Christmas Eve, Killing Time (1967) employs the perspective of a brutal murderer, Joe Detweiler, who views himself as killing time, not people, whose souls he believes he liberates. Berger’s 1973 novel, Regiment of Women, parodies the futuristic novel and portrays a society in which the usual roles of men and women have been reversed. Sneaky People (1975) is a parody of the midwestern novel, featuring childish Buddy Sandifer and his simplistic plot to murder Naomi, his shadowy wife, while he has a long-term affair with Laverne, a prostitute. Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977) satirizes the hard-boiled detective novel through Russel Wren, English instructor turned private eye, as he tracks down international criminal Teddy Villanova. Arthur Rex (1978) parodies the Arthurian legend and is notable for its presentation of the complex women of Camelot. Berger scholars compare Neighbors (1980) to a Franz Kafka novel since it uses dark, absurd humor to depict

the unsettling changes in the life of quiet Earl Keese. Harry and Ramona move into the house next door and disrupt Keese’s physical world and the reader’s view of language, individual rights, and personal freedom. The Feud (1983), which lost to William KENNEDY’s IRONWEED for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, won rave reviews for its presentation of a deeply felt conflict between the Dolf Beeler family of Hornbeck and the Bud Bullard family of nearby Millville. Nowhere (1985), a satirical rendition of the traditional spy novel, parodies such historical constructs as the cold war. In Being Invisible (1987), Fred Wagner can disappear at will, but expresses distaste for the private acts and small crimes his invisibility allows him to witness. The Houseguest (1988) is, according to reviewer Paul Gray, a novel of “comic catastrophe” about the “stable” family life of Doug and Audrey Graves. They finally realize that their houseguest is in fact an intruder uninvited by either spouse (Gray); his outrageous behavior— including the seduction of their daughter—invites anger, revenge, and thoughts of murder. Changing the Past (1990) documents the results of the protagonist’s unusual opportunity to relive his earlier years in ways of his choosing. Orrie’s Story (1990) uses the classical Oresteia to tell the tale of his modern namesake at the end of World War II. Meeting Evil (1992) opens as protagonist John Felton answers his doorbell early one Monday morning and sees Richie, a motorist who says he needs help; from this moment, John is inextricably drawn into evil and murder. In Robert Crews (1994), the alcoholic protagonist, like British novelist Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, is unprepared when his small plane crashes into a lake in the woods. In Suspects (1996), a mother and daughter, Donna Howland and infant Amanda, are murdered in a plot more grotesque, gothic, and fantastic than those of conventional murder stories. The Return of Little Big Man (1999), a sequel published 35 years after the original, again features Jack Crabb, as Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Amanda Teasdale, amalgam of the New Woman, replace the old West of Jack’s youth. Thomas Berger’s 22nd novel, Best Friends (2003), demonstrates that he has lost none of his abilities: As reviewer David Madden notes, the old and valued friendship between Sam Grandy and Roy Courtright

138 BERRIAULT, GINA

founders as the latter becomes involved with “family intrigue, deception, financial impropriety, and sex”; Sam’s heart attack becomes the occasion for a reevaluation of their relationship. Berger writes in Palisades, New York, and lives on the banks of the Hudson River, where he recently completed his 23rd novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, a novel that Berger himself describes as “a little farce about an animatronic female with a life of her own, which will be published next year.” Although he denies plans for a 24th novel, he admits that he has “several ideas” for one (Berger, quoted in Landon, “Thomas Berger”). The movie version of Little Big Man, starring Dustin Hoffman, was released in 1970; the movie version of Neighbors, starring John Belushi, was a Universal Studios release in 1981.

NOVELS Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1978. Being Invisible. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987. Best Friends. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Changing the Past. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989. Crazy in Berlin. New York: Scribner, 1958. Granted Wishes: Three Stories. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1984. The Feud. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1983. The Houseguest. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Killing Time. New York: Dial, 1967. Little Big Man. New York: Dial, 1964. Meeting Evil. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Neighbors. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1980. Orrie’s Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Nowhere. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1985. Regiment of Women. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Reinhart in Love. New York: Scribner, 1962. Reinhart’s Women. New York: Lawrence/Delacorte, 1981. The Return of Little Big Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999. Robert Crews. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Sneaky People. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Suspects: A Novel. New York: Morrow, 1996. Vital Parts. New York: Baron, 1970. Who Is Teddy Villanova? New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1977.

SOURCES Dippie, Brian W. “Jack Crabb and the Sole Survivors of Custer’s Last Stand,” Western American Literature 4 (Fall 1969): 189–202.

Fetrow, Fred M. “The Function of the External Narrator in Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man,” Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (January 1975): 57–65. Gurian, Jay. “Style in the Literary Desert: Little Big Man,” Western American Literature 3 (Winter 1969): 285–296. Hughes, Douglas. “The Schlemiel as Humanist: Thomas Berger’s Carlo Reinhart,” Cithara 15, 1 (November 1975): 3–21. Landon, Brooks. Thomas Berger. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Oliva, Leo E. “Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man as History,” Western American Literature 8 (Spring–Summer 1973): 33–54. Madden, David W. Critical Essays on Thomas Berger. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. Wylder, Delbert E. “Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man as Literature,” Western American Literature 3 (Winter 1969): 273–284.

OTHER Gray, Paul. Review of The Houseguest. Time (April 11, 1988). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:6503097. Accessed May 30, 2005. Landon, Brooks. “A Secret Too Good to Keep. (Thomas Berger’s Novels Go Unfairly Unnoticed).” World and I (October 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:111579368. Accessed May 30, 2005. Zinowitz, Michael Leigh. “The Western as Postmodern Satiric History: Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man.” Clio (January 1, 1999). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 55588220. Accessed May 30, 2005.

BERRIAULT, GINA (1926–1999)

Gina Berriault enjoyed a career that spanned several decades. She was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, both for her short-story collection, Women in Their Beds. Berriault was also the author of four critically acclaimed novels. Typically set in the San Francisco area, these novels won praise for her precise and lyrical depictions of characters in crisis, perhaps most memorably women set adrift from their traditionally male-anchored worlds. Gina Berriault was born Arline Shandling on January 1, 1926, in Long Beach, California. After graduating from high school, Berriault married and later divorced John V. Berriault, a musician, and taught cre-

BERRY, WENDELL 139

ative writing at San Francisco State University. Her first novel, The Descent (1960), featured a college history professor appointed to a cabinet-level position in Washington, D.C. He learns the futility of dealing with duplicitous politicians who are willing to start a nuclear war to enhance their power. The novel was followed by Conference of Victims (1962), about the effects of one man’s suicide on two generations of his family and on his mistress, and The Son (1966), about one woman’s desperate attempts at redefining herself through sex and seduction, including incest with her son. Berriault’s fourth novel, The Lights of Earth (1984), focuses on Ilona Lewis, a writer faced with the sudden success and fame of her lover, Martin Vanderson, a writer, who abandons her for another woman. That same year a film was made from her short story “The Stone Boy,” about a boy whose accidental killing of his brother renders him mute. Berriault wrote the screenplay for the movie, which starred Glenn Close and Robert Duvall. Berriault was the recipient of two O. Henry awards and fiction prizes from The Paris Review. After a brief illness, she died in Sausalito, California, on July 15, 1999.

NOVELS Conference of Victims. New York: Atheneum, 1962. The Descent. New York: Atheneum, 1960. The Lights of Earth. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1984. The Son. New York: New American Library, 1966.

SOURCES Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. “ ‘Don’t I Know You?’: An Interview with Gina Berriault,” The Literary Review 37 (Summer 1994): 714–723. McQuade, Molly. “Gina Berriault’s Fiction,” Chicago Tribune Book World, February 6, 1983, 10–12. Shelnutt, Eve, ed. The Confidence Woman, Twenty-Six Women Writers at Work, 129–132. Atlanta, Ga.: Long Street, 1991.

BERRY, WENDELL (ERDMAN) (1934– ) Although he made his name as an award-winning essayist and poet, Wendell Berry has amazed readers with his talent and versatility; he has written five novels and three collections of short stories, and he has won the Friends of American Writers Award for his

novel The Memory of Old Jack (1974). All his writing evokes love and respect for the land, for Berry believes that individuals must live in harmony with nature and with their community if society is to survive. As scholar Andrew A. Angyal notes, Berry’s writings celebrate the best traditions of self-sufficient agricultural communities “before it is lost forever” (Angyal, ix). A contemporary of poet Gary Snyder and Stanford classmate of Ken KESEY, both of whom have praised his work, Berry has been called an heir to 19th-century nature writer Henry David Thoreau and compared with novelist Edward Abbey and essayist Annie Dillard. His creation of a mythical fictional place—Port William, Kentucky—has prompted comparisons with William FAULKNER and others who invent their own fictional places. Wendell Berry was born on August 5, 1934, in Henry County, Kentucky. He attended the University of Kentucky at Lexington and graduated with a B.A. in English in 1956, and a master’s degree in English the following year. He married Tanya Amyx in 1957. In 1958, Berry moved with his family to the West Coast, where for the next two years he studied, wrote, and taught in the creative writing program at Stanford University. Before returning to his native state in 1964, Berry taught at New York University. In Nathan Coulter (1960), Berry’s first novel, a bildungsroman, the title character tells the story of his Kentucky farming family in the years prior to World War II. This carefully crafted novel traces Nathan’s initiation into adulthood and his commitment to the land. A Place on Earth: A Novel (1967) introduces the setting of Port William, Kentucky, and features Mat Feltner, a tobacco farmer, his wife Margaret, and their son Virgil, who is killed in World War II, Virgil’s widow, Hannah, and Jack Beechum, the crusty protagonist of Berry’s third novel, The Memory of Old Jack. The loss of the son to whom he intended to leave his farm devastates Mat, who consoles himself by working the land. In The Memory of Old Jack Berry provides an extended picture of Port William, locates the action on one September day in 1952, and parallels the passing of the old patriarch Jack Beechum to the demise of the old small-farming tradition. Omnipresent in the novel is Berry’s now familiar belief that one cannot really own the land, one can provide careful stewardship of it. He reiterates this

140 BETTS, DORIS

idea in Remembering: A Novel (1988), and in his most recent novel, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself (2000). Wendell Berry, who taught at the University of Kentucky for many years, returned to full-time farming and writing some years ago. He lives and writes on Lanes Landing Farm, the property he purchased in Port Royal, Kentucky, close to where his great-grandfather had also farmed.

NOVELS Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. The Memory of Old Jack. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974. Nathan Coulter: A Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. A Place on Earth: A Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1967. Remembering: A Novel. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1988.

SOURCES Angyal, Andrew J. Wendell Berry. New York: Twayne, 1995. Ditsky, John. “Wendell Berry: Homage to the Apple Tree,” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 7–15. Hass, Robert. “Wendell Berry: Finding the Land,” Modern Poetry Studies 2, no. 1 (1971): 16–38. Hicks, Jack. “Wendell Berry’s Husband to the World: A Place on Earth,” American Literature 50 (May 1979): 238–254. Merchant, Paul, ed. Wendell Berry. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1991. Morgan, Speer. “Wendell Berry: A Fatal Singing,” Southern Review 10 (October 1974): 865–877. Slovic, Scott. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992. Williamson, Bruce. “The Plowboy Interview: Wendell Berry,” Mother Earth News, no. 20 (March 1973): 6–12.

BETTS, DORIS (1932– ) Doris Betts is the prize-winning author of six novels and three shortstory collections. Despite her southern settings, Betts has resisted the label “southern woman writer,” and is similarly resistant to being labeled a Catholic writer. Her fiction usually focuses on working-class characters with high school educations; Betts believes that the “writer’s duty is to put into words what it is like to be a human being in this world, even for the inarticulate”

(quoted in Evans, x). Her 1981 novel, Heading West, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and Souls Raised from the Dead (1994), winner of the Southern Book Award, was named one of the 20 best books of 1994 by the New York Times. Her most recent novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997) was a critically acclaimed success as well. Doris Waugh Betts was born on June 4, 1932, in Statesville, North Carolina, to William Elmore Waugh, a mill worker, and Mary Ellen Freeze Waugh, who was active in the Associated Reformed Presbyterian Church. Betts has acknowledged the significance of Christianity in her writing. She was educated at Women’s College (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) but left after three years to marry Lowry Matthews Betts, a law student, in 1952. Betts published her first novel, Tall Houses in Winter in 1957; the protagonist, Ryan Godwin, returns to the South when he learns he is dying of cancer. The novel won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award, as did her second novel, The Scarlet Thread (1964), a chronicle of the rise and fall of the Sam Allen family and their southern community. The River to Pickle Beach (1972), her third novel, focuses on Bebe Sellers and is set during the stormy and often violent 1968 political upheavals. In Heading West, the first Betts novel to gain national attention, librarian Nancy Finch is kidnapped in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but, despite all the dangers she encounters after she escapes, she returns home to Greenway and, in an ending whose merits and meaning critics continue to debate, she marries old friend Hunt Thatcher and continues to head west in true American fashion. Souls Raised from the Dead ponders issues of spirituality, motherhood, and fatherhood as the 13year-old Mary Grace Thompson dies from kidney disease; partially responsible is her mother, Christine, whose vanity and self-absorption prevents her from donating a kidney to her daughter. Her father, Frank, struggles with her death and the role of faith in his life. In her most recent novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love, another novel of southerners in the West, the main characters Lula Stone and Madeline Lunatsky become fascinated with the story of the ill-fated Donner Party

BID ME TO LIVE 141

who resorted to cannibalism when they were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1846. During the parallel modern journey Lula, formerly a depressed anorexic, leaves Stephen Grier behind in California and heads to the Midwest and the Wisconsin farm of her new love, Paul Cowan. Betts’s later novels are about female journeys to selfdiscovery. On her retirement in 2001 from the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she taught for more than 35 years, the Doris Betts Distinguished Professorship in Creative Writing was created. The Doris Betts Fiction Prize is an annual prize competition open to any North Carolina resident, and the Doris Betts Collection of manuscripts and correspondence is housed at the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University. Doris Betts lives with her husband on Araby, their Chatham County farm near Chapel Hill, where they raise Arabian horses.

NOVELS Heading West. New York: Knopf, 1981. The River to Pickle Beach. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. The Scarlet Thread. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. The Sharp Teeth of Love. New York: Knopf, 1997. Souls Raised from the Dead. New York: Knopf, 1994. Tall Houses in Winter. New York: Putnam, 1957.

SOURCES Brown, W. Dale. “Interview with Doris Betts,” Southern Quarterly 34, no. 2 (1996): 91–104. Evans, Elizabeth. “Conversations with Doris Betts,” South Carolina Review 28, no. 2 (1996): 4–8. ———. Doris Betts. New York: Twayne, 1997. Holman, David Marion. “Faith and the Unanswerable Questions: The Fiction of Doris Betts,” Southern Literary Journal 15, no. 1 (1982): 15–23. Ketchin, Susan. “Doris Betts: Resting on the Bedrock of Original Sin.” In The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Literature, 230–259. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. McFee, Michael. “Reading a Small History in a Universal Light: Doris Betts, Clyde Edgerton, and the Triumph of True Regionalism,” Pembroke Magazine 23 (1991): 59–67. Powell, Dannye Romine. “Doris Betts.” In Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, 15–31. WinstonSalem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1994. Scura, Dorothy M. “Doris Betts at Mid-Career: Her Voice and Her Art.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Gener-

ation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, 161–179. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Wolfe, George. “The Unique Voice: Doris Betts.” In Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts. Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers, edited by John Carr, 149–173. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972.

BID ME TO LIVE H. D. HILDA DOOLITTLE (1960) The last of H. D.’s many autobiographical novels, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) portrays the struggles of a female writer to realize her personal and artistic identity. The entire novel is mediated through the mind of Julia Ashton (H. D.), moving from the breakup of her marriage with Rafe (the British poet Richard Aldington) set in wartime London to a liberating relationship with the young composer Vane or Vanio (Cecil Gray) in the Cornwall countryside. Overlying this general movement is Julia’s vexed relationship with Rico Frederick (D. H. Lawrence). The novel is also an important example of World War I fiction from a female point of view, in which Julia experiences the war as shattering the identity she had before the war as both a woman and a writer, and the novel recounts her psychological struggle out of war shock to a new and less dependent realization of herself. Bid Me to Live is stylistically demanding, and in characteristic modernist manner, Julia’s thoughts seemingly drift at random, relying heavily on free association and the repetition of key images to establish a sense of coherence. Through roughly the first half of the novel, Julia’s thoughts attempt to stop time or to escape the present as a consequence of the difficulty she has in coming to terms with her immediate situation. In some scenes, such as when she is confronted by her husband’s mistress, Bella Carter (Dorothy Yorke), the outward action is minimal and static, yet Julia’s thoughts consist mostly of flashbacks, indicating her confusion and discomfort. At other times, she focuses on the physical details of her room in an effort to achieve mental stability while blocking out the outside. This somewhat claustrophobic style begins to give way when she meets Vane, particularly when she moves out to the Cornwall countryside. The primary reasons for the breakdown of Julia’s marriage are twofold: Some time prior to the opening of the novel, Julia suffered a

142 BID ME TO LIVE

stillbirth, as a result of which she is afraid of getting pregnant again, and Rafe’s war experiences have had the inevitable effect of emphasizing his masculinity while repressing his more sensitive artistic nature. With Julia’s acquiescence, Rafe is sexually involved with Bella, who lives in the same building, although he remains strongly attached to Julia aesthetically and intellectually—as he remarks to Julia: “I love you, I desire l’autre” (56). Reluctantly, Julia comes to the painful realization that she cannot recapture the balanced, aesthetically based relationship she and Rafe had before the war, which is glimpsed in flashbacks, so she gropes toward a new sense of herself. It is Rico’s presence that hovers most persistently in Julia’s mind, although his appearance in the immediate action of the novel is quite brief, when he and his wife, Elsa (Frieda Lawrence), take temporary refuge in the Ashtons’ London apartment after being evicted from their Cornwall cottage because Elsa is German. Psychologically, Julia turns to Rico because he was among the first to give her affirmation as a poet in the prewar period, and so he serves as partial compensation for the loss of Rafe. Rico challenges Julia to “kick over your tiresome house of life” (80), but, like Rafe, is dismissive of aspects of her writing. During the Fredericks’ brief stay with the Ashtons, Julia interprets Rico’s ambiguous statement, “you are there for all eternity; our love is written in blood . . . for all eternity” (78), as an invitation to enter into a closer relationship, only to have him withdraw from her touch “like a hurt animal” (81), when she attempts to approach him the next day. As several commentators have pointed out, in her depiction of Rico, H. D. implicitly critiques Lawrence who in his works advocated the body, touch, and sexuality, but in his own life was often rather inhibited. With the departure of the Fredericks, Vane arrives and literally draws Julia out of the closed shell of her room and debilitating relationships by persuading her to venture out, despite a Zeppelin air raid, for dinner and a film. The move out of London into the Cornwall countryside is clearly a progression away from war and her past into a setting of spiritual renewal and redefinition. In contrast to the cramped and frequently intruded-upon apartment in the city, she has her own workroom, and when she goes out for walks, she feels

in touch with natural and archaic powers. Although her relationship with Vane is in a sense a revival of the artistically balanced relationship she previously had with Rafe, Julia continues to feel the prevailing presence of Rico, who she senses is responsible for sending Vane to her. Unexpectedly in the penultimate chapter, the narrative switches to the first person as Julia directly addresses Rico in a notebook she does not intend to show him. This reflects Julia’s renewed sense of confidence as she replays a common H. D. strategy with respect to various male mentor figures and lovers in her life, who have in one way or another rejected her or failed to fairly understand her writing. On the one hand, Julia needs to resist psychologically the sting of Rico’s criticisms of her work, as well as his spurning of a more intimate relationship. At the same time she wants to sustain their relationship on a newly conceived basis that does not depend on whether or not he reciprocates. This deeper basis is aesthetic and spiritual, and the concluding pages of the novel are a paean to the creative spirit. Julia adopts the term gloire (taken from a poem by Lawrence) and uses the example of van Gogh’s paintings, in which, for example, a tree is not merely the result of the creative impulse but is its very embodiment: “Because of him alive in the cypress tree, alive in his mother, the cypress would be deified” (181). Identifying this sense of gloire with the maternal creativity of birth, Julia insists on a nongendered source of creativity that Rico is effectively repressing in his gender-based criticisms of her work. Thus the novel ends not only with Julia’s assertion of her own gloire and the authenticity of her work, but also with an implicit challenge to Rico to rediscover the true springs of his own genius.

SOURCES Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. H. D. Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal). New York: Dial Press, 1960. Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. H. D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Milicia, Joseph. “Bid Me to Live: Within the Storm.” In H. D. Woman and Poet, edited by Michael King, 279–288. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986.

BIGGERS, EARL DERR 143

Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. “Style in H. D.’s Novels.” In H. D.: Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, 27–44. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

BIGGERS, EARL DERR (1884–1933)

Earl Derr Biggers created Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective who appeared in eight of Biggers’s novels and in nearly 50 Hollywood films. (A total of six different actors played the role of Chan.) The first novel to feature Charlie Chan, The HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY, was published in 1925, and the final book in this series, Keeper of the Keys, appeared in 1932. Earl Derr Biggers was born on August 26, 1884, in Warren, Ohio, to Robert Biggers and Emma Derr Biggers. He attended Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1907. Biggers was supposedly fired as drama critic of the Boston Traveller because he unhesitatingly “roasted” bad plays at Boston theaters. Although he had almost no money, Biggers wrote his first novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), which was successful not only with the reading public but also with playgoers; George M. Cohan dramatized it and Seven Keys to Baldpate enjoyed a triumph on Broadway and became the basis of four different films, released in 1917, 1925, 1929, and 1945 (Berlin, 36). After publishing two additional novels, Love Insurance (1914) and The Agony Column (1916), as well as several fairly well-received plays, he published The House without a Key. When it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, its protagonist, the first Chinese-Hawaiian-American detective, appealed to myriad readers. As scholar Vincent Starrett observed, Chan, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, became a detective who is larger in the public’s memory than the actual crimes he helps to solve. Biggers followed with five more Charlie Chan novels: The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind That Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), and Keeper of the Keys (1932). The conception of Charlie Chan, Biggers said, occurred in 1919 when he was vacationing in Hawaii and read a newspaper article about two Honolulu detectives named Chang Apana and Lee Fook, who had just solved a case; Biggers was so intrigued that he invented Charlie Chan (Berlin, 36–37), promoting him

to Inspector Chan of the Honolulu Police by the end of the series. For his era, his intentions appeared benign, in spite of interviews where he said that “sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff, but an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order had never been used” (quoted in Williams). Today, with the rise of AsianAmerican studies, Charlie Chan’s image has undergone a drastic change. As the creation of a white man who knew nothing of Chinese Americans, much less Chinese nationals, he is considered at best politically incorrect, at worst, an insulting stereotype. Earl Derr Biggers died at age 49 of a heart attack on April 5, 1933, at his home in Pasadena, California, but Charlie Chan continues to make the news. Respected Asian-American writers such as Elaine Kim and Jessica HAGEDORN have published a collection entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead (1993), decrying the “Oriental” stereotype. Howard M. Berlin, on the other side, has published The Charlie Chan Encyclopedia (2000), an A-to-Z fact book for the many fans of Charlie Chan around the world.

NOVELS The Agony Column. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1916; published as Second Floor Mystery, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930. Behind That Curtain. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1928. The Black Camel. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1929. Celebrated Cases of Charlie Chan. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1933. Charlie Chan Carries On. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1930. The Chinese Parrot. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1926. Fifty Candles. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1926. The House without a Key. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1925. Inside the Lines. (With Robert Welles Ritchie). Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1915. Keeper of the Keys. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1932. Love Insurance. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1914. Seven Keys to Baldpate. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1913.

SOURCES Berlin, Howard M. The Charlie Chan Encyclopedia. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2000.

OTHER Williams, Patrick. “Charlie Chan and the Case of the Cop Who Inspired Him.” The Charlie Chan Family Home.

144 BIG SLEEP, THE

Available online. URL: http://charliechanfamily.tripod. com/id78.html. Accessed August 22, 2005.

BIG SLEEP, THE RAYMOND CHANDLER (1939) Many readers wrongly consider Raymond CHANDLER’s novels to be mere detective stories. The subtle nuances that mimic harsh reality in the plotlines and characterizations, however, help elevate Chandler’s work beyond the genre. This gritty realism could, in part, be a result of Chandler’s late start in his writing career; he was 45 when he began to publish his work. He produced only one collection of short-stories and seven novels. However, Chandler’s first novel, The Big Sleep, established him as a true master of the American detective story. Initially the plot of The Big Sleep seems simple. An established and wealthy family, the Sternwoods, is being blackmailed and sends for the archetypal hardboiled private detective, Philip Marlowe. However, if in fact the blackmail situation was the driving force behind the Sternwoods’ hiring of Marlowe, the novel would have been substantially shorter and far less complex than the final product that the readers encounter. The complications come into play when the question of the blackmail becomes secondary to the job of locating a former bootlegger and common ruffian, Rusty Regan, the missing husband of the eldest Sternwood daughter. Although Regan never actually appears in the novel, he becomes the elusive object of desire for each member of the Sternwood clan, and in light of this, his character can be decoded in various ways. For General Sternwood, Regan represents a connection to the general’s lost youth, rebellion, and sense of adventure. Without Regan, the general is, as Chandler suggests, little more than a decrepit shell of a man, fully separated from a former glorious masculinity. In a similar fashion, Regan provided his wife, Vivian, with admission into the rather masculine and exciting world of crime. Indeed, as the case develops, Chandler often shows the masculine qualities of Vivian’s character in relation to her ability to participate in some illegal, or at least seedy, activity. Unlike the general, Vivian only needed Regan as a key into this criminal world and is fully able to function without him. However, just as a key can open new doors, a key can also formally lock them.

Vivian becomes concerned with her husband’s whereabouts because his disappearance makes her position in the underworld unstable. For Carmen, the youngest of the Sternwoods, Regan represents the final object she needs in her quest to achieve some perverse, and ultimately insane, mimicry of Vivian’s life. It is in this role as reluctant accessory to Carmen’s fantasy that Regan ultimately meets his death. With Regan’s absence, Carmen’s psychosis remains invisible to others. Although Chandler deals with archetypal figures such as the hard-boiled private dick, the aging patriarch, the flirtatious girl, and the sophisticated and sexually charged woman, the notable feature of these characters is that they always appear strikingly real. Unlike other writers in this genre at the time, Chandler’s characterizations exceed predictability and do not rely on conventional portrayals of good and evil. He destabilizes the traditionally held notion that the good guys always win in the end. Chandler is even able to disrupt the ghoulishness of the noir genre by creating characters that have bizarre psychological dysfunctions rather than focusing on ironic or dark crimes. In Chandler’s work the reader finds benevolent mobsters, moral petty thieves, virtually mute stool pigeons, fanged Kewpie-doll girls, and wildly progressive Victorian elders. Even with this seemingly oxymoronic collection of characters, the reader struggles to understand fully the various motivations that link each character to his or her actions. In The Big Sleep, the reader can understand the Sternwoods’ actions based on each family member’s connection to Regan; however, with characters not directly related to Regan, the question of motivation becomes much more complex and unique to the character’s independent personality. Most pointedly, Marlowe is not motivated to solve this case because he feels a need to correct a social injustice, but instead for the satisfaction of a job well done. Similar motivations of personal gain and integrity are mirrored in many of the other characters in the novel. Emotions have little or no space in a world ruled by the individual and personal achievements. This lack of emotional motivation also helps Chandler to escape the archetypal format of so many detective and mystery novels.

BILLY BUDD, SAILOR 145

In 1946, The Big Sleep caught the eye of the Warner Brothers’ executives, and the story was purchased and sent into production. Directed by the well-respected Howard Hawks and staring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Chandler’s novel was adapted to the screen by Nobel laureate William FAULKNER with assistance from Leigh Brackett and Jules Furtherman. Although Warner had the mastery of Faulkner, Hawks, Bogart, and Bacall on their side, the final version of the film suffered from strict censorship guidelines that limited the driving plots of the blackmail case and the psychological instability of the youngest Sternwood daughter, so as to only hint at the sexual perversions in play. This created a confusing line of motives for the two main deaths in the story. Warner executives also added a handful of scenes to showcase Bacall with the hope of attracting more male moviegoers. These additional scenes made the plotline even more convoluted than Chandler’s original.

SOURCES Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Linder, Daniel. “Chandler’s The Big Sleep,” Explicator 59, no. 3 (Spring 2001): 137–140. Van Dover, J. K., ed. The Critical Responses to Raymond Chandler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995. Wertheim, Mary. “Philip Marlowe, Knight in Blue Serge,” Columbia Library Columns 37, no. 2 (1988): 13–22. Michael Miga

BILLY BUDD, SAILOR HERMAN MELVILLE (1924) Herman MELVILLE began writing the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor in 1886 near the end of his life. Although distinct parallels exist between the story and the historic Somers mutiny of 1842, in which Melville’s cousin was involved as an officer aboard the warship, the author did not begin his final work of prose fiction with the idea of dramatizing that incident. Indeed, the Somers mutiny is but one of a multitude of diverse historical and literary sources from which he drew. Not quite complete at the time of his death in September 1891, the novelette remained unpublished until 1924, soon after its first editor, Raymond Weaver, acquired the heavily revised handwritten manuscript, quickly edited

it, and added it to the standard edition of Melville’s Complete Works, which he had prepared for Constable in London two years earlier. Although several later editions appeared over the next four decades, not until 1962 was a thoroughly researched scholarly version of Billy Budd finally published, edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., after their exhaustive study of the manuscript and related documents. Their edition includes a “reading text” for general readers and a “genetic text” for scholars that reproduces as nearly as possible Melville’s complex manuscript in printed form with all its overwritten, inserted, and patched-on segments incorporated via a system of editorial marks and symbols. Read in conjunction with the editors’ history and explanations of the text, the genetic text reveals that Melville composed Billy Budd in three stages beginning with a poem, “Billy in the Darbies,” that ironically closes the final version; he moved next to the section that describes John Claggart, and finally to the long concluding portion that emphasizes Captain Edward Fairfax “Starry” Vere. Most readers will be satisfied with the reading text alone, but serious students of Melville’s novelette will need the invaluable genetic text with its accompanying charts, tables, and other data for a fuller, richer understanding of what he had in mind when he drafted his cryptic “inside narrative.” The importance of that genetic text notwithstanding, however, the straightforward one has sufficed for most readers of Billy Budd, and it will continue to do so because their interest is first in the story and its components, and only afterward in how technicalities of its composition can affect interpretation. The basic story is simple enough. At 21, an experienced but innocent British sailor is impressed onto a 74-gun battleship, the Bellipotent, from a merchantman, the Rights of Man, on which he was the favorite of both captain and crew. Billy was a foundling believed to have been of noble birth. This “Handsome Sailor” is soon equally admired aboard the Bellipotent by all but John Claggart, masterat-arms, also perhaps highly born. The influential narrative voice, which goes beyond merely telling the story, proposes that Claggart’s antagonism to Billy is caused by the officers “depravity according to nature,”

146 BILLY BUDD, SAILOR

as if he were a manifestation of the biblical “mystery of iniquity,” although hints are also given of other, more earthly, possible causes, such as envy and homoerotic attraction (75, 76, 108). In subtle, devious ways he implicates Billy in petty offenses without the sailors realizing who is harassing him or why; when an old Danish tar suggests it is the master-at-arms, Billy is incredulous because he knows he has done nothing to deserve such treatment. Ultimately, Claggart, unable to suppress his bitterness toward Billy any longer, speaks with Captain Vere, falsely charging the innocent sailor with attempting to instigate a mutiny, and the skeptical captain sees no alternative to having Billy respond to the charges. Both illiterate and inarticulate, Billy usually stutters but under pressure cannot speak at all; therefore, uncontrollably outraged, he strikes Claggart in the captain’s quarters with one heavy blow of his fist and kills him. Moments later, Vere musters a drumhead court from among his officers; insisting that martial law necessitates finding Billy guilty of fatally striking an officer, the captain persuades the court to overcome sympathy for the sailor, and Billy is hanged the next morning. The dreadful episode leads to fanciful accounts by the crew, the official record, and the press; ironically, the coda is “Billy in the Darbies,” and as may be expected, it no longer reflects Billy as presented in the preceding narrative. But Billy Budd is considerably more than the story of a sailor falsely charged and executed. As noted above, the narrator specifically identifies two of the three central figures with moral principles, Billy with good and Claggart with evil. The third primary character, however, Captain Vere, is treated far more ambiguously; at some points, the narrator appears sympathetic with his attitude and values, whereas elsewhere he implies that they are questionable at best. To a much smaller degree the same may be said of the narrator’s portraits of Billy and Claggart. Although Billy is the “Handsome Sailor,” innocent and able, he is also simple-minded and animal-like on the order of a songbird or a loyal dog. Claggart has an evil nature among other dishonorable qualities, but he is also an ambitious and capable officer; he has a heart, too, and “could even have loved Billy but for Fate and ban”

(88). As for Captain Vere, he is a meditative intellectual with ability and integrity but little imagination; he reads voluminously but only such expository works as history and philosophy; his books include no fiction, drama, or poetry. At some times he is like a father to Billy, reflecting the author’s own love for his two sons, who died young, but at others he is a strict authoritarian, the voice of martial law; for Vere “forms, measured forms, are everything” (128). His death comes when he is shot in battle, and his last words are “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” (129). If Billy is perceived as a sacrificial Christ-figure in his innocence and goodness, and Claggart as satanic, then Captain Vere may be regarded as godlike. With this in mind, some readers consider Billy’s final words at the yardarm, “God bless Captain Vere!” (123), indicative of Melville’s own ultimate testimony of acceptance after a lifetime of uncertainty and, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, anticipation of annihilation after death. But this idea of Melville’s symbolically announcing his acceptance of Christian truth, with “lamb-like” Billy taking “the full rose of the dawn” at his hanging, is far from unanimous (44, 124). Instead, despite the seemingly allegorical symbolism of the novelette, doubters perceive deep irony underlying the story. They emphasize the ambiguity that Melville purposefully invested to a limited extent in Billy and Claggart, to a much greater degree in Vere, and particularly in what critics have called the narrator’s “smoky” language. Among other stylistic devices, this includes abundant double negatives (“never injudiciously so,” “it was not improbable that” [60, 113]) and diction suggesting a lack of commitment (“may . . . seem somewhat equivocal,” “a rumor . . . nobody could . . . substantiate . . . would . . . have seemed not altogether wanting in credibility” [64, 65]). Such language is typical of Hawthorne’s intentionally suggestive usage, and Melville’s allusion to the symbolism in “The Birthmark” early in Billy Budd (53) implies that he may have been rereading Hawthorne’s tales as he composed his novelette. The narrator’s subtle vagueness also complements the theme of prudence woven through the work. Implicitly comparing Captain Vere’s aims, values, and capabilities with those of the British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson, the narrator discusses prudence as

BIRD ARTIST, THE 147

a questionable asset for a true military leader, in contrast to fervent patriotism, “love of glory,” and intrepidity in battle (58). Captain Graveling of the Rights of Man, from which Billy is impressed, prudently holds his tongue on losing the beloved “Handsome Sailor” from his crew. Similarly, experience has taught the Old Dansker, whom Billy consults about apparent harassment, the “bitter prudence that never interferes in aught and never gives advice” (86), and on recognizing Vere’s anomalous behavior while standing over the dead Claggart, the “prudent surgeon” is disturbed, but he nonetheless says nothing (100). Vere is prudent, too, when he orders Billy’s execution to squelch the possible threat of mutiny. Finally, Billy’s own prudence leads him to lie when asked in the trial if he has heard whispers of mutiny aboard; although an afterguardsman did attempt to bribe him to cooperate in such a venture, he denies it to protect himself, to avoid implicating others on the crew, or perhaps both. Apart from MOBY-DICK, none of Melville’s writings has received more critical—and more controversial— attention than Billy Budd because of its power and ambiguity. In recent years the novelette has been subjected to deconstructive, historical, psychoanalytic, sociological, political, and new-historicist readings, among others, that continue to throw more light on it, but additional light casts new shadows that further obstruct definitive interpretation. Consequently, “the deadly space between” (74) the knowable and the inscrutable in Melville’s “inside narrative” is never likely to be fathomed or bridged to the satisfaction of all readers. As the narrator acknowledges, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges” (128), and so it is with the enigmatic Billy Budd, Sailor.

SOURCES Adler, Joyce Sparer. “Billy Budd and Melville’s Philosophy of War and Peace.” In War in Melville’s Imagination, 160–185. New York: New York University Press, 1981. Marovitz, Sanford E. “Herman in the Darbies: Melville’s Dead-Wall Meditations on Readings from Europe in Billy Budd, Sailor,” Essays in Arts & Sciences 32 (Fall 2003): 61–73. ———. “Melville Among the Realists: W. D. Howells and the Writing of Billy Budd,” American Literary Realism 34 (Fall 2001): 29–46.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Milder, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Parker, Hershel. Reading Billy Budd. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. “Innocence and Infamy: Billy Budd, Sailor,” In A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John Bryant, 407–430. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Stafford, William T., ed. Melville’s Billy Budd and the Critics, 2nd ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Sanford E. Marovitz

BIRD ARTIST, THE HOWARD NORMAN (1994) The Bird Artist, Howard NORMAN’s second novel, is the story of a man struggling to come to terms with his own identity. The novel’s narrator, Fabian Vas, strives to integrate two very disparate parts of his sense of self; he announces these conflicting pieces of himself, as well as several other crucial elements of the novel, in the very first paragraph: “My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though: I am a bird artist, and I have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself” (3). The novel is the story of how Fabian came to kill Witless Bay’s lighthouse keeper. It is also, and perhaps more significantly, the story of how Fabian and the rest of the small town’s residents begin to understand the ways the murder has transformed their lives and relationships. The novel takes place in 1911 in a town so isolated from the rest of the world that the mail comes to town by boat, and only during the summer months. Fabian Vas, employing skills developed through a mail-order art class with a magazine illustrator, leads a satisfying life earning a little money contributing drawings of birds to magazines such as Bird Lore. He had, for years, been spending several nights a week with Margaret Handle, the sexy, assertive, hard-drinking daughter of Witless Bay’s mail-boat captain.

148 BLACK BOY

Things begin to change dramatically when Fabian’s parents decide he should marry. They arrange a marriage on his behalf with a woman from a distant town, his fourth cousin Cora Holly. Though Fabian opposes the marriage, his parents will not relent. Fabian’s father, Orkney, has to leave Witless Bay to earn the money necessary for the wedding. Soon after Orkney’s departure, Fabian’s emotionally fragile mother, Alaric, promptly begins an affair with Botho August, the lighthouse keeper. Though Botho is a private man who’d “rather be up in his crow’s nest than down among common men” (28), he is also a romantic figure in Witless Bay. We soon learn he has also been sleeping with Margaret Handle. Fabian tries to negotiate this complex situation, but his hatred for Botho eventually drives him to murder. The richness of The Bird Artist is a result not of Fabian’s retelling of his story, but instead of the atmosphere Norman creates through an exceptional awareness of compelling and suggestive detail. Norman portrays Witless Bay and its frozen northern terrain and places with peculiar names like Shoe Cove and Dog Tooth Harbor as dreary, cold, ever-present manifestations of the palpable tensions being played out among Fabian, Botho August, Margaret, Alaric, and the other town residents. Norman also populates Witless Bay with a great many quirky, troubled, dark, occasionally funny characters. The web of relationships among the townspeople, and the fact that Witless Bay is the kind of small village where everyone knows everything about everyone else, adds both to the novel’s tension and the undercurrent of inevitability that runs through every expression and gesture of the story’s key characters. The attempts of Fabian Vas and Witless Bay to reconcile his double identities of artist and killer reveal much about the human struggles for self-awareness, compassion, and empathy. Because Norman borrows something in the novel’s tone and color from magical realism, these struggles unfold in unexpected, even startling ways that seem to be revealed as much by the sea, the cold, and the birds Fabian Vas observes and paints as they are by human word and action.

SOURCES Jones, Louis B. Review of The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman, New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1994, p. 7.

Norman, Howard. The Bird Artist. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1994. Nancy Kuhl

BLACK BOY RICHARD WRIGHT (1945) Black Boy, the first book-length installment of Richard WRIGHT’s novelistic autobiography, was a Book-of-theMonth Club selection, the second of Wright’s works to be so recognized, the other being his enormously popular and important first novel NATIVE SON (1940). In Black Boy, Wright delineates his coming-of-age in the segregated South of the early 20th century. The narrative opens when Wright is about four years old and ends when he leaves the South for Chicago when he is 19. Rather than recount his growth and development in strict chronological terms, Wright fashions his narrative around certain guiding themes that characterized his life in the South, principal among those being fear, hunger, and deprivation. Moreover, Wright transcends his own individual experience and captures the experiences of countless black males who grow up in a South that does not recognize them as men and does not nurture them as human beings. In a 1945 interview with John McCaffery, Wright noted, “I wanted to lend, give my tongue, to voiceless Negro boys” (Kinnamon and Fabre, 65). In so doing, Wright achieves something of a primer for growing up black in the Deep South, a lesson he had first offered in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” a previously published essay that appears as the opening chapter of Black Boy. One primary theme that Wright deals with extensively in Black Boy is the intense racism that every African American was subjected to in the South. This racism not only characterized Wright’s own early life, but also was an aspect of southern life that he examined in a number of his short stories and novellas. One especially harrowing experience was the murder of Wright’s Uncle Hoskins by white Arkansans who wanted to control his lucrative saloon business. The family had to flee Arkansas to escape a similar fate. The fear engendered by these and other acts of violence is a second primary aspect of life for blacks in the South during the first third of the 20th century and Wright shows how this fear becomes a stunting if not altogether paralyzing fac-

BLACK OXEN 149

tor in the lives of black boys in particular. The presence of this fear made Wright determined “to render a judgment on [his] environment” (64). Perhaps the most far-reaching characteristic of Black Boy is its focus on hunger, in both its physical and spiritual dimensions. Having been abandoned by their husband and father, Wright’s mother, often ill from a stroke, and her sons were frequently hungry. Just as Frederick Douglass noted in his Narrative that the cruelest behavior of whites toward their slaves was to deprive them of food, Wright echoes a similar sentiment in his autobiography where he claims that one of the most painful and debilitating aspects of growing up black in the South was the lack of sustenance. Despite their best efforts, including young Wright’s taking on many odd jobs to help out with expenses, the family rarely had enough to eat. Spiritual hunger is another aspect of hunger that Wright deals with extensively in Black Boy. This type of hunger manifests itself in the absence of the father, in Wright’s inability to pursue an education in a sustained manner, and in the treachery he often experienced at the hands of fellow African Americans, including members of his own family, for either not knowing his place or refusing to accept the subservient roles expected of him as a black boy in the segregated South. The quest for an education was particularly frustrating for young Wright, and the fact that reading any book except the Bible was considered sinful by his fundamentalist Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother did much to embitter Wright against organized religion. Hunger was such an impediment to Wright’s developing a wholesome perspective about the South that he used “American Hunger” as the working title for the autobiography. At the suggestion of his editor, the narrative was divided into two parts, with Black Boy chronicling the years in the South and American Hunger, published posthumously, chronicling his early years in the North. The text has since been restored and both installments appear under the single title of Black Boy. As black autobiography goes, Richard Wright’s Black Boy stands as a remarkable document of the problems attendant on growing up black in the American South. Its literary merit is fur-

ther enhanced by the author’s supremely competent handling of character development, setting, imagery, and theme.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Brigano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University Press of Pittsburgh, 1970. Gayle, Addison, Jr. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1980. Kinnamon, Keneth, and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. [1945]. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Warren J. Carson

BLACK OXEN GERTRUDE ATHERTON (1923) Black Oxen simultaneously earned critical acclaim and prompted scorn and shock. Called drama, romance, and science fiction in its 1924 film release from Frank Lloyd Productions, the book went into 14 printings in a single year. The film’s popular stars, Corinne Griffin, Thomas S. Guise, and Clara Bow, as well as the controversy (including a condemnation from America’s pulpits) that the book generated, and Boni Liveright Publishers’ incredibly astute use of publicity, probably aided the book’s high sales, but even most critics eventually agreed that parts of the book represented some of ATHERTON’s best work. As critic Charlotte McClure and reviewers have attested, part of Atherton’s literary strength—and weakness—rested in her refusal to fit any particular classification; she avoided pure realism, pure naturalism, and pure sentiment or romanticism, and assiduously shunned labeling herself or her work as regionalist. She observed and reported but never conclusively analyzed, and as a result, her fiction often contained irreconcilable ambiguities that the critics pounced upon as evidence of a lack of depth in her work. Somewhat like an impressionistic painter, she used the canvas of her characters to paint the portrait of the intellectual, social, and political America of her times.

150 BLACK OXEN

Like many other American authors of her time, she could not escape that call to examine the past’s relationship to the present, the European influence in the Western world, and the rising tide of bourgeois influence amid the supposedly classless American society. And in her examinations, women constituted a class in themselves, a class she recognized as wrongly considered inferior by society. Atherton consciously strove not to follow tradition, and often that unwillingness to do so earned her fiction the labels “immoral,” “wild,” “uncouth,” “too sensational,” “unpredictable,” and “unladylike.” The critics most especially condemned her attitude about sexual freedom and her presentation of women who were stubborn nonconformists straying too far from the female ideal. Atherton maintained that her characters represented real women and her books showed the need for improving society and the way to do it. Black Oxen stands as no exception to Atherton’s approach. Its leading character, Madame Marie Zattiany, arrives in Manhattan and intrigues its bourgeois social set because of her beauty and energy and her surprising similarities to a former member of their social set, Mary Ogden. In actuality, she is Mary Ogden, but because she has undergone the Steinach treatment, in which she has had her ovaries irradiated, her youthful appearance, energy, and sexuality belie her age of 58. Lee Clavering, a 30-year-old playwright, falls in love with her and proposes marriage, much to the dismay of the 18-year-old Janet Ogelthorpe, a flapper who cannot comprehend Clavering’s dismissal of her in favor of his attraction to an old woman. Ultimately, Marie Zattiany refuses to marry Clavering— who then settles for Janet Ogelthorpe—and instead agrees to marry Prince Hohenhaur so that she can return to Europe in a position of power and continue her relief work. That power emerges as a crucial element of the theme of the text, for even as Marie Zattiany focuses on her beautiful, youthful, and sensual appearance, she wants that youth and sexuality primarily for the power and energy they can bring to her. “The bare idea of that old game of prowling sex fills [her] with ennui and disgust” (172); the power she seeks moves beyond mere physical attraction or physical acts of love. As Leider

contends, in Black Oxen what conquers is not love but solitary strength; a strong woman can triumph even over time. The Steinach treatment’s glory is that in the Darwinian struggle to survive and dominate, it provides a competitive edge (303). Marie Zattiany clearly wins the competition with strength and purpose. That competition, however, goes on not just among the women of the text. The novel presents as one of its essential themes the battle between past and present, between the morals of a previous era and those of the current one, and between the original concept of the new woman and the existing execution of that vision. These conflicts reveal themselves particularly in the juxtaposition of the female characters, with Janet Ogelthorpe representing the quintessential flapper whose behavior suggests “the limited use to which the flapper [is] putting her new freedom” (Forrey, 196); with Jane Ogelthorpe, Janet’s mother, symbolizing the Victorian woman unable to change or control her own life and who has “done [her] duty by the race . . . [has] brought up [her] sons to be honorable and selfrespecting men . . . and [her] daughters in the best traditions of American womanhood” (193); and with Marie Zattiany standing for the woman of power, grace, and intelligence, who embraces outwardly the Victorian feminine ideal, but who inwardly commands the true ideal of the new woman of autonomy and strength. While Leider, McClure, Forrey, Bookman’s critic Frederick Taber Cooper, a host of readers, and even Atherton’s friends Carl Van Vechten and James D. Phelan have found Black Oxen an autobiographical work based upon Atherton’s own experimentation with rejuvenation through hormone and X-ray treatments, the book goes well beyond mere autobiography and commentary on vanity and appearances to reveal an analysis of a post–World War I America caught up in the exterior elements of life and being to the exclusion of the interior and the intellect, in what Atherton condemns as America’s “lack of brains” (Atherton, Adventures of a Novelist, 562) in a “world falling to ruins” (345). Her heroine gives up the romantic love of Clavering so that she might have the power to do more than raise and care for a man and a child, so that she might have the power to use her “splendid mental

BLATTY, WILLIAM PETER 151

gifts, [her] political genius . . . [to become] the most useful woman in Europe” (322–323). That usefulness makes of woman more than a Victorian conformist or a superficial flapper; it makes of her a shaper of the world.

SOURCES Atherton, Gertrude. Adventures of a Novelist. New York: Arno Press, 1980. ———. Black Oxen. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Bruce, John. Gaudy Century: The Story of San Francisco’s Hundred Years of Robust Journalism. New York: Random House, 1948. Cowie, Alexander. The Rise of the American Novel. New York: American Book, 1948. Crow, Charles L. Itinerary Criticism: Essays on California Writers. Bowling Green, Ohio: Press of Bowling Green, 1978. Cummins, Ella Sterling. “California Writers and Literature.” In The Story of the Files. n.p.: California World’s Fair Commission, Columbia Exposition, 1893. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Forrey, Carolyn. “Gertrude Atherton and the New Woman.” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1971. Leider, Emily Wortis. California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. McClure, Charlotte S. “A Bibliography of the Works by and about Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 9 (1976): 119–126. ———. Gertrude Atherton. No. 23 of Boise State University Western Writers Series, edited by Wayne Chatterton, James H. Maguire, and Dale K. Boyer. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1976. ———. Gertrude Atherton, edited by David J. Nordlon. TUSAS 324 of Twayne’s United States Authors Series Boston: Twayne, 1979. ———. “Gertrude Atherton and Her San Francisco: A Wayward Writer and a Wayword Paradise,” IN (1995): 73–95. Patricia J. Sehulster

BLATTY, WILLIAM PETER (1928– )

The Exorcist, a horror novel published in 1971, made a tremendous impact on the popular imagination, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for

more than a year. This novel by William Peter Blatty has been compared with Thomas Tryon’s The Other and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby in the way they use the horror fiction genre. To cite critic Gary Hoppenstand’s words, their horror fiction uses “grotesque violations” of respected “American institutions and traditions” (Hoppenstand, 36). Blatty was awarded a Silver Medal, California Literature Medal Award for the novel, and a Golden Globe award for the best screenplay for the film, The Exorcist. William Peter Blatty was born on January 7, 1928, in New York City, to Lebanese immigrants Peter Blatty, a carpenter, and Mary Mouakod Blatty. His father deserted the family when William was six, leaving Mary Blatty to raise five children. Blatty won a scholarship to Georgetown University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1950, then earned a master’s degree in English from George Washington University in 1954. From 1951–1954, Blatty worked in the Psychological Warfare Division of the U.S. Air Force, attaining the rank of first lieutenant. After writing four comic novels that did not sell well, and screenplays for seven Hollywood films, Blatty retired to a Lake Tahoe, Nevada, cabin and wrote the draft of The Exorcist, the novel that would change the course of his career. Set in Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), it tells the story of Chris MacNeil, a well-known actress who arrives with her 12-year-old daughter Regan to begin a new film. Regan’s behavior begins to change and bizarre occurrences take place with increasing frequency: Her mother’s director is killed with only Regan present in the room. When Chris calls in Father Damien Karras, also a psychiatrist, the priest’s doubts prevent him from realizing that the child is possessed until she has killed again. In the end, Father Karras, in a humanitarian gesture, absorbs the devil into his own body and hurls himself to his death from Regan’s window. The novel’s popularity prompted most critics to deny that the book was literature but allowed them to praise its plotting and use of suspense. Some critics say that the novel has a clear moral grounding, and that the ending provides the idea of salvation in the contemporary world. Others think it is an expression of adults’ fear of rebellious, sexually active 1970s youth. Others view it in an antifeminist light, blaming Regan’s

152 BLESS ME, ÚLTIMA

troubles on her mother, Chris, for being divorced and for pursuing her career. Blatty wrote Legion, a sequel to The Exorcist, in 1983; he also wrote the film scripts for both. The Exorcist has gone into two more film versions, The Exorcist II and The Exorcist III. Blatty, who was married to Mary Margaret Rigard on February 18, 1950, and, after an annulment, to Elizabeth Gilman that same year, lives with Linda Tuero, a tennis player, whom he married on July 20, 1975. They live in Georgetown where Blatty, who has written seven novels to date, continues to write. Critical essays, many by scholars fascinated with The Exorcist as a cultural phenomenon, continue to appear.

NOVELS Demons Five, Exorcists Nothing: A Fable. New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1996. The Exorcist. New York: Harper, 1971. I, Billy Shakespeare!. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. Legion. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. The Ninth Configuration. New York: Harper, 1978. Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. Which Way to Mecca, Jack?. New York: Bernard Geis Associates, 1960.

SOURCES Beit-Hallahmi, Benjamin. “The Turn of the Screw and The Exorcist: Demoniacal Possession and Childhood Purity,” American Imago: A Psychoanalytic Journal for Culture, Science and the Arts 33 (1976): 296–303. Brock-Servais, Rhonda. “William Peter Blatty.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 18–23. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Burton, John W., David Hicks, Susan P. Montague, and W. Arens. “Chaos Triumphant: Archetypes and Symbols in The Exorcist(s).” In The American Dimension: Cultural Myths and Social Realities, edited by W. Arens & Susan P. Montague, 117–123. Port Washington, N.Y.: Alfred University Press, 1976. Forshey, Gerald E. Rosemary’s Baby, “The Exorcist,” “The Omen”: The Negative Quest for Faith. Chicago: Malcolm X. College, 1979. Hoppenstand, Gary. “Exorcising the Devil Babies: Images of Children and Adolescents in the Best-Selling Horror

Novel.” In Images of the Child, edited by Harry Eiss, 35–58. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1994. Koontz, Dean R. “A Genre in Crisis,” Proteus: A Journal of Ideas 6, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 1–5. Merry, Bruce. “The Exorcist Dies So That We Can All Enjoy the Sunset Again,” University of Windsor Review 11, no. 1 (1975): 5–24. Schober, Adrian. “The Lost and Possessed Child in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist and Victor Kelleher’s Del-Del,” Explorations into Children’s Literature 9, no. 2: 40–48. Winter, Douglas E. “Casting Out Democracy: The Horror Fiction of William Peter Blatty.” In A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction, 84–96. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

OTHER Slovick, Matt. “William Peter Blatty: Author, Screenwriter, Director.” Washington Post.com. Available online. URL: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/ features/dcmovies/blattytalk.htm. Accessed December 5, 2005. Washingtonpost.com. William Peter Blatty Filmography. Available online. URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/style/longterm/filmgrph/william_peter_blatty.htm. Accessed July 25, 2005.

BLESS ME, ÚLTIMA RUDOLFO ANAYA (1972) Second recipient of the Quinto Sol Prize in 1971, this novel opened a new era for Chicano letters. Quinto Sol Publications established an annual prize for Chicano writers to promote their works in mainstream literature and, a year after Tomás RIVERA’s Y NO SE LO TRAGÓ LA TIERRA/AND THE EARTH DID NOT PART (1971) was awarded the prize, ANAYA’s Bless Me, Última was acclaimed best novel. Heart of Aztlán and Tortuga complete Anaya’s trilogy on growing up Chicano in New Mexico during a time of political and social changes, after World War II. Antonio Márez y Luna, the protagonist of the novel, experiences the arrival of Última, a curandera (healer), to his house as the opening of a period of changes and new possibilities in his life. He, as an adolescent, has to fulfill new responsibilities and make decisions that affect his future life as an adult. His mother expects that he will become a man of learning, maybe a priest, while his father, for whom Antonio is his last hope,

BLESS ME, ÚLTIMA 153

dreams of going west, to California, to improve his life as a road builder. León, Eugene, and Andrew (Antonio’s brothers) have already abandoned the family home, enlisting to fight in the war first, then moving to other major cities in New Mexico, such as Santa Fe or Vegas when the war ends. Trapped between his parents’ desires and hopes, Antonio finds in Última the wisdom and balance to guide him through this troubling time in life and the curandera responds to this trust by teaching him about nature and its power. Together they perform cures and confront evil, which appears even in ghostly and threatening forms. Respected and feared at the same time, Última’s power is acknowledged by all the villagers and, although her goodness might be questioned, her wisdom is never doubted. Her name describes her situation as the last representative of her kind: a powerful woman capable of dominating nature, using its magic to cure. The magic of nature can also bring destruction for those who defy the goodness of the curandera, like the Trementina sisters. As a symbol of that special relationship she has with nature, an owl accompanies her and protects her from attacks. She tells Antonio that it has been given to her by a wise man and it is her spirit. At the end of the novel, the owl dies at the hands of Tenorio (embodiment of evil in the novel), who shoots him in revenge for the death of his daughters, the Trementina sisters. On the death of her spirit, Última’s life escapes her body and she dies peacefully, blessing Antonio and leaving the scent of her presence around: “I bless you in the name of all that is good and strong and beautiful, Antonio. Always have the strength to live. Love life and if despair enters your heart, look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills, I shall be with you” (247). Besides Última’s instruction, Antonio receives classes in English at school and this language overtakes Spanish outside the household. The code-switching condition (the combination of two languages to form a new and different linguistic code) that Chicanos experience also plays a relevant role in Anaya’s novel through Antonio’s education. He envisions his own future as a man of letters when he learns to read and write; in fact, he has several premonitory dreams about his destiny during his learning process. The reader

already knows the adult Antonio from his position as narrator of the story, and so the novel, apart from falling in the genre of the autobiography, can be considered a Künstlerroman, or novel about the formative process of an artist. Religion represents a conflicted point in Antonio’s educative process. On the one hand, Antonio feels the mercy and forgiveness of the Virgin of Guadalupe to whom his mother says the rosary and prays for the safe return of her sons; he even dreams of Última’s spirit (her owl) lifting up Our Lady to heaven. On the other hand, he has a different view of the Christian God who allows evil and injustice in the world, especially the deaths of Lupito and Narciso, which he has witnessed in his short life. Thus, after a long period of preparation to take his first communion, he expects to find clarity upon receiving the holy host. However, a feeling of frustration invades him when he realizes that no mystery of the Catholic faith will be revealed for him with the sacrament. A true epiphany, nevertheless, takes place when his friend Cico tells him the story of the golden carp and Antonio discovers its beauty in the river. The impact of the vision makes the eyes of his understanding open wide and he realizes that what he previously had conceived as opposite realities have now become complementary parts of the same truth. For the first time, he knows that he does not have to decide between being a Márez or a Luna, between Spanish or English, good or evil, life or death, but that he has to combine and accept both sides of each pair because they are indivisible and come along together like the two sides of the same coin. Prophecies have been fulfilled in the figure of Antonio, a writer and a recipient of Última’s teachings: her knowledge has been transmitted widely in this novel.

SOURCES Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Última. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972. Augenbraum, Harold, and Margarite Fernández Olmos. U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Maciel, David R., Isidro D. Ortiz, and Maria HerreraSobeck, (eds.) Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000.

154 BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, THE

Novoa, Bruce. Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1990. Imelda Martín-Junquera

BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, THE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1852) The Blithedale Romance was the third of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s four major American romances, after The SCARLET LETTER (1850) and The HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES (1851). Unique among Hawthorne’s novels, it is the only one to feature a firstperson narrator, the urbane and sybaritic Miles Coverdale, minor poet and inveterate voyeur. It is also the most autobiographical of Hawthorne’s novels, based in part on his experiences at Brook Farm, an experimental utopian commune. Contemporary reaction to the novel was mixed: George Eliot called it “unmistakably the finest production of genius in either hemisphere” in many years, while Emerson called it “that disagreeable story” (Idol, 203–204; Miller, 367). Resistance to the novel may have stemmed from its technical innovativeness. Although Hawthorne designated his novel as a “romance,” its unreliable narrator, polytonality, and unresolved plot appear to anticipate certain features of literary modernism, and its influence can be detected in such later novels as Henry JAMES’s The Bostonians (1886) and F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY (1925). The plot concerns the efforts of a group of New England intellectuals to establish a farming community, founded upon socialist principles, that seeks to provide a utopian space outside of the culture of market capitalism and its emphasis on self-interest and competition. In the words of Miles Coverdale, “We sought our profit by mutual aid, instead of wresting it by the strong hand from an enemy . . . or winning it by selfish competition with a neighbor” (19). However, as the novel progresses, the Blithedalers find their community developing into a replica of the American society they sought to leave behind. The members seek out the society of others within their own class, women are restricted to domestic labor, and Blithedale is forced to compete with neighboring farms in order to survive. Most crucially, Blithedale is haunted by history. One of the first decisions made by the Blithedalers as a community is to reject the Native American name of the

land on which they are living, on the grounds that the word is “harsh, ill-connected, and interminable” (37). But such Emersonian renunciations of the past have little lasting force. The Blithedalers remain painfully aware that their new Eden is built on soil stolen from American Natives by European settlers with utopian dreams of their own—on land “stained by genocide and already replete with the dust of earlier failures” (Tanner, xxviii). As the novel progresses, sexual jealousy and selfinterest threaten to tear apart a community already crumbling under the weight of its ideological contradictions. A love triangle forms between three Blithedalers: Hollingsworth, a philanthropist who secretly plans to transform the commune into a colony for the reform of criminals; the anemic yet captivating Priscilla; and the brilliant Zenobia, a celebrated writer and scintillating conversationalist modeled in part on the writer Margaret Fuller. Zenobia is described as a “high-spirited Woman, bruising herself against the narrow limitations of her sex” (2). It is one of the many ironies of The Blithedale Romance that this independent woman should fall in love with the misogynistic and egomaniacal Hollingsworth, who is seeking the resources of a rich wife to underwrite his philanthropic schemes. Through all this, Miles Coverdale adopts a position of panoptic specular detachment. Camping out in a tree-top hermitage, he converts the passions of his fellow Blithedalers into his own private theater. Yet despite his efforts to remain a detached observer, Coverdale finds himself irresistibly drawn to three of his fellow communalists, and in particular to Hollingsworth. Like Zenobia and Priscilla, Coverdale is attracted by Hollingsworth’s “all-devouring egotism” (71), which feeds, vampire-like, on the energy and admiration of others. Coverdale eventually flees Blithedale out of fear of being “penetrated” by the philanthropist’s “magnetism” (134). Animal magnetism, or mesmerism, is the novel’s central metaphor for human relationships, as well as a plot device. (Another character, the sinister Westervelt, is a professional mesmerist.) Hawthorne was horrified by mesmerism, perceiving it as a monstrous violation of an individual’s will by another. Yet human interaction generally, and erotic relationships specifically, tend to

BLOCK, LAWRENCE 155

be marked by such asymmetry in The Blithedale Romance, and the novel suggests it is impossible for the modern subject to escape the dynamics of dominance and submission, not even in love or friendship, not even in utopia. At the end of the novel, the passions at Blithedale explode in a catastrophe that dismantles the Blithedale experiment: the drowning of Zenobia. Zenobia’s death, as narrated by Coverdale, is shrouded in such obscurity that some critics (like Louise DeSalvo) have argued that murder, and not suicide, is suggested—a thesis that would make Blithedale a detective story without a solution. Coverdale’s strange “confession” in the final chapter has added to the speculation: The rhetoric of the confession is much wilder than the disclosure warrants, leaving the impression that Coverdale withholds more than he reveals. Regardless, the excessive brutality of Zenobia’s demise has suggested to some that the novel punishes her for her feminism. Like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Zenobia is dark-haired, passionate, and rebellious—and suffers for it. But the fair-haired, virginal, and submissive Priscilla fares hardly better: When last seen, she is trapped in a joyless marriage to a remorseful Hollingsworth. And Miles Coverdale ends his days alone in his bachelor rooms, a failed poet, reflecting half-satirically, half-regretfully on the failure of the Blithedale project. It is a somber conclusion: As Edwin Miller writes, The Blithedale Romance “sounds in its desperateness and ennui more ominous chords of disintegration and futility” than any of Hawthorne’s other novels (367). In a novel that dramatizes the limits of individual agency and questions the possibility of creating a viable space outside of the dominant culture, it is perhaps fitting that there proves to be for the fiercely independent Zenobia no room of her own except the grave.

SOURCES DeSalvo, Louise. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Edited by Tony Tanner. New York: Oxford, 1998. Idol, John L., Jr., and Buford Jones. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1991. Tanner, Tony. “Introduction.” In Hawthorne: A Life, edited by Brenda Wineapple, vii–xli. New York: Knopf, 2003. Brian Sweeney

BLOCK, LAWRENCE (PAUL KAVANAGH, CHIP HARRISON) (1938– ) Lawrence Block, named the “Grand Master of the murder mystery” by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994, has been writing for almost 50 years. His three wellknown and popular fictional detectives—Evan Tanner, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Matthew Scudder—are hardboiled enough to be compared to Dashiell HAMMETT’s Sam Spade and Raymond CHANDLER’s Philip Marlowe, and Block himself is often compared to detective fiction writers Ross MacDONALD and John D. MacDONALD. Lawrence Block was born on June 24, 1938, in Buffalo, New York, to Arthur Jerome Block and Lenore Harriet Nathan Block. He married Loretta Ann Kallett in 1960; the marriage ended in 1973, and he married Lynne Wood in 1983. After two years at Antioch College, Block dropped out to work for the literary agent Scott Meredith because, as he remarked in an interview with Ernie Bulow, “I wanted to be doing things” (Block and Bulow, 24); by the time of his indifferent return to the campus for a third year, he was already a professional writer and dropped out again, committed to making writing his living. The results speak for themselves. Although Block began with pulp novel and soft pornography writing, he segued into detective fiction with Death Pulls a Doublecross in 1961, and created the first Evan Tanner novel, The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep, in 1966. Evan Tanner is a Korean War veteran who finds sleep impossible because shrapnel has destroyed the sleep center in his brain; in his job as cold war spy for a mysterious unnamed agency, he travels to various countries and learns new languages late at night while the rest of the world sleeps. Block was, meanwhile, writing other crime novels under the pseudonyms Chip Harrison and Paul Kavanagh. Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr series won raves from readers and critics alike: Rhodenbarr is a bookstore owner who hobnobs with the rich and famous by day,

156 BLOCK, LAWRENCE

and who becomes a thief at night, encountering mysteries that he solves. The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling won the Nero Wolfe Award of Best Mystery of 1979. Much darker and steeped in the seamy life of New York’s mean streets is the Matthew Scudder series about a private eye who (illegally, because his license has been revoked) battles the underworld and his own alcoholism. Numerous Scudder novels have swept the Shamus Best Mystery Novel and the Edgar Allan Poe Best Novel awards: Eight Million Ways to Die, in 1983; A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, in 1992; The Devil Knows You’re Dead, in 1994; and both When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (1986) and A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990) won the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award. “Everything real is tragic,” he believes, commenting on John O’HARA, one of his favorite writers—after all, “no one gets out of this alive, you know” (Block and Bulow, 59). Lawrence Block continues to publish prolifically and to earn praise for his novels, particularly for his realistic characterization and for his detailed description of the underlife of the city; indeed, he has published four books on the craft of writing. Several of Block’s books were adapted for film, including Deadly Honeymoon, Eight Million Ways to Die, and The Burglar in the Closet, and he has sold the screen rights to Hit Man and A Walk among the Tombstones. Lawrence Block’s papers are at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Block’s works—novels, short-story collections, nonfiction—have been widely translated, winning him awards in both Japan and France as well as the United States. In 2002, Block received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and the French Grand Maitre du Roman Noir.

SELECTED NOVELS Hit List. New York: Morrow, 2000. Introducing Chip Harrison. (Chip Harrison, pseud.) Woodstock, Vt.: Countryman Press, 1984. Mona. New York: Fawcett, 1961; as Sweet Slow Death, New York: Berkley, 1986. Small Town. New York: Morrow, 2003. The Specialists. New York: Fawcett, 1969. Such Men Are Dangerous: A Novel of Violence. (Paul Kavanagh, pseud.) New York: Macmillan, 1969.

EVAN TANNER SERIES The Cancelled Czech. New York: Fawcett, 1967.

Tanner on Ice. New York: Dutton, 1998. The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. New York: Fawcett, 1966.

MATTHEW SCUDDER SERIES A Dance at the Slaughterhouse. New York: Morrow, 1991. The Devil Knows You’re Dead. New York: Morrow, 1993. Eight Million Ways to Die. New York: Arbor House, 1982. Even the Wicked. New York: Morrow, 1997. Everybody Dies. New York: Morrow, 1999. Hope to Die. New York: Morrow, 2001. In the Midst of Death. New York: Dell, 1976. A Long Line of Dead Men. New York: Morrow, 1994. Out on the Cutting Edge. New York: Morrow, 1989. Sins of the Fathers. New York: Dell, 1976. A Stab in the Dark. New York: Arbor House, 1981. A Ticket to the Boneyard. New York: Morrow, 1990. Time to Murder and Create. New York: Dell, 1977. A Walk among the Tombstones. New York: Morrow, 1992. When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

BERNIE RHODENBARR SERIES Burglars Can’t Be Choosers. New York: Random House, 1977. The Burglar in the Closet. New York: Random House, 1978. The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling. New York: Random House, 1979. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams. New York: Dutton, 1994.

SOURCES Block, Lawrence, and Ernie Bulow. After Hours: Conversations with Lawrence Block. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Burns, Landon C. “Matthew Scudder’s Moral Ambiguity,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 17 (Fall/Winter 1996): 19–32. Casella, Donna. “The Matt Scudder Series: The Saga of an Alcoholic Hardboiled Detective,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 14 (Fall/Winter 1993): 31–50. Charyn, Jerome. The New Mystery. New York: Dutton, 1993. King, Stephen. “No Cats: An Appreciation of Lawrence Block and Matt Scudder.” In The Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Dark Harvest, 1992. Meyer, Adam. “Still Out on the Cutting Edge: An Interview with the Mystery Man: Lawrence Block,” Pirate Writings: Tales of Fantasy, Mystery and Science Fiction 2, no. 7 (Summer 1995): 34–37.

OTHER Klausner, Harriet. Review of The Burglar in the Rye. November 7, 2000. Booksnbites. Available online. URL: http://www.

BLOOD MERIDIAN, OR THE EVENING DARKNESS IN THE WEST 157

booksnbites.com/reviews/block_burglarintherye.html. Accessed June 2, 2005. Klausner, Harriet. Review of Hit List. Booksnbites. Available online. URL: http://harrietklausner.wwwi.com/review/hit_ list. Accessed March 12, 2006. CyberSpace Spinner. Archive of Mystery and Suspense Fiction. “Lawrence Block.” Available online. URL: http://www. hycyber.com/MYST/block_lawrence.html. Accessed June 2, 2005.

BLOOD MERIDIAN, OR THE EVENING DARKNESS IN THE WEST CORMAC MCCARTHY (1992) Blood Meridian is nightmarish, yet so hypnotically written, displaying such a wild and profound command of the language that the critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence. The novel begins with the kid heading out from his Tennessee home (this also reflects McCARTHY’s own shift in the setting of his writing from the south of Tennessee to the American Southwest) to find his way in the world. The kid throws his lot in with a band of mercenaries off to take part of Mexico and claim it for the United States regardless of the outcome of the recent war. Instead they are destroyed in a scene of apocalyptic, almost biblical, violence by a war party of Comanche. Somehow the kid is left injured, but alive, only to be arrested and thrown in a Chihuahua jail. He is released so that he can fight for the Mexican government with a group of American rogues, the Glanton Gang, who have been commissioned as scalp hunters. Here, for the first time, we are introduced to one of the pivotal characters of the book, Judge Holden. Holden is a giant hairless beast of a man who is at the same time both elementally evil and disturbingly childlike. The judge is a master of all things: science, the arts and language, and war and philosophy. Ironically at the same time that he serves as the most civilized of the book’s characters, he is also the most evil and the most amoral of the killers associated with the group.

All of the men who follow John Glanton are a group of violent rogues and ne’er-do-wells, but it is the judge, not Glanton, who quickly takes over the group. After a few days, the men discover that the Mexican authorities cannot tell who the scalps came from, and so they unleash their depravity in an orgy of raping and killing anyone they come across. Babies are crucified on trees, the judge indulges his taste for child molestation, and the kid is repeatedly told that the judge is keeping him alive so that he may kill him in some horrible way in the future. Holden leads the group into worse and worse situations, fighting and decimating Mexican troops and Native American tribes, each skirmish more outlandishly dangerous and bloody than the rest until, eventually, everyone is dead except for the kid and himself. Finally, the kid manages to lose the judge in the salt flats of the Great American Desert. Years after the massacres, the kid finds the judge once again in a saloon and it is intimated that the judge finally kills the kid and then returns to the saloon where he is last seen on stage, “naked, dancing . . . he will never die” (335). Much has been made of the historical antecedents of the book. John Sepich’s excellent book, Notes on Blood Meridian, explains that the story is based upon the Yuma Crossing massacre of 1850 and that some of the characters, including the judge, are drawn from real people, making the book’s cruelty all the more frightening. McCarthy’s language and his passion for the odd, the outcast, and the bloody plant him squarely within the tradition of the Southern Gothic. In Blood Meridian, there is no hope, no redemption, and no escape; racial divisions disappear in that all are evil, self-centered, and violent. Likewise, McCarthy undermines the western mythos of “white hat versus black hat” and presents instead an amoral place of death and mutilation where only the mad can flourish and survive. It seems as though McCarthy is suggesting that, as Terence Moran writes in The New Republic, the end result of the rugged individualism that Americans have so long romanticized about the Old West, and, indeed, have threaded into their national fabric, is a “crazed licentiousness. . . . A rootless quest for blood, money, loot, and women” (Moran, 38).

158 BLUEST EYE, THE

SOURCES McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or the Evening Darkness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985. Moran, Terence. “The Wired West,” The New Republic 6 (May 1985): 37–38. Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. Miami: Cormac McCarthy Society, 1993. Michael Dittman

BLUEST EYE, THE TONI MORRISON (1970) MORRISON’s first novel depicts a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, at the moment she starts menstruating. From then on, destructive events take control in her life, primarily her father’s insistent sexual abuse, which results in her subsequent pregnancy and her mother’s rejection upon the discovery. Actually, the novel reaches its climax at the time Cholly starts raping his daughter; earlier chapters are devoted to introducing the different characters and preparing the reader for the description of the already known terrible denouement. From the beginning, Pecola’s friends Frieda and Claudia insist on discussing the new possibility of having children that developed for Pecola with her menses. The girls are the instrument that Morrison uses, through their innocence, to introduce later events in the narrative. Flashbacks and a technique based on fragmentation and storytelling in the voice of an adult Claudia shape the description of the life of Pecola and her family, with the help of an omniscient narrator for the most intimate details of the Breedlove family and how they relate to their past lives. The Breedloves represent the failure of traditional family life: Cholly and his wife, Pauline, fail to love their children in the proper way, for their own relationship is based on violence after their children are born. Cholly lacks a family model, being an orphan who grew up sleeping in the arms of different women. Unfaithful and often drunk, he ends his life in prison after destroying the lives of his wife and offspring Sammy and Pecola. Sammy abandons the house and his family out of embarrassment while Pecola carries in her body the indelible mark of her father’s abuse. Their lives disintegrate at the same speed as the punctuation marks of the text that open the novel and with which Morrison carries along the narrative, a text that depicts

a family life completely opposite to the Breedloves, who, paradoxically, breed everything but love. Pecola, the link that joins all the characters’ lives in the novel, finds herself unable to articulate her frustration until she decides that her happiness depends upon her having blue eyes, a way of “passing” (as white). The whiteness of the milk she drinks in the Shirley Temple cup also acts as a symbol of Pecola’s desire to become like the actress. Morrison’s reference to Imitation of Life, put in the mouth of Maureen Peal, the girl most assimilated to the white culture in the novel, may suggest the identification of Pecola and her mother, Pauline Breedlove, with the main characters of the movie: “Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life? . . . The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto girl hates her mother ’cause she is black and ugly but then cries at her funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it. . . . Anyway, her name was Pecola too. She was so pretty (52). The impressive blueness of her eyes, she thinks, makes people avoid looking at her, providing protection from neighborhood gossip as a result of the body change caused by her pregnancy. Being too visible suddenly makes her uncomfortable, as she is used to people ignoring her presence or making comments about her or her whole family’s ugliness. As a consequence, her identity suffers deep transformations: the seeing eyes are identified with the personal pronoun I, suggesting Pecola’s identity conflict. She embodies all gender, race, and class discriminations in the treatment she receives from her relatives, friends, and acquaintances. The ugliness of her family is remarked on constantly through the narrative, to the point where it seems to be equivalent to blackness, while white means beautiful. Cinematically speaking, Pauline, Pecola’s mother, stands for the surrogate mother, the perfect complement for the depiction of the white family described at the beginning of the novel: the stereotype of the “mammy” (black female house servant) portrayed in mainstream American fiction and film. The litany repeated throughout the narrative refers to the inner wishes of black girls to be like Shirley Temple and live

BLU’S HANGING 159

in a house with a white fence. Claudia, however, reveals herself as “the new negro” who really wants to make a difference and finds black is beautiful. Thus, she chooses Jane Withers as her idol, the actress remembered today as the antagonist of Miss Temple, and she claims recognition for the talent of Bill Robison (Bojangles), the tap dancer considered the best dancer of all times, who played Shirley Temple’s butler in Little Colonel and Littlest Rebel—both films released in 1935. The figure of the black servant is attractive by the film industry standards of the time. Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda are consequently influenced by the vision of black subordination although they prove unable to reverse their roles, except for Claudia. Then, it is not casual that Morrison places Claudia in the role of the narrator, for she will be the only one to confront discrimination and overcome the obstacles to controlling her life as the main actress in it. She moves forward, unlike the rest of the characters who are somehow crippled, physically or psychologically, or both; they show an inability to solve problems and confront their troubled existences. Pecola suffers from her ugliness and rape, Frieda is molested by Mr. Henry, whose sexual practices are deviant as are Soaphead Church’s encounters with girls. Pauline’s defective foot makes her attractive to her husband, Cholly, whose own personal conflict derives from sexual vexation suffered for the amusement of white men during his adolescence while having sexual intercourse for the first time on his aunt’s funeral day. Morrison’s accurate portrait of the time and location in the novel represents a tribute to the black organizations emerging in Manhattan of the 1930s.

SOURCES Graham, Maryemma, ed. Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. London: Vintage, 1999. Roberson, Gloria G. The World of Toni Morrison: A Guide to Characters and Places in Her Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Imelda Martín-Junquera

BLU’S HANGING LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA (1997) Upon its publication, Blu’s Hanging met with immediate critical acclaim. Critics considered the book “powerful,” “brilliant,” and “mesmerizing.” But when Blu’s Hanging was chosen as the Best Book of Asian American fiction of the year by a panel of judges from the Association of Asian American Studies, the decision provoked strong protest from Filipino Americans. The protesters charged that YAMANAKA’s portrayal of a minor character, “Uncle Paulo,” as a sexual predator, was an “insult” to Filipino Americans and reproduced the stereotypes of FilipinoAmerican men, whose sexuality has been perceived and represented as a “threat” to white “racial purity,” particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries when antimiscegenation laws were in effect in many states. Some critics suggest that complaints from Filipino Americans about the book are related to the marginalization of the Filipino-American community, in contrast to the economic and political power of Japanese Americans in Hawaii. In response to the protests and the demands that the award be rescinded, the board of judges suggested that a special issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies be devoted to an open discussion on the novel and the issues raised. But the protesters refused to reconcile their demands, and the judges eventually resigned. The award was rescinded. Not all Asian Americans shared the protesters’ views. In fact, some writers expressed unease about “censorship” and wrote letters in support of Yamanaka. This controversy over Blu’s Hanging is not an isolated incident. Other Asian-American writers have been criticized for, or accused of, perpetuating Asian-American stereotypes. At issue are the writers’ social responsibilities and artistic freedom, and the relations between literature and society. Even though Uncle Paulo is a minor character, the controversy over his portrayal has generated provocative discussions over these larger issues, including the distinctions between stereotypes and convincing characters. Blu’s Hanging is a tale of survival and coming of age in poverty, in a social environment of racial hierarchy, and without proper parental guardianship. The story is told from the perspective of the 13-year-old narrator, Ivah Ogata, a Japanese American who struggles to take care of her 10-year-old brother and five-year-old sister,

160 BLU’S HANGING

as well as her father, after her mother dies of kidney failure. Ivah’s task is rendered even more difficult not simply because of the lack of money or the constant absence of her father, who is a janitor and works two jobs, but also because each family member has been traumatized by the mother’s death. Devastated by the loss, Ivah’s little sister, Maisie, stops talking and wets her pants at school. She is abused by other children and mistreated by haole (white) teachers. Ivah’s younger brother, Blu, turns to food for comfort in his longing for his mother. His insatiable appetite for food and candy increases as he continues to suffer from his grief over his mother’s absence. While his obesity makes him feel even more insecure, his craving for candy and attention renders him vulnerable. He is sexually abused by an old Japanese-American man, and is raped by Uncle Paulo. In his trials and tribulations, it is his sister, not his father, who rescues him and takes care of him. Inconsolable in his grief for his wife’s death, the father has withdrawn into himself, becomes bad-tempered toward his children, and often neglects his parental obligations, but still needs his daughter Ivah to attend to his daily meals. Forced into adult obligations of motherhood and wifehood, Ivah relies on her memories of her mother for guidance and strength in coping with an impossible situation. She later receives advice and help from her much older cousin, “Big Sis,” and her lesbian lover, Maisie’s special-education teacher, Miss Sandra Ito. Homosexuality, though not directly dealt with in this novel, is present in Ivah’s coming-of-age experience. In contrast to the unsettling violence of sexual abuse, the lesbian relationship between Big Sis and Miss Ito provides a nurturing support network for Ivah and her siblings. Gradually all the family members are able to go through a healing process, and Ivah, with the assistance of Miss Ito, receives a scholarship to a Honolulu private high school. Both Big Sis and Miss Ito will take care of Blu and Maisie when Ivah leaves home to pursue her education. This story of bereavement and deprivation is also a moving story of love that helps the children survive the loss of their mother and hold the family together. Yamanaka is remarkably skillful in weaving into Ivah’s narrative the love story of Ivah’s parents, and a secret they have kept hidden from their children.

At the center of the story is Ivah’s growth, or rather the ethnic, female bildungsroman with a working-class background, in the unique multiracial and multicultural environment of Hawaii. Yamanaka most effectively portrays the differences of race, ethnicity, and class from the perspective of Ivah and through her struggles. Ivah learns about racism against Japanese Americans when her father asks her to go to the parent conference with Maisie’s haole/white teacher: “I no can handle haoles. Think they so holier-than-thou with their fast-talking mouth and everybody mo’ brown than them is dirt under their feet” (57). He relates this white superiority he perceives in Maisie’s teacher, Miss Owens, to racialized class difference established on the sugar plantations of Hawaii. When Ivah refers to her mother’s remarks that some whites are regular people, and “Only the real haolified haoles you gotta watch out for,” Ivah’s father responds by saying that only one out of a hundred haoles can be trusted as a friend. In Hawaii, standard English indicates racial superiority and class privilege. The father’s use of pidgin is a way of asserting his difference as resistance to assimilation, and as affirmation of his Japanese-American workingclass identity. When he answers a telephone call from Miss Owens, he speaks standard English, but when he hangs up, Ivah notes, “He’s mad at himself for kowtowing” (57). Pidgin, formally known as Hawaiian Creole English, is a marker of racial and social status in Hawaii and a trademark of Yamanaka’s novels, as well as a central subject matter in Blu’s Hanging and Yamanaka’s first novel, Wild Meat and Bully Burgers (1996). Like her father, Ivah insists on using pidgin as a language of her Japanese-American working-class identity. She continues to speak pidgin English during her meeting with Miss Owens even though the teacher tells her that they need to “speak to each other in standard English for the duration of this conference” because she finds pidgin English “so limited in its ability to express fully what we need to cover today” (59–60). But Ivah defies Miss Owens’s request. Yamanaka’s employment of pidgin in Blu’s Hanging and her other novels challenges precisely Miss Owens’s kind of prejudice against the language. Her insistence on using pidgin in all her novels is a gesture of resistance to assimilation, an

BONE 161

acknowledgment of the history of colonialism, and a tribute to the vitality of the Hawaiian Creole English developed out of the plantation culture and a multiracial, multicultural society. Pidgin in Yamanaka’s novels is more than a form of resistance; it is also a source of creativity. Yamanaka employs a wide range of variations of pidgin English to capture distinct individual voices, including the voices of children. Much of the power and accomplishment of Blu’s Hanging reside in Yamanaka’s characterization through distinct voices in pidgin.

SOURCES Davis, Rocio. “Children on the Edge: Leaving Home in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on the Mango Street and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging.” In Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas, edited by Dominique Marcais, Mark Niemeyer, Bernard Vincent, and Cathy Waegner, 37–47. American Studies: A Monograph Series, vol. 97. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Carl Winter, 2002. Fujikane, Candace. “Sweeping Racism under the Rug of ‘Censorship’: The Controversy Over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 158–160. Harlan, Megan. Review of Blu’s Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka, New York Times Book Review May 4, 1997: 21. Rodrigues, Darlene. “Imagining ourselves: reflections on the controversy over Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging,” Amerasia Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 195. Zhou Xiaojing

BONE FAE MYENNE NG (1993)

Fae Myenne NG’s Bone revolves around the tragic suicide of a daughter of a San Francisco Chinatown family, and the personal, cultural, and social questions this event forces the characters to negotiate. Leila Leong, Mah’s daughter from her first marriage, narrates the story of her family, which includes her stepfather, Leon, and her half sisters Ona and Nina. The narrative structure is of particular interest: the novel begins at the end, and is recounted by a newly married Leila, who looks back on her family and the Chinatown community where they grew up. The nonlinear process of remembering structures the novel. At the center of the narrative is the suicide of Leila’s middle sister, Ona, and the fam-

ily’s search for explanations. They revisit their history, their actions and decisions, in order to come to terms with the consequences of this event: Mah blames herself because of her affair with her boss, Tommie Hom; Leila thinks that she should have talked to her sister more; Leon believes that the family’s bad luck began when he did not fulfill his promise to Grandpa Leong to send his bones back to China. As the story unfolds, the reader infers that Ona’s leap to her death might have stemmed from her inability to be in the middle— between parents, sisters, cultures, and families. Her suicide also appears to result from problems between her family and her boyfriend’s family, over a failed business partnership. Chinatown itself becomes a protagonist in the novel, and Ng engages issues of Chinese immigrant history and its consequences. Ng recovers the hidden stories of Chinatown life. The Leong family history is emblematic of the revolution of both Chinatown and American institutions, as the old-timers tried to hide Chinatown stories of illegal immigration—specifically the practice of “paper sons,” in which Chinese men pretended to be sons of legal immigrants, thus gaining entry into the United States. Grandpa Leong is Leon’s “paper father,” leading the “son” to affirm that “In this country, paper is more precious than blood” (9). The necessary secrets of the Chinatown inhabitants separate the insiders from the mainstream world on the outside. Bone’s narrative structure itself reproduces this preoccupation with secrets. Leila tells us that her parents “were always saying, Don’t tell this and don’t tell that. Mah was afraid of what people inside Chinatown were saying and Leon was paranoid about everything outside Chinatown. We graduated from keeping their secrets to keeping our own” (118–19). The fact that Mah and Leon taught their children the need for silence profoundly affects Ona, who “got used to keeping everything inside” (19). But the old-timers’ silence was a strategy for survival; Ona’s silence is destructive, and represents the most radical consequences of Chinatown’s communal silence. This idea explains part of the sisters’ estrangement and suggests why no one truly understood the extent of Ona’s desperation. Leila recognizes that this obsession with secrets reverberates in herself.

162 BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, THE

The question of family ties and links to Chinatown obsesses the daughters, who progressively move away from Chinatown. Leila leaves by moving in with her boyfriend, Mason, and subsequently marrying him; Nina moves to New York and continues a pattern of flight by becoming a stewardess. Leila is perhaps the one who most easily crosses the borders between that culture-specific place and mainstream San Francisco. When Bone opens, Leila has already moved out; she returns briefly, to accompany her mother after Ona’s suicide, but she ultimately lives away, understanding that she can leave it and remember it at the same time. This character comprehends that her family history is one that simultaneously binds and burdens: it must be remembered yet left behind. Mah is the only character that cannot leave Chinatown; Leon escapes the trauma of Ona’s death by embarking on long sea voyages and temporarily taking up bachelor’s quarters in a hotel. In this novel structured by and about memory, where secrets and buried histories inform consciousness, and where the very notion of “home” is a complex issue, the ending of the novel stresses Leila’s continued connection with the place of her past. By challenging chronology, and leaving essential questions unanswered, Ng weaves a story that invites multilayered readings of issues of identity, authenticity, borders, and belonging.

SOURCES Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Spatial Re-Imaginations in Fae Myenne Ng’s Chinatown,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 1, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1994): 85–102. Chuang, Jay. “Bone in Bone,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 53–57. Goellnicht, Donald. “Of Bones and Suicide: Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe and Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 300–330. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 1999. Kim, Thomas W. “ ‘For a Paper Son, Paper Is Blood’: Subjectivation and Authenticity in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone,” MELUS 24, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 41–56. Ng, Fae Myenne. Bone. New York: Hyperion, 1993.

Sze, Julie. “Have You Heard?: Gossip, Silence, and Community in Bone.” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 59–69. Yen, Xiaoping. “Fae Myenne Ng.” In Asian American Novel: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel Nelson, 261–266. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Rocío G. Davis

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, THE TOM WOLFE (1987) Tom WOLFE’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987 to widespread critical and popular acclaim. Only days after its release, the dizzying pace and boundless decadence of 1980s Wall Street so enjoyed by the novel’s protagonist, wellborn bond trader Sherman McCoy, ground to a halt on Black Monday, the day of the largest one-day decline in recorded stock market history. This was the first of many “resonant” events that led readers to term Bonfire “prophetic.” But to Wolfe, the verisimilitude was of little surprise. Although begun in 1981 and serialized in an earlier form in Rolling Stone in 1984 and 1985, Bonfire was decades in the making, crafted with the keen observational, stylistic, and narrative skills Wolfe had honed in his pioneering practice of New Journalism, a hybrid form of nonfiction that employs novelistic techniques. Wolfe envisioned “a big book about the city of New York,” with the sprawling sociorealism of the Paris chronicled by Balzac and Zola, two of his idols. The result was a best-seller that earned comparisons to SISTER CARRIE and The GREAT GATSBY for its willingness to grapple with issues of status, desire, and the American dream in the 20th century. Wolfe approached these themes first by immersing himself in the subcultures of his diverse cast of characters. His “reporting,” which took him from the bondtrading floor to Bronx jail cells, allowed him to populate Bonfire with characters whose speech patterns, dress, professions, gait, and homes he could meticulously catalogue. Wolfe’s obsession with what he calls “status details,” from a drug dealer’s refusal to be seen in anything but “new-right-out-of-the-box snowwhite Reebok sneakers” to the McCoys’ Thomas Hope armchair (“Not a mahogany reproduction but one of

BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, THE 163

the rosewood originals!”), is viewed by some critics as distracting, overblown, and even vacuous. However, these details serve to delineate the myriad layers in a stratified New York City unified only by its drives for consumption, its various but omnipresent vanities. The titular bonfire in which they burn is an allusion to the crusade of Girolamo Savonarola, the Florence priest who ordered followers to throw their costliest ornaments into bonfires set in the public square and who was himself burned at the stake in 1498. Desire and ambition fuel not only the setting of Bonfire, but also its complex plot and characters. Subcultures first collide when 38-year-old Sherman McCoy, a self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe,” takes a wrong turn on the way back to Park Avenue and finds himself, along with his Mercedes roadster and young mistress, in the South Bronx on a barricaded highway ramp. After leaving the car to remove the obstruction, he is approached by two black youths and panics. An altercation ensues, and his mistress, Maria Ruskin, takes the wheel. She collects Sherman and speeds away, but not before hitting one of the two boys with a thok that haunts Sherman for weeks to come. Not eager to make his adultery a matter of public record, Sherman agrees with Maria, who is also married, not to go the police. The hit-and-run, reminiscent of Gatsby, sets the wheels of justice in realistically slow motion, a process that is propelled by a variety of interested parties, including a dipsomaniac British tabloid journalist, a frustrated Bronx assistant district attorney who resents the salaries of his corporate-employed former classmates, and a smooth-talking black political leader. All are eager to use the emerging story of a black youth, appropriately named Henry Lamb, slain by a white Upper East Sider to advance their own careers and ambitions. The question of what crime was committed and whether Sherman is in fact to blame quickly becomes irrelevant in the pursuit of headlines, soundbites, and a “Great White Defendant” in the fortresslike Bronx courthouse. The opening chapters provide the reader entry into distinct worlds that are separated by more than zip codes and tax brackets. The lives of Sherman, assistant D.A. Larry Kramer, and reporter Peter Fallow are

glimpsed through their eyes and the conditions in which they work, live, and try to love. Despite their differences, all are afflicted by what Wolfe has referred to as “money fever.” Finances are a constant source of angst, as much for penniless Peter as for Sherman, whose mind is filled with calculations of how he will make ends meet on $1 million a year. As Bonfire moves between “boldfaced parties” attended by emaciated charity-circuit women dubbed “social x-rays” and lunch-hour chats at the Bronx criminal courthouse, the reader comes to understand status as more than the province of the wealthy; each individual is jockeying for status, just within different groups. The 1990 film version of Bonfire, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Hanks, was a box office disaster, in part because it sought to tell the multifaceted story from a single point of view, that of journalist Peter (Americanized and played by Bruce Willis), rather than through the worlds of New Yorkers of various classes on the occasion of a rare intersection. For all its urban sprawl, women are notably peripheral in Bonfire, which makes the panoramic view that Wolfe seeks ultimately incomplete. Nicholas Lemann views the women characters as universally underdeveloped and existing mainly as “foils for male preening.” Similarly, Wolfe’s ability to situate his characters so firmly within their subcultures, with what critic Frank Conroy calls “malicious glee,” leaves the reader with little sympathy for anyone. With no one to root for, the reader is swept up by the novel’s swift comic logic and left dazzled, perhaps satisfied, but in the end, curiously empty. Finally, in the critical haste to engage with the grand scale of the 659-page novel, Wolfe’s preoccupation in his nonfiction with what Chris Anderson called “the rhetorical problem of trying to communicate [an] experience” has gone unnoticed in Bonfire. The refrain of “How to tell them?” “How to tell it?” from Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a chronicle of the drug culture of Ken KESEY and his Merry Pranksters, is reprised as Sherman struggles with how to explain the events behind his imminent arrest to his boss, parents, wife, and daughter. Wolfe seems to have struggled similarly with how to tell the reader how his story ends and closes the novel with an epilogue in the form of a

164 BONTEMPS, ARNA WENDELL

New York Times article that neatly tallies how the individuals concerned have emerged from this particular chain of events. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Bonfire’s author, it is Peter, the journalist, who comes out on top.

SOURCES Anderson, Chris. “Pushing the Outside of the Envelope.” In Style as Argument: Contemporary American Nonfiction, 8–47. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Tom Wolfe. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Conroy, Frank. Review of Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, New York Times Book Review, 1 November 1987, p. 46. Lemann, Nicholas. “New York in the Eighties,” Atlantic Monthly 260, no. 6 (December 1997): 104, 106–107. McKeen, William. Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne, 1995. Scura, Dorothy, ed. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Wolfe, Tom. Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987. Stephanie Murg

BONTEMPS, ARNA WENDELL (1902– 1973) Arna Bontemps was a highly influential member of the Harlem Literary Renaissance and, later, director of the Afro-American program at Yale University. It is, however, as a novelist and short-story writer that he is best remembered. Of his three novels, the best known is Black Thunder (1936). He was born on October 13, 1902, in Alexandria, Louisiana, to Paul Bismark Bontemps, a lay minister in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and Marie Carolina Pembrooke Bontemps, a former schoolteacher. Both parents were Creoles. Bontemps was educated at Pacific Union College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1923 and at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in 1943. He married Alberta Johnson in 1926, and, although he had begun publishing poetry in 1924, he turned to the novel, his first entitled God Sends Sunday (1931). Set in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1890s, it features Little Augie, a jockey who lived life intensely both during his years as the city’s most successful jockey, and afterward, when he lost both fame and fortune. Bontemps collaborated

with Countee Cullen and adapted the novel to the stage as St. Louis Woman (1939). When it opened in New York in 1946, it ran for 113 performances. Black Thunder, his second novel, is a fictional treatment of an 1800 slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in Henrico County, near Richmond, Virginia. Told in the first person in the tradition of the slave narrative, with Bontemps’s frequently praised ability to portray dialect, the novel covers the failure of the rebellion, unsuccessful because of a tremendous rainstorm and a traitor’s betrayal of the cause. Bontemps’s third novel, Drums at Dusk, also dealt with a slave rebellion, this time in Haiti at the time of the French Revolution. The young Frenchman protagonist sympathizes with the plight of the blacks and befriends Touissant-Louverture, the leader of the rebellion. During the last decades of his life, Bontemps became a significant figure in academia, holding librarian positions at Yale and Fisk Universities, where he established special research collections for the Harlem Renaissance writers Langston HUGHES, Jean TOOMER, James Weldon JOHNSON, and Countee Cullen. A biographer, historian, poet, short-story writer, and novelist, Bontemps also wrote more than 15 books for children. He died of a heart attack in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4, 1973.

NOVELS Black Thunder. New York: Macmillan, 1936. Drums at Dusk. New York: Macmillan, 1939. God Sends Sunday. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.

SOURCES Baker, Houston A., Jr. Black Literature in America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. Washington, D.C.: Association in Negro Folk Education, 1937. Reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969. Conroy, Jack. “Memories of Arna Bontemps: Friend and Collaborator,” American Libraries (December 1974). Davis, Arthur P. “Arna Bontemps.” In From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, (1900–1960). Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948.

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, A 165

Jones, Kirkland C. Renaissance Man from Louisiana: A Biography of Arna Wendell Bontemps. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. McPherson, James M., et al. Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Nichols, Charles, ed. The Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. Page, James A. Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Whitlow, Roger. Black American Literature: A Critical History. Chicago, Ill.: Nelson-Hall, 1973. Young, James D. Black Writers in the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, A JOAN DIDION (1977) At least four of DIDION’s five novels have as their central characters wealthy or upper-middle-class women with both significant strengths and profound weaknesses. They are prone to flee rather than fight, and usually make a series of poor choices that lead to insanity or death. In A Book of Common Prayer, Charlotte Douglas, the central character, leaves her second husband, stable attorney Leonard, in San Francisco and flees through the United States with her first husband, irresponsible Warren Bogart. Pregnant with Leonard’s child, Charlotte drifts south with Warren, the father of her first child, Marin, a revolutionary fugitive, finally settling alone in the fictitious Central American country of Boca Grande. Charlotte is strong enough to perform a tracheotomy on a choking man but too weak to resist the sexual attractions of her first husband or any other man—and they are usually not nice men—who appeals to her sexually. Warren Bogart is portrayed as a sexually compelling alcoholic with a mean tongue who occasionally has tender moments. After leaving Warren, who is dying of cancer, Charlotte travels from city to city, delivering a premature baby girl who dies in her arms in Mérida. Her journey ends in Boca Grande, a hot, small country on the verge of revolution. There she becomes friends with Grace StrasserMendana, a widowed anthropologist who narrates the novel, and has affairs with Grace’s brother-in-law as well as her son. Grace is the character whom the reader comes to know best. Fiercely intellectual, always striving for

detachment, Grace was a well-published anthropologist from Denver when she married a wealthy planter from Boca Grande and gave up her profession. To occupy her time, however, she studied biochemistry in depth, discovering that fear of the dark is a protein that can be synthesized in the laboratory. Now dying of cancer at age 60, Grace remains in the country because she finds peace in its “opaque equatorial light.” Grace is narrating events after their conclusion. Thus we know at the beginning that Charlotte will die in Boca Grande, and the movement of the fiction is not chronological but thematic, focused on incidents of characters’ lives and on the changes that take place in Grace’s attitude toward Charlotte. She states at the opening that the novel is her “witness” to the life and death of Charlotte Douglas, but by the book’s conclusion she has become a player in Charlotte’s life. Charlotte insists on considering Boca Grande as a series of tourist attractions, while Grace tries to show her the depressing realities. Grace fails to persuade Charlotte to leave the country when a revolution is imminent, and when she returns, she finds Charlotte’s body on the lawn of the American embassy. No one knows which side shot her. Grace takes care of Charlotte in death, securing a coffin and sending her body to San Francisco. She also fulfills Charlotte’s implicit request that she find Marin and inform her of her mother love and her death. She finds Marin in a dirty room in an apartment in Buffalo, still openly rejecting her mother and her values, but breaking down when Grace reminds her of a particular childhood trip that they took together. No one in A Book of Common Prayer expresses love for anyone else in words, but Grace, Leonard, and Charlotte express affection and commitment through their actions. Grace and Leonard each try to protect Charlotte both emotionally and physically. Charlotte tried to save her premature baby, and in Boca Grande she devotes herself to a clinic providing vaccinations for children and birth control for women. In the end Charlotte dies, her baby dies, and Grace is close to death. Through loving actions as well as the title of the book, Didion is dramatizing ideas that are both spiritual and existential. We have death in common, but we can care for each other in this life. We can also use

166 BOOK OF DANIEL, THE

words to pray for each other; the book is in fact a prayer for Charlotte, her family, and the little country that is torn by revolution on a regular basis. Although Grace planned to be a “witness” to Charlotte’s life in a dispassionate account, she actually served as a maternal, spiritual, and mentoring figure who loaned Charlotte the “grace” of truth and love. Delusion is another prominent theme, as it is in most of Didion’s work. Charlotte persists in claiming that she is part of a loving, orderly family. She believed that Marin was an enrolled student at Berkeley when her daughter was part of a radical group plotting to blow up the Transamerica building in San Francisco. She repeatedly tells Grace that she and her husband are “inseparable” and she and Marin are “inseparable.” She makes innumerable trips to the airport, expecting vainly that Marin will come to Boca Grande to join her. In fact, there are no stable, happy families in the novel. Charlotte is similarly deluded about cultural differences and about the meaning of wars and revolutions, which she regards as part of an inevitable progression toward an orderly society in an orderly world. Grace describes her as “immaculate of history, innocent of politics.” When Leonard comes to Boca Grande to try to persuade Charlotte to leave, however, Grace learns that she also has lived her life under delusions about people close to her. She thought of her dead husband as a planter who did not engage in politics, but learned from Leonard that he, with Leonard’s help in importing arms, had financed the Tupamaros guerrillas. Neither Charlotte nor either of her husbands change in the course of the novel’s events. The narrator’s perceptions are substantially changed, however. Grace started by believing that human personality can be explained by biochemistry and concluded by viewing it as essentially mysterious. She began by being detached from her past and from other people and concluded by caring profoundly about Charlotte. Didion sees both dignity and pathos in such situations: even when the protective impulse fails, the person who cares is ennobled. Human life is not guided by rational or scientific principles. The book cannot explain the fates of its characters, so it becomes a prayer for all of them, but a prayer to an elusive deity.

SOURCES Didion, Joan. A Book of Common Prayer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. Felton, Sharon, ed. The Critical Response to Joan Didion, Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, vol. 8. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Showalter, Elaine, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz, eds. Modern American Women Writers. New York: Collier Books; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1993. Stout, Janis P. Through the Window, out the Door: Women’s Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison and Didion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Winchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Katherine Usher Henderson

BOOK OF DANIEL, THE E. L. DOCTOROW (1971) E. L. DOCTOROW’s 1971 novel focuses on Daniel Isaacson, the disturbed son of parents executed for giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the USSR. While working on his Ph.D. in the late 1960s, Daniel tries to reconcile what he reads, particularly historical studies, with his own experience in an effort to make sense of his past and present. Still troubled by the deaths of his parents, puzzled at his sister Susan’s attempted suicide, and confused about his dissertation topic, Daniel begins his narrative as a way of establishing the guilt or innocence of his parents. Drawing on a wealth of research materials, Daniel identifies historical patterns and tendencies, describes different types of corporal punishment, and analyzes the distribution and uses of power, only to find that history explains very little. Daniel comes to believe that accepting sanctioned narrative forms and language means accepting complicity with existing power structures. As a result, his narrative wanderings and his subsequent evasion of closure are evidence of a subversive refusal to be coopted by any discourse that seeks to rationalize and justify his parents’ death. Daniel even indicts the Left for its own naïveté and its glorification of martyrdom. His father believes almost to the very end that “you cannot put innocent people to death in this country. It can’t be done. The truth will reclaim us” (249). With their faith in the

BOWLES, JANE AUER 167

law and their determination to be seen as victims, Daniel’s parents doom themselves through their own self-dramatization. Artie Sternlicht, Doctorow’s fictionalized version of Abbie Hoffman, contends that the American Communists “were into the system . . . they played it [the trial] by their rules. The government’s rules” (150–51). Sternlicht also criticizes the New Left, pointing out that the academic words thrown around “aren’t words. Those are substitutes for being alive. . . . If you want to sit here and beat your meat, all right, but don’t call it revolution” (137). Later, when Daniel meets with others outside the Pentagon to return his draft card, he highlights the impotence of protest: “The pouch is delivered to the Justice Department, the demonstration ends, and nothing seems to have happened except the demonstration” (252). As the novel progresses, Daniel understands we are not merely helpless victims but willing coconspirators in the maintenance of political and economic power. This insight is especially evident in his analysis of Disneyland, where he points out how works such as Alice in Wonderland and Huck Finn are stripped of their subversive quality and made into palatable commodities. He notes that those enjoying the Mad Hatter’s Teacup Ride have most likely not read Alice in Wonderland and have probably seen the Disney film instead. The same applies to historical re-creation rides such as the Pirates of the Caribbean. This suggests to him that “what is being offered does not suggest the resonance of the original work but is only a sentimental compression of something that is itself already a lie” (288). He sees here the creation of an “abbreviated shorthand culture” in which “the ideal Disneyland patron . . . responds to a process of symbolic manipulation that offers him his culminating and quintessential sentiment at the moment of a purchase” (289). In such a place, where people participate in being manipulated and co-opted, Daniel recognizes how complicit everyone is in the maintenance of such a system. And, no matter how bleak that message may sound, it is a triumph—albeit a small one—that such a recognition is possible in the heart of Disneyland. It gives hope that the subversive artist can exist within that society yet still stand far enough outside to critique it.

Early in the novel, Susan ridicules Daniel for his lack of commitment to a cause, claiming that “you cop out with this phony cynicism bag that conveniently saves you from doing anything. . . . You’d rather jerk off behind a book” (81). By the end of this novel, Daniel finds that the only liberation is in closing the book—escaping from the forms and language sanctioned by the economic and political system—and entering the world of action, no matter how futile your efforts might be. Although his book does not give readers a guideline about how to change the world, it does avoid the dead ends of academic theorizing, because for Daniel such theorizing ultimately becomes, like Disneyland, “a substitute for experience” (289).

SOURCES Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. London: Methuen, 1985. Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991. Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays on E. L. Doctorow. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000. Williams, John. Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996. Monty Kozbial Ernst

BOWLES, JANE AUER (1917–1973) Jane Bowles exerted a strong influence on modernist fiction. The author of the play In the Summer House (1953) and short stories posthumously collected as Plain Pleasures (1966), Bowles was interested in morality, sexuality, and, increasingly, psychological realism. Two Serious Ladies (1943), her only novel, like the work of other modernists from Edith WHARTON to Ernest HEMINGWAY, left gaps in the text for readers to fill. Although Two Serious Ladies did not sell well in the United States, it was popular in England; the playwright Alan Sillitoe called it a “landmark in 20th century American literature.” (Jane Bowles Obituary) Jane Auer Bowles was born on February 22, 1917, in New York City, to Sidney Major Auer of Cincinnati, an insurance agent, and Claire Stajer Auer of New York City, a former teacher. Bowles was educated privately

168 BOWLES, PAUL FREDERICK

and in public schools until a horseback-riding accident; her mother sent her to Leysin, Switzerland, for treatment to her leg. She returned to the United States in 1934, with a permanent limp, and had several affairs with women before marrying composer and author Paul BOWLES, who was equally open about his homosexuality, in 1938. The two expatriates roamed Europe, North Africa, Central America, and Mexico, forming connections with musicians and with Carson McCULLERS, Tennessee WILLIAMS, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and with Gertrude STEIN and her partner, Alice B. Toklas. Two Serious Ladies features Christina Goering, a monied, privileged socialite who renounces luxury in expiation for the sin that she obsessively associates with her wealth; and Frieda Copperfield, who renounces her husband for a Central American prostitute. It was Paul Bowles who pointed to humor as an essential part of Jane Bowles’s work. In this novel, the humor derives from the juxtaposition of the two women’s serious statements about their distinctly superficial seedy lives. Contemporary critics suggest that Paul Bowles’s most celebrated work, The SHELTERING SKY (1949), owes a great deal to Two Serious Ladies. After the couple moved to Tangier, Morocco, in the late 1940s, Jane Auer Bowles became increasingly disoriented. Her lesbian affairs and liaisons became more frequent, she suffered a number of strokes, became dependent on drugs and alcohol, and, after a diagnosis of manic-depressive psychosis, was institutionalized in Spain. Since her death in Malaga, Spain, in 1973, Two Serious Ladies has become a cult novel. Bowles’s unpublished work has been collected and published. Her letters and 18 notebooks are at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

NOVEL Two Serious Ladies. New York: Knopf, 1943.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation. New York: Noonday, 1951. Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel. New York: Dutton, 1965. Bainbridge, John. Another Way of Living: A Gallery of Americans Who Choose to Live in Europe. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968.

Dillon, Millicent. A Little Original Sin New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981. ———, ed. Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935–1990. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1985. Lacey, R. Kevin, and Francis Poole. Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1996. Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989.

OTHER “Jane Bowles, Novelist, Is Dead; Author of ‘Two Serious Ladies,’ ” (Obituary from New York Times, 31 May 1973). The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site. Available online. URL: http://www.paulbowles.org/janeobituary.htm. Accessed December 5, 2005.

BOWLES, PAUL FREDERICK (1910–1999) Paul Bowles, a 20th-century Renaissance man, has had a significant impact on American literature. Although he was a composer, a translator, a painter, and a poet, he is best known as a novelist and short-story writer who imagined and created bleak and disintegrating modern worlds. He wrote four critically acclaimed novels, the best known of which is The SHELTERING SKY (1949). Bowles is often compared with French existentialist writers Andre Gide and Albert Camus, and with the Beat writers Jack KEROUAC and William S. BURROUGHS. With a career spanning most of the 20th century, Bowles received the 1950 National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and, in 1980, a National Book Award nomination for his Collected Stories of Paul Bowles, 1939–1976. Paul Bowles was born on December 20, 1910, in New York City, to Claude Dietz, a dentist, and Rena Winnewisser Bowles. He was educated by brilliant mentors; Bowles studied music composition with Aaron Copland and became interested in prose writing when he met Gertrude STEIN. His wife, Jane Auer, whom he married in 1938, was an additional influence; she was writing Two Serious Ladies (1943) while the couple was living in Morocco in one of their numerous homes. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, concerns a married American couple, Port and Kit

BOWLES, PAUL FREDERICK 169

Moresby, who, together with their friend Tunner, journey to the Sahara. That trip serves as a metaphorical quest for the spirit—and it is found wanting. Port and Kit become isolated from the rest of society, Port becomes terminally ill, and Kit abandons him to become the sexual slave of a series of Arab men; by the time French authorities reach her, she has lost her identity and cannot recall her own name. The novel has been widely praised and compared with Ernest HEMINGWAY’s The SUN ALSO RISES (1926) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947). His second novel, Let It Come Down (1952), a tale of theft and murder, takes its title from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and involves Nelson Dyar, a bank clerk. He escapes his life in New York and settles in Tangier only to find that he is falling apart. His meeting with the expatriate Daisy de Valverde recalls Henry JAMES’s DAISY MILLER and the Jamesian insight about Americans in Europe. The Spider’s House (1955), set during a rebellion in Fez, Morocco, presents four expatriates from France and America. The protagonist, Stenham, is an American novelist who provides a bridge between his own culture and that of Amar, the main Moroccan character. After a long silence while Bowles cared for his wife, who suffered a stroke and died in 1973, he published novels that many critics believe to be his best. Up above the World (1966) narrates the tale of Taylor Slade, a retired doctor. With his young second wife Day, he boards a ship and reaches his fictional Latin American destination only to learn that Mrs. Rainmantle, one of their fellow travelers, has been murdered. The novel details the attempt to erase the murder from the Slades’ memories. Points in Time (1982) is a much admired, innovative work that blends fiction and nonfiction, making it nearly impossible to categorize. His powerful, skillfully crafted and measured prose frequently describes cultural misunderstandings and identity disintegration in nightmarish terms and continues to attract new readers. In 1990, Warner Brothers released a feature film version of The Sheltering Sky, narrated by Bowles and starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger. Paul Bowles died on November 18, 1999. His manuscripts are housed at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; his letters can be found at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

NOVELS Let It Come Down. New York: Random House, 1952. Points in Time. New York: Echo Press, 1982. The Sheltering Sky. New York: New Directions, 1949. The Spider’s House. New York: Random House, 1955. Up above the World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation. New York: Noonday, 1951. Allen, Walter. The Modern Novel. New York: Dutton, 1965. Bainbridge, John. Another Way of Living: A Gallery of Americans Who Choose to Live in Europe. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968. Bertens, Hans. The Fiction of Paul Bowles: The Soul Is the Weariest Part of the Body. Atlantic Highlands. N.J.: Humanities, 1979. Caponi, Gena Dagel. Paul Bowles: Romantic Savage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Dillon, Millicent. You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Green, Michelle. The Dream at the End of the World: Paul Bowles and the Literary Renegades in Tangier. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Hibbard, Allen. Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Lacey, R. Kevin, and Francis Poole. Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1996. Miller, Jeffrey. Paul Bowles: A Descriptive Bibliography. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1986. Patteson, Richard F. A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider. Directed by Regina Weinreich and Catherine Warnow, Film documentary, 1994. Pulsifer, Gary, ed. Paul Bowles by His Friends. London: Peter Owen, 1992. Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator: A Biography of Paul Bowles. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Solotaroff, Theodore. The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Steen, Mike. A Look at Tennessee Williams. New York: Hawthorn, 1969. Stewart, Lawrence D. The Illumination of North Africa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974.

OTHER The Authorized Paul Bowles Web Site. Available online. URL: http://www.paulbowles.org. Accessed March 12, 2006.

170 BOYLE, KAY

BOYLE, KAY (1902–1992)

A member of the expatriate group that made Paris its literary and literal home during the 1920s and 1930s, Kay Boyle lived in France for nearly two decades; during that time she wrote the many short stories and novels for which she is most renowned. In addition to volumes of poetry and essays, children’s books, and numerous articles, Boyle spent six decades producing 18 novels and novellas and scores of “New Yorker stories,” a genre she is credited with inventing. Her novels chronicle the woes of expatriate artists, usually women, and she concentrates on the destructiveness of war, especially that caused by Nazism. Boyle’s experimental style, including stream of consciousness and interior monologue, has prompted comparisons with the modernists James Joyce, William FAULKNER, and Virginia Woolf. In the 1960s, both PLAGUED BY THE NIGHTINGALE and Year before Last were reissued, and MY NEXT BRIDE frequently appears on the reading lists for courses in modernism and feminist literature. Boyle was born on February 15, 1902, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Howard P. Boyle, a businessman, and Katherine Evans Boyle, an independent woman who influenced Boyle’s political activism and championed her involvement with social justice. Reared mainly in Cincinnati, Ohio, Boyle married Richard Brault in 1922, moved with him to France in 1923, lived with Ernest Walsh, editor of This Quarter, in Grasse, France, in 1926, and signed the “Revolution of the Word” issue of Transition magazine in 1929. In the 1930s, Boyle, now an accomplished poet, divorced Brault and married Laurence Vail. She wrote some of her finest stories and novels during this period, including Plagued by the Nightingale, Year before Last, and My Next Bride, all of which address complications within heterosexual relationships, although Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933) was one of the first novels to focus on homosexuality. Death of a Man (1936), too, was revolutionary, containing one of the first portraits of a Nazi, here an idealistic doctor who believes that the Nazis will bring good, rather than evil, into the world. Monday Night (1938) details the disappointments of an aspiring writer, and both Bridegroom’s Body (1938) and The Crazy Hunter (1940) demonstrate the weaknesses and constraints of marriage.

In the 1940s, Boyle concentrated on what have come to be known as her “international novels,” most of which occur during the World War II years. Primer for Combat (1942), set in Nazi-occupied France during the collaboration and resistance period, features an American expatriate who tries to view both movements as the results of German occupation. Avalanche (1944), serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, one of the first books written about the French resistance, was unusual in having a woman as the protagonist. That phenomenon is repeated in A Frenchman Must Die (1946), another serialized French resistance novel. Her novel 1939 (1948) uses the device of separated lovers in two different countries, each on a different side of the war. In His Human Majesty (1949), Boyle takes a look at occupied Germany and turns her attention to the Americans, whom she sees as racist and power-hungry. During the McCarthy era, Boyle’s third husband, Baron Joseph von Franckenstein (she had divorced Vail in 1943) was dismissed from his foreign service post and she from her New Yorker job. She continued, however, in her short stories and novels, to criticize the mentality of war. In The Seagull on the Steps (1955) and Generation without Farewell (1960), Boyle focuses on a German protagonist who must deal with postwar guilt. In her last novel, The Underground Woman (1975), Boyle uses the character of an older woman as a spokeswoman for her own beliefs about the evils of war and racism and the morality of social activism and protest. Boyle taught at San Francisco State University until 1980. She was awarded an American Book Award in 1984 from the Before Columbus Foundation for lifetime achievement. After her death in San Francisco on December 27, 1992, Boyle’s papers and manuscripts were donated to the Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

NOVELS Avalanche. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944. The Crazy Hunter. New York: Harcourt, 1940. Death of a Man. New York: Harcourt, 1936. A Frenchman Must Die. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946. Generation without Farewell. New York: Knopf, 1960. Gentlemen, I Address You Privately. New York: Smith & Haas, 1933.

BOYLE, T. C. 171

His Human Majesty. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949. Monday Night. New York: Harcourt, 1938. My Next Bride. New York: Harcourt, 1934. New York: Virago, 1986. 1939. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948. Plagued by the Nightingale. London: Cape & Smith, 1931. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Primer for Combat. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942. The Seagull on the Step. New York: Knopf, 1955. Three Short Novels [includes Bridegroom’s Body, Decision, Crazy Hunter]. Boston: Beacon, 1958. The Underground Woman. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Year Before Last. New York: Harrison Smith, 1932. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1969.

SOURCES Bell, Elizabeth S. Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Boyle, Kay, and Robert McAlmon. Being Geniuses Together, 1920–1930. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point, 1984. Elkins, Marilyn Roberson. Critical Essays on Kay Boyle. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. ———. Metamorphosizing the Novel: Kay Boyle’s Narrative Innovations. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Hileman, Sharon L. “Kay Boyle.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 45–53. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Madden, Charles F. Talks with Authors. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Mellen, Joan. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Spanier, Sandra Whipple. Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Tooker, Dan, and Roger Hofheins. “Kay Boyle.” In Fiction! Interviews with Northern California Novelists, edited by Dan Tooker and Roger Hofheins, 15–35. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Wilson, Edmund. Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950. Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983.

BOYLE, T(HOMAS) C(ORAGHESSAN) (1948– ) A finalist for the 2003 National Book Award for Drop City, his most recent novel, T. C. Boyle has written nine novels and six short-story collections. Many critics consider him to be a postmod-

ern 20th-century Charles Dickens who draws attention through his satirically conceived novels and stories to a variety of social ills. Although he is often grouped with John BARTH and Thomas PYNCHON, he seems more readable because of the sheer rollicking enthusiasm encoded in his hyperbolic, parodic, and often fantastic tales. T. C. Boyle was born on December 2, 1948, in Peekskill, New York, to Thomas John Boyle, a school bus driver, and Rosemary Post McDonald Boyle, a secretary, both of whom died of complications of alcoholism before Boyle turned 30. The 17-year-old Boyle, named after his father, changed his middle name to Coraghessan in an apparent attempt to distance himself from him. The name comes from his mother’s family. Boyle graduated from the State University of New York in 1968 and married Karen Kvashay in 1974. In 1977 Boyle was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, and he has taught at the University of Southern California ever since. After publishing The Descent of Man, his much lauded story collection (which was also his doctoral dissertation at Iowa), Boyle published his first novel, Water Music, in 1981. It is a comedic, picaresque treatment of the 18th-century Scottish explorer, Mungo Park, and his contemporary fictional counterpart and confidence man, Ned Rise, as they travel through parts of Africa and cruise the Niger River. Boyle’s satiric humor reappears in Budding Prospects (1984), as Felix Nasmyth, a disillusioned teacher, finds new energy in a quintessentially American getrich-quick scheme: growing and selling marijuana during the California hippie era. Despite mainly unreliable rural, establishment, and hippie associates, Nasmyth learns the merits of hard work. Although Boyle continued to publish short fiction (Greasy Lake and Other Stories [1985], If the River Was Whiskey [1989], Without a Hero and Other Stories [1994]), most readers feel that the expansive nature of the novel has given Boyle’s talents some needed room. World’s End (1987), winner of a PEN/Faulkner Award, depicts the complex and intertwined history of three families over 10 generations in New York’s Hudson River Valley. With considerable skill, Boyle shows how traits replicate themselves in three families: the

172 BOY’S OWN STORY, A

tenant-farming Dutch Van Brunts, the displaced Kitchawank Mohonks, and the supercilious landowning Dutch Van Warts. In East Is East (1990), Boyle describes the discrimination suffered by Hiro Tanaka, a 20-year-old Japanese seaman who has fled his native country. Tanaka, son of an American soldier and a Japanese bar hostess, is viewed as a second-class citizen. Now he is in Georgia, U.S.A., interacting with other characters in an Okeefenokee Swamp writer’s colony. Boyle’s fifth novel, The Road to Wellville (1993), targets America’s obsession with health and self-improvement. Health expert Dr. John Kellogg, sanitarium patient Will Lightbody, and entrepreneur Charlie Ossining come together at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan where the road to health is through the colon and the primary metaphor is the enema. The Tortilla Curtain (1995) features two couples: Delaney and Kira Mossbacher, a yuppie Southern California couple, and Candido Rincon and his wife, illegal immigrants whose concerns with survival contrast with the selfindulgent concerns of the Mossbachers. Riven Rock (1998) explores men’s feelings for women through Stanley McCormick, son of the inventor of the reaper, and Katherine Dexter, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Stanley’s obsession with women sends him to a California asylum called Riven Rock. A Friend of the Earth (2000), another of Boyle’s California novels, features ecoterrorist Tyrone Tierwater, who evolves from typical American consumer to defender of flora and fauna; critics point out that while Boyle is serious about environmental issues, and poignantly describes the death of Tyrone’s daughter Sierra in a fall from a giant redwood, his signature humor is omnipresent. Drop City (2003) revives two groups endemic to the American pioneering spirit: aging hippies and Alaskan homesteaders, and transports the hippies from Norm Sender’s Sonoma County, California, ranch to rural Alaska. They meet Sess and Pamela Harder, two tough individualists who wish to live off the land. A violent denouement exposes the strengths and weaknesses in both groups. Boyle and his wife Karen live near Santa Barbara where he continues to teach and to write.

NOVELS Budding Prospects: A Pastoral. New York: Viking, 1984. Drop City. New York: Viking, 2003. East Is East. New York: Viking, 1990. A Friend of the Earth. New York: Viking, 2000. Riven Rock. New York: Viking, 1998. The Road to Wellville. New York: Viking, 1993. The Tortilla Curtain. New York: Viking, 1995. Water Music. Boston: Atlantic–Little Brown, 1981. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1987.

SOURCES Adams, Elizabeth. “An Interview with T. C. Boyle,” Chicago Review 37, nos. 2–3 (1991): 51–63. Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver, eds. Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Pope, D. “A Different Kind of Postmodernism,” Gettysburg Review 3 (Autumn 1990): 658–669.

OTHER TCBoyle.com. Available online. URL: http://www.tcboyle. com. Accessed June 3, 2005. USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. “T. C. Boyle.” Available online. URL: http://www.usc.edu/assets/college/faculty/ profiles/133. html. Accessed June 3, 2005.

BOY’S OWN STORY, A EDMUND WHITE (1982) Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story—the first in his semiautobiographical trilogy, which includes The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997)—has become one of the classic “comingout novels” that were a staple of emerging gay literature during the 1970s and ’80s. While this genre has come under fire for its often assimilationalist politics (McRuer, 29, 33), White’s novel works within the genre’s conventions to show the agony inherent in discovering one’s identification with a stigmatized lifestyle. Editions printed after 1994 should include that year’s introduction by White, which tells the context around writing the novel and also helps to explain some of the artistic methods White employs. Significantly, White gives very little to his nameless narrator in the way of personality, description, or individual identity. Critics occasionally compare his facelessness with Ralph ELLISON’s invisible man. The quality even led one reviewer to suggest that this boy could be anyone and anyone could identify with him—even

BRADBURY, RAY 173

across gender lines (Lehmann-Haupt). The lack of specifics, however, does not end with the boy’s personality. Besides saying that he grew up in a smaller midwestern city, the exact geographical setting of the novel remains mysterious throughout as well. The invisible qualities of both the narrator and his location have come under fire from Robert McRuer, who suggests that both work in racially discriminatory ways, but David Bergman presents an interesting defense. Bergman says that these narrative techniques code his race in ways that any reader can grasp while freeing White’s narrator to write less of his class and race positions and focus instead on the narrator’s more defining identity of an oppressed sexual orientation (Bergman, 2004, 71–72). The thin veneer of plot throughout most of A Boy’s Own Story allows White to move his readers back and forth in time fairly effortlessly. The boy’s maturing happens as we see snapshots of him between the ages of seven and 15 and hear him recount the story of his sexual encounters after the age of 11. Many of his sexual encounters are with others close to his age and happen after his advances—the notable encounters with older people also happen after he has approached them. The disorienting quality of time fluidity almost confuses the fact that we read of the narrator’s sex with another boy at age 13 and that his sister, before age 12, reveals strong sadistic homoerotic tendencies. Yet neither of these moments will put too many readers off; the active practice of sex at his young age seems relatively harmless and essentially developmental for the narrator. The narrator’s encounters with the children of the wealthy, a young woman, and street hustlers help develop one of the strains of contemporary gay literature in general— the paradoxically freeing and entrapping qualities of promiscuity. Indeed, White begins the novel by having his narrator learn that two men could enjoy having sex at the same time, consequently setting the focus on the sexual acts of men as well as on the place of homosexual men in 1950s American culture. The narrator’s most active and recurrent fantasies involve an older man taking him away to another world. White twists the standard damsel-in-distress theme by having the narrator dream primarily of his distant father taking him away. This idea returns at several different points in the novel; the narrator

repeatedly wants to be the person pleasing his usually inaccessible father’s whims. Chronologically, this develops in the earliest portion of the novel directly following his parents’ divorce and father’s remarriage. His desire to possess his father’s love begins the most interesting theme of the story: The narrator wants his father—and his father’s status—for social advancement. We hear of his stepmother’s success in society and can interpret the narrator’s desire to supplant her in the roles of both wife and society woman. Power motivates the narrator; his final bid for maturity involves exercising power over a bisexual man who teaches at the narrator’s private school. The narrator’s plot to tell school officials of the man’s marijuana stash and then have a sexual encounter with the man in the same day provides the final tension and the narrator’s ascendancy to adult or near-adult status. The betrayal of his teacher indicates an unfulfilled struggle to come to terms with homosexuality in ways that resist patriarchal structures, and thereby reveals the final compromise he makes to achieve maturity.

SOURCES Bergman, David. Gaiety Transfigured: Gay Self-Representation in American Literature. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. ———. The Violet Hour: The Violet Quill and the Making of Gay Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Books of the Times,” New York Times, 17 December 1982, p. C37. McRuer, Robert. The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Radel, Nicholas F. “Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White.” In Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. New York: New York University Press, 1994. White, Edmund. A Boy’s Own Story. New York: Plume, 1994. ———. The Burning Library: Essays, edited by David Bergman. New York: Vintage, 1995. John Wiehl

BRADBURY, RAY(MOND) (DOUGLAS) (1920– ) Along with Isaac ASIMOV, Ray Bradbury, recipient of the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Science Fiction Writers of American

174 BRADBURY, RAY

Grand Master Award, is considered one of the major science fiction writers of the 20th century. His already fine reputation in those genres has evolved and now includes mainstream readers and critics (Mogen, 10). Although he is best known as a writer of short stories, he has produced six novels, including FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). Discerning critics point out that in both novels Bradbury is an astute social commentator and a prober into psychological and human issues. In the words of Bradbury scholar George M. Slusser, “What is profoundly American in Bradbury is that behind the ‘facade of childhood innocence’—lies a dark vision of the human condition deeply tainted by Calvinism” (Slusser, 26). Ray Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois, to Leonard Spaulding Bradbury and Esther Moberg Bradbury. Within five years after his 1938 high school graduation, Bradbury had become a full-time writer. He married Marguerite Susan McClure in 1947. After the success of The MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950), a collection of linked short fiction that is considered by some critics a novel, Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, frequently compared to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Made into a popular film, Fahrenheit 451 is the name of a futuristic fire department that does not extinguish fires: Instead, it starts them when an individual is found guilty of reading or owning books. The fireman protagonist, Guy Montag, finally understands the value of books through his friendship with young Clarisse; she takes him to see the secret society of those who are preserving books by memorizing them. DANDELION WINE (1957), again a novel/collection of linked stories, is a series of memories of Bradbury’s Waukegan childhood. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a novel that is also based on Bradbury’s memories. Dandelion Wine is light and optimistic, but Something Wicked is the dark tale of Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade and their encounter with the satanic ringmaster of a traveling carnival. The townsfolk understand too late that, in exchange for granting their wishes, the carnival will steal their souls. In addition to the successes already described, Bradbury wrote for such television programs as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, not to mention

the Ray Bradbury Theatre, showcasing many of his stories, that ran from 1985 to 1992. Augmenting his distinguished career as both author and screenwriter, Ray Bradbury has served as president of the Science-Fantasy Writers of America and as board member of the Screen Writers Guild of America. In 1985, Bradbury wrote Death Is a Lonely Business, a detective novel. Both Death and A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990), use writers as central characters; they, too, have murders to solve. Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 has attained classic status. It was originally filmed by Universal in 1966 and adapted as an opera by Georgia Holof and David Mettere, produced in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1988. The actor-director Mel Gibson has produced another cinematic version of the novel. The Martian Chronicles was adapted as a television miniseries in 1980.

NOVELS Dandelion Wine. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Driving Blind. New York: Avon Books, 1997. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine, 1953. A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities. New York: Knopf, 1990. The Martian Chronicles. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950. Quicker Than the Eye. New York: Avon Books, 1996. The Smile. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1991. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Ray Bradbury. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bradbury, Ray. Ray Bradbury: An American Icon. Videocassette. Great Northern Productions, 1996. Indick, Benjamin Philip. The Drama of Ray Bradbury. Baltimore, Md.: T-K Graphics, 1977. Johnson, Wayne L. Ray Bradbury. New York: Ungar, 1980. Mogen, David. Ray Bradbury. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Nolan, William F. The Ray Bradbury Companion. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1975. Olander, Joseph D., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Ray Bradbury. New York: Taplinger, 1980. Reid, Robin Anne. Ray Bradbury: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Slusser, George Edgar. The Bradbury Chronicles. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977.

BRADLEY, MARION ZIMMER 175

Toupence, William F. Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1998. ———. Ray Bradbury and the Poetics of Reverie: Fantasy, Science Fiction, and the Reader. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984.

BRADLEY, MARION ZIMMER (1930–1999) Marion Zimmer Bradley—who wrote under the pseudonym “blah,” among others—was a prolific shortstory writer, literary critic, editor, and founder of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. Her science fiction and fantasy novels ensured her status as one of the most prominent women writers in these genres, along with Joanna RUSS, Ursula LE GUIN, and Octavia BUTLER. She was among the first to scrutinize gender roles and human relationships, most famously in The MISTS OF AVALON, published in 1984 and winner of a Locus Award that same year. Bradley is best known for her Darkover novels, which chronicle the history of the Darkover planet over several centuries. Marion Zimmer Bradley was born on June 3, 1930, in Albany, New York, to Leslie Raymond Zimmer, a carpenter, and Evelyn Conklin Zimmer, a historian. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Hardin-Simmons College in 1964. She was married to Robert Alden Bradley from 1949 until their divorce in 1963; and to Walter Henry Bree from 1964 until 1990. She began publishing magazine stories in the 1950s, and by 1962 she had begun her career as a novelist: that year she published three novels, including The Planet Savers, the initial novel of the Darkover series. The planet Darkover, lost for centuries until rediscovered by the Terran Empire (Earth), is a place of contradictions: psychic residents vie with innovative technology; all manner of sexual preferences coexist simultaneously; and strong, free Amazons inhabit the planet, where most women live under a heavy patriarchal thumb. Numerous critics point out the impressive dramatic tension created by Bradley’s compelling use of choice and the consequences of individual freedom to decide one’s own fate. In The Shattered Chain (1976), for instance, one of Bradley’s most critically esteemed Darkover novels, Lady Rohana enlists the aid of a tribe of Amazons to rescue a friend who is imprisoned in a community of chained women.

Bradley’s concern with the issue of choice emerges in The MISTS OF AVALON (1983), a best-selling novel that uses the Arthurian legend, a classically male-centered story, but substitutes female perspectives. It features Igraine, mother of Arthur; Vivaine, Igraine’s sister, the high priestess of Avalon; Gwenhwyfar, or Guinevere, wife of Arthur; and Morgaine, half sister of Arthur. In The Firebrand (1988), Bradley again revises a legend, this time the fall of Troy and the story of the Amazon priestess Cassandra. She also wrote numerous novels outside the Darkover series, including mythic fantasies, and lesbian romances, including The Catch Trap (1979), a gay novel set in the 1940s and featuring the family and circus of the Flying Santellis. Trapeze artist Tommy Zane gives up a brilliant career of his own to become the catcher for Mario Santelli, whom he has come to love deeply. Marion Zimmer Bradley continues to attract readers. Although she created numerous plots where women were sexually enslaved and abused, she also made room in her fiction for all types of sexual preference, from the abstainers to the gay, from the promiscuous to the lesbian. She died of a heart attack on September 25, 1999, in Berkeley, California.

SELECTED NOVELS The Bloody Sun. New York: Ace Books, 1964. The Catch Trap. New York: Ballantine, 1979. Darkover Landfall. New York: Daw Books, 1972. Darkover. New York: Daw Books, 1993. The Door through Space. New York: Ace Books, 1961. Endless Voyage. New York: Ace Books, 1975. The Firebrand. New York: Pocket Books, 1988. The Forbidden Tower. New York: Daw Books, 1977; London: G. Prior, 1979. The Heritage of Hastur. New York: Daw Books, 1975. Hunters of the Red Moon. New York: Daw Books, 1973. The Mists of Avalon. New York: Knopf, 1983. The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones. New York: Ace Books, 1962. Republished separately as The Planet Savers. London: G. Prior, 1979 and The Sword of Aldones. London: Arrow, 1979. The Shattered Chain. New York: Daw Books, 1976; London: Arrow, 1978. The Spell Sword. New York: Daw Books, 1974. Stormqueen. New York: Daw Books, 1978. The Survivors. With Paul E. Zimmer. New York: Daw Books, 1979.

176 BRAINARD, CECILIA MANGUERRA

Sword and Sorceress: An Anthology of Heroic Fantasy. New York: Daw Books, 1984. The Winds of Darkover. New York: Ace Books, 1970. Witchlight. New York: Tor, 1996.

SOURCES Breen, Walter. The Gemini Problem: A Study in Darkover. Baltimore, Md.: T-K Graphics, 1976. Breen, Walter, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. The Darkover Concordance: A Reader’s Guide. Berkeley, Calif.: Pennyfarthing Press, 1979. Leith, Linda. “Marion Zimmer Bradley and Darkover,” Science-Fiction Studies 7 (March 1980): 28–35. Wise, S. The Darkover Dilemma: Problems of the Darkover Series. Baltimore, Md.: T-K Graphics, 1976.

OTHER Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust. Available online. URL: http://www.mzbfm.com/. Accessed June 3, 2005. The Worlds of “Marion Zimmer Bradley.” Formerly available online. URL: http://empirezine.com/spotlight/zimmer/ zimmer-bio.htm. Accessed June 3, 2005.

BRAINARD, CECILIA MANGUERRA (1947–

) Cecilia Brainard, one of the most widely published of contemporary Filipina-American writers, is known especially for her innovative use of Filipino myth and legend. She is particularly interested in historiography, that is the ways in which point of view, narrative form, and methods of representation influence history. In her novel Song of Yvonne, (published in the United States as WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT [1994]), the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II are mitigated by the comforting legends told by the epic singer Laydan. The narrator relates stories of the gods and goddesses who help oppressed people reach the promised land, the place where they can put down their burdens, and interweaves these stories with the later narratives of exile resulting from the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II (Ty, 31). In addition to essay and short-story collections, Brainard has published her second novel, Magdalena (2002), a tale of three generations of Filipinas. Brainard, who was born on November 21, 1947, grew up in Cebu City, on the central Philippine island of Cebu. After earning a bachelor’s degree in commu-

nications arts from Maryknoll College in Quezon City, she emigrated to the United States and studied film at the University of California at Los Angeles. She married Lauren Brainard, a Peace Corps volunteer whom she met while he served in the Philippines, and they settled in Santa Monica, California. Brainard wrote a number of essays for the Philippine American News and later published them in a collection called Philippine Woman in America. Best known for When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, in which she integrates songs, legends, superstitions, and folktales into 20th-century settings and situations, Brainard also devotes considerable effort to publishing Asian-American writers in the numerous anthologies that she has edited, the most recent of which is Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America (1997).

NOVELS Magdalena. Austin, Tex.: Plain View Press, 2002. When the Rainbow Goddess Wept. New York: Dutton, 1994.

SOURCES Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. Filipino Woman Writing: Home and Exile in the Autobiographical Narratives of Ten Writers. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994. Ty, Eleanor. “Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 27–33. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

OTHER Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Available online. URL: http:// www.ceciliabrainard.com. Accessed June 3, 2005. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Available online. URL: http:// www.palhbooks.com/cbrainardhome.html. Accessed June 3, 2005.

BRAUTIGAN,

RICHARD

(GARY)

(1933–1984) Two decades after his suicide, Richard Brautigan is viewed by most mainstream critics and readers as a luminary of the hippie movement in its Haight-Ashbury and Woodstock heydays, and many detractors think he had little to say in his later novels and was eclipsed by the more apparent talents of the Beat novelists Jack KEROUAC and William S. BURROUGHS. Brautigan is remembered today chiefly for his avant-garde TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA (1967), a novel that revolutionized postmodern fiction and may be

BRAUTIGAN, RICHARD 177

compared today to works of his contemporary, Ken KESEY, and viewed as the precursor to such younger writers as Tom ROBBINS. Richard Brautigan was born on January 20, 1935, in Tacoma, Washington, to Mary Lula Brautigan; apparently he never met his father, Bernard F. Brautigan, and his mother reportedly also abandoned her children from time to time. While in high school, Brautigan was briefly hospitalized as a paranoid schizophrenic. He moved to San Francisco, lived on the fringes of the Beat poetry crowd, became acquainted with the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and married Virginia Dionne Adler in 1957. The marriage ended in divorce in 1970. Although published in 1965, A Confederate General from Big Sur, part fantasy, part satire, was actually written after Trout Fishing in America. Confederate General features Jessie, the narrator (who is studying the punctuation of Ecclesiastes), who relates the story of his friend Lee Mellon, a northern California drifter who believes he is the southern general, Robert E. Lee. Trout Fishing in America, initially seen by many readers as a somewhat overly optimistic and innocent romance in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau’s nature book, Walden, was viewed by later critics as a sophisticated and subtle critique of contemporary culture. In fact, Brautigan introduces one of the first of the postmodernist self-aware or self-reflexive narrators. In Watermelon Sugar (1968), Brautigan’s third novel, is another first-person narrated tale of hippie life, this time in a commune in a tiny town called Death. Some critics see “watermelon sugar” as a code phrase for the drug LSD; the drug is responsible for the emotionless reactions of the inhabitants to the human tragedies occurring in their midst, including a mass suicide. Brautigan continued to write into the 1970s, publishing six additional novels. All are characterized by a conscious blending of styles and genres. Perhaps the most interesting of these is The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), in which two western gunmen are lured by an Indian girl, Magic Child, to kill a monster who lives at Hawkline Manor. The monster is a result of Professor Hawkline’s experiments with chemicals. Other novels in this vein include The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), Willard and His Bowl-

ing Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1976), Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977), and The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980). Most scholars believe that Brautigan committed suicide in part because of the lack of critical appreciation of his novels. He shot himself sometime in September 1984, in Bolinas, California, and his body was found on October 25 of that year. Although he remains a cult figure, critical reappraisal of his work continues shifting his position in American letters.

NOVELS The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. A Confederate General from Big Sur. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942. New York: Delacorte, 1977. The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974. In Watermelon Sugar. San Francisco, Calif.: Four Seasons, 1968. Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. The Tokyo-Montana Express. New York: Delacorte, 1980. Trout Fishing in America. San Francisco, Calif.: Four Seasons, 1967. Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.

SOURCES Abbott, Keith. Downstream from Trout Fishing in America. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1989. Barber, John F. Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography. London: McFarland, 1990. Blakely, Carolyn F. “Narrative Technique in Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar,” College Language Association Journal 35, no. 2 (1991): 150–158. Boyer, Jay. Richard Brautigan. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1987. Chenetier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. London: Methuen, 1983. Clayton, John. “Richard Brautigan: The Politics of Woodstock,” New American Review 11 (1971): 56–68. Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Foster, Jeffrey M. “Richard Brautigan’s Utopia of Detachment,” Connecticut Review 14, no. 1 (1992): 85–91.

178 BREAD GIVERS

Hernlund, Patricia. “Author’s Intent: In Watermelon Sugar,” Critique 16, no. 1 (1974): 5–17. Horvath, Brooke. “Richard Brautigan’s Search for Control over Death,” American Literature 57, no. 3 (1985): 434–455. Kern, Robert. “Williams, Brautigan and the Poetics of Primitivism,” Chicago Review 27, no. 1 (1975): 47–57. Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Frank O’Hara and Richard Brautigan: Personal Poetry.” In Jerome Klinkowitz, The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change, 33–46. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. Leavitt, Harvey. “The Regained Paradise of Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar,” Critique 16, no. 1 (1974): 18–24. Loewinsohn, Ron. “After the Mimeograph Revolution,” TriQuarterly 18 (Winter 1970): 221–236. Malley, Terence. Richard Brautigan: Writers for the Seventies. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1972. Schmitz, Neil. “Richard Brautigan and the Modern Pastoral,” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (Spring 1973): 109–125. Stevick, Philip. “Sheherazade Runs Out of Plots, Goes on Talking; the King, Puzzled, Listens: an Essay on New Fiction,” Tri-Quarterly 26 (Winter 1973): 332–362. Stull, William L. “Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America: Notes of a Native Son,” American Literature 56, no. 1 (1984): 68–80. Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction 1950–1970, 406–415. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Vanderwerken, David L. “Trout Fishing in America and the American Tradition,” Critique 16, no. 1 (1974): 32–40. Walker, Cheryl. “Richard Brautigan: Youth Fishing in America,” Modern Occasions 2, no. 2 (1972): 308–313.

OTHER Richard Brautigan. Formerly available online. URL: http:// empirezine.com/spotlight/brautigan/brau-intro.htm. Accessed June 3, 2005.

BREAD GIVERS ANZIA YEZIERSKA (1925) According to Louise Levitas Henriksen, YEZIERSKA’s daughter, Doubleday celebrated the publication of Bread Givers in 1925 with an advance printing of 500 numbered copies of the book to be presented to “important people” and a garden party in honor of the author. The novel would be, as Alice Kessler-Harris contends, the most autobiographical of the six novels Yezierska would write between 1920 and 1932 and remains as compelling today as it was in the mid1920s. The novel received critical acclaim and

remained popular until the onset of the Great Depression, after which it eventually went out of print, until Kessler-Harris rediscovered an old copy in a library and petitioned Henriksen to allow her to bring the text to the public’s attention once again in 1973. The story told in Bread Givers addresses one woman’s struggle for education, a subject that finds a contemporary place within the American literary canon. Elizabeth Ammons has argued this point in her groundbreaking Conflicting Stories and posits Yezierska’s novel within a specific tradition of writing by American women who challenged existing definitions of gender roles and demonstrated that the new rights given to women, during the early part of the 20th century, were not only necessary but well deserved. Bread Givers tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of a Jewish family that has immigrated to New York from Poland, only to face economic hardship in the ghetto surrounding Hester Street. The family—composed of the patriarch Reb Smolinsky, a Talmudic scholar, his sacrificing wife, and four daughters—lives in a small tenement apartment that allots one entire precious room in its meager space to Sara’s father and his numerous books, the only real belongings the family brought with them from the Old World. Sara struggles to find her own sense of identity, now caught between two cultures—that of the Old World, represented by her father and his traditional, though misogynistic, beliefs, and that of the New World, driven by capitalism. It is the painful conflict between Sara and her father that drives Yezierska’s novel, a conflict that reflects not only a clash in generational belief systems, but growing cultural differences. Sara begins to assimilate and becomes Americanized, while her father desperately clings to fading remnants of the culture he has left behind. Throughout the novel, Sara tries to negotiate a liminal space for herself between these two cultures—a space and resulting definition of self that, at times, causes both cultures to reject her. The novel opens with Sara’s childhood on Hester Street and her family’s financial hardship, caused by her father’s scholarly devotion and his resulting refusal to find work and support his family monetarily. In Poland, her father possessed a traditionally accepted

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S 179

and highly regarded role in society as a Talmudic scholar, who enabled his research and study of the Torah by marrying a woman from a well-off family. After inheriting and losing his wife’s father’s business, Reb Smolinsky moves his family to America, only to find that the streets he believed to be paved with gold are in actuality not, and he must now work in order to support his family. He finds that masculinity in America is defined through a man’s employment. As a girl, Sara observes and grows to hate what she sees as her father’s tyranny and hypocrisy, revealed through his treatment of her three sisters, Bessie, Mashah, and Favia, either as workers who would give him their earnings or as property to be sold off in marriage. The women in this novel become the bloit gidders (a Yiddish term that means “bread givers,” though part of its meaning is lost in translation) or burden bearers, who must support the father of the family, despite his belief in female inferiority and subservience. Henriksen and, later, Kessler-Harris both emphasize the autobiographical elements of Bread Givers, showing how Yezierska’s difficulty with her own father fueled not only her ambition to escape from poverty, but her nuanced depiction of the educated, traditional Jewish European patriarch. Henriksen reveals that Yezierska visited her father, after the publication of the novel, in an attempt to make peace, to reconcile: “In Bread Givers Anzia had written out her anger at her father and the guilt he forced on her. The writing freed her. She had come to understand and sympathize with him as a zealot like herself, alone in a world of compromisers” (219). Sara, like Yezierska, through her fixed determination, earns the nickname Blut und Eisen, meaning “Blood and Iron,” from her father, since her passion for education supersedes all other needs— emotional, physical, and familial. Yet the very stubbornness that the father criticizes in his daughter is the same iron will he possesses and will enable Sara to accomplish her goals. Unlike Yezierska, who, despite her attempts, never reconciled with her father, Sara does come to see her father as a victim who struggles to maintain his sense of identity in a world that no longer gives his vocation, as a private scholar of the Torah, any value. By bringing Hugo Seelig, a Jewish immigrant from Poland (who has

ascended from humble beginnings to the position of principal of the school at which Sara teaches), home to her father, Sara gives her father a student eager to study the Torah, and thus validates his role as scholar and teacher. When the couple, Sara and Hugo, agree to invite Sara’s father to come and live with them, Sara is now able to allow her father a permanent place in her life, revealing her own maturity and willingness to finally accept her father as a flawed human like herself. As the critic Martin Japtok suggests, Sara shifts from a sense of fierce independence, reminiscent of Emersonian self-reliance, and individualism, to a renewed sense of responsibility connected to her community and family.

SOURCES Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Japtok, Martin. “Justifying Individualism: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, 17–30. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Kessler-Harris, Alice. Introduction to Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska. New York: Persea Books, 2003. Konzett, Delia Caparoso. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Sharon Kehl Califano

BREAKFAST

AT TIFFANY’S TRUMAN CAPOTE (1958) In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman CAPOTE uses satire, wit, and irony, underscored by his inimitable lyric language, to fashion this chic and enigmatic novella. His unnamed first-person narrator, a man with an outsider, retrospective tone, resembles the engineer narrator in Edith WHARTON’s ETHAN FROME or Nick Carraway in F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY. He tells the story of Holly Golightly and her mysterious life, and her possible ties to the Mafia. She is an appealingly honest woman who makes her living as an escort and companion to wealthy men, a woman whose grit, independence, and talent win her the admiration of nearly all readers. Because of her unassailable innocence, she conjures up a female Jay Gatsby who also requires a

180 BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, THE

good deal of money to live as she wants to live in New York City. Unlike Gatsby, however, she is fleeing a dull past with a dull husband and is essentially homeless. Most critics agree that the narrator reflects Capote as he was during his New York brownstone days. He ferrets out information about Holly and passes it along to the reader as he wrestles with his own feelings about Holly’s conduct. Capote also presents a circle of concerned acquaintances, including Joe Bell, the bartender; Madame Sapphia Spanella, an operatic singer as unconventional as Holly; O. J. Berman, the Hollywood agent; Jose Ybarra-Jaegar, the Argentine diplomat; and Sally Tomato, the mafioso (despite his feminine-sounding first name) whom Holly visits at Sing Sing and from whom she receives coded messages. Just as Tennessee WILLIAMS maintained that he was actually Blanche Dubois in his play A Streetcar Named Desire (encoded messages are not unusual in Capote’s work), Capote’s portrait may be hidden in the charming, unconventional, and enigmatic Holly. Her real name, after all, is Lulamae, a likely reference to Capote’s friend, the bisexual Carson (Lulu) McCULLERS. More conventional interpretations include the focus on Holly as a “celebration of innocence” (Reed, 91) and the novella as a Künstlerroman, the story of a writer, detailing the narrator’s progress. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was made into a popular feature film in 1961 starring Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly and George Peppard as the narrator. In these less optimistic times, readers may identify more closely with the Holly Golightly who jumps bail at novel’s end and heads for Brazil: “Home is where you feel at home,” she tells the narrator. “I’m still looking” (102).

SOURCES Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Nance, William L. The Worlds of Truman Capote. New York: Stein and Day, 1970. Reed, Kenneth T. Truman Capote. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, THE THORNTON WILDER (1927) An immediate national and international best-seller that was also well received by critics, The Bridge of San Luis Rey earned Thornton

WILDER his first Pulitzer Prize. (He is still the only writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama.) That Wilder’s second novel has remained in print for more than 75 years attests to its timelessness, as does its selection by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century (Lewis, 4), ranking 37th, which was ahead of such highly regarded novels as The Sun Also Rises, Women in Love, Light in August, The Age of Innocence, Heart of Darkness, Main Street, and Finnegans Wake. Once a standard on high school English class reading lists, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was filmed in 1929 and again in 1944; a new film adaptation starring Robert DeNiro, Kathy Bates, and Harvey Keitel was released in 2005. Scholars attribute the popularity of Wilder’s most famous novel to its accessibility as it deals with philosophical questions about the meaning of life that are asked in every culture in the past, the present, and the future. The Bridge of San Luis Rey both is and is not a novel of its time. It contrasts with such realistic novels set in the contemporary world as The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Main Street; however, its form (including nonlinear, nonchronological structure, multiple interrelated protagonists) resembles other modernist fiction such as Winesburg, Ohio, The Sound and the Fury, and Nightwood (Christensen, 203). A reflexivity bordering on metafiction characterizes the narrative of Bridge—which is more an allegory of reading (natural phenomena, lives, history, letters, and literature) than an Aristotelian causal plot, and makes this short novel of the 1920s of interest to fans and scholars of postmodern fiction. Three sections, each of which focuses on one principal and other secondary characters, framed by a prologue and epilogue, respectively entitled “Perhaps an Accident” and “Perhaps an Intention,” compose The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the philosophical and highly allusive frame device an anonymous first-person narrator relates the rather quixotic life of Brother Juniper, a Franciscan priest traveling and ministering in Peru during the 18th century. The priest regards the deaths of five people who were on an old rope bridge when it broke as an opportunity to prove his belief in Providence: that “either we live by accident and die by accident or we live by plan and die by plan.” Although

BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, THE 181

Wilder has the narrator affect a skepticism toward Brother Juniper’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to man,” the story of the five victims’ lives dramatizes that this “act of God” was simultaneously punishment for the wicked, reward for the good, and mercy for the suffering (Kuner, 76). The next three sections of the novel are parables of profound love, which some scholars attribute to the influence of Marcel Proust on Wilder (Castronovo, 48–49). In “Part Two, The Marquesa de Montemayor,” Wilder explores the emotional complexity of a familiar character type: the mother whose love for her child so consumes her that she smothers her offspring, who must flee to another place to be free. Furthermore, in modeling the marquesa after French letter-writer Madame de Sevigné, Wilder shows how unrequited love, even of a mother toward her daughter, can inspire great literary expressions of the human heart, as we are offered excerpts of what the narrator tells us are now considered great writing in the Spanish language studied by schoolboys. Through the narration and letters we see that ultimately the marquesa transcends her selfish, oppressive love of her daughter, but because it occurs the night before she takes the famous bridge on the day it breaks, she is unable to live out her new determination to live and love rightly. This section also relates the story of a young girl named Pepita, the marquesa’s servant sent to her from the convent in Lima. Pepita too has a consuming love (Burbank, 49), but it is for the abbess who took her in and began grooming her to succeed the abbess when she is too old to run the orphanage and other charitable operations based at the convent. Pepita suffers from her separation from the abbess and the hardship of serving the marquesa; she also reaches a determination on how to live from then forward, and thus is about to “begin a new life,” as are all five victims of the fall of the bridge (Christensen, 198), but she does not survive. “Part Three, Esteban” tells the story of the eponymous young man and his twin brother, Manuel. Growing up in the convent orphanage, Esteban and Manuel are so close emotionally that nothing can come between them except death and perhaps romantic love. When Manuel falls in love for the first time, Esteban is prepared to make the sacrifice of leaving his

brother so he can be happy with Camila Perichole, the actress. However, Manuel trumps this act of fraternal love when, we are told, “in one unhesitating stroke of the will, he removed the Perichole from his heart.” The issue becomes moot when Manuel accidentally tears open his leg and the wound becomes infected, and he dies. Esteban is so devastated by the loss of his twin that he unsuccessfully attempts suicide only to perish, mercifully (Stresau, 23), when the bridge falls. In “Part Four, Uncle Pio,” Wilder tells the tale of a Svengali and his protégé, Camila Perichole. Uncle Pio is an unsavory character except that he has a great passion for the golden age of Spanish theater; when he finds a young peasant girl singing in a café in Peru, he decides to mold her into the greatest actress of his age and succeeds. However, Camila develops other aspirations and passions, and eventually is alienated from him. Uncle Pio’s love for Camila is not romantic or sexual, but he nonetheless suffers from this separation until he finds perhaps what will be an acceptable substitute: he persuades Camila to allow him to take her epileptic son Don Jaime to teach him the classics of Spanish literature and how to become a man. They both die when the bridge falls, but this engenders a spiritual transformation in Camila. For her to have gone from café singer, to honored actress, to member of the social cabal in Lima, to comforter of the poor and sick (the abbess’s successor) attests to the progress of grace in her life. The final section of the novel not only finishes the story of Brother Juniper, who is burnt at the stake for heresy, and closes out the philosophical and theological themes associated with the accident of the bridge; it also brings to resolution the story of a character who appears in the preceding sections: Madre Maria del Pilar, or the abbess. Like the other characters, she has an epiphany about love and life after great suffering (Izzo, 125), but unlike them she is allowed to continue living with this new knowledge, and it is her realization that closes the novel: “But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” From the microcosm of the five victims of

182 BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

the bridge and other characters, to the macrocosm of the final sentence, we see the technique and sentiment Thornton Wilder will employ throughout his career in such plays as “Our Town” (1938) and “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1942), and in such novels as The Eighth Day (1967) and Theophilus North (1973). More fable than novel, perhaps, The Bridge of San Luis Rey transcends the mundane as it reaches for the universal story and the classic ideal of truth.

SOURCES Blank, Martin. Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Burbank, Rex. Thornton Wilder. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: F. Ungar, 1986. Christensen, Peter G. “Human Relatedness and Narrative Techniques in the Early Novels of Thornton Wilder and Glenway Wescott.” In Thornton Wilder: New Essays, edited by Martin Blank, Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer, and David Garrett Izzo, 185–205. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999. Izzo, David Garrett. “Thornton Wilder and the Perennial Philosophy: A Legacy of Goodness as Represented by His Five Affirmations First Enunciated in the Early Plays of The Angel That Troubled the Waters.” In Thornton Wilder: New Essays, edited by Martin Blank, Dalma Hunyadi Brunauer, and David Garrett Izzo, 105–125. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1999. Kuner, Mildred. Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark. New York: Crowell, 1972. Lewis, Paul. “Ulysses at Top As Panel Picks 100 Best Novels,” New York Times, 20 July 1998, pp. E-1, E-4. Stresau, Hermann. Thornton Wilder. Translated by Frieda Schutze. New York: F. Ungar, 1971. Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York: Perennial Classics, HarperCollins, 2003. Lincoln Konkle

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY JAY MCINERNEY (1984) Along with Tama JANOWITZ’s Slaves of New York and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero, Jay MCINfirst novel, Bright Lights, Big City, explores and details the frenetic club life and drug scene of mid1980s New York. Bright Lights, Big City follows the actions of an unnamed young man addressed only as ERNEY’s

“you” by the narrator, as in the opening lines of the novel: “You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.” Whether the effect is taken as an address to the reader understood as the unnamed “you” or if it is a conversational use of self-reflexivity, the novel inaugurated a short-lived vogue of second-person present-tense narration, especially in fiction of the New Yorker. The main character of the novel is a 24-year-old frustrated writer who works as a fact checker for a culturally esteemed New York literary magazine. Coping with both the death of his mother and his recent divorce from a successful model who, like the narrator, is originally from the Midwest, the main character succumbs to the club life and cocaine scene. The constant nightlife begins to take a toll on his work, but he is spurred on by his friend, an up-and-coming ad executive, Tad Allagash. The novel follows the main character’s descent and final rebirth and is paralleled by the running image of a “coma baby” story seen in the New York Post headlines. The denouement of the story involves the main character’s acceptance of his mother’s death and realization that he must take charge of his life, instead of being run by friends such as Allagash or by drugs. The novel concludes as the main character, after another night spent in the clubs, trades his symbolic Ray-Ban sunglasses—which protect him from the light of day—for a loaf of fresh bread, which he realizes he will have to relearn to eat. Often compared to J. D. SALINGER’s The Catcher in the Rye and F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The Great Gatsby, Bright Lights, Big City revels in cynical, deadpan humor and references to popular culture. The novel has been seen as a celebration of the club and drug scene and as a roman à clef to New York in the 1980s. McInerney, however, has argued that the novel is “a modest critique of an age in which an actor is the President, in which fashion models are asked for their opinions, in which getting into a nightclub is seen as a significant human achievement.” One of the first and the most successful of Vintage Contemporaries paperback novels, Bright Lights, Big City poses questions of artistic legitimacy, symbolized by the difference between the high-culture magazine

BROMFIELD, LOUIS 183

the narrator works for and the mass cultural Post that he surreptitiously reads.

SOURCES Edwards, Thomas R. “Babylon Re-Revisited,” New York Review of Books (May 23, 1996): 28–29. Faye, Jefferson. “Cultural/Familial Estrangement: Self-Exile and Self-Destruction in Jay McInerney’s Novels.” In The Literature of Emigration and Exile, edited by James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock, 115–130. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992. Girard, Stephanie. “ ‘Standing at the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk’: Vintage Contemporaries, Bright Lights, Big City, and the Problems of Betweenness,” American Literature 68 (1996): 161–185. McInerney, Jay. Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Vintage, 1984. Noe, Marcia. “(Mis)reading the Region: Midwestern Innocence in the Fiction of Jay McInerney,” Midamerica: the Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 25 (1998): 162–174. Eric Leuschner

BRODKEY, HAROLD (ROY) (1930–1996) Harold Brodkey, widely esteemed for his short stories, many of which were published in the New Yorker, also wrote two novels, The Runaway Soul (1991) and Profane Friendship (1994). His lyrically detailed, realistic evocations of childhood initiation experiences remains, for many readers, unparalleled in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Harold Brodkey was born Aaron Roy Weintraub on October 25, 1930, in Alton, Illinois, and was soon adopted by Joseph and Doris Brodkey. He was educated at Harvard University, graduating cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in 1952. Brodkey was married twice: to Joanna Brown, from 1952 to 1962, and to Ellen Schwamm, a novelist, in 1980. After a brief career in teaching, Brodkey published First Love and Other Sorrows, a story collection, in 1986. His first novel, The Runaway Soul, is a lengthy autobiographical story about Wiley Silenowicz, the Brodkey protagonist. Commenting on the intriguing way Brodkey fashions disparate elements into a coherent whole, reviewer Robert M. Adams says that the novel “can also be taken as a medley of Balkanized writings, a set of lectures, confessions, explorations, and masquerades, various as

a good minestrone” (Adams, 3). Profane Friendship features narrator Niles O’Hara, an American novelist, and Omni, an Italian actor who engage in an intense love affair. As Irving Malin points out, part of the fascination of the novel lies in the reader’s suspicion, never clarified, that Niles is actually an unreliable narrator. After learning that he had contracted AIDS, Brodkey wrote This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (1996), a memoir praised equally for its art and its personal honesty. Brodkey died of complications from AIDS on January 26, 1996, in Manhattan, New York City. Many scholars who have been studying his work suggest that he deserves a more prominent place in the canon of contemporary American writers.

NOVELS Profane Friendship. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994. The Runaway Soul. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1991.

SOURCES Adams, Robert M. “A Good Minestrone,” New York Review of Books 38, no. 19 (November 21, 1991): 3. Birkerts, Sven. “Infinity of Inwardness,” Nation 237 (October 17, 1988): 348–351. Brodkey, Harold. This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Linville, James. “Harold Brodkey: The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 121 (1991): 51–91. Malin, Irving. Review of Profane Friendship, Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 201. Woodward, Richard B. “Brodkey,” Mirabella (October 1991): 90–100.

BROMFIELD, LOUIS (1896–1956) Louis Bromfield, who lived in Paris from 1925–38, wrote 19 novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Early Autumn (1926), his third novel. He also wrote five collections of short stories, a dozen Hollywood screenplays, three plays, and, from Malabar Farm in Pleasant Valley, Ohio, 10 nonfiction works, seven of them about subsistence agriculture and soil conservation. Because he based his novels on his beliefs in Jeffersonian democracy and in an agriculturally based America, he failed to adapt the innovative techniques and urban themes advocated by his modernist contemporaries; this choice, as well as Bromfield’s widespread popularity and his steadfast refusal to mix politics in his writing, caused his fall from critical favor. Ironically, today he is

184 BROMFIELD, LOUIS

perhaps better known for his nature writing than for his fiction. Louis Brumfield (Bromfield after the printing error on the title page of his first novel) was born on December 17, 1896, in Mansfield, Ohio, to Charles Brumfield, a farmer, and Annette Coulter Brumfield. (His strong-willed mother provided the model for many of his later female characters.) After a year studying agriculture at Cornell University, Brumfield transferred to Columbia University to study journalism, but instead volunteered for the American ambulance corps from 1917 to 1919. Brumfield participated in seven major battles and received the Croix de Guerre. Columbia University awarded him an honorary war degree in 1920. He married Mary Appleton Wood in 1921 and, a year before the family’s move to France, Bromfield published his first novel, The Green Bay Tree (1924), the first of four (he had projected six) novels in his Escape series. All four novels in the series center on strong women protagonists who “escape” dull farms and monotonous existences, only to find that they eventually need to reescape from their urban and industrial havens. In The Green Bay Tree, Lily Shane leaves a stultifying existence in her Midwest town by moving to Paris, only to have her new life shattered by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. The novel was adapted for the stage as The House of Women in New York in 1927 and in London in 1928. Ellen Tolliver, Lily’s young cousin who is featured in Possession (1925), escapes her small town to become an internationally famous pianist. Unfortunately, Ellen pays a high price for her success: her allegiance to her music precludes forming any personal relationships. In Early Autumn (1926), Bromfield focuses on the East Coast relatives of the earlier characters: Olivia Pentland marries into an old New England aristocratic family to escape her nouveau-riche status, only to be imprisoned by wealth and scandalous family secrets. A Good Woman (1927), completes the series: Emma Downes, the ironic source of the title, seeks to glorify herself in the eyes of the town through her role as a virtuous woman. In so doing, she is so domineering that she alienates both her husband and her son Philip, the former disappears and she forces Philip into African missionary work and mar-

riage to a missionary’s daughter. Both die, and, heedless of the family she has destroyed, Emma marries a congressman. Bromfield continued to write novels for another two decades. His own personal favorite was The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928), a series of interlinked stories about witnesses to a miracle in post–World War I Italy. Twenty-Four Hours (1930) recounts the events at a New York dinner party and the conflicting values between his materialistic characters and those women guests who feel a kinship with nature. Most critics consider The Farm (1933) and The Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India (1937) among Bromfield’s best novels. The Farm depicts the coming-of-age of a young man who grew up on a farm and reaches maturity just as urban, materialistic values begin to destroy agrarian ones. The Rains Came was very popular, featuring Aunt Phoebe, an American expatriate living in India who watches and records the action: Ransome, a European, represents the destructive colonial presence, and the maharajah represents India’s awakening nationalism and spirit of the future. It was adapted into a featurelength film in 1939. Although Bromfield was, along with his neighbor and fellow author Edith WHARTON, awarded the Legion d’Honneur from the French government, he decided to return to the United States as World War II loomed. He bought Malabar Farm in Ohio and moved gradually from fiction to nonfiction books about the values of agrarian life. Bromfield received the Audubon medal in 1952, for leadership in conservation farming, writing, and lecturing; Malabar Farm is now a state park in central Ohio. He died on the farm on March 18, 1956. Scholar David D. Anderson points out that he deserves to be read more widely; his remarkable gifts at characterization, storytelling, and lyrical style “are not common abilities in any literary age” (Anderson, 180).

NOVELS Colorado. New York and London: Harper, 1947. Early Autumn. New York: Stokes, 1926. The Farm. New York and London: Harper, 1933. A Good Woman. New York: Stokes, 1927. The Green Bay Tree. New York: Stokes, 1924. It Had to Happen. London: Cassell, 1936. Kenny. New York and London: Harper, 1947.

BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN 185

The Man Who Had Everything. New York and London: Harper, 1935. A Modern Hero. New York: Stokes, 1932. Mr. Smith. New York: Harper, 1951. Mrs. Parkington. New York and London: Harper, 1943. Night in Bombay. New York and London: Harper, 1940. Possession. New York: Stokes, 1925; republished as Lilli Barr. London: Unwin, 1926. The Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India. New York and London: Harper, 1937. The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg. New York: Stokes, 1928. Twenty-Four Hours. New York: Stokes, 1930. Until the Day Break. New York and London: Harper, 1942. What Became of Anna Bolton. New York and London: Harper, 1944. The Wild Country. New York: Harper, 1948. Wild Is the River. New York and London: Harper, 1941.

SOURCES Anderson, David D. Louis Bromfield. New York: Twayne. 1964. Brown, Morrison. Louis Bromfield and His Books. Fair Lawn, N.J.: Essential Books, 1957. Geld, Ellen Bromfield. The Heritage: A Daughter’s Memories of Louis Bromfield. New York: Harper 1962. Hughes, James M. Louis Bromfield, Ohio and Self-Discovery. Columbus: State Library of Ohio 1979. Little, Charles E., ed. Louis Bromfield at Malabar: Writings on Farming and Country Life. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. ———. Malabar Farm. New York and London: Harper, 1948.

BROOKS,

GWENDOLYN (1917–2000)

Although primarily known as one of the premier poets of the 20th century—and the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, for the collection Annie Allen, in 1950—Gwendolyn Brooks is also highly regarded for her only novel, MAUD MARTHA (1953). In this novel she uses her lyrical, captivating poetic technique to create a convincing portrait of a strong woman who learns to respect herself. Gwendolyn Brooks, the descendent of an escaped slave, was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917, to David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks but was reared in Chicago. After receiving an associate’s degree from Wilson Junior College in 1936, she married

Henry Lowington Blakely II in 1939, and published her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, a poetry collection, in 1945. Long before such works as Toni MORRISON’s THE BLUEST EYE, Brooks’s Maud Martha demonstrated the differences between black and white concepts of beauty, challenged the dominant white model, and celebrated the strength and dignity that distinguished Maud Martha. Brooks’s work has always been concerned with the black urban poor, with the everyday struggles of those she called “plain black folks,” but most critics point out that, after the Civil Rights movement and the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, her work became more explicitly political. Brooks was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988. The recipient of scores of awards and honorary degrees, Gwendolyn Brooks, at age 68, was also the first African American to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. She promoted the work of many writers and established the Illinois Poet Laureate Awards. Gwendolyn Brooks died of cancer, on December 3, 2000, in Chicago. Her papers are housed at Western Illinois University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature.

NOVEL Maud Martha. New York: Harper, 1953.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Gwendolyn Brooks. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984. Kent, George. Gwendolyn Brooks: A Life. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks: Her Poetry and Fiction. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Shaw, Harry F. Gwendolyn Brooks. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

BROWN,

CHARLES

BROCKDEN

(1771–1810) A novelist, journalist, and editor, Charles Brockden Brown is considered the first professional American novelist. Of his seven published novels, four are still considered significant: WIELAND

186 BROWN, CHARLES BROCKDEN

(1798), a gothic tale of murder and insanity; ORMOND (1799), a gothically inspired tale of seduction; Arthur Mervyn (1799), a picaresque bildungsroman; and Edgar Huntly (1799), a nightmarish portrait of a sleepwalker. Brown is clearly a precursor of Edgar Allen POE and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, both of whom admired his ability to portray the private anguish of an obsessed individual, and the darker side of the human psyche in general. Among more modern practitioners of the gothic, who describe the terrors of a mind in conflict with itself, contemporary critics name William FAULKNER and Henry JAMES (Ringe, 2). One is tempted to add to these writers the novelist Stephen KING. Charles Brockden Brown was born on January 17, 1771, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Elijah Brown, a prosperous Quaker merchant, and Mary Armitt Brown. Rebelling against the study of law, he joined literary clubs first in Philadelphia and then in New York, where he found encouragement, and published Wieland when he was 27 years old. The tale of Theodore Wieland, a melancholy young man, mixes religious delusion and murder: Wieland believes he hears God telling him to murder his wife and children. The novel pits Wieland’s sister Clara, the voice of reason, against that of his friend Carwin, the intriguing but dangerous artist whose ventriloquism leads Wieland to his tragedy and demise. The title character of Ormond, the would-be seducer of Constantia Dudley, is defeated by her intelligence and education. Edgar Huntly, the tormented protagonist of Edgar Huntly, slouches through virgin American forests, mountains, caves, and cliffs. His encounters with Native Americans pave the way for James Fenimore COOPER and his Leatherstocking Tales, particularly The LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Arthur Mervyn is particularly notable for its depiction of the yellow fever outbreak in Philadelphia. Brown also wrote Alcuin (1798), which advocates for political, educational, and sexual freedom for women. Clara Howard (1801) and Jane Talbot (1801) rely on sentimentalism. Yet one critic, Paul Witherington, finds them among his most accomplished novels. Brown is, according to scholar Donald A. Ringe, artistic at his best, and, even at his worst, a significant contributor to the way we interpret subsequent developments in American literature (Ringe, 10). Brown’s manuscripts are housed at the University of Texas at Austin, the Uni-

versity of Virginia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and Bowdoin College.

NOVELS Alcuin: A Dialogue. New York: Printed by T. & J. Swords, 1798. Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, part 1. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799; part 2. New York: George F. Hopkins, 1800. Clara Howard; In a Series of Letters. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell & Asbury Dickins, 1801; republished as Philip Stanley; Or, the Enthusiasm of Love . . . 2 vols. London, 1807. Edgar Huntly; Or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, 3 vols. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799. Jane Talbot, A Novel. Philadelphia: John Bioren & John Conrad, M. & J. Conrad in Baltimore, Md. and Rapin, Conrad in Washington City, 1801. Ormond; Or the Secret Witness. New York: G. Forman for H. Caritat, 1799. Wieland; Or the Transformation. An American Tale. New York: T. & J. Swords for H. Caritat, 1798.

SOURCES Allen, Paul. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown: A Facsimile Reproduction. Edited by Charles E. Bennett. New York: Delmar, Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975. Also published as The Late Charles Brockden Brown. Edited by Robert E. Hemenway and Joseph Katz. Columbia, S.C.: Faust, 1976. Axelrod, Alan. Charles Brockden Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Bell, Michael Davitt. “ ‘The Double-Tongued Deceiver’: Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature 9 (Fall 1974): 143–163. Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. Cleman, John. “Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown’s Major Novels,” Early American Literature 10 (Fall 1975): 190–210. Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Kimball, Arthur G. Rational Fictions: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown. McMinnville, Oreg.: Linfield Research Institute, 1968. Parker, Patricia. Charles Brockden Brown: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

BROWN, DAN 187

Ringe, Donald A. Charles Brockden Brown. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1991. Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Wiley, Lulu Rumsey. The Sources and Influence of the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. New York: Vantage Press, 1950. Witherington, Paul. “Benevolence and the ‘Utmost Stretch’: Charles Brockden Brown’s Narrative Dilemma,” Criticism 14 (Spring 1972): 175–191. ———. “Brockden Brown’s Other Novels: Clara Howard and Jane Talbot,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 29 (December 1974): 257–272.

OTHER License for the World Wide School’s Wieland; Or The Transformation. Available online. URL: http://www. worldwideschool.org/library/books/lit/socialcommentary/ WielandOrtheTransformation/legalese.html. Accessed June 5, 2005. UVa Library: Early American Fiction Collection: Charles Brockden Brown. Restricted availability online. URL: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/authors/cbb.html. Accessed June 5, 2005.

BROWN, DAN (1964– ) Erstwhile schoolteacher turned blockbuster writer, Dan Brown, author of techno-thrillers frequently compared to those of Tom CLANCY and Michael CRICHTON, made publishing headlines with his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003); it rose to the top of most major newspaper’s best-seller lists and, within a year and a half, had more than 7.5 million copies in print. As National Security Institute Managing Director Don Ulsch notes, “what Clancy has written so convincingly about the CIA and the FBI, Brown has [done so] masterfully for the National Security Agency” (Ulsch). Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to a math professor and a musician specializing in sacred music. He was educated at Amherst College, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1986. His first novel, Digital Fortress (1998), features Susan Fletcher, head cryptographer of the NSA, in swift-paced scenes alternating between Washington, D.C., and Seville, Spain. His third, Deception Point

(2001), also features a brainy woman, this time a NASA intelligence analyst. Both the second and fourth novels, Angels and Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code, feature the Harvard art history, iconography, and religion professor Robert Langdon who enjoys the challenge of such phenomena as the big bang theory, the order of Knights Templar, and theories about the Holy Grail. In Angels and Demons, Langdon becomes involved with the ancient secret cult called the Illuminati who seek vengeance against the Vatican because of its ill treatment of such scientists as Galileo and Copernicus. In The Da Vinci Code, Sophie Neveu, whom New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin calls “a chip off the author’s earlier prototype” (Maslin), joins up with Langdon to follow the clues supposedly planted by Leonardo Da Vinci. The astonishing results involve murder, the Mona Lisa, the Madonna of the Rocks, and Da Vinci’s famous painting, The Last Supper. Readers and critics alike continue to praise Brown for his ability to educate and entertain. He is helped in his research by his wife Blythe, an art historian and painter. They travel frequently. Brown is reportedly working on the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, the film version of which is soon to be released by Columbia Pictures. In 2005 The Da Vinci Code was named Britain’s Book of the Year.

NOVELS Angels and Demons. New York: Pocket Books, 2000. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Deception Point. New York: Pocket Books, 2001. Digital Fortress. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

SOURCES Ayers, Jeff. Review of Deception Point, Library Journal 126, no. 16 (October 1, 2001): 139. Maryles, Daisy. “From Angels to Demons,” Publishers Weekly 251, no. 2 (January 12, 2004): 17. Paumgarten, Nick. “Acknowledged.” The New Yorker, 5 May 2003, p. 36. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Digital Fortress, Publishers Weekly 244, no. 52 (December 22, 1997): 39–40.

OTHER Ain, Marissa. “Hidden in Plain Sight.” Yale Review of Books. Available online. URL: http://www.yalereviewofbooks.com/ archive/summer03/review09.shtml.htm. Accessed June 5, 2005.

188 BROWN, RITA MAE

Court, Ayesha. Review of The Da Vinci Code. USA Today Online. (May 8, 2003). Available online. URL: http:// www.usatoday.htm/. Accessed June 15, 2005. Dan Brown Web site. Available online. URL: http://www. danbrown.com/. Accessed June 5, 2005. Maryles, Daisy. “Veni, Vidi, DaVinci.” Publisher’s Weekly, (March 31, 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.danbrown. com/media/venivididavinci.htm. Accessed June 5, 2005. Maslin, Janet. Review of The Da Vinci Code, International Herald Tribune, March 20, 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/drc3.asp?DOCID=1P1: 72708829. Accessed August 27, 2005. ———. “Spinning a Thriller From the Louvre.” Available online. URL: http://www.danbrown.com/novels/davinci_ code/nytimes.html. Accessed June 5, 2005. Morris, Edward. “Explosive New Thriller Explores Secrets of the Church.” Bookpage. Available online. URL: http://www. bookpage.com/6304bp/dan_brown.html (April 2003): 11. Accessed August 22, 2005. Ulsch, Don. Review of Digital Fortress. Available online. URL: http://www.danbrown.com/novels/digital_fortress/ reviews.html. Accessed August 22, 2005. White, Claire E. Interview with Dan Brown. Writers Write. Atlantic Unbound. Available online. URL: http://www. writerswrite.com/journal/may98/brown.htm. (May 1998). Accessed August 22, 2005.

BROWN, RITA MAE (1944– ) Novelist, poet, feminist activist, screenwriter, and essayist, Rita Mae Brown came into prominence with her first novel, RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE (1973), featuring a lesbian protagonist with a sense of humor. Although she has a reputation as a spokesperson for lesbians and Rubyfruit Jungle has become a staple, not just of gay and lesbian literature courses, but also of women’s studies and contemporary American literature courses, Brown has strongly resisted the label of “lesbian writer.” In addition to fiction set in various historical eras, from the present to the Great Depression to the Civil War and the aftermath of the War of 1812, Brown has devoted the last decade to writing mystery novels, some “coauthored” with her cat, Sneaky Pie. She has also authored or coauthored eight screenplays, including Rubyfruit Jungle, based on her novel. Rita Mae Brown was born on November 28, 1944, in Hanover, Pennsylvania, to unmarried parents who gave her up for adoption. Brown was adopted by

Ralph Brown, a butcher, and Julia Buckingham Brown, a bakery employee and mill worker. At age 11 Brown moved with the family to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida; she was educated at the University of Florida and New York University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, and the New York School of Visual Arts, where she received a cinematography certificate, both in 1968. In 1973, the year Rubyfruit Jungle was published, Brown received her doctorate from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. Rubyfruit Jungle has been called a contemporary Huckleberry Finn, a female picaresque, and a lesbian bildungsroman featuring tomboy protagonist Dorothy Bolt. The semiautobiographical novel depicts the talented and intelligent Molly as she surmounts multiple barriers in her search for self-reliance and success. Brown’s second novel, In Her Day (1976), set in New York, chronicles the love affair between art professor Carole Hanratty and a radical feminist named Ilse. Brown followed with the more successful Six of One (1978), as two generations of women in Runnymede, Pennsylvania, exhibit strengths that help them survive World War I and the Great Depression. SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT (1982), set in Montgomery, Alabama, depicts issues of incest and mixed race relationships through Banana Mae Parker and Blue Rhonda Latrec, two prostitutes, and Hortensia Reedmuller Banastre and Hercules Jinks. Sudden Death (1983) depicts corruption on the tennis courts, in this case brought on by the attempts to hide the lesbianism of Carmen Semana, a young Argentine tennis star. Miscegenation emerges again in Brown’s Civil War novel, High Hearts (1986), when a young bride, Geneva Chatfield, disguises herself as a man to follow her husband to the battlefield. The novel is a tribute to the many women who played a role in the Civil War. In Bingo (1988), Brown returns to Runnymede; Nickle, her lesbian protagonist, struggles to save the town newspaper but is distracted by her mother and her aunt, both in their 90s, who try to attract the attention of eligible bachelor Ed Tutweiler Walters. With Wish You Were Here (1990), Brown ventured into the world of the mystery novel and introduced the feline character Mrs. Murphy and Brown’s own cat and “coauthor” Sneaky Pie. These mysteries have brought Brown an even

BROWN, ROSELLEN 189

greater readership. In her 1993 novel VENUS ENVY, Brown revisits the strong lesbian character, this time in art dealer Mary Armstrong Frazier who, when diagnosed with a terminal disease, writes letters admitting her lesbianism, only to learn that she is not dying after all. Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War (1994) is another historical novel, set in 1814, and Riding Shotgun (1996) depicts protagonist Pryor “Cig” Blackwood as she timetravels back to colonial Virginia. Rita Mae Brown continues to write about strong, courageous women whose intelligence and sense of humor helps them succeed even when the odds are against them.

NOVELS Bingo. New York: Bantam, 1988. Catch as Cat Can. New York: Bantam, 2002. Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War. New York: Bantam, 1994. High Hearts. New York: Bantam, 1986. Hotspur. New York: Ballantine, 2002. In Her Day. Plainfield, Vt.: Daughters, Inc., 1976. Outfoxed. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Riding Shotgun. New York: Bantam, 1996. Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser. New York: Bantam, 1997. Rubyfruit Jungle. Plainfield, Vt.: Daughters, Inc., 1973. Six of One. New York: Harper, 1978. Southern Discomfort. New York: Harper, 1982. Sudden Death. New York: Bantam, 1983. Tale of the Tip-Off. New York: Bantam, 2003. Venus Envy. New York: Bantam, 1993.

BROWN, ROSELLEN (1939– ) Rosellen Brown, one of Ms. magazine’s Women of the Year in 1984, received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in 1987. Of her five novels, three—Tender Mercies (1978), Before and After (1992), and Civil Wars (1984)—have been adapted into feature-length films. Also the author of three volumes of poetry and a short-story collection, Brown has been praised for her portrayals of racial issues, mother-daughter relationships, and for her evocations of our ties to family and community. Her “forte,” says reviewer Rochelle Ratner, “is beginning her novels at the very moment when the family structure begins to fall apart, and picking up the action from that point” (Ratner, 31). Because she writes so often about families, Brown told inter-

viewer Mickey Pearlman that she often writes from a feeling of “sheer terror,” hoping that if she tells these stories, they won’t actually happen (Pearlman, 106). But critic Merla Wolk thinks that Brown’s female characters must experience disaster in order to “have access to verbal power,” and to express themselves confidently (Wolk, “Offerings”). Rosellen Brown was born on May 12, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to David H. Brown, a salesman, and Blossom Lieberman Brown. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at Barnard College in 1960, and a master’s degree at Brandeis University in 1962. She married Marvin Hoffman, a teacher, in 1963, and, after a Woodrow Wilson fellowship that took her to Mississippi during the civil rights era, embarked on a writing and teaching career. Her first novel, The Autobiography of My Mother (1976), depicts the often hostile relationship between Gerda Stein, a wellknown civil rights lawyer, and Renata, “her alienated, withered flower-child daughter” (Brown, Seaquist interview). As enmities between the two magnify, Renata’s daughter Tippy slips from her grasp and falls to her death. Yet another disaster occurs in Tender Mercies, Brown’s second novel, as Dan Sturrock mishandles a boat; the ensuing accident results in his wife Laura Courser’s broken neck and paralysis. Laura still functions intellectually, but she will be a quadriplegic for the rest of her life. Civil Wars also courts disaster, an auto accident that orphans two children; they are sent to their uncle, Teddy Carll, an aging and discontented civil rights activist who “left his heart and soul in the sixties” (Simon, 113), and his wife, Jessie. Jessie teaches her nephew and niece to discard their racist attitudes. Brown’s fourth novel, Before and After, opens with the discovery of the body of a pregnant teenager who has been brutally murdered. The novel focuses on Jacob Reiser, the 17-year-old boy who murdered her, and the effects of his behavior on his father, Ben, an artist; mother, Carolyn, a doctor; and 12-year-old sister Judith, who is the moral voice in the book (Brown, Seaquist interview). Jacob is the only one who does not tell his story. Carolyn testifies against him, Ben concocts a story, and Jacob’s trial ends with a hung jury. Half A Heart (2000) once again examines a mother-daughter

190 BROWN, WILLIAM WELLS

relationship and race relations, this time between Miriam Viner, who conceived a child with Eljay, a black Mississippi college professor during the Civil Rights movement, and the long-lost daughter, Ronnee, who seeks out Miriam in her affluent Houston suburb. Rosellen Brown most recently taught at Northwestern University. She lives with her husband in Chicago.

NOVELS The Autobiography of My Mother. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Before and After. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992. Civil Wars. New York: Knopf, 1984. Half a Heart. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000. Tender Mercies. New York: Knopf, 1978.

SOURCES Allen, Bruce. “Tense Novel of Residual Idealism, Racism,” Christian Science Monitor 77, no. 185 (August 15, 1985): 22. Armstrong, Isobel. “In Death Estranged.” Times Literary Supplement, 5 March 1993, p. 21. Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle,” Partisan Review 60, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 65–66. Birkerts, Sven. “Family Secrets,” New Republic, 2 November 1992, pp. 40–42. Brown, Rosellen. “Belles Lettres Interview: Rosellen Brown.” By Carla Seaquist. Belles Lettres 8, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 34–39. ———. “An Interview with Rosellen Brown.” By Karla Hammond. Chicago Review 33, no. 3 (Winter 1983): 117–125. ———. “An Interview with Rosellen Brown.” By Melissa Walker. Contemporary Literature 27, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 144–159. ———. “An Interview with Rosellen Brown.” Missouri Review 17, no. 1 (1994): 91–115. ———. “PW Interviews: Rosellen Brown.” By Judith Pierce Rosenberg. Publishers Weekly 239, no. 39 (August 31, 1992): 54–55. Brzezinski, Steve. Review of Half a Heart, by Rosellen Brown, Antioch Review 58, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 525–526. D’Erasmo, Stacey. “Home Fires.” Nation, 28 September 1992, pp. 333–335. Dunford, Judith. “Realms of Wrong and Right.” Chicago Tribune Books, 6 September 1992, pp. 1, 6. Eder, Richard. “Troubled Family Needs a Reality Check.” Los Angeles Times, 3 September 1992, pp. E4. Fried, Kerry. “Criminal Elements,” New York Review of Books 40, no. 3 (January 14, 1993): 36–37.

Glastonbury, Marion. “Fighting Words,” New Statesman 108, no. 2788 (August 24, 1984): 22–23. Haskell, Molly. “Race and Reunion,” New Leader 83, no. 2 (May–June 2000): 33–34. Johnston, Darcie Conner. “A Crack across Their Lives,” Belles Lettres 8, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 31, 39. Lee, Don. “About Rosellen Brown,” Ploughshares 20, nos. 2–3 (Fall 1994): 235–240. Parson-Nesbitt, Julie. Review of Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, by Rosellen Brown, Belles Lettres 11, no. 1 (January 1996): 34. Pearlman, Mickey. “Rosellen Brown.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women, 103–110. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. ———, and Katherine Usher Henderson. “Rosellen Brown.” In A Voice of One’s Own: Conversations with America’s Writing Women, 121–130. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Ratner, Rochelle. “Categorically Writing,” American Book Review 15, no. 4 (October 1993): 31. Simon, Linda. Review of Civil Wars, by Rosellen Brown, Prairie Schooner 59, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 113–115. Walzer, Judith B. “After the Movement,” Dissent 32 (Spring 1985): 244–246. Wolk, Merla. “Offerings: The Price of Speaking Out in the Fiction of Rosellen Brown,” Critique 38, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 123–134. ———. “Uncivil Wars: The Reproduction of MotherDaughter Conflict and Rosellen Brown’s Autobiography of My Mother,” American Imago 45, no. 2 (Summer 1988): 163–185.

BROWN, WILLIAM WELLS (1816–1884) A pivotal figure in African-American literary history, William Wells Brown wrote CLOTEL; OR, THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER (1853), the first African-American novel, as well as the first play, the first travel narrative, and Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (1847), that went through six editions in the United States and England. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter has assured Brown of a permanent place in history: Published only one year after Harriet Beecher STOWE’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, this powerful social protest novel painted a more horrific picture of the realities of slavery than did Stowe’s best-seller. William Wells Brown was born in slavery around 1816 (some sources say 1814) near Lexington, Kentucky, to Elizabeth Brown. Much of the biographical information comes from his daughter Josephine’s book,

BROWN, WILLIAM WELLS 191

Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter (1856). His father was George Higgins, a slaveholder, and a neighbor of Dr. John Young, a physician, farmer, and politician, who became Brown’s first master. Sold to five different masters by 1833, Brown made two unsuccessful escape attempts (one with his mother, who was sold down the river) before his successful escape on New Year’s Day, 1834, to Cleveland, Ohio. He took his name from Wells Brown, the Quaker who helped him escape. That same year, Brown married Elizabeth Schooner and moved to Buffalo, New York, where he first became active in antislavery and temperance activities. In 1847 he published his Narrative, and the following year Brown and his wife separated; he moved to Boston with his two daughters and then to London, where he continued to write as a journalist and abolitionist while publishing his travel book, Three Years in Europe (1852). The first version of Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter followed. Since Brown was well aware of the rumor that Thomas Jefferson’s mulatto daughter had been sold on the auction block, he based his protagonist on her. His novel contained more information on the realities of slavery than any novel previously published by an American; the novel went through three revisions and title changes, the final version appearing two years after the end of the Civil War. A British friend bought Brown’s freedom in 1854, at which time he returned to the United States, married Annie Elizabeth Gray, and continued writing historical works about African Americans in the military and as citizens during Reconstruction. In later years Brown practiced medicine and had an office in Boston. He died in the Boston suburb of Chelsea on November 6, 1884. William Wells Brown’s papers are held in numerous places, including the Boston Public Library; the Butler Library, Columbia University; the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore; the George Arents Research Library at Syracuse University; the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

NOVEL Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. London: Partridge & Oakey, 1853; rev. ed., Clotelle: A Tale of Southern States. Boston: J. Redpath,

and New York: H. Dexter Hamilton, 1864; rev. ed., Clotelle: or, The Colored Heroine; A Tale of the Southern States. Boston: Lee, 1867.

SOURCES Andrews, William L. Introduction to From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown, edited by William L. Andrews, 1–12. New York: Mentor, 1993. ———. “Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, and the Problem of Authority in New South Writing.” In Southern Literature and Literary Theory, edited by Jefferson Humphries, 1–21. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. ———. “The Novelization of Voice in Early African-American Narrative,” PMLA 105 (January 1990): 23–34. ———. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 27–29, 144–151, 171–176, 272–274. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 38–42. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Brown, Josephine. Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter. Boston: Wallcut, 1856. Brown, William Wells. Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847; enlarged, 1848; republished as Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, Written by Himself. London: Charles Gilpin, 1849. Butterfield, Stephen. Black Autobiography in America, 9–89. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. Dorsey, Peter A. “De-authorizing Slavery: Realism in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Brown’s Clotel,” ESQ 41 (Winter 1995): 256–288. Ernest, John. “The Reconstruction of Whiteness: William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom,” PMLA 113 (October 1998): 1108–1121. Fabi, M. Giulia. “The ‘Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of the Negroes’: Gender, Slave Resistance, and William Wells Brown’s Revisions of Clotel,” African American Review 27, no. 4. (Winter 1993): 639–654. Gilmore, Paul. “ ‘De Genewine Artekil’: William Wells Brown, Blackface Minstrelsy, and Abolitionism,” American Literature 69 (December 1997): 743–780. Greene, J. Lee. Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century, 23–62. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Heermance, J. Noel. William Wells Brown and Clotelle: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969.

192 BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES

Jackson, Blyden. A History of Afro-American Literature. Vol. 1, The Long Beginning, 1746–1895, 326–342. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author, His Development in America, 156–173. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Mulvey, Christopher. “The Fugitive Self and the New World of the North: William Wells Brown’s Discovery of America.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, 99–111. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of AfroAmerican Narrative, 26–31. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Yellin, Jean Fagan. The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863, 154–181. New York: New York University Press, 1972.

BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES PAULE MARSHALL (1959) Set in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s, Brown Girl, Brownstones is Paule MARSHALL’s first novel. Following the classic structure of a bildungsroman, it recounts the story of Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, from age 11 to 20. Told mainly from Selina’s point of view, the story reveals the frustration and pain of growing up in a violent family. Selina is caught between her hard-working and determined mother, Silla, and her frustrated and passive father, Deighton. The novel opens with the image of the “unbroken line of brownstone houses down the long Brooklyn street” (3), and depicts a predominantly oppressive atmosphere of poverty and lack of possibilities, with the drama of World War II in the background. These houses are multilayered symbols: they are a silent and disturbing presence that represents the color of the protagonist’s skins, the racial problems of the community, and a pessimistic vision of these characters’ tragic lives. Most important, they signal Silla’s obsession to “buy house,” or own property, a desire that permeates the community’s life. Silla manages to sell her husband’s property in Barbados, only to have him squander the money. However, nothing stops her from buying her house: she visits a loan shark, rents out rooms, and denounces the amoral life of her neighbor Suggie. Selina’s preference for her father marks her childhood profoundly. A weak dreamer who

never worked, Deighton wanted to live like a white man, return to Barbados, and build a house. An accident at a job leaves him crippled and depressed. His frustration and growing sense of alienation lead him leave his family to join Father Peace’s sect. Silla, unable to bear this abandonment, denounces him to the police who then deport him; Deighton throws himself overboard before arriving at Barbados. Selina mourns her father deeply, dressing in black for more than a year. Her efforts to understand her mother characterize the different stages of her life; she rejects her mother’s ambition and hates her for what she did to her father. At the end of the novel, however, she realizes that she is like her mother, willing to transgress norms in order to fulfill her dreams. Confident about her possibilities, she plans carefully and earns the money to leave Brooklyn. Just as her mother lied to sell her father’s land, Selina lies to acquire the Barbadian Homeowners Association’s grant so she can run away with her lover, Clive. In this relationship, Selina, like her mother before her, is the active partner, studying, working, planning. Successful at everything she sets her mind to, Selina is gradually disillusioned by Clive who, frustrated by her superiority, becomes more and more passive, leading her to leave him. As she begins to engage in American society again, Selina becomes aware of the different barriers that mainstream society builds against black immigrants; she realizes that white people do not look at her, seeing only her color. Her frustration leads her back to Barbados. Returning to her family roots, she seeks a redefinition and reassessment of her cultural identity, a difficult position between her American identity and her Afro-Caribbean background. Though considered an African-American novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is more accurately an immigrant novel of the Caribbean diaspora, stemming from a tradition different from that of Richard WRIGHT, for instance, or Gwendolyn BROOKS. The Boyce family represents the Barbadians who immigrated to New York during the first half of the 20th century, pursuing their American dream of prosperity and wealth, and of the hardships of many Caribbean-American families during the Great Depression and World War II. The novel also celebrates female heroism. With a prominently feminist perspective, Marshall establishes

BUCK, PEARL S. 193

women as centers of power, rather than as victims. Women are, in fact, the economic and emotional protagonists of the social life of Bajuns—the Barbadians’ nickname for themselves—in Brooklyn; their work and determination allow them to prosper, while the men remain in the background, in passive and secondary roles. Silla’s endurance, her rage, her devotion to the dollar and property, her determination to survive in “this man country” make her a symbol of this struggle. Selina speaks with the authentic voice of the Bajun community, and her insights on poverty, race, politics, the war, and colonialism offer a coherent portrait of the social process being enacted by the immigrants. She also symbolizes the anguish of second-generation immigrants who must adapt not only to America but to their parents’ dreams: Selina has to fight to fulfill her own destiny in life, clashing brutally with her mother’s expectations of her college career and medical school. Significantly in the context of ethnic writing, the novel emphasizes the positive value of roots, and suggests a cyclical nature to the immigrant process.

SOURCES Byerman, Keith E. “Gender, Culture and Identity in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones.” In Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth Century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection, edited by Janice Morgan, et al., 135–147. New York: Garland, 1991. Delamotte, Eugenia C. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Denniston, Dorothy Hamer. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Hathaway, Heather. Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Japtok, Martin. “Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism,” African American Review 32, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 305–315. MacPherson, Heidi S. “Perceptions of Place: Geopolitical and Cultural Positioning in Paule Marshall’s Novels.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Londsdale, 75–96. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. 1959. Reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1981.

Pettis, Joyce. Toward a Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Rose, Toby. “Crossroads Are Our Roads: Paule Marshall’s Portrayal of Immigrant Identity Themes.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payan and Rose Toby, 109–121. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Rosalia Baena

BUCK, PEARL S. (PEARL COMFORT SYDENSTRICKER BUCK) (1892–1973) Although her name is practically synonymous with her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, THE GOOD EARTH (1931), Pearl Buck, an internationally best-selling author, was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature (1938). She was also the author of more than 100 books, over 60 of them novels. She wrote plays, short stories, biographies, and numerous nonfiction essays and articles as well. After some decades of critical neglect, The Good Earth became an Oprah Book Club selection in 2004, nearly three-quarters of a century after it first appeared. The revival of interest in Buck’s work was energized by the publication in 1996 of Peter J. Conn’s Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. Reared in China, Buck, who was fluent in both English and Chinese, set many of her novels in China and focused on such cultural issues as polygamy, foot binding, infanticide, interracial marriage, child slavery, prostitution, and opium addiction. The status of women was a constant theme in her work, and Buck, known for her deceptively simple writing style, which echoes Chinese folk narratives and fairy tales, chronicled the successes and defeats of three-dimensional characters for readers throughout the world. As the critic Paul A. Doyle noted, Pearl Buck was “the intermediary between two worlds and two cultures” (15). She received numerous honorary degrees and more than 300 humanitarian awards for her work on behalf of children’s welfare and the adoption of Amerasian children. Buck was born on June 26, 1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, to Absalom Sydenstricker and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker, both Presbyterian missionaries. After spending her first 17 years with her parents in Zhenjiang (Chinkiang), China, Buck was educated at Randolph-

194 BUCK, PEARL S.

Macon College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1914. On May 13, 1915, she married John Lossing Buck, an agricultural adviser, missionary, and economist, and later earned a master’s degree from Cornell University in 1926. She divorced Buck in 1935 and subsequently married Richard Walsh, president of John Day, her publisher. Pearl Buck’s first novel, East Wind: West Wind (1930), sets the themes she would return to throughout her work—the clash between Asian and Western cultures, traditional and contemporary values, age and youth, and the position of women—seen from the perspective of Kwei-lan, who is married to a Western-educated physician to whom she was betrothed before birth. In the second half of the novel, Kwei-lan’s brother marries a Westerner and becomes estranged from the family; hope arrives in the form of the half-Chinese, half-American child born of the union. In The Good Earth, Wang Lung rises from peasant farmer to wealthy landowner; he puts aside his faithful wife, O-lan, and becomes infatuated with Lotus (whom he makes his second wife), and with Pear Blossom, whom he takes from his son and makes his concubine. Two other novels complete the saga begun with The Good Earth, Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935), and reveal the dashed hopes of Wang Lung as his sons and grandsons succumb to modern thought and reject both tradition and the dynasty Wang has built. Other important novels by Buck include The Mother (1934), in which a peasant woman, deserted by her husband, raises her children and tills the land until she has grandchildren. The Proud Heart (1938), set in the United States, presents the conflicts of sculptor Susan Gaylord, torn between the demands of art and those of marriage and family. The Patriot (1939), Dragon Seed (1942), and The Promise (1943) are historical novels that trace the causes of enmity between the Chinese and the Japanese. In Pavilion of Women (1946) Madame Wu, who abandons her rigidity and strict self-control when she engages in a love affair, is finally able to empathize with her son, who has fallen in love with a non-Chinese woman. Written from the point of a view of the bondmaid Peony in the house of Ezra Ben Israel, the novel Peony (1948) focuses on the assimilated Jewish community in Kaifeng (Kaifung) during the mid-19th century. In Imperial Woman (1956), the matriarch, Old

Buddha, finally copes with the inevitability of modern Western culture. Under the pseudonym “John Sedges” Buck wrote five carefully researched novels set in the United States: The Townsman (1945), about the early settlement of Kansas, followed by The Angry Wife (1947), The Long Love (1949), Bright Procession (1952), and Voices in the House (1953). Returning to an Asian setting, The Living Reed (1963) explores the history of the Kim family as it illuminates the changing conditions in Korea from 1883 to 1945. Another well-regarded novel, the somewhat autobiographical The Time Is Noon (1967), depicts a gifted young woman who divorces her first husband to marry the man she loves. Several of Pearl Buck’s novels have been adapted for the screen. A House Divided was filmed by Universal Pictures in 1932; The Good Earth and Dragon Seed were filmed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937 and 1944, respectively; China Sky was filmed by RKO in 1945; and Satan Never Sleeps was filmed by Twentieth Century–Fox in 1962. Of Buck’s nonfiction, among the most admired are the biographies of her parents, The Exile (1936) and The Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul (1936). Buck founded Welcome House, an adoption agency for Amerasian children, in 1949. She died from lung cancer on March 6, 1973, in Danby, Vermont. In 1964 her home, Green Hills Farm, in Perkasie, Pennsylvania, became and remains the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, an advocate for Amerasian orphans.

NOVELS All Under Heaven. New York: John Day, 1973. The Angry Wife (under pseudonym John Sedges). New York: John Day, 1947. The Beech Tree. New York: John Day, 1954. Bright Procession (under pseudonym John Sedges). New York: John Day, 1952. China Flight. Philadelphia: Triangle/Blakiston, 1945. China Sky. Philadelphia: Triangle Books, 1942. The Chinese Story Teller. New York: John Day, 1971. Come, My Beloved. New York: John Day, 1953. Command the Morning. New York: John Day, 1959. Death in the Castle. New York: John Day, 1965. The Dragon Fish. New York: John Day, 1944. Dragon Seed. New York: John Day, 1942. East Wind: West Wind. New York: John Day, 1930. A Gift for the Children. New York: John Day, 1973. The Goddess Abides. New York: John Day, 1972.

BUKOWSKI, CHARLES 195

God’s Men. New York: John Day, 1951. The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. The Hidden Flower. New York: John Day, 1952. A House Divided. New York: Day/Reynal & Hitchcock, 1935. Imperial Woman. New York: John Day, 1956. Johnny Jack and His Beginnings. New York: John Day, 1954. Kinfolk. New York: John Day, 1949. Letter from Peking. New York: John Day, 1957. The Living Reed. New York: John Day, 1963. The Long Love (under pseudonym John Sedges). New York: John Day, 1949. Mandala. New York: John Day, 1970. The Mother. New York: John Day, 1934. Mrs. Starling’s Problem. New York: John Day, 1973. The New Year. New York: John Day, 1968. Once Upon a Christmas. New York: John Day, 1972. The Patriot. New York: John Day, 1939. Pavilion of Women. New York: John Day, 1946. Peony. New York: John Day, 1948. Portrait of a Marriage. New York: John Day, 1945. The Promise. New York: John Day, 1943. The Rainbow. New York: John Day, 1974. Satan Never Sleeps. New York: Pocket Books, 1962. Sons. New York: John Day, 1932. The Story of Dragon Seed. New York: John Day, 1944. This Proud Heart. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938. The Three Daughters of Madame Liang. New York: John Day, 1969. The Time Is Noon. New York: John Day, 1966. The Townsman (under pseudonym John Sedges). New York: John Day, 1945. Voices in the House (under pseudonym John Sedges). New York: John Day, 1953. The Water-Buffalo Children. New York: Dell, 1943.

SOURCES Bentley, Phyllis. “The Art of Pearl S. Buck,” English Journal, 24 (December 1935): 791–800. Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York: Macmillan, 1941; New York: Cooper Square, 1968, 146–154. Cevasco, George A. “Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel,” Asian Studies 5 (December 1967): 437–450. Conn, Peter J. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Doyle, Paul A. Pearl S. Buck. Boston: Twayne, 1965. ———. “Pearl S. Buck’s Short Stories: A Survey,” English Journal 55 (January 1966): 62–68. Harris, Theodore F. Pearl S. Buck. A Biography, 2 vols. New York: Day, 1969, 1971.

Henchoz, Ami. “A Permanent Element in Pearl Buck’s Novels,” English Studies, 25 (August 1943): 97–103. LaFarge, Ann. Pearl Buck. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Leisy, Ernest E. The American Historical Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. Liao, Kang. Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge across the Pacific. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Lipscomb, Elizabeth Johnston, Frances E. Webb, and Peter J. Conn. The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck: Essays Presented at a Centennial Symposium. Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. March 26–28. 1992. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Loewen, Nancy. Pearl Buck. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1995. Shimizu, Mamoru. “On Some Stylistic Features, Chiefly Biblical, of The Good Earth,” Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), English Number (1964): 117–134. Spencer, Cornelia. The Exile’s Daughter: A Biography of Pearl S. Buck. New York: Coward-McCann, 1944. Stirling, Nora. Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict. Piscataway, N.J.: New Century, 1983.

BUKOWSKI, CHARLES

(1920–1994)

Charles Bukowski is the author of approximately 100 books, more than 40 of them volumes of poetry. Also a short-story writer and novelist, he remains a cult figure, the prolific and avant-garde chronicler of the impoverished and the dispossessed, especially those involved in copious amounts of sex, violence, and drugs. Some readers see him in the tradition of Henry MILLER or Ernest HEMINGWAY, with a subtle moral subtext beneath the macho and misogynist characters and themes, and some find him blatantly sexist. His seven novels typically feature a semiautobiographical protagonist named Henry Chinaski; he appears in the poems and short stories as well. Charles Bukowski was born on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier, Henry Charles Bukowski Sr., and a German mother, Katherine Fett Bukowski. The family emigrated to the United States in 1922, and Bukowski was reared in a middleclass Los Angeles suburb. He left college after one year, married Barbara Fry in 1955, divorced her and married Linda Lee Beighle, and had a series of unskilled and menial positions before deciding to become a writer. His decision came late in life when he was nearly 50, and was aided by John Martin, founder of

196 BULOSAN, CARLOS

Black Sparrow Press, who guaranteed him $100 a month if he would become a full-time writer (Brewer, 4). Bukowski wrote his first novel, Post Office (1981) in three weeks; Henry Chinaski, an alcoholic and sexually energetic postal worker, meets his match in a rich Texas woman who marries and then discards him for another man. Henry goes back to the post office. Factotum (1975) is another fictional treatment of Bukowski’s life, this time during and after World War II. It features a younger Henry who seems intent on working at and then leaving as many stultifying jobs as possible, linked to other working-class people on one level, but separated from them by his desire to write. WOMEN (1978) features sequential sexual liaisons that are, as Gay Brewer notes, “analogous” to Factotum’s stream of menial jobs. Set in the 1970s, just after the era utilized in Post Office, it focuses on Henry, who has now achieved some success as a poet, and who, the reader suspects, will settle with or for one woman. The Henry of HAM ON RYE (1982) (his most critically acclaimed work) depicts a fictionalized Bukowski who has been compared by many critics to Mark TWAIN’s Huckleberry Finn. Henry Chinaski is quintessentially American in his rebelliousness, wanderlust, and refusal to become what Huck would call “sivilized.” In Hollywood (1989), Henry is an old man in Hollywood whose life as a young man is being made into a movie similar to Barfly (1987), the screenplay Bukowski wrote about three days in the life of Bukowski/Henry Chinaski. Bukowski died on March 9, 1994, of leukemia, in San Pedro, California. Pulp, his last novel, published posthumously in 1994, is a spoof on the American detective novel as written by Dashiell HAMMETT and Raymond CHANDLER. His papers are divided between special collections at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Temple University.

NOVELS Factotum. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. Ham on Rye. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1982. Hollywood. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1989. Horsemeat. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1982. Post Office. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1971. Pulp. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1994. Women. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1978.

SOURCES Brewer, Gay. Charles Bukowski. New York: Twayne, 1997. Cherkovski, Neeli. Bukowski: A Life. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1997. ———. Hank: The Life and Times of Charles Bukowski. New York: Random House, 1991. Christy, Jim. The Buk Book: Musings on Charles Bukowski. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ECW Press, 1997. Dorbin, Sanford. A Bibliography of Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1969. Fox, Hugh. Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Biographical Study. Somerville, Mass.: Abyss Publications, 1969. Harrison, Russell. Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1994. Richmond, Steve. Spinning off Bukowski. Northville, Mich.: Sun Dog Press, 1996. Sherman, Jory. Bukowski: Friendship, Fame, and Bestial Myth. Augusta, Ga.: Blue Horse Press, 1982. Weinberg, Jeffrey, ed. A Charles Bukowski Checklist. Sudbury, Mass.: Water Row Press, 1987.

OTHER Pegasos: Books and Writers. “Charles Bukowski.” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bukowski.htm. Accessed June 6, 2005.

BULOSAN, CARLOS (1913–1956) Author of poetry, essays, short stories, and an autobiographical novel, Carlos Bulosan was a distinguished FilipinoAmerican writer whose work has become a pillar of Asian-American studies courses and literature classes. AMERICA IS IN THE HEART (1946), once considered by critics to be more novel than autobiography, detailed the narrator’s childhood in the Philippines and and his move to the United States. There he attempted to survive, despite virulent racism. Carlos Bulosan was born on either November 2 or November 24, in 1911, 1913, or 1914, in Binalonan, Pangasinan, the Philippines. After several years of secondary schooling, he sailed for Seattle, Washington, to join his older brother Aurelio and arrived on July 22, 1930. He became a migrant worker and union activist; it was during his hospitalization for tuberculosis that he became a writer, penning short stories, essays, editorials, letters, poems, plays, and his autobiographical novel. He was influenced by writers like Theodore DREISER, James

BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE 197

T. FARRELL, and John STEINBECK, and was asked by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to write a magazine essay: “Freedom from Want” that appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on March 6, 1943 (San Juan, “Searching for the Heart of America”). America Is in the Heart expresses both the pervasiveness of racism in America and the optimistic belief that all its citizens will share an equal chance at achieving the American dream. Bulosan’s popularity, however, was short-lived; he was apparently blacklisted during the McCarthy era because of his sympathy with leftist and socialist causes, and he suffered bouts of depression and alcoholism. Weak from his long illness and extreme poverty, he died of pneumonia in Seattle on September 13, 1956. He is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in the Queen Anne district of that city, and his papers, and several unpublished novels, are housed at the University of Washington.

NOVEL Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1943; Reprint, with introduction by Carey McWilliams. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1973.

SOURCES Bulosan, Carlos. The Cry and the Dedication. Edited by E. San Juan, Jr. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1995. Evangelista, Susan. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: A Biography and Anthology. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1985. Morantte, P. C. Remembering Carlos Bulosan. Quezon City, the Philippines: New Day, 1984. San Juan, E., Jr. Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. New York: Oriole Editions, 1972.

OTHER De Leon, Ferdinand M. “Revisiting the life and legacy of pioneering Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan.” Reflections of Asia. Available online. URL: http://www.reflectionsofasia. com/carlosbulosan.htm. Accessed June 6, 2005. Philippine American Literary House. “The Gift of My Father.” Available online. URL: http://www.palhbooks.com/bulosan. htm. Accessed June 6, 2005. San Juan, E., Jr. “Searching for the Heart of America: Reintroducing Carlos Bulosan.” In Centenaryo Centennial: The Philippine Revolution and the Philippine-American War.

Edited by Jim Zwick. FFP Bulletin (Spring 1993). Available online. URL: http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/ sctexts/bulosan.html. Accessed August 22, 2005.

BURROUGHS, EDGAR RICE (1875–1950) Author of about 70 books, Edgar Rice Burroughs will forever be associated with the mythic Tarzan novels, one of the most popular series ever produced in the United States. These novels about an English lord’s son who was raised by apes in the jungle, have sold more than 100 million copies in 30 languages. The 24 novels of the Tarzan series, however, represent roughly one-third of Burroughs’s publications. There are also the Mars or Martian series, the Pellucidar series, and the Venus series, which most readers consider to be science fiction. Although the work of such a prolific writer is usually uneven, critics of the last two decades especially have increasingly paid attention to Burroughs and his novels. Edgar Rice Burroughs was born on September 1, 1875, in Chicago, Illinois, to George Tyler Burroughs, a Union veteran of the Civil War who owned a prosperous distillery, and Mary Evaline Zieger Burroughs. Although Burroughs managed to graduate from high school, he began his career as a novelist after two decades of dull jobs and failed business ventures. These left him and his wife, Emma Centennia Hulbert, whom he married in 1900, in desperate poverty. In 1911, reduced to living in his father’s house, Burroughs wrote his first novel and sold it to All-Story, a significant science fiction magazine of the day. Written under the pseudonym Norman Bean, it did not appear in book form—as A Princess of Mars—until 1917, by which time Burroughs had published 19 books. The Mars series concerns the conquest of Mars, called Barsoom in the novels, by John Carter, an ageless Virginia aristocrat. The Pellucidar series, set in the bowels of the Earth, features David Innes, a prosperous graduate of Yale who becomes emperor of the denizens of Earth’s core. TARZAN OF THE APES (1912), the first in that series, is by general critical agreement the best of all the Tarzan books. Lord Greystoke and his wife, Alice, marooned on the West African coast, build a jungle tree house where they live until the infant Tarzan is born; they die soon afterward, and Tarzan is adopted by Kala, an ape

198 BURROUGHS, WILLIAM S.

who has lost her own baby. Tarzan educates himself with books left in the treehouse by his parents, learns to speak French from a passing Frenchman, and communicates perfectly with the animals of the jungle. The novel ends as he meets Jane Porter, visits her home in Baltimore, and receives the title he inherited from his father. The Tarzan novels include the themes of Darwinism, eugenics, and the clash of the fantasy world with the real world. There is a subtext concerning rape, as women are frequently pursued by lustful men who must be vanquished by Tarzan or one of his cohorts. Off the page, Tarzan became Hollywood legend, with actors becoming stars after playing the role of the jungle man. Burroughs was unhappy about the changes in the portrayal of the movie Tarzan, played by Johnny Weismuller, particularly his projection as ignorant, ill educated, and monosyllabic, and completely unlike the Tarzan of the early novels. However, as scholar Erling B. Holtsmark notes, Burroughs seems to have assimilated the Hollywood Tarzan into his later Tarzan novels, his hero now “lapsing into monosyllabic or pidginlike English” quite unlike the earlier Tarzan who was “highly articulate and indeed a phenomenal linguist” (Holtsmark, 32). Burroughs divorced his wife, who was by then an alcoholic, in 1934, and married Florence Gilbert Dearholt in 1935. Increasingly worried about finances and by his excessive alcohol use, Burroughs and Florence moved to Hawaii. They divorced in 1942. He returned to California in 1944, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and died of heart disease and hardening of the arteries. The ashes of one of America’s most popular novelists are stored in the Chapel of the Pines Crematorium in Los Angeles. Although aspects of his novels will be deemed “politically incorrect” by critics of a different era, Burroughs, through Tarzan, contributed to the familiar American yearning to be reunited with nature.

SELECTED TARZAN NOVELS The Land that Time Forgot. Chicago: McClurg, 1924; republished in three volumes as The Land that Time Forgot, The People that Time Forgot, and Out of Time’s Abyss. New York: Ace, 1963. The Return of Tarzan. Chicago: McClurg, 1915. The Son of Tarzan. Chicago: McClurg, 1917. Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle. Chicago: McClurg, 1928. Tarzan and the Ant Men. Chicago, and London: McClurg, 1924.

Tarzan of the Apes. Chicago: McClurg, 1914. Tarzan the Terrible. Chicago: McClurg, 1921.

SELECTED MARS NOVELS The Chessmen of Mars. Chicago: McClurg, 1922. The Gods of Mars. Chicago: McClurg, 1918. A Princess of Mars. Chicago: McClurg, 1917. Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Chicago: McClurg, 1920. The Warlord of Mars. Chicago: McClurg, 1919.

SELECTED PELLUCIDAR NOVELS At the Earth’s Core. Chicago: McClurg, 1922. Pellucidar. Chicago: McClurg, 1923.

SOURCES Cheyfitz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan.” Expanded ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Edgar Rice Burroughs Bio Timeline 1875–1889. Available online. URL: http://home.westman.wave.ca/~hillmans/ erblin75.html. Accessed August 22, 2005. Fenton, Robert W. The Big Swingers. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967. Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies. New York: Citadel Press, 1968. Farmer, Philip J. Tarzan Alive. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Heins, Henry H. A Golden Anniversary Bibliography of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Rev. ed. West Kingston, R.I.: Donald M. Grant, 1964. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kasson, John. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Lupoff, Richard A. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. Rev. ed. New York: Ace, 1975. Morton, Walt. “Tracking the Sign of Tarzan: Trans-Media Representations of Pop-Culture Icon.” In You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, 106–125. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Moskowitz, Sam, ed. Explorers of the Infinite. New York: World, 1963. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM S(EWARD) (1914–1997) Considered by admirers to be one of the most talented 20th-century American writers, William S. Burroughs lived the eclectic life mirrored in

BURROUGHS, WILLIAM S. 199

the drug subculture and homosexuality in two of his more notorious novels JUNKY (1977) and NAKED LUNCH (1959). Naked Lunch—its publication in the United States followed three years of court trials for obscenity—has also been called one of the most innovative and visionary novels produced by an American. Although Burroughs, who received a National Institute of Arts and Letters and American Academy award in literature in 1975, was one generation removed from the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack KEROUAC, he identified with their unconventionality; indeed, it was through Ginsberg’s connections that Junky was published, and Burroughs coauthored with Kerouac the as-yet-unpublished novel, “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Mortimer P. Burroughs, a businessman and son of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine, and Laura Lee Burroughs, a descendent of Civil War general Robert E. Lee. After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1936, he was married to Ilse Herzfeld Klapper from 1937 until 1946, when he divorced her and married Joan Vollmer in 1946. He accidentally shot her on September 7, 1951. Queer (1985), a novel written soon after the accident, he said, is constructed around the painful and unmentioned shooting. Following his discharge for psychological reasons after only a few months in the U.S. Army, Burroughs worked at various dead-end jobs until his wife Joan introduced him to Jack Kerouac, who suggested that he try his hand at writing. The result was Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953; published in 1977 as Junky), a novel told in the first person by William Lee, the autobiographical narrator who addresses the subject of Burroughs’s morphine addiction which lasted from the 1940s until 1957. Junky is considered a companion piece to Queer. By comparison to Naked Lunch, Junky is a straightforward account of a highly unconventional subject. In Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs experimented with form. Here he indicts middle-class American values and juxtaposes those fragments with descriptions of a 14-year drug addiction, specific homosexual acts, and murder, demonstrating the power of language in the hands of the writer or speaker who controls that language. The meaning of the title derives from the frozen moment when each diner can see what is on the end of each fork.

Burroughs uses a “cut-up” technique derived from his writing of Naked Lunch and from Brion Gysin, the artist who first used it—that is, he literally cuts texts into fragments and arranges them in random order. This is evident in the trilogy comprising The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). The Soft Machine is in fact the soft machine of the brain, susceptible to the alien viruses disseminated by those who use sex and drugs to control other people. The subject of mind control surfaces too in The Ticket That Exploded. Burroughs suggests antidotes to these viruses and substitutes space travel for the time travel of the earlier novel. He continues to explore those antidotes and the danger of falling prey to outside forces in Nova Express, the shortest and most direct novel in the trilogy. Burroughs supplemented the cut-up technique in The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (1971) with film techniques, particularly the montage. The novel depicts the homosexual rebel “boys” who are fighting the viruses spread by the controlling powers. The rebel boys are led by Audrey Carsons, a Burroughs surrogate who reappears in stories collected in Exterminator! (1973) and the novel Port of Saints that, along with Ah Pook Is Here, demonstrate Burroughs’ experimental blending of science fiction, the western, and the fairy tale. Again Burroughs satirically analyzes social evil and repression, mixed with humor and obscenity. Audrey also appears in the first volume of Burroughs’s next trilogy, Cities of the Red Night (1981) and gradually becomes Kim Carsons in The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1988). Burroughs was at the core of the Beat movement and influential in the 1960s hippie counterculture movement as well. His papers are spread throughout the United States, at the Ohio State University, Arizona State University, the University of Kansas, Columbia University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Other items may be found at Northwestern University, Princeton University, and Syracuse University. He died on August 2, 1997, in Lawrence, Kansas.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Blade Runner: A Movie. Berkeley, Calif.: Blue Wind Press, 1979. Cities of the Red Night: A Boy’s Book. London: Calder; New York: Holt Rinehart, 1981.

200 BUSCH, FREDERICK

Dead Fingers Talk. London: Calder, 1963. Interzone. London: Picador, 1989. Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict. (William Lee, pseud.). New York: Ace, 1953; London: Digit, 1957; complete edition, as Junky. London: Penguin, 1977. The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia Press, 1959; London: Calder, 1964; as Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1962. Nova Express. New York: Grove Press, 1964; London: Cape, 1966. The Place of Dead Roads. New York: Holt Rinehart, 1983; London: Calder, 1984. Port of Saints. Berkeley, Calif.: Blue Wind Press, 1980; London: Calder, 1983. Queer. New York: Viking, 1985; London: Pan, 1986. Short Novels. London: Calder, 1978. The Soft Machine. Paris: Olympia Press, 1961; New York: Grove Press, 1966; London: Calder and Boyars, 1968. The Ticket That Exploded. Paris: Olympia Press, 1962; rev. ed., New York: Grove Press, 1967; London: Calder and Boyars, 1968. The Western Lands. New York: Viking, 1987; London: Pan, 1988. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. New York: Grove Press, 1971; London: Calder and Boyars, 1972; rev. ed., London: Calder, 1979.

SOURCES “William Burroughs Issue” of Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 1 (1984). Bokris, Victor, ed. With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. New York: Seaver, 1981; London: Vermilion, 1982. Buffalo, N.Y.: Intrepid Press, 1971; rev. ed., as The Algebra of Need, London: Boyars, 1991; New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996. Burroughs, William S. The Burroughs File. San Francisco, Calif.: City Lights, 1984. ———. Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953–1957. New York: Full Court Press, 1982. ———. My Education: A Book of Dreams. New York: Viking, 1994. Film Adaptation. Caveney, Graham. Gentleman Junkie: The Life and Legacy of William S. Burroughs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Goodman, Michael B., and Lemuel B. Coley. Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981. ———. William S. Burroughs: A Reference Guide. New York: Garland, 1990. Harris, Oliver, ed. The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945–1959. New York, Viking; London: Picador, 1993.

Kostelanetz, Richard. “From Nightmare to Serendipity: A Retrospective Look at William Burroughs,” Twentieth Century Literature 11, no. 3 (October 1965): 123–130. McConnell, Frank D. “William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction,” Massachusetts Review 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 665–680. Miles, Barry. William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait. New York: Hyperion, 1993. Morgan, Ted. Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs. New York: Holt, 1988; London: Bodley Head, 1991. Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Novels of William S. Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Parkinson, Thomas. “Critical Approaches to William Burroughs, or How to Admit an Admiration for a Good Dirty Book.” In Poets, Poems, Movements, 313–320. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987. Silverberg, Ira, ed. Everything Is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1992. Skerl, Jennie, and Robin Lydenberg, eds. William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception 1959–1989. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Skerl, Jennie. William Burroughs. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Sobieszek, Robert, A. Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts. Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1996.

OTHER William S. Burroughs, 1914–1992. Available online. URL: http://www.thei.aust.com/bill/burroughs.html. Accessed August 27, 2005. Wired for Books. “Audio Interview with William Burroughs.” Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ williamburroughs/. Accessed June 7, 2005.

BUSCH, FREDERICK (1941– )

Author of 14 novels and six short-story collections, Frederick Busch has a reputation as a multifaceted writer of novels and short stories. His style, called “experimental realism” by a number of critics, is a blend of postmodernism with traditional fictional components that many contemporary novelists eschew: As scholar Donald J. Greiner points out, Busch is “very much at ease” with contemporary fictional inventions while at the same time he employs the “traditional staples” of the novel: character, plot, setting, and theme (Greiner, 1988, 3). Busch is known for his presentation of mar-

BUSCH, FREDERICK 201

ital and family issues and his sensitivity to the perspectives of children, but he has also written fiction deriving from the Beowulf legend (I Wanted a Year without Fall [1971]), the life of Charles Dickens (The Mutual Friend [1978]), the Holocaust (Invisible Mending [1984]), and characters haunted by the Civil War (The Night Inspector [1999]) and the Vietnam War (Closing Arguments [1991]). Busch has also written about the process of writing, most recently in A Dangerous Profession: A Book about the Writing Life (1998). Busch won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction for his novel Invisible Mending and a 1994 PEN/Malamud Award for his short fiction. He was also a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Fiction in 1999 and for both a 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for short stories and a 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel The Night Inspector. In spite of this recognition, a good number of critics believe that he is overrated as a thinker and a stylist and that he does not rank with the best contemporary writers despite his enormous output. Frederick Busch was born on August 1, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, to Benjamin Busch, a lawyer, and Phyllis Schnell Busch, a teacher and author. He was educated at Muhlenberg College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1962, and he married Judith Burroughs, a teacher, in 1963. Earning his M.A. (1967) and D.Litt. (1980) degrees from Columbia University, Busch began teaching at Colgate University in 1966 and published his first novel, I Wanted a Year Without Fall in 1971. It is a story told to his son by Ben, about himself and his friend Leo in their youth. Busch says that he was trying to achieve the sort of “mythic dimension” and “ethic simplicity” found in Beowulf (Greiner, 1988, 176). Manual Labor (1974) is the much praised novel about the painful efforts of Phil and Annie to save their marriage after Annie suffers a miscarriage. The Mutual Friend, like Manual Labor, employs the viewpoint of George Dolby, Charles Dickens’s secretary, and Dolby’s view of Dickens in his last years. In Rounds (1979), Eli Silver, a pediatrician, tries to reshape his life after the death of his son and the resulting separation from his wife. Domestic Particulars (1976), closely related stories that most critics see as a novel, chronicles several generations of a New York family from 1919 to 1976 and

centers on Claire and Mac, whose marriage endures the rigors of the Great Depression and the McCarthy era but not too happily. Take This Man (1981) features Tony Prioleau, his lover Ellen Larue Spencer, and their son Gus; as Busch has elaborated, he had wanted for a long time to write it as a tribute to his mother-in-law, Helen Burroughs, who braved travel on country roads in order to reunite with her Sea Bee husband on the West Coast (Greiner, 1988, 186). Invisible Mending blended the horror of the Holocaust and the error-strewn lives of children of survivors. Sometimes I Live in the Country (1986) is a memorable evocation of Busch’s upstate New York and the lonely and displaced young boy Petey, whose father has kidnapped him from his Brooklyn home and taken him to the country. War Babies (1989) is a story of Busch’s contemporaries, those who were born during the war and have vague memories of blackouts, Victory Gardens, and President Roosevelt’s radio broadcasts. The following year, Harry and Catherine appeared, a situation in which the kind, good Harry and the independent, feminist Catherine try to make their relationship succeed. Closing Arguments follows Mark Brennan, an attorney whose attempts at a peaceful existence are interrupted by haunting, violent memories of his experiences as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. A Long Way From Home (1993), a story of abandonment, is told from a young boy’s perspective. He remembers his mother’s desertion of his father and his father’s subsequent abandonment of the son. Girls (1997) returns to upstate New York as Jack, a campus policeman brooding about the deterioration of his marriage to Fanny, searches for Janice, an abducted 14year-old girl. The highly acclaimed Night Inspector features William Bartholomew, a Civil War veteran who lost half his face in battle, and his collusion with Herman Melville in his attempts to save a shipload of children from slavery. Busch’s most recent novel is A Memory of War (2003). He and his wife still live in the country. He continues to teach at Colgate University, where he holds an endowed chair.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Closing Arguments. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991. Domestic Particulars: A Family Chronicle. New York: New Directions, 1976.

202 BUTLER, OCTAVIA ESTELLE

Girls: A Novel. New York: Harmony, 1997. Hardwater Country. New York: Knopf, 1979. Harry and Catherine: A Love Story. New York: Knopf, 1990. I Wanted a Year without Fall. London: Calder & Boyars, 1971. Invisible Mending. Boston: Godine, 1984. Long Way from Home. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993. Manual Labor. New York: New Directions, 1974. A Memory of War. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. The Mutual Friend. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. The Night Inspector. New York: Harmony, 1999. Rounds. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. Sometimes I Live in the Country. Boston: Godine, 1986. Take This Man. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981. War Babies. New York: New Directions, 1989.

SOURCES Busch, Frederick. A Dangerous Profession: A Book about the Writing Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. ———. When People Publish: Essays on Writers and Writing. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986. ———, ed. Letters to a Fiction Writer. New York: Norton, 1999. Cunningham, Michael. “An Interview with Frederick Busch,” Iowa Journal of Literary Studies 3 (1981): 67–74. Garrett, George. “Such Scenes I Never Dreamed Of: Recent Books about the Civil War,” Sewanee Review 108, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 259–270. Greiner, Donald J. “The Absent Friends of Frederick Busch,” Gettysburg Review 3 (Autumn 1990): 746–754. ———. Domestic Particulars: The Novels of Frederick Busch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Jorgensen, Bruce W. “ ‘A Grammar of Events’: A Conversation with Frederick Busch,” Literature and Belief 7 (1987): 26–40. Romano, John. “Frederick Busch: Mimesis and Intensity,” New York Arts Journal (February–March 1978): 23–24. Walker, Charlotte Zoeuml. “Practitioner of a Dangerous Profession: A Conversation with Frederick Busch,” Poets & Writers Magazine 27 (May/June 1999): 33–37.

BUTLER, OCTAVIA ESTELLE (1947–2006) Octavia Butler, novelist and short-story writer, specialized in science fiction. The best-known African-American woman in the field, she brought to her fiction issues of race and gender not normally present in the genre. Butler did not, however, elevate politics over art: her characters are carefully crafted and admired for their believability. She wrote about genetic engineering, issues of power, and interplanetary aliens, but also addressed

the more familiar conflicts in mother-daughter relationships. Butler is probably best known for her Patternmaster series of five novels that traces the domination of society by an elite group of telepathic individuals and for her fantasy novel KINDRED, published in 1979. She won both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award for her novelette, Bloodchild, in 1995, and the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1999 for Parable of the Talents. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1995. Octavia Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, to Laurice Butler, who died when she was an infant, and Octavia Margaret Guy Butler. She was educated at Pasadena City College, earning her A.A. degree in 1968. During these years she was influenced by the fiction of Robert HEINLEIN, Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, Isaac ASIMOV, and Ursula K. LE GUIN. While attending a writing workshop, she met Harlan Ellison, who became her occasional mentor. Kindred, her only novel not extended into a series, features Edana Franklin, a young African-American woman living in contemporary Los Angeles, and her relationship across time with a white child in antebellum Maryland. He will become her slaveholding great-great-grandfather and, because he is necessary to father Edana’s great-grandmother, she, Edana, saves his life more than once. Of her two series, Patternmaster and Xenogenesis, the latter is widely admired for its description of the Cankali, alien rescuers. They arrive on Earth after a nuclear holocaust, determined to mix the best of their genes with the best of human genes. The Patternmaster series, too, has received significant attention and acclaim. Patternmaster was originally founded by Doro, a 4,000-year-old immortal Nubian, an elite group of telepaths who intend to create a group of superhumans. Covering 800 years of human history, the series includes Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984). Butler spent her final years in Seattle, Washington. Her last novel, Parable of the Talents, is another example of her compelling blend of strong African-American women with mixed-race protagonists, wrestling with the difficulties of family and society.

NOVELS Adulthood Rites. London: Gollancz, 1988. Bloodchild, and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.

BUTLER, ROBERT OLEN 203

Clay’s Ark. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Dawn: Xenogenesis. New York: Warner, 1987. The Evening and the Morning and the Night. Eugene, Oreg.: Pulphouse, 1991. Imago. New York: Warner, 1989. Kindred. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Mind of My Mind. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977. Parable of the Sower. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Parable of the Talents. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998. Patternmaster. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Survivor. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Wild Seed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.

SOURCES Armitt, Lucie. “Space, Time and Female Genealogies: A Kristevan Reading of Feminist Science Fiction.” In Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, edited by Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham, 51–61. London: Longman, 1996. Butler, Octavia, and Frances M. Beal. “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre,” Black Scholar (March/April 1986): 14–18. Butler, Octavia. Interview by Randall Kenan. Callaloo 14, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 495–504. Card, Orson Scott. Review of Wild Seed, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, by Octavia Butler. Fantasy & Science Fiction 78, no. 2 (February 1990): 40–43. Lee, Judith. “ ‘We Are All Kin’: Relatedness, Mortality, and the Paradox of Human Immortality.” In Immortal Engines: Life Extension and Immortality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by George Slusser, Gary Westfahl, and Eric S. Rabkin, 170–182. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Peppers, Cathy. “Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s Xenogenesis,” Science-Fiction Studies 22, part 1 (March 1995): 47–62. White, Eric. “The Erotics of Becoming: Xenogenesis and The Thing,” Science-Fiction Studies 20, part 3 (November 1993): 394–408. Zaki, Hoda M. “Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler,” Science-Fiction Studies 17, no. 2 (July 1990): 239–51.

OTHER Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color: Octavia E. Butler. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ bios/entries/butler_octavia_estelle.html. Accessed August 27, 2005.

BUTLER, ROBERT OLEN (JR.) (1945– ) Robert Olen Butler was catapulted to national fame when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collected short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, published in 1992. Its subject is the Vietnam War experience, the major theme of five of Butler’s 10 novels: The Alleys of Eden (1981), Sun Dogs (1982), On Distant Ground (1985), (considered a loosely linked Vietnam trilogy), The Deuce (1989), and The Deep Green Sea (1998). Unlike many earlier writers who wrote about combat in Vietnam, Butler writes from different points of view, including those of Vietnamese immigrants, and uses different settings, from Saigon to Alaska to New Orleans. Many critics have praised his writing for these affective, sensuous details and for the clear depiction of his character’s emotions. Robert Olen Butler was born on January 20, 1945, in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler, Sr., a retired actor and former chairman of the theater department at Saint Louis University, and Lucille Hall Butler. Butler graduated summa cum laude in 1967 from Northwestern University and received a master of arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1969. Butler served with U.S. Army Military Intelligence units in Vietnam during the period 1969 to 1972. He has been married four times, to Carol Supplee, in 1968; to Marilyn Geller (a poet), in 1972; to Maureen Donlan, in 1987, and to Elizabeth Dewberry, in 1995. The title of his first novel, The Alleys of Eden, refers to the back streets of Saigon where most of the novel is set. Here Lanh, a Vietnamese prostitute, and Cliff, an American Army deserter, live happily for four years until they are separated during the fall of Saigon in 1975. The large cultural gap in their backgrounds becomes more apparent when they are reunited in Speedway, Illinois. Sun Dogs features Wilson Hand, a character from The Alleys of Eden who is suffering from his prisoner-of-war experiences and, later, from his ex-wife’s suicide; he dies in Alaska while working as a private investigator pursuing corporate spies. In Countrymen of Bones (1983) Butler departs from his involvement with Vietnam. Set in the post–World War II New Mexico desert, in this novel a university archeologist confronts an army physicist who works for the Manhattan Project. Wabash (1987), too, returns to the

204 BUTLER, ROBERT OLEN

past, this time to the Great Depression and a communist-infiltrated steel mill. Here Butler writes about racism, abuse of women, and class exploitation. In On Distant Ground, David Fleming releases a Viet Cong prisoner with whom he sympathizes, is court-martialed in the United States for his crime, and returns illegally to Vietnam to find his former lover and his Amerasian son only a short time before Saigon falls. The central figure of The Deuce is Tony, the Amerasian son of a Vietnamese mother and American father. Tony is a runaway who is stalked by a pederast. At the same time Tony is trying to make sense of his own origins and identity. They Whisper (1994) is Butler’s most controversial novel. The protagonist is Ira Holloway, a passionate lover of women who whisper their most intimate secrets to him. These secrets include his wife Fiona’s past, a childhood ruined by sexual abuse. Holloway’s strange punishment is his wife’s demand for daily sex. Love is the subject of The Deep Green Sea, again set in Vietnam, between Ben, a 48-year-old Vietnam veteran and Tien, a young mixed-race Vietnamese. Butler lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His most recent novel, Fair Warning (2002), depicts Amy Dickerson, sophisticated Manhattan auctioneer, as she faces greed, power, and the lust for ownership.

NOVELS The Alleys of Eden. New York: Horizon Press, 1981. Countrymen of Bones. New York: Horizon Press, 1983. The Deep Green Sea. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998. The Deuce. New York: Holt, 1989. Fair Warning. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002. Mr. Spaceman. New York: Grove Press, 2000. On Distant Ground. New York: Knopf, 1985. Sun Dogs. New York: Horizon Press, 1982. They Whisper. New York: Holt, 1994. Wabash: A Novel. New York: Holt, 1987.

SOURCES Beidler, Philip D. Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Butler, Robert Olen. In Conversations with American Novelists, edited by Kay Bonetti, Greg Michalson, Speer Morgan, Jo Sapp, and Sam Stowers, 201–216. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Butler, Robert Olen, and Michael Sartisky. “Robert Olen Butler: A Pulitzer Profile.” In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, 155–169. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Smith, Lorrie. “The Rhythms of Timeless Desire (No Phallus Necessary),” New England Review 17, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 175–180.

C

CD

CABELL, JAMES BRANCH (1879–1958) James Branch Cabell has not had the revival that other American writers have enjoyed, yet he was at the center of a cause célèbre in the 1920s. (His novel Jurgen, published in 1919, was reviled as pornographic.) Cabell, one of the 1920s literati, wrote 20 novels, but as critics have observed, he remains the sort of writer who will irritate some readers and delight others. Both camps admire his style—comic and erotic—and his deep knowledge of myth and legend. Clearly, Cabell admired the chivalry of medieval times. He wrote a 20volume autobiography, somewhat fictionalized, called The Biography of the Life of Manuel: The Works of James Branch Cabell, and scholars still believe it was his most significant work. He remains best known for one volume of The Life of Manuel, namely Jurgen. James Branch Cabell was born on April 14, 1879, in Richmond, Virginia, at home, on the site where the Richmond Public Library now stands. The family of his mother, Anne Branch, was prominent in Richmond, and his father, Robert Gamble Cabell II, was the grandson of General Robert E. Lee’s personal physician. Educated at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, Cabell returned to Richmond. His name was associated with scandals in both places and he continued to live the life of a roué, earning a living as a genealogist and writing his first novels and short stories. In 1913 he married Rebecca Priscilla Bradley Shepherd, a widow with five children who made sure that Cabell had privacy and quiet for his

writing. From then on, he wrote prolifically, creating the medieval setting of Poictesme for his ambitious epic. His earlier novels—The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck (1915) and The Cream of the Jest (1917)—were followed by Jurgen, Figures of Earth (1921), The Silver Stallion (1926), and Something About Eve (1927), all in different ways about the basic tension between illusion and reality, and men and women. His allegorical and antic characters engage in the three types of behavior Cabell identifies: chivalric, gallant, and poetic. In Jurgen especially, the characters pass through each stage, moving from religious struggles (chivalry) to a more liberated but respectful and ritualistic sexuality (gallantry) to the more contemplative and less playful poetic state. In the mythic structure of the novel, Jurgen, the Everyman figure—a 40-year-old man with the body of a 20-year-old—loses his youthful passion for Dorothy la Désirée, enacts the code of chivalry for Queen Guenevere, who represents faith, the code of gallantry with the insatiable Queen Anaitis who represents desire, and the code of poetry with Queen Helen, who represents vision. Although he continued to write into the 1950s, by the time of the Great Depression, a majority of critics considered Cabell’s writing to be superficial and irrelevant to the bleak time so many Americans were suffering. At Virginia Commonwealth University, the James Branch Cabell Library opened its doors in 1970; it sponsors one of five Web sites devoted to Cabell, and offers the James Branch Cabell Prize each year for the

205

206 CABLE, GEORGE WASHINGTON

best essay on Cabell and his legacy. The University of Virginia Library in Charlottesville was designated by Cabell as the repository for his books and papers.

SELECTED NOVELS The Cream of the Jest. New York: McBride, 1917. The Devil’s Own Dear Son. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1949. Figures of Earth. New York: McBride, 1921. The First Gentleman of America. New York & Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. Hamlet Had an Uncle. New York & Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940. Jurgen. New York: McBride, 1919. The King Was in his Counting House. New York & Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck. New York: McBride, 1915. The Silver Stallion. New York: McBride, 1926. Smith. New York: McBride, 1935. Smire. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. Smirt. New York: McBride, 1934. Something About Eve. New York: McBride, 1927. The St. Johns, by Cabell and A. J. Hanna. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943. There Were Two Pirates. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1946. The Witch-Woman: A Trilogy about Her. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948.

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew J. Notes on the Cabell Collections at the University of Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1957. Cabell, James Branch. As I Remember It. New York: McBride, 1955. ———. Between Friends: Letters of James Branch Cabell and Others. Edited by Padraic Colum and Margaret Freeman Cabell. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962. ———. The Letters of James Branch Cabell. Edited by Edward Wagenknecht. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975. ———. Quiet, Please. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1952. Davis, Joe Lee. James Branch Cabell. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Flora, Joseph M. “Cabell as Precursor: Reflections on Cabell and Vonnegut,” Kalki 6 (1975): 118–137. Godshalk, William L. “Cabell and Barth: Our Comic Athletes.” In The Comic Imagination in America, edited by Louis Rubin, 275–283. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

———. In Quest of Cabell: Five Exploratory Essays. New York: Revisionist Press, 1976. Inge, Thomas M., and Edgar E. MacDonald, eds. James Branch Cabell, Centennial Essays. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. MacDonald, Edgar E. James Branch Cabell and Richmond-inVirginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Riemer, James D. From Satire to Subversion: The Fantasies of James Branch Cabell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1989. Rothman, Julius L. A Glossarial Index to the “Biography of the Life of Manuel,” James Branch Cabell Series. New York: Revisionist Press, 1976. Tarrant, Desmond. James Branch Cabell: The Dream and the Reality. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Untermeyer, Louis. James Branch Cabell: The Man and His Masks. Richmond, Va.: Whittet & Shepperson, 1970. Van Doren, Carl. James Branch Cabell. Rev. ed. New York: Literary Guild, 1932. Walpole, Hugh. The Art of James Branch Cabell. New York: McBride, 1978. Wells, Arvin R. Jesting Moses: A Study in Cabellian Comedy. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1962. Wilson, Edmund. “The James Branch Cabell Case Reopened,” New Yorker, 21 April 1956, pp. 129–156.

CABLE,

GEORGE

WASHINGTON

(1844–1925) Long admired as a 19th-century regionalist, George Washington Cable attracts contemporary readers because of his early understanding of and opposition to slaveholding. Author of nine novels about life in his native New Orleans, he is particularly noted for The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) and the novella MADAME DELPHINE (1881). A realistic writer of novels and short stories (see Old Creole Days [1879]) whose vivid use of detail evokes the still-familiar images of Louisiana bayous, New Orleans balconies and iron grillwork, he wrote preemptively about the burden of southern guilt over slavery, and about the decaying southern gentry, miscegenation, and racial injustice. Cable was born on October 12, 1844, to George W. Cable, a Virginian from an old slaveholding family, and Rebecca Boardman, a New England Puritan. He left school at age 14 because of his father’s death, and later served in the Confederate Army. After the end of the Civil War, Cable wrote articles for the New Orleans Picayune. In 1869 he married Louise S. Bartlett of New

CAHAN, ABRAHAM 207

Orleans. His first novel, The Grandissimes, takes place at the time of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Joseph Frowenfeld, an American of German ancestry who struggles to understand the feud between the Grandissimes, represented by Honoré Grandissime, and the Nancanous, represented by Aurora. Honoré’s half brother, also named Honoré, is a free man of color but still limited by his race and class. Cable’s second novel, Dr. Sevier (1884), depicts New Orleans during a yellow fever epidemic; John March, Southerner (1894), focuses on the Reconstruction era. Cable’s most popular work, however, was The Cavalier (1901), a Civil War romance, and he wrote about his father’s experiences on the Mississippi River in Gideon’s Band; A Tale of the Mississippi (1914). Through his use of local dialect and his preoccupation with miscegenation, Cable anticipates the novels of William FAULKNER and Robert Penn WARREN. Unpopular because of his sympathy for blacks, Cable and his wife moved to Northampton,Massachusetts, in 1884, where he wrote civil rights commentaries, published in The Silent South (1885) and The Negro Question (1890). He died on January 31, 1925, in St. Petersburg, Florida. His papers are housed at the Tulane University Library.

NOVELS Bylow Hill. New York: Scribner, 1902. The Cavalier. New York: Scribner, 1901. Dr. Sevier. Boston: Osgood, 1884. Gideon’s Band: A Tale of the Mississippi. New York: Scribner, 1914. The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life. Scribner, 1880. John March, Southerner. New York; Scribner, 1894. Kincaid’s Battery. New York: Scribner, 1908. Lovers of Louisiana (To-Day). New York: Scribner, 1918. Madame Delphine. New York: Scribner, 1881.

SOURCES Bendixen, Alfred. “The Grandissimes: A Literary Pioneer Confronts the Southern Tradition,” Southern Quarterly 18 (Summer 1980): 23–33. Berzon, Judith R. Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Biklé, Lucy Leffingwell Cable. George W. Cable: His Life and Letters. New York: Scribner, 1928.

Butcher, Philip. George W. Cable. Boston: Twayne, 1962. ———. George W. Cable: The Northampton Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Cardwell, Guy A. Twins of Genius. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1953. Cleman, John. George Washington Cable Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1996. Ekström, Kjell. George Washington Cable: A Study of His Early Life and Work. Uppsala, Sweden: Lundequistska Bokhandeln; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. Mixon, Wayne. Southern Writers and the New South Movement, 1865–1913, 98–109. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Petry, Alice Hall. “Universal and Particular: The Local Color Phenomenon Reconsidered,” American Literary Realism 12 (Spring 1979): 111–126. Pugh, Griffith T. “George Washington Cable,” Mississippi Quarterly 20 (1967): 69–76. Ringe, Donald A. “The Double Center: Character and Meaning in Cable’s Early Novels,” Studies in the Novel 5 (Spring 1973): 52–62. Rubin, Louis D. George W. Cable; The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic. New York: Pegasus, 1969. Turner, Arlln. Critical Essays on George W. Cable. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. ———. George W. Cable. Southern Writers Series. Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. ———. George W. Cable: A Biography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1956.

CAHAN, ABRAHAM (1860–1951) Abraham Cahan, who experimented with every literary genre, is best known today as the celebrated author of two novels and editor of the first major Jewish newspaper, the Socialist Jewish Daily Forward, founded in 1917. (The Forward, published in Yiddish, united Jews from Europe and became the most significant articulator of Jewish identity as it evolved in New York City’s Lower East Side.) In 1896 Cahan wrote Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, the first major novel of immigrant experience, and in 1917 published The RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY, the mythic story of a Jewish cloakmaker whose upward social mobility is accompanied by the inevitable gains, losses, and contradictions resulting from acculturation into American life. Abraham Cahan was born on July 6, 1860, in the town of Podberezy, Lithuania. He attended Vilna

208 CAHAN, ABRAHAM

Teachers’ Institute, where instruction was conducted in Russian, graduated in 1881, and immigrated to the United States in 1882 to escape the Russian pogroms. Four years after moving to New York, he married Anna Bronstein, a highly educated woman, of Kiev, Russia, on December 11, 1886. While he worked as a journalist (and made a living working in factories and teaching English), Cahan acted on behalf of exploited Jews by helping to organize a variety of unions. He also began to write, and with the encouragement of William Dean HOWELLS, he completed Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. Cahan’s short novel sets forth in detail the paradoxes of immigrant assimilation into American life. As Yekl becomes the increasingly Americanized Jake, he divorces his wife, who reminds him of the past, and marries an Americanized woman, a symbol of Jake’s newly acquired aspirations and sense of possibility. Cahan also wrote The Imported Bridegroom (1898), a novella, and The White Terror and the Red (1905), a fictitious account of Russia during the chaotic days leading up to the Revolution of 1917. The conflict between czarist Russians and Jewish revolutionaries is epitomized by the romance between Prince Boulatoff, the Russian nobleman, and Clara Yavner, the Jewish commoner. Cahan’s masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky, which some critics feel is the first significant novel by an American Jew, paved the way for such writers as Bernard MALAMUD, Saul BELLOW, and Philip ROTH. It is, however, also a classic American realistic novel in the tradition of Howells, Theodore DREISER, and Jack LONDON. Narrated in the first person, the novel follows Levinsky from the Russian provinces to New York, where he becomes the classic American success story. He makes his money in the garment industry, a place identified with Russian Jews. Levinsky, now rich, finds only emptiness and sterility; he cannot connect his old life with his new. This permanent state of American fragmentation echoes from the 19th century and reappears in FITZGERALD’s Jay Gatsby, Bellow’s Augie March, and innumerable other 20th-century American characters. Cahan, who died in 1951 at the age of 91, contributed both to the history and the process of immigrant assimilation into American culture. His thousands of manuscripts and letters are housed in a

number of collections at the Bund Archives and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City.

NOVELS The Rise of David Levinsky. New York and London: Harper, 1917. Social Remedies. New York: New York Labor News Co., 1889. The White Terror and the Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia. New York: Barnes, 1905; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. New York: Appleton, 1896.

SOURCES Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. Engel, David. “The Discrepancies of the Modern: Reevaluating Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (Winter 1979): 68–91. Fiedler, Leslie. “Genesis: The American-Jewish Novel Through the Thirties,” Midstream 4 (Summer 1958): 21–33. Guttmann, Alan. The Jewish Writer in American: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford, 1971. Harap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature: From Early Republic to Mass Immigration, 485–525. Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974. Higham, John. Introduction to The Rise of David Levinsky, v–xii. New York: Harper & Row, 1960. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. Howells, William Dean. Literature and Life, 177–179. New York: Harper, 1902. ———. “New York Low Life in Fiction,” New York World, 26 July 1896, 18. Kirk, Rudolf, and Clara M. Kirk. “Abraham Cahan and William Dean Howells: The Story of a Friendship,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 52 (September 1962): 25–57. Marovitz, Sanford E. “The Lonely New Americans of Abraham Cahan,” American Quarterly 20 (Summer 1969): 196–210. ———. “Yekl: The Ghetto Realism of Abraham Cahan,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 2 (1969): 271–282. ———, and Lewis Fried. “Abraham Cahan. 1860–1951: An Annotated Bibliography,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 3 (Summer 1970): 197–243. Poole, Ernest. “Abraham Cahan: Socialist-JournalistFriend of the Ghetto,” Outlook 99 (October 28, 1911): 467–478.

CAIN, JAMES M. 209

Rischin, Moses. The Promised City: New York Jews, 1870–1914. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962. Rosenfeld, Isaac. An Age of Enormity: Life and Writing in the Forties and Fifties. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company, 1962. Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Singer, David. “David Levinsky’s Fall: A Note on the Liebman Thesis,” American Quarterly 19 (1967): 696–706. Strout, Cushing. “Personality and Cultural History in the Novel: Two American Examples,” New Literary History 1 (1970): 423–438. Zanger, Jules. “David Levinsky: Master of Pilpul,” Papers in Language and Literature 13 (Summer 1977): 283–294.

CAIN, JAMES M(ALLAHAN) (1892–1977) A journalist as well as a novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and scriptwriter, James M. Cain was one of the most successful of the “hard-boiled” writers of crime novels. He is usually considered with the writers Raymond CHANDLER and Dashiel HAMMETT, inventors of the private eyes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. While Cain did not write detective fiction, he did invent in his 17 novels and 16 stories the “tough guy” hero derived in style and scope from H. L. Mencken and Ernest HEMINGWAY, both of whom had profound influence on Cain. This hero can be an aimless drifter or a bank executive, an ex-boxer or an industrial tycoon, but all, according to Cain scholar David Madden, “are pushed, lured, or tempted into breaking violently out of their straight jackets” (Madden, James M. Cain, 75). Cain’s bestknown novels include The POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), Serenade (1937), and Mildred Pierce (1941); of these, all but Serenade were made into films now considered to be classics. James M. Cain was born on July 1, 1892, in Annapolis, Maryland, to James William Cain, professor of English and later president of Washington College, and Rose Cecilia Mallahan Cain, a former opera singer. Educated at Washington College, which Cain entered at age 14, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1910 at age 18. After receiving his master’s degree, also from Washington College, Cain served in the U.S. Army in France from 1917 to 1918, married Mary Rebekah Clough in 1920, and tried his hand at a variety of jobs until he began to write. Although he served as managing editor

of the New Yorker for part of 1931, he left New York for Hollywood where he worked as a scriptwriter and published his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, to instant bestsellerdom. The now classic tale of Southern California during the Great Depression features a love triangle and a murder: Frank Chambers, an aimless drifter, happens on Twin Oaks, the gas station and lunch room owned by Cora Papadakis, with whom he has a steamy affair, and Nick “the Greek” Papadakis, whom the lovers eventually murder. Postman was filmed twice in the United States (the earlier, 1938, MGM version starred Lana Turner and John Garfield) as well as in France and in Italy, and has been adapted as both stage play and opera. The MGM version made film history because Hollywood’s censoring mechanism, the Hays Office, held up distribution for eight years, finally releasing it in 1946. Double Indemnity, his second novel, was serialized in Liberty magazine and proved so popular that long lines of people awaited each issue. Like Postman, Double Indemnity is a tale of illicit love and murder in which an insurance agent, Walter Huff, and his lover, Phyllis Nirdlinger, conspire successfully to kill Phyllis’s husband. The 1944 Warner Brothers film again broke new ground, this time as a film noir classic. Cain’s third novel, Serenade, utilizes the now familiar themes of lust, murder, and betrayal; this time Cain features John Howard Sharp, who loses his magnificent opera voice after a homosexual advance from Stephen Hawes, the conductor; John regains both his voice and his sexual power by assaulting Juana, a Mexican prostitute, who murders Hawes. John’s voice betrays him, however, leading to the tragic denouement in a novel that caused a great deal of controversy for its time. In fact, it became required reading for psychiatry students across the country (Madden, James M. Cain, 51), and was made into a Warner Brothers film in 1956. Mildred Pierce, the last of Cain’s enormously popular 1930s novels, features two predatory, greedy women: Mildred Pierce, who has used men to help her rise from waitress to successful restaurateur, and Veda, her equally unprincipled and egotistical daughter. The novel ends when Mildred discovers her daughter in bed with her current husband. The 1945 Warner Brothers film noir classic earned Joan Crawford an Academy Award.

210 THE CAINE MUTINY

Cain continued to write novels, but only Past All Dishonor (1946), a best-selling tale of a Confederate soldier and a California prostitute, and The Butterfly (1947), a psychologically complex novel about incest, sold well. Cain left Hollywood, moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, with his fourth wife, Florence Macbeth Whitwell, whom he married in 1947. Today Cain’s most widely acclaimed novels attract young readers just as they had attracted their grandparents, and scholars are now examining all of Cain’s novels, including the less well known Sinful Woman (1947), The Moth (1948), Jealous Woman (1950), Galatea (1953), Mignon (1962), The Magician’s Wife (1965), Rainbow’s End (1975), and The Institute (1976). At their best, they present a searing and realistic glimpse into universal human foibles in general, during the era of the Great Depression in particular. When Cain died, of a heart attack, on October 27, 1977, in College Park, Maryland, nine of Cain’s novels had been made into films. Today his work is studied in university-level classes in American literature.

NOVELS The Butterfly. New York: Knopf, 1947. Cloud Nine. New York: Mysterious Press, 1984. Cain X 3. New York: Knopf, 1969. Career in C Major. New York: Knopf, 1943. Double Indemnity. New York: Knopf, 1936. The Embezzler. New York: Knopf, 1943. Galatea. New York: Knopf, 1953. The Government. New York: Knopf, 1930. Jealous Woman. New York: Avon, 1950. Love’s Lovely Counterfeit. New York: Knopf, 1942. The Magician’s Wife. New York: Dial Press, 1965. Mignon. New York: Dial Press, 1965. Mildred Pierce. New York: Knopf, 1941. The Moth. New York: Knopf, 1948. Past All Dishonor. New York: Knopf, 1946. The Postman Always Rings Twice. New York: Knopf, 1934. The Root of His Evil. New York: Avon, 1951. Serenade. New York: Knopf, 1937. Sinful Woman. New York: Avon Editions, 1947. Three of a Kind. New York: Knopf, 1943.

SOURCES Bradbury, Richard. “Sexuality, Guilt and Detection: Tension Between History and Suspense.” In American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, edited by Brian Docherty, 88–99. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Cain, James M. “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” In Cain X 3, 1–100. New York: Knopf, 1969. ———. “Publishers Weekly Interviews: James M. Cain.” By Thomas Chastain. Publishers Weekly 204 (July 24, 1972). Fine Richard. James M. Cain and the American Authors’ Authority. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Hoopes, Roy. Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain. New York: Holt, 1982. Madden, David. James M. Cain. Boston: Twayne, 1970. ———. Cain’s Craft. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Nyman, Jopi. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Oates, Joyce Carol, “Man under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain.” In Tough-Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden, 110–128. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Skenazy, Paul. James M. Cain. New York: Continuum, 1989.

CAINE MUTINY, THE HERMAN WOUK (1951) The Caine Mutiny is a military novel in the manner of James Gould COZZENS’s Guard of Honor. It offers a formal view of military life from the perspectives of officers who, for the most part, are committed to that life and believe strongly in the values that it embodies as well as those that it protects. WOUK sees little irony in the practical necessity of a strong, authoritarian institution serving the needs of a democratic society. This slant makes for a strong contrast between Wouk’s novel and a long line of American novels from Stephen CRANE’s RED BADGE OF COURAGE and John DOS PASSOS’s Three Soldiers to James JONES’s The Thin Red Line, Irwin SHAW’s The YOUNG LIONS, and even Joseph HELLER’s CATCH-22, in which the emphasis has been on the ordinary citizensoldier’s grudging adjustment to military duty. (Interestingly, the novel contains its own counterpoint in the novel, “Multitudes, Multitudes,” being written by one of its characters, a politically progressive young officer named Tom Keefer.) At its center, The Caine Mutiny is a novel of initiation and maturation, for its events very much transform a young officer named Willie Keith. Born into affluence and privilege, Keith has indulged in some mild dissipation while working as a night-club entertainer.

THE CAINE MUTINY 211

When the United States enters World War II following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Keith enlists, attends classes at Columbia University to earn a midshipman’s rank, and is assigned to an old converted destroyer, the USS Caine. The events on board the ship force Keith to examine his values and to make choices on serious issues. He comes to recognize, in both his professional and personal lives, that being responsible involves not just defining one’s convictions but maintaining one’s integrity while wrestling with the ambiguous ramifications of almost every choice. Even the best-considered decision may have unforeseen and even ironic consequences and implications. Shortly after Keith join the USS Caine, it gets a new captain, Commander Philip Queeg. Almost immediately, the men on the Caine recognize that Queeg is a difficult eccentric. Obsessed with enforcing an adherence to every regulation and treating every infraction with an equal severity, Queeg is a judgmental authoritarian who lacks the capacity for sound judgment. This impression of him is reinforced when the ship takes to sea, and Queeg seems unable to cope with any conditions that require quick thinking and a flexible response. His behavior is particularly surprising given that the Caine’s assignments generally take it to the backwaters of the war effort in the Pacific. Indeed, when the Caine does participate in a frontline combat mission, supporting landing craft during the attack on Kwajalein, Queeg is so overcome by his indecisiveness that he orders the Caine away from, rather than toward, the beaches. It is unclear whether he is afflicted with a paralyzing form of obsessive-compulsive disorder or whether he is actually suffering from cowardice. But he convinces everyone that he is dangerously unfit for command when he orders that a yellow dye be dumped overboard to mark where he has separated the Caine from the landing craft that it has been assigned to shield. Relying on a casual knowledge of psychology, Tom Keefer has much earlier diagnosed Queeg as a neurotic who is inclined toward paranoia. He has even laid out the legal case for seizing command of the ship should Queeg become dangerously unstable. Another officer, Steve Maryk, who has been a commercial fisherman in civilian life, takes the more pragmatic approach of doc-

umenting all of Queeg’s idiosyncratic orders and actions. It is hard to tell with complete certainty whether Queeg’s apparent paranoia is actually a recognition of his junior officers’ willingness to mutiny or whether his paranoia is self-fulfilling, creating the response that seems to justify it. In any case, when the ship is caught in a typhoon in the Philippine Sea and Queeg begins to furiously issue incoherent and even contradictory orders, the mutiny, led by Maryk but supported by Keefer and Keith, does occur. Of course, Maryk faces a court-martial after the ship comes to port. As the case is prepared, Queeg gets enough rest away from the stress of command to recover his composure. In fact, the case seems to be leaning much in his favor when naval psychiatrists examine him and find him of sound mind and capable of sound judgments. But Maryk’s lawyer is a young Jewish aviator named Barney Greenwald who understands intuitively how irritating Queeg in small increments will eventually cause him to exhibit the sort of rash behavior that led to the mutiny. Greenwald eventually provokes an outburst from Queeg that saves the careers of Maryk, Keefer, and Keith. But, following that climactic scene, Wouk provides a denouement that radically changes the thematic direction of the novel. For, when Greenwald joins the celebration being thrown by the Caine’s officers, he creates considerable consternation by asserting that Queeg, not they, represent the best hope against fascism. Many of Greenwald’s relatives have suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis, and given the scope of the threat posed by fascism, Queeg’s long military service, his demonstrated commitment to the defense of American values and human freedoms, weighs more, Greenwald argues, than his eccentricities, regardless of how much they may have endangered a particular crew. The military has ultimately not protected one of its own, and it has thereby endangered itself and undermined the war effort. Although Greenwald has clearly been drinking before joining the officers’ celebration, his self-doubt about what they have accomplished by ruining Queeg resonates just enough to make the resolution of the case a more profound issue than that addressed in court, an issue that cannot be resolved by adjudication.

212 CALDWELL, ERSKINE

The novel was adapted to a very successfully staged courtroom drama titled “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” and it was then adapted to film as simply “The Caine Mutiny,” with Humphrey Bogart providing a riveting performance as Queeg.

SOURCES Beichman, Arnold. Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004. Clurman, Harold, and William Appleman Williams. “The Mutiny That’s Raising Cain,” Nation, March 1954, pp. 260–261. Geisnar, Maxwell. “The Age of Wouk,” Nation, November 1955, pp. 399–400. Goertschacher, Wolfgang, and Holger Klein, eds. Krieg auf der Buhne, 369–387. Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1997. Shapiro, Edward. “The Jew as Patriot: Herman Wouk and American Jewish Identity,” American Jewish History 84 (December 1996): 333–351. Steele, John. “Novel,” American Heritage 51 (May/June 2000): 72. Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. Martin Kich

CALDWELL, ERSKINE (PRESTON) (1903–1987) At one time published in the pages of Scribner’s magazine alongside Ernest HEMINGWAY, F. Scott FITZGERALD, and William FAULKNER, Erkine Caldwell peaked, ebbed, nearly disappeared, and has now returned to the lists of writers of significant American novels. He remains controversial as we enter the 21st century, although his focus on the plight of the disadvantaged rural American, along with his distinctive gift of characterization and his ability to plot tales suspensefully, promises that today’s readers will remain interested in this prolific writer. Caldwell’s milieu was the South, and he has been compared to other southern writers like Ellen GLASGOW and Faulkner. All of them are concerned with the depleted earth and with memorable and often grotesque rural characters. On another level, however, he has been compared to John DOS PASSOS, Tillie OLSEN, and John STEINBECK in his veiled optimism for the fate of the proletarian, and, on still another, to D. H. Lawrence for his frank, almost spiritual presentation of sex as a liberating force.

Although his best-known novels remain TOBACCO ROAD (1922) and GOD’S LITTLE ACRE (1933), scholars are now studying other Caldwell novels: Trouble in July (1940), Georgia Boy (1943), and Tragic Ground (1944). Caldwell was born in 1902 in Newnan, Georgia, to the Reverend Ira Sylvester Caldwell, a preacher in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian (ARP) Church, and Caroline Preston Bell, an instructor at the Women’s College and the daughter of a respected Virginia family. Although he became accustomed to moving frequently because of his father’s occupation, Caldwell also developed an awareness of the poor sharecroppers who lived along the tobacco roads where, in earlier times, hogsheads of tobacco had been rolled from the fields to the Savannah River. Although he attended the University of Virginia, Caldwell’s real inspiration seems to have stemmed more from such acquaintances as Margaret MITCHELL, with whom he worked on the Atlanta Journal in 1925, and from his sheer love of reading and his disciplined self-apprenticeship to the writer’s craft. He lived a reclusive life in Maine for three years, publishing two novelettes (The Bastard [1929] and Poor Fool [1930]) with small presses and placing stories in some of the small literary magazines that published Langston HUGHES, Gertrude STEIN, and William Carlos WILLIAMS. His breakthrough came in 1930 when Maxwell Perkins, editor in chief at Scribner’s, published two of Caldwell’s stories, and in 1931, published American Earth, a collection of Caldwell’s stories. In 1932, Perkins accepted Tobacco Road for publication, and in what would continue to be one of Caldwell’s most significant strengths, his portrayal of southern poverty appears in this novel in sharp focus. One of his real contributions to American fiction, moreover, is Jeter Lester, a comic-grotesque character who is a cotton farmer. Too poor during the depression years to buy seed or fertilizer for his crops, Jeter seeks—but does not find—solace in his 18-year-old harelipped daughter, Ellie May, and his 16-year-old son, Dude, two of his 17 children. He lives in squalor with Ada, whom he married when she was 11 years old, with his mother, and with Dude’s wife, Bessie Rice, a hypocritical preacher woman. The fire set to burn his own fields is the fire that ultimately burns Jeter and Ada in their cabin. Caldwell’s blending of the comic with the tragic

CALISHER, HORTENSE 213

produces curiously effective results, and Tobacco Road, forever linked with his name, captured the imagination of the American reading public. In the words of scholar James Devlin, the novel was the first example of Caldwell’s ability to write about the poor, engaging the reader’s interest without depending on their empathy, so that they “might concentrate more objectively on the problems they presented” (Devlin, 5). Caldwell’s long career of writing long and short fiction and nonfiction about the problems of the poor earned him election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984. He married four times: Helen Lannigan, daughter of a University of Virginia athletic instructor, in 1925; Margaret Bourke-White, the photographer with whom he collaborated on several photoessay books, notably the Great Depression–era You Have Seen Their Faces (1937); June Johnson, in 1942; and Virginia Fletcher. Erskine Caldwell invented the term “tobacco road,” and it has permanently entered the American lexicon, connoting images of poor white rural southerners. When he died on April 11, 1987, his reputation as a chronicler of the rural poor was just beginning to grow. After his death from lung cancer, he was cremated; the repository for his ashes is in Ashland, Oregon. The Erskine Caldwell Collection at Baker Library, Dartmouth College, comprises the most extensive collection of Caldwell’s papers.

NOVELS American Earth. New York: Scribner, 1931. The Bastard. New York: Heron Press, 1929. Georgia Boy. New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1943. God’s Little Acre. New York: Viking, 1933. Poor Fool. New York: Rariora Press, 1930. The Sacrilege of Alan Kent. Portland, Maine: Falmouth Book House, 1936. Tobacco Road. New York: Scribner, 1932.

SOURCES Arnold, Edwin T., ed. Erskine Caldwell Reconsidered. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. Erskine Caldwell and the Fiction of Poverty: The Flesh and the Spirit. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. Caldwell, Erskine. Call It Experience: The Years of Learning How to Write. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1951. Devlin, James E. Caldwell. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965. Hoag, Ronald Wesley. “Erskine Caldwell.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Klevar, Harvey L. Erskine Caldwell: A Biography. Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Korges, James. Erskine Caldwell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. MacDonald, Scott, ed. Critical Essays on Erskine Caldwell. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Miller, Dan B. Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road. New York: Random House, 1998. Mixon, Wayne. The People’s Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Sutton, William A. Black Like It Is/Was: Caldwell’s Treatment of Racial Themes. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974.

CALISHER, HORTENSE (1911– ) Author of 14 novels, numerous novellas and short stories, and two memoirs, Hortense Calisher has been awarded a 1989 National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, earned three National Book Award nominations and four O. Henry Awards. Her short fiction is more acclaimed than her novels, but in any case she is considered “a writer’s writer.” Calisher’s novels are notable for their psychologically rich portrayals of characters from ordinary backgrounds; they can realize themselves as individuals by facing and then shedding their pasts. Often sorrowful or despairing, they grapple with demons and are usually optimistic by the novel’s end. Hortense Calisher was born on December 20, 1911, in New York City, to Joseph Calisher and Hedwig Lichtstern Calisher. Her father, born during the Civil War and originally from Richmond, Virginia, moved to New York, became a soap and perfume manufacturer, and married a German immigrant 22 years his junior; Calisher has frequently commented on this unique background and its strong influence on her writing. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in 1932, married Heaton Bennet Heffelfinger, an engineer, in 1935, and published her first story in the New Yorker in 1948. After divorcing Heffelfinger she married Curtish Harnack, a writer, in 1959, and published her first novel, False Entry, in 1961. It won the National

214 CALISHER, HORTENSE

Book Award. It is an unusual love story between a middle-aged encyclopedia compiler and Ruth Mannix, the daughter of a judge. By rejecting his penchant for using the past rather than the present to gain “false entry” into others’ lives, he carves out his own identity, sees the potential of love between himself and Ruth, and commits himself to love, the present, and the future, thereby genuinely entering her life. Textures of Life (1963) depicts a rebellious young couple, David and Liz, who must reinvent themselves in order to succeed at marriage and parenthood. Journal from Ellipsia (1965), a radical departure for Calisher, features Janice Jamison, a young anthropologist who leaves her laboratory for the perfect planet of Ellipsia. One of its inhabitants, Eli the ellipsoid, wants to experience the tribulations of the inhabitants of Earth. The Railway Police, and The Last Trolley Ride, novellas published together in 1966, include the Kafkaesque story of a bald-headed and brilliant social worker who learns to accept herself as she is; readers see it as an allegory for becoming a writer. The second story takes place in upstate New York as a grandson recalls the lives of his 80-year-old grandfathers, both named Jim. In 1969 Calisher published The New Yorkers, her most critically acclaimed novel; it tells the story of Ruth Mannix (of False Entry), who, at age 12, murdered her mother, after discovering her in bed with a lover. Queenie (1971) and Eagle Eye (1973) are companion novels that respond to the upheavals of the 1960s: Queenie speaks from the perspective of innocence, while Bunty Bronstein, who avoided the Vietnam War draft, begins life anew with a computer in California. Standard Dreaming (1972), one of Calisher’s best novellas, explores with plastic surgeon Dr. Berners the possibility that certain corrupt youth of the 1960s caused their own problems; the parents were not, as was the popular theory, the major cause of dysfunction. In 1977 Calisher published On Keeping Women, a feminist novel in which Lexie, the main character, attempts to overcome her unhappiness at the menial tasks assigned to the modern wife and mother, and to understand and redefine herself. In The Bobby-Soxer (1986) a young woman examines her external and internal ambiguities when she revisits the provincial geography of her childhood, while Age

(1987), written in diary form, conveys the ability to assimilate memories while continuing to grow with age. Her 1997 novel In the Slammer with Carol Smith demonstrates the dual needs of one woman, jailed for a botched bombing in her radical 1970s student days. Free from prison, she understands that she needs solitude as well as closeness with others. In the Palace of the Movie King (1993) focuses on issues of dislocation and loss. Filmmaker Paul Gonchev, an immigrant, was born to Russian parents, reared in Japan, and now makes travel documentaries in Albania. Although he achieves fame after his immigration to the United States, he is alienated in the new country and longs for the old. Calisher’s most recent novel, Sunday Jews (2002), published at age 90, demonstrates the long assimilation process of 60-something Zipporah Zangwill, married to the lapsed Catholic Peter Duffy, as they recall their memories and analyze their five children whom they visit each Sunday. Hortense Calisher’s canvas is a broad one. Whether she will ultimately be better known for her novels or for her short stories, she has chronicled myriad facets of 20th-century American life and has helped illuminate the psyches of ordinary folk. She lives in New York City.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Age. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987. The Bobby-Soxer. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986. Eagle Eye. New York: Arbor House, 1973. False Entry. Boston: Little Brown, 1961. In the Palace of the Movie King. New York: Random House, 1993. In the Slammer with Carol Smith. New York: Marion Boyars, 1997. Journal from Ellipsia. Boston: Little Brown, 1965. Mysteries of Motion. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983. The New Yorkers. Boston: Little Brown, 1969. The Novellas of Hortense Calisher. New York: Modern Library, 1997. On Keeping Women. New York: Arbor House, 1977. Queenie. New York: Arbor House, 1971. The Railway Police, and The Last Trolley Ride. Boston: Little Brown, 1966. The Small Bang (Jack Fenno, pseud.). New York: Random House, 1992. Standard Dreaming. New York: Arbor House, 1972.

CALL IT SLEEP 215

Sunday Jews. New York: Harcourt, 2002. Textures of Life. Boston: Little Brown, 1963.

SOURCES Allen, Bruce. “Find Hortense,” Nation, 1 December 1997, pp. 34–36. Bader, Eleanor J. “The Triumph of Age,” Belles Lettres 4, no. 2 (Winter 1989) 7. Calisher, Hortense. “The Art of Fiction.” Interviewed by Allan Gurganus, Pamela McCordick, and Mona Simpson. Paris Review, no. 105 (Winter 1987): 157–187. Calisher, Hortense, with Gregory Fitz Gerald and Peter Marchant. “A Conversation with Hortense Calisher,” edited by Earl Ingersoll and Peter Marchant, Southwest Review 71, no. 2 (Spring 1986) 186–193. Cavell, Marcia. “Pondering a Family Mystery,” New Leader (June 16–30, 1986): 20. Drake, Sylvie. “Charting the Frontier Called Age,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 13 December 1987, p. 11. Hahn, Emily. “In Appreciation of Hortense Calisher,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 6, no. 2 (Summer 1965): 243–249. Johnson, Lucy. “High Polish,” The Progressive 26, no. 1 (January 1962): 49–50. Kiely, Robert. “On the Subject of Love,” Nation, May 25, 1963, pp. 447–448. King, Francis. “What a Marvel!,” Spectator, May 25, 1996, pp. 32–34. Krim, Seymour. “Friends for Life: A Writer Remembers,” Washington Post Book World, 8 January 1989, p. 7. Longley, Edna. “Pilgrim Mothers.” Partisan Review 47, no. 2 (1980): 308–313. See, Carolyn. “Lights, Camera, Confusion,” Washington Post Book World, 11 February 1994, p. 2. Snodgrass, Kathleen. The Fiction of Hortense Calisher. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. ———. “On Hortense Calisher,” Iowa Review 24, no. 3 (Fall 1994) 185–187. Yuenger, James. “Age: Laying Bare Life’s Fears, Triumphs,” Chicago Tribune Books, 6 October 1987, p. 3.

CALL IT SLEEP HENRY ROTH (1934)

Henry ROTH’s autobiographical first novel Call It Sleep (1934) has come to be recognized as one of the most poignant and honest depictions of immigrant, specifically Jewish immigrant, life in all of American literature. Its account of living conditions in poor neighborhoods, the pressures of assimilation and the difficulties of working conditions and maintaining employment read at times

like a work of ethnography. At the same time the book offers a compelling and often disturbing psychological portrait of the traumas of childhood and the everyday tyrannies of family life. These experiences are heightened by their reflection in the eyes of a young boy, the protagonist David Schearl, who is caught in the interplay of cultures, none of which he really understands. From the perspective of this imaginative and perceptive young boy Roth’s lyrical work evokes the struggles, including the inner ones, facing recent immigrants in America during the period of the country’s greatest influx of migrants. Call It Sleep relates the experiences of David Schearl, a young child who, like Roth himself, was born in what was then territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before emigrating with his mother to America to be reunited with his father. Starting in 1907 the novel follows, over several years, David’s activities and, more important, his feelings as he and his family grapple with the unfamiliar and often hostile realities of life in the poor and working-class immigrant neighborhoods of New York. Throughout, young David is caught painfully, not only between his family’s Jewish culture and the culture of mainstream America, but also between his love for his protective and sheltering mother and his hatred for his violent and overbearing father. To avoid the wrath of his father, as well as to discover his place in relation to the other immigrant children, David turns to the streets, where he encounters profanity, sexuality, neighborhood gangs, and anti-Semitism. When the novel was first released in 1934 it received passing notice, elevated for a moment as part of the emerging genre of proletarian fiction that was garnering some attention as the deepening slump of the Great Depression gave rise to social movements giving voice to the concerns of working-class people and putting forward demands for socioeconomic reform. The depression, however, also claimed Roth’s work among its victims, and when his publisher went bankrupt the book went out of print and was quickly forgotten. Despite Roth’s committed membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1933, the novel was dismissed by the major leftist journal, New Masses, for its supposed dilution of working-class experience into introspection. Leftist critics condemned the book for a

216 CALL IT SLEEP

variety of perceived faults ranging from a supposed preoccupation with sexual neuroses to its unbridled impressionist flourishes. Roth’s emphasis on linguistic innovations and his concern with characters’ psychological development led Leftist commentators at the time of the novel’s release to overlook its significant, if subtle, social criticism. At the same time Call It Sleep did find some significant supporters among the Left. The noted literary theorist Kenneth Burke argued in New Masses that communist critics should pay special attention to Roth’s book since it dealt with the psychological phenomena of orientation and rebirth that have been central to communist concerns with the development of new meanings and new consciousness among people. Burke also attempted to situate Call It Sleep as a fluent and sympathetic expression of the prepolitical thinking of childhood rather than a statement of a mature, class-conscious adult. Indeed, as a work of proletarian fiction, Call It Sleep moves beyond the general considerations of the genre adding unique concerns to the more recognizable focus on the sufferings and strivings of the working class. At the same time it might be noted that Burke’s defense of Call It Sleep made no attempt to examine, or even to mention, the book’s grounding in Jewish immigrant experiences. This was in fact typical of most reviews at the time of the book’s release. One must recall that Roth’s novel was written during a period when the combined effects of the depression and rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. had severely impacted Jewish communities. Jewish immigrants were faced with employers who refused to hire them and landlords and landowners who refused to rent or sell housing. Roth was among the generation of American Jewish writers of the 1930s who, as active socialists, viewed their Jewishness through a secular lens. Socialism, not religion, offered the necessary response to the problems facing Jewish immigrants in capitalist America. Thus, Call It Sleep expresses a complex relationship between Jewish identity and traditions, identified especially through Davey’s mother and aunt, and Davey’s own rebellious imagination amid the material struggles of life in the Lower East Side. This is expressed most forcefully in Roth’s compelling shifts of language, con-

trasting the Yiddish spoken, and translated into a precise, even elegant, English, and the profane and fractured English spoken in the streets. The failure to examine or even to acknowledge the contexts of Jewish heritage, either for the author or his novel’s protagonists, suggests the limits of Leftist criticism and the limited framework within which proletarian literature was viewed. In Call It Sleep Roth expanded the form of proletarian writing, situating working-class concerns within the specific cultural, religious, or ethnic experiences through which workingpeople actually live, and contemplate, their lives. In doing so the author slipped the bounds of economistic approaches to class or class consciousness that were predominant among much of Leftist criticism of the 1930s. In light of the Left’s generally unfavorable response to Call It Sleep Roth attempted a second novel, another autobiographical work intended this time to please the Communist Party, to which he was deeply committed. Finding himself unable to write a more characteristic proletarian novel he soon destroyed the work and in the 1940s burned his journals and manuscripts altogether. Following the release of Call It Sleep, Roth suffered one of the most prolonged periods of writer’s block experienced by any first-rate author. Almost 60 years passed before his second novel, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, the first volume of his Mercy of a Rude Stream quartet of novels, was published in the 1990s. In the intervening period, Roth’s first novel experienced a remarkable rebirth. In 1956, The American Scholar listed Call It Sleep among “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years.” In 1960 the book was republished in hardcover, and by 1964, a paperback edition was finally released. The paperback edition became the first paperback to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Review of Books. Nearly 30 years after the release of Call It Sleep, both the book and its author enjoyed a positive reappraisal in the literary world. With the novel’s re-release in the 1960s, at a time when many critics were becoming more interested in examining and expressing ethnic experiences and identities, Call It Sleep came to be regarded as a significant expression of Jewish-American literature. Since then it has taken a key place among courses on American Jewish literature. More recently Leftist critics

CALL OF THE WILD, THE 217

have also come to recognize Call It Sleep as among the finest and most enduring examples of the proletarian novel. Roth’s novel had long been forgotten or dismissed along with other works of so-called proletarian fiction from the 1930s. In recent years, however, the literature of the thirties has been subjected to a critical revaluation which has revived interest in a number of long-overlooked 1930s writers. Call It Sleep is a late-regarded literary classic. A complex work, it has found favor among a diverse readership including, but by no means limited to, students of working-class fiction and Jewish-American literature. Yet it is a rich and challenging work that overflows any easy categorization. It is a work that, through an innovative use of language and psychological insights, examines the intricacies of ethnicity and class, reminding us that these are always interconnected.

SOURCE Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Ballou, 1934. Jeff Shantz

CALL OF THE WILD, THE JACK LONDON (1903) The Call of the Wild is a fabulous version of the young adult adventure story (including brave animals, Indians, a contest, etc.), and it is also a sophisticated exploration of the roles of Nature in shaping destiny in a naturalistic, deterministic, and transcendentalist sense. The style in which Jack LONDON wrote The Call of the Wild at first seems stereotypically masculine and precise in an overbearing way, but any grand tone is tempered by a stoic regard of humanity. The novel is enthusiastic throughout, and it is about transformation. The protagonist and only character the reader is allowed any firsthand insight into is the amazing husky, Buck. All other characters flit by as though swimming under the ice, their features never sharp, their motivations and emotions mostly related to the reader in sentence-long, omniscient, self-contained flashes—even these flashes usually in direct association to Buck: “Spitz, as lead-dog and acknowledged master of the team, felt his supremacy threatened by this strange Southland dog” (72). Buck is the center of everything. Because Buck is not a human being, he can be lent the objectivity reputedly taken on by the natu-

ralist writer. Buck’s objectivity is accentuated in turn by this outsider status, and through Buck London seeks to indoctrinate the reader in pure experience: At first step upon the cold surface, Buck’s feet sank into a white mushy something very like mud. He sprang back with a snort. More of this white stuff was falling through the air. He shook himself, but more of it fell upon him. He sniffed it curiously, then licked some up on his tongue. It bit like fire, and the next instant was gone. This puzzled him. He tried it again, with the same result. The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow. (54) It seems as though London’s motivation in this is to couple the transcendentalist worship of Nature with the allegiance to Science that characterizes much of his era. Buck is inextricable from his environment, from the natural stimuli that determine his evolving fate, but he still remains an objective observer—it is not that he is not without ego, but that his experiences are pure, instinctual, and unfettered. Thus, London garners flexibility. Because Buck presides over all events and circumstances in the novel, the heat is off: London can vacillate between omniscience, objectivity, unabashed melodrama (“Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine” [135]), and can overtly begin to philosophize—and all this as deemed necessary to move the characterization of Buck away from straight, inherently disingenuous anthropomorphism, or attributing human emotions to animals. London has accrued many entertaining tools with which to shift focus strategically. He also keeps men in the picture, though they are always transient (“And that was the last of Francois and Perrault. Like other men, they passed out of Buck’s life for good” [85]). This haziness, though, reinforces their connectedness to the environment—indeed, the human beings in The Call of the Wild are rarely more than stimuli—which again, allows London a certain stylistic flexibility. He capitalizes on this in order to indulge his enthusiasm and infatuation with natural

218 CAMERON, PETER

selection and the relatively fresh idea of placing humanity in evolutionary context. When Buck has primordial visions of “the hairy man sleeping by the fire, head between his knees and hands clasped above,” a man who “could spring up into the trees and travel ahead as fast as on the ground” (125), London is at his most exuberant. It is his sobriety that is his saving grace in the midst of this possible overenthusiasm—he has the striking insight that “(t)he salient thing of this other world seemed fear” (125). London is always mentioning qualities and traits; he condenses the evolutionary recurrences in the novel into separate learned behaviors, such as “The Law of Club and Fang” and doggedly points out the learning process: He [Buck] was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. (51) So, while The Call of the Wild is an exemplar of Jack London’s dual fascination with natural science and transcendentalist ideas, it is almost about lineal transformation. There is growth in every chapter: “. . . it was a secret growth. His newborn cunning gave him poise and control” (65); “later his feet grew hard to the trail, and the worn-out footgear was thrown away” (71); “he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility” (130). London’s style reflects this consistent growth, utilizing his potboilerish format to pile on thick detail and description, primarily concerning dogs and landscape, thus engineering an entertaining building-up that is never without a summary action or payoff. In this way the progression of the men in the novel builds to the one Buck loves—“it was because of his great love for John Thornton that he lost his head” (135)—and then past him. This aesthetic of progression, of a slow but consistent and repeated blooming, is used by London to call attention away from dualism and to produce a refined adventure.

SOURCE London, Jack. ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’, and Other Stories. Edited by Andrew Sinclair. Penguin: New York, 1981. Jay Pluck

CAMERON, PETER (1959– )

Peter Cameron, the author of four novels and three story collections, was first published when he was 26 years old. He is considered a minimalist who explores upheavals from wrecked marriages to dysfunctional families in the lives of ordinary people and is compared often to Ann BEATTLE, Raymond Carver, and Bobbie Ann MASON. Several of his stories have won O. Henry prizes. Cameron was born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, to Donald O. Cameron, an economist, and Sally Shaw Cameron. Reared in the environs of New York City and, for several years, in London, where he attended The American School, Cameron completed his education at Hamilton College, receiving his bachelor of arts degree in 1982. Cameron moved to New York City and established himself as a careful chronicler of real-life dialogue and conversation. His first collection of short fiction, One Way or Another (1986) received widespread critical attention. Cameron’s first novel, Leap Year (1990), was serialize in the New York City magazine Seven Days throughout 1988, so it is peppered, of course, with witty allusions to New York City life. During the writing of this novel, Cameron volunteered with the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, an organization devoted to gay rights and issues, where he still works. The Weekend (1994) has at its center the anniversary of the death of Tony, who died of AIDS, and a reunion of friends at the upstate New York estate of Tony’s half brother John and his wife, Marian. Cameron’s third novel, Andorra (1997), is set in an imaginary country and is, for the most part, a novel of deception, mystery, and, for Alexander Fox, unexpected disillusion. In City of Your Final Destination (2001), Cameron continues to use the foreign travel motif. Here a 28-year-old graduate student, Omar Razaghi, visits Uruguay at the urging of his girlfriend, Dierdre, to interview the family of deceased poet Jules Gund, about whom Omar is writing a biography. His interaction with Gund’s widow, Caroline, mistress Arden, and brother Adam, who refuse to cooperate on the book, reveals Cameron’s ever-present sense of humor as well as his increasing compassion for human foibles. Peter Cameron lives in Manhattan’s West Village, where he continues to write. He is much respected by fellow writers and critics of contemporary fiction.

CAMPBELL, BEBE MOORE 219

NOVELS Andorra. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1997. City of Your Final Destination. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Leap Year. New York: Harper, 1990. The Weekend. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994.

SOURCES Brown, Rosellen. “The Emperor’s New Fiction,” Boston Review (August 1986): 7–8. Gambone, Philip. Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers, 284–300. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. Leavitt, David. “New Voices and Old Values,” New York Times Book Review, 12 May 1985, p. 1. Weber, Myles. “When a Risk Group Is Not a Risk Group: The Absence of AIDS Panic in Peter Cameron’s Fiction,” in AIDS—The Literary Response, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 69–75. New York: Twayne, 1992.

CAMPBELL, BEBE MOORE (1950– ) Bebe Moore Campbell is the author of four acclaimed novels, more than 100 journal and magazine articles, and a popular memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing Up with and without My Dad (1989). Her novels focus directly on racial, class, and gender issues, and her first novel, Your Blues Ain’t like Mine (1992), which won the NAACP Image Award for literature and appeared on the New York Times Notable Book list, was based on the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Similarly Brothers and Sisters (1994) explores the tensions that led to the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles and quickly appeared on the New York Times best-seller list; Singing in the Comeback Choir (1998), based on Campbell’s life, iterates the themes of responsibility and healing; and What You Owe Me (2001) is about friendship, betrayal, and recovery. Campbell has been forthright and even outspoken about her beliefs and literary aims. In an interview with Martha Satz, she says that she is “an integrationist” rather than “a separatist.” Convinced that her “ancestors have invested too much” in the United States to promote divisiveness, she believes that “our strengths lie in saluting our differences and getting along. African-Americans need to begin to look really closely and make some movement toward changing the problems we have in our community. A lot of situations we find ourselves in have to do with

institutionalized racism in America. And a lot have to do with the way we make choices” (Satz, 195). Bebe Moore Campbell was born in 1950, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to George Linwood Peter Moore, county farm agent and restaurant owner, and Doris Moore, a social worker. Her parents were both collegeeducated: her mother had earned a bachelor’s and two master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, and her father had attended North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College. When Campbell was an infant, an automobile accident left her father a paraplegic; her parents divorced. She spent her summers with him in North Carolina, gaining a perspective on the South. She received her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, then studied with Toni Cade BAMBARA, who stimulated her interest in writing. In her first novel, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, 15year-old Armstrong Todd is murdered in rural Mississippi. Although the novel explores the relationships and motivations of both blacks and whites, it ends with the impossibility of a marriage between the black Marguerite and the white Clayton. Brothers and Sisters focuses on Esther Jackson, a black bank manager and her white female colleague Mallory Post. With the Rodney King incident as backdrop, Esther helps Mallory relinquish her racist attitudes. In Campbell’s third novel, Singing in the Comeback Choir, Maxine McCoy returns to the Philadelphia community where she grew up, now a black neighborhood wrestling with drug pushers and dysfunction, and the general malaise of urban blight. Maxine helps the community and learns from her mentor, her 76-year-old grandmother Lindy Walker. What You Owe Me is (as Campbell has proclaimed about all her novels) concerned with healing, this time from the betrayal of one friend by another. It uses the unusual combination of two hotel maids, Holocaust survivor Gilda Rosenstein and her black friend, Hosanna Clark. Divorced from Tiko F. Campbell, Campbell married Ellis Gordon, Jr., in 1984. They live in Los Angeles, where she continues to write and to produce commentaries for National Public Radio.

NOVELS Brothers and Sisters. New York: Putnam, 1994. Singing in the Comeback Choir. New York: Putnam, 1998.

220 THE “CANARY” MURDER CASE

What You Owe Me. New York: Putnam, 2001. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine. New York: Putnam, 1992.

SOURCES Campbell, Jane. “An Interview with Bebe Moore Campbell,” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American Arts and Letters 22 (Fall 1999): 954–972. Chambers, Veronica. “Bebe Moore Campbell and Joyce Carol Oates: An Interview,” New York Times Magazine, 25 December 1994, p. 6. Edgerton, Clyde. “Medicine for Broken Souls.” Review of Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, by Bebe Moore Campbell. New York Times, 20 September 1992, p. 332. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Which Counts More, Gender or Race?” New York Times Magazine, 25 December 1994, pp. 16–22. Russell-Robinson, Joyce. Contemporary African-American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographic Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999, pp. 76–81. Satz, Martha. “I Hope I Can Teach a Little Bit: An Interview With Bebe Moore Campbell.” Southwest Review (Spring 1996): 195.

OTHER African-American Literature Book Club. “Bebe Moore Campbell.” Available online. URL: http://authors.aalbc. com/bebe.htm. Accessed June 9, 2005. Voices from the Gap, Women Writers of Color. “Bebe Moore Campbell.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn. edu/vg/Bios/entries/campbell_bebe_moore.html. Accessed June 9, 2005.

THE “CANARY” MURDER CASE S. S. VAN DINE (1927) The “Canary” Murder Case was the second of Philo Vance’s 12 interventions into the murder investigations of New York City district attorney John F. X. Markham. Vance is a young aesthete with “a liberal independent income” that enables him to employ a butler (Currie) and an attorney-biographer (S. S. Van Dine), and a European education that has trained him to drop his “g’s” (“It is a bit mystifyin’,” 64) and to invoke his aunt (“Oh, my aunt! Oh my precious aunt,” 198). Markham is Vance’s closest friend, and while he does not share Vance’s Nietzschean disdain for the herd, Markham is tolerant of his friend’s flippancies, and when he encounters an unusually mystifying homicide, he wisely submits himself and the police force of New York City to the instruction of imperious Vance.

Vance approaches the elucidation of murder with little reverence for the physical traces—cigarette ashes, footprints, torn bits of manuscript—that revealed so much to Sherlock Holmes and his epigones. In chapter 2 of The “Canary” Murder Case, he discourses on the futility of pursuing such leads. Rather, he proposes an aesthetic-psychological approach that studies the manner of the criminal rather as an art historian studies the manner of a painter. Once he fully comprehends the style of the crime, the investigator will infallibly be able to profile the criminal. As it happens, chapter 3 confronts Markham with a crime that proves the impotence of the analysis of physical evidence. Margaret Odell is the dead canary: she is a Follies dancer who translated her notoriety in the bohemian demi-monde into a series of remunerative relationships with five men: Charles (Pop) Cleaver, a gambler with political connections; Kenneth Spotswoode, a wealthy blueblood; Louis Mannix, a fur importer; Ambroise Lindquist, a physician-therapist for high society; and Tony Skeel, a professional burgler. Odell is discovered strangled in her disordered apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. She had entertained Spotswoode until 11:30 P.M. As Spotswoode passed the building’s telephone station on his way out, both he and the night operator, William Jessup, heard Margaret Odell cry out; they rushed back to her door to hear her say everything was all right. Spotswoode then departed, and the watchful eye of Jessup and the fact that the door of a side corridor was bolted on the inside make it apparently impossible for anyone else to have entered or exited the apartment. Van Dine, who narrates the case, provides floor plans of the building and of the apartment to verify this. Piqued by the situation, Vance commits himself to the investigation: “Really, y’ know, I’m no avenger of society, but I do detest an unsolved problem” (128). Cleaver, Mannix, Lindquist, and Skeel all have alibis for the time of the murder, but Vance is able to discredit all of them. Suspicion fastens upon Skeel, whose fingerprints place him inside the door of the Canary’s clothes closet, but Vance insists that his is not the mind that designed the crime, though he does demonstrate that Skeel could have used a pair of tweezers and a bit of thread to throw the inside bolt of the side door from

CANE 221

outside the building, thus enabling him to escape unseen after the murder. Skeel makes an appointment to speak to the district attorney but is killed before he can talk. Cleaver, Mannix, and Spotswoode have no alibi for the time of this second murder either. (Dr. Lindquist, having been confined to a sanatorium, is eliminated as a suspect.) Vance asks the docile Markham to call the three remaining suspects to Markham’s apartment for an informal inquiry and a few hands of poker. Van Dine provides a diagram of the seating at the poker table. By observing how Cleaver and Mannix respond to prearranged hands of poker, and by how Mannix responds to a challenge of cutting cards, Vance determines that Spotswoode is the murderer. He then leads Markham back to Margaret Odell’s apartment, where he discovers that Spotswoode used a phonograph record of himself (“in falsetto”) crying out and then saying everything was all right. Confronted by Markham, Spotswoode confesses: Margaret Odell had blackmailed her other lovers for money; she was asking Spotswoode to divorce his wife and marry her. He requests a moment to write a note to his wife, and Vance, knowing Spotswoode’s intention, urges Markham to acquiesce. To Markham’s dismay and Vance’s satisfaction, Spotswoode commits suicide. It is difficult for many 21st-century readers to understand how the Philo Vance stories could ever have been so popular in the 1920s. Indeed, the difficulty was already emerging in the late 1930s. Vance appears to be an insufferable prig, and Markham a very lax officer of the law, condoning all sorts of improprieties, as Vance absconds with evidence from the crime scene and arbitrarily cuts off lines of questioning from the district attorney and Sergeant Heath of the homicide squad. Van Dine’s plotting does not approach the cleverness of that of Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. The phonograph trick, though not original, is neatly used, but having Margaret Odell’s ex-boyfriend choose to burgle her apartment on the same night her current boyfriend chooses to execute a well-planned murder scheme stretches credibility. And the characterization is sketchy: the men and women are all thinly defined types. Detective fiction, even very good detective fiction, frequently works with types, but Vance’s profession that psychological analysis is a universal solvent for crime

only emphasizes how little the reader learns of the inner lives of Skeel, Cleaver, Mannix, Lindquist, or Spotswoode . . . or of Van Dine, Markham, or even Vance himself. The victim, Margaret Odell, remains a cipher. But the Philo Vance novels were enormously popular. The first, The Benson Murder Case (1926) sold well enough for VAN DINE’S publisher, Scribner, to develop a major advertising campaign for the second. The “Canary” Murder Case was serialized in the publisher’s house magazine, an unprecedented distinction. Philo Vance joined Mah Jongg, crossword puzzles, and King Tut in the fads of 1927, and through the early years of the Great Depression, he kept his author’s brandy snifter full and his publisher solvent. And while Philo Vance might, as Ogden Nash famously observed, need a kick in the pants, his affectations and his hothouse enthusiasms for French phrases, Japanese prints, Egyptian jewelry, and Cézanne paintings certainly made him memorable. This was the deliberate plan of Willard Huntington Wright, the avant-garde editor, novelist, and art critic who wore the mask of S. S. Van Dine. Wright’s editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, explained: “He said the point was not whether people liked Vance but to make him distinctive, so that they could not forget him” (214). Wright presented Philo Vance as a sort of cartoon ubermensch whose judgments on all matters—on art and on society as well as on guilt and innocence—are infallible, and he set him in the racy milieu of 1920s New York City. Both the character and the scene were something new in detective fiction, and S. S. Van Dine earned his reputation as a significant innovator in the genre.

SOURCES Loughery, John. Alias S. S. Van Dine. New York: Scribner, 1992. Perkins, Maxwell. Editor to Author. New York: Scribner, 1979. Tuska, Jon. Philo Vance: The Life and Times of S. S. Van Dine. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. Van Dine, S. S. The “Canary” Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1927. J. K. Van Dover

CANE JEAN TOOMER (1923) Comprising three self-contained yet interrelated sections of prose, poetry,

222 CANE

and a play, Cane presents scenes of African-American life and features characters that attempt to reconcile opposites of the African-American experience. The book’s narrative events seem disconnected, and time flows irregularly. Cane moves in a circular manner, evidenced in part by the half-circles that appear before each section. Toomer’s “innovative experiments with time and plot progression,” argues Robert B. Jones, “demonstrate an ever-present attempt to collapse self and world, lyrical and narrative—in sum, to introduce poetic strategies into narrative” (43). Cane’s fusion of prose, poetry, and drama makes it difficult to define the book as a “novel.” To be sure, Cane’s ambiguous genre and Toomer’s treatment of land and race dualities contribute to its continuing appeal. Part 1, set in rural Georgia, establishes half of Cane’s race and land binaries. Darwin T. Turner describes the poems and short stories in part 1 as “redolent with images of nature, Africa, and sensuous appeals to eye and ear” (135). While linking African Americans with the natural world raises the issue of primitivism, Turner believed that an undeniable link exists between African Americans and southern land. He viewed the complicated link as beneficial in spite of its negative connotations: “Toomer firmly believed that the black peasant’s alienation from the soil had caused him to become emotionally sterile” (Benson and Dillard, 79). When African Americans share a strong rapport with the land, they are emotionally and spiritually strong. Southern land, however, carries the curse of slavery, which makes problematic its relationship to African Americans. Race and land issues surface throughout part 1, but are especially prevalent in the poem “Song of the Son.” Toomer focuses on slavery and land: O land and soil, read soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines, Now just before an epoch’s sun declines, Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee (14) [.] The speaker directly addresses the southern landscape to which he returns. He identifies his geographic origins, “the land that has nourished and given him an appreciation for the songs of the race” (Benson and Dillard, 52). The speaker’s homecoming also prophe-

sies Ralph Kabnis’s return to Georgia, although the tone in “Song of the Son” is one of awe rather than fear. The “epoch” is slavery, which along with southern land contributes to African-American identity. The speaker apparently feels comfortable with these opposing forces of his consciousness and self. Antithetical to the first section, part 2 takes place in Washington, D.C., and Chicago. Dynamics of race and land shift as the artificial world of the North contrasts with the natural world of the South, which provides the second half of Cane’s race and land binaries. Part 2 paints a complex portrait of the urban African-American’s task of creating a solid identity in a white reality that they are part of and alienated from. This is apparent in the hybrid poem/prose piece, “Seventh Street”: “Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned softskinned life, who set you flowing? . . . White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, in brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets?” (41). The blood of African Americans has infiltrated the social system of the largely white North. Many northern African Americans long for the South, or at least experience nostalgia for it. In “Calling Jesus,” for example, Nora imagines “the bare feet of Christ moving across bales of Southern cotton, will steal in and cover it [Nora’s soul] that it need not shiver, and carry it to her where she sleeps: cradled in dream-fluted cane” (58). Racial demarcations change along with geography: whereas the lines between black and white were sharp in part 1, race in part 2 is now an ambiguous category. “Theater,” perhaps Toomer’s most complex and impressive articulation of this phenomenon, features black and white dichotomies and ambiguities throughout its surreal narrative. “Box Seat” also addresses some of the same issues, but “Bona and Paul,” the final story of part 2, encapsulates the binaries of race and land and sets the stage for “Kabnis.” Toomer writes, “Paul follows the sun to a pine-matted hillock in Georgia. He sees the slanting roofs of unpainted cabins tinted lavender. A Negress chants a lullaby beneath the mate-eyes of a southern planter” (73). Paul identifies his race, at least in part, by his geographic location; his transplantation has “removed

CANIN, ETHAN 223

[him] from a natural surrounding, so that Paul can identify only with the sun, not with the stench of the city” (Benson and Dillard, 83). The North is not an African American’s home land, so assimilation into northern society requires that a black person must surrender a part, if not all, of his or her blackness. Toomer based Ralph Kabnis, the title character of Cane’s third section, on his experiences as a schoolteacher in Sparta, Georgia. Kabnis, whose story Toomer relates in prose and drama, feels so divided by his associations with the South and North, with the black and white worlds, that not even returning to his Georgia home can help him create a unified self. Kabnis’s metaphysical struggles mirror Toomer’s own spiritual concerns. Nellie Y. McKay notes that Toomer “wished . . . to deemphasize racial or cultural divisions among groups of people who were all Americans because he wanted to align himself with things that stressed common experiences, forms, and spirit” (198–99). Despite Toomer’s desire to transcend race categories, he acknowledged his African descent and portrayed African Americans in writing. Kabnis either cannot or will not acknowledge his divided origins and embrace his African-American identity—he fails to synthesize the novel’s race and land binaries. Kabnis, therefore, reflects and contributes to the fragmented themes and form of Cane, which readers still try to decipher more than 80 years after its original publication.

SOURCES Benson, Brian Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard. Jean Toomer. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 389. Edited by Kenneth E. Eble. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Jones, Robert B. Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. McKay, Nellie Y. Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. O’Daniel, Therman B., ed. Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1988. Toomer, Jean. Cane. Edited by Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton, 1988. Turner, Darwin T., ed. Introduction to the 1975 edition of Cane, 121–138. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Corey M. Taylor

CANIN, ETHAN (1960– )

Ethan Canin began his career as one of the youngest members of a new generation of writers. He published his first short story when he was 19 years old; like Walker PERCY and Michael CRICHTON before him, Canin entered the medical profession before realizing that he might have a successful career as a writer. After the success of his story collection Emperor of Air (1988), Canin published his first novel, Blue River, in 1991. He has been influenced by such surprisingly different writers as John CHEEVER and Danielle STEELE, who taught him in a private high school. His predilection for exploring family tensions and rivalries in three forms—the short story, the novella, and the novel—has been praised for its psychological depth, character development, and strong, lucid style. Ethan Canin was born on July 19, 1960, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Stuart V. Canin, a violinist, and Virginia Yarkin Canin, an artist and teacher. Canin received his bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in 1982, his master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1984, and his medical degree from Harvard University in 1992. Blue River, published the year before he graduated from Harvard, focuses on two very different brothers, one of whom in extremis forces the successful one, Edward, to reevaluate his earlier behavior. The Palace Thief (1994), which brought comparisons to John O’HARA, is a collection of four novellas, each of which focuses on a different man. Abba Roth, for example, in Accountant, tries to be less generous to his family, only to learn that such selfishness diminishes him. In City of Broken Hearts, where there is a male empty-nest syndrome, the protagonist realizes that his wife and son need more independence. (The young student in the title story steals and cheats on a history examination and his ill-gotten gains haunt him for the rest of his life.) For Kings and Planets (1998), Canin’s second novel, a coming-of-age story, demonstrates the psychological and cultural contrasts between Orno Tarcher, a Missourian who matriculates at a New York City college, and Marshall Emerson, the irrepressible and witty New Yorker who struggles with drug addiction and who remains Tarcher’s friend for a decade. Tarcher becomes a dentist and Emerson a writer, and they serve as artful

224 CANNERY ROW

metaphors for the contrast between the American small town and the metropolis. Tarcher steals Emerson’s girlfriend and Emerson marries Tarcher’s sister. Canin’s most recent novel, Carry Me Across the Water (2001) drew admiration for its complexity and scope. August Kleinman, its protagonist and a wealthy Pittsburgh beer brewer—travels across the ocean to deliver letters to the family of a man he killed in World War II. Through carefully rendered flashbacks and transitions, Canin reveals Kleinman’s childhood escape from Nazi Germany, his Brooklyn childhood, role in the South Pacific theater during the war, successful Pittsburgh career, and retirement to Boston. Even after the critical acclaim he has garnered, Canin still finds that writing “is exceptionally difficult for me. It is so much more difficult than medicine!” (Frumkes). Ethan Canin teaches at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. His advice to new writers is to read: as he told Lewis Burke Frumkes in an interview, “I tried to travel; I tried spending time in the jungle; I tried building houses, and I discovered that, at least for me, that doesn’t work. The only thing that nurtures imagination is reading, and reading good books” (Frumkes). The novella The Palace Thief was adapted for the screen by Neil Tolkin and directed by Michael Hoffman; Universal released it as The Emperor’s Club.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Blue River. Boston: Houghton, 1991. Carry Me Across the Water. New York: Random House, 2001. For Kings and Planets. New York: Random House, 1998. The Palace Thief. New York: Random House, 1994.

SOURCES Brzezinski, Steve. Review of For Kings and Planets. Antioch Review 57, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 243. Danto, Ginger. “Bad Brother on His Doorstep.” Review of Blue River. Publishers Weekly, 18 December 1987, pp. 19–20; 8 August 1991, 18–19; 23 August 1991, 42. Frumkes, Lewis Burke. “A conversation with . . . Ethan Canin,” The Writer 113, no. 15 (May 2000): 19. Hoffert, Barbara. Review of For Kings and Planets, Library Journal 123, no. 14 (September 1, 1998): 212. Hooper, Brad. Review of For Kings and Planets, Booklist 94, no. 22 (August 1, 1998): 1920. Leavitt, David. “As Children and Others See It.” Review of Emperor of the Air. New York Times Book Review, 14 Febru-

ary 1988, p. 7; 20 October 1991, p. 9; 3 February 1994, p. 16; 10 September 1998, p. 9. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. Review of Emperor of the Air. New York Times, 25 January 1988; 8 February 1988. ———. “Errors in Judgment and Ripples Thereof.” Review of The Palace Thief. Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1994, p. 20. ———. “Missouri Boy Meets New York; Guess Who Wins.” Review of For Kings and Planets. Washington Post, 20 January 1988.

OTHER Canin, Ethan. “Ethan Canin leads readers on a journey across time and space.” Interview by Ellen Kanner for BookPage. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage. com/0105bp/ethan_canin.html. Accessed June 9, 2005. ———. “Interview: Ethan Canin.” By Robert Birnbaum for identitytheory.com. Available online. URL: http://www. identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum23.html. Accessed June 9, 2005.

CANNERY ROW JOHN STEINBECK (1945)

Several critics have suggested that Cannery Row grew out of STEINBECK’s disgust for the battlefield during his assignment as a war correspondent in Germany and his desire to escape to something light and cheerful. Steinbeck affirmed this in various letters, describing the novel as a “funny little book that is fun and pretty nice.” The novel recreates a nostalgic and sentimental past, when life was simple and easy (and, for the author, a time when the dissatisfaction and malaise brought about by success and fame were not factors in his life). Cannery Row has been called Steinbeck’s most perfectly realized novel based on his concept of non-teleological “is” thinking. This philosophy, developed by Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts during their 1940 collecting voyage on their boat, The Western Flyer, involves the acceptance of whatever exists in the natural world. Questions of why or how movements occur are of no importance. Rather, individuals using critical thinking are careful to avoid imposing any prior values or systems in evaluating the world around them. Pure in heart, they strive for objectivity: to understand that whatever “is” is right. Such objectivity, of course, is neither simple nor easy to achieve. It requires a spontaneous painlessness that is often contrary to human nature.

CANNERY ROW 225

Cannery Row is the record of Steinbeck’s search for the truth, for the principle that can tie humanity to the pattern of all life and the relation of one person to another. In Cannery Row, the drowned girl found during Doc’s exploration of the tidal flat exemplifies this unity. After the find, Doc hears cosmic music, the music of the spheres. The vision implies great beauty and even ecstasy, although it is simultaneously appalling and fearful. In this vision of death, the purposiveness of events is shown to be irrelevant; there can be no answers—only pictures that become larger and more significant as one’s horizon increases. The novel has often been labeled an “essay in loneliness” and “a poisoned creampuff,” which suggests pain rather than pleasure. The text reveals that the opinion of the world without is often too simplistic, and the novel counters with the world within, the internal resources that mirror life’s complexity. The outside world imposes societal values on individuals. Respectability, progress, possessions, and responsibility all imply some sort of regulation that controls men and women, and Steinbeck acknowledges that those who withdraw from such control of their lives are labeled as eccentric or weird like Mack and the boys in the novel. Cannery Row, therefore, is not a simple book that advocates a bohemian, laid-back, free style similar to the Beat generation that followed soon in the early 1950s. Its complexity reveals the positives and the negatives caused by the duality of human beings, and it is designed to help readers recognize that life itself is many-faceted. One has to be open to new worlds to replace the world that is continually in the process of self-destruction. Often Steinbeck portrays the pain as overwhelming, resulting in self-destruction. In fact, suicides are recurrent events on the Row: Horace Abbeville shoots himself when he loses his property over a grocery debt; William, the bouncer at Dora’s, stabs himself with an ice pick; the drowned girl on the reef seems to have ended her own life; and the young boy Joey’s father has eaten rat poison in despair when he loses his job. None can escape depression so easily. One of Steinbeck’s aims in Cannery Row certainly seems to be urging intellectual beings to come away from the rush and the demands of the city and discover true peace. Maintaining this simple life, however,

is not easy. Even members of the Row are unable to consistently persevere in their rejection of societal values. For example, Mack and the boys are compelled to dress up the Palace Flophouse, the Malloys seek curtains for their home in a boiler that has no windows, and Frankie thinks an expensive gift is necessary in order to express his love. Consequently, any simplistic reading of the novel as advocating one lifestyle over another must be dismissed as wholly inadequate. Moreover, the orderliness of the captain’s wife in chapter 15 has created a world of hell for her husband. The rigid moral codes of Monterey citizens have condemned the Bear Flag brothel without realizing what Dora and her girls have done for the community. Ultimately, the reader is forced to conclude that the only solution is to strive to be the most perfect human one can in an imperfect universe. Aside from non-teleological thinking and the simple lifestyle, most critics suggest that Cannery Row can best be seen as an allegory, displaying the universal tendencies of humans in the worlds that the setting microcosmically represents. The waves and the tide pools seem to function symbolically, echoing natural rhythms of life and at the same time suggesting the chaotic swirl of existence with its eddies, vortexes, and still waters. The free flux demonstrated by the pool prefigures the patchwork of time that Steinbeck utilizes throughout his work. This sense of timelessness is suggested both by the frequent insertion of anachronisms and also by lack of chronological patterns in the text. Steinbeck’s repetitious use of parties in his novels is also deserving of attention. Although most critics center on two parties given for Doc, the novel contains many other celebrations. Mack and the boys’ informal cookout before the frog hunt and the party given by the captain in chapter 14 also are quite spontaneous and congenial, indicating the value of the camaraderie and interrelationships that such celebrations symbolize. The party of the two soldiers and their prostitutes and those parties given by Mary Talbot for the stray cats and her husband, Tom, are examples of such successful uninhibited expressions of joy and celebration. Similarly, Mary’s parties in chapter 24 bring excitement and a special glow to herself and others. As Steinbeck’s narrator notes, the parties “covered and concealed the

226 CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, A

fact that she didn’t have very nice clothes and [that] the Talbots didn’t have any money” (152). The final party, which ends the novel, brings more individuals into the celebration. Lonely human beings, sometimes despondent and set apart, find salvation in the festivity provided by such infectious merrymaking. Finally, the Daodejing (Tao Teh Ching) of Laozi (Lao Tze), a Chinese philosopher of the sixth century B.C., is also a significant source of the philosophy advocated in Cannery Row. Developed in detail by Peter Lisca in his book John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth, the parallels between the Tao and Cannery Row are striking. Both were written during a time of brutal war and presented a system of values that was opposed to the qualities that had caused the war. For example, Taoism rejects holding fixed and strong opinions because they usually lead to violence. In this faith the moral life is one of inaction, and there can be success in failure. Believers hold to the right of individuals to cultivate simple physical enjoyments and the inner life. The novel contains several echos of the Tao. Doc becomes the symbolic Taoist sage who adheres to the following Taoist principles: (1) by not believing people, you turn them into liars; (2) by analyzing all life, you can assure that there is no useless person; and (3) by looking at nature you can come to know yourself. In contrast to the tenets of the Tao is the evil that men bring upon themselves through greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest. Lisca concludes that Cannery Row has twin themes: an escape from both Western materialism and Western activism. Material success and rigid order and direction are rejected as the ultimate evidence of personal achievement. The passivity of Eastern philosophy, also stressed in East of Eden, is revealed as more valuable than the Western emphasis on acquisitiveness and aggression. One also thinks back to Steinbeck’s American heritage: the independence and self-reliance valued by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the isolation and contemplation practiced by Henry David Thoreau. In conclusion, accommodation and transformation seem to be goals of Cannery Row. Although love is portrayed as fragile and risky, there is no better way to become completely human and to see wholeness momentarily. Doc, the detached lonely observer of the

good life, is pulled into the human commune by Mack and the boys, but as the insightful sage, he recognizes that pleasure is fleeting and that life is consistently a mixture of good and evil. The book’s conclusion with Doc’s paradoxical joy and sorrow is therefore appropriate to the reality of weltschmerz (world sorrow). The individual who is truly in tune with his or her inner self acknowledges his or her own duality and the inevitability of a life intermixed with positives and negatives.

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Hayashi, Tetsumaro. ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. ———. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Hedgpeth, Joel W. “Philosophy on Cannery Row.” In Steinbeck: The Man and His Work, edited by Richard Astro and Tetsumaro Hayashi, 89–129. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Michael J. Meyer

CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, A WALTER M. MILLER, JR. (1960) Walter M. MILLER, Jr., saw the publication of the first of his Leibowitz short stories in 1955. His story about a brotherhood of monks and their connection to a long-dead scientist amid the ruins of civilization was a landmark in speculative literature, as it offered one the first serious treatments of a post-apocalyptic world. In his story, after long years of hiding from the aftermath of a nuclear war, humanity has reemerged from shelter and is attempting to resume life. Science and scientists provided a target for the rage and pain of the

CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ, A 227

survivors, who need someone to take responsibility for the tragedy. Society’s attempt to purge the source of its destruction led to persecution of scientists and the destruction of the knowledge that they carried. In the turmoil, the only sanctuary the scientists could find was the church. At that time, well in the past of the story, the church sheltered the scientists and their books and papers, understanding that this knowledge would be critical to restoring humanity to civilization. But with the passage of time, the scientists have died, and the church has forgotten what little it knew about the books it preserves. Now the monks of the abbey and others like them preserve the knowledge they were entrusted with, transcribing documents and books, faithfully waiting for the day when humanity might reclaim this part of its heritage. Miller’s first story shows us this world in the story of Francis Gerard of Utah, a pilgrim who wishes to join the brotherhood of monks dedicated to the memory of Leibowitz the Engineer. Miller examines faith amid the ruins as he tells of Gerard’s personal quest to become a monk and the order’s quest to have its patron recognized as the saint they believe him to be. The second story of the Monks of Leibowitz, “And the Light is Risen,” was published in 1956. From the retrograde Dark Ages of the first story, the world of Leibowitz emerges into a new Renaissance, as science struggles to find an accommodation within the weight of tradition and faith. A scientist struggles with the abbot about what should be done with the knowledge in the brotherhood’s care, and the monks themselves start to polarize around the two viewpoints. The closing chapter of the saga of the Monks of Leibowitz was published in 1957 as “The Last Canticle,” and in it Miller examines a world that has returned from ashes to a new cold war. Nations grapple for supremacy, restrained only by the threat of mutual destruction. And as tensions escalate, it falls to the church and the Monks of Leibowitz to attempt to shepherd humanity as they have always done. In 1960, the three reworked stories were published in a single novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. Taken together, the stories follow humanity through the centuries, from the rubble of a destroyed world to the cusp of a new apocalypse. Miller’s Canticle sets the

stage for a self-destructive cycle that seems intrinsic to humanity. At the same time, the characters and the stories are imbued with hope, from the dedication of the monks preserving the knowledge of history to the end of the saga as the characters try to step beyond the cycle. The novel achieved a degree of success that Miller never saw in any of his other works, before or after. A Canticle for Leibowitz won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961, and is featured repeatedly on recommended reading lists within the speculative fiction genres. As mentioned, the novel is noted as one of the first significant examinations of the world after a nuclear war, but it is equally important for its examination of the questions of faith and religion. It is not an easy novel to read, being composed of three distinct parts, and with little beyond a carving of Leibowitz and the Brotherhood itself to provide continuity through hundreds of years. What makes the novel stand out is its gently ironic humor. Miller treats his characters with dignity but allows the reader to appreciate their foibles. Even the glimpses of Leibowitz himself bring irony to the regard the brothers hold for the man. Miller’s world bears the scars of what has befallen it, with broken cities and abandoned roads and people living in the irradiated aftermath. He tells the story of his characters, and makes the larger issues they deal with more personal and vivid. Forty years after the novel was initially published, Miller’s writing, characters, and story feel current and topical, despite the fact that the cold war has passed into history. Miller’s experiences during World War II and his personal search that led him to examine his faith and ultimately convert to Catholicism drove questions that remain fundamental and valid today.

SOURCE Miller, Walter M., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.

OTHER Bisson, Terry. “A Canticle for Miller.” Terry Bisson SF Story Showcase. Available online. URL: http://www.terrybisson. com/miller.html. Accessed June 9, 2005.

228 CAPOTE, TRUMAN

Brians, Paul. “Study Guide for Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959).” Washington State University. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/ science_fiction/canticle.html. Accessed June 9, 2005. DiverseBooks. “Walter M. Miller, Jr. Bibliography Summary.” Available online. URL: http://www.diversebooks.com/cgibin/ea.cgi?Walter_M._Miller,_Jr. Accessed June 9, 2005. Liukkonen, Petri. “Walter M. Miller, Jr.” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wmiller.htm. Accessed June 9, 2005.

CAPOTE, TRUMAN (1924–1984)

Like Carson McCULLERS, another 20th-century southern genius who published her first novel in her early 20s, Truman Capote published his first novel at age 24. Like McCullers, he, too, left his native South for New York City, loving the sound of the pavement under his feet (Reed, 16), but nonetheless using the South as material for his early stories and novels (OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS [1948] and The Grass Harp [1951]). Holly Golightly, the protagonist of Capote’s New York novel, BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S (1958), is a southern transplant. Capote, in fact, does not leave the South in his fiction until he enters Kansas, the setting of IN COLD BLOOD (1965). Readers are still attracted to Capote’s lyrical and impressionistic style, and to his then courageous introduction of homosexual characters and experiences in his first three novels. These novels, dependent in part on memory and nostalgia, stand up well to the passage of time, attracting new readers with each successive generation. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, critical opinion is united in believing that Capote’s greatest legacy is In Cold Blood, generally acknowledged to be a masterpiece that launched the genre of the nonfiction novel. Capote was born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans, Louisiana, to 16-year-old former Miss Alabama, Nina Faulk Persons, who had married Truman’s father, a traveling salesman, and then divorced him when Truman was four years old. The boy was sent to relatives in Monroeville, Alabama, where he was reared for six years by four elderly unmarried cousins, three women and one man, including Miss Sook Faulk, the woman he considered his substitute mother, and whom he immortalized in two memoirs, The Thanksgiving Visitor (1967) and the now classic A Christmas Memory (1966) (Nance, 12; Reed, 18). He

moved to New York after his mother’s remarriage, in 1939, to Joseph Garcia Capote, a Cuban businessman who legally adopted him. Although he never attended college, Capote read the British and European writers Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Anton Chekhov, and greatly admired Willa CATHER as well as the southern writers William FAULKNER, Eudora WELTY, and McCullers (Nance, 12). The moment he finished high school, Capote found his way to the New Yorker, where he worked briefly before being fired. (Accounts of the reasons vary, but the most interesting suggests that Capote infuriated the poet Robert Frost, who then wrote an angry letter to New Yorker editor Harold Ross.) Capote returned to Alabama and wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms. The publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms brought fame to Capote. A bildungsroman featuring the young Joel Knox, a highly autobiographical protagonist who, according to critic Kenneth Reed, takes his place next to the “innocent American boy-men” who appear in American fiction from Mark TWAIN’s Huckleberry Finn to J. D. SALINGER’s Holden Caulfield (Reed, 75). The Grass Harp, similarly, features Collin Fenwick, another young orphaned protagonist who is raised by older sisters and experiments with the lines between social orthodoxy and individual freedom. Like Joel, Collin seeks a father, experiments with his sexual identity, and is to some extent preoccupied with death. His most celebrated presentation of these themes, however, occurs in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, a novella whose protagonist, Holly Golightly, has entered the canon of fictional American characters. Capote himself appears as the writer narrator, and his presentation of Holly—who in many ways is a fictional Capote—is a compelling and complex portrait of a somewhat Gatsbyesque innocent, who disregards convention and longs for a place to call home. In Cold Blood unquestionably established Capote’s niche in the annals of American literature. The nonfiction novel recounts the cold-blooded murder of a Kansas family by two drifters who, by the end of the novel, the reader knows nearly as well as does Capote, who spent six years writing the book. The universal acclaim that greeted In Cold Blood was rooted in its revelation of the collision of innocence and evil in Amer-

CARRIE 229

ican life as much as in its brilliantly detailed and suspenseful recounting of the murder. In addition to winning the 1967 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, the novel made Capote rich and even more famous. At New York’s Plaza Hotel, Capote hosted one of the central social events of the late 20th century, the Black and White Ball (all guests wore formal attire in black and white). In addition to political and Hollywood figures, the attendees included a number of poets and playwrights—Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman—and novelists—John STEINBECK, Harper LEE, Philip ROTH, Robert Penn WARREN, Anita LOOS, Norman MAILER, John O’HARA, James MICHENER. His difficulties mounted, however, when, after accepting a large advance for his new novel, Answered Prayers, he found himself unable to finish and increasingly dependent on drugs and alcohol: In November 1975, he allowed Esquire to publish “La Cote Basque, 1965,” an exposé that named names and revealed gossip and secrets about the rich and powerful that cost him a large number of friendships and turned him into a social outcast. Although his memoirs and other nonfiction pieces continued to be published, his success had been assured with his four novels. Answered Prayers, his incomplete roman à clef about New York’s jetsetters, was published posthumously in 1988. An abuser of both drugs and alcohol, Capote died of liver disease and drug intoxication in Los Angeles, in 1984, at the home of Joanne Carson (former wife of television host Johnny Carson).

NOVELS Breakfast at Tiffany’s. New York: Random House, 1958. The Grass Harp. New York: Random House, 1951. In Cold Blood. New York: Random House, 1965. Other Voices, Other Rooms. New York: Random House, 1948.

SOURCES Brinnin, John Malcolm. Sextet: T. S. Eliot, Truman Capote and Others. New York: Delacorte, 1981. Bryer, Jackson R. “Truman Capote: A Bibliography.” In Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”: A Critical Handbook, edited by Irving Malin, 239–269. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Garson, Halen S. Truman Capote. New York: Ungar, 1980.

———. “Truman Capote.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Grobel, Lawrence. Conversations with Capote. New York: New American Library, 1985. Hollowell, John. Fact and Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 63–86. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer, 209–219. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Malin, Irving, ed. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1968. Nance, William L. The Worlds of Truman Capote. New York: Stein & Day, 1970. Reed, Kenneth T. Truman Capote. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Stanton, Robert J. Truman Capote: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

OTHER Trinidad, David. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” La Petite Zine, issue 11 (Fall 2002). Available online. URL: http://www.lapetitezine.org/DavidTrinidad.htm. Accessed June 9, 2005.

CARRIE STEPHEN KING (1974)

Carrie was Stephen King’s first blockbuster novel. Constantly in print since its publication in 1974, it remains in the vanguard of the popular works—including more than 20 novels—by the prolific modern-day Edgar Allan POE. In the introduction to Carrie, King acknowledges that the book is “dated,” but also contends accurately that it is still a successful thriller. Still relevant and terrifying, Carrie is a tale of adolescent sexuality, telekinetics, cruelty, and revenge that keeps readers on the edge of their seats. In addition to using eyewitness accounts, sometimes in first person and sometimes in third, King includes newspaper reports, journals, and scientific papers to form the backbone of his narrative. Maintaining the tension, he compels us to keep turning the pages, even while we dread doing so. The novel opens abruptly as Carrie White begins to bleed in the shower after gym class. She knows nothing about menstruation and, consequently, believes she is dying. As she stands, “bovinely,” in the locker room shower, the other girls gleefully heckle and torment her. Carrie is no stranger to their torment. Growing up in the small New England town of Chamberlin, Maine,

230 CARRIE

she has been attending school with the same children since the first grade and has been a social outcast from the beginning. Carrie’s home life is no better than her school life. She must fight for her survival as “a victim of her mother’s religious mania” (126). Under the rule of Margaret White, or Momma, Carrie endures years of mental and physical torture. Never allowed to function normally, she is forbidden to socialize with other children or even wear normal clothing. Instead she is beaten, forced to pray on her knees for hours at a time, and locked in a terrifying closet. After the episode in the shower, the girls who had taunted Carrie are punished by the school authorities. One girl, Sue Snell, feeling guilty for her part, arranges for her popular boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom. Because her boyfriend is popular, Snell thinks that Carrie will be safe. A second girl, however, who is not allowed to go to the prom, plots revenge. And it is this revenge that leads us to the climax of the book, an apocalyptic scene of supernatural horror where Carrie finally unleashes her telekinetic powers and takes her revenge. In the pivotal opening shower scene, King also begins drawing his poignant portrayal of Carrie as a social outcast. This portrayal introduces one of the main themes in the novel, that of the darkness of small-town America and the cruelty and repression that often occur inside such a milieu. Although throughout the novel King explores such other themes as sexuality and violence, cruelty and revenge, fundamentalist religion—and, most obviously, the possibility of the supernatural—it is the suffocation and intolerance of small-town America that becomes most compelling and enduringly relevant. Through King’s portrayal of Carrie, he helps us to sympathize with her loneliness, her hopefulness, and her yearning to be normal: In the school library there was a stack of back issues of Seventeen and often she leafed through them . . . the models looks so easy and smooth in their short, kicky skirts, pantyhose, and frilly underwear with patterns on them. . . . She could fix her hair. Buy pantyhose and blue and green

tights. Make little skirts and dresses from Butterick and Simplicity patterns. She could be, could be, could be—Alive (42). Carrie’s struggle strikes a painful chord in each reader; indeed, King seems to ask, don’t we all feel a part of Carrie, the misfit, the outsider? Don’t we all know a Carrie from our own small towns? Haven’t we witnessed similar cruelties inflicted on those outcasts? In fact, King often portrays Carrie in an animalistic fashion to accentuate the horror of the students’ bullying of one so vulnerable. In the shower scene, Carrie’s eyes “rolled with white wetness, like the eyes of a hog in the slaughtering pen” (10). Later she brays, grunts, and even gobbles. Often in response to a question, she responds not verbally but instead with the guttural animalistic grunt of “Ohuh?” King also explores the other side, however. He casts a sympathetic eye upon the small-town people as well, seeming to suggest that they, too, are victims. Sue Snell, for instance, suggests that even those who profit from it experience the suffocation of small-town America. When Snell contemplates the popularity of herself and her boyfriend, and imagines her future in Chamberlin, she becomes aware of the claustrophobic and destructive plight that awaits her: And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America. . . . The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform (47–48). As King leads us toward the apocalyptic climax, he begins to warn about the dangers of intolerance. He seems to suggest an imminent judgment day for those who victimize outsiders and misfits. Using Carrie as the messianic figure, King blends the Christian imagery throughout the novel—book, fire, crucifixes—with the idea of revenge as Carrie considers the torment that has been inflicted upon her: And didn’t Momma say there would be a day of judgment. . . . and an angel with a sword? If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and shepherd’s crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and snickerers,

CASEY, JOHN 231

to root out the evil and destroy it screaming—in a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness. And if only she could be His sword and His arm (23).

King, Stephen. Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power. Introduction by Stephen King. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.

degree (1968) from the University of Iowa. Casey was married to Jane Barnes, a writer, from 1967 to 1980; and has been married to Rosamond Pinchot Pittman, an artist and calligrapher, since 1982. His first novel, An American Romance, reflects his knowledge of campus life at Radcliffe College, Chicago, and Iowa City, all places where he has taught. In Testimony and Demeanor (1979, a novella, and three short stories) the protagonist in the novella, a young lawyer in a New York law firm, reflects Casey’s legal background and won praise as an insightful depiction of the overworked but sensitive young lawyer. The award-winning Spartina (from a variety of marsh grass), a sea story that becomes a voyage toward self-recognition, has been compared with other great American tales of oceangoing men, including Ernest HEMINGWAY’s THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA. Casey’s most recent novel, The Half-Life of Happiness (1998), delves deeply into the character of Mike Reardon, a Charlottesville lawyer who runs for Congress, and of his wife, Joss Reardon, a filmmaker who embarks on a lesbian affair. They move irrevocably toward a divorce. John Casey lives in Charlottesville, where he is a professor of creative writing.

Rita Mahoney

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

CASEY, JOHN (1939– )

An American Romance. New York: Atheneum, 1977. The Half-life of Happiness. New York: Knopf, 1998. South Country. New York: Knopf, 1988. Spartina. New York: Knopf, 1989. Testimony and Demeanor. New York: Knopf, 1979.

With this warning, King seems to suggest dire consequences for the tormenters of those who are different or unwanted, perhaps even destruction at a horrifying level. Carrie, a novel of supernatural horror and suspense, is even more eerie when viewed as social commentary. Especially in the aftermath of Columbine and other hazing incidents occurring in contemporary America, this message strikes a chilling chord. If Carrie is dated, as King observed in his preface, it is dated only in terms of the supernatural, a subject critics have explored in great depth since 1974. Viewed as social critique, however, Carrie remains just as relevant as it was 30 years ago, perhaps even more so. Carrie therefore, not only remains a page-turning tale of suspense, but also functions as a strong social critique by a visionary American writer.

SOURCE

John Casey, novelist and short-story writer, first attracted critical attention with An American Romance (1977), an academic satire and love story, but it was his second novel, Spartina (1989) that earned the most acclaim and a National Book Award. There and in subsequent novels, noted the critics, Casey created characters who are so distinctively depicted that they seem virtually to enter the reader’s life. His novels often portray broken marriages and death, but his work is saved from bitterness and despair through Casey’s use of humor and satire. John Casey was born on January 18, 1939, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Joseph Edward Casey, an attorney, and Constance Dudley Casey. After serving with the U.S. Army Reserve, Casey completed his bachelor’s degree (1962) and his law degree (1965) from Harvard University and his master of fine arts

SOURCES Baker, John F. “Dark Horse Spartina Wins Fiction NBA,” Publishers Weekly (December 15, 1989): 18. D’Evelyn, Thomas. Review of Spartina, by John Casey. Christian Science Monitor, 15 August 1989, p. 12. Nicklin, Julie L. “John Casey, Who Once Fished to Eat and to Write, Gains Awards, Raves for Novel about Fisherman,” Chronicle of Higher Education (January 31, 1990): A3. Wilkinson, Joanne. Review of The Half-Life of Happiness, by John Casey. Booklist (February 15, 1998): 948.

OTHER Arrington, Rebecca. “New Film Features U.Va., Local Writers.” Inside UV Online. Available online. URL: http://www. virginia.edu/insideuva/2000/06/film.html. Accessed June 9, 2005.

232 CASTEDO, ELENA

Zacharek, Stephanie. Review of The Half-Life of Happiness. Salon. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/books/ sneaks/1998/03/02review.html. Accessed June 9, 2005.

CASTEDO, ELENA (1937– ) Elena Castedo is a novelist, short-story writer, poet, researcher, and professor of Latin American studies, whose novel Paradise (1990) was nominated for the National Book Award. Castedo has been widely praised for her ability to present history and politics from the point of view of a child narrator, as she does in Paradise. Told from the point of view of the young Solita, the novel relates the flight of a Spanish family from Spain to an unnamed Latin American country during the Spanish civil war. Critic Georgette M. Dorn characterizes Castedo’s style (she writes in both Spanish and English) by quoting a group of young writers who maintain that Castedo has created a new style they call “essentialism,” combining “objectivity, subjectivity, topicality, humor, comedy, lyricism, emotional truthfulness and psychological insight, thus distilling an ‘essence’ from reality” (Dorn). Elena Castedo was born on September 1, 1937, in Barcelona, Spain, to Leopoldo Castedo, an art historian, and Elvira Magana Castedo, a linguist. Forced to flee Spain with her family during the Spanish civil war, Castedo was reared in Chile. After marrying Dalton Wooding in 1958 (he died in 1965), Castedo earned a teaching degree from Pontifical University of Chile in 1966, a master of arts degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968, and a doctoral degree from Harvard University in 1976. In 1973 she married A. Denny Ellerman, an economist. The publication of Paradise caused critical excitement: Dorn quotes a critic from Chile’s El Mercurio who believed that “Suddenly and with her first novel, the author has stepped to the forefront of Chilean fiction.” (quoted in Dorn); The paper named Paradise Book of the Year. Castedo has also won prizes for her short fiction. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts. NOVEL Paradise. New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1990.

SOURCE Dorn, Georgette M. “Paradise Found . . . in Two Worlds,” Americas (English Edition) 43, no. 3 (May–June 1991): 16–19.

OTHER “The Class of 2000,” in Hispanic (March 31, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:28393586. Accessed August 7, 2005. Dorn, Georgette M. “Paradise Found . . . in Two Worlds.” In Americas (English Edition, May 1, 1991). Questia. Available online. URL: http://www.questia.com/PM. qst?a=o&d=5000132915. Accessed August 7, 2005.

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE J. D. SALINGER (1951) J. D. SALINGER’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951, evolved over a 10-year period. In 1941, the New Yorker accepted Salinger’s “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” with Holden Caulfield as protagonist; however, because the magazine thought a story about a distraught preparatory schoolboy contemplating running away during Christmas holidays inappropriate while America’s young men were being sent to war, it delayed publication until 1946. The first published story featuring Holden Caulfield was “I’m Crazy” (1945). In it, as well as in “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” are scenes that Salinger included in the novel. Before the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger published four other stories in which Holden or characters sharing Holden’s sentiments appear: “The Last Day of the Last Furlough” (1944); “A Boy in France” (1945); “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise” (1945); and “The Stranger” (1945). In 1946, Salinger wrote Ernest HEMINGWAY, mentioning a play about Holden, and in the same year Salinger was reported to have completed a 90-page novelette of The Catcher in the Rye that had been accepted by a publisher. Sensing need for further revision and detachment from the text, Salinger withdrew it. The narrator of The Catcher in the Rye, 17-year-old Holden Caulfield, who is haunted by the death of his younger brother, Allie, is recuperating in an institution in the West following an emotional collapse. Holden’s story begins on a Saturday, at Pencey Preparatory School in Agerstown, Pennsylvania, from which he has been expelled, after having previously been dismissed from Wooten School and Elkton Hills. Although Holden had intended to return home to New York for

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE 233

the Christmas holidays and tell his parents about his expulsion, he bolts from his dormitory on Saturday night after a fight with his roommate and goes to New York, where he intends to spend the weekend in a hotel before returning home. Miserable and depressed, he pushes himself to exhaustion, drinking and dancing. He also botches a date in his hotel room with a prostitute named Sunny. Holden’s depression intensifies as he laments the absence of sincerity, spontaneity, sensitivity, and justice. Entertainers, actors, and even those who profess religions have lost touch with the essence or sources that served once to inspire them, and his brother D. B., a talented fiction writer, has betrayed his talent, becoming a Hollywood writer of screenplays. The adult world, ugly, dehumanizing, and corrupt, is not one he wishes to join or have his young sister, Phoebe, join. Tellingly, he wonders what happens to the ducks when the park pond freezes. He asks a girlfriend to run away with him, but she refuses. Dangerously tired, Holden finds the innocence of children regenerative. Watching a little boy singing lyrics from Robert Burns’s “Coming Through the Rye” makes him less depressed, and he feels invigorated when he helps a little girl tighten her skates with her skate key. He cherishes exhibits in the Museum of Natural History, where nothing changed, where everything always remained just as it was. Holden has felt obliged to try to protect and save children, but he becomes painfully aware that while museum exhibits do not change, people do and that he cannot prevent that change. Eager to see his sister, Holden returns home. His parents are out. He tells Phoebe that if he had his choice of jobs, he would prefer to stand at the edge of a cliff where children are playing in a field of rye and to keep them from falling. When his parents return, Holden goes to the apartment of his favorite English teacher, Mr. Antolini, but it is an unsatisfactory visit. Antolini likewise lacks spontaneity, offering only stale precepts and advice. Holden leaves when Antolini makes a homosexual advance. Determined to escape New York, Holden leaves a note at Phoebe’s school asking her to meet him. He wants to say good-bye. When Phoebe arrives, carrying her suitcase, intending to follow him, Holden feels renewed responsibility for her and decides not to leave. He takes her to the park, where

while watching her ride a carousel, he becomes enlightened and thoroughly aware that he cannot be the catcher in the rye. In the epilogue Holden refuses further comment about the past or future, concluding that to tell anyone anything causes him to miss everybody. Early critics saw The Catcher in the Rye as a quest novel, in the tradition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Readers differ, however, about the object and resolution of Holden’s quest. Nevertheless, his story is clearly a journey by an adolescent, alienated from a post–World War II society who seeks truth and, above all, love in a world in which the arts lack freshness; religion lacks God; and sex lacks love. Only in the innocence of children does Holden find relief from his despair; thus, he feels compelled to save children from the world’s corrupting influences. Throughout the novel rain is associated with Holden’s despair, and sun with respite. Although it rains as he watches his sister Phoebe (also the name of the twin sister of the sun-god Apollo) ride the carousel, Holden, euphoric and enlightened, ceases to associate the rain with doom as he did when it rained in the cemetery where his brother Allie is buried. He chooses instead to sit in the rain, achieving, however temporarily, a moment of peace. In the epilogue Holden stops his story, maintaining control over his narrative and the parameters of his existence, choosing not to dwell in the past or look to the future, but to live in the comfort of a continuous present. Despite many excellent reviews of The Catcher in the Rye, the reception of the novel was mixed. Reviewers for journals with religious affiliation often condemned the book, attacking what they saw as its offensive language, and many communities banned it. Yet, by the close of the 20th century, more than 15 million copies of The Catcher in the Rye had been sold; it had been translated into more than 30 languages; and Holden Caulfield had become one of the most memorable characters in American literature.

SOURCES Baunbach, Jonathan. “The Saint as a Young Man: A reappraisal of The Catcher in the Rye,” Modern Language Quarterly 25 (December 1964): 461–472. Reprinted in Holden Caulfield. Edited by Harold Bloom. New York & Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1990.

234 CATCH-22

French, Warren. J. D. Salinger, Revisited. 1963. Rev. ed., Boston: Twayne, 1988. Hassan, Ihab. “Rare Quixotic Gesture: The Fiction of J. D. Salinger,” Western Review 21 (Summer 1957): 261–288. Reprinted in Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait. Edited by Henry Anatole Grunwald. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Whitfield, Stephen J. “Cherished and Cursed: Toward a Social History of The Catcher in the Rye.” New England Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1997): 567–600. John Unrue

CATCH-22 JOSEPH HELLER (1961)

One of the founding works of antirealist or postmodern fiction, Joseph HELLER’ Catch-22 realizes an important aim of such writing: It renders a world through its language. Minimally drawn from Heller’s own experience as a bombardier in World War II (Heller, stationed in Corsica, flew 60 missions), the novel takes place on the fictional island of Pianosa and dramatizes the experiences of a cadre of soldiers, officers, support staff, and nurses stationed there. Catch-22 initially reads as nearly incomprehensible because Heller’s style, characterized by repetitive phrasing, rapid-fire slapstick dialogue, fragmented narrative, and cinematic jumps in time and space, demands studied attention and ample time for acculturation. Once the reader becomes familiar with it, however, the novel provides opportunity to consider the natures of patriotism and war, capitalism and human greed, the role of religion, and the loss of individuality in the overarching systems of the modern world. In the “New Preface” to the 1994 Scribner paperback edition, Heller describes the novel’s relatively slow genesis and meteoric rise to fame upon its discovery by the public. Forty years after its publication, Catch-22 remains required reading at many American universities and its title has become a well-known idiom in English for describing sticky situations which offer no pleasant option for escape. When extracted from its nonlinear presentation, the plot follows the military career of a B-25 bombardier

named John Yossarian from his basic training in Colorado, through his flight school in Santa Ana, California, to his deployment to the European front. Ostensibly, the setting is World War II, but the war as described is curiously devoid of specific historical reference and the timeframe of the novel is complicated with references to hallmarks of cold war–era technology, such as IBM and mimeograph machines, or helicopters in military use. Yossarian and his peers serve at the discretion of supervisors motivated entirely by career mobility, and readers learn to make chronological sense of the novel via the ever-increasing number of missions required by the diabolically inane Colonel Cathcart, commander of Yossarian’s division. A series of midair misadventures, coupled with the escalating mortality rates of his compeers, convinces Yossarian to find a means to avoid missions or to transfer home. Catch-22 describes the various attempts Yossarian makes to get out of service, including faking illness, altering maps of unconquered territory, walking backwards or naked through the base camp, and refusing to fly. Critics tend to focus primarily on Catch-22’s black comedy as the vehicle whereby Heller makes known his attitude towards his subject matter. Clearly, many of the novel’s characters resonate as so absurd as to risk the text’s indictments of the systems they represent. The chaplain, A. T. Tappman, has difficulty believing in God and in helping the soldiers confront their existential insecurities; the camp doctor, Doc Daneeka, is a hypochondriac seized by self-pity and fear of death; and the mess hall supervisor, Milo Minderbinder, forms a pervasive ‘syndicate’ in which various subordinates interweave a profiteering web that produces serious, often deadly, results for its members, whom Milo insists all own a share. Despite their idiosyncrasies, the characters gradually earn the reader’s admiration and love, so when they are killed, a sense of paranoia and hopelessness replaces what the reader initially sees as humorous absurdity. This paranoia replicates that hitherto exhibited by Yossarian, “They’re trying to kill me!” he often complains, vocalizing his desire to escape the war. As a result, what previously may have been read as his cowardice increasingly appears as what we might call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (“shell-shock” in World War II).

CATHER, WILLA 235

The cumulative process through which the reader discerns Yossarian’s disdain for the war matches Heller’s heightening of the violence in the novel. Yossarian increasingly reacts to his surroundings in a hostile manner. Whereas once he retreated from conflict by entering the hospital, Yossarian begins to respond aggressively by belittling his friends in strings of invectives, and in one scene, by seizing McWatt by the throat and threatening to strangle him for his frenetic flying methods. One Thanksgiving, soldiers frighten Yossarian when in a drunken stupor they accidentally fire their machine guns. Yossarian fires back at them and punches his best friends, Nately, in the nose when Nately tries to stop him. The culmination of this trajectory of increasing violence occurs in Chapter 39, entitled “The Eternal City.” In this chapter, Yossarian goes AWOL in Rome and witnesses various forms of brutality being inflicted upon the weak: dogs, children, and women. In each scene, narrated in surreal fashion, representatives of military or police law fail to protect the innocent, or worse, perpetrate the crimes. Yossarian’s witnessing of these events signifies not only the inefficacy of systems meant to prevent atrocity, but also the devastating effects of war on noncombatants. As a retreat, Yossarian ducks into the private apartments kept for soldiers on leave to find that his compatriot, Aarfy, has just hurled a prostitute named Michaela out the window to her death. Aarfy’s nonchalance, despite Yossarian’s protest that he “murdered a human being” (428), shows how wartime acceptance of brutality and killing permeates the entire culture and disrupts standards of moral action. Yossarian’s refusal to excuse Aarfy’s actions demonstrates that, despite Yossarian’s own untoward responses to situations, he maintains a moral compass. The reader may not understand Yossarian’s personal damage, however, until the novel’s penultimate chapter, “Snowden.” In a tour-de-force of emotionally charged, suspenseful writing, the chapter offers a full account of the death of Snowden, the details of which have slowly been revealed previously. As Snowden’s guts slither across the floor, Yossarian realizes that “Man was matter. . . . The spirit gone, man is garbage” (450). Given the early occurrence of this event in the

novel’s chronology, Yossarian’s refusal either to lose his spirit (or his life) in the insanity of war, or to be treated as matter by the military, enables the reader to view him as heroic, instead of as a whining soldier who shirks his duty. His escape at novel’s end, despite any questions about loyalty that arise, emerges as the only appropriate response to his “Catch-22.”

SOURCES Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. New York: Scribner, 1961. Merrill, Robert. Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Potts, Stephen W. “Catch-22”: Antiheroic Antinovel. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1999. Jon Adams

CATHER, WILLA (1873–1947)

One of the major American novelists and short-story writers of the 20th century, Willa Cather is recognized today not only for her celebration of the vast beauty of the American landscape, but also for her exploration of the darker forces underlying the myths of American life. Always optimistic, Cather depicts immigrants and pioneers who displayed the qualities of courage, perseverance, and a sensitivity to natural beauty, no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives. Her many awards include the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), the Howells Medal from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, to which she was elected in 1944. Her works have never gone out of print, particularly the novels that most critics agree are her best: MY ÁNTONIA (1918), The Professor’s House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), along with the much admired O PIONEERS! (1913), A LOST LADY (1923), and Shadows on the Rock (1931). Other novels can be substituted on this list—The SONG OF THE LARK (1915), for instance, her most ambitious attempt to capture and convey the artistic spirits and process. Few writers can match Cather’s ability to capture the essence of her characters, to describe complex psychological states with seeming simplicity, and to

236 CATHER, WILLA

depict the magnificence of nature in spare but lyrically imagistic terms, whether in Nebraska, New Mexico, Virginia, or Canada, the settings of her novels. Willa Sibert Cather was born on December 7, 1873, in the Back Creek Valley farming area of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains, to Charles F. Cather, a rancher and insurance salesman, and Mary Virginia Boak Cather. At age nine, she moved with her family from Willow Shade, their Virginia farmhouse, to the Nebraska Divide where Charles Cather’s brother and parents were farming. In My Ántonia, through her protagonist Jim Burden, Cather renders her shock at the move from the tree-studded mountains to the bleak, seemingly endless prairie. She was reared on a farm, and then in the town of Red Cloud, and was educated at the University of Nebraska, graduating in 1896. She began publishing fiction during her 10 years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; after her move to New York in 1906, she worked for McClure’s Magazine for five years, took a leave of absence, and published her first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912). She never returned to journalism, instead writing a steady stream of novels and short stories for the next three decades. O Pioneers! is the story of Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant who runs her own farm and upsets traditional notions about women. In The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronenberg succeeds in New York as a brilliant opera singer, but alienates those at home in Colorado who disapprove of women as artists. All three novels use an unsentimental narrative voice. My Ántonia, perhaps Cather’s most famous novel, features Ántonia Shimerda, who survives the poverty of her parents’ tiny sod house and a lover’s seduction and betrayal to marry, have a family, and help run a productive farm. After World War I, Cather expressed dismay at the growing materialism, the betrayal of the original pioneer values, and she reached into the past to find spiritual as well as actual pioneers. In One of Ours (1922), in which Claude Wheeler seems to echo Cather’s own disillusion with the values of Nebraskans, he enlists in the army and dies on the battlefield during World War I. A Lost Lady features Marian Forrester, the young wife of a prosperous railroad builder, whose grasping materialism make her a metaphor for the decline of American culture. The Professor’s House also demonstrates

Cather’s disillusionment with contemporary culture: Professor Godfrey St. Peter, unhappy with his materialistic wife and culturally indifferent community, finds inspiration in the story of Tom Outland, a former student who tried to preserve the Colorado cliff dwellings before his death in World War I. My Mortal Enemy (1926) is probably Cather’s most bitter reaction to the contemporary scene. Myra Driscoll lives to regret her impulsive elopement with Oswald Henshawe: her wealthy great uncle disinherits her, and Myra ends up living in poverty with Oswald, now her mortal enemy, and mourning her decision to marry for love. Cather’s fascination with the Southwest returns in Death Comes for the Archbishop, set in New Mexico in the mid–19th century, and the novel she considered her best. The archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his vicar, Joseph Vaillant, carve an orderly, spiritual community out of their part of the Nebraska territory. Shadows on the Rock (1931), likewise removed from the modern era, is set in 17th-century Quebec. The middle-aged widower Euclide Auclair and his 12year-old daughter Cecile and her marriage to a Canadian-born woodsman, with whom she has many children, are symbols of Canada’s future. With Lucy Gayheart (1935), Cather returns to Chicago to depict a young woman’s affair with an aging musician. He drowns, presaging her own demise as she returns to Nebraska and falls into the local river. Cather’s final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), her only Virginia-based book, set in pre–Civil War days, depicts Sapphira and Henry Colbert’s differences over Nancy, Sapphira’s slave: when Sapphira attempts to sell Nancy, her mother, Mrs. Blake, helps Nancy escape via the Underground Railroad. The novel is currently undergoing numerous scholarly evaluations for Cather’s views on race. Indeed, scholarly books and doctoral dissertations on Willa Cather and her work are almost too numerous to count, and interest in her work shows no sign of declining. Speculation about her presumed lesbianism continues to change older interpretations of her work. Cather’s novels continue to be taught at both the high school and college levels, still intriguing new generations of readers. Willa Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in New York.

CATHER, WILLA 237

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Alexander’s Bridge. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Knopf, 1927. A Lost Lady. New York: Knopf, 1923. Lucy Gayheart. New York: Knopf, 1935. My Ántonia. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918. My Mortal Enemy. New York: Knopf, 1926. O Pioneers! Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. One of Ours. New York: Knopf, 1922. The Professor’s House. New York: Knopf, 1925. Sapphira and the Slave Girl. New York: Knopf, 1940. Shadows on the Rock. New York: Knopf, 1931. The Song of the Lark. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915.

SOURCES Acocella, Joan. “Cather and the Academy,” New Yorker, 27 November 1995, pp. 56–71. Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather’s Short Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. Bennett, Mildred. The World of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961. New ed., 1995. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Willa Cather. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Brienzo, Gary. Willa Cather’s Transforming Vision: New France and the American Northeast. Selinsgrove, Pa., Susquehanna University Press, 1994. Carlin, Deborah. Cather, Canon, and the Politics of Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Crane, Joan. Willa Cather: A Bibliography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. Gerber, Philip. Willa Cather. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1995. Harrell, David. From Mesa Verde to The Professor’s House. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Harvey, Sally Peltier. Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1995. Hively, Evelyn Helmick. Sacred Fire: Willa Cather’s Novel Cycle. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994. Keene, Ann T. Willa Cather. New York: J. Messner, 1994. Lee, Hermione. Willa Cather: Double Lives. New York: Pantheon, 1990. McDonald, Joyce. The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather’s Southern Heritage. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. March, John. A Reader’s Companion to the Fiction of Willa Cather. Edited by Marilyn Arnold. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Meyering, Sheryl L. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Willa Cather. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Murphy, John J. My Ántonia: The Road Home. Boston: Twayne, 1989. ———, ed. Critical Essays on Willa Cather. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. ———. Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History. (The Brigham Young University Symposium). Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1990. O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———, ed. New Essays on Cather’s My Antonia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Reynolds, Guy. Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Romines, Ann. Willa Cather’s Southern Connections: New Essays on Cather and the South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Ronning, Kari, and Elizabeth Turner. Willa Cather’s University Days: The University of Nebraska, 1980–1895. Lincoln: Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, 1995. Rose, Phyllis. “Modernism: The Case of Willa Cather.” In Modernism Reconsidered, edited by Robert Kiely, 123–145. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Rosowski, Susan J. The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———, ed. Approaches to Teaching My Ántonia. New York: Modern Language Association, 1989. ———. Cather Studies 1. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. Cather Studies 2. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. ———. Cather Studies 3. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Skaggs, Merrill Maguire. After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Slote, Bernice, and Virginia Faulkner, ed. The Art of Willa Cather. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1974. Steinbauer, Janine. Willa Cather. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1995. Trilling, Lionel. “Willa Cather,” New Republic 90 (February 10, 1937): 10–13. Trout, Steven. Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Wagenknecht, Edward. Willa Cather. New York: Continuum, 1994.

238 CEBU

Wasserman, Loretta. Willa Cather: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Wenzell, Tim. Willa Cather’s My Ántonia. Piscataway, N.J.: Research & Education Association, 1996. Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

CEBU PETER BACHO (1986)

Peter BACHO was born in Seattle in 1950, the son of immigrants from Cebu, the Philippines. His first novel, Cebu, won the 1992 American Book Award. Cebu is a quintessentially Filipino-American novel that explores culture clash, family history, identity, and faith. The fast-paced book focuses on the life of Ben Lucero, an American-born Filipino priest from Seattle, his life-changing trip to Cebu after the death of his mother, and the rippling repercussions this visit has on his identity, relationships, spirituality, and vocation upon his return to the United States. Upending the model of the white explorer confronting the “heart of darkness” in the Far East, Bacho portrays a Filipino American returning “home” to realize just how un-Filipino he truly is; in this way Bacho also complicates the balikbayan (homecoming) narrative. To Ben, the Philippines is exotic and at times incomprehensible; it disorients him and makes him question every aspect of his life. Beginning with his crisis of faith when confronted with Filipino folk religious practices (via the crucifixion of Carlito), Ben’s disorientation culminates in an affair with Ellen Labrado (his aunt’s assistant), which results in his exposure as a priestly fraud. While attempting to administer last rites to a dying victim on the streets of Manila, he is admonished by the victim’s rejection: “Get me a real priest, Benny.” Ben runs back to Seattle, then considers suicide when hearing from his aunt Clara that Ellen died from an abortion (presumably of his child); he reaffirms his faith and commitment to the priesthood only to have his renewed belief in his vocation tested by gang warfare between rival Filipino groups. Ben’s decision to deny absolution to an Ilocano gang member (who accuses him of not being a “real Filipino”) results in his own gamble with God. While dualities such as mothers/sons, body/soul, sin/forgiveness, God/fate are central to the novel, the interrelated themes central to the contemporary Fil-

ipino/American experience are at its true core: “Flips” (American-born Filipinos) against “FOBs” (“fresh off the boat,” or recent immigrants); Filipino regionalism, manifested in inherited distrust and tension between Tagalog, Ilocano and Cebuano immigrants; and barkada, the transformation of provincial pride and brotherhood into gang warfare in the United States. Each of these issues hinges on the idea of utang, or obligation. Gang members are involved in an endless cycle of violence to defend honor and avenge dishonor; moreover, Ben’s life is circumscribed by obligations. Remedios promised God that her firstborn (Ben) would become a priest; Tia Clara promised to watch over Ben, and Ben promised his mother to bury her in Cebu. These obligations set in motion the volatile chain of events that change Ben’s life. Bacho uses foils to explore aspects of gender, sexuality, and points of view. Cebu opens with the surreal wartime exploits of Remedios, Ben’s religious, devoted mother, and Clara, Remedios’s agnostic, slightly sinister best friend, while Ben’s foil throughout the novel is his childhood friend, Teddy—a ladies’ man and smalltime criminal. With each pair, Bacho traces their long history, and muses on how their relationships thrive despite glaring philosophical differences and life choices. These four characters are the most developed; however, Bacho’s depictions of women like Ellen and Sugar (Teddy’s girlfriend) are one-dimensional—partly because his real focus is the relationship between Ben and Teddy. Despite its American Book Award, Cebu has garnered little critical attention. One reason may be that the novel does not fit neatly into the prevailing models of Asian-American novels as narratives of “immigration and settlement” as noted by Oscar Campomanes; he contends that Filipino-American literature should be read as one of “exile and emergence” (Campomanes, 51). Another factor may be that Bacho’s graphic representation of tensions and problems in Filipino diasporic communities may cause some readers to dismiss this book as a negative portrayal of the culture and to accuse it of promulgating racism towards recent Filipino immigrants or the Philippines in general. Feminist readers might object to the rather underdeveloped female characters, other than Clara and Remedios;

CEREMONY 239

nevertheless, Bacho’s social commentary, combined with his innovative plot and unforgettable characters, makes for an important chronicle of the contemporary Filipino-American experience.

SOURCES Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra, ed. Fiction by Filipinos in America. Quezon City, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1993. Campomanes, Oscar. “Filipinos in the US and Their Literature of Exile.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 49–78. Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1992. Carbo, Nick, ed. Returning a Borrowed Tongue: An Anthology of Filipino and Filipino American Poetry. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House Press, 1995. Casper, Leonard. “Cebu,” Pacific Affairs 65, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 438–439. “Cebu,” Publishers Weekly 238, no. 43 (September 27, 1991): 42. Francia, Luis, and Eric Gamalinda, eds. Flippin: Filipinos on America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. Gonzalez, N. V. M., and Oscar Campomanes. “Filipino American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Chueng, 62–124. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Tabios, Eileen, and Nick Carbo. Babaylan: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers. San Francisco, Calif.: Aunt Lute, 2000. Melinda L. de Jesús

CEREMONY LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1977) The Native sensibilities of Leslie Marmon SILKO’s Ceremony that influence overall design, point of view, and character development, challenge the classically accepted definition of novel. Ceremony is a war story, and, like many others of its genre, revolves around the returning shell-shocked World War II soldier. It is also a protest novel about cultural and racial misunderstanding as well as of Native American oppression. In this sense, as emblems of political protest, the characters are narrowly developed, some approaching allegorical representation. These fictional American Indians signify various levels of victimization and alienation. The Anglo characters in the novel, the army

doctors and the ranchers, portray ignorance and hatred. Ceremony also incorporates universal mythic properties. The novel’s protagonist, Tayo, might be compared to such other wandering fictional heroes as Ulysses of Homer’s Odyssey or Beowulf of the Norse myth that bears his name. They share common traits: orphaned in youth and possessing special talents, they are able to overcome perilous odds with the help of mentors and magical friends, and return home to their people older, wiser, and fit to lead. Above all, Ceremony is an American Indian novel. Silko, of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and European descent, uses the Native concepts of harmony and balance as both thematic and structural anchors. The principal story begins with Tayo, broken in spirit and physically ravaged after fighting in the Pacific jungles, returning to his Auntie’s drought-ridden New Mexican ranch. Tayo is ill with nightmares and night sweats, disorientation and depression. He is also ill in the tribal sense: Tayo is out of balance, and can be cured only when he, along with his community, are set right. His war venture, as soldier and killer, ends in sickness, and so requires a journey to wellness and reconciliation. Unlike Rocky, his full-blooded Laguna cousin, who lost his life during the Bataan Death March, Tayo is a hazeleyed mixed-breed survivor destined to reconcile, among other things, his own warring selves. There is the unknown father, possibly Caucasian and Mexican, who contributes to Tayo’s cultural and genetic mix but to no tangible memory. His mother, “Sis,” is full Laguna Pueblo, but, uprooted and alcoholic, dies at an early age, leaving young Tayo with her sister, “Auntie.” It is Tayo’s blind Grandma who exerts the matriarchal spirituality that starts his cure when she intones at the sickbed, ‘ “A’moo’oh, a’moo’ohh” ’ (33). Tayo’s community is also sick and broken, torn apart by war, unemployment and drought. It is made whole when Tayo returns from his quest a spiritual leader, bringing with him the lost cattle and earth-replenishing rain. The concepts of wholeness and balance challenge the traditional western perspectives of right and wrong, one versus the other. Ts’eh, the young female agent who works on behalf of Tayo’s cure, and Night Swan, her older counterpart, are two sides of the same coin, as are the Laguna spirit helpers, Corn Woman

240 CHA, THERESA HAK KYUNG

and Reed Woman. Tayo’s guardian uncle, Josiah, dies before Tayo returns from war, but Tayo vividly recalls Josiah’s words: “Nothing was all good or all bad either; it all depended” (11). During his recovery, Tayo himself learns to accept this philosophy. Ceremony does not have a traditional linear plot. The action does not follow calendar time; instead, events are conjured up through memory, or reenacted, as in ritual. The first few pages of the novel constitute the renactment, or spinning out, of an older, larger, creation story; the lines are arranged like poetry. Throughout the novel, similar “poetic” sections look in silhouette like Pueblo kachina dolls, figurines carved from cottonwood root made to invoke ancestral spirits. The poems are narrated, in fact, by ancient voices that comprise a chorus of Spider, Buzzard, Bear, Trickster, Grasshopper, Fly, and Hummingbird, to name a few. These creatures are examples of animism, a native perspective that gives equal status to all living beings. The tale that Spiderwoman spins not only runs parallel to Tayo’s story, but also literally contains his story. The various healing ceremonies in which Tayo partakes along his route are really initiations. His processes of rebirth, which take place on sacred grounds, reenact the creation of his people and the replenishment of the earth. The physical land of the Southwest ranch and surrounding desert plays a role in Ceremony. The novel is about cycles, including seasons and farming. The ancient agricultural myths, passed down from Silko’s Anasazi forebears, are the sources that underpin her work. When Tayo’s friends become drunk and disoriented, careening around the desert in a dirty truck, they act against their own basic nature as Native people who have a sense of place and know how to make that place productive. Conversely, Tayo grows to understand and respect the land. He knows that Josiah’s spotted cattle have wandered south. When he and Ts’eh, a reappearance of the Yellow Woman figure of Pueblo lore, briefly live together in the canyon, Tayo learns a way of life from her loving communion with the herbs and insects. This instructive quality constitutes another attribute of American Indian storytelling. The reader learns that the story is larger than any single quest for balance and belonging, and that the curative power of Ceremony

encompasses all who partake of it, including the listener. The life-enforcing lessons of vigilance, hard work, respect for place and respect for each other radiate outward from the novel to include all readers within the sacred circle of story.

SOURCES Hailey, David E., Jr. “The Visual Elegance of Ts’its’tsi’nako and the Other Invisible Characters in Ceremony,” Wicazo SA Review 6, no. 2 (1990): 1–6. Kroeber, Karl. Artistry in Native American Myths. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986. Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. ———, and Krupat, Arnold, eds. Recovering the Word. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Nan Claire Tynberg

CHA, THERESA HAK KYUNG (1951–1982) Theresa Hak Kyung Cha wrote a poetic and postmodern fictional autobiography or novel—the postmodern use of multiple genres make the book difficult to categorize—about the experience of exile, the suffering of women, and the ways in which they transcend both experiences. In DICTEE (1982), the writer allows the reader to suffer and struggle with Cha, also one of the characters in the novel, as she meets the challenge of learning another language. Her major theme is immigration and its disjunctive and fragmenting effects. As Gilbey and Lin point out, the book, which tells the stories of several women—Ya Guan Soon, a Korean revolutionary; Demeter and Persephone; Cha’s mother; Joan of Arc; Hyung Soon Huo; and Cha—and is divided into nine parts. It blends journal entries with allegorical, if fragmented, stories, pictures, irregular spacing, maps, and dreams, all of which suggest confusion and disarray, loss, and the remnants of memory (Gilby). Cha was born on March 4, 1951, in Pusan, Korea. Eleven years later, the family moved to Hawaii, and in 1964 they moved permanently to northern California. Cha studied literature at the University of California at Berkeley, earning both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in comparative literature, and a Master of Fine Arts degree. Cha also studied film in both the United

CHABON, MICHAEL 241

States and France. Best known for Dictee, Cha was tragically murdered in New York City on November 5, 1982, only one week after its publication.

NOVEL Dictee. New York: Tanam, 1982.

SOURCES Kim, Elaine H., and Norma Alarcon, eds. Writing Self/Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on “Dictee” by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1994. Lin, Yi-Chun Tricia. “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 34–37. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000. Siegle, Robert. Suburban Ambush: Downtown Writing and the Fiction of Insurgency. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

OTHER Gilby, Dena Mildred. “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.” Voices from the Gaps. Available online. URL: http://www.voices. cla.umn.edu/rg/Bios/entries/cha_theresa_hak_kyung.html. Accessed June 10, 2005.

CHABON, MICHAEL (1963– )

Acclaimed by many critics as one of the most gifted writers of recent times, Michael Chabon won several awards— including the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a National Book Award nomination—for his novel, The AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY (2000), also nominated for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Chabon is praised repeatedly for evoking the tragicomic years of adolescence, complete with sexual longing and disappointment. Michael Chabon was born on May 24, 1963, in Washington, D.C., to Robert Chabon, a lawyer, hospital manager, and physician, and Sharon Chabon, a lawyer. He was reared in nearby Columbia, Maryland, where he and his mother moved after his parents divorced when he was six. Chabon earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in creative writing from the University of California at Irvine. Indeed, his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, grew out of his master’s thesis: Art Bechstein, a University of Pittsburgh student, wrestles with his bisexuality and with the criminal activities of his best friend, Cleveland, and his mobster father. In

1995, Chabon published Wonder Boys, whose protagonist, a frustrated English professor named Grady Tripp, is in trouble with his editor because his novel remains incomplete, not surprising because of his personal crisis: his wife Emily leaves him after his affair with the provost, Sara Gaskell, and one of his creative writing students attempts suicide. Wonder Boys was adapted for release by Paramount Studios as a critically acclaimed feature-length film. Chabon’s next novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, features Josef Kavalier, a Czech who left Europe just ahead of Hitler, and his cousin Sammy Kaplan, a genius at writing pulp fiction. Josef has managed to smuggle out the Golem of Prague, a clay figure with the power to protect Jews from their enemies. Together in New York City the two cousins create a comic-book character called “The Escapist” who battles the forces of evil during World War II. The novel spans the years 1939 to 1999, and has been optioned for a film by Paramount. Chabon’s most recent novel is for children. He lives in Berkeley, California, where he is reportedly at work on a novel with the working title of “Hotzeplotz.”

NOVELS The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. New York: Random House, 2000. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. New York: Morrow, 1988. Wonder Boys. New York: Villard, 1995.

SOURCES Arana, Marie. “Michael Chabon: Touched by Fortune,” Washington Post Book World, 16 July 2000, p. 6. Buzbee, Lewis. “Michael Chabon: Comics Came First,” New York Times Book Review, 24 September 2000, p. 9. Giles, Jeff. “He’s a Real Boy Wonder,” Newsweek (April 10, 1995): 76. Hunter, Stephen. “Possible to Put Down!” Washington Post, 25 February 2000, p. C5. Kakutani, Michiko. “A Novel about a Novelist and His Messy Life,” New York Times, 17 March 1995, p. C28. Kalfus, Ken. Review of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, New York Times Book Review, 24 September 2000, p. 8. Maslin, Janet. “A Life and Death Story Set in Comic Book Land,” New York Times, 21 September 2000, p. E10. Moody, Rick. “Pitching Michael Chabon,” Voice Literary Supplement, 11 April 1995, p. 9.

242 CHANDLER, RAYMOND

Smith, Jeremy. “Heroes, Superheroes, and Anti-Heroes: Three New Books Display the Power of Pictures in Storytelling,” Chicago Tribune Books, 12 November 2000, p. 1. Ward, Robert. “Writing High,” New York Times Book Review, 9 April 1995, p. 7.

OTHER Chabon, Michael. “Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.” Interview by Dave Welch. Powell’s City of Books. Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/chabon.htm. Accessed August 22, 2005. ———. Interview by Tobias Scott. Onion (November 22, 2000). Available online. URL: http://avclub.com/content/ node/24253. Accessed August 22, 2005. Miller, Laura “The Lost Adventure of Childhood.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ books/int/2002/10/22/chabon/. Accessed June 10, 2005.

CHANDLER, RAYMOND (THORNTON) (1888–1959) Raymond Chandler created one of the most enduring protagonists in American fiction: Philip Marlowe, his laconic loner, the star of his hard-boiled detective fiction. Since Chandler’s death, scholars and critics have studied his work seriously, with many labeling him a modernist, along with Ernest HEMINGWAY and F. Scott FITZGERALD. University courses in late-20th-century literature routinely include his novels, particularly The BIG SLEEP (1939). The screenplay for that novel, which Chandler admired, was written by William FAULKNER, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman. In his famous essay, “The Simple Art of Murder” (1950), Chandler acknowledged the influence of his predecessor Dashiell HAMMETT, whom he admired for taking murder out of British upper-class drawing rooms and placing it where it belonged. In Chandler’s famous phrase from that essay, that meant in the “mean streets” of American cities, in Chandler’s case, Los Angeles, California. Raymond Chandler was born on July 23, 1888, in Chicago, Illinois, to Maurice Benjamin Chandler, a civil engineer for the western railway, and Florence Thornton Chandler. His parents divorced in 1895 and his mother took him to live in England, where he studied at Dulwich College, a British preparatory school, until age 17. In 1912, after two years in Europe and five more trying to become a writer in England, Chandler

sailed for the United States, where he would remain until World War I, when he fought in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces and then in the British Royal Air Force. He returned to the United States, settled in Los Angeles, and married Cissy Pascal in 1924. Problems with alcoholism eventually cost him his high-salaried job with an oil company. Chandler began to write for the pulp magazine Black Mask until he published The Big Sleep. The novel, made into a feature-length film starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Regan, begins as Marlowe, the private investigator, is hired to solve a simple case of blackmailing. He soon discovers a tangled web of pornography, drugs, gambling, and murder among his wealthy patrons; they contrast starkly with Marlowe, a gritty, battered, underpaid but moral man. The publication of The Big Sleep energized Chandler, who published six additional novels, all featuring Philip Marlowe, that became classics. In Farewell My Lovely (1940), Marlowe is increasingly cynical about his efforts to fight crime. He thinks it is futile but persists, despite his sleazy clients and the corrupt police. In The High Window (1942) Marlowe observes the posh life of the wealthy but becomes increasingly bitter about his inability to make a difference in what he feels is an American postwar wasteland. No longer a knightlike figure, he is disillusioned with the world in general. In The Lady in the Lake (1943) Marlowe must solve a complicated string of murders, but he finds a small group of constables in a middle-class community who are honest and have not yet given up their belief in justice. After six years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, Chandler returned to novel writing, with The Little Sister (1949). The novel examines midwesterners in Hollywood, who experience the moral vacuum in the movie industry. Chandler’s portrait of Delores Gonzales, a totally corrupt Hollywood starlet, is the ultimate in his many negative portrayals of women. The Long Goodbye (1954), in many ways his most ambitious work, has also been singled out by numerous critics as Chandler’s personal farewell. For the only time, he allows Marlowe—who understands that he cannot expect help from the police—to administer his own justice. The novel won an Edgar award, but Chandler, whose wife had died at the end

CHAPPELL, FRED 243

of the year, attempted suicide a few months later, in February 1955. Chandler recovered enough to write the short novel, Playback (1958). Here an aging Marlowe exhibits despairing and somewhat weaker behavior. His moral code is not as strong as it once was, but he does agree to marry the character Linda Loring. In the first three chapters of Poodle Springs (the rest written by Robert Parker and published in 1989), Marlowe and Loring are newlyweds. The long fictional career of Philip Marlowe has ended. Chandler himself accepted the presidency of the Mystery Writers of America after proposing marriage to Helga Greene, his agent, but died a few weeks later on March 26, 1959.

NOVELS The Big Sleep. New York: Knopf, 1939. Farewell My Lovely. New York: Knopf, 1940. The High Window. New York: Knopf, 1942. Killer in the Rain. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Knopf, 1943. The Little Sister. New York: Ballantine Books, 1949. The Long Goodbye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Playback. New York: Ballantine, 1958.

SOURCES Chandler, Raymond. English Summer. Edited by Frank McShane. New York: Ecco, 1976. ———. The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler. Edited by Frank McShane. New York: Ecco, 1976. ———. “The Simple Art of Murder.” In The Simple Art of Murder. Boston: Houghton, 1950. Durham, Philip. Down These Mean Streets A Man Must Go: Raymond Chandler’s Knight. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. Gross, Miriam, ed. The World of Raymond Chandler. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977. Marling, William. Raymond Chandler. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Parker, Robert B. Perchance to Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. New York: Putnam, 1991. Speir, Jerry. Raymond Chandler. New York: Ungar, 1981. Van Dover, J. K., ed. The Critical Responses to Raymond Chandler. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Wolfe, Peter. Something More Than Night: The Case of Raymond Chandler. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1985.

CHAPPELL, FRED (DAVIS) (1936– ) Fred Chappell, poet and novelist, usually places his novels in the North Carolina Appalachian region where he was reared. Much admired for his storytelling abilities, Chappell is nonetheless a southern writer whose emphasis on the darker and more violent aspects of life reminds contemporary readers of the gothic tales of William FAULKNER, Carson McCULLERS, and Flannery O’CONNOR. His characters are (or are involved with) murderers, nymphomaniacs, sadists, and alcoholics, yet Chappell also points out that memory and nostalgia are healing properties; he builds bridges between contentious agrarian and urban environments, and his novels are for the most part built on a foundation of intricately blended symbolism and myth. Fred Chappell was born on May 28, 1936, in Canton, North Carolina, to James Taylor Chappell, a furniture retailer, and Anne Davis Chappell. He married Susan Nicholls in 1959, received his bachelor’s degree in 1961, and a master’s in 1964, both from Duke University. His first novel, It Is Time, Lord (1963) contains the themes that will consistently reappear throughout his work, particularly the effect of the past on the present. In this semiautobiographical novel, James Christopher undergoes a spiritual crisis but comes to understand the significance of childhood events involving his father and sister. He matures and builds a better relationship with his wife, Sylvia. In The Inkling (1965), his second novel, Chappell focuses on Jan Anderson, trapped by his needy mother, his retarded and controlling sister Timmie, his destructive Uncle Hake, and Hake’s wife Lora, who seduces Jan. Similarly, Peter Leland, the minister protagonist of Dagon (1968), explores the symbolic dark rooms of the house bequeathed to him by his grandparents. The critic Casey Clabaugh says that the “multiple levels of meaning,” and Chappell’s impressive use of “gothicism, horror, and southern grotesque, make this Chappell’s most versatile novel” (Clabough). The disintegration of a minister—whose affair with Mina, a sadist, leads him to murder his wife Sheila—also places it in an American tradition that includes Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s THE SCARLET LETTER, Harold FREDERIC’s The Damnation of Theron Ware, and Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING. The Gaudy Place (1972) depicts the characters from seedy Gimlet Street in Braceboro (a fictionalized

244 CHARLOTTE TEMPLE: A TALE OF TRUTH

Asheville), North Carolina, and juxtaposes them against the middle-class Harper family. Chappell places the Gimlet Street pimp Oxie in a library and contrasts him with the professor’s son Lynn Harper, now in jail. The comic meeting near the end of the novel signifies that each character is tied to his own world and incapable of functioning in the other’s. Chappell’s novel tetralogy includes the story series I Am One of You Forever: A Novel (1985), that introduces a small fictional town in North Carolina and the impact of World War II on the various eccentric characters; Brighten the Corner Where You Are (1989) focuses on Kirkman’s postwar career in academe; the connected short stories in Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You (1996) explore a father-son relationship as Jess’s grandmother lies dying. In Look Back All the Green Valley (1999) Jess tries to sort out the mystery of his father’s identity and to honor his recently dead mother. All are connected through the perspectives of Joe Robert Kirkman and his first-person narrator son Jess, and all emphasize the significance of memory and the role played by imagination. Indeed, speaking of I Am One of You Forever, the novelist Clyde EDGERTON has commented that Chappell puts “storytelling up against death”; both are at war “like brightness and darkness, good and evil” (Edgerton, 84–85). Since 1964, Fred Chappell has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he is professor of English. In addition to many other awards, Chappell received the National Institute and American Academy awards in literature in 1968, and in 1997 he became poet laureate of North Carolina.

NOVELS Dagon. New York: Harcourt, 1968. It Is Time, Lord. New York: Atheneum, 1963. The Gaudy Place. New York: Harcourt, 1972. The Inkling. New York: Harcourt, 1965.

NOVELS IN KIRKMAN TETRALOGY I Am One of You Forever: A Novel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Brighten the Corner Where You Are. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Farewell. I’m Bound to Leave You (connected short stories). New York: Picador, 1996. Look Back All the Green Valley. New York: Picador, 1999.

SOURCES Broughton, Irv, ed. The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Authors. Vol. 3. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990. Campbell, Hilbert. “Fred Chappell’s Urn of Memory: I Am One of You Forever,” Southern Literary Journal 25, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 103–111. Carr, John, ed. Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts: Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers, 216–235. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Chappell, Fred, and Jennifer Howard. “Fred Chappell: From the Mountains to the Mainstream,” Publishers Weekly 243, no. 40 (September 30, 1996): 55–65. Edgerton, Clyde, et al. “Tributes to Fred Chappell,” Pembroke Magazine 23 (1991): 77–92. Garrett, George, ed. Craft So Hard to Learn: Conversations with Poets and Novelists about the Teaching of Writing. New York: Morrow, 1972. Lang, John. Understanding Fred Chappell. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Makuck, Peter. “Chappell’s Continuities: First and Last Words,” Virginia Quarterly Review 68, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 315–336. Ragan, David Paul. “At the Grave of Sut Lovingood: Virgil Campbell in the Work of Fred Chappell,” Mississippi Quarterly 37 (Winter 1983–1984): 21–30. Walker, Jeanne Murray. “Ways to Move Beyond the Self,” Shenandoah 44 (Summer 1994): 111–126.

OTHER Clabough, Casey. “Appropriations of History, Gothicism, and Cthulhu: Fred Chappell’s Dagon,” Mosaic (September 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 109270179. Accessed August 27, 2005.

CHARLOTTE TEMPLE: A TALE OF TRUTH SUSANNA HASWELL ROWSON (1794) Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth was America’s first best-seller, with more than 200 editions published from the 18th through the 20th centuries. This sensational tale of a poor girl seduced and abandoned touched thousands of readers in the early republic but can often be difficult for modern readers to appreciate, given its heavily didactic message cloaked in melodramatic scenes that brought so many to tears for more than a century. For a 21st-century public that considers melancholia something to be diagnosed and treated

CHARLOTTE TEMPLE: A TALE OF TRUTH 245

rather than a romantic sentiment to be indulged, as 18th-century readers believed, examining Charlotte Temple’s highly emotional language can become tedious. Critics have long noted the novel’s artistic defects and are often at a loss to try to explain its popularity. Early critics said little of it at all beyond acknowledging its fame and noting Charlotte Temple’s aesthetic failures. Yet in her introduction to Charlotte Temple, Susanna ROWSON makes clear her purposes are educational, not aesthetic: “If the following tale should save one hapless fair from the error which ruined poor Charlotte, or rescue from impending misery the heart of one anxious parent, I shall feel a much higher gratification . . . than could possibly result from the applause which might attend the most elegant finished piece of literature. . . .” (1). To judge the novel by modern standards is to deny both Rowson’s intent and the cultural effect of Charlotte Temple on the collective American conscious for more than 100 years. Examining the reasons for Charlotte Temple’s popularity reveals much about the politics, society, and culture for which it was written. Charlotte Temple begins in England where the 15year-old Charlotte is at school, away from her loving parents and grandfather. Temple is the darling of her family, a dutiful and affectionate daughter who adores her parents and grandfather. Her parents are in the midst of planning a surprise party for their daughter’s 16th birthday at the same instant that Temple meets the man who will cause her downfall. Temple does not readily appear the type of girl to disobey parents or commit a sexual sin. This is, in large part, Rowson’s point. That a girl as pious and virtuous as Temple could be deceived shows that anyone is subject to deception and, therefore, all should beware. Lieutenant Montraville becomes infatuated with Temple when he sees her and her schoolmates leaving church a few days before his departure for America. With the aid of Temple’s unscrupulous teacher, Mademoiselle La Rue, Montraville is able to contrive several clandestine meetings with Temple that foster her increasing devotion. The first time Temple sneaks out of school with Miss La Rue, she feels terribly guilty: “I cannot think we have done exactly right in going out

this evening Mademoiselle” (27). But La Rue, a woman “hardened in guilt” who will “spare no pains to bring down innocence and beauty to the shocking level with herself” (30) artfully persuades Temple that she has done no wrong, is a “foolish little prude,” and has won the heart of Montraville. With such encouragement from a trusted guardian, Temple cannot combat the desires of her own heart coupled with Montraville’s entreaties. When Montraville asks her to join him when his military company is deployed to America, Temple agrees in part because of Montraville’s impassioned plea: “Cruel Charlotte . . . if you disappoint my ardent hopes, by all that is sacred, this hand shall put a period to my existence. I cannot, I will not live without you!” Equally persuasive for Temple is that her trusted adviser La Rue plans to travel with her in the company of Montraville’s friend Belcour. Temple is seduced as much by the conniving but trusted woman as by the unthinking but sincere man. Important for the sympathy Rowson hopes to generate, Temple is rendered unconscious in a fainting spell at the moment of elopement, so that the specific decision to leave her beloved family and trust her life and virtue to her seducer is not actually hers; she is borne away by Montraville, La Rue, and Belcour. This device allows Temple to remain a moral character despite having made an unwise choice. Although Temple’s sin is sexual in nature, she is described throughout as an innocent, a mere child, duped by misguided trust. For example, when the upstanding Mrs. Beauchamp, a stand-in for the sympathetic narrator, discovers on the boat to America that Temple is Montraville’s mistress, she comments, “But surely her mind is not depraved. The goodness of her heart is depicted in her ingenuous countenance” (66). Temple has allowed herself to be swayed from her devotion to her parents by La Rue; Temple is, therefore, not corrupt. Only when Temple overhears Beauchamp does she begin to realize the consequences of her mistake: she is too naive, too virtuous even, to understand seduction, let alone its moral and social penalties. Not until months later, alone in the house Montraville has set up for her outside New York City, does she fully understand herself as a fallen woman who cannot expect sympathy from any respectable person. Still, the narrator remains forgiving.

246 CHARLOTTE TEMPLE: A TALE OF TRUTH

She sends Beauchamp to help Temple, despite the social repercussions, and through her Temple finally is able to send a letter to her family. Temple’s parents are as forgiving as the narrator insists the reader be. The moment word arrives of Temple (Montraville has carefully destroyed all other letters she has written), Mr. Temple sets out to rescue his daughter and bring her home to England. But help comes too late. Montraville quickly tires of Temple after he arrives in America, discovering true love in Julia Franklin, “the very reverse of Charlotte Temple” (73). His guilt about Temple prevents him from courting Franklin until his friend Belcour convinces him that Temple has been unfaithful. Montraville is willing to believe Belcour’s lie so that he may marry the wealthy Franklin with a clear conscience. Montraville promises, through Belcour, to always care for Temple and their unborn child. Belcour proves unworthy of even this trust and keeps the money for himself, hoping to win Temple’s dependence. But Temple, virtuous before and after her one sin, continually refuses Belcour’s advances so that he also abandons her, leaving her penniless and pregnant in a New York winter. When Temple’s heartless landlady throws her out, she must walk 10 miles in a snowstorm to the home of her old guardian La Rue, the only person she can think to turn to in this foreign land. La Rue has succeeded where Temple failed in gaining a sympathetic and rich husband. True to her selfish character, the evil La Rue remains unmoved and will do nothing to aid the suffering Temple. Instead, La Rue’s impoverished manservant takes Temple in, giving her a place to deliver a healthy daughter and wait for Mr. Temple to appear. He arrives in time to take his granddaughter in his arms and to watch his daughter die. The narrator makes clear that sexual sin is not Charlotte Temple’s worst crime. When Temple repents on her deathbed, “her ingratitude to her parents [w]as what lay most heavy on her heart” (126), not her illegitimate pregnancy. The novel presents several examples of women who remain loyal to their parents and are, therefore, rewarded with a happy marriage, such as Julia Franklin and Lucy Temple, Charlotte Temple’s own mother. Temple is not only deserted and denied an honorable marriage to Montraville, but also is forsaken by her trusted maternal substitutes, Mme. Du Pont (the

headmistress at her school), La Rue, and Beauchamp. Critic Julia Stern argues that this is the just consequence of leaving her own mother (77). Being abandoned by all familial ties is ultimately what leads to her death. Still, it is a redemptive death: just before Temple dies, “a sudden beam of joy passed across her languid features, she raised her eyes to heaven and then closed them forever” (127). The true villains of this tale, La Rue and Belcour, equally heartless and conniving, find no redemption. Instead, they both die violently (Montraville stabs Belcour in a duel) and miserably (La Rue languishes, forgotten, in a hospital near the Temples several years later). Montraville, truly penitent for his unjust treatment of Temple, lives “subject to severe fits of melancholy” for the rest of his days. In her introduction to the novel, Ann Douglas notes the connections between Rowson’s tale and emerging melodrama on the American stage (xiv–xv). Rowson worked for some years as an actress and learned melodramatic strategies such as easily identifiable villains and heroes, a swift and just punishment or reward for each character according to his or her merits, and highly emotional scenes, meant to deliberately convey a clear, moral message. When the narrator frequently interrupts the story with an aside about how to read the related events, the narrator hopes to ensure a sympathetic response that will unite a heterogeneous American public (Stern, 37) and teach them the correct way to interpret the text (Forcey, 230). Many critics speculate that the way readers in the late 18th century understood the text is as an allegory: The virtuous Temple represents the new republic who willingly breaks from England but nevertheless suffers terribly from the rupture, as America does by losing so many lives in battle; or, Temple might represent all foreigners coming to America’s shores, hoping for a better life, but finding the American dream doesn’t apply to all equally. Although Charlotte Temple was written by a British woman living in England and was published there originally in 1791, Americans considered the novel their own. The novel put the story of women, especially young women, at the center of a narrative. By addressing young readers directly, the narrator gives them an importance they did not usually enjoy (Wood-

CHASE, JOAN 247

ward, 130). Using physical evidence from copies of original texts, Cathy Davidson notes Charlotte Temple was a novel read and reread, passed on and discussed by thousands of readers. She claims that through these readings the American public made the novel American (Davidson, 168). This democratic assertion is borne out by the “Charlotte cult” that searched for the real woman upon whom the fictional character was based and made pilgrimages in the 19th century to visit what was believed to be Charlotte’s grave in New York City (Davidson, 168). Susanna Rowson encouraged readers in their belief that the sentimental story was founded on real events when she subtitled the novel A Tale of Truth. There is no physical evidence to support this claim (the gravestone is real and can still be seen today, but it covers no grave), but readers easily crossed the line between fact and fiction, forging this pathetic account of betrayal and seduction into an early American legend.

SOURCES Armstrong, Nancy. “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of American Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 1–24. Baron, Dennis. “‘My Vile Arts’: Male and Female Discourse in Charlotte Temple,” Studies in the Humanities 18, no. 2 (1992): 135–145. Davidson, Cathy N. “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book.” In Reading in America, edited by Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Evans, Gareth. “Rakes, Coquettes and Republican Patriarchs: Class, Gender and Nation in Early American Sentimental Fiction,” Canadian Review of American Studies 25, no. 3 (1995): 41–62. Forcey, Blythe. “Charlotte Temple and the End of the Epistolary,” American Literature 63, no. 2 (1991): 225–241. Hansen, Klaus P. “The Sentimental Novel and Its Feminist Critique,” Early American Literature 26, no. 1 (1991): 39–54. Parker, Patricia L. Susanna Rowson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986. Rowson, Susanna. Charlotte Temple and Lucy Temple. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin, 1991. Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Weil, Dorothy. In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762–1824). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Woodward, Maureen L. “Female Captivity and the Deployment of Race in Three Early American Texts,” Papers on Language & Literature 32, no. 2 (1996): 115–146. Heidi Johnson

CHASE, JOAN

Her output is small—two novels and one short-story collection—but Joan Chase has been hailed as an exceptional writer whose lucid style, accurate dialogue, and incisive character portrayals have gained her widespread respect and admiration. Her first novel, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) won the Hemingway Foundation Award from the PEN American Center. Her second, The Evening Wolves (1989), also won praise from reviewers. Information about Joan Chase’s personal life is scarce. She was born in Monroeville, Alabama, educated at the University of Maryland and graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree; from time to time she has taught university-level writing courses. In all Chase’s works, family tensions and feuds are rendered with astonishing accuracy, none more so than the wars between women and men. These gender differences and hostile material relationships are especially evident on the Ohio farm depicted in During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. The Queen of Persia, or “Gram,” grabs the reins of power from her violent, ne’er-do-well husband and rules over the house, her seven children, her four young granddaughters, and the farm itself until she sells it for her retirement. It is through their eyes (each granddaughter narrates a portion of the novel) that we see the conflicts between parents, and aunts and uncles, and watch these young narrators get ready for the world beyond the farm, a world that cannot be much tougher than the farm that helped to form them. Chase’s second novel, The Evening Wolves, contains another household stressful for young girls. At the center of the novel is Francis Clemmons, recently widowed and left with two daughters and a baby son to raise; when he marries Gloria, the new stepmother must cope with his dual character as bully and charmer. Like its predecessor, The Evening Wolves is

248 CHÁVEZ, DENISE

narrated by females: Gloria and the daughters Margy and Ruthann. Margy is adept at self-defense but Ruthann is vulnerable to the boys and men, compared by Chase to the wolves at night, existing mainly to satisfy their sex drives by preying on young women. And as reviewer R. Z. Sheppard observes, “Whatever the biological or social truth of Wolves, the novel’s artistic conviction cannot be separated from its language, a private brew of nuance, unexpected humor and explosive strength that can already be quickly and appreciatively distinguished as the Chase style” (Sheppard, 98). Joan Chase published Bonneville Blue, a collection of short fiction, in 1991, and is thought to be writing a third novel.

NOVELS During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. New York: Harper, 1983. The Evening Wolves. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1989.

SOURCES Morris, Adalaide. “First Persons Plural in Contemporary Feminist Fiction,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 11–29. Payant, Katherine. “Female Friendship in Contemporary Bildungsroman.” In Communication and Women’s Friendships: Parallels and Intersections in Literature and Life, edited by Joanna Stephens Mink, 151–163. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1993. Sheppard, R. Z. Review of The Evening Wolves, by Joan Chase. Time, 8 May 1989, p. 98. Vásquez, Mary S. “Prisoners and Refugees: Language of Violence in The House of Bernardo Alba and During the Reign of the Queen of Persia.” In Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay Collection, edited by Katherine Anne Ackley, 221–236. New York: Garland, 1990.

OTHER Sheppard, R. Z. Review of The Evening Wolves, Time (May 8, 1989). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 7564005&num=3. Accessed June 10, 2005.

CHÁVEZ, DENISE (ELIA) (1948– ) Denise CHÁVEZ occupies a prominent place in contemporary Chicana fiction. Although admired as a prolific playwright, she is well known for her first novel, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and for FACE OF AN ANGEL,

winner of the 1994 National Book Award. According to Chicano novelist Rudolfo ANAYA, Chávez is “an outstanding Chicana novelist” because of “her ability to reveal the inner and often chaotic lives of her characters” (quoted in Review of Loving Pedro Infante, 88). It is with women that all Chávez’s fiction is primarily concerned: from mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and antepasados (ancestors), to shopgirls, waitresses, and maids. As many critics have observed, her work is unified by realistic dialogue and a strong sense of the New Mexican towns and communities within which she finds both the tragedy and the comedy of her Chicano characters. Denise Chávez was born on August 15, 1948, in Las Cruces, on the Texas–Mexico–New Mexico border, to Epifanio E. Chávez, an attorney, and Delfina Rede Chávez, a teacher. Because her parents divorced when Chávez was young, she was raised in a household where women played the prominent roles. Chávez earned her bachelor’s degree from New Mexico State University in 1971, a master of fine arts degree from Trinity University in 1974, and a master of arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1982. The Last of the Menu Girls, although composed of short stories, is frequently referred to as a novel; here Rocío Esquivel, the protagonist, matures into a young woman and provides a major link among the stories. Ignoring the usual female role models, Rocío emerges at 17 as an independent writer secure in her independence and self-image. Face of an Angel, set in Agua Oscura (Dark Water), New Mexico, features Soveida Dosamantes, a waitress, who cuts through the “standard patriarchal history” and gradually, according to scholar Maya Socolovsky, reclaims the voices of her women ancestors (Socolovsky). On one level, the novel is a witty and gossipy account of the individuals in Soveida’s community, while on another, deeper level, it recounts Soveida’s father’s sexual abuse of her cousin Mara and, quite possibly, of Soveida herself; it also pays homage to earlier women victims for whom Soveida vows to speak. Her most recent novel, Loving Pedro Infante (2001) features Teresina (La Terry) Avila, secretary of the Pedro Infante Fan Club in Cabritoville, Texas. In Chávez’s words, Pedro Infante, a well-known Mexican singer and movie actor in the 1940s and 1950s who

THE CHEER LEADER 249

died in 1957 at the age of 40, “was probably the epitome of male masculine beauty in the mind and hearts of Latinos, Mexicanos, and people across the world” (Hansen). Through Terry”s infatuation with Infante, Chávez examines the obsessive nature of love. Chávez lives in Las Cruces, where she is working on a novel entitled “The King and Queen of Comezon.” “Comezon,” she explains, “is a Spanish word that means an itch. In this case, it means a longing that you can never satisfy. I’ve always wanted to write about a longing that springs from the experience of la frontera, the borders that separate us and that are within us, borders real and imagined. This book is my love story to the border, a place of transformation and healing.” (quoted in Review of Loving Pedro Infante, 88).

NOVELS Face of an Angel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. The Last of the Menu Girls. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1986. Loving Pedro Infante. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.

SOURCES Carr, Irene Campos. “Life Was, and Is, Service,” Belles Lettres 10 (Spring 1995): 35. Eysturoy, Annie O. “Denise Chávez.” In This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, 156–169. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Review of Loving Pedro Infante. Hispanic 14, no. 4 (April 1, 2001): 88.

OTHER Denise Chávez. Available online. URL: http://www.ou.edu/ worldlit/authors/chavez/chavez.html. Accessed August 27, 2005. Hansen, Liane. “Interview: Denise Chávez discusses the continuing fascination of fans with Pedro Infante.” Transcript of NPR’s Weekend Edition, Sunday, May 1, 2001. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:45528263. Accessed August 27, 2005. Socolovsky, Maya. “Narrative and traumatic memory in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel,” MELUS, December 22, 2003. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:113523871. Accessed August 27, 2005.

VG: Voices from the Gaps. “Denise Chávez.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/chavez_ denise.html. Accessed August 27, 2005.

THE CHEER LEADER JILL MCCORKLE (1985) The Cheer Leader was Jill McCORKLE’s first novel, and it was published simultaneously with her second, July 7th, in 1985. Like most first novels, The Cheer Leader contains autobiographical elements. McCorkle, like her protagonist, grew up in North Carolina, where she was the popular girl in high school. The Cheer Leader is Jo Spencer, a beautiful, brainy girl with a supportive family and loyal friends. However, her coming-of-age in a small town in North Carolina is far from carefree. The Cheer Leader is divided into four sections. The first portion of the novel consists of “snapshots,” in which Jo recalls the moments captured in old family photographs. In an informal, almost confessional voice, Jo tells us, “This is Mama,” and “I am upset in this picture.” This introduction to Jo’s family and friends frames our perceptions throughout the course of the novel. Jo’s references to Vacation Bible School, to overnight camp, and to her older brother surface repeatedly, and the poignancy of her recollections creates a remarkable intimacy between her and the reader. As a result, Jo emerges as a deeply introspective individual, whose commitment to popularity and to the superficial accolades of adolescence belies her intelligent and creative nature. In the second part of the novel, Jo falls in love with the archetypal bad boy, Red Williams. Red is older and immersed in the drug culture of the early seventies, and for Jo, his refusal to play by the rules is refreshing and erotic. Yet as their relationship intensifies, Jo finds herself caught between her good-girl image, as May queen and A student, and her yearnings to abandon the demands of conformity altogether. As the title of the novel suggests, Jo is torn between her own desires and the labels imposed upon her by society. Unable to commit a rebellion of her own, Jo creates her identity through Red, and through him, she seeks to stake her claim to something meaningful, original, and adult. By the third portion of the novel, Jo is in college and deeply troubled by the end of her romance with Red, as well as by the end of her high school years. No

250 CHEEVER, JOHN

longer the most popular or the most beautiful, Jo feels anonymous. In fact, she does not even recognize herself. McCorkle strategically conveys this self-alienation, as Jo begins to narrate in the third person. Her introspective, candid voice becomes guarded and juvenile. Overwhelmed by the pressures of adulthood and utterly detached from her own needs, Jo structures her life around a series of rigid rules. As she explains, “The rules must be followed to a tee or something awful will happen” (167). Thus, Jo seeks order and control in a world that increasingly seems to evade her understanding. Jo’s struggle to regain the ordered simplicity of childhood results in a full-fledged nervous breakdown and leaves her in therapy. By the novel’s end, Jo is in graduate school, and as she brews some tea and muses about her college years, she exudes the self-assurance of a strong adult. Although she remains unmarried and unsure about her future, she confesses, “At least right now I know that I am a little bit of everything I’ve ever been” (266). As a result of McCorkle’s skillful narrative technique, we know exactly what she means. Critics usually locate McCorkle in the context of her southern background, and certainly The Cheer Leader can be read as comment on the cultural climate of the American South in the 1970s. However, this novel also deserves consideration as a traditional coming-of-age novel. Like Holden Caulfield and Marjorie Morningstar, Jo Spencer navigates the unpredictable terrain between innocence and experience. Additionally, the novel’s frequent allusions to feminist thinkers and Jo’s difficulty imagining herself in a society that wants to define her as an “either/or” makes The Cheer Leader an ideal candidate for a feminist reading.

SOURCES Bennett, Barbara. Understanding Jill McCorkle. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. McCorkle, Jill. The Cheer Leader. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1985. Sari Edelstein

CHEEVER, JOHN (WILLIAM) (1912–1982) Initially viewed by a number of critics and readers as a glib yet prolific writer of New Yorker short stories, John

Cheever gradually achieved a solid reputation as a serious novelist with a complex moral vision (Time magazine called him “Ovid in Ossining” in 1964). His first two novels, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964), tell the story of a patrician New England family that peaks and declines in a way similar to Cheever’s own ancestors. Bullet Park (1969) is the critically well-received examination of the dark center of American suburbia, and FALCONER (1977), possibly his most admired novel, explores fraternal relationships, murder, prison, and homosexuality. Cheever was born on May 27, 1912, in Quincy, Massachusetts, to Mary Liley Cheever and Frederick Cheever, who lost his shoe factory during the 1920s. Thereafter his mother supported the family through a gift shop that she opened in 1926. Cheever, expelled from Thayer Academy in an incident made famous in his 1919 New Republic short story, “Expelled,” lived in New York during most of the decade of the 1930s and married Mary Winternitz on March 22, 1941. While serving in the army during World War II, Cheever published his first and critically acclaimed story collection, The Way Some People Live (1943). After the war he focused his attention on the millions of Americans who made their way into the suburbs after World War II, publishing numerous short stories and The Wapshot Chronicle, which won the National Book Award in 1958. In this novel, Cheever experiments with points of view, employing Leander Wapshot’s journal entries and interrupting the third-person narrator to address the reader directly. In both The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Howells Medal in 1965, Cheever explores the lives of the Wapshots—Coverly and Beverley, Honora, Moses, and Melissa—as he exposes the dark undersides of individual suburbanites. With Bullet Park Cheever’s protagonists, Hammer and Nailes, both react to the enervating atmosphere of their well-to-do environment; Hammer passively retreats into drugs and Nailes commits murder in an effort to change the status quo. Falconer is the only Cheever novel to be set outside suburbia. When Ezekiel Farragut murders his own brother, he is sent to Sing Sing Prison, where Cheever himself had taught writing classes. The novel uses prison, rather than an

CHERRY, KELLY 251

upper-middle class community, to examine the grim realities that beset its characters. Despite the bleakness that so many of his characters feel, Cheever never loses his optimistic perception of America. His ability to present the paradox of American life is, indeed, a large part of his literary legacy. Beset with his own problems concerning alcoholism and homosexuality, which sometimes undercut his reputation and earning power, Cheever continued to write fiction that mirrored American life as he saw it. He died on June 18, 1982, in Ossining, New York. A number of his papers are housed in the library at Brandeis University. His daughter, Susan Cheever, a well-known memoirist, has written about their family in Home Before Dark (1984).

NOVELS Bullet Park. New York: Knopf, 1969. Falconer. New York: Knopf, 1977. Oh What a Paradise It Seems. New York: Knopf, 1982. Some People, Places, and Things That Will Not Appear in My Next Novel. New York: Harper & Row, 1961. The Wapshot Chronicle. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. The Wapshot Scandal. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. Time to Murder and Create. New York: McKay, 1966, pp. 171–177. Bosha, Francis J. John Cheever: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Cheever, Benjamin, ed. The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Cheever, John. The Journals of John Cheever. Edited by Susan Cheever. New York: Knopf, 1991. Cheever, Susan. Home Before Dark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Coale, Samuel. John Cheever. New York: Ungar, 1977. Donaldson, Scott. John Cheever. New York: Random House, 1988. ———, ed. Conversations with John Cheever. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Glad Tidings: A Friendship in Letters. The Correspondence of John Cheever and John D. Weaver, 1945–1982. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Hunt, George W. John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Company of Love. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1983. Meanor, Patrick. John Cheever Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1995. O’Hara, James Eugene. John Cheever: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Waldmeir, Joseph J., ed. Critical Essays on John Cheever. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

CHERRY, KELLY (1940– ) An award-winning poet with a distinguished career as both writer and professor, Kelly Cherry is also a prose fiction writer whose novels and short stories have been critically acclaimed. She has written six novels that, according to one critic, are superior to her poetry, and her work has been translated into 10 languages. Although her work addresses contemporary moral issues, and romantic and marital relationships, Cherry is a writer who infuses her work with humor to relieve the often bleak landscape she describes. Many of her protagonists are women, and most of her settings include the university campuses where her characters work and the towns that house them. Kelly Cherry was born in 1940, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to J. Milton Cherry, a violinist and music professor, and Mary Spooner Cherry, a violinist and writer. She was educated at Mary Washington College, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1961, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (MFA, 1967). She was married to Jonathan Silver in 1966, was divorced in 1969, and married Burke Davis III, a writer. She described her doomed cold war love affair with Imant Kalnin, a Latvian musician, in her memoir, The Exiled Heart (1991). She published her first novel, Sick and Full of Burning, in 1974. It focuses on divorced medical student Mary and the way she copes with sexual fulfillment (or the lack of it) with the men she meets. Her second novel, Augusta Played (1979), refers to the musical career of the protagonist, a flutist, and her husband, a music professor. Augusta manages to play on as the marriage breaks down irretrievably. My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (1990) focuses on the middle-aged divorced professor Nina Bryant who, regardless of the promise of self-healing trumpeted by American culture, understands that no quick fixes can alleviate the pain and fragmentation that this lonely single woman feels. She must also cope with the scars of an incestuous rape. Cherry followed My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers with the similarly structured and conceived The Society of

252 CHESNUTT, CHARLES WADDELL

Friends: Stories (1999), a sequel that again features Nina Bryant. Despite the title, most reviewers read the book as a novel. Cherry excels at expressing her incisive insights into the emotional realities of Nina and her neighbors, including Shelley, a nurse who discovers her daughter’s lesbianism and Guy, a bookstore owner whose lesbian wife is cuckolding him. The events of September 11, 2001, left Cherry “without words” for about a year (Edwards). She published her most recent novel, We Can Still Be Friends, in 2003. Using four first-person perspectives, it describes the upheavals in the lives of Tony, Ava, Claire, and Boyd. Tony, a surgeon, leaves his wife, Ava, professor of women’s studies, for Claire, an art historian married to movie producer Boyd. The plot becomes morally complicated by Ava’s miscarriage of Tony’s child and vengeful conception of Boyd’s. Kelly Cherry, who retired from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1999, won an out-of-court settlement of her gender bias lawsuit against the university. She continues to hold the title of Eudora Welty professor of English Emerita, to teach at various universities, and to write (Murphy).

NOVELS Augusta Played. Boston: Houghton, 1979. The Lost Traveller’s Dream. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1984. My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1990. Sick and Full of Burning. New York: Viking, 1974. The Society of Friends: Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. We Can Still Be Friends. New York: Soho Press, 2003.

Steinberg, Sybil. Review of My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories, Publishers Weekly 237, no. 5 (February 2, 1990): 76. Weigel, Margaret. “Some Anti-Bridgets,” The Women’s Review of Books 20, no. 10–11 (July 2003): 33–35.

OTHER Edwards, Bob. “Profile: Artists Respond to 9/11.” Morning Edition (NPR). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1: 68067990. Accessed June 11, 2005. Murphy, Kevin. “UW SETTLES WITH EX-PROF FOR $127,500 WRITER KELLY CHERRY CLAIMED GENDER BIAS,” Wisconsin State Journal. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com.library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1: 85062551. Accessed June 11, 2005. Schneider, Pat. “ ‘Friends,’ Seems Too Familiar.” The Capital Times. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 107723576. Accessed June 11, 2005. Unsigned review of God’s Loud Hand. Publishers Weekly (February 15, 1993). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:13469787. Accessed August 27, 2005. Unsigned review of Writing the World. Publishers Weekly (April 24, 1995). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:16860214. Accessed August 27, 2005. Westhoff, Julia. “U. Wisconsin campus sex discrimination suit settled,” University Wire (January 22, 2002). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:49672406. Accessed August 27, 2005.

CHESNUTT,

CHARLES

WADDELL

SOURCES

(1858–1932) One of the most significant voices in

Bunge, Nancy L. Finding the Words: Conversations with Writers Who Teach. Athens: Swallow Press: Ohio University Press, 1985. Cherry, Kelly. The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. ———. Writing the World. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Haggas, Carol. Review of We Can Still Be Friends, Booklist 99, no. 16 (April 15, 2003): 1447. Pearl, Nancy. Review of We Can Still Be Friends, Library Journal 128, no. 7 (April 15, 2003): 120. Review of The Society of Friends, Publishers Weekly 246, no. 32 (August 9, 1999): 345.

African-American fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century, Charles Chesnutt is known for his short stories depicting a variety of lives, tales, legends, and folk customs of African Americans. But he also wrote three novels and used in these a less subtle and ironic tone. In The HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS (1900), The MARROW OF TRADITION (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905) his attack on white racism is evident. The first novel deals with characters who, like himself, were seven-eighths white and, according to Chesnutt, unwelcome in either black or white circles. The second novel focuses on one fictional town as a metaphor for the rapidly deteriorat-

CHESNUTT, CHARLES WADDELL 253

ing state of race relations in the post–Civil War South. In the third novel, Chesnutt is increasingly pessimistic about sympathetic whites who want to improve educational and social conditions for blacks. Charles Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858, to free blacks who had migrated from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Both Chesnutt’s grandfathers were white, and he could easily have passed for white himself, but he chose to identify as black. A school principal encouraged Chesnutt’s parents to let him continue his schooling until he was 16, and the result was that he became a teacher at age 16. He married Susan Perry, a fellow teacher, in 1858. After a time of restless wandering to New York City, Chesnutt decided that he wanted to become a writer. At the time of publication, Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars used the controversial subjects of miscegenation and “passing.” In the novel, Rena Walden, daughter of a white southern plantation owner and his light-skinned mistress, attempts to pass for white in a South Carolina town. Her brother, John, who has been passing for white for several years, introduces her to George Tryon, a member of the southern aristocracy, who falls in love with her. When her race is accidentally revealed, Rena tries to make a life for herself among black people, accepting a job as a schoolteacher, but she is pursued both by the lecherous principal and by Tryon himself. Rena dies trying to escape from both of them. (This is unfortunately the stereotype of the tragic mulatto.) Chesnutt hoped through this novel to penetrate the consciousness of white people. In a number of newspaper articles, Chesnutt argued that unless the laws were changed, blacks like himself—so-called octoroons—would continue to try to pass in order to improve their situations. The House Behind the Cedars sold well, and Chesnutt’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, asked him for another novel. Chesnutt had long wanted to write about the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898 and the result was his most ambitious novel, a story painted on a broad canvas. He produced the small southern town of Wellington, with a large cast of characters and two families, the powerful white Carteret family who dislike blacks and the more progressive black Miller family who believe that a more

tolerant society will see blacks and whites as equals. The two families are linked by the wives, who are half sisters. Dr. Adam Miller, the black doctor, runs the hospital and is seen as the town healer. When the town erupts in a riot, however, his son is killed and the hospital on which Miller has pinned his hopes for an assimilated society is destroyed. When Carteret summons Dr. Miller to tend to his ill son, Miller at first refuses; In the end, however, he relents, and resumes his role as doctor. The outlook for curing the bigotry that lies at the very marrow of white southern life is, however, bleak. Chesnutt’s friends advised him to avoid novels about the “race problem,” and indeed, even northern reaction to The Marrow of Tradition was evasive and nervous. Still, Chesnutt wrote one more, The Colonel’s Dream (1905). The last of his three “New South” novels was, in the opinion of scholar William L. Andrews, “the most undeluded and thoroughgoing exposé of the New South myth in the literature of his day.” Colonel Henry French, a confederate officer during the Civil War, goes north for some years, then returns to North Carolina for health reasons. He attempts to appeal to the sense of fair play and equality among his white friends in an effort to improve the situation of both blacks and poor whites, but his effort is doomed by Bill Fetters, a powerful and corrupt politician. Critics found the novel pessimistic. Chesnutt never wrote another novel. He stayed active on the lecture circuit and continued to write speeches and essays. Although his novels did not enjoy the success that they would today, he created the first truly African-American literature. There, white readers could see blacks as they were, not as the stereotypes to which those readers were accustomed; and these novels paved the way for the explosion of literary talent during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1928, Charles Waddell Chesnutt received the Spingarn Medal for his fiction depicting the lives of African Americans. In 1932, he died of arteriosclerosis in his home in Cleveland, Ohio.

NOVELS The Colonel’s Dream. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905. The House Behind the Cedars. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. The Marrow of Tradition. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901.

254 CHILD, LYDIA MARIA FRANCIS

SOURCES

CHILD,

Andrews, William L. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Chesnutt, Helen M. Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952. Baldwin, Richard E. “The Art of The Conjure Woman,” American Literature 43 (November 1971): 385–398. Bone, Robert. Down Home: Pastoral Impulse in Afro-American Short Fiction. New York: Putnam’s, 1975. Ellison, Curtis W., and E. W. Metcalf, Jr. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Gibson, Donald B. “Charles W. Chesnutt: The Anatomy of a Dream,” In Politics of Literary Expression: A Study of Major Black Writers, 125–154. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1981. Heermance, J. Noel. Charles W. Chesnutt: America’s First Great Black Novelist. Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1974. Hemenway, Robert E. “The Functions of Folklore in Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 13, no. 3 (1976): 283–309. Howells, William Dean. “Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Stories,” Atlantic Monthly 85 (May 1900): 699–701. Keller, Frances Richardson. An American Crusade: The Life of Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978. Smith, Valerie, et al., eds. African American Writers. New York: Scribner, 1991. Render, Sylvia Lyons. Charles W. Chesnutt. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Sedlack, Robert P. “The Evolution of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars,” CLA Journal 19 (December 1975): 125–135. Terry, Eugene. “Charles W. Chesnutt: A Victim of the Color Line,” Contributions to Black Studies 1, no. 1 (1977): 15–44. Wideman, John. “Charles W. Chesnutt: The Marrow of Tradition,” American Scholar 42 (Winter 1972–1973): 128–134.

(1802–1880) Although Lydia Maria Child wrote

OTHER Campbell, Donna. “Charles W. Chesnutt.” Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbell/amlit/chesnutt.htm. Accessed on August 27, 2005. The Charles Chesnutt Page. Available online. URL: http:// www.accd.edu/sac/english/bailey/chesnutt.htm. Accessed on August 26, 2005. World Wide School Library (E-texts): The House Behind the Cedars. Available online. URL: http://www.worldwideschool. org/library/books/lit/romance/TheHouseBehindTheCedars/ toc.html. Accessed on August 26, 2005.

LYDIA

MARIA

FRANCIS

the familiar lines, “Over the river and through the wood,/To grandfather’s house we’ll go,” this novelist, short-fiction writer, abolitionist, and crusader for the rights of women and Native Americans—a major figure in the mid-19th century—has been almost entirely forgotten in the last 100 years. If she is remembered at all, it is not for the poem Thanksgiving Day (1857) but for her novel Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times (1824). She wrote three other novels as well: Philothea: A Romance (1836), The Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution (1825), and A Romance of the Republic (1867). Among her 30 books, one, The Frugal Housewife (1829), went through 33 American editions. Child also wrote biographies of such influential women as the French novelist Germaine de Staël and other influential women, and edited and helped publish Harriet JACOBS’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Lydia Francis was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1802, to Convers Francis and Susannah Rand Francis. At the age of 22, she met David Lee Child, the man she would eventually marry in 1828. That same year she also published Hobomok, the story of a love affair between a Puritan woman and a Native American. Mary Conant, the fiancée of Charles Brown, a young man who is thought to be lost at sea, falls in love with Hobomok, an Indian chief. She marries him and bears his child before learning of Brown’s safe return. The novel is one of the earliest to explore the then incendiary (and now quite common) idea that people could marry across race. The Rebels, her second novel, set in Boston before the American Revolution, depicts the colonists’ fight for freedom. Philothea, set in ancient Greece, is a romance whose title character embodies the qualities of an earlier age. Her last novel, A Romance of the Republic, set during the American Civil War, is the tragic tale of a mulatta. In all her novels, Child’s concerns are clearly with the oppressed. Her talents as a novelist were matched by her abilities as an abolitionist reformer and an advocate of women’s suffrage.

CHILD OF GOD 255

NOVELS Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times. Boston: Cummings, Hillard, 1824. Philothea. A Romance. Boston: Otis, Broaders, 1836. The Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution. Boston: Cummings, Hillard, 1825. A Romance of the Republic. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867.

SOURCES Baer, Helene G. The Heart Is Like Heaven. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. Clifford, Deborah Pickman. Crusader for Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Karcher, Carolyn. The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994. ———. “A Romance of the Republic: An Abolitionist Vision of America’s Racial Destiny.” In Slavery and Literary Imagination, edited by Arnold Rampersad and Deborah E. McDowell, 81–103. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Meltzer, Milton. Tongue of Flame: The Life of Lydia Maria Child. New York: T.Y. Cromwell, 1965. Osborne, William S. Lydia Maria Child. Boston: Twayne, 1980.

CHILD OF GOD CORMAC MCCARTHY (1974) Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCARTHY spent his formative years in Knoxville, Tennessee, the setting for his fiercely exuberant fourth novel, SUTTREE (1979). Each of his previous novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), and Child of God (1974)— follows the twisted fate of tortured souls in the Appalachian hill country. Without the protective filters of parody or satire, Child of God casts an unflinching gaze at a sex-starved, rifle-toting outcast named Lester Ballad, one of the most unpleasant degenerates in literature. All the more astonishing that he is the centerpiece of what, without popular recognition or extensive critical scrutiny, represents a milestone within the Western canon. In the first part of the novel, Lester is hard to like but as a backstory emerges he might, at least, elicit a little compassion. Abandoned by his mother, witness to his father’s suicide in childhood, as an adult he is dispossessed, assaulted with an axe, and increasingly marginalized in his community. The reader’s absorp-

tion in Lester is, however, more than an empathetic response to hard times, for McCarthy portraiture works a singular kind of mesmerism that draws readers into behavior they might not like to know, behavior that is ugly in the extreme. By the time Lester becomes a serial killer of women—women whose corpses he collects in a cave for his sexual gratification—McCarthy seems to be challenging us to properly endorse or to honestly renounce the idea in the book’s title. If Lester too is not a child of God to all of us—and like all of us—where, then, is the compassion at the heart of our religions? If it is, indeed, hypocritical to stop short of Lester, is any of us equipped to embrace a necrophiliac? In revealing Lester’s life without judging it, Child of God does, in a way, embrace him, at least as a fact of nature worthy of inspection. In an authorial achievement of negative capability to rival Shakespeare, Lester’s villainy is made to feel rooted in the fabric of the cosmos itself. “A malign star kept him” (41) is one of the flashes of prose lighting by which McCarthy illuminates his subject, an observation of such clarifying insight that one is tempted to see the author as such a star himself. Therein lies the novel’s boldness and power, and that is what makes it so troubling. With Lester there is never a twinge of remorse: killing is simply how he gets along and takes a share of the world’s pleasure for himself. Lester is uncivil in the extreme, but he is not, in the conventional sense, punished by the law, although Lester’s entire life can be construed as punishment. In Child of God, every location reads like a corner of Lester’s psyche; and yet, as in all of his best work, McCarthy’s prose imparts a numinous aura to even the most desolated, downtrodden details. Some chapters depart from the third-person narrative with disembodied monologues. These colorful, front-porch perspectives on Lester add dimension to the story without diluting it, and are so well crafted they could stand as short sketches, performance pieces, or prose poems on their own. These vignettes, as with all of the book’s crisp, biting dialogue, positively sing of the region in which they are set, exemplifying the principle that great dialogue needs to be more than believable, amusing, or dramatic: it needs to be poetry, a mandate for which McCarthy is well qualified.

256 CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER

An ear for rural vernacular is similarly apparent in director Richard Pearce’s film “The Gardener’s Son” (1976), a dramatization of a historical homicide in the milltown of Graniteville, South Carolina, for which McCarthy wrote the screenplay. This superbly acted film, starring Brad Dourif and Kevin Conway, makes an interesting comparison to Child of God, for it too examines the short life of a murderer with a raw kind of pluck that is bolstered by a gun. The theme of a serial killer and necrophiliac is disturbingly dark enough to caution many an author and, of course, many a reader, but Child of God pursues it relentlessly. As the narrative proceeds, the realization that McCarthy will shy away from nothing is equally worrisome and exhilarating. Like The Gardener’s Son, and like another of McCarthy’s masterworks, BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985), which follows the escapades of marauding scalp hunters in the 19th-century Southwest, Child of God draws upon historical circumstances and, also like Blood Meridian, it is a horror story made unforgettably beautiful in the telling, a brave expedition into the secrets of human depravity in which there is nothing heroic—excepting, perhaps, the author’s prose. In judging whether McCarthy has created these works out of highbrow sensationalism or out of some antisocial strain in his own aesthetic, the reader is confronted with two undeniable facts: that such brutality has indeed occurred in this country and is latent everywhere; and that McCarthy is a writer of uncompromising integrity. For readers who are fascinated to watch a man like Lester, it is hard to imagine a better guide than McCarthy, who appears not to mind what suspicions we will hold or what conclusions we will draw about the man holding the pen. In illuminating darkness, Cormac McCarthy never lightens it: dark, in McCarthy, is very dark indeed, enthrallingly so for readers who are willing to have a look.

SOURCES Arnold, Edwin T. “Naming, Knowing and Nothingness: McCarthy’s Moral Parables.” In Perspectives On Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 45–69. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Ciuba, Gary M. “McCarthy’s Enfant Terrible: Mimetic Desire and Sacred Violence in Child of God.” In Sacred Violence. Vol. 1, Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works, edited by

Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 93–102. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Lang, John. “Lester Ballad: McCarthy’s Challenge to the Reader’s Compassion.” In Sacred Violence. Vol. 1, Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 103–111. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Luce, Dianne C. “The Cave of Oblivion: Platonic Mythology in Child of God.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, 171–198. Albuquerque: University Press of New Mexico, 2002. McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian. New York: Random House, 1985. ———. Child of God. New York: Random House, 1974. ———. The Gardener’s Son. Hopewell, N.J.: The Ecco Press, 1996. Sullivan, Nell. “The Evolution of the Dead Girlfriend Motif in Outer Dark and Child of God.” In Myth, Legend, Dust, edited by Rick Wallach, 68–77. Manchester, England: University Press of Manchester, 2000. Peter Josyph

CHILLY SCENES OF WINTER ANN BEATTIE (1976) Ann BEATTIE once said of her characters, “They are suffering. They are suffering” (Rothstein, 2). Chilly Scenes of Winter examines the particular suffering of 27-year-old Charles while he attempts to cope with his mother’s mental illness, works at a government job, talks and drinks with his sister Susan and friend Sam, and obsessively remembers a romance with a married ex-coworker named Laura. Beattie maintains a painstakingly focused and detailed gaze at Charles’s daily actions and emotions; we find out what he eats, wears, and, most important, thinks. She manages both to ground the novel in realism and to continue in the traditions of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, writers who allowed the specifics of a character’s interior life to pile up. In the words of J. D. O’Hara, who reviewed the book for The New York Times in 1976, “Beattie dramatizes our own formlessness. She is especially the artist of situations, not plots, and her novel is an excellent example of this predilection” (O’Hara, 1). Following both modernists like Joyce, and American masters like J. D. SALINGER and F. Scott FITZGERALD, Beattie is preoccupied with the day-to-day emotions of characters rather than complex plot developments.

CHIN, FRANK 257

The novel opens with Sam, Charles’s best friend, who has been drinking heavily since the recent death of his dog. Sam is successful with women in that he easily seduces them, but, like Charles, maintaining any kind of emotional attachment is nearly impossible for him. Along with his sister, Susan, Charles attempts to cope with his mother’s mental illness as well as their needy stepfather, Pete. Lonely and helpless in the face of his wife’s problems, Pete finds small happiness in novelty when he buys a Honda Civic. The purchase of the car takes on supreme importance for Pete, a man trapped seeking love from his stepchildren and trying to cure a woman whose illness he can not control. Another lost character, Pamela Smith, Charles’s ex-girlfriend, travels to and from California twice in the short time frame of the novel. Undecided about her sexual orientation and incapable of becoming attached to any person or place, Pamela reappears in Charles’s life twice in the novel asking for help and shelter. Charles provides both, and he and Sam even travel the New Jersey Turnpike in a storm to try and save her. She, too, feels no true connection to Charles, continually calling him “nice,” and leaves with her brother to return West without telling Charles. Flashbacks make up a large part of Charles’s stream of consciousness; he spends a lot of time remembering his childhood and his time with Laura. His memories of his early years are full of shame and anxiety, leading him to fear policemen and obsessively check his wallet to make sure he has enough money. At various times in the book, Charles tries to remember his father, who died when he was young. He is only able to recall a picture of a father on a glass that said “Number One Dad.” Like Pete’s attachment to his Honda Civic and Sam’s desire to hear the new Dylan song, Charles’s memory of the glass stands in for any real feeling he might have for his lost father. Charles’s boss, Bill, seeks a lost pen, a gift from his college-age son that his wife purchased for the son to give, and Beattie is interested in the way these things stand in for the connections they are supposed to symbolize. The music of the 1960s and mid-1970s create a backdrop for this novel about characters who strive for a sense of connection and true emotion in a world where even understanding one another or feeling any-

thing at all has become difficult. The attention Beattie pays to the music playing in the background of the character’s lives both creates a novel of a specific season and city and shows the isolation of the characters; we hear the story of a woman who, obsessed with Bob Dylan, sits looking out the window awaiting his arrival. Like Samuel Beckett’s characters in Waiting for Godot, Charles and Sam search for the new Dylan song or the truth about Rod Stewart’s fate for lack of anything more meaningful to think about. In a 1980 interview, Ann Beattie says about her novelistic endings, “I get into a lot of trouble with endings. They either come to me or they don’t” (Maynard, 6). She ends Chilly Scenes of Winter with Charles successfully winning back Laura, a character he has sought after and remembered for most of the book. The final scene is not a comfort, however, because one closes the book unconvinced that Laura and, particularly, Charles, will be able to overcome their own difficulties. Beattie not only chronicles the malaise of a generation in this novel, she also brings the reader to experience the internal life of her lost characters.

SOURCES Beattie, Ann. Chilly Scenes of Winter. New York: Doubleday, 1976. Maynard, Joyce. “Visiting Ann Beattie,” The New York Times on the Web. (11 May 1980). Available online. URL: http:// www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/11/reviews/beattieinterview.html. Accessed June 13, 2005. O’Hara, J. D. Review of Chilly Scenes of Winter and Distortions, New York Times on the Web (15 August 1976). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/ 98/06/28/specials/beattie-winter.html. Accessed June 13, 2005. Rothstein, Mervyn. “Ann Beattie’s Life After Real Estate,” New York Times on the Web (30 December 1985). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/ 28/specials/beattie-estate.html. Accessed June 13, 2005. Elizabeth Brewer Redwine

CHIN, FRANK (1940– ) One of the earliest Chinese-American writers to disparage the idea of Chinese-American stereotypes, playwright, critic, and poet Frank Chin is the author of two novels, DONALD DUK (1991) and Gunga Din Highway (1994). As the novel

258 CHINABERRY TREE: A NOVEL OF AMERICAN LIFE, THE

opens, Donald Duk, the 12-year-old Chinese-American protagonist of the bildungsroman named for him, is openly impatient with his name and his ethnicity. By depicting Donald in arguments with his history teacher—who mouths all the old misconceptions and stereotypes about the Chinese—Chin, with some help from Duk’s father and uncle, manages to set the record straight, rebutting the notion of so-called Chinese passivity with evidence of Chinese heroes, and adding all the Chinese names to the roster of the railroad builders (that had listed only the Irish). In Gunga Din Highway, Chin focuses again on father-son relationships, as he did in Donald Duk, mixing Chinese myth with allusions to the contemporary world. Chin teaches a lesson in ending Asian-American stereotyping by presenting satirically such characters as the protagonist, Longman Kwan, who wants to be the first Chinaman to play Charlie Chan, and Pandora Toy, a clear parody of Chinese-American author Maxine Hong KINGSTON (Kingston had parodied Chin in her earlier novel, TRIPMASTER MONKEY [1989]). Critics are divided between those who find Chin a talented and significant novelist, and those who, like Claudia Ricci, find Chin’s cynical and “disdainful” tone deprecating (quoted in Huang, 54). Popularly known in some circles as the “Godfather” of Asian-American literature, Chin gained such a reputation by coediting the landmark Asian-American anthology, Aiiieeeee! (1974) and The Big Aiiieeeee! (1991). Although at odds with a number of Asian Americans who, in their diversity, have naturally moved in different directions, Frank Chin is unquestionably a significant force as a novelist as well as critic, playwright, story writer, and essayist.

NOVELS Donald Duk. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House, 1991. Gunga Din Highway. Minneapolis, Minn.: Coffee House, 1994.

SOURCES Chin, Frank. “Frank Chin: An Interview with Robert Murray Davis,” Amerasia 14, no. 2 (1998): 81–95. Huang, Guiyou. “Frank Chin.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 48–55. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

CHINABERRY TREE: A NOVEL OF AMERICAN LIFE, THE JESSIE REDMON FAUSET (1931)

Jessie Redmon FAUSET was, for many decades, regarded mainly for her productive encouragement of other black writers—she is still renowned for being one of the “midwives” of the Harlem Renaissance. But for some years now, her four novels have been read with renewed vigor by feminist critics in particular (Fauset’s novels all lament the marginalization of women in post–World War I culture) and by critics keen to stress the role that African-American writers have played in the development of the American novel. Fauset’s novels also serve as a historical example of a writer asserting the worth of black identity. Unsympathetic characters in her novels tend to be light-skinned blacks who never repent for “passing” as white—the almost grotesque Olivia in Comedy: American Style, who endures a lonely existence as a result of quashing her links with darker-skinned African Americans, is one such character. Fauset’s heroines, contrarily, tend to be young black women who initially “pass” as white, but who mature into accepting the intrinsic worth of their colored identity, ending their “passing,” and willfully rejecting the then dominant notion that whiteness is inherently superior to blackness—such a progression is made by Angela in Plum Bun. Fauset’s stories are always told by omniscient narrators, who often reveal historical injustices—the generations-long discrimination against the black side of the Bye family in There Is Confusion is typical. Historical acts of infidelity and harsh treatment of women are also focused upon: 1931’s The Chinaberry Tree, the third novel by Fauset, is typical in this regard. The action is set within the middle-class and working-class black communities of Red Brook, a typical “little hick town” in New Jersey. One third of the way into the novel, it becomes obvious that the main character, Melissa Paul, is pursuing a doomed relationship with a local man, the rich, conservative Malory Forten. Wrongly, Melissa believes that her parents were married. In fact, she was fathered by Malory’s father, who had an affair with Melissa’s mother. If consummated, the relationship between Malory and his half sister would constitute incest. The narrator manipulates the reader, heightening anxiety: will the couple marry, and

CHINABERRY TREE: A NOVEL OF AMERICAN LIFE, THE 259

perpetrate the ultimate sexual taboo? Or will they find out the painful truth beforehand? We wait until the day of their planned elopement to find out. Allusive to ancient Greek tragedy, the novel’s tension rises—with self-conscious, theatrical language, the narrator asks: will The Chinaberry Tree end in tragedy or in comedy? The reader does not find out until the last few pages of the 300-plus-page book. Male characters are held responsible for the majority of the cruelties that occur in Red Brook. Melissa’s mother was not an enthusiastic participant in the adulterous relationship with Sylvester Forten—the man simply “wouldn’t leave Judy [Melissa’s mother] alone.” Men are possessive and greedy, keen on “hunting” for women and for female deference. Forten, indeed, appears almost like a pantomime villain. Earlier on, the narrator has condemned his “unhampered selfishness,” and his contempt for his female kin: he “sneered at his wife” and “despised his two plain little girls.” Melissa’s cousin, Laurentine Strange, is shunned, because she is illegitimate, the product of a relationship between a black woman and a reckless, married white man, Colonel Halloway. Men seem to translate women into commodities: one particularly aggressive youth, Harry Robbins would “do anything to possess” Melissa. Even the novel’s most sympathetic male, Asshur Lane, has a habit of hectoring and patronizing women, telling Melissa, repeatedly, that “you must be good.” So bored is Melissa by his moralizing and by his concealed but profound superciliousness, that his repetitiveness “sent her yawning to bed.” Fauset’s heroines will not accept endless condescension from unimaginative males. In addition to the problems caused by predatory males, Fauset’s female characters must also deal with “this nonsense about color.” Although The Chinaberry Tree conveys anger at the second-class status of blacks—a system of oppression typified by a ludicrous restaurant argument, when Malory and Melissa aren’t allowed to choose from the entire range of desserts— the novel is more preoccupied with class differences between African Americans. Some black communities are disregarded by those blacks who progress to be doctors and successful dressmakers. The affluent Malory, for example, has “absolutely no feeling about color,” and has no care for less well-off blacks: “no one could

surpass him,” so other blacks’ plights do not concern him. Such attitudes cause division within black communities, and impede efforts to advance a united front against whites’ discrimination. At the other end of the social scale, a young black woman, the “sulky” Pelasgie Stede, bitterly resents having to serve better-off blacks; her only pleasure is to prattle viciously about the alleged misdoings of the middle-class blacks, resenting them more than whites. One such misdeed is a public fight between Robbins and Lane over Melissa. A racist newspaper editor sees the fight, and plans to report it, to cause embarrassment for the Strange family. Only a sort of bribe from a businessman, who is courting Laurentine, prevents him from publishing the story. But blacks can be bribed too. The Stranges’ old black gardener, Stede, always asserts, amusingly, that he never asks for food, but he hints that he wants food with blatant desire. He could not refuse “Pentecost” if “suthin’ sweet was set before me.” Generously giving food— “Pentecost”—to Stede leads to “ample and satisfactory rewards”—good service. Red Brook, then, is not a community, but a gathering of self-interested individuals. When networks of mutual flattery and self-serving facades of community spirit break down, or when masculine urges cause the fracturing of marital unions, it is female characters who suffer most.

SOURCES Allen, Carol. Black Women Intellectuals: Strategies of Nation, Family, and Neighborhood, 47–76. New York: Garland, 1998. Austin, Rhonda. “Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961).” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 101–106. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Calloway, Licia Morrow. Black Family (Dys)Function in Novels by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Fannie Hart. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Fauset, Jessie Redmon. The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life. New York: Stokes, 1931. Gale, Zona. Foreword to The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, by Jessie Redmon Fauset. College Park, Md.: McGrath Publishing, 1969, vii–viii. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

260 CHOI, SUSAN

Knopf, Marcy Jane. Foreword to Jessie Redmon Fauset. “The Chinaberry Tree” and Selected Writings, edited by Marcy Jane Knopf, ix–xxix. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Lupton, Mary Jane. “Bad Blood in Jersey: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree,” CLA Journal 27, no. 4 (1984): 383–392. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Schenck, Mary Jane. “Jessie Fauset: The Politics of Fulfillment vs. the Lost Generation,” South Atlantic Review 66, no. 1 (2001): 102–125. Stetz, Margaret D. “Jessie Fauset’s Fiction: Reconsidering Race and Revising Aestheticism.” In Literature and Racial Ambiguity, edited by Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks, 253–270. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitsun Publishing, 1981. Tomlinson, Susan. “ ‘An Unwanted Coquetry’: The Commercial Seductions of Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree.” In Middlebrow Moderns: Popular American Women Writers of the 1920s, edited by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith, 227–243. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Zafar, Ratia. “Fictions of the Harlem Renaissance.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature. Vol. 6, Prose Writing, 1910–1950, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch, 320–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kevin De Ornellas

CHOI, SUSAN (1969– ) Susan Choi has all the auguries of an auspicious career. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the American Book Award. Although, as with many Asian-American writers, Choi’s fiction focuses on the experiences of immigrants to the United States, The Foreign Student is propelled by her fresh approach as she introduces two unlikely characters in their late 20s into the small college town of Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1955. Ahn Chang, the student of the title, is traumatized by memories of the Korean War, and falls in love with Katherine Monroe, a professor’s daughter who has her own traumas to contend with: hers involve seduction by a close friend of her parents during her girlhood. These nightmarish recollections are heightened, rather than muted, by their juxtaposition to the peaceful, dreamlike, southern college setting. Intriguing, as well, is Choi’s uncon-

ventional use of language: As critic Elizabeth Fitzpatrick notes, Choi seems to distrust language “as a means of communicating experience”; instead, Choi implies communication through “small acts that take the place of language—feeding, providing ashtrays, sitting in silence with a bedridden uncle” (Fitzpatrick, 61). Both the characters and the readers learn to read the small services and the silences that serve as bridges between these two strangers. Choi was born in 1969 in Indiana to a Korean immigrant father and an American mother of Russian-Jewish descent. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University and later enrolled in the master’s program in creative writing at Cornell University. She currently lives and writes in New York City.

NOVEL The Foreign Student. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

SOURCE Fitzpatrick, Elizabeth. “Susan Choi.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 60–63. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

CHOPIN, KATE (1851–1904) Kate Chopin, the acclaimed author of the now classic novel The AWAKENING (1899) and of an impressive body of short fiction, focused on women as characters; she revealed the startling discrepancies between them and the men in their lives. She was undeniably unconventional for her era and region, especially in her attention to the solitary artist, and to women’s changing identity as they sought social and financial independence and decreased dependence on men. Although a general furor and an outraged sense of morality greeted The Awakening, by the end of her career Chopin had managed to write two novels and nearly 100 short stories as well as essays and poems. Nearly all them portray the truth about women—as Chopin saw it—especially how they would act and feel were their lives not dictated by societal norms and male expectations. A native of St. Louis, Chopin was born on February 8, 1851, to Thomas O’Flaherty and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty. When she was five years old her father was killed in a railroad accident, leaving his 21-year-old widow

THE CHOSEN 261

wealthy and independent. Raised in a household that consisted of mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Chopin graduated from the Sacred Heart Academy in 1868, and on June 9, 1870, married Oscar Chopin, son of a Louisiana cotton planter. By 1879 the couple had six children. After her husband’s death three years later, the 39-year old Chopin moved back to St. Louis with her mother. Her writing career, in which she drew on both the New Orleans and Cloutierville environments where she had lived with her husband, began. Chopin’s first novel, At Fault, published in 1890, features Thérése LaFirme, a Creole widow in love with David Hosmer, a married man and a Yankee sawmill owner. Here Chopin presents the clash between northern urban industrialism and southern plantation life through the twin settings of St. Louis and rural Louisiana. The autobiographical sources for this novel are fairly obvious: after her own husband’s death, Chopin managed his remaining plantations and had an affair with Albert Sampite, a married planter. As she would later in The Awakening, Chopin examines unhappy marriages and the question of divorce in a rational, unemotional manner. In The Awakening, it is Mme. Edna Pontellier who does not love her husband, Léonce, a New Orleans businessman; she engages in highly charged romances with Robert Lebrun, a bachelor, and Alcée Arobin, the local lothario. The critical firestorm that greeted The Awakening effectively ended Chopin’s writing career: her publisher canceled her new story collection, A Vocation and a Voice, and Chopin did not even attempt to publish “The Storm,” a steamy, frank depiction of sexuality. (Both eventually were published, in 1991 and 1969, respectively.) Kate Chopin lived only five more years. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage on August 22, 1904 and was buried in the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. A century later, her work is studied in nearly every American literature classroom. Most of Chopin’s papers are housed at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis.

NOVELS At Fault. St. Louis, Mo.: Nixon-Jones Printing Co., 1890. The Awakening. Chicago, Ill., & New York: 1899. New York: Norton, 1976. Unpublished novel Young Dr. Gosse.

SOURCES Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. Kate Chopin. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bonner, Thomas. The Kate Chopin Companion, with Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Boren, Lynda, and Sara de Saussure Davis, eds. Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Boynton, Victoria. “Kate Chopin.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight, 50–60. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (two volumes). Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Jones, Ann Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Kaur, Iqbal, ed. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening: Critical Essays. New Delhi, India: Deep and Deep Publications, 1995. Petry, Alice Hall, ed. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1996. Scaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1985. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Springer, Marlene, ed. Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

THE CHOSEN CHAIM POTOK (1967)

Chaim POTOK’s The Chosen is a novel about Orthodox and Hasidic Jews living in Brooklyn toward the end of World War II, written in a contemporary vernacular. It is about two kinds of orthodoxy and about two subcultures confronting each other. It is also a kind of love story, about Danny and Reuven, not another angst-ridden novel about alienation. In The Chosen, set in the Crown Heights and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, a baseball game between an orthodox team and a Hasidic team brings together Danny Saunders, son of the rebbe, and Reuven Malter, son of a Zionist activist talmudic scholar. Danny, elevating the game to a Holy War, purposely hits

262 CHRIST IN CONCRETE

Reuven with a ball, sending him to the hospital. At the hospital Danny makes amends and in the doing they become fast friends, which is frowned on by the rebbe. Meantime Reb Saunders, the tzaddik (the wise one, leader of the sect), believing that there is a danger that his son’s soul might be dominated by his mind, decides to speak to him in silence. In this way he will foster the values of heart and soul. Mr. Malter, viewed by the Hasidim as a rationalist and not a true believer, fuses the best secular learning with the best in talmudic scholarship. What happens is that as the relationship between Danny and Reuven ripens, Danny decides to become a psychologist, abdicating his role as heir to his father, while Reuven decides to become a rabbi, a rabbi to whom symbolic logic, math, and secular philosophy would help fuse the sacred and the secular. Each was combining two culture and each was reflecting his and Potok’s own attempts as a zwischenmensch (a between person) to explore the role of Judaism in a secular society. The Chosen, for all its religious character, is a highly American novel. As Sheldon Grebstein has pointed out, it is reminiscent of the American cultural myth at the heart of the Horatio Alger stories and The Great Gatsby, optimism and the dream of success. Potok is demonstrating the collision of two subcultures in an American context. As Tony Savio (an exboxer in the hospital who may lose an eye because of ring injuries) warns Reuven about Danny: “Real religious guy? Fanatic.” One of the points made by Potok is that religion is a fine thing—but not the destructive, all-consuming inflexible kind practiced by the Hasidim. Danny’s decision at the end to become a psychologist includes the use of Freud and talmudic study, as he is determined to continue to be an observant Jew. In The Chosen Danny and Reuven represent the two poles within Orthodox Judaism. In that space lie the tensions Potok was exploring. As a writer, as a rabbi, as a scholar he was trying to understand and explain the forces that exist and the cultural confrontations he saw, as Judaism, traditional and modern, came in contact with the world we all know.

SOURCES Alexander, Edward. Chaim Potok. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

Grebstein, Sheldon. “The Phenomenon of the Really Best Seller: Chaim Potok’s The Chosen,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring 1975): 23–31. Nissenson, Hugh. “The Spark and the Shell,” New York Times Book Review, 7 May 1967, p. 4. Potok, Chaim. The Chosen. New York: Knopf, 1967. ———. “Reply to a Semi-Sympathetic Critic,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1976): 30–34. Rosen, Jonathan. “Chaim Potok and the Question of Jewish Writing.” In Chaim Potok and Jewish American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2002. Sternlicht, Sanford. Chaim Potok. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Walden, Daniel, ed. Conversations with Chaim Potok. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. ———. “The World of Chaim Potok,” whole issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring 1975). Daniel Walden

CHRIST IN CONCRETE PIETRO

DI DONATO (1939) Geremio is a proud bricklayer, emigrated

from Italy and living on New York’s Lower East Side. He works on a job with his fellow immigrants and tries to keep them safe as their site boss cuts corners on building materials and safety procedures. The novel opens on Good Friday, and Geremio is anticipating payday. He has just bought his own house for his wife, Annunziata and their seven children, and thinks that life in America epitomizes the dream it promises. On that day, however, Geremio falls victim to a horrific industrial accident, one of the most harrowing in American literature. Because of weakened mortar, the brick wall built by his crew collapses and hurls Geremio into the mortar forms, his arms outstretched in the form of a crucifix, as the mortar and forms smother and crush him. DI DONATO takes the reader into the anguished mind of Geremio as he feels his bones break into fragments, as he desperately uses his teeth to try to gnaw through the forms so that he can breathe and call for help. We hear him pray and we hear him lament his loss of his family and future. This tortured man at the opening of Christ in Concrete, initiates a tale of rage at the injustices perpetrated by big business on the underpaid, underprotected, and underrespected immigrant workers of the early 20th century. From the moment of Geremio’s

CHU, LOUIS HING 263

death, the humiliation and destruction of his family is sealed. Di Donato, fictionalizing only slightly events from his own childhood, details the promises made to his immigrant family, particularly by the American company that employed the father. The story is told by Geremio’s oldest son, Paul. Paul’s parents hope that Paul will become a real American and acquire the advantages they never had: Paul attends school, and he hopes to become a radio operator. With his father’s death, however, the dreams for Paul evaporate. Even though he is barely 12, he must now be the man, the father, So Paul sets out to be a bricklayer, just as he would have done in the Old Country. Despite his youth, his father’s co-workers help him to keep up with the older men, especially after the resultant hearing on the worksite death: The committee blames Geremio, thereby allowing Boss Murdin to escape any fines or payments to Geremio’s family. Paul searches for help as his family’s burdens grow: His mother gives birth to his seventh sibling, his uncle breaks his leg and can now only work with the women doing sweatshop piecework at home. Paul looks to the Catholic Church to help his family in their profound hunger, but he finds only a self-interested priest who stuffs his face as he spouts clichés about God providing for those in need. Di Donato presents Catholicism, and its ties to Italian family customs, as the center of the lives of the working poor, who manage to derive joy in their impoverished lives and talk themselves through tragedies. Di Donato’s point is clear: In America the church is no help, and the only solace derives from the family itself, as it attempts to aid and heal. For di Donato, the only god in America is the one that Geremio calls God Job. Job is what offers the immigrants their fragile chances at American success: a house and money. Job is also the god who continually crucifies those who are most supplicating and vulnerable before him. By redefining God as the American middle-class work ethnic, the author suggests that the true religion of America is Protestantism, especially as it deals out tough pragmatism and individuals-only salvations. The novel closes with Paul spiritually and physically breaking the heart of his faithful mother, Annunziata, by renouncing his belief in God. Annunziata, who has

given life and love to her children (even as she has had to sacrifice Paul’s childhood in order to feed them all), cannot accept the American god, who says that “too many” children are not gifts, but self-indulgence and lack of self-control. Distrusting both Catholicism and Protestantism, Paul sees nothing in either the Italian or American God. His mother collapses and dies as he insists on his own truth and his own bitterness. Christ in Concrete distinguishes itself as a workingclass novel, with such common features as the alienation of work, the brutality of corporations and the wealthy, and its view of religion as complicit in the weakening and demonizing of working-class people. The novel is also distinguished in the features it eschews: rejecting the “happy ending” cliché, it refuses to focus on Paul as an exceptional child who must “escape” the burden of his family and his class through education and self-advancement. Paul remains with his family and class, who need him, and within him his unrequited rage continues to smolder.

SOURCE di Donato. Pietro. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet Classic, 1993. Carolyn Whitson

CHU, LOUIS HING (1915–1970) Louis Hing Chu, a novelist now celebrated by Chinese-American critics and scholars for his contribution to the ChineseAmerican literary tradition, was unknown during his lifetime. His novel, EAT A BOWL OF TEA, played a pivotal role in upsetting dichotomous stereotypes about Chinese immigrants, that is, that they are good and loyal servants who need to be saved by the white man’s religion, or that they are evil and inscrutable villains long past saving. In Eat A Bowl of Tea, as the critic Shunzhu Wang points out, Chu depicts the people of Chinatown with realistic detail and without a hint of “exoticism” or “Orientalism” (Wang, 70). Born on October 1, 1915, in Canton, China, Chu and his family immigrated to the United States in 1924 and settled in Newark, New Jersey. After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Upsala College in 1937, Chu earned a master’s degree in sociology from New York University in 1940. During World War II he

264 CHUTE, CAROLYN

served for two years with the U.S. Army in Kunming, China. Under the War Brides Act of 1945, he returned to China to marry Kang Wong. The couple moved to New York’s Chinatown where they raised their four children, ran “Chinese Festival,” a Chinese daily radio program, and opened Acme Co., a record shop. Chu also took creative writing courses at the New School for Social Research. Eat A Bowl of Tea is read today for its unflinching portrait of Chinese-American bachelors without appropriate marriage partners, and interweaves such themes as racial bigotry, “Tong” or gang issues, and marriage crises (Wang, 71). Although only briefly reviewed on its publication in 1961, the novel has been reissued twice since its rediscovery by Asian scholars; Chu is included in the landmark anthology, Aiiieeeee! (1974). Today, Chu’s place in American literary history appears to be solid and his work continues to invite interpretation and commentary.

Hawkes, a factory worker, from 1963 to 1972, and married Michael Chute, a woodcutter, in 1978. After working in restaurants, factories, hospitals, on farms, and in schools, Chute published The Beans of Egypt, Maine, a book that focuses on a backwoods family named Bean and is told through the narrative viewpoint of Earlene, a neighbor. Earlene marries Beal Bean and later “takes up” with his cousin Reuben Bean, the man who may actually be her father. The novel is replete with the antics of the Beans: shooting, rampaging, copulation, and incest— written in Chute’s rhythmic and lyrical style. The novel produced many negative reactions to this behavior, and Chute refused to apologize or offer an opinion on either the behavior or the criticism. Carolyn Chute followed with four novels: Metal Man (1988), Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts (1988), MERRY MEN (1994), and Snow Man (1999). She lives with her husband in Parsonsfield, Maine, where she continues to write and take an active role in the 2nd Maine Militia.

NOVEL

NOVELS

Eat A Bowl of Tea. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979.

The Beans of Egypt, Maine. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1985. Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. Merry Men. New York: Harcourt Brace. 1994. Metal Man. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. Snow Man. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999.

SOURCES Chan, Jeffery. Introduction to Eat A Bowl of Tea, 1–5. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to Their Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Wang, Shunzhu. “Louis Hing Chu.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. 68–75. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

CHUTE, CAROLYN (1947– )

Carolyn Chute has written five novels and a number of as yet uncollected short stories. Her first novel, The BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE (1985), the grimly humorous tale of an impoverished family in rural Maine, was an instant best-seller that earned Chute comparisons with rural folk creators (especially of poor and uneducated characters) from William FAULKNER, Erskine CALDWELL, and Kaye GIBBONS, to Alice WALKER. Carolyn Chute was born on June 14, 1947, in Portland, Maine, to Joseph R. Chute, a salesman, and Annie Penny Prindall Chute. She was married to James

SOURCES Bruckner, D. J. R. Review of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, New York Times, 4 January 1985, p. C28. Harris, Bertha. Review of The Beans of Egypt, Maine, by Carolyn Chute, New York Times Book Review, 4 January 1985, p. C28.

OTHER Salon.com, “Wicked Good Militia.” Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/08/features/maine.html. Accessed June 13, 2005.

CIDER HOUSE RULES, THE JOHN IRVING (1985) Frequently compared to Charles Dickens, critically acclaimed writer John IRVING makes use of the bildungsroman genre in his sixth novel The Cider House Rules (1985). The novel follows the development of orphan Homer Wells, from his childhood during the early 20th century at St. Cloud’s orphanage in Maine, to his adult life at an orchard, and eventually

CIDER HOUSE RULES, THE 265

back to St. Cloud’s, where he replaces Dr. Wilbur Larch, whose obstetrical work includes deliveries and abortions. However, Homer’s reasons for his return to St. Cloud’s, like the issue of abortion itself, are neither clear-cut nor easily reconciled. As Homer, Larch, and other characters try to live by inflexible rules “symbolized in the unread list of rules posted in the cider house,” Irving presents a forum for his readers to consider the many sides to the issue of choice. The plot of Cider House develops sequentially, except for an early flashback into Larch’s life and background. His youthful experiences with a prostitute who gives him gonorrhea and also dies from a botched abortion, and whose daughter dies from another botched abortion, contribute to his developing conviction of the need for safe and legal abortions. At St. Cloud’s orphanage, Larch resolves: “He would deliver babies. He would deliver mothers, too” (75). In other words, he would deliver children and perform abortions, with the assistance of his loyal staff. The language Larch uses to describe his work has particular relevance. Whereas his medical colleagues refer to the birth delivery as “the Lord’s work” and abortions as “the Devil’s work” (75), Larch regards both operations as “the Lord’s work,” deliberately sidestepping the legal question of abortion and acting primarily on the level of practicality: as long as there are unwanted children in the world, Larch decides, abortion is necessary. While the early chapters focus on Larch, who also maintains a lifetime ether addition, most of Cider House focuses on Homer Wells, one of the orphans Larch delivers at St. Cloud’s. In the midst of equally complex characters, Homer’s development from child to adult in part seems to be what earns Irving the comparison to Dickens in that Homer’s story is one of becoming, although in a sense his story is a sequel to Larch’s. Under the doctor’s loving care and tutelage, Homer becomes a skilled obstetrician. It is Larch’s hope that Homer will one day perform “the Lord’s work,” all of it, when the doctor can no longer continue at St. Cloud’s. But after finding an aborted fetus, Homer decides that he is morally opposed to abortion: “Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It’s his choice. If it’s a fetus, to him that’s fine. It’s a baby to me,

thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too” (169). Heartbroken, but hopeful that Homer will return one day to St. Cloud’s to perform “the Lord’s work,” Larch allows Homer to leave with his new friends, a happy, unmarried couple, Candy Kendall and Wally Worthington, who have sought Larch’s abortion services. While Wally is away fighting in World War II, Homer becomes increasingly aware of his love for Candy, who reciprocates only when they both believe that Wally has died in the war. Homer and Candy have a child, Angel, but when Wally does return home, paralyzed from the waist down, Candy marries Wally. Yet the three friends remain in Maine to raise Angel together at the Worthington family orchard, although the secret of Angel’s parentage is kept from the boy and Wally. Homer settles into his unconventional family life, and for 15 years he resists Larch’s desire for his return to St. Cloud’s. However, Homer is confronted by the “necessity” of abortion when Rose Rose, the daughter of the orchard foreman, Mr. Rose, is impregnated by her father. Following the ether death of Larch, Homer performs an abortion on Rose Rose, and he and Candy reveal their secret to Wally and Angel. Then Homer resigns himself to sharing Larch’s view on the practical necessity of abortion: “[I]f he could operate on Rose Rose, how could he refuse to help a stranger? How could he refuse anyone? Only a god makes that kind of decision. I’ll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion” (535). Homer’s resolution and the issue of abortion was secondary to the initial conception of Cider House, according to Irving, who explained how the issue first developed through Larch’s character: “[W]hat doctor would be most sympathetic to performing abortions but the doctor who delivered unwanted babies, then cared for them in an orphanage?” (quoted in Campbell, 107). Although Larch’s appearance in the novel initiates the underlying “conversation” about abortion, Irving extends this conversation to the challenges of principled living in a world fraught with ambiguity. Larch chooses to deliver babies and mothers, an ethical choice he makes based on his experiences as a younger man. Similarly, Homer must set the standards of his life by making his own choices and witnessing

266 CISNEROS, SANDRA

their consequences. After living with Candy, Wally, and Angel in the ambiguous state of “waiting and seeing,” Homer confronts his avoidance—and Candy’s avoidance—of making a definitive choice about their family life, which is as insular and loving as it is fractured and dishonest. Josie Campbell draws the parallel between Homer’s family and the issue of abortion: “The complexities of their triangular relationship are resonant of the complexities of the abortion debate. In neither case is there necessarily a right answer” (117–118). Homer’s development as a character hinges on his perception of life’s ambiguities. Therefore, his development also depends upon his ability to negotiate rules, which he discovers can change as situations change. Homer, like Candy, Wally, Larch, Rose Rose, and Mr. Rose, make up their own rules when conventional “rules” and standards no longer fit the ethical choices they make. By the end of the novel, Homer finds resolution about where he belongs and about performing abortions, but readers may not find the same resolution as easily. Although choice is the underlying ethical stance in Cider House, Irving allows his readers to make up their own minds about abortion, using the complex lives of his characters to posit the difficulties of living moral lives in an ambiguous universe.

SOURCES Campbell, Josie P. John Irving: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Irving, John. The Cider House Rules. 1985. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. Heather Ostman

CISNEROS, SANDRA (1954– ) Transforming her well-deserved reputation as an excellent poet, over the last two decades Sandra Cisneros published two novels and a collection of critically acclaimed short fiction. As critics frequently note, her work exhibits lyrically expressed images of Latinas, sometimes victimized but more often fierce, strong, and independent. Typically, her women transcend poverty, machismo, racism, and the guilt instilled in them by a Catholic upbringing to become educated, successful women who feel a sense of divided loyalty between the United States and Mexico. Cisneros won the Before Columbus

Foundation’s American Book Award for her first novel, The HOUSE ON MANGO STREET (1984), which was praised for a mix of poetry and prose, and, 18 years later, her second, Caramelo (2003), received good reviews. Sandra Cisneros was born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in 1976, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1978. The House on Mango Street, a female bildungsroman that took Cisneros five years to write, features a young girl named Esperanza who grows to maturity in a cracked and peeling house on Mango Street in a Chicago Latino neighborhood. Cisneros uses carefully crafted monologues to present Esperanza and they become more sophisticated after Esperanza is raped and her female role models encourage her to become a writer. Cisneros’ most recent novel, Caramelo, is divided into three parts, the first devoted to the family of Lala Reyes, the second to her grandmother, and the third to Lala’s own coming of age. Set in Mexico, Chicago, and Texas, the book moves from past to present; Cisneros uses magical realism as she recounts the numerous family stories. Sandra Cisneros’s work, particularly The House on Mango Street, is regularly discussed in high school and college literature courses. Like her character Esperanza, Cisneros devotes much of her time to fostering the careers of other Latinas. The House on Mango Street was performed as a play in Chicago at the Edgewater Theater on October 16, 1992. Sandra Cisneros lives in San Antonio in a house painted purple, a traditional Mexican color that expresses Mexican pride but that caused a furor among some members of the neighborhood historical association (Rimer, S8).

NOVELS Caramelo. New York: Knopf, 2003. The House on Mango Street. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1984.

SOURCES Campbell, Bebe Moore. “Crossing Borders,” New York Times Book Review, 26 May 1991, p. 6. Chesla, Elizabeth L. Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street.” Piscataway, N.J.: Research & Education Association, 1996.

CLANCY, TOM 267

Cisneros, Sandra. “An interview with Sandra Cisneros.” By Raúl Niño. Booklist 90, no. 1 (September 1, 1993): 367. ———. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” By Pilar E. Rodríguez Aranda. Americas Review 18 (Spring 1991): 64–80. Doyle, Jacqueline. “More Room of Her Own: Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,” The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) 19, no. 4. (Winter 1994): 5–35. Ganz, Robin. “Sandra Cisneros: Border Crossings and Beyond,” MELUS 19, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 1,929. Herrera-Sobek, María. “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction.” In Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, edited by María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes, 171–181. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1988. Kanoza, Theresa. “Esperanza’s Mango Street: Home for Keeps.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 25, no. 3 (May 1995): 9. Kingsolver, Barbara. “Fiction with a Tex-Mex Tilt,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 April 1991, pp. 3, 12. Matchie, Thomas. “Literary Continuity in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,” The Midwest Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 6,779. Mirriam-Goldberg, Caryn. Sandra Cisneros: Latina Writer and Activist. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1998. Mullen, Harryette. “ ‘A Silence between Us Like a Language’: The Untranslatability of Experience in Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 320. Olivares, Julian. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and the ‘Poetics of Space.’ ” In Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, edited by María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes, 160–170. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1988. Rimer, Sara. “Novelist’s Purple Palette Is Not to Everyone’s Taste,” New York Times, 13 July 1998, p. S8. Soto, Gary. “Voices of Sadness & Science,” The Bloomsbury Review 8, no. 4 (July–August 1988): 21. Thomson, Jeff. “ ‘What Is Called Heaven’: Identity in Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek,” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 41,524. Accessed July 11, 2005.

OTHER Cisneros, Sandra. “Audio Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” By Don Swaim. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/sandracisneros/. Accessed June 13, 2005. Sandra Cisneros: Teacher Resource File. Available online. URL: http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/cisneros.html. Accessed July 11, 2005.

VG: Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. “Sandra Cisneros.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn. edu/vg/Bios/entries/cisneros_sandra.html. Accessed June 13, 2005.

CLANCY, TOM (1947– ) Tom Clancy is among the most successful and innovative writers of the techno-thriller, a recently popularized genre that incorporates espionage, thriller, and science fiction. One of the most popular writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the market for Clancy’s highly researched, suspenseful thrillers that range from the end of the cold war to contemporary terrorist issues shows no signs of abating. Clancy’s phenomenally successful debut novel, The HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1984), introduced Jack Ryan, the hero of numerous Clancy novels. Subsequent popular Clancy protagonists include U.S. Navy SEAL John Kelly. Tom Clancy was born Thomas Lanier Clancy, Jr., in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1947. His father worked as a mail carrier and credit employee, and his mother was a department store employee. Clancy was educated at Loyola College in Baltimore, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1969. That same year, in August, he married Wanda Thomas, an insurance agency manager; after working for more than a decade as an insurance agent, Clancy made publishing history when The Hunt For Red October topped the best-seller lists despite its initially small printing by the Naval Institute Press. Filled with technical expertise, believable characters, and a suspenseful chase after a defecting Russian nuclear submarine, the novel was followed by the futuristic Red Storm Rising (1986) which takes place during a third world war sparked by a Muslim fundamentalist bombing of a Siberian oil refinery. It features air force first lieutenant and meteorologist Mike Edwards as the hero; Patriot Games, set in both London, England, and the Washington, D.C., area, again features Jack Ryan, professor of naval history at Annapolis and CIA operative, and involves the British royal family and I.R.A. terrorists; The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988), set in the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, and the United States, has Jack Ryan racing against time as the United States seeks to deploy a missile defense system ahead of the Soviets; Clear and Present

268 CLANCY, TOM

Danger (1989) sends Jack Ryan, now acting head of the CIA, into the midst of the murky wars against South American drug cartels; and The Sum of All Fears (1991) involves the detonation of a nuclear missile during a National Football League Super Bowl game as Ryan seeks to end hostilities between Arabs and Israelis. Without Remorse (1993), set during the 1970s, introduces ex-Navy SEAL John Kelly who embarks on a covert CIA rescue mission of Vietnam POWs and is given the identity of John Clark. Jack Ryan reappears as national security adviser in Debt of Honor (1994), and then as vice president, when he works with John Clark; a Japanese kamikaze pilot crashes into the U.S. Capitol and Ryan becomes the president of the United States. Executive Orders (1996), continues where Debt of Honor ended and President Ryan struggles to reestablish the U.S. government. He must contend with Mideast wars and trouble at home. Rainbow Six (1998) features the return of John Clark, whom Clancy repeatedly refers to as the “dark side” of Jack Ryan; Clark is now ex-CIA and leader of a group of international counterterrorists. Tom Clancy, who was divorced a few years ago, lives and writes in his Huntingtown, Maryland, estate overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. Three of Clancy’s novels have been made into feature-length films. The Hunt for Red October starred Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin in 1990; Patriot Games starred Harrison Ford and Anne Archer in 1992; and Clear and Present Danger starred Harrison Ford and Willem Dafoe in 1994. His most recent novel is The Teeth of the Tiger (2003).

NOVELS The Bear and the Dragon. New York: Putnam, 2000. The Cardinal of the Kremlin. New York: Putnam, 1988. Clear and Present Danger. New York: Putnam, 1989. The Deadliest Game. New York: Berkley, 1999. Debt of Honor. New York: Putnam, 1994. Executive Orders. New York: Putnam, 1996. The Hunt for Red October. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1984. Net Force: Hidden Agenda. New York: Berkley, 2000. Night Moves. New York: Berkley, 1999. Op-Center. Thorndike, Me.: Thorndike Press, 1995. Patriot Games. New York: Putnam, 1987.

Patriot Games (film version). New York: Berkley, 1992. Private Lives. New York: Berkley, 2000. Rainbow Six. New York: Putnam, 1998. Red Storm Rising. New York: Putnam, 1986. Shadow of Honor. New York: Berkley, 2000. SSN (with Martin Greenberg). New York: Berkley, 2000. The Sum of All Fears. New York: Putnam, 1991. The Teeth of the Tiger. New York: Putnam, 2003. Tom Clancy’s Net Force. New York: Berkley, 1999. Virtual Vandals. New York: Berkley, 1999. Without Remorse. New York: Putnam, 1994.

SOURCES Abrams, Elliott. “Operation Showboat: A Real War on Drugs,” Wall Street Journal, 16 August 1989, p. A10. Anderson, Patrick. “King of the ‘Techno-Thriller’ Or: How Tom Clancy Quit Selling Insurance and Became a Very Rich Novelist,” New York Times Magazine, 1 May 1998, pp. 545, 835. Batchelor, John Calvin. “Tom Clancy’s Damn-the LiteraryTorpedoes Style Dances at the Edge of the Daily News,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 21 August 1994, pp. 1, 9. Beschloss, Michael R. “President Jack Ryan,” Washington Post Book World, 18 August 1996, pp. 1, 14. Buckley, Christopher. “Megabashing Japan,” New York Times Book Review, 2 October 1994, pp. 28–29. Clancy, Tom. An Interview with Tom Clancy, by John Mutter. Publishers Weekly 230, no. 6 (August 8, 1986): 534. Clancy, Tom, Martin Harry Greenberg, and Roland J. Green, eds. The Tom Clancy Companion. New York: Berkley Books, 1992. Cowley, Jason. “He Is the Most Popular Novelist on Earth, Whose Images of Catastrophe Animate the Modern American Psyche,” New Statesman & Society (September 24, 2001): 20. Dean, Paul. “Harrison Ford, Call Your Agent,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 25 August 1996, p. 5. Gibson, J. William. “Redeeming Vietnam: Techno-Thriller Novels of the 1980s,” Cultural Critique 19 (Fall 1991): 179–202. Hitchens, Christopher. “Something for the Boys,” New York Review of Books, 14 November 1996, pp. 34–36. Hixson, Walter L. “Red Storm Rising: Tom Clancy Novels and the Cult of National Security,” Diplomatic History 17, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 599–613. Hyde, Anthony. “Shadow of a Gunman,” Washington Post Book World, 26 July 1987, pp. 1–2. Isaacson, Walter. “Red Storm Rising,” Time, 11 August 1986, p. 64.

CLARK, CAROL HIGGINS 269

Kondracke, Morton. “A Missile for Every Occasion,” New York Times Book Review, 28 July 1991, pp. 9–10. Lehman, John. “Jack Ryan’s New Gizmos Save Another Day,” Wall Street Journal, 2 September 1994, p. A7. Lekachman, Robert. “Making the World Safe for Conventional War,” New York Times Book Review, 31 July 1988, p. 6. Liddy, G. Gordon. “The Smell of Napalm in the Morning,” New York Times Book Review, 22 August 1993, pp. 13–14. Menand, Louis. “Very Popular Mechanics,” New Yorker, 16 September 1991, pp. 91–92, 94–95. Ryan, William F. “The Genesis of the Techno-thriller,” Virginia Quarterly Review 69, no. 1 (Winter 1993): 24–40. Shacochis, Bob. A review of The Sum of All Fears, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 4 August 1991, pp. 3, 8. Thomas, Ross. “Crackdown in Colombia,” Washington Post Book World, 13 August 1989, pp. 1, 8. ———. “White Knight, Green Villains.” New York Times Book Review, 2 August 1987, p. 11. Wise, David. “Just Say Nuke ’Em,” New York Times Book Review, 13 August 1989, p. 9.

OTHER Doppler’s Tom Clancy Page. Available online. URL: http://www.qis.net/~doppler/tc/indexf.html. Accessed June 14, 2005. Wired for Books. “Audio Interview with Tom Clancy.” Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/tomclancy/. Accessed June 14, 2005.

CLARK, CAROL HIGGINS (1956– ) A successful author and actor in her own right, Carol Higgins Clark is the daughter of internationally known suspense writer Mary Higgins CLARK. Although they collaborate occasionally (Deck the Halls in 2000, and He Sees You When You’re Sleeping in 2001), Clark has pointed out that despite the similarity of their names, their professions, their genres, and their successes, she writes books that are noticeably different from her mother’s: her wit, lack of morbidity, and sense of humor are immediately apparent to readers of her mystery novels. Higgins’s sleuth is Regan Reilly, whom Clark has endowed with a mother who writes suspense novels. Reilly solves mysteries both in the United States and abroad, and through her Clark satirizes characters ranging from Southampton socialites to hosiery professionals. All seven of the Regan Reilly novels have appeared on the New York

Times best-seller list, and Decked (1992) was nominated for an Agatha Award. Carol Higgins Clark was born in 1956. Her father was Warren Clark, an airline executive. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College. In a recent interview she said that she will probably set a future novel on a similar college campus since they provide such rich fictional possibilities. In fact, Decked is set at an Oxford University class reunion where a supposed runaway, Athena, turns up as a corpse. Reilly must apprehend the murderer. Clark’s trademark sense of humor is clear in the title of her second Regan Reilly novel, Snagged (1993). Here her sleuth investigates several murder attempts on the life of a salesman at a hosiery convention which merges bizarrely with another convention, one for funeral directors. Iced (1995) parodies the wealthy residents of Aspen, Colorado, where Regan apprehends art thieves, and Twanged (1998) caricatures wealthy Southamptonites. Fleeced opens with Reilly at a mystery writers conference organized by her famous writer mother. Regan comes to the aid of her friend Thomas Pilsner, who is accused of stealing diamonds. Clark’s sense of humor emerges again in her short stories, one of which is entitled “For Whom the Bell Beeps”; Therein she transforms her real-life experience with a broken answering machine into key evidence: The fictional machine contains messages from the murderer that eventually incriminate him (online interview). Clark lives in New York City and intends to return to acting but will continue to write. She has appeared off-Broadway and in television films and miniseries, including A Cry in the Night (based on a novel by her mother), the Carnegie Hall performance of Wendy Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others, as well as Fatal Charm and Night of the Fox. Her most recent novel, Popped (2003), finds Regan in Las Vegas helping Danny, her old school friend, and preventing his TV show—which involves hot air balloons—from being sabotaged.

NOVELS Deck the Halls (with Mary Higgins Clark). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Decked. New York: Warner Books, 1992.

270 CLARK, MARY HIGGINS

Fleeced. New York: Scribner, 2001. He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (with Mary Higgins Clark). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Iced. New York: Warner Books, 1995. Jinxed. New York: Scribner, 2002. Popped. New York: Scribner, 2003. Snagged. New York: Warner Books, 1993. Twanged. New York: Warner Books, 1998.

SOURCES Baker, John F. “Move for Higgins Clark, Jr.,” Publishers Weekly 247, no. 10 (March 6, 2000): 14. Cooper, Ilene. Review of Popped. Booklist 100, no. 2 (September 15, 2003): 180. Maryles, Daisy. “A Clark Duet Scores,” Publishers Weekly 251, no. 48 (November 29, 2004): 12. Quinn, Judy. “7 Figure Deals for Carol Higgins Clark,” Publishers Weekly 244, no. 46 (November 10, 1997): 17. Review of Jinxed. Publishers Weekly 249, no. 31 (August 5, 2002): 56. Wilkens, Mary Frances. Review of Burned. Booklist 101, no. 14 (March 15, 2005): 1,269.

OTHER Book Reporter.com. Interview with Carol Higgins Clark. Available online. URL: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/auclark-carol.asp. Accessed August 27, 2005. Carol Higgins Clark.com. Available online. URL: http://www. carolhigginsclark.com. Accessed June 14, 2005.

CLARK, MARY HIGGINS (1929– ) Long known as the “queen of suspense,” Mary Higgins Clark is one of the most successful writers of fiction in the second half of the 20th century. She is famous for mysteries and thrillers, fast-paced narratives that few readers can put down; but, as Clark scholar Linda C. Pelzer notes, Clark’s novels are not mysteries in the traditional sense because they focus more on ordinary characters than on solutions (Pelzer, 7), and these ordinary characters almost always face terrifying, frequently bizarre, situations. Mary Higgins Clark’s novels have become best-sellers in the United States and around the world. Some of the best known include Where Are the Children? (1975), A Stranger Is Watching (1978), The Cradle Will Fall (1980), A Cry in the Night (1982), and Stillwatch (1984); many of her 22 novels and two of her short stories have been made into Hollywood or tele-

vision movies. Her many awards include the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1980. Mary Higgins Clark was born on December 24, 1929, in New York City, to Luke Joseph Higgins, a bar and restaurant owner, and Nora C. Durkin Higgins. The sudden death of her father forced Clark to go to work rather than to college, but at the age of 50 she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree from Fordham University. She married Warren F. Clark, an airline executive, on December 26, 1949; history repeated itself when her husband died unexpectedly in 1978, leaving Clark with five children to raise. She married twice more: briefly, to Raymond Charles Ploetz, in 1978, and then to John J. Conheeney, a retired Merrill Lynch futures CEO. Clark credits her 15-year career in radio scriptwriting with teaching her to write economically, giving the reader a great amount of information in a brief amount of space and providing a taut, suspense-filled narrative. Although her first book, Aspire to the Heavens: A Biography of George Washington (1969) did not sell well, her first novel, Where Are the Children?, published six years later, became a best-seller; it features Nancy Harmon, a mother accused of killing her children not once, but twice. Her second, A Stranger Is Watching, earned over $1 million in paperback rights; it focuses on the issue of capital punishment as the children of Steve Martin, an advocate of the death penalty, are held hostage by the same psychopath who murdered Martin’s wife, Nina. Since then Clark has produced best-sellers on a regular basis, often using lines from popular songs as titles. They suggest troubling or sinister circumstances: All Around the Town (1992), I’ll Be Seeing You (1993), Let Me Call You Sweetheart (1995), Moonlight Becomes You (1996), and We’ll Meet Again (1999). Recently, Clark’s second daughter, Carol Higgins CLARK, has appeared alongside her mother on the bestseller lists, and mother and daughter have coauthored two books, Deck the Halls (2000) and He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (2001). She lives in Saddle River, New Jersey, and Manhattan, and remains actively committed to community literacy as well as to such writers groups as Mystery Writers of America. Her most recent novels,

CLARK, WALTER VAN TILBURG 271

both published in 2002, are Daddy’s Little Girl and Mount Vernon Love Story.

NOVELS All Around the Town. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. All Through the Night. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Aspire to the Heavens: A Biography of George Washington. New York: Meredith Press, 1969. Before I Say Goodbye. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. The Cradle Will Fall. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. A Cry in the Night. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Daddy’s Little Girl. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Deck the Halls (with Carol Higgins Clark). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. He Sees You When You’re Sleeping (with Carol Higgins Clark). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. I’ll Be Seeing You. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. I, Witness (contributor). New York: Times Books, 1978. Let Me Call You Sweetheart. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Loves Music, Loves to Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Missing in Manhattan: The Adams Round Table. Stamford, Conn.: Longmeadow Press, 1992. Moonlight Becomes You: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Mount Vernon Love Story: A Novel of George and Martha Washington. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Murder in Manhattan (with Thomas Chastain and others). New York: Morrow, 1986. On the Street Where You Live. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Pretend You Don’t See Her. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Remember Me. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Silent Night: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Stillwatch. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. A Stranger Is Watching. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. Weep No More, My Lady. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. We’ll Meet Again. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Where Are the Children?. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. While My Pretty One Sleeps. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. You Belong to Me. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

SOURCES Pelzer, Linda C. Mary Higgins Clark: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

OTHER Powells.com. “Mary Higgins Clark Reveals: “Pan Am was the airline.” Available online. URL: http://www.powells. com/authors/higginsclark.html. Accessed June 14, 2005. Writers Write. “A Conversation with Mary Higgins Clark.” Available online. URL: http://www.writerswrite.com/ journal/may00/clark.htm. Accessed June 14, 2005.

CLARK,

WALTER

VAN

TILBURG

(1909–1971) Like the prolific Zane GREY and Louis L’AMOUR, Walter Van Tilburg Clark was a novelist and short-story writer associated with the American West. Critics and readers generally agree that his novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1941) has assured him a permanent place in American literature. Although his output is small—he wrote only three novels—Clark is perhaps more usefully compared with two contemporary writers Larry McMURTRY and Cormac McCARTHY, both of whom, like Clark, have written novels that might be termed “anti-westerns.” Walter Van Tilburg Clark was born on August 3, 1909, in East Orland, Maine, to Walter Ernest Clark, a teacher, economist, and president of the University of Nevada, and Euphemia Murray Abrams Clark. He earned his bachelor of arts (1931) and his master of arts (1932) degrees from the University of Nevada, and an additional master of arts degree from the University of Vermont (1934). He married Barbara Frances Morse in 1933, and had a decades-long career teaching literature and creative writing at both the high school and university levels. When it appeared, The Oxbow Incident was instantly recognized as a literary work about the morality of an individual cowboy, Art Croft, who is faced with the lynching of innocent men. Given the book’s publication during World War II, many critics see the abusive lynchers and the helpless onlookers as metaphors for Nazi Germany and its largely complicit populace. In any case, The Oxbow Incident is a study of evil, and Clark brings considerable intellectual, as well as artistic, power to bear. It has been translated into at least 20 languages and has never gone out of print. Clark’s second novel, The City of Trembling Leaves, an autobiographical coming-of-age novel, is set in Reno and features a narrator named Walt Clark. He describes protagonist Tim Hazzard’s growth into manhood along

272 CLAVELL, JAMES

with his artistic and musical friends. A noteworthy part of the novel addresses the importance of nature and its conservation. The Track of the Cat (1949) is, according to some critics, an even better novel than Oxbow. Pitting two brothers against each other—Curt Bridges wishes to escape the family Nevada ranch for big-city life; his older brother Art believes in the sacredness of nature— the book is a complex study of the relationship between humans and the natural world. The mountain lion that causes the deaths of both brothers is eventually killed by the old Indian Joe Sam and Harold Bridges, the youngest brother. As in Oxbow, Clark addresses prejudice associated with ethnicity and difference. The Ox-Bow Incident was filmed by Twentieth Century–Fox in 1943, and The Track of the Cat was filmed by Warner Brothers in 1954. One of Clark’s stories, “The Wind and the Snow of Winter,” won the 1945 O. Henry Memorial Award. His papers are housed in the Special Collections Department at the University of Nevada Library in Reno and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

NOVELS The City of Trembling Leaves. New York: Random House, 1945. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York: Random House, 1940. The Track of the Cat. New York: Random House, 1949.

SOURCES Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957, 170–196. Laird, Charlton. Walter Van Tilburg Clark: Critiques. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1983. Lee, L. L. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1973. Lindroth, James R. Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident: A Critical Commentary. New York: Monarch Press, 1966. Stegner, Wallace. One Way to Spell Man. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982, 124–135. Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boston: Twayne, 1969.

OTHER Christensen, Jon. “Spirits of the Land.” Available online. URL: http://www.greatbasinweb.com/gb1-1/spirits.html. Accessed via google.com, August 27, 2005. Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark.” Available online. URL: http://www.library.unr.edu/friends/ hallfame/clark/html. Accessed August 27, 2005.

CLAVELL, JAMES (DUMARESQ) (1925– 1994) Born in Australia, the naturalized American James Clavell became one of the most celebrated novelists and scriptwriters of the 20th century. His days as a prisoner of war during World War II led to a fascination with Asia, and he wrote best-selling novels set in Japan, Hong Kong, China, and Changi (on Singapore Island): King Rat (1962), Tai-Pan: A Novel of Hong Kong (1966), Shogun: A Novel of Japan (1975), and Noble House: A Novel of Contemporary Hong Kong (1981), as well as Whirlwind (1986), set in the Iranian desert. His themes include the supposed incompatibility between East and West, the corrupting nature of power, and the often unsuccessful struggle against evil. Clavell, a careful researcher who was fascinated with history, has also been compared to Charles Dickens because of the social and moral scope of his tales. He has been praised for his carefully structured plots and his ability to keep readers in suspense. Nearly all his novels have been made into feature-length films or television mini-series. James deMaresq Clavell was born on October 10, 1925, to Richard Charles Clavell, a captain in the British Royal Navy, and Eileen Collis Clavell. He served from 1940 to 1946 with the Royal Artillery; three and a half years of that service was spent in Changi, a Japanese POW camp notorious because so few of its prisoners survived. At the end of the war, Clavell studied briefly at the University of Birmingham in England, married April Stride in 1951, and immigrated to the United States in 1953. In the United States he embarked on a remarkably successful career as a screenplay writer, director, and producer, with such credits as the now classic science fiction film The Fly and the classic 1963 World War II film, The Great Escape. Perhaps his most acclaimed film script was To Sir With Love, describing a black teacher’s success with hostile British juvenile delinquents. It was a screenwriters strike that led Clavell to write the best-selling King Rat, set in Changi, about two soldiers, British and American, who stay alive in their POW camp—and, incidentally, become its undisputed leaders—by selling rats. He followed with another smash hit, Tai-Pan, a historical novel, set in 1841, about the founding of British Hong Kong, Dirk Struan is the first merchant overlord—tai-pan—of the Noble House trading com-

CLAY WALLS 273

pany. Shogun, too, was the product of extended historical research; Clavell wanted to understand the nation that had held him captive during the war. Set in 17thcentury Japan, the novel follows John Blackthorne, an Elizabethan sailor who changes from an English ruffian into the respected adviser to the shogun, a powerful military ruler. Noble House and Gai-Jin also evoke historical eras of Japan. Clavell’s King Rat was produced by Columbia Pictures in 1965, Tai-Pan by the De Laurentis Entertainment Group in 1965. Sho-gun and Noble House were made into television miniseries in 1980 and 1988, respectively, and two versions of King Rat and Whirlwind are being planned. Shogun was produced for the stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and on Broadway. James Clavell died of complications of cancer on September 6, 1994, at Vevey, Switzerland.

NOVELS The Children’s Story. New York: Delacorte, 1981. Gai-Jin: A Novel of Japan. New York: Delacorte, 1993. King Rat. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Reprinted as James Clavell’s “King Rat,” New York: Delacorte, 1983. Noble House: A Novel of Contemporary Hong Kong. New York: Delacorte, 1981. Shogun: A Novel of Japan. New York: Atheneum, 1975. Tai-Pan: A Novel of Hong Kong. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Reprint, New York: Delacorte, 1983. Thrump-o-moto, illustrated by George Sharp. New York: Delacorte, 1986. Two Complete Novels (includes Tai-Pan and King Rat). New York: Wings Books, 1995. Whirlwind. New York: Morrow, 1986.

SOURCES MacDonald, Gina. James Clavell: A Critical Companion, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. The Making of James Clavell’s “Shogun.” New York: Dell, 1980.

CLAY WALLS KIM RONYOUNG (GLORIA HAHN) (1986) Clay Walls narrates the story of a Korean immigrant family from about 1920 to 1946, and their struggle to find their place in the United States. The novel develops chronologically and is divided into three sections, the first two from the point of view of Haesu and her husband, Chun, and the third narrated

in first person by their teenage daughter, Faye. This narrative strategy allows KIM to personalize the situation of the early immigrants and to juxtapose different perspectives. The characters express diverse views of racism, poverty, the question of assimilation, longing for the homeland, marriage and family problems, all set against the background of American popular culture and the historical events that characterized those years: the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II. Haesu, though she is the primary focus of only the first section, is the center of consciousness in the novel, making it clearly the story of a female immigrant’s attempts to survive in America, as well as a demonstration of the significance of loyalty to the homeland. Of the yangban (aristocratic) class, Haesu suffers acutely because of the poverty and racism she encounters when she moves to Los Angeles to join her husband. Though Chun is of a lower class, their marriage was approved by her parents because he had requested his employer, an American missionary, to serve as matchmaker. Haesu has difficulty adapting to American life and establishing a harmonious relationship with her husband, and raises their children—Harold, John, and Faye—to believe that Korea is the true home to which they will return. She participates actively in pro-independence meetings and nurtures an idealized vision of Korea, until a trip home shatters her illusions: on her voyage back, as she unwittingly becomes involved in a case of intrigue and espionage, she learns that her parents have separated, that Japanese officers maintain a strict surveillance over village affairs, and that her uncle is a political fugitive. This situation obliges Haesu and Chun to return permanently to the United States. Nonetheless, before leaving, they buy land in Quaksan, as security and for the satisfaction of being landowners, and as a way of maintaining a link to Korea. The land is lost when North Korea is created. The family tragedy is heightened when Chun loses his most lucrative contract for his produce supply business, becomes addicted to gambling, and is forced to leave home to find work as an itinerant laborer. He dies alone and penniless in Reno, Nevada. Haesu’s determination to

274 CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE

raise her children forces her to work, but because she never forgets she is yangban and not allowed to work outside the home, she manages to take in sewing. The section narrated by Faye highlights the growing ambivalence of second-generation children who identify most closely with American culture, yet acknowledge the influence of their parents’ culture. Faye and her brothers also experience the racism directed at Asians after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the loss of her first boyfriend to tuberculosis. The process of Faye’s socialization in America leads her to develop interethnic friendships and to want to act and dress like a typical American. Faye’s narrative ends the novel on a positive note as she begins a courtship with a young Korea-American man who studies medicine at Yale University. Kim’s prose is deceptively simple. The chronological structure and straightforward prose offer a nuanced portrait of the characters and the situations: Haesu’s determination and her pride, Chun’s fundamental good-heartedness and his insecurity, the children’s experience of racism and episodes when they demonstrate a superior attitude toward other Asian nationalities. The novel also delves into the complex political and cultural situation in Korea during the Japanese occupation, and the nationalist spirit and commitment of diverse characters of the Korean American community. It engages the various ways in which an immigrant’s dreams necessarily undergo modification, or must be deferred, and describes the strategies of assimilation or survival that the characters employ. One of the most poignant stories is that of Clara, Haesu’s closest friend, who, in an effort to look less Asian, is disfigured after submitting herself to an operation to widen her eyes and lighten her skin. The central metaphor, the clay walls of the title, refers to the traditional walls erected around Korean homes. This metaphor applies to the characters’ shifting relationship with America: the immigrants’ enforced isolation from mainstream society and their own choice to keep within their community. Because these walls can be easily torn down, however, Kim shows that second-generation children do manage, in different ways, to enter American society and tenuously establish places for themselves.

SOURCES Kim Ronyoung. Clay Walls. 1986. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Oh, Sae-o. “ ‘Precious Possessions Hidden’: A Cultural Background to Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls,” MELUS 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 31–49. Phillips, Jane. “We’d Be Rich in Korea: Value and Contingency in Clay Walls by Ronyoung Kim,” MELUS 23, no. 2 (1998): 175–187. Shin, Duckhee. “Class and Self-Identity in Clay Walls,” MELUS 24, no. 4 (1999): 125–136. ———. “Clay Walls by Ronyoung Kim.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida, 78–85. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001. Yun, Cung-Hei. “Beyond Clay Walls: Korean American Literature.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Amy Ling and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, 79–96. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Rocío G. Davis

CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE

See

TWAIN, MARK.

CLOTEL; OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER WILLIAM WELLS BROWN (1853) When Clotel of William Wells BROWN’s Clotel; or The President’s Daughter plunges to her death in the Potomac River, she makes a conscious choice; she will have freedom from oppression or she will have death. Some scholars, including Michael Berthold, Suzanne Bost, and Jean Fagan Yellin, have asserted that such an action utilizes mere melodrama to fit with the convention of the popular sentimental literature of the time. Others, including Claudia Tate and Judith R. Berzon, have suggested that the use of the tragic mulatta figure enables white audiences to identify easily with the character. These critics’ theories ignore Brown’s other possible reasons for using the mulatta character: to show that black and white Americans share the same American impulses: the wish for equality and independence and the belief in a right to choose one’s path in life, to create and express one’s identity, and to improve her station in life. For Brown, the mulatta symbolizes the independence-loving American in a black body.

CLOTEL; OR THE PRESIDENT’S DAUGHTER 275

At first glance, Clotel represents only the typical tragic mulatta and her predictable plot. The reader meets Clotel as victim; she stands on the auction block. At this point in the novel, Clotel actually looks gladly to her purchaser, the young Horatio Green because she views her condition as victim-slave as so inescapable that she imagines living as Horatio’s mistress, as his sex-slave, as a positive arrangement. Clotel can rationalize and accept the sham marriage because the law will allow her and Horatio only that option, but when Horatio expects her to continue to act as his wife though he will marry another, a shift occurs, and Clotel demonstrates some self-assertion. She refuses to meet with Horatio once he has married. In refusing to compromise, instead of choosing to continue as a victim of Horatio’s exploitation, Clotel consciously denies him that power. When the consequences of her decision cause separation from her child, Clotel becomes the active, resisting rebel. While many scholars, including James Kinney and Michael Berthold, consider Clotel’s choice to pass as merely an attempt to escape her identity and its accompanying negative effects, Clotel’s passing actually represents a movement toward creating her own identity, gaining her independence, and ideally, bringing her daughter along with her. Clotel passes only temporarily, and she goes beyond a simple reliance upon physical appearance to use instead intelligent, deliberate, astute, and detailed planning (13). Her passing exists merely for expediency’s sake, and as soon as she arrives in Cincinnati, “Clotel again resume[s] her own apparel and prepare[s] to start in search of her child” (169). Though her obstinate determination to reach her goal forces her to reinvent herself again, this time in the form of a gentleman from Italy or Spain, the disguise gets her to her daughter safely because it frees her of both the risk of sexual objectification and the abuse of a slave woman. As at last Clotel reaches her daughter in Virginia, she ceases to function as a slave woman. She has shed her slave identity with her passing disguises. Though Clotel does not succeed, even in her death, she shows her progression away from victimization and toward individual identity. Rather than give up her new identity as free woman, Clotel very deliberately and resolutely

chooses without a single tear and without any begging or whining, “with a single bound, [to vault] over the railings of the bridge, and [sink] forever beneath the waves of the river!” (207). She jumps not just from the bridge, but also from her former identity, a self she refuses to return to once she has formed another more satisfactory to her, one she and not the white patriarchy has chosen for herself. Though on one level Clotel fits into the tragic mulatta category because her torment ends in death, on another level, her actions and ultimate death twist entirely the white, preconceived notions about black women because she first refuses to allow that body to be used sexually by Horatio once he marries and then by her new master, then disguises that body to subvert power, and finally casts that body away to eliminate society’s ability to consign her to the ranks of chattel ever again. Clotel’s daughter, Mary follows a similar pattern as she also finds her independence and self-definition in an atypical way for the tragic mulatto. She resists the system by adopting the disguise of a male, but she does not use that disguise to run away. Mary adopts the disguise of a male slave who has actually participated in an insurrection and faces the ultimate penalty for doing so. She not only passes as George to help him escape, but she also pleads with him to allow her to do so. She chooses her imprisonment and consequences instead of merely playing the victim of them. Mary surpasses her mother’s attempts at identity-building with two additional actions. Mary preserves her chastity, for she marries Devenant so as not to allow a sham marriage just for its protection, and she does not commit suicide in the public sphere; instead, she leaves the American public sphere to live in the private sphere in France. There she builds her own identity as a freed woman and a wife. While neither Clotel’s nor Mary’s methods of achieving independence and self-definition prove perfect, each woman refuses to remain a mere victim who helplessly accepts betrayal, rape, slavery, and suffering. “Clotel and Mary have . . . a vision of freedom . . . and they find their identit[ies] in acting upon that vision” (Herzog, 164, 169). Their vision—an imagining of themselves as independent, unowned human beings, as individuals not defined by their masters, gender, or

276 CLOUDSPLITTER, A NOVEL

race—leads them to break away from the tragic mulatta convention. They take charge of their own lives, their own selves.

SOURCES Berthold, Michael. “Cross-Dressing and Forgetfulness of Self in William Wells Brown’s Clotel,” College Literature 20 (October 1993): 19–30. Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: Gotham Library of New York University Press, 1978. Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or The President’s Daughter, edited by Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/Saint Martin’s, 2000. Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of Literary Tradition, 1871–1915. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Delany, Douglass, and Harper. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of African-American Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Heermance, J. Noel. William Wells Brown and Clotel: A Portrait of the Artist in the First Negro Novel. New York: Archon Books, 1969. Herzog, Kristin. “William Wells Brown’s Clotel: From Victimization to Vision and Action.” In Women, Ethnics, and Exotics: Images of Power in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Fiction, 121–144. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983. Kinney, James. Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Pfeiffer, Kathleen. Race Passing and American Individualism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Yellin, Jean Fagan. The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863. New York: New York University Press, 1972. Patricia J. Sehulster

CLOUDSPLITTER,

A NOVEL RUSSELL BANKS (1998) This historical novel about the radical abolitionist John Brown was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. At the time he was writing the novel, Russell BANKS made his home near North Elba, New York, the Adirondack community where Brown was laid to rest. A decade before his execution for attempting to provoke a slave uprising with an attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Brown had relocated to the North Elba area. A New York philanthropist had financed the establishment of a farm settlement named Timbuktu where African Americans could politically, socially, and culturally define themselves within their own community. Brown wished to support this experiment, but his sensibility was too radical for an extended rustic idyll. The title of Baker’s novel is taken from the English translation of the Iroquois name for the mountain overlooking the Brown homestead. The appellation clearly serves to describe the career of the zealot who was long said to have provoked the bloodiest conflict in American history. Almost 800 pages long, Cloudsplitter is narrated by Brown’s son Owen, now an aged recluse. The ambiguities in the historical record of the events in which Brown was involved and the even greater ambiguities in Brown’s own character are rooted in his deification by some segments of American society and his vilification by others. Even within a novel, it is almost impossible to enter into the interior life of John Brown through historical accounts of the events of that life. Banks must have considered a first-person narration, but perhaps he did not wish simply to replicate the first-person approach in William STYRON’s The CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER. It is also true that the relative thinness of the historical record on Turner gave Styron much greater leeway in attempting to suggest Turner’s state of mind than Banks would have in suggesting Brown’s. Banks’s decision to have Owen narrate the novel offers some advantages because although it does permit an intimate glimpse of Brown, the issue of Brown’s true character is layered over, narratively, with the issue of the accuracy of Owen’s recollections. Indeed, the latter issue is made more complex by Owen’s advanced age, by the idiosyncrasies that his

CLOUDSPLITTER, A NOVEL 277

isolation has amplified, and by his straightforward admission that he has been notorious for fabricating tales about his father. Furthermore, Owen’s feelings about his father and about his participation in his father’s raids at Pottawatomie and Harper’s Ferry are intensely ambivalent. That the narrative ultimately serves as what is undoubtedly one of the longest suicide notes in literary history only reinforces the point that Owen’s story cannot be extricated from his father’s, any more than his father’s story can be extricated from the historical and the extra-historical attempts to tell it. So it is much more than just a situational irony that Owen composes his narrative in reply to a request for information by a scholar writing a history of the Brown family. The novel depicts in great detail the complexities of mid-19th-century American life in both the North and the South. One of these complexities is central to Brown’s story and to Owen’s retelling of it. Free African Americans involved in the Abolitionist movement had cautioned Brown that it was unlikely that large numbers of slaves brutally conditioned to their state would be psychologically capable of recognizing the opportunity in Brown’s attack on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. They doubted that an uprising would occur quickly enough and in sufficient strength for it to succeed. Moreover, they worried that a failed uprising would make the conditions under which slaves lived only more oppressive, for even the mildest gestures of selfassertion would subsequently be viewed as intimations of insurrection and would be punished harshly. In this context, Brown’s messianic resolve to conduct the attack begins to seem like a willful determination to seek martyrdom. Although some have suggested that Brown recognized the need for a great martyr in the Abolitionist cause, the fact that he became just such a figure does not necessarily mean that he was primarily motivated by the broader cause. It may have been, as Baker makes clear, that he was driven by a more personal religious obsession with proving his own righteousness, and the Abolitionist cause was the perfect vehicle for a more personal crusade. Brown may have had few real illusions about the chances for success in the raid on Harper’s Ferry and yet have been deluded in manifold ways.

Even if Brown was not technically insane, his religious fervor so possessed him that he often behaved like a madman. When Owen was a boy, he once fell from a roof and broke his arm. He had been trying to escape his father’s impassioned observance of the sabbath, and Brown was so angered by what he perceived as his son’s unholiness that, instead of comforting him, he yanked the broken bones back into place and permanently crippled the arm. The physical scars are suggestive of even more terrible psychological scars, and the fates of Owen’s three brothers—in particular the self-mutilating youngest brother, Fred—make it clear that Owen was not singularly affected by his father’s increasingly unconstrained vehemence. Banks has indicated in interviews that in order to credibly reproduce Brown’s speech, he restricted his diction to words found in the King James Bible and in the 1853 edition of Webster’s dictionary. Some reviewers have, however, complained that some of Owen’s speech and perceptions seem inappropriately contemporary, rather than historically accurate. Among contemporary novels, the closest complement to Cloudsplitter is Joyce Carol OATES’s Angel of Light.

SOURCES Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry,” TLS (May 22, 1998): 7. Banks, Russell. Cloudsplitter, A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. ———. “The Art of Fiction CLII.” Interview by Robert Faggen and Barry Munger. Paris Review 40 (Summer 1998): 50–88. ———. “In Response to James McPherson’s Reading of Cloudsplitter.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 67–76. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. ———. “A Conversation with Russell Banks.” Interview by Lewis Burke Frumkes. Writer 111 (August 1998): 18–20. Gussow, Mel. “John Brown Lives Anew as a Writer’s Inspiration,” New York Times, 27 April 1998, p. E1. Kazin, Alfred. “God’s Own Terrorist,” New York Review of Books, 9 April 1998, pp. 8–9. Kirn, Walter. “The Wages of Righteousness,” New York Times Book Review, 22 February 1998, p. 9. Malcomson, Scott L. “The Color Line.” New Yorker, 6 April 1998, pp. 102–104. McPherson, James M. “Russell Banks’s Fictional Portrait of John Brown.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists

278 COBEN, HARLAN

Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 61–66. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001. Niemi, Robert. Russell Banks. Twayne United States Authors Series, 680. New York: Twayne, 1997. Scott, A. O. “Abraham and Oedipus.” Nation, 16 March 1998, pp. 27–29. Wylie, J. J. “Reinventing Realism: An Interview with Russell Banks,” Michigan Quarterly Review 39 (Fall 2000): 737–753. Martin Kich

COBEN, HARLAN (1962– ) Harlan Coben is the first mystery writer to win all three major detective fiction awards: the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Awards. His talent for ingenious plots and vividly rendered characters helped get him on the New York Times best-seller list. Coben is especially known for his Myron Bolitar novels, beginning with Deal Breaker (1995). No Second Chance (2003) was the first mystery ever selected for the International Book-of-the Month Club, as the main selection for book clubs in 15 countries (Maryles). His novels have been translated into more than 20 languages. Harlan Coben was born on January 4, 1962, in Newark, New Jersey, to Carl Gerald Coben and Barbara Kronberg Coben. He was educated at Amherst College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in political science in 1984. In 1988 he married Anne Armstrong and, after a brief career in the travel industry, published his first novel, Play Dead, in 1990. It features David Baskin, a Boston Celtics basketball player who stages his fake death while on his honeymoon with his bride, fashion model Laura Ayers, when a terrible secret in David’s past is revealed. Miracle Cure (1991), Coben’s second, is another novel praised for its fast pace: a series of murders occurs in an AIDS research clinic that involves clients from the worlds of sports, law enforcement, politics, and religion. Myron Bolitar, an ex-basketball star with successful dual careers as sports agent and attorney, fits into the classic detective fiction pattern of the unmarried investigator hero with the useful friend (such as, Sherlock Holmes and Watson); in Coben’s novels Bolitar’s friend is Windsor Horne Lockwood III, or “Win.” No Second Chance focuses on pediatric surgeon Marc Seidman whose wife Monica is murdered

and baby girl Tara is kidnapped in the opening pages of this complicated tale. The complex twists and turns of the plot, along with his large cast of characters convinced a critic that “Coben has blossomed into the male Mary Higgins Clark” (Kirkus Review). Harlan Coben also continues to write “stand alone” novels, the most recent being the critically acclaimed Gone for Good (2002). Here Ken Klein’s family believes he is dead until his brother will investigates and becomes enmeshed in secrets he never anticipated. Coben lives in New Jersey with his wife, who is medical director of Covenant House in Newark. His most recent stand-alone novels are Just One Look (2004) and The Innocent published in 2005.

NOVELS Gone for Good. New York: Delacorte, 2002. The Innocent. New York: Dutton, 2005 Just One Look. New York: Dutton, 2004. Miracle Cure. Latham, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1991. No Second Chance. New York: Dutton, 2003. Play Dead. Latham, N.Y.: British American Publishing, 1990. Tell No One: A Novel. New York: Delacorte, 2001.

MYRON BOLITAR NOVELS Back Spin. New York: Dell, 1997. Darkest Fear. New York: Delacorte, 2000. Deal Breaker. New York: Dell, 1995. Dropshot. New York: Dell, 1996. Fade Away. New York: Dell, 1996. The Final Detail. New York: Dell, 2000. One False Move. New York: Dell, 1997.

SOURCES Maryles, Daisy. “He doesn’t need one!” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 19 (May 12, 2003): 20. Review of No Second Chance. In Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 4 (February 15, 2003): 253.

COGEWEA, THE HALF-BLOOD MOURNDOVE (HUM-ISHU-MA) (1927) On its surface, Cogewea, the Half-Blood is a classic western romance. The novel follows its eponymous heroine as she navigates the rough world of a Montana cattle ranch and attempts to do the same in the even rougher world of the traditional love triangle. As one of the best riders at the Horseshoe Brand Ranch, Cogewea (which means

ING

COGEWEA, THE HALF-BLOOD 279

“little chipmunk” in Okanogan) wins the admiration of Jim LaGrinder, the ranch foreman and, like Cogewea, the descendant of a biracial marriage. His bid for Cogewea’s hand is thwarted, however, by the foppish Alfred Denismore, a white easterner who travels to the ranch in the hope of actualizing his romantic notions of the West. Much to Jim’s dismay, Cogewea agrees to leave with Denismore with the hope of realizing her dream of marrying a well-read man who would appreciate her attempts at domesticity. Denismore, on the other hand, has very different plans in mind. After persuading Cogewea to withdraw her inheritance from the local bank, he leads her away from the ranch. On their journey, Denismore reveals his true colors, beating Cogewea, stealing her small fortune, and leaving her gagged and bound to a cottonwood tree. She is rescued by Jim and, two years later, they marry in a conclusion characterized by Arnold Krupat as of the classic canonical “ ‘comic’ type, like those found in western narratives such as William Shakespeare’s ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’ ” (Krupat, 128). However, as Susan Bernardin rightly observes, the novel’s deceptively traditional form also contains a revolutionary combination of oral culture, social critique, and political commentary. For MOURNING DOVE, “the western romance provided a primary site for the ongoing negotiation of dominant cultural anxieties about miscegenation, ‘blood mixture,’ and its implications for national identity” (Bernardin, 488). The daughter of an Indian mother and a Caucasian father, Cogewea exists as a liminal figure not able to subscribe to the traditions of either white or Indian cultures. As such, she is “deeply bound up in the contradictions of her age” (Krupat, 132). Cogewea’s marginal status is perhaps best exemplified in the novel’s treatment of an annual fair and horse race held near the ranch. There, she wins both the white “ladies’ ” race and the “squaws’ ” competition. But in spite of her adroit riding and her claim to both ethnicities, Cogewea is denied both prizes as a result of her complicated racial identity. Like her heroine, Mourning Dove was also the daughter of a biracial relationship. Born Christine Quintasket, Mourning Dove was the daughter of

Joseph Quintasket, a first-generation Irishman, and Lucy Stukin, a full-blooded Colville Indian (Fischer, introduction to Cogewea, vi). Mourning Dove spent much of her young adult life collecting the stories of her people and garnering a deep appreciation for the complexities these stories represented. In the words of editor Jim Miller, when setting out to write Cogewea, she insisted that she wanted to create a work of fiction that would convey “the emotional depth and range of Native peoples to counter the stoic stereotype she found so offensive” (Miller, 71). One powerful way Mourning Dove accomplishes this goal is through the characterization of Cogewea’s family. As the middle child, Cogewea also stands metaphorically between her two sisters and their divergent attitudes concerning the future of Native American people in the United States. Cogewea’s older sister, Julia, advocates a system of assimilation into the white culture, and she tells her sister that “civilization is the only hope for the Indian” (274). Mary, the youngest daughter, stands much more closely aligned with her very traditional grandmother. As such, she represents a foil to Julia and, in so doing, “voices a criticism that certainly pertains to Julia and may serve as a warning to Cogewea” (Krupat, 132). This warning is reified by Cogewea’s grandmother, The Stemteemä. The most traditionally Indian of all of the characters, The Stemteemä represents the past glory of the Okanogan culture. Some of the richest moments of the novel come in the form of The Stemteemä’s extended frame-narratives. There, we hear the story of Indians such as Green-Blanket Feet, who ran off with a white husband only to be beaten and left for dead. This story is told to Cogewea as a warning about her relationship with Denismore and, by novel’s end, we also realize that it is a painful foreshadowing of her own fate. Cogewea’s blending of oral tradition with the western romance allows Mourning Dove to transcend the limitations of both genres and to create a highly effective amalgamation of them. According to Alanna Brown, Mourning Dove thereby “became the first Native American to organically include Indian Culture and oral literature, as well as Indian social dilemmas” (51).

280 COLOR PURPLE, THE

Although many scholars rightfully contend that Cogewea is the first novel written by a Native American woman, that authorship is not without controversy. Cogewea was published only after Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a historian and publisher with strong ties to the Native American communities in the Northwest, first heavily edited Mourning Dove’s story and then began a publicity campaign on her behalf. McWhorter’s additions and revisions were substantial, and the end result was a novel described by Mourning Dove in an oft-quoted letter as “some one elses book and not mine at all” (Fischer, xi). Scholars differ in their accounts of McWhorter. Some, like Kathleen Donovan, describe him as approaching Mourning Dove and her writing “with missionary zeal” (Donovan, 110). Others see Cogewea as authored by two different writers, no doubt alluding to Mourning Dove’s desire to write romantic fiction and McWhorter’s insistence that she include criticism of the American government’s mishandling of Indian affairs. And yet, a fair number of critics insist that these objectives need not be at odds with one another. As Carol Miller argues, the conclusion of the novel represents the actualization of an emotional and spiritual whole: “in both structure and theme, the story resolves itself in the restoration of lives in a harmonious adaptive balance” (Carol Miller, 146).

SOURCES Bernardin, Susan K. “Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood,” American Literature 67 (1995): 487–509. Donovan, Kathleen. Feminist Readings of Native American Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Krupat, Arnold. “From Half-Blood to Mixedblood: Cogewea and the ‘Discourse of Indian Blood,’ ” MFS 45, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 120–145. Miller, Carol. “Meditation and Authority: The Native American Voices of Mourning Dove and Ella Deloria.” In Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action, edited by James A. Banks, 141–155. New York: Teacher’s College, 1996. Miller, Jay. “Mourning Dove: The Author as Cultural Mediator.” In Being and Becoming an Indian: Biographical Studies of North American Frontiers, edited by J. A. Clifford, 160–182. Chicago, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1989. ———. “Mourning Dove: Editing in All Directions to ‘Get Real,’ ” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 65–72.

Mourning Dove. Cogewea, The Half-Blood, introduction by Dexter Fischer, ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Kathryn Miles

COLOR PURPLE, THE ALICE WALKER (1982) The winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the subject of an Oscar-nominated film by Stephen Spielberg two years later, The Color Purple by Alice Walker is often associated with the struggle of black women to gain self-respect and independence. Written in the form of letters, the novel follows the main character, Celie, who experiences physical abuse and sexual violation at the hands of several males in her life and who learns to use female role models to come to terms with the lack of self-esteem that her negative experiences with men in her childhood and adolescence have created. Feeling isolated, ugly, and unloved, Celie’s only recourse is to talk to God in the hope that the deity will help her change the squalor and cruelty that surrounds her. Despite her pleas in the letter, the promised deliverance by a loving God never seems to come, and eventually Celie decides to address a human in her letters rather than depend on rescue from an absent godhead. Celie’s first negative encounter with men occurs when she falls victim to incest as her “Pa” uses her as a sexual outlet when her mother falls ill. Even when he remarries after Celie’s mother dies, the abuse continues until he decides to offer Celie’s service to Mr.——, a nearby neighbor. Thus Celie moves from one type of sexual slavery to another, as Mr.—— is more interested in Celie’s taking care of his children and his house than he is in loving her and treating her as a real person. Consequently, Celie is sexually unfulfilled, viewing intercourse as a scatological obligation rather than as an erotic pleasure. As the narrative demonstrates she continuously searches for someone who will truly love her for herself and not as a possession. As time passes, the passive Celie is introduced to several women who she finds to be far more compatible and loving than members of the opposite sex. Sophia, another black woman, who marries Harpo, Mr.——’s son, demonstrates her strength and serves as a powerful role model for Celie by refusing to be dom-

COLOR PURPLE, THE 281

inated and ordered around as most women of this era were. Harpo, following his father’s lead, treats his wife as a slave and when she disobeys him, he beats her, urged to do so by Celie, who at this point sees Sophia merely as hard-headed and stubborn, the opposite of the submissive role she believes all women must play. Angered by Celie’s betrayal, Sophia tells the protagonist she must assert her independence and stand up for herself if she is ever to find happiness. When Sophia leaves Harpo and begins a life of her own, her actions demonstrate to Celie that females do not need males to find either fulfillment or happiness. Another role model for Celie is Shug Avery, the blues singer who is revealed as Mr. ——’s long-lost love. Shug, whose job gives her monetary independence and no need to be supported by a man, is the first person who appreciates and sees the positive traits that have been buried deep within Celie’s psyche. As Celie nurses Shug back to health in Mr. ——’s home, she begins to discover the beauty that exists both inside herself and inside Shug as well. Before this,the only other person to perceive Celie’s worth was her younger sister, Nettie, but Celie has been stripped of Nettie’s love when Mr.—— banishes her from his property early in the novel after she rebuffs his sexual approach. For a long time, Nettie disappears from Celie’s life, seemingly forgetting her promise to write and inform Celie of her whereabouts. Eventually, however, Celie discovers that Mr. —— (now known as Albert) has cruelly hidden Nettie’s letters, preventing Celie from knowing that her dear sister was indeed keeping her in loving memory and had gone with a missionary couple to Africa, where she found both fulfillment and success. While the novel depicts these three female characters as strong, Walker also uses the text to demonstrate how the inequities of gender and race impact the characters. Walker does this specifically by showing Sophia’s plight when she is employed by Miss Millie, the mayor’s wife, and is forced to submit to the white race’s demeaning dismissal of strong personality and independent nature. Sophia is eventually jailed for her feisty opposition to the majority race, but despite beatings and bouts of depression, she ultimately triumphs.

Similarly, Squeak (Mary Alice), Harpo’s girlfriend after Sophia leaves him, is shown as weak and oppressed until she accepts Shug Avery’s invitation to become a singer and thus have an occupation that will bring her independence. Evidently, Walker wanted The Color Purple to stress work as a solution to attaining positive self-identity, for the women in the novel with jobs outside the home find true strength by refusing to be dependent on men for their very survival. When Shug later helps Celie to fund a tailoring business in Memphis, Celie becomes a self-made entrepreneur, creating women’s pants, a career that implies she has gained equality with, and is capable of, “wearing the pants in the family.” The importance of identity is also shown in the novel through naming. For example, at times the weaker characters allow their names to be changed by the aggressive characters. Moreover in some cases, characters are depicted as weak because they do not know the name of another character and consequently lack the power to oppose them. In addition, The Color Purple seems to question whether tolerance and patience are indeed virtues and whether temper tantrums and aggressive behavior are vices. Clearly, as the novel progresses, Celie must deliberate and decide whether she wants to continue a passive/submissive existence or whether she wishes to transform her life by becoming an assertive and aggressive individual, newly independent from subjection to others. By standing up to Albert and by accepting the love offered by Shug, Celie is able to regain her relationship with Nettie, discovering that she has strengths that she had previously considered dormant. Though most men in the novel are initially shown in a negative light, they are eventually transformed by the powerful women and are forced to acknowledge that the benefits provided by strong females are far more worthwhile than the servile roles they fill when they are unacknowledged and ignored as inferiors. Finally, the sexual awakening Celie experiences has often caused this novel to be classified as lesbian fiction. However, it seems more likely that what is really discovered is the power of sexual ties to express love rather than oppression. Love thus empowers characters when it possesses deep, rather than surface, meaning and

282 COLTER, CYRUS

when it is not used to place one partner in subjection to another. The reuniting of Celie and Nettie, the love of Shug and Celie, and the emancipation of Sophia and Mary Alice strongly suggest that “feminist” would be a better label for the novel than lesbian. It encourages women of color and females in general to value self-discovery and to assert their right to be equals with the men who attempt to degrade and dominate them. As she is reunited with Nettie and triumphs over Albert, Celie’s life is like the color purple: something to be marveled at. If, as Shug says, “it pisses God off when someone walks by the color purple and does not notice it,” then the color’s very existence makes it worthwhile and admirable. Consequently, all of nature and even the insecure Celie of the earlier chapters, is worthy of notice because they contain a part of the deity, possessing a regal quality that harks back to their African heritage and that cannot be destroyed.

SOURCE Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982. Mike Meyer

COLTER, CYRUS (1910– )

Widely read in American and Russian literature, Cyrus Colter is a novelist and award-winning short-fiction writer much influenced by the existentialism of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. African-American identity and the search for its definition permeate all his novels; as the son in City of Light asks his mother, “But why didn’t you school me on how to be black?” Nearly all his characters feel isolated and alienated, but Colter refuses to provide solutions or panaceas for that phenomenon. Cyrus Colter was born on January 8, 1910, in Noblesville, Indiana, to James Alexander and Ethel Marietta Bassett, and, after the death of his mother when he was 6, was reared by his grandparents. He was educated at Ohio State University, then, after graduating from the Kent Law School of Illinois Institute of Technology, married Mary Imogene Mackay, a teacher, on January 1, 1943, and practiced law in Chicago until World War II. In 1942 he enlisted in the army, served for four years, became a field artillery captain, and participated in the liberation of north

Italy. After eight years as an attorney, he was appointed Illinois Commerce Commissioner and, in 1973, was named the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University. Two of his novels appeared in the early 1970s. The Rivers of Eros (1972) is a gripping tale about the sins of the parents being visited upon the daughter: Clothilda Pilgrim, a widow desperate to stop the affair between her 16-year-old daughter Addie and her married employer, loses her mind and murders Addie. Years earlier her husband had murdered Clothilda’s daughter, the child of an adulterous affair. This deterministic theme continues in The Hippodrome (1973); the aging Jackson Yaeger, whose much younger wife has been unfaithful, murders both the wife and the lover. Night Studies: A Novelistic Investigation of Race Relations in America (1979), probably Colter’s most ambitious work, explores the apocalyptic moments of actual black history as the backdrop to three fictional stories: those of John Calvin Knight, leader of the Black People’ Congress, Griselda, a white San Francisco woman, and Mary Dee Adkins, an art student studying in Paris. His penultimate novel, A Chocolate Soldier (1988), tells the tales of Cager, the soldier, and Mesach, the pastor, who recall an incident 35 years ago during their Gladstone College days, which leads inexorably to a fatalistic and tragic ending. Colter’s final novel, City of Light (1993), takes place in Paris as Paul Kesey, a seemingly untroubled and well-educated young black man, uncovers a series of letters that explain his unnatural attachment to his dead mother. This discovery leads to the deaths of several characters whose fate was determined by past events over which they have no control.

NOVELS A Chocolate Soldier. Chicago: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988. City of Light. Chicago: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1993. The Hippodrome. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1973. Night Studies: A Novelistic Investigation of Race Relations in America. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1979. The Rivers of Eros. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1972.

SOURCES Bender, Robert M. “The Fiction of Cyrus Colter,” New Letters 48, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 93–101.

COMFORT WOMAN 283

Cross, Gilton. “Fought for It and Paid Taxes Too: Four Interviews with Cyrus Colter,” Callaloo 14, no. 4 (1991): 855–897. Gibbons, Reginald. “Colter’s Novelistic Contradictions,” Callaloo 14, no. 4 (1992): 898–905. Kapai, Leila. “Cyrus Colter.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 102–107. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.

COLWIN, LAURIE (1944–1992) Before her death at age 48, Laurie Colwin published five novels, three story collections, and two cookbooks. Like John Cheever, she was a sharp observer of the contemporary scene, understanding loss, failed love, self-deception, and the failure of reason. Critics have even compared her crystalline style, witty dialogue, and delicate humor to that of Jane Austen. For Colwin’s characters, however, solace comes in the form of art and the imagination, although a layer of sorrow runs deeply, just below the humorous veneer of much of her work. Her characters usually live comfortable lives in Greenwich Village—and, according to one online reviewer, they “don’t just ‘have dinner,’ they have roast chicken with herbs served on charming, chipped flea-market china placed on a worn oak table with an antique Mason jar of daffodils in the center” (littleyellowhouse.com). Laurie Colwin was born on June 14, 1944, in New York City, to Peter Barnett Colwin, a fund-raiser and director of the United Jewish Appeal. After dropping out of Bard College, Colwin worked in publishing houses and literary agencies, began to publish stories, and became the food columnist for Gourmet Magazine. Her first novel, Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975), features Elizabeth Bax who, after the death of her husband, Sam, in a sailing accident, falls in love with Sam’s brother Patrick. Her second and bestknown novel, Happy All the Time (1978), grew out of two earlier stories, “The Girl with the Harlequin Glasses” and “Passion and Affect.” It tells the tale of the courtship and marriage of two cousins, Guido and Vincent, and their future wives, Holly Sturgis and Misty Berkowitz. Colwin’s third novel, Family Happiness (1982), depicts the upper-middle-class Polly Demarest

whose perfect Manhattan life crumbles during a heated affair with artist Lincoln Bennett. Goodbye without Leaving (1990) focuses on the only white female singer on tour with a black rhythm and blues act, and Colwin’s last novel, A Big Storm Knocked It Over (1993), chronicles the life of Jane Louise at a major publishing firm. Colwin believed that many readers and critics misinterpreted her intent, when they called her a writer of happy endings. “There is not one single happy ending in any book written by me,” she told interviewer Mickey Pearlman. Happy All the Time, said Colwin is a book about “people in a cheerfully anxious state.” She cited the “unresolved ending” of Family Happiness, and said she had no interest in whether Polly Demarest ends up with her husband or her lover: Colwin’s “mission,” she said, was to depict “a certain kind of struggle” (quoted in Pearlman & Henderson, 123). Laurie Colwin, who devoted much of her time to working in homeless shelters, died of a heart attack on October 24, 1992, in New York City. According to many friends, she never lost track of anyone she knew and was a uniquely generous spirit.

NOVELS A Big Storm Knocked It Over. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Family Happiness. New York: Knopf, 1982. Goodbye without Leaving. New York: Poseidon Press, 1990. Happy All the Time. New York: Knopf, 1978. Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object. New York: Viking, 1975.

SOURCES Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. “Laurie Colwin.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women, 120–124. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Richlin, Amy. “Guilty Pleasures: The Fiction of Laurie Colwin,” New England Review 13, no. 3–4 (Spring/Summer 1991): 296–309.

OTHER Cravings. Review of Home Cooking and More Home Cooking. Available online. URL: http://www.littleyellowhouse.com/ abooks/book38.html. Accessed June 15, 2005.

COMFORT WOMAN NORA OKJA KELLER (1997) Comfort Woman is the first novel of author Nora Okja KELLER, who was born in Korea to a Korean mother and American father and raised in Hawaii. The title of this historical novel refers to the mostly Korean “comfort women” who were forced into prostitution at

284 COMPANY OF WOMEN, THE

“recreation camps” for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The women who lived in such camps were raped, beaten, and sometimes tortured; the majority died in the camps and few survived to tell their stories. Comfort Woman presents a fictionalized account of one comfort woman through the story of Akiko, one of the novel’s two narrators. Akiko’s story alternates with that of her American-born daughter, Beccah. The novel moves between the two narrators and between the past and the present, revealing the complex and shifting connections between mother and daughter, and exploring the ways in which the wounds of one generation are passed to the next. Together, the distinct voices and the inextricably linked stories of Akiko and Beccah form a fierce and powerful story that has both historical and emotional authenticity. As a girl in Korea, Akiko was sold into slavery to raise a dowry for her sister. She was forced into a recreation camp run by the Japanese army where, by the time she was 12, Japanese soldiers raped her every night. Akiko recounts in painful detail the condition of the camps and the treatment she and her fellow comfort women suffered at the hands of the soldiers. After several years, Akiko is able to escape. After the war she marries an American missionary, returning with him to the United States. Beccah, whose father dies when she is five years old, has difficulty understanding Akiko’s strange behavior, speaking to the spirits of the dead, falling into trances, and earning money as a spiritual guide and fortune-teller. Beccah loves her mother deeply, but she is embarrassed by her spiritual rituals and superstitions. Beccah grows up knowing nothing of her mother’s past and so does not realize that much of her mother’s behavior is tied the grief, anger, guilt, and terror she suffers as a result of her experiences as a comfort woman. The chapters narrated by Beccah intimately recount her difficult adolescence, including her feelings of isolation and her conflicted and ambivalent feelings about her mother. Keller masterfully conveys Beccah’s alienation from both her peers and Akiko and the confusion of love and shame she feels for her mother. Often, the ordinariness of Beccah’s experiences at school and with friends stand in stark contrast to

Akiko’s experiences as a comfort woman (when she was about Beccah’s age) and to her understanding of the ghost-filled world in which she lives. In this context, Akiko’s life in the recreation camps and their psychological aftermath is made all the more horrifying and powerful for the reader. In both voices, Keller’s prose is lyrical and deeply imagistic. The beauty of Keller’s prose provides a kind of balance to the difficult and painful nature of the story. In addition, in Comfort Woman, Keller’s characters, and her readers, experience a full range of emotional experience: not only grief and pain, but also humor and consolation. Comfort Woman has been widely praised by critics and was a recipient of the American Book Award.

SOURCES Hill, Logan. “Novel History Lessons: A Profile of Nora Okja Keller,” Poets & Writers 30, no. 2 (2002): 31–37. Keller, Nora Okja. Comfort Woman. New York: Viking, 1997. Nancy Kuhl

COMPANY OF WOMEN, THE MARY GORDON (1980) Mary GORDON’s The Company of Women is the story of five Catholic women in the early sixties who have met through a series of “working women’s“ retreats, and their devotion to one priest. Father Cyprian is a former “Paraclete” priest, who cannot accept the reforms brewing in the church, and thus has been relieved of his duties and become a secular priest. Although three of the women have been widowed or abandoned by weak men lost to insanity or alcoholism (one is also a bereaved mother), only Charlotte has a child: Felicitas Maria Taylor, called “the one virgin martyr whose name contained some hope for ordinary human happiness” (3). Felicitas was born with tremendous expectations. Father Cyprian himself was her baptizer, and though Charlotte’s brother was the baby’s one godfather, three of the women thought of themselves as her godmother—though only one of the women drew the longest straw, and actually signed her name to the baptismal certificate. Felicitas, who was only six months old when her father died (Mary Gordon’s father died when she was only five) becomes an extraordinary

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER 285

child. Very smart, and always in the company of adults, Felicitas has nothing in common with other children, a little girl who has books and ideas rather than tea parties and dolls. Charlotte, Felicitas’ mother, looks at her little girl, and visualizes Felicitas “only among the elders, the child in the temple, amazing the scribes with learning.” It’s around Felicitas (“she’s our only hope” (7), Father Cyprian tells one of the women) that the five women and the priest revolve. Not only the beloved substitute daughter of five mothers, Felicitas is seen by Father Cyprian as his “spiritual prodigy.” Trained by medievalists, Cyprian believes not so much in the modern church as he does in the final word of authority. Father Cyprian, a man who refuses to go to his own dying mother’s bedside, believes it his responsibility to teach this child to reject the things that are “soft” and “womanish.” Father Cyprian tells Felicitas that “we must hate the world to love God” (71). “You are the chosen one” (45) is what Felicitas believes she sees in Father Cyprian’s stare, and “Make straight the way of the Lord” (45) his directive. As in Mary Gordon’s prize-winning first novel, Final Payments, with Isabel Moore her invalid father’s caretaker, Felicitas Taylor surrenders her life to Father Cyprian. Both the invalid father and Cyprian are authoritarian celibates who are much older than Isabel. Though Father Cyprian hopes to give Felicitas a sharp mind and a clean soul as he prepares her for life in the world, her spiritual and intellectual education leaves her innocent and inexperienced fodder for the amoral Professor Robert Cavendish—who has in common with Father Cyprian only a huge ego. Felicitas’s liaison with Cavendish leaves her pregnant and alone, but it also returns her to the love and support of the only “family” she has ever known. When Felicitas meets Leo, a good and decent owner of a hardware store, she marries him (“It is for shelter that we marry, and make love” [243]), not out of any particular passion, but to give her daughter, Linda, a corporeal father and a normal life. By the end of the novel, through Felicitas, her “mothers” and her “Father” will have reached self-realization, and Felicitas realizes that though Father Cyprian will die, the women will always have each other.

SOURCE Gordon, Mary. The Company of Women. New York: Random House, 1980. Christine O’Hagen

THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER WILLIAM STYRON (1971) With his first three novels, William STYRON established himself as a distinctly southern novelist. Lie Down in Darkness (1951) is a family saga in the Faulknerian mode, presenting a family burdened by its eroding belief in its history and its destiny and featuring individuals, equally Machiavellian and melodramatic, whose respectable lives belie passionate compulsions and obsessions that often seem intimations of madness. Specifically, the novel reconstructs the life of a young woman whose death and prolonged burial paradoxically emphasize how distinctive and yet how representative a personality she has been. Set at a North Carolina army base, The Long March (1952) is a military novel in the mode of Gore VIDAL’s Williwaw and Carson McCULLERS’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, weird tales equally martial and Freudian. Like McCullers’s novel, Styron’s seems to be as much about the South as about the military. Set This House Afire (1959) is a murder mystery within a southern gothic frame. Although it is initially set in New York among the dissolute offspring of wealth and privilege, the novel’s action moves to South Carolina. There, all sorts of ready contrasts present themselves between the commercially dynamic and socially profligate lifestyle in the northern metropolis and the mannered and more circumspectly decadent lifestyle in the still patrician South. With its mix of professional and artistic character types, scientific investigation and superstition, Set This House Afire is a prototype for such later novels and films as Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). Treating the largest slave rebellion in the history of the antebellum South, The Confessions of Nat Turner is, of course, a novel that is set in the South and that addresses the issue that has most defined southern history. But it is not a novel in the conventionally southern, or southern-gothic, mode. Styron has much greater ambitions than working within that mode had

286 THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER

allowed him to achieve in his previous novels. Paradoxically, in attempting to reconstruct a largely undocumented historical moment and to enter into Nat Turner’s consciousness, Styron is trying to transcend the conventional historical, cultural, and literary assumptions about slavery, about the South, and about America. Thus, in treating a topic that might seem to be of rather narrow, regional interest, Styron is reaching for the big book, for the great American novel. Framed as Nat Turner’s reflections as he waits to be executed, the novel provides a thorough exposition of the conundrum that has bedeviled Nat Turner and his compatriots. In the white view, a slave’s unwillingness to accept enslavement is evidence of not just rebelliousness but of evil. For all of the social, political, and spiritual institutions of the antebellum South have thoroughly defined slaveholding as not only a practical necessity but also a moral necessity. Slavery has been rationalized as a benevolent institution, through which slaves are cared for materially and spiritually in a manner that would be impossible if they were suddenly freed without any means to sustain themselves. On the other hand, most slaves have been conditioned intellectually and emotionally to acquiesce to their enslavement. So most of the slaves to whom Nat Turner appeals as he attempts his rebellion are too fearful or too uncertain to join him. Styron tries to establish that however extraordinary the rebellion may have been, it would not have been possible without an equally singular effort by Nat Turner to step intellectually as well as emotionally outside his condition. In effect, Styron is defining that effort as an existential assertion of self. Indeed, some critics have charged that despite Styron’s efforts to represent authentically the historical realities of slaveholding in the antebellum South, down even to the smallest details, he ultimately superimposes some more contemporary philosophical concerns onto the story. Yet by far the most controversial aspect of the novel has been the charge that it represents a subtle but pernicious sort of racism. For Styron, a southerner, assumes that he can enter into the consciousness of an African American, a slave in whose oppression his ancestors were at some level complicit, if only by acceding to its continued existence. In the politically charged era of the Civil Rights movement,

Styron seemed to many to be presumptuously co-opting African-American history and seemed to some even to be advancing his own career by creating a sensational literary event out of a story to which he had no moral, never mind literary, right. The novel itself turns on two paradoxes that readers of any race may have difficulty coming to terms with. First, Nat Turner does recognize that he is, in many ways, superior to the average African-American slave. Thus, the very qualities that permit him to conceive of and to carry out the rebellion may ultimately cause it to fail. For Nat Turner is in many ways an African American whose consciousness exists in the largely nonexistent territory between enslavement and exclusively white privilege. In addition, much of his sense of superiority has resulted from his having been singled out by his white masters for accomplishments that they have found extraordinary in an African American. So if he is an elitist, it is an attitude that at least in part has its source, ironically, in the worst kind of racial condescension. Second, once the rebellion begins, Nat Turner cannot control and, in fact, does not wish to control the violence against whites. The terrible violence that the rebellion will demand for it to succeed also requires a purity of motive. But, almost from the start, the rebellion becomes less a crusade than an orgy of bloodletting, some of it fueled by drinking. Ironically, Nat Turner discovers that he himself is incapable of the kind of arbitrary, merciless brutality that a rampage involves. Although this incapacity clearly represents a failure in his leadership, he cannot accept that it represents any sort of compensating humanity of spirit. Moreover, Nat Turner’s earlier violent sexual fantasies involving white women would seem, at least narratively, to justify the white demonization of AfricanAmerican men who do not acquiesce to their oppression. (Political, economic, and cultural oppression is thus crudely linked to sexual repression or a lack of sexual projection.) If those fantasies suggest that Nat Turner cannot step entirely out of the condition that oppresses him, they may be the best evidence that Styron is trying to present his protagonist as a complex personality whose motives and emotions defy neat classification. Unfortunately, in treating a

CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE, THE 287

topic as controversial as this novel’s, an author also has to recognize that critics are going to seize on such emotionally charged details. Almost inevitably, there may be as little chance of subtlety in the responses to such a novel as there was in the responses to the rebellion itself.

SOURCES Allen, Joe. “Blues in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 24 (November 1994): 2–3. Amis, Harry D. “History as Self-Serving Myth: Another Look at Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner,” College Language Association Journal 22 (1978): 134–146. Askin, Denise T. “The Half-Loaf of Learning: A Theme in Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Notes on Modern American Literature 3 (1978): item 6. Betts, Richard A. “The Confessions of Nat Turner and the Uses of Tragedy,” College Language Association Journal 27 (June 1984): 419–435. Brock, Geoffrey Arthur. “At the Crossroads of Politics and History: The Controversies Surrounding William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Dissertation Abstracts International 57, no. 4 (October 1996): 1615A. University of Pennsylvania. DA9627892. Cash, Jean W. “Styron’s Use of the Bible in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Resources for American Literary Study 12 (Autumn 1982): 134–142. Cheshire, Ardner R., Jr. “The Recollective Structure of The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Southern Review 12 (1976): 110–121. Clarke, John H., ed. William Styron’s ‘Nat Turner’: Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon, 1968. Core, George. “The Confessions of Nat Turner and the Burden of the Past,” Southern Literary Journal 2, no. 2 (1970): 117–134. Curtis, Bruce. “Fiction, Myth, and History in William Styron’s Nat Turner,” University College Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1971): 27–32. Davis, Mary Kemp. “William Styron’s Nat Turner as an Archetypal,” Southern Literary Journal 28 (Fall 1995): 67–84. Fabricant, Daniel S. “Thomas R. Gray and William Styron: Finally, a Critical Look at the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner,” American Journal of Legal History 37 (July 1993): 332–361. Friedman, Melvin J. “The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Convergence of ‘Nonfiction Novel’ and ‘Meditation on History,’ ” Journal of Popular Culture 1 (1967): 166–175. Genovese, Eugene D. “William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Meditation on Evil, Redemption, and His-

tory.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark C. Carnes, 209–220. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Hilson, Mica. “The ‘Problem’ of William Styron: Slave Subjectivity and The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Literary Griot 14 (Spring–Fall 2002): 103–123. Holder, Alan. “Styron’s Slave: The Confessions of Nat Turner,” South Atlantic Quarterly 68 (1969): 167–180. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. “William Styron and Human Bondage: The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Hollins Critic 4, no. 5 (1967): 1–12. Strine, Mary S. “The Confessions of Nat Turner: Styron’s ‘Meditation on History’ as Rhetorical Act,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 (1978): 246–266. Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1971. Swanson, William J. “Religious Implications in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Cimarron Review 12 (1970): 57–66. Uya, Okon E. “Race, Ideology and Scholarship in the United States: William Styron’s Nat Turner and Its Critics,” American Studies International 15, no. 2 (1976): 63–81. Martin Kich

CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE, THE HERMAN MELVILLE (1857) In the mid-1800s, a swindler named William Thompson walked the streets of New York. He approached strangers, entangled them in his web of rhetorical artifice, and conned them out of their money and possessions. His modus operandi involved a plea for his victim’s confidence in the context of an artful story. When he was finally arrested in 1849 a journalist for the New York Herald ran an article dubbing Thompson “The Confidence-Man.” Many literary scholars believe this story was an inspiration for Herman MELVILLE’s novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The novel—received with befuddlement and disregard by many critics—was Melville’s last publication before his death in 1891. The novel’s lack of linear plot development frustrated early critics who faced instead a multiplicity of characters, conversations, and con jobs. The motley crew of characters in The Confidence-Man embarks, tarries, and disembarks as the Mississippi River boat, Fidèle, travels southward from the Missouri Territory. “Fidèle,” writes Melville, is “always full of strangers,

288 CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE, THE

she continually, in some degree, adds to, or replaces them with strangers still more strange” (7). Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish one character from another and to determine one character’s motive or another’s deterrent. Physical distinctions—a hooked nose, wooden leg, or auburn hair, for example—are often the best way to identify one traveler from another. In fact, one of the major themes of the novel is the idea of appearance and deception. Although several characters have been identified with Melville’s contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo E MERSON , Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, and Henry David THOREAU, most characters embody the spirit of the original confidence man (Robertson-Lorant, 366). Like Thompson, these characters swindle, coerce, trick, and defraud their victims through the clever, often satirical, use of language. Scholar Scott Eric Atkins suggests that these rhetorical techniques help to establish a “truth of uncertainty” aboard the Fidèle. In “The Renewal of an Old Acquaintance,” for example, a man in mourning approaches a man named Mr. Roberts and begins to play a memory game with him. The man in mourning tells Mr. Roberts that they were previously acquainted and persuades him to trust his memory of their meeting. Once confidence is gained, the man in mourning asks Mr. Roberts for money, launching into “a tale of singular interest, involving calamities against which no integrity, no forethought, no energy, no genius, no piety, could guard,” in order to justify his request (26). As the listener becomes transfixed by the tale, he pulls money from his wallet and gives it to the man in mourning. A similar transaction occurs in chapter 16, “A Sick Man, After Some Impatience, Is Induced to Become a Patient.” An herb doctor persuades a sick man to have confidence in his herbal remedies through a lengthy discussion of his distrust in “chemical practitioners.” The doctor then asks the sick man to consider the mind-body connection and have confidence in its ability to heal, with some help, of course, from the doctor’s own herbal remedy. The sick man is ultimately persuaded to purchase the doctor’s “OmniBalsamic Reinvigorator.” “The most confident hopes so often have failed me,” says the sick man, “and now how much?” (107). Both victims allow their uncer-

tainties to become their vulnerabilities and thus provide an entry for the confidence men. Sometimes pitiful, often humorous, these con artists call into question the readers’ faith in their own beliefs and their confidence in human nature. In fact, one of the most intriguing ways to read The Confidence-Man is a critique of American culture and society. Melville scholar Lawrence Buell notes that the author’s “attention turned increasingly toward anatomies of American social issues” in his later works (Buell, 92). Indeed, it seems that Melville chose the trope of the confidence man to expose his readers to 19th-century American expansionist and capitalist ideologies and their attendant social issues. Perhaps encouraged by his short satirical works criticizing Zachary Taylor, “Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack,” Melville departed from the conventional novel and chose a disorienting satire as his medium for expression (Robertson-Lorant, 160). In chapter 26, for example, on the “metaphysics of Indian-hating,” Melville lampoons Colonel John Moredock for his destructive work among Native Americans. The crippled “Black Guinea” of chapter 3, reflects the level of distrust that existed between whites and blacks: Melville’s characters wonder whether or not the Black Guinea’s deformity—and the color of his skin— are “sham[s]” (12). The lack of description of the Mississippi River, its banks, and its ports is also significant because its absence symbolizes one of the most unfortunate consequences of the settling of the American frontier: the land itself was often overshadowed by the human desire for profit. In effect, with the publication of The Confidence-Man, Melville launched his own ship of fools and asked readers: where will be our destiny in this great American project? Although Melville’s literary career collapsed after publication of The Confidence-Man, both the author and the novel have since been the object of vigorous study by modern scholars and the phrase “confidence man” survives today in common discourse.

SOURCES Bryant, John. “The Persistence of Melville: Representative Writer for a Multicultural Age.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 3–28. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.

CONNELL, EVAN S., JR. 289

Buell, Lawrence. “Melville and the Question of American Decolonization.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 77–98. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997. Lindberg, Gary. “The Confidence-Man” in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Introduction by Tony Tanner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996.

OTHER Atkins, Scott Eric. “The Metafiction of The Confidence-Man.” 1996. Electronic Texts for the Study of American Culture, University of Virginia, Department of American Studies. Available online. URL: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/ atkins/cmintro2.html#16. Accessed June 15, 2005. Jennifer Hughes Westerman

CONNELL, EVAN S(HELBY), JR. (1924– ) Evan S. Connell, in the opinion of numerous critics, deserves more scholarly recognition than he has yet received, in spite of his American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in 1987, and his 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation. Although his name is indelibly associated with two celebrated novels, MRS. BRIDGE (1959) and MR. BRIDGE (1969), both character studies considered among the very best of the 20th century, Connell’s other work is remarkable for its breadth and artistry. He has earned praise for the way he depicts varying historical tableaux, ranging from the American postwar Midwest to the world of alchemists in the 17th century, the Holy Land Crusades, and the American West, portrayed in the award-winning nonfictional Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (1984). The novel won rave reviews and placed Connell on the best-seller lists. (Connell has also written two volumes of epic poetry, including Points for a Compass Rose [1973], which was nominated for the National Book Award for Poetry the following year.) Evan Connell was born on August 17, 1924, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Evan Shelby Connell, a surgeon, and Elton Williamson Connell. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1945 as a flight instructor and was educated at the University of Kansas, where he

received his B.A. in 1947. Although he first moved to San Francisco in the 1940s and attended graduate school at Stanford, Connell’s former classmate, Greg Bottoms, noted that Connell “always expressed a distaste for teaching and lecturing, even giving readings. So he did what the writer Hilary Masters once told me to do: Take the most mindless, insipid, mechanized, soulless job you can find; be a drone so you can save all of your energy for writing. Thus the San Francisco unemployment office in the tumultuous ’60s: drone city. The job, however, proved to be a wellspring of dark inspirations” for Connell. He produced Mrs. Bridge, recognized for its arresting portrait of the aristocratic, idle, and ultimately lonely India Bridge, and for its detailed, realistic evocation of Kansas City from World War I to the aftermath of World War II. He followed this novel with The Patriot (1960) and The Diary of a Rapist (1966). For the former, Connell drew on his own experiences as a pilot. Melvin Isaacs, a “bumbling” cadet-patriot flunks out of flight school. His foil, Patrick Cole, Isaac’s fellow graduate student, sees through the hypocrisy of war propaganda and the pretension of some modern art. The Diary of a Rapist, now an acclaimed underground classic, presents first-person narrator Earl Summerfield, the alienated and increasingly paranoid civil servant who uses violence to liberate himself from a life he views as hopeless. Returning to his fictional Kansas City family in Mr. Bridge, Connell presented, an even darker view of patrician life, its prejudices, and the empty world they create than in Mrs. Bridge. Inevitably compared to Sinclair LEWIS’s MAIN STREET and BABBITT, the two novels about the Bridges indict the hypocrisy of upper-class life. The Connoisseur (1974), on the other hand, is the first of several novels about New York widower Karl Muhlbach; in this one he becomes mesmerized by a pre-Columbian statue. Muhlbach appears again in several short stories and in Double Honeymoon (1976), a disturbing tale of Muhlbach’s marriage to Lambeth Brett, the young beauty who bewitches the older man and whose life ends in suicide. Turning from Kansas City and New York, Connell set The Alchymist’s Journal (1991) in 17th-century Europe; and featured one named character, Paracelsus, an alchemist based on an

290 CONROY, PAT

actual 15th-century physician. The novel won praise for its painstaking research, erudition, and evocation of a distant era when people were also obsessed with gold. Connell earned even more admiration for Deus Lo Volt!: Chronicle of the Crusades (2000), his most recent novel. Through the protagonist, a French knight, he presents a medieval view of the Crusades. After 35 years of living near San Francisco, Evan Connell moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1989, where he still lives and writes. Since then, the novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, were combined and filmed as Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, by Merchant-Ivory Productions in 1990. Son of the Morning Star was adapted for American Broadcasting Companies (ABC) by Republic Pictures in 1991. According to Greg Bottoms, Evan Connell remains “perhaps our most subversive writer.”

NOVELS The Alchymist’s Journal. Berkeley, Calif.: North Point Press, 1991. The Connoisseur. New York: Knopf, 1974. Deus Lo Volt!: Chronicle of the Crusades. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2000. The Diary of a Rapist. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Double Honeymoon. New York: Putnam, 1976. Mr. Bridge. New York: Knopf, 1969. Mrs. Bridge. New York: Viking, 1959. The Patriot. New York: Viking, 1960.

SOURCES Blaisdell, Gus. “After Ground Zero: The Writings of Evan S. Connell, Jr.,” New Mexico Quarterly 36, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 181–207.

OTHER Bottoms, Greg. “Evan S. Connell.” Salon.com (July 8, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/people/bc/ 2000/07/18/connell/. Accessed March 13, 2006.

CONROY, (DONALD) PAT(RICK) (1945– ) Pat Conroy is modest about his international fame and the tens of million of copies of his novels in print. “If I could write like FAULKNER or Thomas WOLFE, I surely would,” he says, adding, “I’d much rather write like them than like me” (Gorner). In spite of his disclaimers, millions of devotees continue to buy Conroy’s novels (seven published to date), the most popular and widely

praised of which are The Great Santini (1976) and The Prince of Tides (1986). Conroy’s novels are set in the South, usually in Beaufort, South Carolina, the town that he calls home. Lauded for the lyrical qualities of his prose, Conroy writes about the conflicts between fathers and sons, the tragic results of racism and antiSemitism, and the love-hate relationships among spouses and family members that upset the human search for equanimity. Pat Conroy was born on October 26, 1946, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Donald Conroy, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, of Chicago, and Frances “Peggy” Egan Peck Conroy, of Rome, Georgia, and Beaufort, South Carolina. Although the family moved constantly, Conroy spent his last two years of high school in Beaufort and then attended the Citadel, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1967. From the beginning, his novels have been personal and autobiographical. His first novel, The Boo (1970), was written in defense of Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, assistant commandant of cadets at the Citadel, who had been demoted shortly after Conroy arrived as a student. Called “juvenilia” by Robert C. Willingham and derided by Conroy himself, who called it “one of the worst books written in our language!” (Bookpage online interview), the book nonetheless adumbrates some of the mature Conroy and demonstrates his characteristic “iconoclasm and offbeat humor” (Burns). Conroy’s second novel, The Water Is Wide (1972), was also written in response to an academic situation, this time about his teaching experiences in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. There Conroy taught illiterate black students and disobeyed the school administration who told him not to “rock the boat” (Willingham). Conroy was fired, but the book subsequently won a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was filmed as Conrack, starring Jon Voight in the role of Conroy. The Great Santini (1976), based on Colonel Conroy, Conroy’s father, here fictionalized as Bull Meecham or “the Great Santini,” explores the explosive emotions of love and hate between father and son, the pervasiveness of prejudice against African Americans and Jews, and the strength of ties among family members.

COOLEY, MARTHA 291

Although most critics agree that in the end, the adolescent Ben Meecham understands, respects, and loves his father, the patently autobiographical bestselling novel caused “a collective nervous breakdown” for Conroy’s whole family: various factions stopped speaking to each other, Conroy’s mother divorced her husband of 33 years, and Conroy’s own eight-year marriage to Barbara Bolling, whose first husband died in Vietnam, ended in divorce. In 1980 he published The Lords of Discipline, a novel that exposed the sexism, racism, and harsh military discipline at the Citadel. It, too, sold well, but as Burns points out, nothing could have prepared him and his second wife, Lenore Gurewitz Fleischer, whom he married in 1981, for the explosive success of The Prince of Tides (1986). Written in Rome, the novel returns to Conroy’s adolescent years in Beaufort and features the first-person narration of Tom Wingo, a Savannah-born southerner now living in New York. In his sessions with Susan Lowenstein, his psychiatrist, he discloses the sexual abuse suffered during his adolescence, as he learns to reclaim optimism and hope for the immediate future. Conroy scholar Landon Burns places Prince of Tides with William STYRON’s LIE DOWN IN DARKNESS, Reynolds PRICE’s The Surface of Earth, and the novels and stories in Carson McCULLERS’s The BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ, “as one of the Southern classics” (Burns). In 1995, Conroy published Beach Music, the story of Jack McCall, recently widowed by his wife’s suicide. After she leaps to her death from a bridge in South Carolina, he moves with his young daughter to Rome. When he returns home, he must deal with his mother’s death from leukemia, and issues related to the Holocaust, World War II, and an FBI informant’s betrayal during the Vietnam War era. His most recent novel, My Losing Season, was published in 2002. As he told interviewer Peer Gorner, “Each book has been more ambitious. I’m trying to be more courageous” (Gorner). A number of popular films, in addition to The Water Is Wide, have been made from Conroy’s novels, including The Great Santini, starring Robert Duvall as Bull Meecham and Michael O’Keefe as his son Ben; The Lords of Discipline, starring Robert Keith as Conroy; and

The Prince of Tides, starring Barbra Streisand. Paramount bought the film rights to Beach Music in 1995. Pat Conroy continues to write and, with his wife, to divide his time between San Francisco and Fripp Island, South Carolina.

NOVELS Beach Music. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 1995. The Boo. Verona, Va.: McClure Press, 1970. The Great Santini. Boston: Houghton, 1976. The Lords of Discipline. Boston: Houghton, 1980. My Losing Season. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2002. The Prince of Tides. Boston: Houghton, 1986. The Water Is Wide. Boston: Houghton, 1972.

SOURCES Burkholder, Robert E. “The Uses of Myth in Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini,” Critique: Studies of Modern Fiction 21 (1979): 31–37. Gorner, Peter. “An Author ‘Blessed’ by Unhappiness,” Chicago Tribune, 25 November 1986. Wertsch, Mary Edwards. Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress. New York: Harmony Books, 1991. York, Lamar. “Pat Conroy.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of The South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 78–82. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. ———. “Pat Conroy’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Southerner,” Southern Literary Journal 19 (Spring 1987): 34–46.

OTHER Burns, Landon C. “Pat Conroy.” Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Online. Available online by subscription. URL: http://gw2/scbbs.com/cc/cc.jsp? bk=conroyeid=1-1. Accessed August 25, 2005.

COOLEY, MARTHA (1955– ) Martha Cooley has written one critically acclaimed novel, The Archivist (1998), based on letters that poet, critic, and playwright T. S. Eliot wrote to an American woman, Emily Hale, during the 1930s and 1940s, when his marriage to Vivian Eliot was failing. In an interview with the Arizona Republic, she recalled that she “was sitting there at breakfast—I will never forget this—and I thought that if I was the librarian in charge of that archive, I’d be under the covers with a flashlight. I’d be reading those letters.” (Stephenson). She applies that excitement and intrigue to a novel about a contemporary archivist, Matthias Lane (and a

292 COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE

young poet, Roberta Spire), who reads the letters. She then creates parallels between Matt’s dead wife, Judith, and Eliot’s wife, Vivian—both of whom were committed to mental institutions. Cooley skillfully engages the past and the present in a moving evocation of pain, loss, and secrets, and the inevitable intersection of fictional art and real life. Martha Cooley was born in Flemington, New Jersey, on September 1, 1955, to Richard Cooley, a teacher, and Mary van den Hoek Cooley. She was educated at Trinity College, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1977. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York, and published Thirty-three Swoons, her second novel, in 2005.

NOVELS The Archivist. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Thirty-three Swoons. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005.

SOURCES Baker, Martha. “T. S. Eliot’s Letters Inspire a Novel,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 22 March 1998. Morton, Brian. “The Hollow Men,” New York Times, 26 April 1998, p. 9. Nesvisky, Matt. “Only Connect,” Jerusalem Post, 14 August 1998. Postlethwaite, Diana. “Review of The Archivist,” Women’s Review of Books, 1 July 1998, p. 26.

OTHER Stephenson, Anne. “Novelist Inspired by T. S. Eliot.” Arizona Republic (April 12, 1998). Available online. URL: http:// www.princeton.edu/pr/news/98/c/0417-clips.htm. Accessed August 27, 2005.

COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789–1851) After acknowledging the early contributions to American literature of Charles Brockdon BROWN and others, scholars agree that James Fenimore Cooper—novelist, historian, travel writer, social commentator—remains the foundational figure for the American novel tradition. Cooper, more than anyone, formed the 19th-century European’s image of American character, nature, and society. Adapting the model created by the British historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, Cooper created a popular interest in American history and gave readers a more informed awareness of the roots of American culture and institutions. As the inventor of the frontier novel and sea novel, he influenced the themes, character

types, and symbolism characteristic of these novelistic subgenres. His influence in the 20th century resonates in the work of Joseph Conrad and William FAULKNER. Cooper himself anticipated that he would be remembered chiefly for the LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, and certainly these novels are as central to understanding the American mythos and psyche as those depicting Hester Prynne, Huckleberry Finn, and Jay Gatsby. Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, but grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a frontier settlement established by his father, Judge William Cooper. Much evidence suggests that Cooper was ambivalent about his father’s powerful personality, rags-to-riches success, and political clout—both in New York and in Washington, D.C. After his father’s death, Cooper, encouraged by his young wife, wrote an imitative novel, Precaution (1820), and then proceeded to write The Spy, published in 1821, a tale of military conflict and intrigue during the Revolutionary War. The great and immediate success of The Spy launched Cooper on his new career as a novelist, and within a few years he had published such brilliant novels as The Pioneers (1823), The Pilot (1823), The LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826), The Prairie (1827), and The Red Rover (1827). With The Pilot and The Red Rover, Cooper melded the protagonists and the ships as part of the action, and, in so doing, invented the modern sea novel. And with the Leatherstocking Tales (The Pathfinder (1840) and The DEERSLAYER (1841) would complete the five-volume series), Cooper wrote the epic of the American “westward” movement. His greatest character, Natty Bumppo, woodsman, is gradually driven from the disappearing forest wilderness around the mid-18th-century upstate New York town of Templeton (based on Cooperstown) to the western plains recently acquired by President Jefferson as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Cooper’s powerful prose descriptions of the rugged beauty of the American landscape also appealed to readers in English around the globe. In 1826 Cooper took his family on an extended European tour. Influenced by his friend the marquis de Lafayette and others, he stayed to write a number of nonfiction works about the American democratic experiment, the most famous of which is Notions of the Americans (1828). He also wrote a series of European

COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE 293

historical novels that explore the evils of aristocratic and oligarchic forms of government, the most powerful of which is The Bravo (1831). But the public wanted his adventure novels, not the political and controversial books he had been writing. So, on his return to the United States in 1834, he announced the end of his novelistic career, turned to a five-volume set describing his European travels (1836–38), and began work on his History of the Navy of the United States (1839). (It is still considered the definitive work on the subject.) He did return to novel writing, in due course, completing the Leatherstocking Tales with The Pathfinder (1840) and The DEERSLAYER (1841), as well as the memorable novels Satanstoe (1845) and The Crater (1847). In the past few decades, Cooper’s works have been rescued from Mark TWAIN’s mockery and the children’s literature shelves as he is taught seriously again in high school and university courses, and his contributions to American history, culture and literature are recognized for their importance.

SELECTED NOVELS The Borderers. London: Colburn & Bentley, 1829; republished as The Wept of Wish Ton-Wish, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829. The Bravo. London: Colburn & Bentley, 1831. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831. The Chainbearer. London: Bentley, 1845; New York: Burgess, Stringer & Company, 1845. The Deerslayer. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1841. Home As Found. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1838. Homeward Bound. London: Bentley, 1838; Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1838. The Last of the Mohicans. Philadelphia, Pa.: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1826. Lionel Lincoln. New York: C. Wiley, 1824, 1825. Mark’s Reef. London: Bentley, 1847; republished as The Crater, New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1847. New York. Edited by Dixon Ran Fox. New York: Payson, 1932. Notions of the Americans. London: Colburn, 1828; Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828. The Pathfinder. London: Bentley, 1840; Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840. The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea. New York: C. Wiley, 1823. The Pioneers. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823. The Prairie. London: Colburn, 1827; Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1827. Precaution. New York: Goodrich, 1820.

Ravensnest. London: Bentley, 1846; republished as The Redskins, New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1846. The Red Rover. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828; Paris: Bossange, 1827. Satanstoe. London: Bentley, 1845; New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1845. The Spy. New York: Wiley & Halsted, 1821. The Water-Witch. Dresden, Germany: Walther, 1830; Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831.

SOURCES Adams, Charles Hansford. The Guardian of the Law: Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Baker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (Mark Twain). “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” North American Review 161 (July 1895): 1–12. Darnell, Donald. James Fenimore Cooper: Novelist of Manners. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993. Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. Dekker, George, and John P. McWilliams, eds. James Fenimore Cooper: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973. Franklin, Wayne. The New World of James Fenimore Cooper Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1982. House, Kay. Cooper’s Americans. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. Kelly, William P. Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Long, Robert Emmet. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: Continuum, 1990. McWilliams, John. The Last of the Mohicans: Civil Savagery & Savage Civility. New York: Twayne, 1995. ———. Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Motley, Warren. The American Abraham: James Fenimore Cooper and the Frontier Patriarch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Parkman, Francis. “Review of The Works of James Fenimore Cooper,” North American Review 74 (January 1852): 147–161. Peck, H. Daniel. A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977. Railton, Stephen. Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978.

294 COOVER, ROBERT

Rans, Geoffrey. Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Novels. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Ringe, Donald A. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: Twayne, 1962. Taylor, Alan. William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1995. Verhoeven, W. M., ed. James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, 1993. Walker, Warren S. James Fenimore Cooper: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1962. ———. Plots and Characters in the Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978. Wallace, James D. Early Cooper and His Audience. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

COOVER, ROBERT (1932– )

Robert Coover has long had a distinguished reputation as one of America’s foremost writers of novels and short fiction. Best known to the reading public for his frequently anthologized short stories (“The Babysitter,” for instance), Coover has also written nine novels. An artist as well as an innovator, he is frequently compared to other postmodernist experimentalists and metafictionalists, particularly Donald BARTHELME, Thomas PYNCHON, and William GASS. His penchant for rewriting traditional biblical stories and fairly tales and for blending fantasy with reality has also suggested comparisons with Gabriel García Márquez. In 1992, Coover wrote a widely anthologized essay, “The End of Books and Hypertext,” first published in the New York Times. The essay was partly the result of his experimental hyperfiction workshops at Brown University, and his active interest in electronic media and the possibilities of new technology. Robert Coover was born on February 4, 1932, in Charles City, Iowa, to Grant Marion Coover, a newspaper editor, and Maxine Sweet Coover. Reared in Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois, Coover earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1953 from Southern Illinois University. After attending Officers Candidate School, he spent three years as a navy lieutenant in Europe, where he met Maria del Pilar Sans Mallafré, a University of Barcelona student whom he married in 1959. Of his first two books, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) is the closest Coover has come to writing a traditional or realist novel. It concerns a mining disaster

in a small Midwest community that elevates its braindamaged hero to Christlike stature; the larger question concerns the human propensity for mythmaking in response to inexplicable events. Coover’s second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop. (1968), features Henry Waugh, a Walter Mittytype character who invents an illusory world of baseball in response to his boredom with the real world. The novel’s postmodern ending leaves the reader to observe the baseball players as they create their own stories and traditions. Coover’s most controversial—and probably his best—novel is The Public Burning (1977), a story based on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the alleged Soviet spies who were executed in 1953. The novel’s publication was delayed because Coover used then-president Richard Nixon—who had been vice president in 1953—as narrator of the historical events that Coover loosely combines with those arising from his imagination. Coover followed with his 1981 novella Spanking the Maid, a postmodernist blending of Victorian guidebooks for interaction with one’s servant and the 19thcentury literature of pornography; it also speaks to the relationship between reader and writer. Repetition, expansion, and proliferation of his material occurs even more noticeably in Gerald’s Party (1986), a novel based loosely on the detective story along with other traditional literary forms. The absurd situations mock traditional forms. Gerald, for example, the host of the party, continues to behave as the urbane host, despite the mayhem caused when the police beat the dead victim’s husband to death with croquet mallets. In 1987, Coover returned to Nixon, who this time was portrayed as a professional football player in Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? In a blending of historical fact and imaginative fiction, Coover shows Nixon’s rise and fall in 1930s Chicago, where, during a labor strike, Nixon is killed by a policeman. In the 1990s, Pinocchio in Venice (1991) appeared. Coover creates an absurd and aging rendition of the fairytale figure, now a professor of art history who writes his magnum opus when he returns to Italy, the country of his birth. While in Venice, Pinocchio revisits the creatures of his youth. Pushing the limits of real-

COQUETTE, THE 295

ism and blending Thomas Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, with the Pinocchio story, Coover creates his own version of magical realism. In 1996, John’s Wife, set in a small midwestern town that becomes a metropolis, is aided by Coover’s complex sentences and style as each resident unsuccessfully attempts to define the illusory wife of John, the town’s powerful builder. Briar Rose (1996), retells the tale of Sleeping Beauty, in this case named Rose, who is imprisoned by a crone and is plagued by nightmares, in which her handsome prince-rescuer is already married, or has already turned into a toad, or turns her into a toad as well. The quintessential experimentalist, Robert Coover’s novels continue to delight a coterie of enthusiasts.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Adventures of Lucky Pierre. New York: Grove, 2002. Briar Rose. New York: Grove, 1998. Gerald’s Party. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Ghost Town: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. John’s Wife. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. The Origin of the Brunists. New York: Putnam, 1966. Pinocchio in Venice. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. The Public Burning. New York: Viking, 1977. Spanking the Maid. Bloomfield Hills, Mich. and Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark, 1981. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York: Random House, 1968. Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.

SOURCES Cope, Jackson I. Robert Coover’s Fictions. New York: Twayne, 1992. Gado, Frank, compiler. First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing. Schenectady, N.Y.: Union College Press, 1973. Gordon, Lois G. Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. LeClair, Thomas, and Larry McCaffery. Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser Verlag, 1994.

Semrau, Janus. American Self-Conscious Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s: Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Ronald Sukenick. Poznan, Poland: Wydawn Nauk. Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu, 1986. Schulz, Max. Black Humor Fiction of the 1960s. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973.

OTHER Brown University. “Robert Coover.” Available online. URL: http://www.brown.edu/Departments/English/Writing/ coover.htm. Accessed June 16, 2005.

COQUETTE, THE HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER (1797) This novel has all the characteristics of the seduction tales popular in the 18th and 19th centuries: a virtuous woman, a scheming man, a moment of weakness, a doomed pregnancy, and a last, tearful scene wherein the woman acknowledges her folly before dying. The trials of Eliza Wharton in The Coquette were based on the real-life events of Elizabeth Whitman, a woman from a respectable family, who died in a small country inn days after delivering an illegitimate baby that lived not long past its birth. On July 29, 1788, a newspaper article describing her last days kindly attributed to Whitman superior qualities, no doubt for the sensational reaction her death would create (Davidson, 141). The story was soon reprinted throughout the new nation and contemporary clergy seized upon the story to illustrate the dangers of immorality and to drive home often-preached ideas about how young women should live (Davidson, 148). With the novel, published in 1797, Hannah FOSTER, distantly related to Whitman through marriage, attempted to reconsider the stark interpretations offered by a judgmental clergy and society. Told in epistolary form, The Coquette begins soon after Eliza Wharton has, within a few months, buried both her father and fiancé. While sorrowful at their deaths, Wharton feels “pleasure” at having escaped an arranged marriage that could not have made her happy. She is eager to enjoy her newfound freedom socializing among friends and hesitates to make another alliance with any man. But because of her obvious virtues, Wharton is soon pursued aggressively by two men: Reverend Boyer, an intense but boorish man of the same profession as her father and ex-fiancé;

296 COQUETTE, THE

and Major Sanford, an apparently wealthy, charming man with a reputation as a rake. The two represent not only opposing personalities, but also contrasting 18thcentury principles, namely “reason” in Boyer and “fancy” in Sanford. Wharton’s reaction to the two men is “What a pity . . . that the graces and virtues are not oftner united! They must, however, meet in the man of my choice; and till I find such a one, I shall continue to subscribe my name Eliza Wharton” (22). After so narrowly dodging an incompatible match, Wharton refuses to unite with any man who cannot satisfy her head and heart; she clings, instead, to independence. Eighteenth-century society frowned on such a decision, and Wharton’s family and friends repeated advise her to marry quickly. Mrs. Richman, with whom Wharton stays after leaving her parents’ home, tells Wharton soon after she arrives: “Your friends, my dear, solicitous for your welfare, wish to see you suitably and agreeably connected” (13). Her mother’s counsel is far more ominous: Wharton must marry because “[a]s you are young and charming, a thousand dangers lurk unseen around you” (40). The specific “dangers” remain unnamed. The plot line itself illustrates that point, though Wharton cannot, or perhaps will not, see the consequences of a woman choosing freedom until it is too late. All of Wharton’s associates urge her to marry Boyer, and while her “reason” can admit to his superiority, as Wharton explains to Boyer, “I recoil at the thought of immediately forming a connection, which must confine me to the duties of domestic life” (29). Wharton favors Sanford, but she has been denied autonomy for too long to easily resign it. To all observers, Wharton’s obstinate attempt to remain free appears mere coquetry, or an attempt to secure attention without affection from two men. Wharton cannot withstand pressures from her family, friends, and Boyer forever. To Sanford’s dismay, Wharton resigns herself to marrying Boyer, a man she knows is her temperamental opposite. But before Wharton can tell him of her choice, he catches her trying to explain her decision to Sanford in a private meeting. Without waiting to determine the cause of the meeting, Boyer and his wounded pride depart, leaving only a condemning letter behind for Wharton. In a novel that follows classic dramatic form, this scene represents the climax, which all three characters

describe from their perspective. That this particular scene and not the later sexual fall (which is merely implied) is the center of the narrative, underscores that Wharton’s primary error is not in allowing herself to be seduced, but instead in trying to remain independent of either man. Until this point the characters of Wharton, Boyer, and Sanford are carefully developed and the conflict explicated. From here, Wharton’s life spirals swiftly downward, emphasizing what she well understood after that fateful night: her life is essentially over. She has lost her reputation as a virtuous woman, and without it there is little she can look forward to in her society. Sanford also realizes this and can now afford to toy with Wharton: he abandons her, soon after, to pursue a wealthy woman who will cover his many hidden debts. He will eventually return to ensure Wharton’s fall, indeed, justifies her fall in reputation; in the meantime, Wharton’s friends try desperately to convince her all is not lost. Wharton makes one last attempt to restore her ruined reputation when she writes to Boyer a year later, proposing marriage. Boyer then has the great satisfaction of announcing his upcoming marriage to a truly virtuous woman and of counseling Wharton “to adhere, with undeviating exactness, to the path of rectitude and innocence” (104). Wharton reacts with the cry of a seduced woman (Davidson, introduction to Coquette, xvii): “I am undone!” (105). From then on Wharton refuses to be comforted. Her health begins to fail, socializing becomes unbearable, and even writing “suits [her] not” (134). As her voice disappears from the text, Wharton becomes a veritable ghost, a shadow of the woman who once demanded freedom. This would seem to suggest that Boyer’s utter denouncement, a rejection by the representative of respectable, married society, is as responsible for Wharton’s eventual demise as her sexual seducer, Sanford. Boyer’s rejection and Wharton’s near silence leaves Sanford to gloat at his eventual conquest and her friends to moralize about it. The last few chapters become increasingly didactic and culminate with Wharton regaining her voice long enough to unambiguously state the moral of the story: “May my unhappy story serve as a beacon to warn the American fair of the dangerous tendency and destruc-

COQUETTE, THE 297

tive consequences of associating with men of your [Sanford’s] character, of destroying their time, and risking their reputation by the practice of coquetry and its attendant follies” (159). In her death Wharton sees no redemption for herself; hence, the warning she offers the “American fair.” If no one learns from her death, she will die in vain. Nonetheless, the text offers characters and issues throughout the novel that are much more complex than this simple, clear moral would imply. Even early critics, dismissive of seduction novels, recognized The Coquette as an outstanding example of sentimental fiction, mainly because no character within the novel is stereotypical: Wharton is virtuous but indecisive, Boyer is moderate but proud, and Sanford is calculating yet strangely sincere. The epistolary structure of the novel allows the multiple voices to come through, and the reader gets a taste of both the male and female perspective on love and marriage. Still, the female voice comes through most clearly. The novel offers a rare chance for the fallen woman to explain herself. Modern readers, much like Wharton’s clerical contemporaries, are prone to condemn Wharton: she knew the rules of her society, and she refused to conform. Worse, she “played” two men; she deserves some sort of punishment. Yet Foster insists we take a closer look. In Foster’s retelling of the factual Elizabeth Whitman story, none of the original pain is gone; none of the facts change; Wharton and her child die alone and abandoned. But in the novel, Wharton is a sympathetic character, and not simply because she dies a pathetic death. She is sincere and intelligent, she knows her weaknesses and strengths; she is human and stumbles only after her options have disappeared. Foster’s retelling considers the female perspective: the realities of women’s lives, loves, and choices. Critics see Wharton’s story as more than the tale of one woman’s sexual fall. For feminist critics Wharton represents all women living in 18th-century America. The novel shows that even with middle-class status and an education, women had few choices. For example, Cathy N. Davidson in her introduction to the novel writes that Wharton “naively sought to exercise her freedom only to learn that she had none” (xvii). In this way The Coquette highlights the “powerlessness

shared by its female contemporary readers” (Fleischmann, 311). Other critics view the story as an allegory with Wharton as a symbol of the new nation. These arguments illustrate that there was a strong societal link between women and virtue in the new republic’s politics. As one critic writes, “by linking the private trials of women in finding their way to personal independence with a variety of public concerns connected to both American and female identification, Foster suggests that the lives of women serve as registers for the political and social problems of post-Revolutionary American society” (Richards, 238). Certainly Wharton’s desire for freedom would resonate with her contemporaries who had just fought the War of Independence, yet the novel seems to argue through Wharton’s eventual death that freedom is impossible. In the years following the revolution, the new citizenry debated how to govern both legally and communally. Political and societal views became more conservative about personal freedoms as the newly established nation tried to solidify its authority. When Wharton insists upon her right to reject the role assigned her by society, she threatens the entire social and political fabric of the new nation. As one critic puts it, “[Wharton’s] death can be viewed as a moral lesson about code violation: a rebel is ritually punished, and an order is preserved” (Fleischmann, 323). Whether as a symbol of all womanhood or of the new republic itself, this novel makes clear that the liberty Wharton clings to, the desperate desire to, as Wharton says, “enjoy that freedom which I so highly prize,” cannot be achieved. As explained by Lucy Freeman, one of several spokeswomen for societal values in the novel, the freedom Wharton refers to is merely “a play about words” (30–31). Wharton has misinterpreted the meaning of freedom as defined in the 18th century. Ultimately, the conservative societal definition is the one that must be upheld to preserve order. Hannah Foster’s novel supports this idea with the punishment of its rebellious heroine, the tragic death of Eliza Wharton, but not before questioning the definition itself. Foster’s contemporaries could obviously identify with her message and the tragic character of Eliza Wharton/Elizabeth Whitman: they made The Coquette

298 CORNWELL, PATRICIA

a national best-seller, one of the first in the new nation. Today sentimental lovers no longer journey to Elizabeth Whitman’s grave in sacred pilgrimages, but those who read The Coquette will still find plenty to satisfy.

SOURCES Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America 1789–1860. New York: Pageant Books, 1959. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolutions and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Fleischmann, Fritz. “Concealed Lessons: Foster’s Coquette and Brockden Brown’s Lesson on Concealment.” In Early America Re-Explored: New Readings in Colonial, Early National, and Antebellum Culture, edited by Klaus H. Schmidt and Fritz Fleischmann, 309–348. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Foster, Hannah W. The Coquette. Edited and with an introduction by Cathy N. Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Gould, Phillip. “Virtue, Ideology, and the American Revolution: The Legacy of the Republican Synthesis,” American Literary History 5, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 564–577. Hamilton, Kristie. “An Assault on the Will: Republican Virtue and the City in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette,” Early American Literature 24, no. 2 (1989): 135–151. Lewis, Jan. “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture 44, no. 4 (October 1987): 689–721. Richards, Jeffrey H. “The Politics of Seduction: Theater, Sexuality, and National Virtue in the Novels of Hannah Foster.” In Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History, edited by Della Pollock, 238–257. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Shuffelton, Frank. “Mrs. Foster’s Coquette and the Decline of the Brotherly Watch,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century 16 (1986): 135–151. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Domesticating ‘Virtue’: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America.” In Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, edited by Elaine Scarry, 160–184. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Stern, Julia. “Beyond ‘A Play about Word’: Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette.” In The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel, 71–151. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Wenska, Walter P., Jr. “The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom,” Early American Literature 12 (1977–78): 243–255. Heidi Johnson

CORNWELL, PATRICIA (DANIELS) (1956–

) Patricia Cornwell is the only crime writer to have written a novel (Postmortem, 1990) that won five awards in the same year: the Edgar, Creasy, Anthony, Macavity, and the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure. She is also the world’s acknowledged expert in forensic mysteries. More than 12 of her novels have made the New York Times best-seller list. Along with Sue GRAFTON and Sara PARETSKY, Cornwell has helped define and legitimize the woman detective. But her creation, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the Richmond, Virginia, medical examiner who has a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from Georgetown University still must surmount the usual hurdles of sexism, as must Cornwell’s other recurring character, police chief Judy Hammer. Patricia Cornwell was born on June 9, 1956, in Miami, Florida, to Sam Daniels, an attorney, and Maria Zenner Daniels, a secretary. Within four years of her parents’ divorce, Cornwell’s mother became so depressed that she relinquished the care of her three children, including nine-year-old Patricia, to the Reverend Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth Bell Graham, who found homes for them with missionaries. After her graduation from Davidson College in 1979 and her marriage in 1980 to Charles Cornwell, a college professor, Cornwell published her first book, A Time for Remembering: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham (1983), a biography of the evangelist’s wife. It was her work as a crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer, however, and the increasing amounts of time at the Richmond, Virginia morgue, that led to her first novel, Postmortem. The novel focuses on a serial rapist-murderer whose identity the forensic pathologist Scarpetta uncovers. Body of Evidence (1991) followed and featured Beryl Madison, a writer who reports death threats to the police; they are unable to prevent her murder. In All That Remains (1992), Scarpetta must find the murderer of a couple found dead in their car, while in Cruel and Unusual (1993), Temple Gault, the brilliant but psy-

CORRECTIONS, THE 299

chotic serial murderer, taunts Scarpetta. Gault, who specializes in killing children, reappears in The Body Farm (1994), and From Potter’s Field (1995), where he murders a homeless woman in Central Park. Other Scarpetta mysteries include Cause of Death (1996), about the links between a right-wing cult and a murdered reporter; Unnatural Exposure (1997), set in England and Ireland; Point of Origin (1998), in which Scarpetta’s FBI lover Benton Wesley is murdered; and Black Notice (1999) and The Last Precinct (2000), international mysteries in which Scarpetta struggles with the powerful Chandonne crime family. Novels featuring Judy Hammer focus on Hammer’s Charlotte, North Carolina, police department; they include Hornet’s Nest (1997), Southern Cross (1998), and Isle of Dogs (2001). Dr. Scarpetta returns in Cornwell’s most recent novel, Blow Fly (2003). Here Cornwell’s forensics expert is stripped of her position and returns to Florida, only to become drawn into murders in Baton Rouge. Cornwell has also written a Scarpetta cookbook, Food to Die For: Secrets from Kay Scarpetta’s Kitchen (2001) and the well-researched Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed (2002). Here she presents her theory that the artist Walter Richard Sickert, student of James McNeil Whistler, was in fact Jack the Ripper. Patricia Cornwell lives and writes in Westport, Connecticut.

NOVELS All That Remains. New York: Scribner, 1992. Black Notice. New York: Putnam, 1999. Blow Fly: A Scarpetta Novel. New York: Putnam & Sons, 2003. The Body Farm. New York: Scribner, 1994. Body of Evidence. New York: Scribner, 1991. Cause of Death. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1996. Cruel and Unusual. New York: Scribner, 1993. From Potter’s Field. New York: Scribner, 1995. Hornet’s Nest. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1997. Isle of Dogs. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. The Last Precinct (part of “Kay Scarpetta” series). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2000. Point of Origin. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1998. Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed. Boston: Putnam, 2002. Postmortem. New York: Scribner, 1990. Scarpetta’s Winter Table. Charleston, S.C.: Wyrick & Co., 1998.

Southern Cross. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1998. Unnatural Exposure. New York: Putnam & Sons, 1997.

SOURCES Berch, Bettina. “Cruel and Unusual,” Belles Lettres 9, no. 1 (Fall 1993): 37. Blincoe, Nicholas. “A Question of Time,” London Observer, 28 February 1999, p. 12. De Haven, Tom. “Hornet’s Nest,” Entertainment Weekly, no. 361 (January 10, 1997): 50. Delman, David. “The Latest, but Not the Best, from Cornwell,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 8 August 1999, p. H01. Kent, Bill. “Thrillers,” Washington Post Book World, 9 August 1998, p. 4. Messent, Peter. “Patricia Cornwell’s Unnatural Exposure and the Representation of Space: Changing Patterns in Crime Fiction,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 21, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2000): 37–45. O’Donoghue, Heather. “More Problems for Dr. Scarpetta,” Times Literary Supplement, 10 October 1997, p. 24. Raphael, Lev. “Internal Struggle Brings Series Alive,” Detroit Free Press, 27 October 2000, p. 2G. Robbins, Joan Hamerman. “Living Dangerously,” Women’s Review of Books 8, nos. 10–11 (July 7, 1991): 32. Schegulla, Eva. “Thriller,” The Armchair Detective 26, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 118. Scott, Mary. “The Knives Are Out,” New Statesman & Society 8, no. 374 (October 13, 1995): 32–33. Sexton, David. “Brazil, Where the Nuts Come From,” Spectator 278, no. 8797 (March 1, 1997): 29–30. Sutherland, John. “Marksmanship,” London Review of Books 18 (November 14, 1996): 24–25.

OTHER Cornwell, Patricia. “Tough on Crime.” Author interview. The Observer (October 19, 2003). Available online. URL: http:// books. guardian.co.uk/departments/crime/story/ 0,6000,1065952.00.html. Accessed August 28, 2005. ———. Author interview. Bookpage (August 1999). Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9908bp/ patricia_cornwell.html. Accessed August 28, 2005.

CORRECTIONS, THE JONATHAN FRANZEN (2001) FRANZEN’s novel The Corrections, the author’s third novel and winner of the 2001 National Book Award, is a depiction of late 20th-century family life in the fictional midwestern city of St. Jude. Alfred and Enid Lambert struggle with their own aging and illness, particularly Alfred’s depression and dementia,

300 CORRECTIONS, THE

and the loss of connection to their three adult children, Gary, Denise, and Chip. The title references “a shortlived drop in stock prices—a correction” (Hill, 32) that is here applied to the American family and the changing face of the American dream as it crosses into a new millennium. The novel, lauded by writers as disparate as David Foster Wallace and Pat CONROY, was “treated to rapturous reviews in seemingly every major publication” (Hill, 58); it was also “nominated for every major award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award” (Hill, 52). The novel’s center is the Lambert home and Enid’s desire for all of the family to “have one last Christmas in St. Jude” (75). Gary, the oldest of the children, tries to appease his histrionic wife, Caroline, who manipulates the couple’s three sons, “her best friends” (139), into waging an assault on Gary’s attempts to take them to St. Jude for the holidays. Gary, an investment banker, also tries to help his mother and father negotiate a patent fee for a discovery by Alfred necessary to produce Corecktall, a new drug for the very mental diseases that claim Alfred as a victim. Gary struggles with his own fears that he may be depressed, thereby proving Caroline correct, while he also tries to keep peace in his family and avoid the “optimistic egalitarianism” of the Midwest that “failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him” (175). Chip, Gary’s younger brother, has recently lost his position at a small liberal arts college because of his inappropriate relationship with an intelligent but somewhat fixated student, Melissa Paquette. Chip’s romance with his sexually manipulative student pushes him to find a new career as a screenwriter, but on his journey toward profitable employment, he takes a job as a web designer for Lithuania.com, an online company designed to sell shares in a Lithuanian political party in exchange for various perks and privileges in Vilnius, a scheme that comes close to getting him shot before he can get out of the country. His sister, Denise, a chef, attempts to understand her ambiguous sexual identity as she moves from divorce, to a sexual liaison with the financier of her restaurant, Brian, then to his wife, and then back again, without ever seeming to come to terms with any choice she makes. With fre-

quent digressive avenues, the novel chronicles Enid’s confrontation with her children as they try to understand feelings about their growing up and their present lives, all under the guise of the decision about whether or not to return to St. Jude for the holidays. Though the Lambert family populates the world of The Corrections, the Midwest itself, symbolic of the sterile and stultifying world that precede the children’s present—and equally unsatisfying—lives, is as much a character as any of the Lambert clan. Franzen positions his unsettled characters in the posture of continuously struggling to detach themselves from the tarnish that a midwestern middle-class upbringing has left on their souls, to the extent that abrupt confrontations with it, in this case caused by any sort of contact with their parents, spirals them into emotional chasms from which they are inept at extricating themselves. When Chip finally arrives at his parents’ home for the promised last Christmas together, for example, his confrontation with his family is far more injurious than his strip search by the ski-masked “policemen” of the provisional Lithuanian government he has just escaped from. Chip stands at the entrance to his ancestral home, and his awareness of “the enchanted interior . . . dense with objects and smells and colors, humidity, large personalities” is punctuated with Franzen’s simple declaration, “He was afraid to enter” (536). Chip’s rejection of a lifestyle he imagines his parents live is only exceeded by his rejection of the life he learns his parents are actually living, a life of despair and hopelessness, of new drug therapy trials that cannot possibly halt the progression of Alfred’s consuming dementia, and of Enid’s patchwork of lies and rationalizations that fails to stop the crumbling of her intricately fashioned facade of a world view. Surprisingly, Franzen’s novel came to prominence in many American households through the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. After the novel was chosen for the Book Club, Franzen hinted “that appearing on [Oprah’s] show was out of keeping with his place in ‘the high-art literary tradition’ ” (Kirkpatrick). He quickly attempted to mollify the outraged readership of Oprah’s Book Club, not to mention others of the literary community, by claiming, “Mistake, mistake, mistake to use the word ‘high’ ” (Kirkpatrick). Franzen

CORREGIDORA 301

also tried to restore his image in an essay, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” from his 2002 collection, How to Be Alone. Therein Franzen writes that during his book tour to promote the novel, he tries to “respond in kind to each kind of reader” by agreeing with that person’s views, and he punctuates this comment with the understated phrase, “I’ll get in trouble for this” (300). The hubbub created by the Oprah scandal had a significant effect on Franzen’s novel and “the Oprah fiasco sent sales through the roof” (Hill, 60). Franzen’s work will no doubt continue to be hailed as an accurate portrayal of late 20th-century life. His ambivalence about both traditional and changing definitions of family, commercialism, success, and achievement mirror our society’s own concerns about them. Though critics may argue about the staying power of a novel like Franzen’s The Corrections, as its readers we recognize the accuracy of the portrayal of contemporary life as we struggle to define our future.

SOURCES Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2001. ———. How to Be Alone. 2002. New York: Picador–Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Hill, Laban Carrick. Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.” Barnes & Noble Reader’s Companion Series. New York: Sparks Publishing, 2003.

OTHER Freund, Charles Paul. “Franzen’s Folly: The Novelist v. High Art’s Dark Other.” reasononline (November 16, 2001). Available online. URL: http://www.reason.com/hod/cf111601. shtml. Accessed June 16, 2005. Jonathan Franzen. Available online. URL: http://www. johnathanfranzen.com. Accessed June 16, 2005. Kirkpatrick, David. “ ‘Oprah’ Gaffe by Franzen Draws Ire and Sales.” New York Times, (October 21, 2001). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com. Accessed June 16, 2005. Michel Camp

CORREGIDORA GAYL JONES (1975)

When a literary artist belongs to a community that is denied cultural, economic, and political authority, she is often expected to write in the name of that community. All of her work, it is assumed, deals with the common

experience of “her race”—and has no other significance. She becomes the spokeswoman of “her people,” a substitute voice for the members of her “oppressed” group, who have the same problems as she does. The writing of Gayl Jones has been traditionally received in this way. Like Toni MORRISON, Jones is customarily referred to as an “African-American novelist.” The significance of Jones’s masterwork, Corregidora, however, is not reducible to the race of its author. At the novel’s opening, lounge singer Ursa Corregidora is shoved down a staircase by her husband, Mutt—a catastrophic blow that results in her infertility. After she renounces her husband, Ursa enters into a relationship with Tadpole, the owner of the Happy Café, the bar at which she performs. Like all of her significant relationships with men, this second relationship proves disastrous and doomed to failure. Every man in the novel, without exception, sees Ursa as a “hole”—that is, as a beguiling and visually appealing thing to be penetrated. The narrative suggests this on the figural level. A talented novelist, Jones weaves images of orifices throughout her text—tunnels that swallow, and tighten around, trains; lamellae such as nostrils, vaginas, and mouths; wounds; and so on. Although one of Ursa’s “holes” is barren, another “hole” is bountifully “prosperous” (171)—her mouth, from which the “blues” issue. A movement of sonic exteriorization corresponds to a countermovement of vaginal interiorization. It is easy to be trapped by these more immediate, sociosexual dimensions of the narrative. Corregidora may seem, on its face, to be nothing more than another novel about a woman imprisoned in abusive and sadistic relationships with appropriative men. But the meanings of Corregidora are far more profound than this. A “transcendental” framework envelops the immediate narrative and casts it in relief, thereby enhancing its significance. We learn that Ursa is the great-granddaughter of Portuguese slave-trader and procurer, Corregidora, who sired both Ursa’s mother and grandmother. Throughout the course of the novel, the men in Ursa’s life take on a resemblance to Corregidora—and this resemblance sheds light on both the sexual basis of racism and the tendency of “oppressed” cultures to take on the traits of imperialist hegemonies. According to the logic of the novel, the

302 COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS, THE

children of slaves resemble either slaves or slave drivers. Even within communities born of slavery, the novel suggests, persist relationships of enslavement. “How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies?” (59), Ursa asks at one point. As long as hierarchical relationships form between women and men, Jones’s novel suggests, there will never be an end to this acquiescence; Corregidora will continue to achieve posthumous victories. A typical response to genocide is the injunction to remember. Although her infertility robs Ursa of the ability to “make generations” (10), the essence of being a woman, she is taught, she can still “leave evidence” (14), can still attest to the historical memory of slavery. All documents that detailed Corregidora’s treatment of his slaves were seemingly destroyed, as if the abolition of slavery abolished memory itself. According to the injunction of the Corregidora women (Ursa’s ancestors), one must testify, one must remember, one must “leave evidence.” And yet memory is precisely Ursa’s problem. Memory cripples her. Throughout the novel, Ursa struggles to overcome the trauma of her personal past. And this past—in particular, the survival in memory of her relationship with Mutt—belongs to the larger, communal past that is her filial legacy. Her consciousness is rigidified, frozen in the immemorial past of the Corregidora women. This “communal” past is doomed to repeat itself infinitely, thus suspending the presence of the present and Ursa’s individual experience of the present. Her individual experience of the present is inextricably married to her personal past, and her most intimate past is, at the same time, also the past of her community. The words that Ursa uses to describe her mother could also apply to Ursa herself: “It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong” (129). At the shocking and unforgettable close of the novel, the past and present coincide almost absolutely. When, after 22 years of estrangement, Ursa is reunited with her first husband, the historical memory of slavery is superimposed and mapped onto their relationship. Both Ursa and Mutt become allegorical figures, each representing slave and slaveholder, respectively. The

present-past and the past-present reflect each other in an infinite mirror-play until they both become almost indistinguishable from each other. At the juncture of both temporalities is an inversion of power relations that comes by way of a sex act. Ursa performs fellatio on her first husband. Oral sex replaces oral transmission. Here we have the perpetuation of a traumatic past, and yet it is a repetition with a difference. Fellatio is disempowering for the man upon whom it is performed; dangerously close to emasculation, it is experienced as “a moment of broken skin but not sexlessness, a moment just before sexlessness, a moment that stops just before sexlessness” (184). For the woman, by contrast, it may be an act vacant of all sensuality, one that is abstracted of all emotional content. Fellatio may infuse the performer with a feeling of power’s intensification; its objective may not be the enhancement of erotic pleasure, but the pleasure that comes with the enhancement of one’s feeling of power. By playing the role of the guardian of memory, Ursa dramatizes the intersection of her individual and communal past; by doing so, she is able to loosen the paralysis of historical consciousness: “My veins are centuries meeting” (41).

SOURCES Awe, Britta. “You Your Own Woman: Redefining Corporeal and Psychological Boundaries in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora.” Master’s thesis, Department of English, Northwestern University, 1998. Dubey, Madhu. Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Horvitz, Deborah. “Sadism Demands a Story: Oedipus, Feminism, and Sexuality in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina,” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 2 (1998): 238–252. Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. New York: Random House, 1975. Simon, Bruce. “Traumatic Repetition: Gayl Jones’s Corregidora.” In Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, edited by Judith Jackson Fossett, 93–112. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Joseph Suglia

COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS, THE SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1896) Between 1870 and 1910, American literary realism shared the scene with

COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS, THE 303

two tangentially related genres, naturalism and regionalism, or local-color fiction. Although regionalism, with its often romantic and ideal depiction of past and place, is frequently discussed as the opposite of realistic fiction, the two share two common features: a preoccupation with a precise depiction of ordinary human beings and their surrounding environment, and an analysis of the influence of those surroundings on human behavior. Sarah Orne JEWETT, in her picturesque description of Dunnet Landing, Maine, in The Country of the Pointed Firs, draws on these elements to create a snapshot of an isolated Maine village arrested in time. More of a fictionalized personal memoir than a traditional novel, Jewett’s work provides an inherent critique of the industrialization and urbanization sweeping across the country during this period. In its isolation, the declining maritime community of Dunnet Landing is a stronghold of the past staunchly resistant to change and development. When the anonymous narrator returns to Dunnet Landing after an extended absence, she notices that the village remains unaltered. She arrives to find “the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of village with its elaborate conventionalities” (2). The pointed firs that greet the traveler at the shore become an important image of constancy in the book. The evergreen is an apt symbol of the unchanging nature of the village where the past is always alive in the present. The past is venerated throughout the novel as the source of wisdom, community, and connection to the surrounding environment. Romanticized characters like Mrs. Todd, Captain Littlepage, and old Elijah Tilley carry the past with them, keeping its values alive and circulating in the present. Dunnet Landing is able to resist change through both its geographical isolation and its internal emphasis on community ritual. As holdovers from the past, these rituals play an integral role in defining the community. Mrs. Todd’s occupation as a “learned herbalist” is a good example (5). She dispenses natural remedies to “suffering neighbors,” carrying on the traditions of ancient healers and medicine men and women who cared for their communities for thousands of years before the development of modern medicine (4). Although there is a doctor present in the

village with whom Mrs. Todd converses on “the best of terms” (5), her steady stream of nightly customers attests to the community’s faith in Mrs. Todd’s “primeval herbs” and the ancient tradition she represents (78). The narrator reveals that “Mrs. Todd’s wisdom was an intimation of truth itself,” a truth inherited from an ancient past, one that is not to be acquired in modern books on medicine (93). Significantly, Mrs. Todd also subsists on this age-old tradition. Her home business, along with the old, small-scale fishermen who support themselves with their minimal catch from the sea, draws attention to what is noticeably absent from Dunnet Landing: commercialization, rampant materialism, class division, poverty, overcrowding, pollution, and the various other hallmarks of industrialization and urbanization. Mrs. Todd’s occupation as an herbalist also establishes an important connection between her and the beauty and vitality of the surrounding landscape. Mrs. Todd’s house and herb garden meld together in one expanse that harmoniously combines the human-made and the natural world. Her house, like the surrounding houses and especially her mother’s home on Green Island, visually emphasizes the important and influential connection that exists between humans and nature in Jewett’s work. Green Island is a virtual paradise where humans can experience a touch of heaven on earth. The narrator invokes the heavenly atmosphere that pervades Green Island the first time she sees it from afar: “The sunburst upon that outermost island made it seem like a sudden revelation of the world beyond this which some believe to be so near” (45). Once there, the narrator admits, “It was impossible not to wish to stay on forever at Green Island” (81). The paradise-like quality of Green Island arises not only from its striking beauty, but also from the thorough connection that exists there between humans and the land on which they live. The physical structure of Mrs. Blackett’s house visually represents this: “It was one of the houses that seem firm-rooted in the ground, as if they were two-thirds below the surface, like icebergs” (59). The house is literally part of the land. Mrs. Blackett, too, is firmly rooted to the ground. She has lived on Green Island for decades, and like the other characters in the book, it appears she will go on living there

304 COZZENS, JAMES GOULD

forever, as the spirit of the dead recluse, Joanna, continues to exist on Shell Heap Island. Through this connection to the land and the past, Jewett extols the idealized values of human life in a simpler, purer, preindustrialized state. Implicit in Jewett’s celebration of the values of community consciousness, human integrity, and reverence for nature, is a suspicion and critique of the antithetical values associated with urbanization, mainly progress, as it is driven by rampant individualism, material advancement, complexity, and endless change. Life is not only simpler in Dunnet Landing, but also obviously better in its simplicity. Humans in that community have advanced to an ideal pinnacle of development where they live harmoniously with the traditions of the past, each other, and the natural world. Of course, it is an ideal that can only be maintained in a utopian Maine village completely isolated from the rest of the world, and literally on the verge of extinction.

SOURCE Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. Edited by Sarah Way Sherman. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997. Kathleen Hicks

COZZENS, JAMES GOULD (1903–1978) According to scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, the fiction of James Gould Cozzens, a popular novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, is replete with characters who are seeking a moral standard; of special significance is the issue of personal responsibility. Cozzens’s best-known novels also demonstrate the author’s thorough knowledge of medicine and the law. James Gould Cozzens was born on August 19, 1903, in Chicago to Henry William Cozzens, a manufacturing company executive, and Bertha Wood Cozzens. When he was three years old, Cozzens’s family moved to Staten Island, New York. He later attended the Kent School and Harvard University, publishing an essay in the Atlantic Monthly while at Kent and his first novel, Confusion (1924), while still at Harvard. He married Sylvia Bernice Baumgarten, a literary agent, in 1927. Cozzens left Harvard after two years and spent the rest of his life as a novelist, sometimes

supporting himself with temporary jobs. His life in Cuba in 1925 and 1926 provided the impetus for The Cock Pit (1928) and The Son of Perdition (1929). After writing these apprentice novels, Cozzens began to attract serious critical attention with S.S. San Pedro: A Tale of the Sea (1931), about the unexplained sinking of that ship. From 1942 to 1945, Cozzens served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps; these military experiences provided material for one of his most acclaimed novels, Guard of Honor. The Last Adam (1933), set in New Winton, Connecticut, ravaged by a typhoid epidemic, demonstrates the moral deficiencies in both the old money classes, represented by Herbert Banning and his wife, and the new, represented by county health officer George Bull and diary farmer Janet Cardmaker. Castaway (1934) features the emotionally disturbed Mr. Lecky, who holes up in a department store and shoots and kills a nameless idiot who in fact is his alter ego. The use of compressed action recurs in Men and Brethren (1936), detailing two days in the life of Episcopal clergyman Ernest Cudlipp. Just as Cudlipp wrestles—and largely succeeds—in balancing the ideal life with the art of the possible, thus demonstrating his humanness, Francis Ellery, the young writer protagonist of Ask Me Tomorrow (1940) has flaws as well as attractive characteristics. He works his way toward a mature adult life based on reason and a sense of responsibility, as do all of Cozzens’s major characters. Cozzens’s greatest financial success came with The Just and the Unjust (1942), a novel praised for its accurate depictions of courtroom procedures during a murder trial. Over three and a half days, Abner Coates, the assistant district attorney, and Martin Bunting, the district attorney, prosecute a murder as they deal with personal issues that test their idealism and integrity. This novel was followed by Guard of Honor, believed by some critics to be the best American novel written about World War II. Set on an Army Air Force base in Ocanara, Florida, the novel features the respected General Bus Beal who, along with Colonel Norman Ross, confronts the hate directed at a black bomber crew. The characters range from zealous bigots to condescending liberals. By Love Possessed was instantly popular and almost as instantly controversial; some reviewers called it the most revealing novel ever

CRANE, STEPHEN 305

written about midcentury Americans and, as such, eligible for the Nobel Prize; some saw Cozzens as conservative and reactionary. Lawyer Arthur Winner offers to defend Ralph Detweiler, the brother of his secretary, Helen Detweiler; Ralph has been accused of raping a young woman from a mill village. The novel is Cozzens’s most complex presentation of moral quandaries and the many possible types of human love. Morning, Noon and Night (1968), Cozzens’s last novel, is narrated by Henry Dodd Worthington, president of a thriving management consulting firm. Despite his successful life, Henry is uncertain about all things, concluding that age merely brings more questions and challenges long-held opinions that were once firm and unshakable. Critic and author George Garrett points out that, in the midst of fiction peopled by criminals, psychopaths, unbalanced individuals and non-heroes in general, Cozzens’s characters confront human frailty and evil and try to behave as well as possible. It remains to be seen whether he will be read and studied with the same seriousness accorded some of his contemporaries. James Gould Cozzens died on August 9, 1979, of complications from cancer surgery. The Last Adam was made into a motion picture entitled “Doctor Bull,” 1933, starring Will Rogers; By Love Possessed was made into a motion picture by United Artists in 1961, starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and Lana Turner. Cozzens’s stories are collected in Children and Others (1968) and A Flower in Her Hair (1975). Beginning with The Last Adam, Cozzens’s novels were frequent Book-of-theMonth Club selections. His most popular and commercially successful novel, By Love Possessed (1957), received the William Dean Howells Medal, and Guard of Honor (1948) won the Pulitzer Prize. His papers are housed in the Princeton University Library.

NOVELS Ask Me Tomorrow. New York: Harcourt, 1940. Published as Ask Me Tomorrow; or, The Pleasant Comedy of Young Fortunas. New York: Harcourt, 1969. By Love Possessed. New York: Harcourt, 1957. Castaway. New York: Random House, 1934. Cock Pit. New York: Morrow, 1928. Confusion. Boston: B.J. Brimmer, 1924. Guard of Honor. New York: Harcourt, 1948.

The Just and the Unjust. New York: Harcourt, 1942. The Last Adam. New York: Harcourt, 1933. Original edition published in England as A Cure of Flesh. London: Longmans, Green, 1933. Men and Brethren. New York: Harcourt, 1936. Michael Scarlett. New York: A & C Boni, 1925. Morning Noon and Night. New York: Harcourt, 1968. The Son of Perdition. New York: Morrow, 1929. S.S. San Pedro: A Tale of the Sea. New York: Harcourt, 1931.

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew, J. James Gould Cozzens: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. ———. James Gould Cozzens: A Life Apart. New York: Harcourt, 1983. ———. James Gould Cozzens: New Acquist of True Experience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. ———. Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1978. Hicks, Granville. James Gould Cozzens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966. Maxwell, D. E. S. Cozzens. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1964. Michel, Pierre. James Gould Cozzens. Boston: Twayne, 1974. ———. James Gould Cozzens: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. Mooney, Harry John, Jr. James Gould Cozzens: Novelist of Intellect. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. Whitbread, Thomas. Seven Contemporary Authors. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.

CRANE, STEPHEN (1871–1900) Stephen Crane, a literary genius who died at age 29, left his mark on American literature with the novel MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS (1893) and the novella The RED BADGE OF COURAGE: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895). Maggie, the first naturalistic novel by an American writer, proved so shocking in its realistic description of immorality and slum life that Crane had to publish it privately under the pseudonym Johnston Smith. But it is The Red Badge of Courage that is responsible for Crane’s reputation as a writer who above all aimed for honesty and a complete lack of hypocrisy. In a poetic style, Crane depicted humans alone and helpless in a hostile world, in conflict with nature yet able to learn from their hubris. Along with Henry JAMES, he helped usher in the modern period of American litera-

306 CRANE, STEPHEN

ture, foreshadowing such 20th-century writers as Theodore DREISER, James T. FARRELL and Ernest HEMINGWAY. Born to Jonathan Townley Crane, a Methodist preacher, and Mary Helen Peck on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, Crane, the youngest of 14 children, was reared in four New Jersey cities: Jersey City, Bloomington, Asbury Park, and Paterson. The family moved to Port Jervis, New York, a town later immortalized in the novella The Monster (1899) and in his Whilholmville Stories (1900). Apparently indifferent to formal education, he moved to New York where he wrote for newspapers, primarily the New York Tribune. Because of his friendships with Hamlin GARLAND and William Dean HOWELLS, The Red Badge of Courage was published serially in The Philadelphia Press, and Maggie was finally published under his own name in 1896. Crane’s third novel, George’s Mother, takes place in the Bowery, where Crane himself had slept in shelters, while his fourth, The Third Violet (1897), concerns impoverished bohemian artists living in New York. Maggie, although criticized for the prostitution that seduces the title character, was in fact characteristic of the social realism that defines a great many prominent 20th-century writers. The Red Badge of Courage, a realistic war novel presented through the naive soldier Henry Fleming, a farm boy, uses memorable imagery and poetic language. The Monster depicts Henry Johnson, a black servant who is badly disfigured while rescuing a friend from a burning building; the town ostracizes him, a phenomenon presented with poignant irony. At his death, Crane left an unfinished novel, The O’Ruddy: A Romance (1903), completed by his friend Robert Barr and published posthumously. During the last decade of his life, Crane, together with his lover Cora Taylor— the first woman to be a war correspondent—whom he married in Greece on August 25, 1898, covered the Greco-Turkish war. They settled in England, and then covered the Spanish-American War in Cuba before returning to England and a house called Brede Place. Stephen Crane succumbed to tuberculosis on June 5, 1900, and died in Badenweiler, Germany, where he had gone to seek medical treatment. He is buried in Hillside, New Jersey.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Active Service: A Novel. New York: Stokes, 1899. George’s Mother. New York and London: Edward Arnold, 1896. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Johnston Smith, pseud.). New York: Privately printed, 1893. Rev. ed. (as Stephen Crane), New York: Appleton, 1896. The O’Ruddy: A Romance (with Robert Barr). New York: Stokes, 1903. The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War. New York: Appleton, 1895. The Third Violet. New York: Appleton, 1897.

SOURCES Benfey, Christopher E. G. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Knopf, 1992. Bergon, Frank. Stephen Crane’s Artistry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: Sloane, 1950. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Stephen Crane. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Cady, Edwin H. Stephen Crane. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Colvert, James B. Stephen Crane. San Diego, Calif., New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. Edited by Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Dooley, Patrick Kiaran. Stephen Crane: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Scholarship. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Halliburton, David. The Color of the Sky: A Study of Stephen Crane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Holton, Milne. Cylinder of Vision: The Fiction and Journalistic Writing of Stephen Crane. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972. Knapp, Bettina L. Stephen Crane. New York: Ungar, 1987. LaFrance, Marston. A Reading of Stephen Crane. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. Mitchell, Lee Clark, ed. New Essays on “The Red Badge of Courage.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Nagel, James. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Robertson, Michael. Stephen Crane: Journalism and the Making of Modern American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Stephen Crane: Letters. Edited by R. W. Stallman and Lillian Gilkes. New York: New York University Press, 1960. Sufrin, Mark. Stephen Crane. New York: Atheneum, 1992.

CRAWFORD, F. MARION 307

Wertheim, Stanley. A Stephen Crane Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul M. Sorrentino. The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871–1900. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Wolford, Chester L. Stephen Crane: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

OTHER The Stephen Crane Society Home Page. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/Campbelld/crane/index.html. Accessed August 28, 2005.

CRAWFORD,

F(RANCIS)

MARION

(1854–1909) Considered by many critics and readers to be the most important novelist of the late 19th century, F. Marion Crawford wrote 44 novels, along with four plays, numerous short stories, essays, histories, and travel books. His best-sellers included A Cigarette Maker’s Romance (1890), Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome (1902), and The White Sister (1909). Unlike prevailing realist writers like William Dean HOWELLS, Crawford believed in romantic fiction. The Novel: What It Is (1893) was Crawford’s rebuttal to Howell’s Criticism and Fiction, which defined and validated the realist movement. Francis Marion Crawford was born on August 2, 1854, in Bagni di Lucca, Italy, to Thomas Crawford, an expatriate American sculptor, and Louisa Cutler Ward Crawford, the sister of Julia Ward Howe (who wrote the lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). He grew up in Italy, was fluent in more than a dozen languages, and, between 1870 and 1879, was privately tutored in Rome and at Cambridge University; he was further educated at Harvard University, Heidelberg University, and the Hochschule in Karlsruhe, Germany. Considered urbane and cosmopolitan by his American peers, he married Elizabeth Berdan in 1884, just after publishing his first novel, in 1882. Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India was based on a story Crawford overheard while living in India and traveling through the Himalayas. The novel anticipates the better-known Kim by Rudyard Kipling; it also interprets the culture of Indians for Western readers. He set a number of his novels in other countries, including Germany, Persia, Spain, Turkey, and the United States. But his best-

known and best-written novels are set in Italy: Saracinesca, Sant’ Ilario, Don Orsino (a trilogy on a powerful Roman family), Marzio’s Crucifix, and A CigaretteMaker’s Romance. Others include Corleone: A Tale of Sicily (1897), Casa Braccio (1895), A Roman Singer (1884), and Pietro Ghisleri (1893). Although his popularity has declined notably, the works of F. Marion Crawford delighted the readers of his day, just as the romance continues to attract its devotees a century later. Crawford died on April 9, 1909, in Sorrento, Italy. His papers are housed mainly in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. Additional material may be found in Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; the New York Public Library; the Library of Congress; Yale University; Princeton University; and the University of Pennsylvania.

SELECTED NOVELS Casa Braccio, 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan, 1895. Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome. New York and London: Macmillan, 1902. A Cigarette-Maker’s Romance, 2 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, 1890. Corleone: A Tale of Sicily, 2 vols. New York and London: Macmillan, 1897. Don Orsino. New York and London: Macmillan, 1892. A Lady of Rome. New York and London: Macmillan, 1906. Marion Darche: A Story without Comment. New York and London: Macmillan, 1893. Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India. New York: Macmillan, 1882. Pietro Ghisleri. New York and London: Macmillan, 1893. A Roman Singer. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884. Sant’ Ilario, 3 vols. London and New York, 1889. Saracinesca. New York: Macmillan, 1887. The White Sister. New York: Macmillan, 1909.

SOURCES Chanler, Margaret. Roman Spring: Memoirs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1934. Churchill, Kenneth. Italy and English Literature, 1764–1930. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Elliott, Maud Howe. My Cousin: F. Marion Crawford. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Moran, John Charles. An F. Marion Crawford Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

308 CRICHTON, MICHAEL

———. Seeking Refuge in Torre San Nicola: An Introduction to F. Marion Crawford. Nashville, Tenn.: F. Marion Crawford Memorial Society, 1980. Pilkington, John, Jr. F. Marion Crawford. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Ziff, Larzer. The American 1890s: Life and Times of a Lost Generation. New York: Viking, 1966.

CRICHTON, (JOHN) MICHAEL (1942– ) Michael Crichton has been lauded for his brilliance as a popular writer and for his versatility in several genres. Author of such best-selling novels as The Andromeda Strain (1969) and Jurassic Park (1990) and director of films Coma (1977) and Twister (1996), he has become internationally famous for his work in science fiction and suspense, particularly in the genre of the technothriller. His novels—which have sold more than 100 million copies and have been translated into 30 languages—owe their popular success to Crichton’s swift pacing and mixture of scientific detail, fantasy, and plausible reality. His topics range from cloning and organ theft to sexual harassment, as well as both NASA and alien spaceships. He is the winner of two Edgar Awards, in 1968 for A Case of Need, and in 1979 for The Great Train Robbery, and is the creator of the widely acclaimed National Broadcasting Company television series, E.R. Michael Crichton was born on October 23, 1942, in Chicago, Illinois, to John Henderson Crichton, a corporate president, and Zula Miller Crichton. He was educated at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1964 and a medical degree in 1969. Realizing early that he preferred a writing to a medical career, he wrote two detective novels—Odds On (1966) and A Case of Need—while still in medical school. In 1969, under his own name (pseudonyms included John Lange, Michael Douglas, and Jeffrey Hudson) he published The Andromeda Strain, his first best-seller, a tale of an extraterrestrial plague inadvertently brought to Earth by a NASA spaceship. The Terminal Man (1972) likewise used the world of science and medicine, this time as Harry Benson, a modern Frankenstein, wired to the source of his epileptic seizures, becomes increasingly unbalanced and dangerous. In The Great Train Robbery, Crichton moves to Victorian England and depicts

Edward Pierce’s attempt to rob a Crimea-bound train of its army payroll. In Congo (1980), an intelligent gorilla named Amy acts as interpreter between her fellow apes and the scientists seeking diamonds. Sphere (1987) involves psychologist Norman Johnson in a squid attack and the undersea investigation of a centuries-old submerged spaceship. The best-seller Jurassic Park features billionaire John Hammond in his Costa Rican amusement park where tourists view cloned dinosaurs. Rising Sun, a political thriller, depicts detective Peter J. Smith’s attempts to solve the murder of a young American woman at a Japanese corporation cocktail party, and Disclosure (1994), another best-seller, introduces the sexual harassment of computer executive Tom Sanders by his female boss. Other novels include The Lost World (1995), Airframe (1996), and Timeline (1999). Nine of Crichton’s books have been produced as feature-length films: The Andromeda Strain, by Universal, in 1971; A Case of Need, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in 1972; Binary (as Pursuit), by ABC-TV, in 1972; The Terminal Man, by Warner Bros., in 1974; Westworld, by Crichton for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in 1973; Jurassic Park, by Steven Spielberg, in 1994; Congo, by Frank Marshall and Paramount, in 1995; Disclosure, in 1995; and Timeline, by Paramount Pictures, in 2003. Michael Crichton has been married four times: to Joan Radam from 1965 to 1970; to Kathleen St. Johns from 1978 to 1980; to Suzanne Childs; and to Anne-Marie Martin, with whom he wrote the screenplay for the movie Twister in 1996, from 1987 to 2002. Crichton lives in Santa Monica, California, where he is developing a video game with Sega Productions. Crichton’s more recent books are Prey (2002), featuring self-reproducing micro-robots programmed to attack humans near the Nevada desert laboratory from which the robots have escaped, and State of Fear (2004).

NOVELS Airframe. New York: Knopf, 1996. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Knopf, 1969. A Case in Need (under pseudonym Jeffrey Hudson). New York: NAL World, 1968. Congo. New York: Knopf, 1980. Dealing: Or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues, (with brother Douglas Crichton, under joint pseudonym Michael Douglas). New York: Knopf, 1971.

CROSSING TO SAFETY 309

Disclosure. New York: Knopf, 1994. Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadlan. New York: Knopf, 1976. The Great Train Robbery. New York: Knopf, 1975. Jurassic Park. New York: Knopf, 1990, re-published as Michael Crichton’s Jurassic World. New York: Knopf, 1997. The Lost World. New York: Knopf, 1995. Prey. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Relating His Experiences with the Northmen in A.D. 922. New York: Knopf, 1976. Rising Sun. New York: Knopf, 1992. Sphere. New York: Knopf, 1987. State of Fear. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. The Terminal Man. New York: Knopf, 1972. Timeline. New York: Knopf, 1999. Westworld. New York: Bantam, 1974.

SOURCES Jaynes, Gregory, Jeffrey Ressner, and Andrea Sachs. “Meet Mister Wizard,” Time 146, no. 3 (September 25, 1995): 60–67. Morrison, Patt. “From Dinophobia to Gynephobia: She said . . . ,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 16 January 1994, p. 1–9. Trembley, Elizabeth A. Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

OTHER The Official Site of Michael Crichton. Available online. URL: http://www.crichton-official.com/. Accessed August 28, 2005. Crichton, Michael. Wired for Books. Audio interview. Available online. URL: http://www.wiredforbooks.org/ michaelcrichton/. Accessed August 28, 2005. Yoke, Carl B. “Michael Crichton.” In St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed., edited by Jay P. Pederson. Chicago: St. James Press, 1996. Available online. URL: http://www. galenet.galegroup.com. Accessed March 15, 2006.

CROSSING TO SAFETY WALLACE STEGNER (1987) It is appropriate, perhaps, that the last of Wallace STEGNER’s 28 novels is titled Crossing to Safety, with its hints of the balmy security of a beatific afterlife. But though this graceful novel does deal sensitively with its characters’ passage to death, it concentrates more vividly on what allows them to live: reaching across to one another. Crossing to Safety sketches the quiet but remarkable story of the endur-

ing friendship of two couples, Larry and Sally Morgan and Sid and Charity Lang, who meet as Larry and Sid are beginning academic careers in Wisconsin during the Great Depression. Larry, the narrator, and Sally are struggling, unconnected westerners; Sid and Charity each descend from abundant wealth and lineage. Despite their differences, however, they immediately forge a strong connection, vying for academic jobs together, engaging magnanimously in wine and music, birthing children almost simultaneously. Larry soon finds himself jobless, but Sid and Charity come to the rescue, connecting the promising writer with a publisher uncle and offering the couple their home-awayfrom-home, Battell Pond. To the reader, it almost seems too sticky sweet and surreptitious, and the narrator himself admits as much: “I was Cinderella to them, as I was to myself. No matter how cold the ashes or grubby the household chores, I lived by the faith that when the time came, the glass slipper would fit my little foot, and that when I needed her the Fairy Godmother would pull up in her pumpkin coach” (134). But Stegner, as he has proved himself in countless novels, is no stranger to the power of human endurance, and specifically to the power of community and friendship to aid in such endurance. He admits that there is “No Eden valid without serpent” (139). And though modern readers would expect the serpent to raise its ugly head in the form of the sordid affair, the tawdry triangle, Stegner gives us something much less television-worthy, much more real. The lives of the Langs and Morgans are, indeed, not perfect. Sid, an excellent teacher, nevertheless fails in the publish-orperish world of academia, and his wife, Charity, vicariously achieving her dreams through him, suffers a nervous breakdown. Larry does achieve moderate success as a writer, but his loving wife, Sally, contracts polio, ironically at the idyllic Battell Pond. What is remarkable to watch through it all is how each of the four characters steadfastly supports, needles, cajoles, and loves the others through their successes and failures. Ultimately, Stegner’s crossing has less to do with reaching the journey’s end than with bridging the chasm between individuals. The four characters’ lives are beautifully rendered upon a varied American landscape. An active environ-

310 CRYING OF LOT 49, THE

mentalist, Stegner brings his love of nature to the atmospheres he evokes throughout the novel: from the auburn autumn of Wisconsin to the humming summer of Vermont, from Larry’s remembered New Mexico to the couples’ late-in-life Florentine idyll. He also deftly straddles the divisions between classes, between those who inherit and those who do not, between New England Brahmins and frontier orphans. Atmosphere and politics, however, are backdrop to what is most essential in Stegner’s last literary gift in Crossing to Safety: the salvific power of love and friendship.

SOURCES Meine, Curt, ed. Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History and Landscape. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997. Rankin, Charles E., ed. Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Williams, Terry Tempest. Introduction to Crossing to Safety. New York: The Modern Library, 2002. Patricia Lee

CRYING OF LOT 49, THE THOMAS PYNCHON (1966) Thomas PYNCHON’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 embodies the postmodern exploration so prevalent in American fiction of the mid-20th century. In the novel, Pynchon plays upon such postmodern themes as conspiracy theories, paranoia, the challenge of a central government’s authority and omniscience, underground rebellions staged quietly yet aggressively, the deterioration of personal relationships, and the general state of confusing decay in America. He does so through his satirical examination of the subculture of Southern California. He mixes metaphors and modern media such as television, radio, and rock-and-roll music as he weaves an intricate and sometimes disorienting web of lies, intrigue, and self-doubt around the previously pedestrian life of the main character, Mrs. Oedipa Maas. The novel opens as Oedipa discovers that her exboyfriend has died and has named her executor of his estate. Oedipa does not immediately feel grief over the loss of her ex-lover; instead, she is preoccupied with the practical matters and annoyances associated with her new duty as executor. This theme of emotional detachment and the isolation that separates individuals even in

close relationships is prevalent throughout the novel and is embodied in each of the relationships that Oedipa forms during her quest. Oedipa leaves her quiet suburban hometown of Kinneret, California, and her husband, who, in typical Pynchon fashion, is emotionally damaged himself, to carry out her duties in the peculiar city of San Narciso, the home of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. Here she meets a range of strange, disenfranchised, misfit characters. The relationships that Oedipa forms with these characters help to reveal elements of her personality and represent symptoms of the dysfunction Pynchon sees as characteristic of the government and culture of America at the time. Oedipa first stumbles across the Tristero as a result of a strange stamp on one of her ex-boyfriend’s otherwise unremarkable letters. The Tristero is a secret organization whose origins reach into the 16th century in Europe and whose main purpose seems to be as an avenue for undermining the postal service, which represents the government and mainstream America. The Tristero acts as an outlet for the frustrations, disgust, and distrust of underground America, “a host of hitherto unnoticed, sometimes alarming, often tremendously pathetic elements curdling America’s cream” (Cowart, 8). As Oedipa becomes obsessed with the Tristero, the question becomes not how and why the Tristero functions, but whether it truly exists. Is it an actual organization or is it a conspiracy against Oedipa orchestrated by the deceased Pierce Inverarity? Or, worst of all, is it a delusion of Oedipa’s paranoid mind, a by-product of the banal suburban life she has led, much like her husband Much Maas’s schizophrenic madness resulting from his attempt to escape the “unvarying gray sickness” (14) of the cultural mainstream American life (presented poignantly in the description of Much’s career as a usedcar salesman) through self-medication? The novel, therefore, asks which is truly the illusion: the underground American culture revealed to Oedipa through her quest to discover the Tristero or the white suburban middle-class life she has led up until this point? As the novel comes to a close, this question is left unanswered. We leave Oedipa at the beginning of the auction, aware that she is being somehow threatened, but unsure of who or what poses this threat—whether it comes from within Oedipa herself or is, in fact, an outside force.

CRYING OF LOT 49, THE 311

Many critics have interpreted The Crying of Lot 49 as a portrait of the growing unease of many Americans during the mid-20th century and the fragmentation of self and country in the aftermath of such events as the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Civil Rights movement, and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, all reinforced and documented by the media. The 1960s was a decade fraught with disturbing revelations and scandals, and for the first time, ordinary citizens were able to see these dramas criticized and questioned in the cold light of television journalism. Pynchon’s novel reflects the consequent distrust of government and media and the paranoia that borders on the formation of conspiracy theories (like that of the Tristero) widespread among the American people during this period. The novel also expresses Pynchon’s own apprehension about the apparent discrepancy between the representation of American life—the bright and shiny visions of Americana projected on television, and in the advertisements of glossy magazines—and the reality of racial and generational tensions that were beginning to erupt. As the disparity came to the surface of public consciousness, attempts to resolve the representation and the reality of American life resulted in a type of cultural schizophrenia that is represented literally by Much Mass, Oedipa’s husband, and Oedipa’s obsession with the Tristero, contributing to her own suspicions of mental illness. Oedipa represents the need to acknowledge this discrepancy, as well as the inability to do so. Ever her name is symbolic, inviting readers to recognize in her a sixties version of the Sophoclean protagonist, Oedipus, who undertakes a quest involving his own past and a diseased social present. Reenacting the passion of Oedipus, Pynchon’s character discovers in her own blindness and complacency the source of her country’s trouble (Cowart, 10). The sixties was also a decade during which Americans were forced to deal with monumental losses of figureheads, like John F. Kennedy, to whom they looked for support and guidance, as well as ordinary citizens, like the many youths killed during the Vietnam War. Because of the often unexpected nature of these losses and the injustice associated with them, Americans were often ill-equipped to cope with their

grief and questioned their belief in foundations like government, religion, and family. Pynchon uses Oedipa to illustrate this sense of alienation as well as the attempt to come to terms with the death of those around her (Inverarity and Randy Driblette). In fact, Pynchon displays Oedipa “grop[ing] for suburban trappings, for anything, to head off a wave of nihilism” (Flaxman, 45) caused by the losses that she has experienced. Like Americans during the 1960s, these losses force Oedipa to confront the reality of her own eventual death, just as the possibility of the Tristero’s existence forces her to confront the problems facing America. When asked if she has ever considered the possibility that the Tristero is a conspiracy against her, Oedipa reasons, “It had occurred to her. But like the thought that someday she would have to die, Oedipa had been steadfastly refusing to look at that possibility directly, or in any but the most accidental of lights” (167). Oedipa’s quest therefore represents a national need for self-knowledge. The landscape of California acts as a microcosm of America, a distillation of American culture, and a catalyst for Oedipa’s revelation. The landscape also demonstrates the symptoms of the growing problems in American life. Pynchon calls the road on which Oedipa travels in San Narciso, for example, a “hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain.” In The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon ultimately is able to convey the cultural anxieties and fragmentation of the historical period through his postmodern approach to writing. His descriptions of character and landscape, as well as his development of the plot, often leave the reader with more questions than answers. Indeed, the significance of Oedipa’s inconclusive quest and the importance of this lack of resolution is evident in the novel’s title, which derives its peculiar name from a collection of stamps that is to be auctioned off as lot 49 of Inverarity’s estate. These stamps have been one of the strongest links to the Tristero, and it is at the climactic moment, just before the cryer auctions off lot 49–and therefore on the cusp of a revelation regarding the fate of Oedipa and the reality of the Tristero—that

312 CUMMINGS, E. E.

the novel reaches its abrupt end. Pynchon does not provide the reader with a sense of false security that would only further contribute to the disparity between representation and reality which he has already cited. Instead, he chooses to leave Oedipa’s fate open-ended, just as the fate of the American people had yet and has yet to be determined.

SOURCES Baxter, Charles. “De-faced America: The Great Gatsby and The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 7 (1981): 22–37. Bergh, Patricia A. “Deconstructing the Image: Thomas Pynchon’s Postmodern Woman,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 1–12. Cowart, David. “Pynchon and the Sixties,” Critique 41, no. 1 (Fall 1999): 3–12. Freese, Peter. “Surviving the End: Apocalypse, Evolution, and Entropy in Bernard Malamud, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon,” Critique 36, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 163–175. Merrill, Robert. “The Form and Meaning of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,” Ariel 8, no. 1 (1977): 115–116. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Richwell, Adrian Emily. “The Crying of Lot 49: A Source Study,” Pynchon Notes 17 (Fall 1985): 78–80. Rohland, M. W. “A Child Roaming the Night: Oedipa’s Dead Issue in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 40–41 (Spring–Fall 1997): 110–124. Heather Bliven

CUMMINGS, E(DWARD) E(STLIN) (1894–1962) Although he will always be known as one of America’s best and most innovative poets, E. E. Cummings wrote The ENORMOUS ROOM (1922), an acclaimed novel of World War I that was immensely popular among readers of his day. Based on his experiences in France, where, like Ernest HEMINGWAY, Cummings had volunteered to serve with an ambulance unit, the novel is a coming-of-age tale in which the autobiographical protagonist matures and becomes more worldly. Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edward Cummings, a professor of sociology and political science, and Rebecca Haswell Clarke Cummings. He earned his bachelor of arts degree (magna cum laude, 1915) and

a master of arts degree (1916) from Harvard University and published his first poetry in Eight Harvard Poets. This was the first time his name was printed in lowercase, instead of uppercase letters and it became his trademark. In 1917, he volunteered for the NortonHarjes Ambulance Service in France, and was quickly accepted. Because he spent time with French soldiers and corresponded with known communist Emma Goldman, Cummings, along with his American friend, William Slater Brown, was sent to an internment camp in Normandy, La Ferte Mace, where they and other foreigners were held in one large room. Only the efforts of his influential father secured his release in December 1917. The Enormous Room, Cummings’s fictionalized account of his detainment, has long been considered a World War I classic; rather than dwell on the horrors of war, however, the protagonist in Cummings’s coming-of-age tale avoids the dehumanizing aspects of his imprisonment by behaving with dignity. The novel also lampoons bureaucrats, institutions, and all aspects of government that tyrannize the individual. Despite the success of the novel, Cummings never wrote another. Instead, he returned to the United States, resumed his affair with Elaine Thayer, the wife of his friend Schofield Thayer, and served in the U. S. Army until the end of the war. He married three times: Elaine Orr Thayer (1924–25), Anne Minnerly Barton (1929–1932), and Marion Morehouse (common-law, 1934). He became widely known as a writer, published numerous volumes of poetry and of essays, wrote several plays, and exhibited his artwork. E. E. Cummings was Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University from 1952 to 1953. He died on September 3, 1962, in North Conway, New Hampshire, and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. His papers, including much unpublished material, are housed at the libraries of Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Texas, and the University of Virginia.

SOURCES Ahearn, Barry. Pound/Cummings: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cummings. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Baum, S. V., ed. EETI: E. E. Cummings and the Critics. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1962.

CUMMINS, MARIA SUSANNA 313

Blackmur, Richard Press. The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. Cummings, E. E. The Enormous Room. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922; rev. ed. New York: Liveright, 1978. ———. i: six nonlectures. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. ———. Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. Edited by F. W. Dupee and George Stade. New York: Harcourt, 1969. Dumas, Bethany K. E. E. Cummings: A Remembrance of Miracles. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974. Friedman, Norman. E. E. Cummings: The Growth of a Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. ———. E. E. Cummings: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1972. Hoffman, Frederick J. The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade. Rev. ed. New York: Collier, 1962. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. New York: Horizon Press, 1966. Kennedy, Richard S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980. ———. E. E. Cummings Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Marks, Barry. E. E. Cummings. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Norman, Charles. E. E. Cummings: The Magic-Maker. Rev. ed. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1964. Rotella, Guy L. E. E. Cummings: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Triem, Eve. E. E. Cummings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Wegner, Robert E. The Poetry and Prose of E. E. Cummings. New York: Harcourt, 1965.

OTHER An Unofficial E. E. Cummings Starting Point. Available online. URL: http://members.tripod.com/~DWipf/cummings.html. Accessed July 20, 2005.

CUMMINS, MARIA SUSANNA (1827– 1866) Maria Susanna Cummins was a Massachusetts novelist whose fame rests on her best-selling novel, The Lamplighter (1854), an example of the domestic or sentimental fiction popular in the United States in the 1850s and 1860s. The novel sold 10,000 copies within eight weeks, and 100,000 in its first decade. It is to this novel that Nathaniel HAWTHORNE obliquely referred when in 1885 he complained, famously, about the “d——d [damned] mob of scribbling women” (Cooper, 230).

Maria Susanna Cummins was born on April 9, 1827, in Salem, Massachusetts, to David Cummins, a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and Mehitable Cave Cummins. Because her father believed in education for women, he sent her to Mrs. Charles Sedgwick’s Young Ladies School in Lenox, Massachusetts. Mrs. Sedgwick was a sister-in-law of novelist Catherine Maria SEDGWICK, who wrote the widely admired A New England Tale (1822) and HOPE LESLIE (1827), so Cummins was educated in a milieu that fostered women’s creativity. When she was 28, she published The Lamplighter, the best-selling story of Gerty, an orphan from Boston, who, after being cruelly mistreated by her legal caretaker, is adopted by Trueman Flint, a gentle, kindly lamplighter. The novel contains the elements that critic and scholar Nina Baym has identified in domestic fiction of that era: the heroine, initially high-tempered, learns to control her passions and understand her selfworth, but only after a period in which she is orphaned or mistreated before maturing and marrying a good man (Baym, 19, 35). Gerty follows this pattern, marrying her childhood sweetheart and reuniting with her father whom she had presumed dead. Cummins wrote three other novels: Mabel Vaughan (1857), another popular novel, features an impecunious young woman who rejects her chance to join the morally corrupt upper class and heads west to become a pioneer; El Fureidis (1860); and Haunted Hearts (1864). Cummins’s depiction of minor characters and the details regarding urban life prepares the way for the realists who were to dominate the late 19th century. Maria Susanna Cummins, who never married, lived at the family residence in Dorchester, Massachusetts, until her death on October 1, 1866, at age 39.

NOVELS El Fureidis. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1860. Haunted Hearts. Boston: Tilton, 1864. The Lamplighter (Anonymous). Boston: Jewett, 1854. Mabel Vaughan. Boston: Jewett, 1857.

SOURCES Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Cooper, Allene. “Maria Susanna Cummins.” In The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, edited

314 CUNNINGHAM, MICHAEL

by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner Martin, 230–231. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Manthorne, Jane. “The Lachrymose Ladies,” Horn Book Magazine 43 (June 1967; August 1967; October 1967): 375–384; 501–513; 622–631. Papashvily, Helen Waite. All the Happy Endings. New York: Harper, 1956.

OTHER Domestic or Sentimental Fiction, 1820–1860. Selected Bibliography. Available online. URL: http://guweb2.gonzaga. edu/faculty/campbell/en1311/domestic.htm. Accessed July 20, 2005.

CUNNINGHAM, MICHAEL (1952– ) Winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Michael Cunningham gained national recognition for his novel The HOURS (1998). He also received the Lambda Literary Award for gay men’s fiction for Flesh and Blood (1995). Author of two other novels—Golden States (1984) and A Home at the End of the World (1990)—as well as short stories published in The New Yorker, Cunningham, in the opinion of critic Reed Woodhouse, is “one of a new generation of writers” who subsume “their gay characters . . . within a larger social group.” Michael Cunningham was born on November 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio, raised in Pasadena, California, and educated at Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1975. He was awarded a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1980. Cunningham, who has lived in New York since 1981, published his first novel, Golden States, in 1984. It features 12-year-old David Stark who, like all characters in a bildungsroman, gains self-confidence and self-knowledge. A Home at the End of the World is a more compelling story of a ménage à trois in which Clare loves Jonathan and gives birth to Bobby’s baby. Their upstate New York idyll is ruined by the visit of Erich, a friend stricken with AIDS. Flesh and Blood tells the tale of Greek immigrants: Constantine Stassos, his wife, May, and their three children, Susan, Will, and Zoe. Their American dream involves shoplifting, incest, cross-dressing, and a child out of wedlock. In The Hours, Cunningham links Virginia Woolf, who is writing her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway in post–World

War I London, with two other women: Laura Brown, a post–World War II Los Angeles wife and mother who is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary Greenwich Village lesbian nicknamed Clarissa Dalloway. The Hours (Virginia Woolf’s working title for Mrs. Dalloway) is a story of hope and despair, of isolation and the impulse toward self-destruction. As Cunningham noted in a recent interview, “Happiness doesn’t much interest me” (Peregrine, 30). The Hours was made into a feature-length film directed by Stephen Daldry, and featuring Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, and Meryl Streep. A Home at the End of the World has also been filmed: starring Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts, and Sissy Spacek, it was directed by Michael Mayer, for release in the fall of 2003. Michael Cunningham has recently published Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, an artistic mixture of travelogue and memoir. He is currently at work on three linked novellas, each written in a different genre: horror story, thriller, and science fiction (Peregrine, 31).

NOVELS Flesh and Blood. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1995. Golden States. New York: Crown, 1984. A Home at the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1990. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998.

SOURCES Eagan, Joseph M. “Michael Cunningham.” In Gay and Lesbian Literature. Vol. 2. Detroit, Mich.: St. James, 1998. Eder, Richard. “Squaring a Triangle,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 11 November 1990, p. 3. Kaufman, David. “All in the Family,” Nation, 1 July 1991, p. 21. Kornblatt, Joyce Reiser. “Such Good Friends,” New York Times Book Review, 11 November 1990, p. 12. Peregrine, Tony. “The Artist After Hours,” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 10, no. 2 (March–April 2003): 30–31. Woodhouse, Reed. “Michael Cunningham.” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 83–88. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

OTHER Literati.net. About the Author: Michael Cunningham. Available online. URL: http://literati.net/Cunningham/. Accessed July 20, 2005.

CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY, THE 315

CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY, THE EDITH WHARTON (1913)

Edith WHARTON was thought to be “voicing anti-American sentiments” and exalting French culture (Dwight, 167) in The Custom of the Country to justify her move from America to France. But the objects of criticism in the novel are American materialism and the way it influences marriage practices of American women. Tracing the root of the heroine Undine Spragg’s crudity, Susan Goodman points out that “an indictment of irresponsibly permissive child-rearing practices” has been overlooked (Goodman, 62). Published in 1913, The Custom of the Country shows how an ambitious and materialistic girl, Undine Spragg, gains amusement and success by marrying different men in succession. Having divorced Elmer Moffatt two months after her marriage to him in Apex City, Undine follows her parents to New York. With her extraordinary beauty and deceptive innocence, Undine wins the approval of Ralph Marvel, member of an old New York family. When Undine finds Ralph unable to meet her material needs, she determines to capture the wealthy Peter Van Degan, in vain, because the latter refuses to marry her after learning that she ignored the telegram about her own husband Ralph’s severe illness. Selling the pearls given to her by Peter Van Degan, Undine is able to stay in Paris, attempting to attract the attention of Marquis Raymond de Chelles and finally succeeding in marrying him when Ralph dies. Undine fails to adjust to the French way of life and yearns for more luxury than Raymond can afford. After her divorce from Raymond, Undine remarries Elmer Moffatt, who is now a billionaire. The novel ends with Undine’s dissatisfaction with Moffatt for lacking cultivation and with the fact that she, a divorced woman, is not allowed to be an ambassadress. The custom of the country, the unbridled pursuit of material success, is most clearly manifested in Undine’s marriages. Ralph, the embodiment of New York family tradition, is subject to the most vehement challenge from the unscrupulous woman Undine. Throughout the novel, Undine constructs her relationship to her father, her husbands, and even her child in terms of business. Ralph, however, represents another custom of the country, particularly in New York: Men from decay-

ing but genteel families have virtually no profession, and their wives are responsible for upholding the family honor. That Ralph takes up writing fiction to satisfy Undine’s craving for material luxury points to the vulnerability of New York tradition in the face of materialism, but his drastic failure, culminating in his eventual suicide, suggests not only the destructiveness of materialism but also the passivity and indolence of the descendants of once vibrant and vigorous Old New York families. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the custom of the country is free from criticism. As Ralph observes, he loses his chance of winning the custody of his son Paul because, for the sake of family honor, the issue of divorce is never brought up. Furthermore, Ralph mistakenly believes in Undine’s innocence and idealizes the possibility of preventing Undine from falling under the influence of New York values—when, in fact, she has correctly assessed current values and acts accordingly. Similarly, the custom of the country, France, embodied in Raymond de Chelles, suffers a defeat in the battle against the intrusion of American materialism. A sharp irony is detected when the tapestries, symbolic of tradition, passed from generation to generation, fall into the possession of the collector Elmer Moffatt. If the material aspect of the custom is subject to the destructive material pursuit typical of America, the spiritual aspect fares no better, as when the religion that safeguards family unity loses its power to the custom of the other country. Again, however, Elmer and Undine seem full of life when compared with Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles, metaphors of the dying aristocracies in both countries. While some critics note the superiority of French custom to that of American, which seems to be in accordance with Wharton’s preference for French culture, the textual details argue that such interpretation is a bit reductive. For one thing, Raymond mixes with other women after his marriage to Undine. For another, though divorce is forbidden in a culture that abides by family integrity, it is disheartening to see that the unhappy marriage brings to each partner nothing but a death in life. Therefore, Wharton’s purpose is not to glorify the custom of one country or to condemn that of the other. Rather, the novel can be read as a revela-

316 CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY, THE

tion of both customs as they really were. And Wharton meant for the reader to judge for him or herself. In addition to the common feature of two customs that both focus on vulnerable family honor, the two customs as embodied in Ralph and Raymond, who worship physical beauty, are also responsible for their own ruin. “It’s one of the deepest instincts in human nature. The murdered are as much given as the murderer to haunting the scene of the crime” (62). Although both men claim to be victimized by Undine’s deceptive appearance, it is clear that both men attach importance to the beauty of a woman. The standard of judging a woman either in New York or in Saint Desert remains the same: she must be beautiful or pleasing to men’s gazing eyes. Undine’s marriages come full circle when she finally remarries her first husband, Elmer Moffatt, and this union can be considered as a new custom of the country: commodity versus commodity. The emergence of the custom forms a sharp contrast with the older customs of the two countries in that no humanity is involved at all in the new custom. If the old New York values elevate false and empty family honor, and the French, inflated and hollow expectations of women, the new custom pioneered by Undine and Elmer worships at the altar of material success and fails to pursue things of the spirit. Wharton mounts a vigorous attack against the limitations of materialism by ending the novel with Undine’s frowning at her inability to achieve

her next ambition. Yet Wharton also points out that both countries waste the energy, talents, and ambition of its women. The critical reading of the novel would be incomplete if Charles Bowen, the commentator on the custom of the country in the story, were not mentioned. The reader finds Charles Bowen not entirely reliable in commenting on the relationship between the sexes. As critic Abby Werlock points out, “with her boundless and chafing and restless energy,” Undine embodies “the frustration of women with the financial and marital customs of the country” (Werlock, 7). Perhaps the lesson is that men should not make a fetish of feminine beauty. In that case, women like Undine would find it unnecessary to seek fulfillment through undesirable marriages.

SOURCES Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Werlock, Abby. “The Custom of the Country: George Sand’s Indiana and Edith Wharton’s Indiana/Undine,” Edith Wharton Review, 18, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 1–7. Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country, 1913; New York: Bantam, 1991. Li Jin

C

DD

DAHOMEAN, THE FRANK YERBY (1971) With 33 novels to his credit, Frank YERBY (1916–91) is the most prolific African-American novelist to date, yet he receives little attention in the academy. Even during the height of his publishing success, his production of best-sellers, which continuously featured white protagonists, and his professed lack of interest in writing protest fiction earned the disdain or disregard of scholars whose focus was African-American writing. The fact that he wrote popular, formulaic fiction (what he called costume novels) also disqualified him from serious attention from most literary critics in spite of his subversive revisions of received history. Because Yerby addresses black culture in a compelling way within his costume novel formula in The Dahomean (1971), many critics consider it to be his masterpiece. The Dahomean was published during the Civil Rights era, a time when the rallying cries for AfricanAmerican equality were “Black Power” and “Black Is Beautiful.” One of the ways blacks used to reaffirm their power and beauty during this era was to look to their African roots. With The Dahomean, Frank Yerby participates in this quest and provides a way for his black readers to do the same. Where his predominantly white audience is concerned, he reveals in his “Note to the Reader” that he is attempting “to correct the Anglo-Saxon reader’s historical perspective.” The novel was met with positive criticism, something Yerby had seen very little of in the past, because the book fit in so nicely with the social and literary milieu of the

time; furthermore, this is what many African-American critics had hoped Yerby would use his talents for all along. The story is set in the African kingdom of Dahomey during the early 1800s, and it features Nyasanu, who later renames himself Hwesu (a routine occurrence in Dahomean culture). He is an exquisitely handsome, intelligent, noble, and sensitive chief’s son who becomes a war hero and rises to the position of governor before he is sold into American slavery at the end of the novel by his jealous older brother and a vengeful, young Dahomean prince. From this brief plot summary, readers may observe that Yerby is finally meeting the expectations of his critics and culture, but there are also hints that he will remain true to his reputation as a myth debunker by rendering a balanced historical portrait rather than romanticized nostalgia. The novel is full of fastidiously researched information that Yerby briefly documents in his “Note to the Reader.” He portrays a race of proud, admirable people and gives readers a page-turning history lesson that corrects many long-held negative myths about 19th-century Africa. The novel elaborates on Dahomean achievements in the arts, agriculture, commerce, and diplomacy. He also dismantles the notion that oral African cultures were backward by explaining how their uncanny talent for memorization allowed them to keep their historical and commercial records without using a writing system. Furthermore, he takes many opportunities to validate African stan-

317

318 DAISY MILLER: A STUDY

dards of beauty; for example, Nyasanu officially renames his bride Nyaunu wi, “black woman,” on his wedding day as a boastful tribute to her classic African (jet black skin, wooly hair, curvy figure) beauty. The African standard of beauty is then continuously reinforced as characters who are white or light-skinned are seen by the primary African characters as unattractive or deformed, thereby underscoring the ideas that black is indeed beautiful and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Conversely, Yerby also makes a concerted effort to correct overly romanticized notions of Africa that some blacks were adopting in the late 1960s and early 1970s in their efforts to undo the negative effects of slavery and its aftermath on black self-esteem. He documents that bad along with the good throughout his portrait of Dahomean life. Most important, he addresses the controversial issue of Africans selling each other into slavery to other African nations and to whites involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Yerby’s Dahomean characters critique their own society for making slaves of their war captives and for selling them to Europeans for monetary gain. Yerby even posits that the Dahomean king made war for the express purpose of capturing slaves to sell to white slave traders. By the end of the novel, Yerby leaves Hwesu enslaved in Virginia and pondering why his people would sell each other into slavery. He concludes that it can only be because Africans could not fathom how horrible American chattel slavery was compared to the “rather gentle and indulgent variety of its practiced at home” (415). Six years later, Yerby continues Hwesu’s story in the neo-slave narrative A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979). Here he demonstrates his lifelong commitment to opening his readers’ minds through his entertaining, subversive, and thought-provoking revisions of history. Now that critics are beginning to give Yerby the attention he is due, perhaps his voice will continue to resonate for a new generation of readers.

SOURCES Glasrud, Bruce A., and Laurie Champion. “ ‘The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands’: Frank Yerby, A Black Author in White America,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23 (2000): 15–21.

Hill, James. “The Anti-Heroic Hero in Frank Yerby’s Historical Novels.” In Perspectives of Black Popular Culture, edited by Harry B. Shaw, 114–154. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1990. Yerby, Frank. The Dahomean: An Historical Novel. New York: Dial, 1971. ———. “How and Why I Write the Costume Novel,” Harper’s (October 1959): 145–150. Valerie Matthews Crawford

DAISY MILLER: A STUDY HENRY JAMES (1879) With its academic-sounding title, Daisy Miller: A Study establishes the quizzical and judgmental perspective of Frederick Winterbourne, a 27-yearold expatriate who lives and “studies” in Geneva, Switzerland. The novella, originally published serially in Cornhill magazine in 1878, begins when Winterbourne arrives in Vevey to visit his headache-prone aunt, Mrs. Costello. Almost immediately he meets Daisy Miller, a young American from Schenectady, New York, who is traveling through Europe with her mother and younger brother, Randolph. Her indifference to and outright defiance of social convention, particularly for an unmarried woman, intrigues and shocks Winterbourne and his wealthy social circle. In the course of Winterbourne’s “study” of Daisy, which he attributes to a penchant for “observing and analyzing,” James asks the reader to study Winterbourne and what he represents: a society whose social conventions restrict women. Like his other fiction at the time, such as Washington Square (1880) and Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry JAMES depicts unconventional female characters who struggle against Victorian notions of womanhood. Daisy’s death—a result of catching Roman fever while on a late-night rendezvous with an Italian suitor—is James’s condemnation of a society that tries to regulate female sexuality. Her sexual passion (or fever), like Edna Pontellier’s sexual emancipation from her husband in Kate Chopin’s The AWAKENING (1899), ultimately destroys her; it is too great a violation for society to bear. Winterbourne is obsessed with the question of Daisy’s “innocence,” and the narrative reflects his frustrated attempts to find a label or category that explains her behavior. Dissatisfied with English terms, he often

DANDELION WINE 319

resorts to French and Italian, such as inconduite, coquette, rendezvous, tête-à-tête, and amoroso—all of which imply something illicit as well as illusory about her behavior. Early in the story, he triumphantly concludes that “Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt. . . . a pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller” (458). Yet this term doesn’t satisfy him for long, for he soon finds himself “vexed at his want to instinctive certitude as to how far her eccentricities were generic, national, and how far they were personal” (486). This word game ends when he convinces himself that she has had an affair with Mr. Giovanelli. Abandoning the need for labels, he concludes: “She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect” (489). This pivotal moment is oddly exhilarating for Winterbourne: “[He] stopped, with a sort of horror; and, it must be added, with a sort of relief” (489). Throughout the story, he has been hiding behind diction in a thinly veiled attempt to quell his own desires for her. Even the heavy use of semi-colons and commas in this passage reinforces the ways in which he continually stifles his own emotions, remaining, as his name suggests, distant and cold: “Then, as he was going to advance again, he checked himself; not from the fear that he was doing her injustice, but from a sense of the danger of appearing unbecomingly exhilarated by this sudden revulsion from cautious criticism” (489). James ends Daisy Miller: A Study with both the revelation that Winterbourne’s assumptions about Daisy were incorrect and an allusion to his continuing liaison with a married women. His hypocrisy—the juxtaposition of his outrage at Daisy’s presumed impropriety with his own affair—offers one final example of the double-standard facing women in a society where men have intellectual, social, and sexual freedom denied to women.

SOURCES Bell, Millicent. Meaning in Henry James. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. James, Henry. Daisy Miller: A Study (1879). Vol. 2 of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 3d ed. edited by Paul Lauter, 452–492. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Posnock, Ross. The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Thomas Fahy

DANDELION WINE RAY BRADBURY (1956) In the novel Dandelion Wine, Ray BRADBURY employs that fantasy world of children to show the coming of age of a young boy during the summer of 1928. Bradbury cleverly uses the loss of innocence of a young boy the summer before the nation’s loss of innocence after the 1929 stock market crash. Black Tuesday in 1929 brought death to an American lifestyle. The crash plunged the country into the Great Depression of the 1930s, and Americans struggled to find a way to survive. (Mengeling, 878). After 1929, Bradbury was uprooted from his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, to move with his family to look for stable work. His Midwestern small town existence then switched to a very different life in Los Angeles, California. Many critics believe that this novel is about Bradbury’s own childhood in the Midwest. Dandelion Wine introduces Douglas and Tom Spalding on the first morning of their summer vacation. Doug, the protagonist, awakes full of anticipation for the long awaited break from the formal months in school. Doug decides to keep a journal divided into two parts. The first part is called RITES AND CEREMONIES, and the second part is DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS. He explains to his younger brother Tom that he realized that every summer they do the same thing and that he wants to make note of the new events as they happen. Bradbury uses the journal as a way to demonstrate Doug’s process of self-discovery. The fact that Doug understands that events are changing, and desires to remember, shows an awareness of his place in the family and community. Bradbury laces Doug’s life with the mystery and magic of a child’s world. On a summer morning, Doug stretches out his arm over Green Town and commands each house to awaken. He smiles in satisfaction as he sees the lights appear in the windows of the houses. Doug’s focus on rituals assigns a mystical nature to the day-to-day activities of the summer, as in the yearly making of dandelion wine. With his brother, Doug

320 DANTICAT, EDWIDGE

joins their grandfather to gather the golden flowers, run the blooms through the press, and bottle the wine for storage. The wine appears to possess special qualities that are enhanced by the perfect conditions on the day they were bottled. Doug imagines drinking the summer wine to overcome the bleakness of the winter months. When his great-grandmother dies, however, Doug is shaken from his imagined wonder world. Only with difficulty does Doug write in his journal about his faceto-face encounter with death. His fantasy life is severely torn with the reality of each person’s mortality and the knowledge that he, too, will one day die. Bradbury uses the nearby ravine as a symbol of death. The ravine is described as dark, void of summer sounds, and reeking of decay. The ravine is also where Green Town’s serial killer lurks in the dark. The image grows in importance as Doug becomes ill and appears to sink into his own dark ravine. He descends inside himself; he hears his great-grandmother singing “Shall We Gather at the River.” His dreams enable him to gain an understanding of the natural place of death in the many rituals of life. He becomes more aware of the cycles of the seasons—fall follows summer, but summer always returns. As Doug and Tom sees the signs of fall with the appearance of school supplies in the store windows, Doug states that next summer will be bigger and better than ever. In the description of the next summer, he includes deaths and births in his list. He appears to have a new appreciation of the seasons of life. Doug’s journal becomes a new way for him to remember the summer months. Bradbury demonstrates an amazing ability to mix the wonderment of childhood with the harsh realities of life. Children’s fantasies create a lyrical way of viewing the coming of age of a young boy, who is at the door of adulthood.

SOURCES Bradbury, Ray. Dandelion Wine. New York: Bantam Books, 1957. Johnson, Wayne L. Ray Bradbury. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. Mengeling, Marvin E. “Ray Bradbury’s ‘Dandelion Wine’: Themes, Sources, and Style.” English Journal 60, no. 7 (October 1971): 877–887. Marilyn Lewis

DANTICAT, EDWIDGE (1969– ) A significant new American writer with several critically acclaimed novels set in Haiti and Brooklyn, New York, Edwidge Danticat (pronounced Dahn-ti-kah) is the Haitian-born author of Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), an Oprah Book Club selection, and The FARMING OF BONES (1998), an American Book Award winner. She has also written two collections of short stories, Krik? Krak! (1995), a National Book Award finalist, and The Dew Breaker (2004); Granta named her as one of the “Best of American Novelists” in 1996. Danticat is praised often for the rich lyricism of her prose that offsets her violent subject matter, and for her ability to describe being “young, black, Haitian and female [and] wandering in a world too often eager to regard all of those conditions as less than worthwhile” (Danticat and Fichtner). Edwidge Danticat was born on January 19, 1969, in Port-au-Prince to André Danticat, a cabdriver, and Rose Danticat, a textile worker. After living with an aunt from age four through 12, she joined her parents in Brooklyn in 1981 and was educated at Barnard College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1990, and at Brown University, where she earned her master of fine arts degree in 1993. The following year she published Breath, Eyes, Memory, a novel begun during her high school years and transformed into her master’s thesis. This loosely autobiographical novel features Sophie Caco, who also lives for several years with an aunt before emigrating to the United States at age 12. Four generations of women provide strength and sustenance for each other and for Sophie, who escapes the fate of her single mother, a suicide. Danticat’s second novel, The Farming of Bones, recounts the 1937 Dominican Republic massacre of more than 12,000 Haitian farmworkers. The narrator is Amabelle Desir, a young Haitian who works for Señora Valencia, a Dominican, before being separated from her lover Sebastien and escaping the genocide. NOVELS Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Soho Press, 1994. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho Press, 1998.

SOURCES Brice-Finch, Jacqueline. Review of The Farming of Bones, in World Literature Today 73, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 373.

DARK LAUGHTER 321

Danticat, Edwidge, and Renée H. Shea. An interview in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 12–15. Jaffrey, Zia. Review of The Farming of Bones, Nation 267, no. 16 (November 16, 1998): 62. Mackay, Mary. “Living Seeing, Remembering,” Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 36, 38. Pierre-Pierre, Garry. “Haitian Tales, Flatbush Scenes,” New York Times, 26 January 1995, pp. C1, C8.

OTHER Danticat, Edwidge, and Margaria Fichtner. “Author Edwidge Danticat Writes about Being Young, Black, Haitian, and Female,” Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (May 1, 1995). Available online. URL: http://www.Kingsborough. edu/academicDepartments/English/read/bem/FichtnerMargaria.htm. Accessed September 5, 2005. Edwidge Danticat - All Books. Available online. URL: http:// www.non.com/books/Danticat_Edwidge_cc.htm. Accessed August 28, 2005. Richmond Review. Review of Farming of Bones. Available online. URL: http://www.richmondreview.co.uk/books/ farming.html. Accessed August 28, 2005. Upchurch, Michael. “No Room for the Living,” New York Times Book Review (27 September 1998). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/reviews/ 980927.27upchurn.html. Accessed August 28, 2005. Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color: Edwidge Danticat. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ vg/bios/entries/danticat_edwidge.html. Accessed August 28, 2005.

DARK LAUGHTER SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1925) Dark Laughter, published in 1925, was Sherwood ANDERSON’s first popular success. Of Anderson’s novels, Dark Laughter “perhaps makes the most comprehensive effort to unify the complex concerns of his fiction: individual fulfillment, sexual freedom, artistic development, even national destiny” (Holtz, 135). However, even contemporary critics recognized the stylistic shortcomings of Anderson’s prose, which he derived from James Joyce’s Ulysses, published just a few years earlier (Howe, 197). A modern reading of Anderson’s book may elicit many fruitful glimpses into the world of the Roaring Twenties. Anderson’s account in Dark Laughter represents an acute look at the direct and indirect effects of World War I on individuals and society, more specifically at the strain on and between men and women as they attempt to find their place in postwar society.

The protagonist of Dark Laughter is Bruce Dudley, who, we learn through a succession of memories and thoughts, has recently abandoned his successful, working wife, his secure, yet futile, career as a newspaper reporter, and the artistically rigid and pretentious life that had been expected of him in Chicago. He has escaped down the Ohio River, fulfilling a boyish dream conjured by Mark TWAIN’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. After spending a couple of months in New Orleans, he moves to his boyhood town of Old Harbor, Indiana, and acquires a job in a factory. While working in the factory, Bruce becomes infatuated with the factory owner’s wife, Aline Grey, who is having doubts about her role in society and her impulsive, yet expected, marriage to Fred Grey, a wealthy American businessman. Aline thinks: There might be nothing to life but just that—living—seeing the days pass—being a wife and perhaps presently a mother—dreaming—keeping the thing, down inside, in order. If one couldn’t always keep it in order at least one could keep it out of sight. You walked in a certain way—wore the right clothes—knew how to talk—kept up a kind of touch with the arts, with music, painting, the new moods in house furnishings—read the latest novels. You and your husband had together a certain position to maintain and you did your share. (134) Both Bruce and Aline are attempting to escape the “moral and spiritual emptiness at the core of cultural libertarianism” (Sweeney, 11). This theme is at the heart of many of Anderson’s novels; however, “true escape . . . involves a type of transcendence, something which many of Anderson’s characters struggle toward, a few come close to, and one or two perhaps attain” (Sweeney, 18). Although Bruce and Aline do in fact leave Old Harbor together, the ending of Dark Laughter leaves much to be resolved. As soon as they have decided to leave, they begin to doubt their choices, to wonder if they will be able to succeed in their new roles. The reader must conclude whether or not they will truly transcend their roles in society. In Dark Laughter, Bruce’s escape down the Ohio River is apropos because, according to Anderson, “the

322 DARK LAUGHTER

great river . . . had come to represent the lost youth of Middle America” (17). For Anderson, the river symbolized the death of romance correlating with the rise of industrial commerce. Anderson writes: First thing [the factory men] did when they got the chance was to choke off the river, take the romance out of commerce. They may not have intended anything of the sort, romance and commerce were just natural enemies. They made the river as dead as a door-nail with their railroads and it has been that way ever since. (18) The “choked” river is reminiscent of Fred Grey, the archetypal character of the “tension-ridden sterility of post-war industrial society” (Jones, 3). Fred and Aline are not able to have children, a problem they both think of, but never discuss. Fred Grey’s character is set in opposition to that of Bruce Dudley’s, and the two can be examined as an illustration of Fate versus Determinism. For Fred, life happens and he has only to accept his fate. When Aline confronts Fred about her affair and intent to leave, Anderson writes, “Fred said nothing. What was to be said? When you are in a battle the bullets hit you or you escape, you live, you are glad of life. There was a heavy silence” (304). For Bruce and Aline, who have determined to change their fates, “for better or worse a new life had begun for them” (309). Anderson leaves it to the reader to decide if Bruce and Aline have made the right choices. Recent criticism has focused on showing Anderson’s works as progressively expressionist. From Winesburg, Ohio to Dark Laughter, Anderson explores people’s inability to accurately express their inner feelings and thoughts. Although, as Fred Madden suggests, “concentration on the problems of self-expression does not, in itself, make Anderson’s work Expressionist. But the close relationship between these expressional problems and the twisted or grotesque emotional states of his characters do give his work some definable Expressionist contours” (370). Expressionists counter this repression by adhering to primitivism, in which humans’ primordial instincts are held in higher regard that what is learned or instituted. In Dark Laughter, this primitivism is embodied in the African-American culture (Stouck, 33).

After driving his first wife from their apartment simply by smiling, Bruce thinks, “If one couldn’t smile at oneself, take a laugh for oneself as one went along, what was the use living at all?” (61). This thought is the premise for Bruce’s escape and his journey to discover and expose his inner passion. Although Bruce and Aline awaken desire in each other, their conversation remains stunted and forced, their outward expression limited. Throughout the story, it is only the blacks who openly sing, laugh, and tell jokes. From the carefree, slow-talking blacks that Bruce envies in New Orleans to the Greys’ obedient but mischievous black servants, laughter, or “dark laughter,” represents a freedom of expression that can only be attained by uninhibited, natural, and instinctual behavior, something which Bruce and Aline never quite achieve. And in the end, as Bruce and Aline elope, “the blacks laugh mockingly and wisely as they recognize the futility of escape” (David D. Anderson, 271).

SOURCES Anderson, David D. “Anderson and Myth.” In Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, edited by James Nagel, 267–283. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Anderson, Sherwood. Dark Laughter. New York: Liveright, 1960. Bunge, Nancy. “Women in Sherwood Anderson’s Fiction.” In Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, edited by James Nagel, 242–249. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Chase, Cleveland. “In Retrospect.” In Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, edited by James Nagel, 86–91. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Holtz, William. “Sherwood Anderson and Rose Wilder Lane: Source and Method in Dark Laughter,” Journal of Modern Literature (March 1985): 131–152. Howe, Irving. Sherwood Anderson. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966. Jones, Howard Mumford. Introduction to Dark Laughter, 3. New York: Liveright, 1960. Madden, Fred. “Expressionist Contours in Sherwood Anderson’s Fiction,” Midwest Quarterly (Summer 1997): 363–371. Miller, William V. “Earth-Mothers, Succubi and Other Ectoplasmic Spirits: The Women in Sherwood.” In Critical Essays on Sherwood Anderson, edited by James Nagel, 196–209. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Stouck, David. “Anderson’s Expressionist Art.” In New Essays on Winesburg, Ohio, edited by John W. Crowley, 27–51. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

DAUGHTER OF EARTH 323

Sweeney, Gerard M. Sherwood Anderson, Wanderer and MythMaker. Columbus: State Library of Ohio, 1979. Paige Huskey

DAUGHTER OF EARTH AGNES SMEDLEY (1929) This novel examines the destruction of working-class families and individuals in early 1900s America. Focusing on the character of Marie, the novel shows a farming family leaving the supportive (but socially restrictive) community of farmers to look for a rise in fortune by mining in Colorado. Marie is a precocious and imaginative child who cannot tolerate what she sees as the bondage of womanhood. Her mother’s life is one of powerlessness and killing drudgery; her father is free to squander his earnings and those of his family. As he breaks apart under the dangerous and oppressive work conditions he experiences, Marie’s father looks to his family as his sole opportunity to be a “man” in the way his bosses are men—he abuses and exploits his family to compensate for his own abuse and exploitation. Marie chooses to fight to get an education in an environment where an educated female is considered ridiculous, selfish, and dangerous to the community. In her quest, she is humiliated for her poverty and lack of middle-class mannerisms; she is nearly raped as she is assumed to be a prostitute simply by being a woman working outside her home. She eventually makes it to college, and at first it seems that education has rewarded her with happiness. Happiness appears in the novel in a conventional way for female heroines—through love and belonging. But as Marie tries to form a companionate marriage while studying, she is haunted by the way she observes marriage being destructive to working-class women—they are subject to beatings and imprisonment; the required self-sacrifice is total. Her hauntedness in regard to marriage ultimately destroys her relationship, as she becomes pregnant unintentionally and has to seek an illegal abortion. Her feelings of entrapment and her resentment of her husband’s relative freedom drive her to divorce. Marie cannot imagine herself as a whole person in the context of motherhood and wifehood. Family to her is an oppressive structure to women, but she also sees that having a family when one is poor places one in the hands of a society that uses poor people’s family

obligations to each other to keep them in jobs that kill both body and soul. To be free and her own self, Marie feels she must be alone. She is not equipped with middle-class values that encourage self-development and self-advancement, so she sees her successes as an individual as literally coming at the expense of her family members. Without her labor, the family is poorer; without her contributing to women’s work, her mother dies of exhaustion doing it alone; without her monetary sacrifices to the men in her family, her brother cannot get out of prison and dies an ugly death there. Marie seeks to find community and justice by getting involved in liberation politics. She finds opportunities for building solidarity and being useful when she is briefly thrown into prison for political protest; while there, she helps the women she shares her cell with to see how the structures of class and sexism have placed them in prison—their crimes involve controlling their own sexuality and committing petty theft to support their husbands or lovers. Marie also finds community in the Indian liberation movement. She finds a loving husband in a man from another culture who does not hold a standard wherein women must be ignorant and submissive, but once Marie is raped by his best friend and political opponent, he finds her a source of shame and mistrust. At the end of the novel, Marie is out of solutions. She leaves to be an activist in another country, as she sees the possibility for revolution and equality impossible in America, particularly for a woman. This novel is striking in its detailed and clear depiction of how the personal is political (and vice versa) in the life of someone who in the grand scheme of 1900s American culture would seem not to matter at all: a working-class woman. Its articulation of the social powerlessness a woman had to fight in that time places it in the same ground-breaking category as its contemporaries, The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper. However, unlike these classics, Daughter of Earth places focus on the importance of women’s liberation for the working class and the poor.

SOURCE Smedley, Agnes. Daughter of Earth. 1929. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Carolyn Whitsun

324 DAVIS, H. L.

DAVIS, H(AROLD) L(ENORE) (1896–1960) Although his poetry was admired by Carl Sandburg and Robinson Jeffers, H. L. Davis is best known today for his five novels. They address the myths and psychological underpinnings of the American West during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Although Davis published stories and poetry in American Mercury, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and Poetry, H. L. Mencken, editor of American Mercury, encouraged him to move from poetry to fiction, and H. L. Davis won the Pulitzer Prize and the Harper Prize for his first novel, HONEY IN THE HORN (1935). His other novels include Harp of a Thousand Strings (1947), Beulah Land (1949), Winds of Morning (1952)—considered by some critics to be his best—and The Distant Music (1957). H. L. Davis was born on October 18, 1894, in Rone’s Mill, Oregon, to James Alexander Davis, a country schoolteacher, and Ruth Bridges Davis. After serving briefly in the U.S. Army in 1918, Davis published his first book of literary criticism. In 1928, he married Marion Lay, a journalist. The picaresque Honey in the Horn, written in Mexico, is a humorous coming-of-age story featuring Clay Calvert, whose odyssey takes him through rural Oregon where he works at mowing, harvesting, and homesteading. He learns, too, about love, human nature, and the existence of good and evil. With the help of Luce, the horsetrader’s daughter whom he loves, Clay learns to stop wandering and to accept the coexistence of good and evil. Unlike Mark TWAIN’s Huck Finn, with whom he is frequently compared, he does not flee. Davis’s second novel, Harp of a Thousand Strings, is a complex tale set during the French Revolution and its aftermath. It features three Americans, Melancthon Crawford, Commodore Robinette, and the Native American known as Indian Jory, as well as two French characters: Jean-Lambert Tallien and Thérèse de Fontenay. Davis uses his American characters to represent different emotions (love, greed, vengefulness, and so forth). He illustrates the continuum of humanity and the links between the Old World and the New through the characters, who met in Tripoli and cross paths again many years later in Oklahoma. Davis and Marion Lay divorced in 1943, shortly after Harp was published. Davis’s third novel, Beulah Land, features the half-Cherokee, half-white Ruhama

Warne, who, together with her male white friend Askwani (who was been raised by Indians), leaves North Carolina, the site of the old Cherokee Nation. The journey is punctuated by a long stop to make a home on an Illinois farm and by the death of her father in the Civil War. She and Askwani reach Oregon and marry; their daughter returns East and marries an Englishman. Davis followed with Winds of Morning, a popular and critical success, set in 1927, that chronicles the life of Amos G. Clarke, who forms a close friendship with Pap Hendricks, the old settler, and falls in love with Calanthe, his granddaughter. At the end of this novel—which also details the relationship between whites and Indians—by examining past mistakes, the two men accommodate themselves to future possibilities. In 1953, a year after the novel’s publication, Davis married Elizabeth Tonkin Martin del Campo. He published his final novel, The Distant Music in 1957. An Oregon settlement novel, it focuses on several generations of the Mulock family and their often agonizing relation to the land. Davis, whose heart and circulatory problems led to the amputation of a leg in 1956, died of a heart attack in 1960, in San Antonio, Texas. Today, along with Cormac McCARTHY, Larry McMURTRY, Wallace STEGNER, and Walter Van Tilburg CLARK, H. L. Davis is respected not only for his literary artistry but for the significance of his evocation of those Americans who pioneered the West. The major collection of H. L. Davis’s manuscripts, letters, journals, and unpublished works is held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin.

NOVELS Beulah Land. New York: Morrow, 1949. The Distant Music. New York: Morrow, 1957. Harp of a Thousand Strings. New York: Morrow, 1947. Honey in the Horn. New York: Harper, 1935. Winds of Morning. New York: Morrow, 1952.

SOURCES Bain, Robert. H. L. Davis. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1974. Brunvand, Jan Harold. “Honey in the Horn and ‘Acres of Clams’: The Regional Fiction of H. L. Davis,” Western American Literature 2 (Summer 1967): 134–145. Bryant, Paul T. H. L. Davis. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

DAVIS, REBECCA BLAINE HARDING

Corning, Howard McKinley. “All the Words On the Pages, I: H. L. Davis,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 73 (December 1972): 293–331. Greiner, Francis F. “Voice of the West: Harold L. Davis,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 66 (September 16, 1965): 240–248. Jones, Phillip L. “The West of H. L. Davis,” South Dakota Review 6 (Winter 1968–69): 72–84. Kohler, Dayton. “H. L. Davis: Writer in the West,” College English 14 (December 1952): 133–140. Lauber, John. “A Western Classic: H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 85–86. Love, Glen A. “Stemming the Avalanche of Tripe,” in H. L. Davis: Collected Essays and Stories, 321–340. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1986. Milton, John R. “Variations on Western Realism.” In The Novel of the American West, 300–307. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Powers, Alfred. History of Oregon Literature, 676–679. Portland, Oreg.: Metropolitan, 1935.

DAVIS, REBECCA BLAINE HARDING (1831–1910) With the anonymous publication of her LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS, or the Korl Woman (1861) in the Atlantic Monthly, Rebecca Harding moved onto the American literary scene as a new interpreter of realism and naturalism; she focused on the starved and brutal conditions of factory and mill workers, who, like the korl (the refuse of the iron-mill), were a by-product of mid-19th century industrialization in America. When James T. Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, asked her for more fiction, she responded with Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day (1862), another bleak and withering look at the conditions of overworked and underfed ironworkers. Although she wrote 10 novels, more than 100 short stories, essays, and children’s literature, she is still—after a revival spearheaded by author Tillie OLSEN in the 1970s—best known for the way she expanded literary realism for Life in the Iron Mills and Margaret Howth. Rebecca Harding was born on June 24, 1831, in Washington, Pennsylvania, the first of five children of Richard Harding and Rachel Leets Harding, who moved to Alabama and then to Wheeling, West Virginia, where Davis was reared near the iron foundries. She attended the Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1848. After publication of her first two novels she married L.

325

Clarke Davis, a Philadelphia journalist with literary aspirations of his own. Apparently he supported Davis’s career as well, although scholars suggest that she wrote out of financial exigencies. Three of her novels—Waiting for the Verdict (1867), Dallas Galbraith (1868), and Natasqua (1886)—were written to be serialized in the influential magazines Galaxy, Lippincott’s, and Scribners, in that order. As scholar Lisa L. Long points out, Davis seems very close to the modern concept of a woman who balanced at considerable cost, now and then, both family and career (Long, 90). One of her three children, Richard Harding DAVIS, was to become an influential journalist and novelist. Davis’s social concerns are evident in each novel she wrote, and they all reflect her own struggle to create in spite of the forces working against her. John Andross (1874) in an exposé of the Whiskey Ring Scandal in Pennsylvania and an examination of the frequent misuses of power under a capitalistic system; Waiting for the Verdict looks at post–Civil War injustice against African Americans; Earthen Pitchers (1873) depicts women as professionals; and A Law unto Herself (1878) demonstrates that the second-class status of women is woven into the American legal system. Increasingly, scholars focus on Davis’s novels and novellas as products of a woman ahead of her era and intensively aware of contemporary issues, someone who paved the way for such naturalists as Stephen CRANE, Theodore DREISER, Frank NORRIS, John STEINBECK, and Tillie OLSEN. Davis died of a stroke on September 29, 1910, at age 79. Her papers are found in the Clifton Waller Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia and also in the James T. Fields Papers in the Huntington Library.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Dallas Galbraith. Philadelphia, Pa.: Lippincott, 1868. Doctor Warrick’s Daughters. New York: Harper, 1896. Earthen Pitchers. Scribner Monthly 7 (November 1873–April 1874): 46 pages. Frances Waldeaux. New York: Harper, 1897. John Andross. New York: Orange Judd, 1874. Kent Hampden. New York: Scribner, 1892. A Law unto Herself. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1878. Life in the Iron Mills, or The Korl Woman. First serialized in Atlantic Monthly 7, no. 34 (January 1861). Reprint, with biographical interpretation by Tillie Olsen. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1972.

326 DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING

Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1862. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1990. Natasqua. New York: Cassell-Rainbow, 1886. Waiting for the Verdict. 1867. Reprint, New York: Sheldon, 1868; Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Gregg, 1968.

SOURCES Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Hesford, Walter. “The Literary Context of Life in the Iron Mills,” American Literature 49, no. 1 (1977): 70–85. Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son. New York: Holt, 1961. Long, Lisa A. “Rebecca Harding Davis.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight, 88–98. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Olsen, Tillie. Preface to Life in the Iron Mills. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1972. Pfaelzer, Jean. “Rebecca Harding Davis: Domesticity, Social Order, and the Industrial Novel,” International Journal of Woman’s Studies 4, no. 3 (1981): 233–244. Rose, Jane Atteridge. Rebecca Harding Davis. New York: Twayne, 1993.

DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING (1864–1916) Novelist, fin-de-siècle war correspondent, and pioneering mystery and sports writer, Richard Harding Davis, known as the glamour boy, the American [Rudyard] Kipling, the Beau Brummel of the Press, lived a life of adventure and influence that his fictional creations might have envied: He covered wars in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America; became a model for artist Charles Dana Gibson, who created the Gibson Girl and illustrated numerous books by Davis; worked as the editor of Harper’s Weekly and helped shape the modern American magazine; created the chivalrous and sophisticated hero Courtland Van Bibber; and, through his use of spies, intrigue, and adventure, anticipated the fiction of the pulp magazine Black Mask. Apart from its literary merits, Davis’s writing is viewed today as a significant window into American historic and social tradition as the 19th century closed and the 20th century opened. His novels are sentimental and genteel but he also wrote the antecedents of contemporary detective fiction (In the Fog [1901], Gallegher and Other Stories [1891]). Davis covered Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders during

the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Boer War, and World War I. As a sports writer, he earned the then vast sum of $500 for covering the 1895 Yale-Princeton football game. He also wrote about 20 plays. Richard Harding Davis was born on April 18, 1864, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Lemuel Clarke Davis, a newspaper editor, and the novelist Rebecca Harding Davis. He married Cecil Clark in 1899; when the marriage ended in divorce in 1912, he married actress Elizabeth Genevieve McEvoy (stage name Bessie McCoy) that same year. Soldiers of Fortune (1897), his bestknown novel, is a tale of an adventurous American who supports American commercial interests abroad; In the Fog, set in London, is memorable for creating an atmosphere of suspense and adventure lurking down every foggy lane; Somewhere in France (1915) is a World War I spy tale; The Dictator is a political farce set in a fictitious Latin American country and The Galloper, another farce, is set during the Greco-Turkish War. Soldiers of Fortune was made into a silent film, as was The Scarlet Car (1916), and his story “Gallegher,” about a Philadelphia newspaper boy who solves a murder that has stumped the police, inspired a series of Gallegher films in the 1960s aired on The Wonderful World of Disney. Richard Harding Davis died on April 11, 1916, at home in Mount Kisco, New York. His papers are housed in the Richard Harding Davis Collection at the University of Virginia; in the files of Charles Scribner Sons at Princeton University; and in the library of Lehigh University.

NOVELS About Paris. New York: Harper, 1895. The Adventures of My Freshman. Bethlehem, Pa.: Privately printed, 1884. The Boy Scout. New York: Scribner, 1914. Captain Macklin: His Memoirs. New York: Scribner, 1902. Cinderella and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1896. The Congo and Coasts of Africa. New York: Scribner, 1907. The Consul. New York: Scribner, 1911. Cuba in War Time. New York: Russell, 1897. The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns. New York: Scribner, 1898. The Deserter. New York: Scribner, 1917. Dr. Jameson’s Raiders vs. the Johannesburg Reformers. New York: Russell, 1897.

DAY OF THE LOCUST, THE 327

Farces: The Dictator, The Galloper, “Miss Civilization.” New York: Scribner, 1906. Gallegher and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1891. In the Fog. New York: Russell, 1901. The King’s Jackal. New York: Scribner, 1898. The Lion and the Unicorn. New York: Scribner, 1899. The Lost Road. New York: Scribner, 1913. The Man Who Could Not Lose. New York: Scribner, 1911. Once upon a Time. New York: Scribner, 1910. Our English Cousins. New York: Harper, 1894. The Princess Aline. New York: Harper, 1895. Ranson’s Folly. New York: Scribner, 1902. Real Soldiers of Fortune. New York: Scribner, 1906. The Red-Cross Girl. New York: Scribner, 1912. The Rulers of the Mediterranean. New York: Harper, 1894. The Scarlet Car. New York: Scribner, 1907. Soldiers of Fortune. New York: Scribner, 1897. Somewhere in France. New York: Scribner, 1915. Three Gringos in Venezuela and Central America. New York: Harper, 1896. Van Bibber and Others. New York: Harper, 1892. Vera, the Medium. New York: Scribner, 1908. The West from a Car-Window. New York: Harper, 1892. The White Mice. New York: Scribner, 1909. With Both Armies in South Africa. New York: Scribner, 1900. With the Allies. New York: Scribner, 1914. With the French in France and Salonika. New York: Scribner, 1916.

SOURCES Davis, Charles Belmont, ed. Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis. New York: Scribner, 1917. Downey, Fairfax. Richard Harding Davis: His Day. New York and London: Scribner, 1933. Langford, Gerald. The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961. Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam. The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Lubow, Arthur. The Reporter Who Would Be King: A Biography of Richard Harding Davis. New York: Scribner, 1992. Osborn, Scott C., and Robert L. Phillips, Jr. Richard Harding Davis. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Solensten, John M. “The Gibson Boy: A Reassessment,” American Literary Realism 4 (Fall 1971): 303–312. ———. Richard Harding Davis. 1864–1916. Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1970.

OTHER Richard Harding Davis. Available online. URL: http://members.aol.com/MG4273/rhdavis.htm#Davis. Accessed August 28, 2005. Richard Harding Davis’s The King’s Jackal. Available online. URL: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgibin/toccer?id=DavKing& tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/lv1/Archive. Accessed August 28, 2005.

DAY OF THE LOCUST, THE NATHANAEL WEST (1939) The Day of the Locust was the fourth and final novel Nathanael WEST wrote before his death in an automobile accident the following year. It is West’s Hollywood novel, the most significant literary fruit of his move to Southern California to supplement his meager earnings from his novels by writing screenplays, mostly for low-budget films produced at second-rate studios. The novel portrays the tawdry side of Tinseltown that West knew best, picking up on the theme of a homegrown American fascist movement that he had explored in his previous novel A Cool Million (1934). This time he located the seeds of this movement in the betrayals of Hollywood’s dream factory. Despite glowing reviews from writers such as F. Scott FITZGERALD and Edmund Wilson, however, The Day of the Locust was, like West’s other novels, doomed to obscurity until long after his death. The central character in the novel is Tod Hackett, a young painter from the East who has come to Hollywood to design sets and costumes. But Tod is more an observer than a participant in most of the novel’s action; he serves as an intelligent consciousness that registers the horror and absurdity of the other characters, grotesques drawn from West’s experiences on and off the studio lots. Even the reality of Tod’s Hollywood is awash in illusion, with everyone and everything pretending to be something else. The architecture is a crazy mix of styles, imitating everything from Spanish-style villas to Irish cottages. Tod’s acquaintances include a pugnacious dwarf named Abe Kusich, whose truculence is an elaborate defense mechanism, a sophisticated screenwriter named Claude Estee, who pretends to be a southern gentleman, and an ersatz cowboy named Earle Shoop, who proves to be the most serious rival for Faye Greener, the woman of Tod’s own dreams.

328 DAY OF THE LOCUST, THE

Faye lives with her father, Harry, a washed-up vaudeville clown, in Tod’s apartment building, and though he lusts after her, she refuses to return his affections because he is neither handsome nor rich. While she struggles to find roles as an extra, she longs to be a star, and her sexual desires have become inextricably bound with this larger ambition. In a flashback, we hear how Faye and her father met another character named Homer Simpson when Harry tried to sell him some of his “miracle solvent” silver polish. Homer is a recent arrival from Iowa, where he was a bookkeeper for a hotel, sent to California for his health by a doctor. He is haunted by the memory of his attempt to reach out to a hotel guest who could not pay her bill, an attempt that was misunderstood as a cheap sexual advance. Curiously, his hands seem to have a life of their own, apparently manifesting his restless unconscious desires. Like Tod, he becomes captivated by Faye, but Tod pities and befriends him. In addition to his studio work, Tod is working on a painting of his own entitled “The Burning of Los Angeles,” and Homer seems to him one of the victims of Hollywood’s illusory promises who inhabit the violent mob this painting depicts. When Harry dies, Faye briefly turns to prostitution to pay for the funeral, but she eventually takes advantage of Homer’s infatuation by moving in with him. She is soon joined by Earle and his friend Miguel, who move into the garage and use it to stage cockfights. One night Faye invites Tod, joined by Claude and Abe, to a fight Earle and Miguel have scheduled between their birds and those owned by a man from San Diego. When the other owner doesn’t show up, Claude buys a cock from Earle and Miguel and pits it against their champion in a brutal scene that is described in excruciating detail. After the cockfight, everyone goes inside Homer’s house for a party, where a different kind of cockfight ensues between Earle, Miguel, and Abe over the provocative Faye. When Tod returns the next morning, he discovers that after he left, Homer and Earle had walked in on Faye and Miguel in bed together, and Earle and Miguel had fought again. All the guests, including Faye, have vanished, and Tod tries to comfort the distraught, nearly catatonic Homer. Having put Homer to sleep, Tod goes out for dinner, but as he makes his way back to Homer’s house he

encounters an enormous crowd that has gathered around “Kahn’s Persian Palace Theater” for a movie premier. He finds Homer wandering half-dressed among the crowd with his suitcases, and Homer tells him he wants to go back to Iowa. When Tod goes to find a cab, leaving Homer on a bench, Homer is taunted by his neighbor, an obnoxious aspiring child star named Adore Loomis. This proves to be the last straw for Homer, whose latent resentment finally erupts into violence. Tod returns too late to prevent him from stomping the child to death in the street. At the same moment, the crowd at the premier surges and becomes a violent mob, separating Tod from Homer. In the wake of the riot, the badly injured Tod is rescued by policemen, and the novel concludes with his anguished cry in imitation of the police siren. While many early reviews treated the novel as merely a Hollywood novel, praising it for its accuracy or blaming it for its distortion, the critics who helped revive West’s reputation in the 1950s and 1960s detected far broader ambitions in it. There is a more urgent, serious tone in The Day of the Locust that is not present in West’s earlier novels. One obvious indication of this change in tone is that, while the novel contains West’s customary grotesques and several moments of fine parody, it is not nearly as funny as his early work. Most critics attribute this increased seriousness to West’s growing anxiety about the emergence of an American fascist movement, which they take to be vividly depicted in the climactic riot at the movie premier as well as in Tod’s painting. In an important early study of West’s fiction, James F. Light attributes West’s antipathy to this kind of mob violence to his status as a Jewish American in 1930s America. This concern with the political implications of West’s vision continues to dominate contemporary readings of the novel. Jonathan Veitch finds in West’s critique of the dream factory a critique of modern capitalism, but in his view, West’s enemy is Hollywood’s commodification of dreams in the service of consumer capitalism. Rita Barnard sees in the mob violence at the end of the novel a potentially liberating release of the energies of the masses, while Veitch thinks that such energies have been diverted to reactionary ends by the alienating effects of consumerism.

DAY OF THE LOCUST, THE 329

Both critics, however, see the novel as a committed leftist political critique. An alternative reading is suggested by a famous letter from West to Malcolm Cowley, in which the former complains of his difficulties in expressing his leftist political sentiments in The Day of the Locust. West writes: “But I’m a comic writer and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the ‘big things’ without seeming to laugh or at least smile. . . . What I mean is that out here we have a strong progressive movement and I devote a great deal of time to it. Yet, although this new novel is about Hollywood, I found it impossible to include any of those activities in it.” It seems clear that West’s problem is not with any particular form of leftist critique, but rather with political idealism in general. As a public citizen, West’s letter implies, he believes strongly in leftist causes, but as a private novelist, he can only satirize causes in general. This idea suggests a very different reading of The Day of the Locust, one focused on the distinction between public and private acts of violence. Early readers of the novel often complained of its lack of unity, which they blamed on a weak protagonist who was only an observer and not a participant in the action. Tod Hackett was a late addition, appearing only in the latest drafts of the novel. In earlier versions, West tried the third person or used Claude Estee as the consciousness through which to filter events. As Jay Martin points out in his biography of West, Tod’s gradual emergence in West’s revisions coincides with an emergence of the theme of art in its relationship to mass culture and social reality. For Martin, in its later versions, the novel becomes a story of the triumph of a kind of art. The Day of the Locust is about the business of dreams, and West encourages his readers to distinguish between the producers of dreams like Faye and Harry Greener and the consumers of dreams like Homer Simpson. He depicts the latter as midwesterners consumed with boredom who are lured to California by the exotic promises of Hollywood. Their dreams are fed not only by movies, but also by bizarre economic and religious cults like that of “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All,” who preaches the gospel of raw vegetables. Soon, however, they become bored with these sham

dreams, and their boredom becomes resentment toward those who produced them. Such is the source of the mob’s violence at the end of the novel. But it becomes clear that the producers of the illusions are themselves in the thrall of illusions, including those they create. This is best illustrated in the extraordinary scene in which Harry peddles his “miracle solvent” to Homer. When his heart begins to give out, even he is not sure whether his illness is part of his pitch or not. Both Greeners have come to Hollywood to pursue an illusion—the illusion of stardom—and even more sophisticated characters like Tod and Claude Estee seem to be victims of this illusion, or at least its milder Depression-era form, the illusion of success. A more telling distinction is that between Tod and virtually everyone else in the novel. West writes of those who have come to California to pursue their dreams: “Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure.” This is clearly not true of Tod. From the beginning of the novel, he is distinguished from the other characters by his capacity to achieve greater depths of thought and feeling. While Earle Shoop is described as having “a two-dimensional face that a talented child might have drawn with a ruler and a compass,” Tod is described as a doltish-looking person who, “despite his appearance, was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes.” Tod spends his leisure time creating art, in the form of his painting “The Burning of Los Angeles.” It is Tod’s ability to create illusions on his own terms, and not merely on the terms of the mass culture industry, that distinguishes him from the novel’s other characters. The characteristic style of Tod’s art is elucidated by the novel’s associations of laughter with criticism. According to the novel, the greatest weapon against illusion is laughter, and this is shown most clearly in the scene where the Greeners first encounter Homer. Harry counters his daughter’s overly theatrical response to his malady by laughing at it, and West tells us that this is his characteristic weapon against her artificiality. While these characters are capable of laughing at the illusions of others, however, they prove

330 DEATH IN THE FAMILY, A

incapable of laughing at their own. Tod appears to be the only character in the novel who is fully aware of his own absurdity—in fact, he is capable of an all-consuming, apocalyptic laughter, as the novel’s final sentence proves when it observes that his siren-like wail begins in laughter at himself. What Tod’s art has that the illusions of mass culture do not, then, is a capacity for mockery, even self-mockery—a capacity for irony. Another form Tod’s superiority takes is in his response to the betrayal of his dreams. When confronted by such betrayal, the consistent response of the novel’s other characters is physical violence. Faye Greener can only counter her father’s laughter by striking him, and she is associated with violence throughout the novel. The irascible Abe Kusich is always on the verge of violence. Earle Shoop responds to his friends’ taunts with violence, and he and his partner Miguel engage in violence by proxy in their cockfights. Homer Simpson’s hands, which seem to be beyond his control, foreshadow the uncontrollable violence with which he strikes out at Adore Loomis. Most important, the resentful mob at the premier can only fight back against the betrayal of their dreams with violence. Tod, on the other hand, has another outlet, and this is made clear when he pursues Faye after an ill-fated cookout with Earle and Miguel. For Tod and the other male characters, Faye is the ultimate symbol of the dreams everyone is chasing, and earlier Tod reacts to her betrayal with violent thoughts: he imagines raping her. Now, as Faye is fleeing the violence she has caused at the campfire, he has his chance to realize his dream, but he interrupts his pursuit to turn his thoughts to his painting. Rather than resorting to physical violence, Tod opts for the imaginative violence of art. While the betrayed California dreamers at the premier can only be satisfied with physical violence, Tod can appease his desire to destroy the dreams that betrayed him on his canvas with his powerful ironic imagination. This disparity between the public and the private is the one West alludes to in his letter to Malcolm Cowley, and it defines the modernist vision of The Day of the Locust. Although the novel was virtually ignored when it was first published, it is now generally considered to rank among the best novels ever written about Hollywood. In what seems like a tremendous irony, West’s

Hollywood novel was itself made into a reasonably faithful Hollywood film in 1975 by director John Schlesinger. That someone would make a film with such a dim view of the industry that produced it reflects the growing sense of irony and cynicism that filled both “high” culture and “mass” culture in the waning decades of the 20th century in America. The prevalence of this sensibility may itself be a sign of the enduring influence of West’s novel.

SOURCES Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Light, James F. Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1961. Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———, ed. Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. Strychacz, Thomas. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930’s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. West, Nathanael. Novels and Other Writings. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: Library of America, 1997. Bryan Vescio

DEATH IN THE FAMILY, A JAMES AGEE (1956) Author James AGEE first became well known for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a collaborative work with photographer Walker Evans in which the two documented the lives of southern sharecroppers. But it is only partly because of this association with photography that Agee’s writing style is often described as “photographic.” In his posthumously published masterpiece, A Death in the Family, Agee works his characters through a family tragedy in heart-wrenchingly microscopic detail. Told primarily from the perspective of the child Rufus, the story is the semiautobiographical account of a young family—Jay, Mary, and their two children Rufus and Catherine—dealing with the accidental death of Jay. The extended family provides a rich cast of counterpoints for Jay’s surviving family, and much of the novel’s momentum rides on the conflict between Jay’s rural family and Mary’s Catholic upbring-

DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY, THE 331

ing, as opposed to dwelling on the personal anguish of death. Indeed, much of the emotional content and detail (names, for instance) are introduced elliptically or by implication. For example, Jay’s death occurs “off stage” between the end of the novel’s first section and the beginning of the second, and the phone call notifying Mary of the accident simply tells her that there has been an accident and she should send a male relative. Also, chapters frequently open with characters identified by pronouns with no antecedents as in, “For some time now his mother had seemed different” (102). The effect of this technique demonstrates another sense in which Agee’s writing is photographic: not only does it offer rich physical detail in setting a location, it also seeks to create its impressions with the decontextualized temporality of photography. The photographed subject is perpetually in the present while the photograph itself is instantly an artifact of the past. The skill of a good photographer is to capture the essence of the subject in such a way that it is legible across the suspended temporality of the medium. In the same way, Agee’s subjects’ incidental decisions and observations capture their emotional essence with utter clarity. Furthermore, the materiality of the text brings it to the foreground in a way that reminds the reader that the text is, in a sense, haunted. The novel was published after Agee’s early death in 1955, and editors had to make important decisions about how to include certain unpublished material that seemed thematically congruous, though diacritically separate. The result of their decision is that several sections of the text appear in italics, including the passage entitled “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” which has become Agee’s best-known work of prose. This brief passage, which opens the novel, is narrated in first person, unlike the rest of the work, and though the narrator seems to be a much older Rufus recalling an early memory, there is a dreamlike suspension of certain details, and an eerie sense in which it is the late author speaking from the grave. The novel’s problematic construction and the sense in which the events of the story echo Agee’s own life (the novel is set in Agee’s hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee, and Agee’s father died under similar circumstances) haunt the novel without

undermining its authenticity or ability to communicate directly. Though the novel is assembled by third parties, the sense in which Rufus is the author heightens the clarity with which readers experience an intimate connection with the text and raises the questions of being and remembrance around which the novel is structured. In his analysis of Agee’s writing, Victor A. Kramer compares the final text with Agee’s unfinished manuscript and finds that, though assembling an unfinished manuscript is a difficult task, “several clear misreadings of Agee’s difficult script (or poor proofreading) have resulted in the incorporation of errors which demand correction” (Kramer, 134). Furthermore, in James Agee and the Legend of Himself, Alan Spiegel positions his critical study in the context of misunderstandings of Agee’s life and work. For example, the standard biographical blurb on printings of Death in the Family includes the following “full-blown American gothic” characterization. “James Agee . . . was the most prodigiously talented writer of his generation and one of the most tragic figures of our time. He had three wives and four children. He drank too much. . . . etc.” (quoted in Spiegel, 11). Understanding Agee fully thus requires acknowledging and avoiding a good deal of myopia, ironic for a writer of such clarity.

SOURCES Agee, James. A Death in the Family. New York: McDowell Obelensky, 1956. Kramer, Victor A. Agee and Actuality: Artistic Vision in His Work. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Company, 1991. Lofaro, Michael A., ed. James Agee: Reconsiderations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Spiegel, Alan. James Agee and the Legend of Himself: A Critical Study. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Zach Whalen

DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY, THE JOHN D. MACDONALD (1964) Travis McGee, the hero of John D. MacDONALD’s groundbreaking mystery The Deep Blue Good-by, is a moralizer who waxes on about the wonders of Florida’s coast, and about the nature of the human race. At one particularly bleak point, McGee looks down from an airplane and muses, “The worst thing about having a hundred and eighty million

332 DEEPHAVEN

people is looking down and seeing how much room there is for more” (121). The novel, however, which is the first in a series of 21, does not set out to be a great social tome. Instead, it is a hard-boiled detective novel—one that crosses genres with a main character of great morality and intelligence, in addition to the brute strength necessary to conquer the usual troop of bad guys. In this case, the “bad guy” is Junior Allen, and McGee does make some mistakes, getting beaten up along the way. The inherent evil in a character like Junior Allen gives MacDonald a chance to write one of his mini-rants about human nature, and about society’s current cures for these ills: “Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud, or Jesus. Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast” (85). This tirade, written before the book’s publication in 1964, almost sends a shiver down the back of the contemporary reader. Not many people at that time had such an idea about where American values were headed. MacDonald here demonstrates prescience about American culture that we recognize some 40 years later, a culture that is ever more unwilling to name evil as a distinct and untreatable force, in a world that loves to psychoanalyze everything. The premise of the series is that McGee lives aboard a houseboat called The Busted Flush (in honor of the poker game in which McGee won the vessel), and takes his retirement in chunks rather than waiting for the end of his life. He calls himself a “retrieval expert,” which basically means that he helps women (usually beautiful ones) recover fortunes that they have lost in various ways. As a rule, he takes half, as commission, but in The Deep Blue Good-by, he takes only a little off the top to recover expenses—because he has not been able to recover the entire fortune. This is just one example of McGee’s righteousness, but he has his flaws as well. MacDonald was a successful novelist before he created the Travis McGee series, and MacDonald made several missteps while trying to write the series that his editors asked for. The first character was too serious; the second too jocular. McGee balances a fine line between the two: he hints

at a mysteriously troubled past, but also takes great pleasure in life, and shows an eagerness to visit his friend, the Alabama Tiger, and his continual floating houseboat party. The great precarious balance of seriousness and wit in Travis McGee has been influential in other novelists, as well—current best-selling novelist Carl HIAASEN, who himself straddles the line between mystery writer and moralist, writes an introduction to The Deep Blue Good-by expressing great appreciation of MacDonald and his creation: “McGee, knock-about retriever of lost fortunes, saver of spiraling souls; McGee of the deepwater tan, scarred knuckles, and untender mercies.” He goes on to explain what other MacDonald fans feel—a hope that McGee can still be found puttering about slip F-18, Bahia Mar.

SOURCES French, Warren, ed. John D. MacDonald. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Geherin, David. John D. MacDonald. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982. MacDonald, John D. The Deep Blue Good-by. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1995. Allie D’Augustine

DEEPHAVEN SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1877) Published in 1877, Sarah Orne JEWETT’s first booklength work, Deephaven, is not a novel in the conventional sense. Many of the sketches that make up the work were previously published in The Atlantic Monthly (Gale, 69). Yet, as Jewett biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne notes, it is more than a collection of sketches or short stories. Though the work defies easy characterization, it is classified with her novels (80). Generally considered an example of American regionalism, Deephaven is as much about the fictional Maine port town that gives the book its name as it is about its two protagonists, Bostonians Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis. Deephaven is isolated, located some distance from the railroad, and has been hurt by the loss of the shipbuilding industry. After Kate’s mother inherits a mansion in the town from her aunt, Miss Katherine Brandon, Kate decides to spend the summer there if Helen will be her companion. Helen narrates

DEEPHAVEN 333

the stories, which create a portrait of a way of life that was slipping away as America became more industrialized. She tries to relate “the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town” (37). Among the most notable characters is Mrs. Kew, who runs the lighthouse with her husband. She is a hostess and traveling companion for the young women, who consider her one of their favorite acquaintances. Kate and Helen also spend time with the Widow Jim, a friend of Miss Brandon’s who helped care for her in her old age. The Widow Jim is a window into the social hierarchy of the town, in which Kate’s aunt ranked high. The young women also make friends with the many retired sailors in the town who tell them fantastic stories about their travels and teach them how to fish. Although much of the book is lighthearted, Jewett tells a number of tragic tales as well. On a trip with Mrs. Kew to the circus, Kate and Helen visit the sideshow and meet the giantess. Both young women are embarrassed for the woman, but Mrs. Kew discovers that she is actually an old acquaintance of hers. The giantess’s story could be a cautionary tale about the difficulties a woman faces after her father and husband both die, leaving her penniless, and her son’s family refuses to take her in. She is both a sympathetic figure and considered “absurd” by Helen. The narrator also shifts the focus, and spends a good deal of time lavishing praise on Kate for being polite to the giantess. More tragic is the tale of the poor farming family, the Dockums, whom Kate and Helen meet while on an excursion a few miles from town. Though Jewett is sometimes dismissed as a sentimentalist, Silverthorne argues that stories like that of the Dockums demonstrate her “mastery of naturalistic realism” (78). The farm family is overwhelmed by their own poverty as they attempt to eke out a living on the rocky Maine land. When the girls return to visit the family later, they find themselves at Mr. Dockum’s funeral. They discover that Mrs. Dockum had died earlier, and her husband then drank himself into an early grave. The children are to be split up and sent to live with relatives. Like many of the other stories in the book, the Dockums’ tale seems to be designed to evoke sympathy and

even empathy. Jewett herself said that she wanted Deephaven to help outsiders gain insight into the inner lives of country people, “to see there is deep and true sentiment and loyalty and tenderness and courtesy and patience—where at first sight there is only roughness and coarseness and something to be ridiculed” (quoted in Silverthorne, 79). Paul R. Petrie argues that in Deephaven, Jewett is responding to William Dean Howells’s requirement that literature should ideally have a moral purpose, namely to bridge the divide between different sectors of society torn apart by class and regional differences in increasingly industrialized post–Civil War America. Petrie says Jewett attempts to achieve this moral purpose through the sympathetic attitude of cosmopolitan figures Kate and Helen toward the residents of the town, and Helen’s detailed narration of the intricacies of their lives (Petrie, 99–101). Despite this intention, Jewett seems preoccupied with class divisions in the novel, sometimes reinforcing them. Sally Chauncey, a member of an old, upper-class family who has been driven insane by the loss of her family’s fortune, is among the most sympathetic characters in the book. As the young women visit Miss Chauncey in her deteriorating mansion, Helen notes her similarity to the much-adored Kate, namely that both are “of the same stamp and rank” (130). Sarah Way Sherman argues that Kate and Helen both indulge in the freedom of working-class women, wearing old clothes to go fishing for example, but both are always aware of their ties and loyalty to the aristocratic class (Sherman, 133). In the fall, Kate and Helen leave Deephaven and return to Boston. Helen wonders if they will go back someday. Though she reflects on Deephaven’s beauty, she knows that if they do go back, they will find that all the warehouses will be gone, and “the few old gentlefolks who still linger will be dead then” (141).

SOURCES Gale, Robert. A Sarah Orne Jewett Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Jewett, Sarah Orne. Deephaven. In Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories, edited by Michael Davitt Bell, 1–141. New York: The Library of America, 1994. Petrie, Paul R. “ ‘To Make Them Acquainted with One Another’: Jewett, Howells, and the Dual Aesthetic of Deephaven.” In Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the

334 DEERSLAYER, THE; OR, THE FIRST WARPATH

Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards, 99–120. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Sherman, Sarah Way. Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Silverthorne, Elizabeth. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1993. Jessica Hausmann

DEERSLAYER; OR, THE FIRST WARPATH, THE JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1841) The Deerslayer comes first in the narrative cycle that comprises COOPER’s Leatherstocking Tales, though it was the last of these novels to be composed. Cooper had originally intended to write only three books about his hero Natty Bumppo (The Pioneers, 1823; The LAST OF THE MOHICANS, 1826; The Prairie, 1827), but financial circumstances required Cooper, late in his life, to return to his popular and commercially successful Leatherstocking series. He wrote The Pathfinder in 1840 and The Deerslayer in 1841; Cooper died 10 years later, in early 1851. The timeframe of the novel immediately predates The Last of the Mohicans, and the story “introduces” the characters Natty Bumppo and his companion Chingachgook. Cooper is aware, of course, that Natty needs no introduction to readers after four successful novels. Thus, in The Deerslayer Cooper is shoring up the foundations of the legend he has already created. The Deerslayer, in this respect, seems like a “prequel” to the other novels in the series, giving the reader a lot of background information on Natty Bumppo and how he came acquire his sense of values. The pace of this novel is far more leisurely than The Last of the Mohicans. There is no backdrop of a great war being contested, and his characters have time for long conversations and observations about the beautiful, placid Lake Glimmerglass. That is, Cooper removes as much distracting background setting as possible in order to foreground the portrait of his young hero. In this novel, Cooper establishes Natty’s values as a white man surviving in the wilderness and highlights above all else Natty’s deep sense of intuitive, natural morality and honesty. Though Natty has learned some Christian values from Moravian missionaries to the Indians, he remains outside of civilization,

and claims only those values and practices that to him seem in accord with the traditions of the cultures, both Indian and white, that he encounters. The action of the novel centers on Thomas Hutter and his two daughters, the flirtatious and experienced Judith and the naïve, innocent Hetty, and their transitory existence around the shores of Lake Glimmerglass, in upstate New York. Hutter’s encounters with the Indians of the region require him to keep moving, in a oddly constructed houseboat referred to as “The Ark.” Accompanying Hutter and the girls is Henry March (nicknamed “Hurry Harry”), the moral antithesis of Natty; Harry respects no law except for his own will, whereas Natty recognizes the natural “gifts” of the Indians and has a deep respect for their culture; his strongest value, in some respects, is tolerance. For example, when Natty, a captive of the Indian antagonist of the novel, is given a 24-hour, non-escorted “furlough” to report his circumstance to Judith and Hetty Hutter, there is no doubt that he will honor the conditions of his captivity, and freely return to be executed. In another instance of the novel, Natty refuses to take part in a scalping raid (one of two scalping raids planned by the white Hurry Harry in the novel against unsuspecting Indians—he intends to sell the scalps to the British), because scalping is not a Christian practice, and is alone an Indian “gift” (as Natty refers to the unique practices of different cultures). As in all of the novels of the Leatherstocking series, the narrative follows many captures and escapes of the whites by the Indians. One of these escapes occurs with aid of Chingachgook, whom Natty cherishes as his closest (and really, his only) friend. Chingachgook’s story involves his attempted rescue of his lover Hist-ohHist. This provides the second narrative strain of the novel, and fills an important role for the future: Histoh-Hist will provide Chingachgook with a son, Uncas, the “last Mohican” of the next novel in the series. In The Deerslayer Natty acquires his famous long rifle, “Killdeer,” and is given his most famous sobriquet, Hawkeye, as a result of his first human kill. Cooper gives us the scene in sweeping romantic terms, and the event is indeed significant for the formation of Natty’s character. English novelist and critic D. H. Lawrence has written about Cooper’s creation that “the

DELANY, SAMUEL R. 335

essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. . . . What sort of man is [Natty]? Patient and gentle as he is, he is a slayer,” and the foundations of that legend are created in this single event from The Deerslayer. No longer is Natty a simple slayer of deer; he is now Hawkeye, a slayer of man, which contradicts his noble sense of morality. Natty realizes that shedding human blood brings him into a different relationship with nature, and thus is Natty “born” into his legendary status. Cooper does not allow this realization to pass with long, expository passages on the subject. As with many pairs of Cooper “females,” Judith has a sexual awareness that renders her unfit for Natty’s serious romantic attention, while Hetty is frail, innocent, and too pure to survive in the world of experience without male protection. Natty can never be restricted by a single romantic encounter, of course, since his character represents a preference for the freedom of the wilderness to a social institution like marriage. Like David Gamut in Last of the Mohicans, Hetty is protected by her peculiar behavior (in this case, her feeblemindedness) because of the Indians’ belief that the insane are divinely protected, and like Alice Munro in that same novel, she cannot survive by her wits, as can Judith. Unlike Alice, though, Hetty has no male protector, and thus cannot survive the novel. The end of The Deerslayer describes tensions that will soon escalate into the French and Indian War, and sets up the conditions necessary for the thrill ride of the next novel in the series. However, the significance of The Deerslayer is in Cooper’s creation of his major characters, and his self-aware transition of Natty Bumppo from a mere character into the mythical figure he maintains in the rest of the Leatherstocking series.

SOURCES Kelly, William P. Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking, 1964. Railton, Stephen. Fenimore Cooper: A Study of His Life and Imagination. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Bill Scalia

DELANY, SAMUEL R(AY, JR.) (1942– ) Winner of 10 Nebula awards, 10 Hugo awards, and two Lambda Awards (for gay and lesbian fiction), Samuel Delany is one of the premier writers of science fiction. He is credited with opening up the genre to African Americans, and with expanding the limitations of the genre through radical experimentation with plot, structure, sexual thematics, and linguistic innovation. He is best known for his novel Dahlgren (1975), the critically successful Babel-17, and his Neveryon series. One of the few African Americans to succeed in the genre, Delany has written more than three dozen volumes of fiction and nonfiction and has received popular as well as critical acclaim. Universities have also recognized his intellectual contributions to the field, as evidenced by his long string of appointments to academic institutions across the United States. Samuel Delany was born on April 1, 1942, to Samuel Ray Delany, a funeral home director, and Margaret Boyd Carey Delany, a New York Public Library librarian. After marrying poet Marilyn Hacker in 1961, Delany spent a few months at City College of New York, then dropped out and published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, in 1962 at age 20. The novel uses an ocean voyage similar to the mythical Jason’s, and a poet named Geo leads the modern Argonauts. Delany creates mythical patterns, particularly the circular nature of the quest, to which he returns in Dahlgren and Nova (1968). Dahlgren, the longest of Delany’s science fiction novels, traces the journey of Kid, the somewhat autobiographical protagonist who is dyslexic and bisexual and who travels through a corrupted city of the near future. Nova follows a mixed-race hero, Lorq Von Ray, whose mission, in the face of scarce fuel supplies, is to procure from a nova (an exploding star) the fuel essential to defeating the two other competing groups. The novel demonstrates the uniqueness of societies and the difficulty their respective citizens have in comprehending each other. Babel-17 (1966), winner of both the Hugo and the Nebula awards, features Rydra Wong, an Asian woman recruited to translate the alien coded communications that officials on Earth have intercepted. The reader gains insight into the way language structures and affects reality.

336 DELILLO, DON

Numerous other novels followed, such as Triton (1976), about sexual exploitation in a supposed sexual utopia, and the Neveryon series, “sword-and-sorcerer” short stories and a novel (Neveryona [1983]) that question the impact of language on society. The quest for sexual identity is represented by Gorgik, a slave who rises to power and eradicates the institution of slavery. Delany has also published several pornographic novels, including The Tides of Lust (1973), and nonfiction that examines the nature of language, race, and gender through the lenses of French theorists Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes. Delany and his wife separated after the birth of their daughter in 1967, and he currently lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches at Temple University and participates actively in national and international conferences.

NOVELS Babel-17. New York: Ace Books, 1966. The Ballad of Beta-2. New York: Ace Books, 1965. The Bridge of Lost Desire. New York: Arbor House, 1987. Captives of the Flame. New York: Ace Books, 1963. City of a Thousand Suns. New York: Ace Books, 1965. The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction. New York: Bantam, 1986. Dhalgren. New York: Bantam, 1975. The Einstein Intersection. New York: Ace Books, 1967. Empire Star. New York: Ace Books, 1966. Equinox. New York: Masquerade, 1994. The Fall of the Towers. New York: Ace Books, 1970. Flight from Neveryon. New York: Bantam, 1985. Hogg. Boulder, Colo., and Normal, Colo.: Fiction Collective Two/Black Ice Books, 1995. The Jewels of Aptor. New York: Ace Books, 1962. The Mad Man. New York: Masquerade, 1994. Neveryona; or, The Tale of Signs and Cities. New York: Bantam, 1983. Nova. New York: Doubleday, 1968. Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand. New York: Bantam, 1984. Tales of Neveryon. New York: Bantam, 1979. The Tides of Lust. New York: Lancer Books, 1973. The Towers of Toron. New York: Ace Books, 1964. They Fly at Ciron. Seattle: Incunabula, 1993. Triton. New York: Bantam, 1976. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1996.

SOURCES Barbour, Douglas. Worlds Out of Words: The Science Fiction Novels of Samuel R. Delany. Somerset, England: Bran’s Head Books, 1979. Bleiler, E. F., ed. Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. New York: Scribner, 1982. Collings, Michael R., Samuel R. Delany, and John Wilkins: Artificial Languages, Science and Science Fiction. Selected Essays from the 4th International Conference on the Fantastic in Arts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Delany, Samuel. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999. Hassler, Donald M. The Urban Pastoral and Labored Ease of Samuel R. Delany. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Johnson, Charles. “A Dialogue: Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ on Science Fiction,” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 22, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 27–35. Malekin, Peter. The Self, the Referent, and the Real in Science Fiction and the Fantastic: Lem, Pynchon, Kubin, and Delany. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory, eds. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1984. Sallis, James. Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delaney. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Slusser, George Edgar. The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of Semi-Precious Words. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1977. Weedman, Jane Branham. Samuel R. Delany. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1982.

OTHER Samuel R. Delany Information. Available online. URL: http://www.pcc.com/~jay/delany/. Accessed September 1, 2005. Samuel Ray Delany. Available online. URL: http://hubcap. clemson.edu/~sparks/sff/delany.html. Accessed September 1, 2005.

DELILLO, DON (1936– ) Don DeLillo, along with John BARTH, Donald BARTHELME, Thomas PYNCHON, and William GADDIS, has helped define postmodernism with his critically acclaimed experimental

DELILLO, DON 337

novels. Although his earlier novels were appreciated more by critics than by general readers, his more recent work, particularly WHITE NOISE (1985), LIBRA (1988), MAO II (1991), and UNDERWORLD (1997) has gained more popularity. He is frequently praised for his portrait of contemporary society, one with misleading surfaces and dark undertones. The darkness seems to suggest inhuman technology, materialism, loneliness, dislocation, and disjunction. DeLillo’s distinguished career has earned him the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a National Book Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. Don DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrants. He has disclosed few details about his private life; he was, however, educated at Fordham University and graduated in 1958. He has remarked that the single biggest influence in his life was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In an interview with Vince Passaro, DeLillo said he did not think he would have written the darkness into his novels had the world remained as it was before that cataclysmic event. His first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. It is an “ON THE ROAD” sort of novel in which David Bell, a 28-year-old television network executive, leaves his troubled marriage and sets out for the West Coast on an identity quest. DeLillo’s preoccupation in this novel with Americans as media creations, is reminiscent of Walker PERCY’s novels The MOVIEGOER and LANCELOT. End Zone (1972), which uses football as a metaphor for nuclear war, employs the Logos College football team of west Texas—and its narrator-protagonist Gary Harkness— to satirize what DeLillo sees as the American obsession with sports and war. This second novel, in its self-conscious concern with the relation of language to identity and reality, has a distinctly postmodern aura. In DeLillo’s third novel, Great Jones Street (1973), his alienated narrator-protagonist, Bucky Wunderlick, has exiled himself from the glitzy life of the rock star, moving from Houston to the Bowery in New York City, but becomes involved in a government-sponsored cartel that silences dissidents. He learns that complete seclusion is impossible, individual power is illusory, and the world is ruled by a corporation called Transparanoia.

Ratner’s Star (1976) features Billy Twillig, a 14-yearold mathematical genius who is recruited to work in outer space on an obscure math concept called zorgs. He is later moved to a project called Zlogicon that attempts to create an intergalactic language devoid of ambiguity or nuance. Terrorism is the subject of Players (1977), in which an assassination disrupts and irrevocably changes the lives of yuppie New York couple Pammy and Lyle Wynant, propelling each into sexual encounters that prove lonely, isolated, and empty, as is Lyle’s new role as FBI double agent. Running Dog (1978) features Running Dog magazine journalist Moll Robbins, and Glen Selvey, a pornography buyer-turned-double agent. The characters become involved in the retrieval of a bogus pornographic film of Adolf Hitler in his bunker. DeLillo followed with The Names (1982), in which Americans, their culture, and the significance of language are illuminated on the international stage. The novel features narrator-protagonist James Axton, an analyst for an American company that insures multinational corporations and has ties to the CIA; James becomes part of the search for The Names, a ritualistic cult that commits murders in their quest for peace and safety. White Noise is often called DeLillo’s breakthrough novel: winner of an American Book Award, it is a minimalist and witty look at late-20th-century Americans and their reliance on medication, therapy, and mediation as antidotes to the increasing weakness of the postmodern self. Narrated by Jack Gladney, chair of the department of Hitler studies at a small liberal arts college, the novel transcends the campus novel genre to become a commentary on the American fear of dying and the lengths to which people will go—drug addiction, adultery—to eliminate this fear. Libra, the best-selling novel considered by many critics to be DeLillo’s most accomplished work, uses both invented and historical personae in its narration of events leading to President Kennedy’s assassination. DeLillo combines an account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life with a conspiracy by former CIA operatives and an attempt by Nicholas Branch to write the history of the assassination, an event that continues to evoke half-truths and confusion. Mao II, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, features Bill Gray, who, while trying to write his third novel, becomes enmeshed in a situation in which

338 DELIVERANCE

a fellow writer has been taken hostage by Middle Eastern terrorists. Peopling the novel are celebrities from artist Andy Warhol to Chinese chairman Mao. It depicts an America controlled by blurred media images and decreased individuality. Underworld, another best-seller, uses Nick Shay, a professional garbage collector accused of murder, as a way to confront some of the 20th century’s most critical moments, from the cold war and the threat of nuclear destruction to 1951, the year the Giants won the World Series. DeLillo’s most recent novels are The Body Artist: A Novel (2001) and Cosmopolitis (2003). Although primarily a novelist, DeLillo has written plays, essays, and short stories. He has been married to Barbara Bennet, a former banker, now a landscape designer, since 1975.

NOVELS Americana. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. The Body Artist: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2001. Cosmopolitis. New York: Scribner, 2003. End Zone. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Great Jones Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Libra. New York and London: Viking, 1988. Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991. The Names. New York: Knopf, 1982. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977. Ratner’s Star. New York: Knopf, 1976. Running Dog. New York: Knopf, 1978. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997. White Noise. New York: Viking, 1985.

SOURCES Civello, Paul. American Literary Naturalism and Its TwentiethCentury Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Delillo, Don, and Mark Osteen, eds. White Noise: Text and Criticism. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne, 1993. LeClair, Thomas. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Lentricchia, Frank, ed. Introducing Don DeLillo. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1991. Hantke, Steffen. Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Passaro, Vince. “Dangerous Don DeLillo,” New York Times Magazine, 19 May 1991, pp. 34, 36, 38, 76, 77. Ruppersburg, Hugh M., and Tim Engles, eds. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. Boston: G. K. Hall, 2000.

OTHER Don DeLillo/DeLillo. Available online. URL:http://www. perival.com/delillo/delillo.html. Accessed September 2, 2005.

DELIVERANCE JAMES DICKEY (1970) For more than 30 years, James DICKEY’s first novel, Deliverance, has reverberated throughout American culture in general and southern literature in particular. Revolving around a single shocking scene of male sodomy and rape, the novel has presented a source of general unease to readers and critics alike. Moreover, the novel’s central question—what really is delivered from what—is only implicitly answered. In many ways, the novel is a moral quagmire, with readers left feeling ambivalent about a human ingression into a wilderness both physical and metaphysical. The plot of Deliverance is deceptively straightforward: four friends, of varying physical strength and integrity, encounter humanity at its most savage, amoral, and primitive in the persons of two mountain men. Bobby, the weakest and most feminine of the four friends, is anally raped; Ed only escapes similar abuse when Lewis, the strongest and most adamantly prepared of the four, coolly shoots—and kills—one of the attackers with an arrow. Told from Ed’s point of view, the rest of the novel chronicles the friends’ harrowing journey down an increasingly dangerous river and Ed’s murder of a man he assumes to be the remaining rapist. The book interlaces two prevailing themes, forcing its characters to, as Lewis states, believe in survival at all costs and to question whether or not civilized behavior and laws are leisures permitted only by man’s mastery and suppression of the natural world and his own inner nature. Ed, especially, must evaluate his own character and the actions that he will commit in order to survive. From the very beginning of the book, Dickey invites his readers to question the meaning of the title, and initially it appears that the wild, as-yet-untamed river and backwoods of North Georgia offer the four main

DELIVERANCE 339

characters, Lewis, Ed, Drew, and Bobby, a brief liberation from the civilized monotony of their everyday lives. Much later, though, Ed is forced to seek deliverance from a much more literal enemy, a man he believes has shot and killed Drew and is planning to kill the other three when they resume their journey down the river in the morning. As Lewis did, Ed finally kills his enemy with an arrow, a weapon starkly primitive in contrast to the attacker’s gun. The wilderness, itself a deliverance from the safely civilized world, then, becomes a lesson in survival, in which true deliverance is only available through an inner determination to survive. James Dickey acknowledged Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces as an inspiration for Deliverance. Drawing upon a 1949 review essay by Stanley Edgar Hyman that discussed both Campbell’s book and Arnold Van Gennep’s Les Rites de Passage (Eisiminger, 53), Dickey, in Deliverance, reveals a strong interest in the relationship between the natural world and the creation of the mythic hero. Although Ronald Schmitt argues that Deliverance suggests that the epic journey essential to the mythic hero’s development is no longer relevant to the modern world, Dickey emphasizes both the natural world and the journey down the river as essential to Ed’s growing self-knowledge. Angelin Brewer, unlike Schmitt, sees Ed as having fulfilled the steps requisite for a mythic hero, his journey translating his ordinary identity into that of a “heroic individual” (Brewer, 14). Indeed, Ed’s journey changes him, forcing him to come to terms with his own capacity for killing and willingness to abandon civilized and legal ways of interaction. Ed is easily swayed by Lewis’s determination to hide the body of the rapist he killed with an arrow— to destroy the evidence of his “crime” rather than admit his actions and possibly face a trial. Significantly, the one character who steadfastly advocated law, order, and civilized behavior—Drew—dies, though neither the reader nor Ed can conclusively state whether the river or a bullet killed him. In order to survive, Ed exchanges his civilized identity for one almost animalistic and very primal, at one point tracking his enemy on his hands and knees, drawn on

by a blood trail. Yet both Ed and Lewis—though not Bobby—easily and contentedly return to their mundane lives. The novel technically ends many years later, with the last few pages jumping into a future in which Ed and his wife Martha have a cottage on a lake just beginning to be developed. Ed knows that the river he traveled—the river that offered him deliverance from his once-boring life and escape back into that life—has been dammed and tamed into a lake. That river, then, and his life-changing experiences, are only available to him in his mind, as the seminal events of his life. Ed’s journey, which taught him the true value of civilization and underscored humanity’s atavistic potential, is one that every generation must repeat across a perpetually changing terrain. Ed is able to return to his normal life and see it anew—as a good life—because he now fully understands the alternative; though not a truly heroic man, he is, as he observes about Lewis, “a human being, and a good one.” James Dickey firmly believed that his identity as a southerner lent a crucial component to his writing (Spears, 110) and a truly southern preoccupation with nature and natural forces reoccurs throughout his poetry and fiction. It is this dependence upon nature as both a rejuvenating and a challenging force that characterizes Deliverance. Man is, no matter how ostensibly civilized, ultimately only a part of a perpetual struggle to survive.

SOURCES Baughman, Ronald. Understanding James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Butterworth, Keen. “The Savage Mind: James Dickey’s Deliverance,” The Southern Literary Journal 28, no. 2 (1996): 69–78. Dickey, James. Deliverance. New York: Delta, 1994. Eisiminger, Sterling. “James Dickey’s Deliverance: A Source Note,” American Notes and Queries 19 (November/December 1980): 53–54. Schmitt, Ronald. “Transformations of the Hero in James Dickey’s Deliverance,” James Dickey Newsletter 8, no. 1. (1991): 9–16. Spears, Monroe K. “James Dickey as a Southern Visionary,” Virginia Quarterly Review 63, no. 1 (1987): 110–123. Winter Elliott

340 DELL, FLOYD

DELL, FLOYD (1887–1969)

A novelist, journalist, playwright and editor, Floyd Dell was a prominent writer associated with the Chicago Renaissance, the artistic elites of the Jazz Age Greenwich Village, and the Works Project Administration (WPA) in Washington, D.C. Dell joined the Socialist Party when he was 16 years old, and wrote his first and most admired novel, Moon-Calf, in 1920. This novel spoke for his generation much as did F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY; indeed, Dell is sometimes referred to as the “Scott Fitzgerald of Illinois.” Unlike Fitzgerald, however, Dell’s concern was with the lives of ordinary working people. He was also an ardent supporter of women’s causes and wrote both nonfiction and fiction about prominent strong women and about the right of individuals to control their own sexuality. Floyd Dell was born on June 28, 1887, in Barry, Illinois, to Anthony Dell, a butcher, and Kate Crone Dell, a schoolteacher. Reared in Illinois and Iowa, Dell did not complete high school; he was married to Margery Currey, a teacher, from 1909 until their divorce in 1916; his second marriage, in 1919, was to Berta Marie Gage. After a brief career in journalism in the Midwest, where he became a respected editor and book reviewer with the Chicago Evening Post’s Friday Literary Review, Dell moved to New York City (where he formed a close relationship with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay) and became a writer for the socialist magazine the Masses until its collapse in 1917. He then became a writer for the Liberator. In 1920 Moon-Calf was published to critical acclaim. Its protagonist, Felix Fay, is an idealistic midwesterner who must learn to modify his unreachable goals to fit within the narrower parameters of real life. Felix is clearly based in Dell’s own experiences with poverty, his desire to improve his life, and his efforts to challenge economic and marital barriers. According to scholar John E. Hart, Moon-Calf, “with its proclamation of rebellious assertion and young idealism that affirms, rather than denies,” has earned “a place as a minor classic” (Hart, 171). Dell’s other novels include The Briary-Bush (1921), the sequel to Moon-Calf, and several that emphasize the potential of women. This Mad Ideal (1925) features a strong young hero named Judith Valentine who some critics believe is the female Felix Fay. He also wrote

Homecoming: An Autobiography, in 1933. Floyd Dell died on July 23, 1969. A number of his papers and letters are housed at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

NOVELS The Briary-Bush. New York: Knopf, 1921. Diana Stair. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. The Golden Spike. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. Janet March. New York: Knopf, 1923; rev. ed. New York: Doran, 1927. Looking at Life. New York: Knopf, 1924. Love in Greenwich Village. New York: Doran, 1926. Love Without Money. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931. Moon-Calf. New York: Knopf, 1920. An Old Man’s Folly. New York: Doran, 1926. Runaway. New York: Doran, 1925. Souvenir. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929. Sweet-and-Twenty. Cincinnati, Ohio: Stewart Kidd, 1921. This Mad Ideal. New York: Knopf, 1925. An Unmarried Father. New York: Doran, 1927. Were You Ever a Child?. New York: Knopf, 1929. Women as World-Builders. Chicago: Forbes, 1913.

SOURCES Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, 1–148. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Butler, Francelia, ed. “Parnassus in the 1920’s: Floyd Dell Contemplates His Own Period,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 12 (1967): 131–148. Churchill, Allen. The Improper Bohemians, a Recreation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday. New York: Dutton, 1959. Clayton, Douglas. Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel. Chicago: I.R. Dee, 1994. Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Living, 443–444, 545–564. New York: Harper, 1948. ———. Love and Revolution, My Journey Through an Epoch. New York: Random House, 1964. Fishbein, Leslie. “Floyd Dell: The Impact of Freud and Marx on a Radical Mind,” Psychoanalytic Review 63 (1976): 267–280. Hahn, Emily. Romantic Rebels, an Informal History of Bohemianism in America, 159–233. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Hart, John E. Floyd Dell. Boston: Twayne, 1971. Hatcher, Harlan. Creating the Modern American Novel, 73–82. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Holtz, William. “Willa Cather and Floyd Dell.” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 38, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 34–36.

DELTA WEDDING 341

Kramer, Dale. Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest 1900–1930. New York: Appleton-Century, 1966. Noe, Marcia. “A Romantic and Miraculous City Shapes Three Midwestern Writers,” Western Illinois Regional Studies 1 (1978): 176–198. Roba, William H. “Floyd Dell in Iowa.” Books at Iowa 44 (April 1986): 27–41. Sautter, R. Craig, ed. Floyd Dell: Essays from the Friday Literary Review, 1901–1913. Highland Park, Ill.: December Press, 1995. ———. “Remembering Floyd Dell,” Midwestern Miscellany 13 (1985): 33–42.

DELTA WEDDING EUDORA WELTY (1949) As the title implies, Delta Wedding records the wedding preparations of a Mississippi plantation family. In this early novel, we see Eudora WELTY’s trademark fascination with family, place, and the conflict between the individual and the community. Welty said that she chose to set this novel in 1923 because nothing remarkable, such as war, depression, or flood, had happened then. Perhaps she also attempted to capture a time just before industrialization and racial tension changed the South forever. Her delta is an idyllic setting, where the land shimmers “like the wing of a lighted dragonfly.” The family name, Fairchild, suggests privilege, happiness, and innocence, and the plantation name, Shellmound, suggests protection and isolation. Though all seems nearly perfect on the surface, Welty, through puzzling details, insinuates a lurking menace at Shellmound. Many characters struggle against their positions within the tight-knit Fairchild family, which consists of Battle and Ellen Fairchild, their eight children, and an assortment of aunts, uncles, and cousins. The third-person point of view shifts from character to character, capturing their reactions to the prewedding commotion and to their relatives. The novel’s focus, however, is not these preparations, or even the wedding itself, but the introspections of individuals. The character through whom readers first meet the Fairchilds is nine-year-old cousin Laura McRaven, who arrives for the wedding on the Yellow Dog, a “mixed train.” An emblem of integration that almost destroys the idyllic family life before the novel begins, the train foreshadows a distant conflict for the whole delta sim-

ilar to the ones experienced individually by Laura and other family members. Through a story that the children love to repeat, Laura learns that before her arrival the Dog had almost run over her cousin Maureen, whose foot had gotten stuck in the track, and that Uncle George’s heroic attempts to save this slow-witted niece caused a rift between himself and his wife, Aunt Robbie. Through this “mixed” train, carrying both black and white passengers, Welty intimates that the antebellum social structure on the plantation, with paternalistic landed gentry, an overseer, and subservient black laborers, is nearing its demise. The name Yellow Dog is particularly resonant given that the word yellow refers to a person of mixed racial heritage. This mixed train’s intrusion on the delta, however gradual, threatens the white community’s stability. George plays the role of the chivalrous protector against this unstoppable emblem of progress and the future, but his niece holds open her arms to embrace the invader. The whole clan reels after this encounter with the train, and the characters must renegotiate their positions within a changing world. At the calm center of this turmoil is Ellen Fairchild, whose thoughts reveal that she feels out of place in the delta, but she nevertheless holds the other family members together, at least for the time being. Robbie and George are the most deeply affected by the near-tragedy on the train tracks. Coming from a poor white family, Robbie has never felt that the Fairchilds accepted her. Her husband’s risking his life to save Maureen prompts Robbie’s crisis: “George Fairchild, you didn’t do this for me!” she says after his brush with death (61). Rather than accept that she is now part of George’s family, she interprets his action as his choice of his family over her. Longing to make him regret the choice and court her again, Robbie leaves George to hide in the town store where she had clerked before she married him. George, the family favorite, seems a lost soul without his wife. He mopes about the house and sleeps with a drifter girl who mysteriously appears and disappears on the plantation. Welty relays such unexpected details without comment, unsettling the reader and suggesting further, unacknowledged, sin. Finally planning to go to Shellmound to confront her husband, Robbie, not George,

342 DEMILLE, NELSON

must go through a purifying fire, walking through fields white with glare under the noonday summer sun. When Robbie finally reaches Shellmound she reunites with George and his family on his terms. The incident with the Yellow Dog also affects Dabney, whose wedding forms the central event of the novel. After George saves Maureen, Dabney walks up the tracks and becomes engaged to Troy, the overseer. But Dabney’s feelings about Troy and about her own identity are ambivalent. Riding to her maiden aunts’ house for an obligatory prewedding visit, she sees her future husband riding a dark horse far ahead with his gun held up against the sky. This romantic and sexually charged vision of her fiancé prompts Dabney’s confused thoughts about the step she is about to take: “Troy Flavin was the overseer. The Fairchilds would die, everybody said, if this happened. But now everybody seemed to be just too busy to die or not” (31). That no one does die or even strenuously object to her fiancé is a thought 17-year-old Dabney returns to again and again, as if she hopes her family will stop her. For Laura, the recent death of her mother and the unfamiliar surroundings prompt conflicting desires to maintain her separateness and to become one of the Fairchilds. Yet when she is finally invited to live with her aunt and uncle at Shellmound, Laura decides instead to return to her father in the city. At the novel’s close, Laura stretches out her arms “to the radiant night” instead of to the family, a gesture that mirrors Maureen’s attempt to embrace the Yellow Dog, symbol of change and destruction, as it bears down upon her. As the white child Laura embraces the black night, she herself can be read as a symbol of integration and change. Despite this image of integration at the end, the African-American characters in Delta Wedding appear as symbols instead of as fully developed personalities. The interaction between black and white is explored only from the white perspective. Partly because of such characterizations, some critics have faulted Welty for not commenting more critically on southern race relations in her writing. Nonetheless, the novel includes significant African-American characters. Pinchy, for example, like many of the white characters, is in the midst of an internal struggle, as she tries to “come

through,” or to make a religious conversion. Her spiritual transformation parallels the preparations for Dabney’s wedding, and Pinchy succeeds in “coming through” on the eve of the ceremony. Although Welty never elaborates on Pinchy’s internal struggle, not even to define the phrase “coming through,” Pinchy interacts with several of the white characters. Just as Welty reveals complex thoughts behind the Fairchilds’ gay exteriors and danger beneath the beautiful surface, she also suggests a rich alternate narrative playing simultaneously behind the scenes of a white wedding.

SOURCES Hardy, John Edward. “Delta Wedding as Region and Symbol.” In Eudora Welty, edited by Harold Bloom, 29–43. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Kieft, Ruth M. Vande. Eudora Welty. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Welty, Eudora. Delta Wedding. 1945. Reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979. Betina Entzminger

DEMILLE, (RICHARD) NELSON (1943– ) With more than 30 million books in print, Nelson DeMille is an immensely popular novelist who creates authentic and intriguing characters and saturates his detective and mystery fiction with action and romance. As a stylist, DeMille brings both elegance and wit to these genres. Early in his career, he wrote a series of police novels set in the seamier neighborhoods of New York City. These novels, starring police sergeant Joe Ryker, were reissued in the early 1990s. For more than two decades DeMille’s thrillers have been translated into at least 20 languages; they take place, as we would expect, in settings as varied as Vietnam, Babylon, Russia, Long Island, Georgia, and Ohio. Nelson DeMille was born on August 23, 1943, in New York City, to Huron DeMille, a builder, and Antonia Panzera DeMille. His education at Hofstra University was interrupted in 1966 by the Vietnam War, in which DeMille, a first lieutenant, served as an infantry platoon leader with the First Cavalry Division. His decorations include a Bronze Star and a Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He returned to college in 1969 and completed his bachelor’s degree at Hofstra in 1970. He was married to

DEMILLE, NELSON 343

Ellen Wasserman from 1971 to 1987, and he married Ginney Sindel in 1988. During the first half of the 1970s, while working full time as an insurance investigator, DeMille published six New York City police novels, paperback originals: The Sniper, The Hammer of God, and The Agent of Death, were published in 1974. Three of these novels feature Joe Keller: The Smack Man, The Death Squad, and The Night of the Phoenix, published in 1975. These novels are populated by crazed Vietnam veterans, crazed clerics, drug dealers, torturers, and other predators who were supposedly endangering the lives of New York City citizens. In the aftermath of the first Arab highjacking at Entebbe in 1972, DeMille wrote By the Rivers of Babylon (1978), his first “big book”; it became a Book-ofthe-Month Club selection. He followed it with Cathedral (1981), about the complex reasons behind the IRA’s seizure of hostages at New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. In The Talbot Odyssey (1984), the CIA has been penetrated at the highest levels, and no one is above suspicion. Word of Honor (1985) contrasts the current court-martial of Ben Tyson, a former lieutenant in Vietnam, with flashbacks to the massacre of Vietnamese villagers. Set in Russia, The Charm School (1989) refers to a KGB training camp that teaches Soviet agents to pass as Americans. The Gold Coast (1990) features John Sutter, a WASP lawyer who narrates the story of Frank Bellarosa, his next-door neighbor and high-ranking mafioso who hires Sutter for his legal expertise; the contrast between the two men demonstrates DeMille’s facility with speech patterns; it raises the question of the unreliable narrator who reveals more than he knows. In the 1990s, DeMille, who continued to vary his settings and plots, appeared often on the New York Times best-seller lists. The General’s Daughter (1992), set on a Georgia army base and introducing Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner, reveals corruption at the highest military levels; the general’s daughter becomes both a victim of rape and of her father’s ambition. Spencerville (1994) depicts a small-town Ohio love triangle involving a sadistic and powerful police chief, his abused wife, and her high school boyfriend, himself a victim of the traumas of the Vietnam War in which he served.

Plum Island (1997) features NYPD detective John Corey. While convalescing from a wound in Southold, a town in rural Long Island, he investigates the murder of a young couple, both scientists, who worked on nearby Plum Island. Corey discovers that they were involved in germ warfare research. Corey returns in The Lion’s Game (2000), a thriller written after the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center bombing. The novel opens with Corey and the fictional Anti-Terrorist Task Force waiting for a defecting Libyan terrorist whose name means “The Lion.” The Lion’s Game was not only a best-seller, but was repeatedly referred to after the September 11, 2001, attacks as an example of DeMille’s prescient imagination and as an illustration of the “truth is stranger than fiction” phenomenom. Interviewer Linda Richardson points out, however, that “there is a high degree of humor in The Lion’s Game” that contrasts with the novel’s tense and somber mood. DeMille agrees, adding that much of the humor happens when KGB-trained Asad Khalil comes face to face with real Americans (Richards). In DeMille’s most recent novel, Up Country (2002), Chief Warrant Officer Paul Brenner, Vietnam veteran, returns to Vietnam to investigate a murder that occurred over 30 years ago. DeMille feels fortunate to be part of New York’s “literary world.” “Not that we all sit around the Algonquin Hotel sipping sherry, but there is a literary world there” (Richards). The General’s Daughter was made into a 1999 Paramount Pictures film directed by Simon West, starring John Travolta. In 2003 Word of Honor, adapted from DeMille’s novel, was aired on TNT. He and his wife live in Garden City, New York, where he will write at least two more novels; a distinct possibility exists that either John Corey or Paul Brenner or both will make return appearances.

NOVELS By the Rivers of Babylon. San Diego, Calif: Harcourt, 1978. Cathedral. New York: Delacorte, 1981. The Charm School. New York: Warner Books, 1989. The General’s Daughter. New York: Warner Books, 1992. The Gold Coast. New York: Warner Books, 1990. Hitler’s Children (Kurt Ladner, pseud.). Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1976. The Lion’s Game. New York: Warner Books, 2000.

344 DEMOCRACY: AN AMERICAN NOVEL

Mayday (with Thomas H. Block). New York: Richard Marek, 1979. Plum Island. New York: Warner Books, 1997. The Quest. Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1975. Spencerville. New York: Warner Books, 1994. The Talbot Odyssey. New York: Delacorte, 1984. Up Country. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Word of Honor. New York: Warner Books, 1985.

POLICE NOVELS The Agent of Death. Norwalk, Conn.: Leisure Books, 1974. The Cannibal. Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1975. Death Squad. Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1975. The Hammer of God. Norwalk, Conn.: Leisure Books, 1974. Night of the Phoenix. Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1975. The Smack Man. Staten Island, N.Y.: Manor Publishing, 1975. The Sniper. Norwalk, Conn.: Leisure Books, 1974.

OTHER Cryer, Dan. “Nelson DeMille.” Available online. URL: http://www.newsday.com/extras/lihistory/specgrow/nelson. htm. Accessed September 1, 2005. Interview: Nelson DeMille. Available online. URL: http:// www.twobookmark.com/authors/16/313/interview9714. html. Accessed September 1, 2005. Nelson DeMille Official Website. Available online. URL: http:// www.nelsondemille.net/. Accessed September 1, 2005. DeMille, Nelson. (March 2000) Interview by Linda Richards. January Magazine. Available online. URL: http://www. januarymagazine.com/profiles/demille.html. Accessed September 1, 2005.

DEMOCRACY: AN AMERICAN NOVEL HENRY ADAMS (1880) In 1996 Primary Colors, a roman à clef about President Clinton’s campaign from someone close enough to observe its inner workings, was published anonymously. The book was widely read and created a cottage industry dedicated to guessing the author’s name. Eventually, reporter Joe Klein admitted he was the author. However, this was not the first time that happened. In 1880, Democracy, a roman à clef about President Grant’s administration by someone who knew its inner secrets, was also published anonymously. The book was widely read, but the author’s name, Henry ADAMS, was not revealed until 1909 (1217). The Washington

National Opera produced Democracy: An American Comedy, based on Democracy and Adams’s second novel, Esther, in 2005, capitalizing on their humor and timelessness. Henry Adams’s lineage gave him unique access to officials in the highest levels of government. His great grandfather, John Adams, and his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, both served as president. His father served as a Massachusetts congressman for five years and even ran for vice president. In The Education of Henry Adams, Adams explains he “knew, more or less, all the men in any way prominent at Washington, or knew all about them” (988). Adams, however, felt more comfortable working as a historian and writing about history, economics, and, occasionally, novels than becoming a politician himself. Publishing his novel anonymously was less out of fear for its consequences than a desire to stay out of the limelight. Democracy follows Mrs. Lightfoot Lee (Madeleine), a 30-year-old widow, who decides to winter, along with her sister Sybil, in Washington, D.C., rather than return to New York City as she normally does. Bored by discussing philosophy with the “sleepy” transcendentalists, restless and discontent, Madeleine wants to know America’s democracy from the inside out: It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. (7) However, in contrast to these noble aims, the narrator reveals another of Madeleine’s reasons: “[w]hat she wanted, was POWER” (8). She listens to senators speak, especially the “Peonia Giant” senator Silas P. Ratcliffe; “[t]o her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went

DESSA ROSE 345

again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it” (12). She moves on, exploring Washington’s social life. Mrs. Lee becomes enamored with Ratcliffe. A man with enormous ambitions, he freely admits to her that he altered the outcome of the presidential election by stuffing ballot boxes so his candidate would win. It is partially through her influence that Senator Ratcliffe becomes a “respectable member of society whom a man who had never been in prison or in politics might safely acknowledge as a friend” (153). What Madeleine eventually learns about democracy and power disheartens her. She sees the president and first lady in a receiving line behave as if they were robots; “they stood stiff and awkward by the door, both their faces stripped of every sign of intelligence. . . . here they stood, automata, representatives of the society which streamed past them” (44). Lord Skye, the minister from England adds, “ ‘Your national mind,’ said he, ‘has no eyelids. It requires a broad glare and a beaten road. It prefers shadows which you can cut out with a knife’ ” (64). The narrator explains why an American senator may be suspicious of a British minister, who may not understand that democracy “is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should” (17). Senator Ratcliffe often argues with Lord Skye, partially because of his jealousy of Madeleine’s platonic interest in Skye. At one point he threatens to send him “home in an American frigate” (61). Ratcliffe also uses his political powers to persuade Madeleine to marry him. He seduces her with power, not love. In spite of her new perspective, Madeleine feels “[u]nderneath the scum floating on the surface of politics . . . there was a sort of healthy ocean current of honest purpose, which swept the scum before it, and kept the mass pure” (98). From her new vantage point Madeleine could see “how the great machine floundered about, bespattering with mud even her own pure garments” (98). Even though Ratcliffe kicks up some of the mud, Madeleine considers marrying him. The narrator observes, “ingenious authors . . . have decided that any

woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her ‘higher nature’ is properly appealed to” (143). Based on evidence delivered by her sister, Madeleine decides against marrying Ratcliffe. Madeleine sees irony in her closing remark in the text, that “the bitterest part of all this horrid story is that nine out of ten of our countrymen would say I had made a mistake” (184). Important changes in a person’s life, such as marriage, should not be voted on democratically. Henry Adams based much of Madeleine Lee’s personality and drive on himself. He documents his own drive toward “first principles” (112) and the ultimate source of power in The Education of Henry Adams. There, he moves further away from transcendentalism toward naturalism. Adams asserts Americans cannot be changed from being one of two types, either “in the mould of Lincoln, somewhat sad, sometimes pathetic, once tragic; or like Grant, inarticulate, uncertain, distrustful of himself, still more distrustful of others, and awed by money” (991); yet he saw people who tried; “Congress was full of such men . . . in the Executive, Grant . . . political specimens—pathetic in their helplessness to do anything with power when it came to them” (991–992). Democracy’s subtitle, “An American Novel,” is therefore ironic. The book argues America’s government is as flawed as any other government in the world and, not, as it believes itself to be, “novel” at all.

SOURCE Adams, Henry. Henry Adams: Novels, Mont Saint Michel, The Education. Edited by Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels. New York: Library of America, 1983. James M. Wilson

DESSA ROSE SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS (1986) In the author’s note to Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne WILLIAMS writes that her novel is based on two historical incidents involving women: a pregnant black woman who helped lead a slave uprising in 1829 in Kentucky whose execution was delayed until after the birth of her baby, and a white woman who was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves on her plantation in North Carolina in 1830. Dessa Rose is

346 DESSA ROSE

based on the fictional premise of what could have happened had these two women met. Written in the genre of the neo-slave narrative, a genre comprising contemporary narratives that reimagine slavery, such as Ishmael REED’s Flight to Canada, Charles JOHNSON’s Middle Passage, Toni MORRISON’s BELOVED, Ernest GAINES’s The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN and others, Williams’s novel begins with the question of who has the right to tell a slave’s story. Williams introduces a white character, Adam Nehemiah, the author of “The Master’s Complete Guide to Dealing with Slaves and Other Dependents,” who interviews Dessa in prison for a book he is writing on slave uprisings. In the first section of the novel, when Dessa tells her story to Nehemiah, it becomes evident that the white writer is unable to grasp the full human import of Dessa’s life and experience. Blinded by his own aspirations to become an important southern author servicing the interests of the slaveholding class, he cannot see Dessa as more than a “darky” who might provide important clues leading toward the capture of the escaped slaves and the prevention of future slave rebellions. Dessa, however, increasingly realizes the power of her narrative to influence Nehemiah, and by dropping appropriate clues she sends him on a hunt for a maroon settlement, during which time she manages to escape from prison. By displaying the ironic gap between Dessa’s lived experience and Nehemiah’s misrepresentation of it, Williams critiques the power of mainstream narratives to reconstruct and thereby misconstrue the slave’s story. Ashraf Rushdy argues that by showing “how a journalist ‘reconstructs’ the authentic voice of a slave rebel,” Williams proposes a critique of William STYRON’s The CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, a book she claims “travestied the as-told-to memoir of slave revolt leader Nat Turner.” Additionally, by showing how Dessa becomes increasingly aware of her ability to communicate her own interests to both Nehemiah and the slave community, Williams celebrates the power of the oral tradition over the hegemonic written text. Dessa’s subaltern voice finds life-saving alternative ways of communicating, including the African-American traditions of signifying, call and response, songs and spirituals, all of which Dessa uses to communicate successfully

with members of the African-American community who help rescue Dessa and her unborn baby. As in the classical slave narrative, Williams traces Dessa’s journey from property to personhood, a journey complicated by the fact that Dessa is a woman whose self-definition, “much like Harriet Jacobs’ in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” is complicated by pregnancy and maternity. After Dessa escapes from prison and gives birth to her baby on the run, she is brought to the remote plantation of Mistress Ruth Elizabeth Sutton, “Miz Rufel,” who is known to provide refuge for runaway slaves. Like Nehemiah, Rufel is curious about Dessa’s story, but unlike him, she recognizes and eventually accepts the challenges of Dessa’s narrative to her own view of the world. This challenge includes correcting her misconceptions about Dessa’s experiences as well as recognizing and reexamining her own role as a white plantation mistress in the slave economy. For instance, Rufel must learn that her intimate attachment to her “mammy” was largely based on her own fantasies about a woman whom she did not really know apart from her role as her mammy. Rufel’s highly selective and romantic memories of a system of southern paternalism are radically dismantled as she slowly begins to assess her own situation more realistically. Abandoned by her husband, who turned out to be a gambler, Rufel begins to listen to the fugitive slaves on her plantation, falls in love with a black man, and eventually participates in a plan that promises freedom to all of them, herself included. In a final ironic plot twist, the slaves seize on their status as property and sell themselves for their own profit, a scheme which causes Rufel and Dessa, posing as mistress and maid, to enact the very roles that they are rejecting. But it is ironically through this performance that they come to appreciate each other as human beings, as women, and even as friends. Their friendship is sealed when Dessa and Rufel realize that they are both oppressed as women by the patriarchal system, and together they work to undermine the rules of patriarchy that enslave them. The narrative ends with an optimistic feminist perspective that provides hope for interracial sisterhood and is in keeping with Sherley Anne Williams’s belief that feminist theory and black aesthetics may offer

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS 347

“not only the possibility of changing one’s reading of the world, but of changing the world itself” (69). Precisely that is at stake in Dessa Rose.

SOURCES McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating Between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom: Dessa Rose.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 144–163. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Rushdy, Ashraf H. H. “Reading Mammy: The Subject of Relation: Sherley Anne Williams’ Dessa Rose,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (September 1993): 365–389. Williams, Sherley Anne. Dessa Rose. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. ———. “Some Implications of Womanist Theory.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 68–75. New York: Meridian, 1990. Annette Trefzer

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS WALTER MOSLEY (1990) With Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter MOSLEY came to the fore as a formidable writer of detective fiction. A former president of the Mystery Writers of America, Mosley uses his knowledge of Los Angeles in his novels to take detective fiction in a new direction. Mosley’s first novel relates the story of Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a black man hired to use his familiarity with the black social scene in 1940s Los Angeles to find Daphne Monet, a white woman who tends to move in black social circles. Recently fired from his job, Easy is forced into this shadowy world by his desire to maintain ownership of his house. Despite his reluctance, Easy accepts the job arranged by his friend Joppy and offered by DeWitt Albright, a white man, but Easy soon discovers that others have a keen interest in the young woman as well. Todd Carter, a powerful and wealthy white man and Albright’s boss, is in love with Daphne and wants her back, in spite of her theft of a large sum of money. Albright wants to find the money for himself more than he wants to find Daphne. Matthew Teran, former mayoral candidate who also engages in perversions with young Mexican boys, wants to harass Daphne in retaliation for Carter’s failure to support his political campaign. Easy’s search for Daphne also leaves a string of dead bodies. Howard Green is bludgeoned so badly that his

wife can hardly identify him. Soon afterward, Coretta James, a friend of Easy who gives him information about Daphne, is killed. Richard McGee, friend of Daphne, ends up with a knife in his chest. Matthew Teran is shot in the heart. Easy may well be next, for in his search for Daphne, he crosses Frank Green, a local gangster whose facility with a knife is legendary. Easy is saved by Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, an old friend who has an even more violent reputation than Frank. With Mouse’s help, Easy discovers that Daphne is actually a mulatto woman and Frank Green’s sister. She enlisted Joppy’s aid in eluding Albright. She reveals that Joppy killed Howard Green by accident and killed Coretta to keep her quiet, while she herself confesses to killing Matthew Teran when he refused to leave her alone. Richard McGee is killed by another of Easy’s friends in an unrelated dispute. Mouse shoots Joppy on general principle, and Daphne, Easy, and Mouse split the stolen money. After enlisting the aid of Todd Carter to smooth things over with the police, Easy contemplates his new life where his home ownership is secure, and he is comfortable in his new profession as a private investigator. Mosley’s novel represents a contemporary foray by an African American into the genre of detective fiction. In many ways, his novel reflects the conventions of the detective genre as established by such writers as Raymond CHANDLER and Dashiell HAMMETT. Easy is the lone detective operating through a complex landscape unknown to those who hire him. The setting for the novel is an urban landscape peopled with police with questionable ethics and women who function as sexual objects. Mosley uses Los Angeles as dilapidated landscape that can only be navigated by individual will. As with most detective fiction, Easy’s world is one full of violence. In this regard, Albright, Mouse and Frank Green all function in a similar manner. They all kill without a thought. They use violence as a solution to every problem and actually take pleasure in the power such killing affords them. Albright exudes violence from the moment Easy meets him, and he consistently demonstrates the ease with which he could kill anyone: kids who harass Easy, Daphne Monet, Easy himself. Mouse murders his stepfather and blames another individual who ends up dead, but he never

348 DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS

suffers the consequences of his violent actions. He actually takes pleasure in threatening Frank Green, and manifests no emotion when he kills Joppy in the end. In Mouse’s case, such violence cannot be justified as the handmaiden of justice, for Mouse kills according to his own mode of morality. His stepfather cheats him out of his inheritance, so he must die. Frank threatens Easy, so he must die. Frank Green actively pursues a profession that requires violence as a job skill. Frank builds a reputation on his facility with the knife, and people who disrespect Frank usually end up dead. In this novel people die regularly and seven are dead by its end. Although not the first to write an African-American detective novel, Mosley’s work represents a meditation on race in the genre. Easy becomes a private detective following a racial incident with his boss at the airplane factory that results in his termination. He equates his experience with his boss at the airplane factory to plantation dynamics between master and slave. He runs afoul of the police, not just because he is an extra-legal professional, but also because he is a black man in Los Angeles. Easy’s encounters with Albright, Carter, his boss at the airplane factory, his experience in the war, are all contextualized by encounters with white people who failed to acknowledge him as an equal human being and give him respect. Race determines Easy’s movements, for he readily admits to avoiding certain places peopled predominantly by whites. Although Easy feels familiar with the black community, his worth as a private detective comes from his ability to move between the black community and the white. He uses the stereotypes of white America to get out of difficult situations alive. When the police escort Easy to the station without telling him why, he is careful not to give them all the information he possesses, lest they pin the crime on him with no evidence. He uses his facility with black culture and people to get information that eludes his employers. In doing so, Easy embodies the concept of double-consciousness whereby blacks develop strategies to account for their awareness in two cultural spheres. Whereas most private detectives maintain an uneasy relationship with local law enforcement, Easy’s relations are complicated by the history of blacks and the

criminal justice system. He is arrested without knowing the charges, assaulted during interrogations, threatened with future violence and trumped up charges, all because of the assumption on the part of the Los Angeles police department that as a black man, Easy must be involved with criminal activity. He is guilty until proven innocent. While violence is commonplace in the detective genre, Mosley consistently links violence to a racially informed worldview. The shadowy underground of Los Angeles parallels Easy’s experiences during World War II. Easy joined the army to save the world but was relegated to a segregated noncombat position. After being antagonized by white soldiers who characterized black soldiers as cowards, he volunteers for the invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. It is here that Easy develops an inner voice that sanctions the use of violence as a means of self-preservation. And despite the violence that permeates the novel, Easy consistently decries it. He keeps a grudge against Mouse for years for killing his stepfather. In fact, all of Easy’s killings occurred on the battlefields of Europe. Race forms the basis of other significant differences between conventional detective fiction and Mosley’s fiction. Like his African-American predecessor Chester HIMES, Mosley focuses on a sense of community. Whereas Easy operates as a loner, he also participates in a black community that acts as a buffer between blacks and the white community. He can only function as a good detective by using his social and cultural connections in the black community. The racial aspect of the novel is compounded by gender aspects raised with Daphne. The dilemma surrounding Daphne emerges from the fact that she is a black woman passing as white. As the “devil in the blue dress,” her deception causes several people to lose their lives. It is not her mixed-race status that is at issue, however. Rather, it is her manipulation of her marginality that causes trouble. Daphne transforms herself to the needs and desires of the men she chooses, and once they discover her true identity, she moves on. She most often targets white men, most of whom would be horrified to discover her true racial status. Her association with black men puts them in

DE VRIES, PETER 349

harm’s way, for becoming involved with her represents a breaking of social taboos against interracial relationships. Black or white, male or female, most of the characters strive after the same goal: money. Money in and of itself is benign, but Mosley depicts its use in ways that are both destructive and productive. Easy wants money so that he can keep his house and live a modest life. Yet, he is also cognizant that money motivates people to kill and be killed. Easy attributes Carter’s failure to register him as a human being to his wealth. Albright tracks Daphne solely because of the money involved. From Joppy to Coretta, individuals are moved to do things when there is the promise of a payoff. In spite of the seedy underworld he moves in, Easy also represents the hopes and dreams of the black postwar generation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his motivation for getting into the detective business in the first place: keeping his home. It is significant because neither Easy nor his friends, nor many blacks at the time had the potential to own a home. Home ownership translates into a marker for integration and racial justice. It also reflects a desire to emulate the middle class and its values. Although modest, for Easy, his home represents a symbol of his masculinity, for real men owned homes. His ability to keep it represents his ability to live as he chooses. As Easy progresses through the novel, he develops a sense of agency. He is distinctly uncomfortable working for Albright, but once he begins to handle the case according to what he thinks is right, he enjoys the sense of responsibility. Mosley’s novel also strays from the traditional detective novel in its emphasis on setting. Easy is a migrant from the South, and much of the novel is spent comparing the relatively slow pace of Houston, Texas with the frenetic pace of Los Angeles. Mosley’s novel is a study of living in multiethnic Los Angeles. He takes pains to illuminate the diversity of the city. Easy is conscious of the intermittent tensions between blacks and Jews as well as the sympathies between blacks and Mexican Americans. Mosley’s later novels trace the development of Easy as a detective, but Devil in a Blue Dress outlines the perennial issues that will continue to present themselves.

SOURCES Berger, Roger. “ ‘The Black Dick’: Race, Sexuality, and Discourse in the L.A. Novels of Walter Mosley,” African American Review 31, no. 2 (1997): 281–294. Coale, Samuel. “Race, Region, and Rites in Mosley’s Mysteries.” The Mystery of Mysteries: Cultural Differences and Designs. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Kennedy, Liam. “Black Noir: Race and Urban Space in Walter Mosley’s Detective Fiction.” In Diversity and Detective Fiction, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, 224–239. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Lock, Helen. “Invisible Detection: The Case of Walter Mosley,” MELUS 26, no.1 (2001): 77–90. Mason, Theodore O. “Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins: The Detective and Afro-American Fiction,” Kenyon Review 14, no. 4 (1992): 173–183. Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. Soitos, Stephen. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Crystal Anderson

DE VRIES, PETER (1910–1993) Peter De Vries was the prolific author of 24 novels and scores of short stories, many of which were published in the New Yorker—of which he was poetry editor—and all of which demonstrate De Vries’s inimitable blend of humor, satire, wit, punning, and parody. Most of his novels target sexual mores or religion (Into Your Tent I’ll Creep [1971] and The Blood of the Lamb [1962], for instance), with a few aimed at parodying famous writers or the writing process (The Tents of Wickedness [1959]). His widely read novels have received very positive critical reviews; critics were quick to point out that his novels exposed the moral, cultural, and social foibles of late 20th-century America. Peter De Vries was born on February 27, 1910, in Chicago, Illinois, to Joost and Henrietta Eldersveld De Vries. He was educated at Calvin College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1931. After six years as editor of Chicago’s Poetry magazine (1938–1944), he married poet Katinka Loieser and began his long and productive stint with the New Yorker. His first three novels—

350 DE VRIES, PETER

But Who Wakes the Bugler? (1940), The Handsome Heart (1943), and Angels Can’t Do Better (1944), considered by De Vries as apprentice work, nonetheless demonstrate the kind of humor that the author would use to still greater effect in his more polished work. The Tunnel of Love (1954), which became a Broadway play and a feature-length film, was his first success. Augie Poole, a cartoonist and suburbanite struggles with the possible adoption of his out-of-wedlock child. The Broadway play was adapted in 1957 by De Vries and Joseph Fields, and the two also collaborated on the movie, directed by Gene Kelly and starring Richard Widmark as Augie Poole and Doris Day as Isolde, his unsuspecting wife. Comfort Me With Apples (1956) focuses on Chick Swallow and his marital infidelities, and his ethical decisions, as does the novel that followed, Tents of Wickedness, which also contains parodies of William FAULKNER, Ernest HEMINGWAY, and Thomas WOLFE. The Mackerel Plaza (1958), considered one of De Vries’s wittiest novels, is also one concerned with the dearth of religious and moral values. The Reverend Andrew Mackerel of the People’s Liberal Church is both the source and the target of the humor. In The Blood of the Lamb, considered by critics to be De Vries’s finest work, the author manages to blend humor with tragedy. He recounts the conflict between a father’s religious faith shaken by the loss of his child to an incurable disease. De Vries himself had lost his youngest daughter to leukemia. Other novels that blend humor and religion include Let Me Count the Ways (1965), as protagonist Tom Waltz faces religious conversion. De Vries then turned to the issues of gender identity, the sexual revolution, and women’s liberation. In this vein, The Vale of Laughter (1967) uses sex and psychology; Into Your Tent I’ll Creep satirizes the women’s movement; Forever Panting (1973) depicts marital infidelity, as do I Hear America Swinging (1976) and Consenting Adults: Or, The Duchess Will Be Furious (1980). Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983) and De Vries’s 1986 novel, Peckham’s Marbles, concentrate on writers and the literary life. More critical studies are needed about this writer who, according to some of the most influential literary critics, is among the most talented of the mid–20th century. It is significant that, in the 21st century, a number of Internet sites are devoted to De Vries, with

special appreciation for his turns of phrases: “a suburban mother’s role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after”—and “When I can no longer bear to think of the victims of broken homes, I begin to think of the victims of intact ones.” In addition to the filming of The Tunnel of Love, Let Me Count the Ways (1965) became the 1970 movie, How Do I Love Thee?, written by De Vries and Everett Freeman, directed by Michael Gordon, and starring Jackie Gleason as Stanley Waltz, Maureen O’Hara as Elsie Waltz, and Shelley Winters as Lena Mervin. Reuben, Reuben (1964) adapted by De Vries and Julius J. Epstein and directed by Robert Ellis Miller, and starring Kelly McGillis as Geneva Spofford and Tom Conti as Gowan McGland, was filmed in 1983. De Vries lived for many years with his wife in Westport, Connecticut. He died on September 28, 1993, of pneumonia, in Norwalk, Connecticut.

NOVELS Angels Can’t Do Better. New York: Coward-McCann, 1944. The Blood of the Lamb. Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, 1962. But Who Wakes the Bugler?. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. The Cat’s Pajamas & Witch’s Milk. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1968. Comfort Me With Apples. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1956. Consenting Adults: Or, The Duchess Will Be Furious. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. Forever Panting. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1973. The Glory of the Hummingbird. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1974. The Handsome Heart. New York: Coward-McCann, 1943. I Hear America Swinging. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976. Into Your Tent I’ll Creep. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1971. Let Me Count the Ways. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1965. The Mackerel Plaza. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1958. Madder Music. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1977. Mrs. Wallop. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1970. No But I Saw the Movie. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952. Peckham’s Marbles. New York: Putnam, 1986; London: Hale, 1990. The Prick of Noon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985.

DEXTER, PETE 351

Reuben, Reuben. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1964. Sauce for the Goose. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. Slouching Towards Kalamazoo. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. The Tents of Wickedness. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1959. The Tunnel of Love. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954. The Vale of Laughter. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1967. Through the Fields of Clover. Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1961.

SOURCES Bowden, Edwin T. “Peter De Vries—The First Thirty Years: A Bibliography, 1934–1964,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 6 (1964): 543–570. Bowden, James H. Peter De Vries. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Campion, Dan. Peter De Vries and Surrealism. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Challender, Craig. “Peter De Vries: The Case for Comic Seriousness,” Studies in American Humor 1, no. 1 (April 1974): 40–52. De Vries, Peter. “An Interview with Peter De Vries,” by Douglas M. Davis. College English 28 (1967): 524–529. ———. “A Studies in the Novel Interview: An Interview in New York with Peter De Vries,” by Richard B. Sale. Studies in the Novel 1 (1967): 364–369. Hasley, Louis. “The Hamlet of Peter De Vries: To Wit or Not to Wit,” South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (Autumn 1971): 467–476. Jellema, Roderick. Peter De Vries: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1966.

OTHER BrainyQuote. “Peter De Vries quotes.” Available online. URL: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/peter_de_ vries.html. Accessed June 20, 2005.

DEXTER, PETE (1943– )

Pete Dexter, novelist and journalist, has written six novels to date. His third, PARIS TROUT (1988), won the National Book Award, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was adapted as a cable television film starring Dennis Hopper, Barbara Hershey, and Ed Harris. Dexter has become known for his artful contributions to noir fiction and for his ability to write film scripts that are similarly grim. Pete Dexter was born in 1943, in Potomac, Michigan. Reared in Georgia and South Dakota, he earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of South Dakota

in 1970. While working as a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News, Dexter was nearly beaten to death in a barroom fight by people who were angry over a column he had written about a murder committed in a nearby Philadelphia neighborhood. After his recovery from this life-changing incident, Dexter began to write suspense novels, the first of which, God’s Pocket, appeared to critical acclaim in 1983. Set in a realistically depicted Philadelphia neighborhood, the bleakly humorous novel depicts the murder of Leon Hubbard, a construction worker, by a coworker named Lucien, whom Leon had threatened. As Lucien and the other workers attempt to pass off Leon’s murder as an accident, Leon’s mother tries to discover the identity of the killer. Deadwood (1986) retreats to the Old West of the late 19th century and recreates the lives of historical personalities like Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. He subverts the heroic myth of the American West, combines gritty realism with somber humor, and uses Charley Utter, Hickok’s best friend, to point out that fiction and mythmaking can be more powerful than reality. With Paris Trout, Dexter moves south to 1950s Georgia. In the town of Cotton Point the unprincipled loan shark Paris Trout exploits the African-American community, murders a young black woman, and comes face to face with justice. The novel was praised for its Faulknerian sense of violence and for the dark gothic humor that evokes the work of Flannery O’CONNOR. Brotherly Love (1991), as the title indicates, takes place in Philadelphia and features Peter Flood, the boxer protagonist. Dexter blends murder, repressed guilt, and dangerous encounters as Peter Flood attempts to assuage his guilt over his sister’s death and to avenge the execution of his father. Paperboy (1995) is set in North Florida in the 1960s. The paperboy is Jack Jones, son of a local newspaper owner and brother of a reporter for a major Miami paper; together, Jack and his brother reopen a 1965 murder involving a backwoodsman convicted of the murder of a racist policeman. Train (2003), Dexter’s most recent novel, opens with a violent rape and double murder aboard a ship off Newport Beach, California, in the 1950s. Millard Packard is the streetwise, violent policeman who loves money: he is befriended by Train, a young black golf caddy of good character.

352 DHARMA BUMS

Dexter lives with his second wife, Dian Dexter, on an island in Puget Sound. He continues to write for the Sacramento Bee. He wrote two film scripts, Mulholland Falls and Rush, a noir film about undercover police who infiltrate the drug world and become addicts themselves, and he coauthored the screenplay for Michael (1996), starring John Travolta, Andie MacDowell, and William Hurt.

NOVELS Brotherly Love. New York: Random House, 1991. Deadwood. New york: Random House, 1986. God’s Pocket. New York: Random House, 1984. The Paperboy. New York: Random House, 1995. Paris Trout. New York: Random House, 1988. Train. New York: Random House, 2003.

SOURCE MostlyFiction/Dexter. Available online. URL: http://www. mostlyfiction.com/mystery/dexter.htm. Accessed March 13, 2006.

DHARMA BUMS, THE JACK KEROUAC (1958) Written late in Jack KEROUAC’s life, The Dharma Bums revisits the infamous picaresque style of ON THE ROAD; it is the subtle changes that Kerouac makes to this form, however, that make the novel of particular interest. The Dharma Bums, is a much more figurative recollection of actual events than On the Road. Much like Kerouac’s earlier works, the events of the The Dharma Bums unfold in a linear manner as the reader traces the protagonist’s travels from coast to coast. However, Kerouac shows inventiveness and mastery in removing particular parts of “reality” from an actual series of events and crafting them into a fictional narrative. As with many of his previous works, Kerouac uses his real-life friends as characters and disguises them with various pseudonyms; Alvah Goldbook is more or less Allen Ginsberg; Japhy Ryder is essentially Gary Snyder, and Ray Smith is roughly Jack Kerouac. However, Kerouac makes subtle departures from reality to make the characters fictional. The most pointed example of this is in the character of Alvah Goldbook. In the second chapter, Kerouac carefully recounts the events of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, an actual literary movement, in which Goldbook reads a

revolutionary poem entitled “Wail” to a packed crowd at Gallery Six. This clearly refers to the public premiere of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” at the San Francisco Six Gallery. The Goldbook character is academic, aesthetic, outspoken, and eccentric, but unlike his real-life counterpart, he is heterosexual and a reluctant, not enthusiastic, Buddhist. Kerouac intentionally fashions the Goldbook character after Ginsberg but deliberately separates the fictional character from the real man. Although Kerouac wrote many letters to his friends that described his exploits with women, drugs, and drinking, these conventional Beat antics are largely absent in The Dharma Bums. Instead, Kerouac presents a great deal of academic discourse, a departure from the documentary style that made him famous. At the center of The Dharma Bums is Kerouac’s attempt to make a statement of purpose grounded in his discussion and understanding of both Buddhism and American freedom. Unlike On the Road, the novel is not looking solely at Kerouac and his friends, but instead at all of America. Kerouac uses the metaphor of movement to display the dangers of a sedentary way of life. He stresses his sense of stagnation in several anecdotes that show how challenging and costly it has become to travel in America. In On the Road, by contrast, travel and adventure happened almost unconsciously. In Dharma Bums, Ray finds it difficult to hitchhike or hop a train successfully, but the inability to move is not limited to the problems of longdistance transportation; Ray needs to learn how to walk again, and he is taught by Japhy on their trip to climb the Matterhorn, a key turning point in the novel. With this metaphor of restricted movement, Kerouac suggests that the complacency of the American people is making them lose their dynamic quality of movement and action that makes America such a wonderful social experiment. Kerouac calls college, for example, “nothing but grooming school for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing while the

DIAMANT, ANITA 353

Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization” (39). Kerouac goes on to argue that through the practice of meditation and prayer, the learning of Buddhist philosophy, and the action of movement America can reverse the effects of this stagnation. Kerouac calls for a “rucksack revolution” that consists of renouncing material things in exchange for simple staples of life, commitment to the betterment of the individual and society through Buddhist teachings and practices, and the continuing movement of the population around America. Kerouac shows a commitment to this revolution through Ray’s eventual pilgrimage to the isolation of a mountain in Washington state.

SOURCES Giamo, Benedict. Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hart, John E. “Future Hero in Paradise: Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums,” Studies in Modern Fiction 14, no. 3 (1973): 52–62. Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Theado, Matt. Understanding Jack Kerouac. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Michael Miga

DIAMANT, ANITA (1951– )

Anita Diamant burst onto the literary scene with the publication of her first novel (and seventh book), The Red Tent, in 1998. The book, which takes the story of the Biblical Jacob and refocuses it on Dinah, his daughter, and on his four wives, was an immediate success. There are considerably more than a million copies in print. Part of her success, Diamant has pointed out in a recent interview, is that both The Red Tent and her next novel, The Good Harbor (2001), “tell ‘untold’ or perhaps ‘undertold’ stories about the heart of women’s experiences,” (author biography). Anita Diamant was born on June 27, 1951, in Newark, New Jersey, to Maurice Diamant, a Linotype operator and newspaper proofreader, and Helene

Diamant. Reared in Denver after age 12, Diamant received her bachelor’s degree from Washington University at St. Louis in 1973, and then moved east, earning her master of arts degree in 1975 from the State University of New York at Binghamton. After working as a columnist and staff writer for the Boston Phoenix, she married Jim Ball, in 1983. After discovering the paucity of books on modern Jewish weddings, Diamant published The New Jewish Wedding (1985), and continued writing books on subjects from naming Jewish babies to mastering Jewish parenting to converting to Judaism. It was a natural evolution for Diamant, 25 years later, to write The Red Tent, a fictional evocation of the customs and traditions, tribulations and strengths of biblical women. The perspectives of Dinah and of Jacob’s four wives— Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah, all mother surrogates— help present the Jewish past in an entirely new way. Diamant wrote the book knowing that the voices of Jewish women had been almost entirely absent from the story. Good Harbor (2001) is the story of the friendship that blossoms between two Jewish women who struggle with illness and marital difficulties. Set in the town of Cape Ann on the Massachusetts coast, the book explores the relationship between Kathleen and a younger woman, Joyce, in the context of the ironically threatening undertow of Good Harbor. Her third novel, according to Diamant, will be set in the 19th century and will feature “a group of strong, unconventional women living on the edge of society” (ReadingGroupGuides.com). Diamant lives with her husband in West Newton, Massachussetts.

NOVELS Good Harbor. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. The Red Tent. New York: Picador, 1998.

INTERNET SOURCES Anita Diamant Home Page. Available online. URL: http:// AnitaDiamant.com. Accessed June 20, 2005. ReadingGroupGuides.com. “Author Biography: Anita Diamant.” Available online. URL: http://www. readinggroupguides.com/guides/good_harbor-author.asp# bio. Accessed June 20, 2005.

354 DICK, PHILIP K.

DICK, PHILIP K(INDRED) (1928–1982) A prolific writer of both novels and short stories, Philip K. Dick is famous without and within the world of science fiction. His vision is dark, frequently despairing and even paranoid, yet alleviated by elements of black comedy. His best-known novels include The Man in the High Castle (1962), winner of the 1963 World Science Fiction Society Hugo award; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and VALIS (1981). The cult film noir, Blade Runner, loosely based on DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968) made Dick’s novel famous as well. Although a central theme is the clash between multiple realities, his admirers believe that his soaring imagination and empathetic characters are drawn mainly from Dick’s belief in the humane qualities of the ordinary American. The posthumous publication of several novels about life in 1950s California has earned Dick a reputation in mainstream fiction about this era. Philip K. Dick was born on December 16, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, to Joseph Edgar Dick, a government employee, and Dorothy Kindred Dick. Married and divorced four times between 1949 and 1973, his fifth marriage, to Tess Busby on April 18, 1973, also ended in divorce. Eschewing his midwestern origins, Dick lived most of his life in the San Francisco area of California. The Man in the High Castle, usually considered his finest novel, rests on the premise that the axis powers won World War II, and that the Germans control the eastern and the Japanese the western coast of the United States. One of Dick’s favorite techniques was to create parallel or alternate worlds; in The Man in the High Castle, the Nazi/Japanese alternate world demonstrates dangerously similar values in the parallel or actual post–World War II United States. In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Jason Taverner, a television talk-show host wakes up one morning in a hallucinatory world that does not recognize him. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (nominated for the 1968 Nebula award), exemplifies Dick’s interest in simulacra, the creation and existence of such mechanical or electronic beings as androids. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch three protagonists are caught in a druginfested world. Reality and unreality merge when they

see a Messiah, an apparently godlike figure from the stars. A Scanner Darkly depicts Fred, a narcotics agent, and Bob Arctor, a user, who are two sides of the same being until drug use causes brain damage that turns Fred and Bob into Bruce, a mindless victim of the futuristic drug culture. Like a number of other science fiction writers, Dick has been faulted for shallow portraits of women. However, he created Angel Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Numerous Dick novels and stories have been made into featurelength films. In addition to Blade Runner, Total Recall (1990) was based on his short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”; the French film Confessions d’un Barjo on Confessions of a Crap Artist; and Gary Walkow’s film The Trouble with Dick, based on Dick’s life; Gary Felder’s Imposter, based on his short story by that name; Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, based on that story; and, most recently, Paramount Pictures’ Paycheck, based on Dick’s story “Paycheck.” After suffering a stroke, Philip Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California.

SELECTED NOVELS Confessions of a Crap Artist. New York: Entwhistle Books, 1975; London: Magnum, 1979. Deus Irae with Roger Zelazny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976; London: Gollancz, 1977. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968; London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. New York: Ace, 1965; London: Arrow, 1977. Eye in the Sky. New York: Ace, 1957; London: Arrow, 1971. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974; London: Gollancz, 1974. A Handful of Darkness. Boston: Gregg, 1978; London: Rich & Cowan, 1955. The Man in the High Castle. New York: Putnam’s, 1962; Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965. The Man Who Japed. New York: Ace, 1956; London: Magnum, 1978. Now Wait for Last Year. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966; London: Manor, 1974. The Penultimate Truth. New York: Belmont, 1964; London: Cape, 1967. A Scanner Darkly. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977; London: Gollancz, 1977.

DICKEY, JAMES 355

The Simulacra. New York: Ace, 1964; London: Methuen, 1977. Solar Lottery. New York: Ace, 1955. Republished as World of Chance. London: Rich & Cowan, 1956. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965; London: Cape, 1966. Time Out of Joint. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1959; London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1961. Ubik. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969; London: Rapp & Whiting, 1970. Valis. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Vulcan’s Hammer. New York: Ace, 1960; London: Arrow, 1976.

SOURCES Aldiss, Brian W. “Dick’s Maledictory Web: About and Around Martian Time-slip,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 42–47. Bray, Mary Kay. “Mandalic Activism: An Approach to Structure, Theme, and Tone in Four Novels by Philip K. Dick,” Extrapolation 21 (Summer 1980): 146–157. Dick, Philip K. “An Interview with Philip K. Dick: Conducted September 10, 1976,” by Daniel DePrez, Science Fiction Review 5 no. 4 (1976): 6–12. Fitting, Peter. “Ubik: The Doconstruction of Bourgeois SF,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 47–54. Gillespie, Bruce, ed. Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd. The Best of SF Commentary, Number 1. Melbourne, Australia: Norstrilla Press, 1975. Green, Terence M. “Philip K. Dick: A Parallax View,” Science Fiction Review 5 no. 2 (1976): 12–15. Jameson, Frederic. “After Armageddon: Character Systems in Dr. Bloodmoney,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 31–42. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature, 242–249, 263–265. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. Le Guin, Ursula K. “Science Fiction as Prophesy: Philip K. Dick,” New Republic 175 (October 30, 1976): 33–34. Lem, Stanislaw. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 54–67. Mullen, R. D., and Darko Suvin, eds. “The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 3–75. Pagetti, Carlo. “Dick and Meta-SF,” Science-Fiction Studies 2 (March 1975): 24–31. Taylor, Angus. Philip K. Dick & The Umbrella of Light. Baltimore, Md.: T-K Graphics, 1975.

Warrick, Patricia S., and Martin Harry Greenberg. “The Encounter of Taoism and Fascism in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,” Science-Fiction Studies 7 (July 1980): 174–190. ———. Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

OTHER Philip K. Dick. Available online. URL: http://www.philipkdick. com. Accessed August 23, 2005.

DICKEY, JAMES (1923–1996) James Dickey won the National Book Award in 1966 when he was the consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. He published his first novel, DELIVERANCE, in 1970. The novel was a popular success, and Dickey wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Deliverance in 1982. According to scholars Richard J. Calhoun and Robert W. Hill, the thematic concerns of Dickey’s novels echo those of his poetry: war, nature, love, family, and a transcendence from the mundane and the commonplace. Most critics feel, in fact, that stylistically, too, Dickey’s novels are an extension of his poetry. Dickey wrote two other novels, Alnilam (1987) and To the White Sea (1993) while continuing to write poetry, essays, and literary criticism. James Dickey was born in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, on February 2, 1923, to Eugene Dickey, a lawyer, and Maibelle Swift Dickey. His education at Clemson University was interrupted by World War II; Dickey enlisted in the army air corps and flew more than 100 missions in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Japan. After the war he attended Vanderbilt University, married Maxine Syerson in 1948, and graduated magna cum laude in 1949. From his earliest published writing, readers and critics saw in Dickey a form of southern gothic style that blends a romantic view of nature with violence. This certainly characterizes Deliverance, a tale of four urban men who take a weekend canoe trip that becomes a nightmare of violence, rape, and survival. Alnilam follows a father, Ed Cahill, as he investigates a mysterious World War II plane crash at a Georgia training camp in which his son Joel is killed. The mystical novel demonstrates the conflict between the material and

356 DICTEE

the spiritual worlds. Similarly, To the White Sea uses images of flight to tell the tale of Muldrow, a World War II tail gunner whose plane crashes on a Japanese island. As he dies, he feels that he is flying upward to become part of the wind. After a prolific career as writer and teacher, James Dickey died on January 19, 1996. He was at work on another novel, Crux, and on a film adaptation of To the White Sea. He is survived by his second wife, Deborah Dodson, whom he married in 1977. Dickey’s papers are held primarily at the Special Collections Department of the Emory University Libraries in Atlanta, Georgia.

NOVELS Alnilam. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Deliverance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970. To the White Sea. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

SOURCES Alexander, George L. “A Psychoanalytic Observation on the Scopophilic Imagery in James Dickey’s Deliverance,” James Dickey Newsletter 11 (Fall 1994): 2–11. Baughman, Ronald. “James Dickey’s Alnilam: Toward a True Center Point,” South Carolina Review 26 (Spring 1994): 173–179. ———. Understanding James Dickey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. ———, ed. The Voiced Connections of James Dickey: Interviews and Conversations. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989. Bloom, Harold, ed. James Dickey: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman. James Dickey: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Calhoun, Richard J., ed. James Dickey: The Expansive Imagination: A Collection of Critical Essays. DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Calhoun, Richard J., and Robert W. Hill. James Dickey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Dickey, James. Deliverance [screenplay]. Cardondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. ———. “The Iron of English: An Interview with James Dickey,” by Donald J. Greiner. South Carolina Review 26 (Spring 1994): 9–20. Greiner, Donald J. “The Harmony of Bestiality in James Dickey’s Deliverance,” South Carolina Review 5 (December 1972): 43–49.

Italia, Paul G. “Love and Lust in James Dickey’s Deliverance,” Modern Fiction Studies 21 (Summaer 1975): 203–213. Kirschten, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on James Dickey. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Suarez, Ernest. James Dickey and the Politics of Canon: Assessing the Savage Ideal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. The Texas Review, Special Issue: The Fiction of James Dickey 17 (Fall/Winter 1996/1997).

DICTEE THERESA HAK KYUNG CHA (1982) Dictee is among the most challenging of what might be called “postmodern” texts. Written in multiple genres, Dictee resists any easy categorization, and its narrative structure and language break conventional rules. Theresa Hak Kyung CHA’s innovative use of narrative and language is in part related to her immigrant experience of exile, and to the history of Korea’s colonization by Japan. But the book as a whole entails a much wider range of themes and narratives than those concerning the immigrant experience or Korean history. Rather than plot or characterization, the book is structured and driven by two interlocking, recurring, thematic concerns—language and gender—from which other related topics branch out and are explored together with these two overarching themes. The epigraph of the book, written by Cha herself but attributed by her to Sappho, expresses her aspiration for inventing a new way of using language: “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.” Positioned between the book’s frontispiece of a photograph of Korean words inscribed on the walls of a coal mine and the list of the book’s nine sections named after the muses, this epigraph asserts Cha’s desire to use language to articulate the unutterable, the repressed, including the silences between the Korean words carved in stone, which read: “Mother / I miss you / I am hungry / I want to go home.” Inscribed during the Japanese colonization of Korea (1910–1945) when thousands of young men were pressed into labor such as working in coal mines, the intensity of the language in the epigraph matches the extreme brutality of colonial subjugation. The evocation of Sappho anticipates the centrality of the effects of language, and women’s relationship to language and discourses to be explored

DICTEE 357

throughout the book. These thematic concerns are interwoven and developed through juxtaposed fragmentary discourses, leading toward the nine sections of the book: CLIO/HISTORY; CALLIOPE/EPIC POETRY; URANIA/ ASTRONOMY; MELPOMENE/TRAGEDY; ERATO/LOVE POETRY; EUTERPE/LYRIC POETRY; THALIA/COMEDY; TERPSICHORE/ CHORAL DANCE; and POLYHYMNIA/SACRED POETRY. Following the section names, a fragmentary passage in both French and English, which mimics a dictation exercise in teaching a foreign language, echoes the title, Dictee. The implied authority of the one who dictates and the subjugation of the one who follows the dictation are foregrounded in the next fragment entitled DISEUSE. This fragment recontextualizes mimicry in learning a language, and develops its implications by relating mimicry to gendered language: “She mimicks the speaking. That might resemble speech” (3). Cha’s manipulation of language, including her control of its rhythm, serves several functions. It exposes the loss of the female subject agency in the language that erases her desire, her thought, and her experience along with her voice; it enacts the difficult process through which “she” struggles to give voice to her own speech, while building up the momentum of truimph when the female subject finally arrives at utterance. The difficulty and necessity for the woman to break away from mimicry and come to her own voice are indirectly revealed through fragments that follow DISEUSE, which allude to gendered power relations in religion. Cha employs innovative punctuation to isolate and enhance particular words and phrases, revealing male domination embedded in the rituals and precepts of Christianity through description of a mass, in which a devout female Christian faithfully receives Him, who is “the one who deciphers he the one who invokes in the Name. He the one who becomes He. Man-God” (13). In juxtaposition to this brief description and comment, Cha introduces paragraphs of translation exercises from English into French, the contents of which demonstrate that these languageacquisition practices are coded with ideologies of nationalism, Christianity, and patriarchy. As these paragraphs unfold, it becomes clear that their narratives, dialogues, and descriptions at once enact and critique the process in which dominant ideologies in language

and discourse constitute nationalist, religious, and gendered subjects. These themes are further expanded and developed in the nine sections of the book. For instance, in the CLIO/HISTORY section the question of how to “write words more naked than flesh,” more “sensitive than nerve” becomes an urgent task for the author to render the enormity of atrocities of Japanese colonization of Korea in such a way that words can move the reader to “intervene” so that such history will not repeat itself. Through individual and collective memories, this section reveals that Japanese colonial dictatorship imposed Japanese language and culture on Koreans, erasing 5,000 years of Korean history, and violently suppressing Korean resistance. While the narrative about the way Korean children and teachers are forced to adopt Japanese names and speak Japanese language resonates with the power relations in dictating a foreign language and in performing male domination in religion, the story about a Korean national heroine, Yu Guan Soon, a leader in the mass demonstration against Japanese occupation, who was captured and tortured at 16 and died at 17, a martyr to the cause of Korean independence, parallels the story of Joan of Arc, alluded to in the section ERATO/LOVE POETRY. Cha opens the chapter CLIO/HISTORY with a photo of Yu Guan Soon, and the dates of her birth and death, thus restoring the female presence in the national history, a presence reinforced by the narrative of the exile experience of the narrator’s mother under Japanese occupation. This female presence and participation in Korean national history contrasts women’s absence from official documents such as the petition to President Roosevelt, signed in 1905 by Korean Americans, including Syngman Rhee, who became president of South Korea after World War II. Cha incorporates into this section the text of this petition to suggest that its formal, elegant, and perfect English fails to galvanize its reader because it is not “physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone to the core, to the mark to the point where it is necessary to intervene. . . .” (32). Cha explores further women’s subordinate positions in national history and religion in the section ERATO/LOVE POETRY. The stories of St. Therese of Lisieux and Joan of Arc are retold in such a way that they at once expose and

358 DIDION, JOAN

critique patriarchy in institutionalized religion. The image of Joan of Arc in imprisonment with shaved hair, a still from Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, alludes to the interrogation of Joan of Arc and her torture, and her eventual execution by the tyranny of patriarchal power. In this section, Cha also uses collage to juxtapose and disrupt two intersecting narratives of love—one secular, the other religious; the former is about a woman’s love for her husband and her subordination to him, the latter about St. Therese’s love for God and Christ and her sacrifice for that love. While the pauses and the repetition of words or phrases in Cha’s rhythmic language are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s writing, her employment of visual images and shifting perspectives are informed by French avant-garde film theories, which seek to denaturalize representation and enable the spectator/reader to be aware of his/her participation in constructing image, delivering reality from a particular, situated gaze. Engaging with questions of power in language, narrative, and representation, Dictee reopens questions about historical witness, while reconstructing a female genealogy through writing.

SOURCES Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Kim, Elaine H., and Norma Alarcón, eds. Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1994. Spahr, Julian M. “Postmodernism, Readers and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee,” College Literature 23 (October 1996): 21–37. Zhou Xiaojing

DIDION, JOAN (1934– ) Equally well known for fiction and nonfiction, and for creating complex female characters, Joan Didion is the author of five novels. Her second, PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, was nominated for the 1971 National Book Award, and her fourth, Democracy, received a 1984 Los Angeles Times Book Award nomination. Didion is admired for her ability to portray the trends, foibles, and idiosyncrasies of modern life. Her richly economical and precise style is widely respected, as is her technique of depicting a family as a microcosm of the state of California, which then becomes a microcosm of the state of the United States.

Joan Didion was born on December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California, to Frank Reese Didion and Eduene Jerrett Didion. She earned a B.A. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1956, worked as a writer for Vogue from 1956 to 1963, and married the writer John Gregory Dunne in 1964. She published her first novel, Run, River, in 1963. This novel, set in California, depicts Everett Knight and Lily McClellan whose elopement turns sour when Everett goes off to World War II and Lily becomes pregnant as the result of an affair. Didion’s view of the violence and fragmentation of modern life is mirrored in the violent and fragmented marriage between Everett and Lily; only Lily is strong enough to survive the chaos that engulfs them. Play It As It Lays (1970) was Didion’s first best-selling novel; the desert setting is a metaphor for the equally parched values of Hollywood that the protagonist, Maria Wyeth, tries vainly to transcend. Eventually she acknowledges the persistent presence of evil in an unreliable world. A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER (1977) tells the story of a native Californian, film actor Charlotte Douglas, whose innocence and optimism are never shattered, not even when her daughter Marin leaves home to join a gang of terrorists. Douglas travels to the fictional Latin American country of Boca Grande, where she is eventually murdered during a coup d’état. It is Grace, the 60-year-old narrator, who seeks meaning in the emptiness of Charlotte’s life. Democracy (1984) again uses a family situation to symbolize the national condition. Set in 1975, before and just after the fall of Saigon, the family of Inez Christian Victor is disintegrating. Her father is a murderer and her husband has become a vain and superficial politician. Inez flees, spends some time with Jack Lovett, her CIA lover, who rescues her daughter Jessica before he dies. Inez remains in Kuala Lumpur and dedicates her life to working with Vietnamese refugees. In The Last Thing He Wanted (1996) Elena McMahon leaves her job as a journalist in Washington, D.C., to live in Miami, Florida, with her dying father. She travels to Costa Rica where she helps her father with his last arms deal with the Nicaraguan contras. The novel evolves into a political espionage thriller with complicated subplots in which Elena becomes deeply embroiled.

DI DONATO, PIETRO 359

Besides the five novels, Joan Didion has written several nonfiction books, and, with her husband, seven screenplays. Her memoir of the year after the sudden death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2005. She lives and works in New York City.

NOVELS A Book of Common Prayer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. Democracy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984; London: Chatto & Windus, 1984. The Last Thing He Wanted. New York: Knopf, 1996. Play It As It Lays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Run River. New York: Obolensky, 1963; London: Cape, 1964.

SOURCES Amis, Martin. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 160–169. London: Cape, 1986; New York: Viking, 1987. Braman, Sandra. “Joan Didion.” In A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre, edited by Thomas B. Connery, 353–358. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Felton, Sharon, ed. The Critical Response to Joan Didion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Friedman, Ellen G., ed. Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Henderson, Katherine. Joan Didion. New York: Ungar, 1981. Kirkhorn, Michael J. “Journalism’s Guilty Secret,” Nieman Reports (Summer 1992): 3641. Loris, Michelle Carbone. Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Winchell, Mark. Joan Didion. Rev. ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

OTHER Metroactive. “Fear of Meaning.” Available online. URL: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/11.21.96/book s=9647.htm/. Accessed June 21, 2005. Salon.com. “The Salon Interview: Joan Didion,” by Dave Eggers. Available online. http://www.salon.com/oct96./ interview961028.html. Accessed June 21, 2005.

DI DONATO, PIETRO (1911–1992)

Pietro di Donato—novelist, playwright, and short-story writer—was the author of the acclaimed autobiographical novel, CHRIST IN CONCRETE (1937), now considered a classic American novel. It is the fictionalized account of the way di Donato, son of an immigrant

bricklayer killed in a construction accident, grew up while taking responsibility for his mother and seven siblings, Pietro di Donato was born on April 3, 1911, in West Hoboken, New Jersey, to Geremio di Donato and Annunziata Chinquina di Donato, both from Abruzzi, Italy. When di Donato was 12 years old, his father was crushed beneath a faultily constructed building. To support the family, di Donato quickly excelled in his father’s trade. After his family moved to Northport, Long Island, he wrote the short story, “Christ in Concrete,” and it was published in the September 1937 issue of Esquire. Republished as one of the year’s best stories, it became the first chapter of the novel of the same name, one of the first to delineate the Italian-American immigrant experience. The protagonist, Paolo (called Paulie), whose father is killed when he was 12, is much like every Italian bricklayer in New York City prior to 1940. He educates himself by going to night school and puts aside some of the myths and superstitions his mother has brought with her from Italy. The novel conveys the unrelieved and impoverished conditions of workers and widows like his mother. Di Donato married Helen Dean on February 24, 1943. His second novel, This Woman (1959) is a sequel to Christ in Concrete. Here, Paolo has a love affair with Isa Tromm, an attractive married woman from the American South. Isa’s mother blames Isa for the death of Isa’s husband, Jack. Paolo is suffering from Italian Catholic guilt about Jack’s death and he sees him as a repository of the values he must embrace if he marries Isa. Again using his own family, this time his father and mother, Three Circles of Light (1960) examines the spiritual background of Italian Americans, including the Catholic Church, and those who believe in folk religion practiced by faith healers like La Smorfia, whose power is as great as the priest’s. Through Geremio di Donato’s infidelity to his wife with an American woman, di Donato also demonstrates the Italian mores that dictate Annunziata di Donato’s servility and endurance; Paolo must learn to leave behind customs that impede attainment of the American dream while holding fast to the heritage that gives him his identity.

360 DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE

Closely aligned to this novel is Immigrant Saint, the Life of Mother Cabrini (1960), an Italian-American nun who became the first American chosen for sainthood. Di Donato followed this biography with The Penitent (1962), di Donato’s story of Maria Goretti, a 12-yearold murder victim who resisted her rapist and was elevated to sainthood by the Catholic Church. Di Donato also wrote a one-act play, The Love of Annunziata (1941), and, before he died, was planning to write a play called “Christ in Plastic.” His stories are collected in Naked Author, published in 1970. It is, however, as a novelist, that Pietro di Donato will be remembered. He died on January 19, 1992.

NOVELS Christ in Concrete. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1939. Immigrant Saint, the Life of Mother Cabrini. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Naked Author: The Collected Works of Pietro Di Donato. New York: Phaedra, 1970. The Penitent. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1962. This Woman. New York: Ballantine, 1959. Three Circles of Light. New York: Messner, 1960.

SOURCES Amfitheatrof, Erik. “Christ in Concrete.” In The Children of Columbus: An Informal History of the Italians in the New World, 309–310. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Cordasco, Francesco. “The Religious Experience of Italian Americans.” In Italian Americans: A Guide to Information Sources, Ethnic Studies, 143–144, 152, 155. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research, 1978. De Conde, Alexander. “Christ in Concrete.” In Half-Bitter, Half Sweet, 383. New York: Scribner, 1972. Diomede, Matthew. Pietro Di Donato: The Master Builder. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Green, Rose Basile. “Adjusting to a Pluralistic Society,” and “Counterrevulsion.” In The Italian-American Novel, 44–45, 150–157, 165. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. Lopreato, Joseph. “Intergroup Relations.” In The Italian Americans, 121–122. New York: Random House, 1970. Napolitano, Louise. An American Story: Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Pisani, Lawrence Frank. “Italian-American Literature.” In The Italian in America, 215–216. New York: Exposition Press, 1957.

DIVAKARUNI, CHITRA BANERJEE (1956– ) Drawing on her experiences as an immigrant and a woman, Divakaruni has stated that her expatriate status actually contributed to her desire to write (Moka-Dias, 87). Beginning with her prize-winning short stories, Divakaruni addressed such issues as racism, mixed marriages, divorce, poverty, and abortion. In The MISTRESS OF SPICES, her first novel, Tito, the mistress of spices, who runs a spice shop in Oakland, California, helps the women who come to her cope with domestic abuse, drug problems, and intergenerational as well as marital conflict. In Sister of My Heart, her second novel, Divakaruni illustrates and examines the conflicts between traditional Indian mothers and Westernized cousins. Both novels have dual settings: India and the United States. Born in July 1956 in Calcutta, India, Divakaruni attended Presidency College there and earned a master’s degree at Wright State University in 1977. Her entire family moved to Oklahoma in 1978, but Divakaruni enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley to study for her doctoral degree. Like Filipina-American Cecilia Manguerra BRAINARD, or KoreanAmerican Theresa Hak Kyung CHA, Divakaruni blends into the contemporary settings of her novels an intriguing mix of magic, allegory, myth, memory, and immigrant life, placing a woman at the center of her stories. At pains to demonstrate the diversity among the South Asian community, Divakaruni depicts characters of different classes and backgrounds and, as critic Brunda Moka-Dias observes, in so doing exposes the “model minority” myth. In Sister of My Heart, Divakaruni tests the bonds between two cousins who, born on the same day, grew up as sisters in the same household. Mysterious family secrets and obligations, arranged marriages, pregnancies, and doomed love affairs propel one sister, Sudha, to Bengal, the other, Anju, to the United States. Telling the story contrapuntally from each sister’s viewpoint, the novel ends with both of them in the United states and on the brink of yet more experience, more stories.

NOVELS Mistress of Spices. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Sister of My Heart. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

DIXON, STEPHEN 361

SOURCES Moka-Dias, Brunda. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 87–92. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

OTHER VG: Voices from the Gaps. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/ entries/divakaruni_chitra_banerjee.html. Accessed June 21, 2005.

DIXON, STEPHEN (1936– ) Stephen Dixon, an innovative postmodernist, primarily known for more than 400 short stories, has also written nine novels, including the National Book Award and PEN/Faulkner finalist, Frog (1991). Interstate (1995), also a National Book Award finalist, received plaudits for its tensely original portrayal of a family chased and shot at on an interstate highway. Many of Dixon’s novels are set in New York City and are concerned with the intersection of the bizarre and the domestic in the lives of ordinary individuals. Although he is often praised for his realistic depictions of post–World War II American life, Dixon is frequently compared to experimental writers like the Czechoslovakian novelist Franz Kafka, the British playwright Samuel Beckett, or French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. All use darkly tragic revisionings of images and incidents from different perspectives. Stephen Dixon was born Stephen Ditchik on June 6, 1936, in Brooklyn, New York, to Abraham Mayer Ditchik, a dentist, and Florence Leder Ditchik, an interior decorator. Reared in Manhattan Dixon was educated at City College of New York, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1958. He married Anne Frydman, a translator and lecturer in 1983, and published his first novel, Too Late (1978), a story about a violent movie that turns into a violent story: when the narrator’s woman friend leaves the movie, he remains, only to reach home and realize that she must have encountered violence and has disappeared. Fall & Rise (1985) depicts the all-night attempt of the character to seduce a woman he has just met at a party. Frog is ingeniously put together; fragments of essays, letters, poem, novels, novellas, and stories chronicle the progress of teacher Howard Tetch as he achieves his goal of mar-

riage (to Denise) and fatherhood (to daughters Olivia and Eva). Interstate (1995) presents eight different perspectives of a highway drive-by shooting of the daughter of Nathan, the grieving father who continuously replays the murder in his head. He never clarifies for the reader whether the different perspectives result from his memory variations, his intellectual consideration of different possibilities, or his own worries about his remaining children’s survival in an unsafe world. In Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (1997), Dixon continues his fictional experimentation by using one novel titled Abortions and the other Evangeline to depict the double life of Gould Bookbinder, college instructor and literary critic; in the first, his sexual history covers 40 years and may help explain, in the second, his self-absorbed, even aggressive, desire to father more children with Sally, his ill wife, and to continue his long-term affair with Evangeline. Garbage (1998) focuses on bar owner Shaney Fleet, who refuses to pay protection to the local Mafia. When he lands in the hospital after a serious beating, the remaining valuables in the store are stolen by his neighbors. He followed with Thirty: Pieces of a Novel (1999), in which Gould Bookbinder returns to give the reader a glimpse into his future, one involved with sexual obsessions with women of all types. As readers by now expect, the novel is composed of many fragments that reveal various components of Gould’s life. Stephen Dixon lives with his wife near Baltimore, Maryland, where he is professor of fiction at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent novels are Tisch (2000); Old Friends (2003), a tale of two aging writers; and Phone Rings (2004), featuring the relationship between two brothers.

NOVELS Fall & Rise. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point, 1985. Frog. Latham, N.Y.: British American, 1991. Garbage. New York: Cane Hill, 1988. Gould: A Novel in Two Novels. New York: Holt, 1997. Interstate: A Novel. New York: Holt, 1995. Old Friends. Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2003. Phonic Rings. Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2004. Thirty: Pieces of a Novel. New York: Holt, 1999. Tisch. Palmdale, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2000. Too Late. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Work. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Street Fiction, 1977.

362 DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

SOURCES Boyd, Greg. “The Story’s Story: A Letter to Stephen Dixon.” In Balzac’s Dolls and Other Essays, Studies, and Literary Sketches, 131–138. Daphne, Ala.: Légéreté, 1987. Cummins, Walter. “Story Worlds,” Literary Review 17 (Winter 1982): 462–472. Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Self-Apparent Word: Fiction as Language/Language as Fiction, 95–108, 122–124, 136–137. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. ———. “Stephen Dixon: Experimental Realism,” North American Review 266 (March 1981): 54–56. ———. Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction, 8–14, 165–167, 171–173. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Mandelbaum, Paul. “Dangerous Obsessions,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, 61 (April 1989): 14–19. Martin, Richard. “The Critic as Entertainer: Ten Digressions and a Diversion on Stereotypes and Innovations,” Amerikastudien/American Studies (Munich, Germany) 30 (1985): 425–428. Saltzman, Arthur M. “To See the World in a Grain of Sand: Expanding Literary Minimalism,” Contemporary Literature 31 (Winter 1990): 423–433. Warren, Tim. “Stephen Dixon: a Writer Obsessed with his Craft,” Baltimore Sun, 31 April 1989, Section F, pp. 11, 13–15.

OTHER For Writer Stephen Dixon, Recognition Has Come Slowly. Available online. URL: http://www.jhu.edu./gazette/aprjun95/ may1595/15dixon.html. Accessed September 3, 2005.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? PHILIP K. DICK (1968) DICK’s novel deserves to be better known than as the story behind the film Blade Runner (directed by Ridley Scott, released in 1982), whose cult status has done much to liberate his work from the marketing ghetto of sci-fi pulp and to prompt the making of many other films based on or inspired by his paranoid extrapolation of emerging technologies. The film narrowed the focus to enhance romance and pathos. But Dick’s parable of the future commodification of animals, both organic and electronic, functions as a critique of present-day capitalist economics. To understand this, one must understand the symbolic functions and meanings of animals in his post-apocalyptic world. Animals are beloved and

their loss grievously mourned due to the unconscious guilt that humans feel for their extinction and the widespread ecological destruction brought about by nuclear war. They are also the principal commodity fetish (to use marxist and psychoanalytic terminology, with which Dick was familiar) because their value has nothing to do with their use—the practical functions they can perform, the work they can do. Their value has everything to do with what they signify—that is, with the status they give their owner. However, this status is itself a reflection of the kinds of desires that are projected onto them, on the way that they function as substitute objects for some other object, some other desire, that cannot be acknowledged and therefore cannot be satisfied. This can be seen in regard to the bounty hunter, Deckard, who must kill androids in order to finance his purchase of a live, organic animal. He, like all the other humans, values live, organic animals not only because of their status-bestowing rarity, but also because their very aliveness constitutes a striking contrast with the chronic depression that, in emotional terms, leaves human barely alive and increasingly like machines. This rare aliveness would serve to re-enchant Deckard’s disenchanted, sterile existence, which will further be enhanced by a rise in self-esteem due to a rise in social status. The characteristic Dickian irony resides in the circularity: Deckard would not need the live animal, the reenchantment, quite so badly if he did not feel so ambivalent regarding the killing of “andys.” A glancing reference to a caged squirrel on a wheel (110) provides an image of Deckard’s treadmill situation, a capitalist arrangement in which people feel needy because of the vacuity of their lives and jobs but must work in soul-destroying occupations to pay for commodities that are supposed to substitute for those unsatisfied needs. It is typical of Dick’s melancholy irony that, for all the rarity and fetishization, the attribution of animal characteristics remains a means of degrading the other, as in the epithets “anthead” and “chickenhead”, which are applied to the ambiguous J. R. Isidore. “The special Mr. Isidore” (191) seems at once a mental degenerate, a delusional schizophrenic, and a saintly empath (note

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? 363

the implicit pun on “is/adore”). Most of the characters try to assuage their misery through the banal inanities of the Buster Friendly TV program and to program their feelings with the futuristic mood organ, thereby further blurring any meaningful distinction between humans and machines (Dick’s objective throughout the book). But Isidore (and the reader) has inescapable, terrifyingly immediate access to the cosmic process of entropy, the dissipation of energy and consequent disintegration of order into a chaos of dust, which he calls “kippleization” (56ff)—a typically Dickian whimsy in the face of the abyss. Many of Dick’s novels mobilize a dialectic between two seemingly contradictory ideas: that the external world of experience is actually the psyche, the internal world, objectified; and that paranoid schizophrenics and dopers are for this very reason capable of witnessing the universe as it really is (compare The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch [1965], A Maze of Death [1970], and VALIS [1981]). Both ideas are present in the experiences registered by Isidore, as they are in the description of Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, which a character explicitly links to the life-world of the androids, but which is implicitly meant by Dick to apply to humans: “Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; [the oppressed creature] had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound” (112). Here, and throughout the book (notably in images of dismembered animals), Dick insistently evokes the qualities characterizing “the tomb world” (183)—a term he adapted from existential-psychoanalysis’s description of the lived world of people who are in clinical depression and from descriptions of the fallen, broken world deserted by God, which he found in the Kabbalah, a compilation of Jewish mystical writings. Dick’s science fiction is a prime example of his own dictum that “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” He brilliantly deploys the genre’s conventional strategies of estrangement and defamiliarization, which make the normative seem strange and the alien strangely familiar, for the purpose of exploring themes that are the classic preoccupations of philosophy and theology:

ontology (what is the nature of beings—for example, what differentiates humans from animals and from machines, such as the androids?); epistemology (which modes of being best access reality, can we trust our senses or our reason, how do we know what we think we know?); metaphysics (is there an ultimate meaning to our suffering, what is sin, is redemption possible?). Dick’s proffered response to his ontological and epistemological questioning is empathy, although close attention to the ambiguity of his treatment makes this more problematic than comforting. His metaphysics are even less comforting. For Dick, the void is a malign agency, “the absence which would win out” (181). This agency manifests itself not only in alienation, depression, entropy, and silence (a major motif), but also in cruelty, the absence of empathy. The androids and Deckard display cruelty in almost equal degree: for example, Pris’s torture of a spider torments Isidore, while Deckard comes to realize, “I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy” (84), but never quits his job. However, cruelty is not characterized as a matter of psychology of ethics. The shadowy, abiding but impotent, Messiah figure Mercer, who seems to climb his Golgotha on an eternal video loop, shows no mercy and yet all mercy in telling Deckard: “How can I save you . . . if I can’t save myself? There is no salvation. . . . You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. . . . It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life” (153). Out of the dust emerges a toad, Mercer’s sacred animal, thought to be extinct; Decker’s elation wilts when it turns out to be electronic. While Deckard comes to acknowledge that even “electric things have their lives. . . .” Paltry as those lives are (208), the gentle Isidore makes no such distinction; he strives mightily to save a real cat from dying though he believes it to be electronic. And in this spirit the reader must turn in hope to his visionary (or hallucinated) resurrection and reconnection of the bones (22, 66), which exceeds that of the Messiah prophesied by Ezekiel by including the bones of the animals.

364 DOCTOROW, E. L.

SOURCES Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Gollancz, 1999. Kerman, Judith B., ed. Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984. Umland, Samuel J. Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Warrick, Patricia. Mind in Motion: the Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. David Brottman

DOCTOROW, E(DGAR) L(AWRENCE) (1931– ) An award-winning playwright and short-story and essay writer, E. L. Doctorow is best known for his novels, particularly the popular and critically acclaimed RAGTIME (1975). Winner of awards from the National Book Critics Circle and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ragtime was made into a feature-length film in 1981, as was Welcome to Hard Times (1960) in 1967 and The BOOK OF DANIEL (1971) in 1983. Each of Doctorow’s novels portrays a different historical era; he mixes historical fact with fiction and uses invented characters in encounters with historical figures like the Archduke Ferdinand, J. P. Morgan, or Josephine Baker. Because he includes song lyrics, newspaper excerpts, Bible verses, and other artifacts of popular culture, Doctorow has been compared to his predecessor, John DOS PASSOS, who experimented with similar techniques in his U.S.A. TRILOGY. Doctorow is a man fascinated with American history and that is evident in his choice of novel topics: the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the lawlessness of the Old West, the Jazz Age, or the New York World’s Fair. At the same time he blends literary genres, demonstrating his familiarity with the parable, bildungsroman, picaresque novel, and with dystopian fiction. At all times he examines the various avatars of the American dream.

E. L. Doctorow was born on January 6, 1931, in the Bronx, New York City, to David Richard Doctorow and Rose Levine Doctorow. Educated at the Bronx High School of Science, he earned a bachelor’s degree with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, served with the United States Army from 1953 to 1955, and married Helen Setzer in 1954. He published his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times (1960), a western (or, as some critics argue, an antiwestern), while he was an editor at Dial Press. The novel is violent and grittily realistic, featuring the evil Bad Man from Bodie (used as the title for the British edition), Clay Turner, who rapes, kills, and burns a prairie town to the ground. The ensuing violence interrupts the taming of the Dakota frontier. Big As Life (1966), a science fiction novel, depicts New York City’s response to the appearance of two gigantic creatures from another space-time continuum; predictably, a super-bureaucracy is formed with sinister effects on both the populace and the space creatures. The Book of Daniel is based on the execution of the Rosenbergs; the main narrator, Daniel Isaacson, tells the tale of his executed parents and agonizes over the cold war climate that made such a trial and conviction possible. Doctorow’s first popular novel, however, was Ragtime, a part-fact, part-fantasy re-creation and reexamination of the United States during the 1920s. Appearances by Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, and Henry Ford, among others, help convey the highs and lows of the era. Doctorow’s next two novels, Loon Lake (1980) and World’s Fair (1985), both of which take place in the 1930s, present opposing points of view. Joe, the jobless protagonist of Loon Lake, comes of age on the road, a product of the Depression-era Hoovervilles; he seeks success, riches, women, and self-understanding. Blending memoir, fiction, and history, the autobiographical World’s Fair is a far less depressing account of growing up during the Great Depression. In contrast, Billy Bathgate (1989) is a picaresque coming-of-age tale; the protagonist grows up as an assistant to the infamous gangster Dutch Schultz. Republican candidate for president in 1944 and 1948, Thomas E. Dewey and newspaperman Walter Winchell appear here as well; the book earned Doctorow the National Book Critics Circle Award. In his next novel, The

DODSWORTH 365

Waterworks (1994), McIlvaine, his narrator-newspaper editor, reveals corruption on the part of both science and industry and the ways they prey on children and dying men. City of God (2000), whose title is drawn from St. Augustine, ponders the ways in which contemporary America has lost its goodness. Doctorow lives in New Rochelle, New York, where he continues to write.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Big as Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Billy Bathgate. New York: Random House, 1989. The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House, 1971. City of God. New York: Random House, 2000. Lives of the Poets: Six Stories and a Novella. New York: Random House, 1984. Loon Lake. New York: Random House, 1980. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975. The Waterworks. New York: Random House, 1994. Welcome to Hard Times. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960. World’s Fair. New York: Random House, 1985.

SOURCES Doctorow, E. K. An Interview with E. L. Doctorow. By Kay Bonetti. American Audio Prose Library 10012 audiocassette, 1990. Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Friedl, Herwig, and Dieter Schulz, eds. E. L. Doctorow: A Democracy of Perception. Essen, Germany: Die Blau Eule, 1988. Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. E. L. Doctorow. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Jacobs, Naomi. “Fiction Histories and the Death of Progress.” In The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction, 69–104. Carbonale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Johnson, Diane. “The Righteous Artist: E. L. Doctorow.” In Terrorists & Novelists, edited by Diane Johnson, 141–149. New York: Knopf, 1982. Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Morris, Christopher D. Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Parks, John G. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Continuum, 1991. Tokarczyk, Michelle M. E. L. Doctorow: An Annotated Bibliography. New York and London: Garland, 1988.

Trenner, Richard, ed. E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1983. Williams, John. Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996.

DODSWORTH SINCLAIR LEWIS (1929)

Dodsworth is the last work of Sinclair LEWIS’s great period of the 1920s, an era during which Lewis published influential novels such as MAIN STREET (1922), BABBITT (1922), ARROWSMITH (1925), and ELMER GANTRY (1927) before winning the Nobel Prize in 1930. Lewis’s main characters to this point had been of two types: ineffectual idealists opposed to the shams and hypocrisies of the social systems of which they were a part, or selfdeluding characters whose lack of insight allowed them to cling to and perpetuate these systems. For example, idealists like Carol Kennicott, who fights against the restrictions and uniformity of Main Street, or Martin Arrowsmith, who protests the compromised scientific experiments and political infighting that characterized medical research, see problems clearly but cannot solve them; those complicit with the systems, like Babbitt and the morally bankrupt Reverend Elmer Gantry, thrive within their social milieu but do so at the price of gaining self-knowledge. As reviewers noted at the time, DODSWORTH marks a departure from these works in its sympathetic portrait of the American businessman, a character type that Lewis had roundly satirized—some would say caricatured—in his portrait of realtor George Follansbee Babbitt and the garrulous monologuist Lowell Schmaltz of The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen (1928). Samuel Dodsworth represents a reversal from Lewis’s previous practice, for although he is, like most Lewis protagonists, a questing hero, he is also solidly part of the establishment. Dodsworth is in some respects Main Street revisited, but this time the phlegmatic, sensible husband is the sympathetic character, while his restless, dissatisfied wife, Fran, takes her place as one of the most supremely demanding wife-goddesses of American literature. Dodsworth is Lewis’s treatment of the international theme, Jamesian (see Henry JAMES) in concept if not in scope or execution. Sam Dodsworth, a 50ish automobile

366 DODSWORTH

manufacturer, is decidedly “not a Babbitt” (Lewis, 11); as indicated by his design and engineering skills, his forte is putting his creative visions into practical form. He stands in awe of his wife, Fran, who is 10 years his junior but believes herself to be light-years ahead of Sam in cultural sophistication. Despite their wealth and modernity, the Dodsworths hew closely to the 19th-century ideology of separate spheres: Powerful in the business world, Sam defers to Fran as the innately moral guardian of culture and ethics, seeing her (as Will Kennicott does Carol Kennicott in Main Street) as his soul. As he reflects when, in a piece of foreshadowing, he considers his options should Fran some day take a lover, “She had a right to her own way. She was better than he, that slender, shining being, in the golden frock. . . . She was a divine thing, while he was a clodhopper” (55). When Sam sells his company and retires, he and Fran decide to travel, but whereas he yearns for adventure and exploration, she wants to “become a European,” as she puts it. For Fran, this means being accepted by what she considers the best society in each of the countries they visit, although her judgment in choosing false friends like Madame de Penable, a shabbier version of Henry JAMES’s Madame Merle of The PORTRAIT OF A LADY, marks her as less knowledgeable than Sam about what really matters: human nature. Lewis renders Fran’s European education symbolically as a series of increasingly intimate relationships with men of each nationality they encounter. As she pursues youth and culture, dropping years from her age and adding blonde highlights to her hair, she spurns the advances of the English Captain Lockert, carries on an intense friendship with the Italian Captain Gioserro, and takes the Jewish playboy Arnold Israel as her lover before finally, and most seriously, asking Sam for a divorce so that she can marry a German count, Kurt von Obersdorf. As Fran explains, each of these relationships is really Sam’s fault, since he has failed to be sufficiently interested in her happiness. Bereft of his “child” Fran by her pursuit of Kurt, Sam turns to drinking too much and to a brief, liberating affair with a courtesan before finding his true mate, Edith Cortright, a companionable divorcee who shares his dream of travel, and building something substantial once more. After Kurt’s family forbids their marriage because Fran is too old to bear children, she summons Sam and tries to reestablish their relationship invoking the sanctity

of the marriage she had previously been eager to dissolve, but Sam for once puts his life before Fran’s and returns to Edith in Italy. Like Henry James and Edith WHARTON before him, Lewis is more interested in exposing his Americans to the social systems of Europe than in cataloguing the details of their travels, but his attitude is ambivalent. For example, in his internal monologues Sam, like the narrative voice, admires European architecture but notes also the European disdain for work (but not for money) and for the Americans who worship both. Other differences between Europe and America are debated liberally and often—for Dorothy Parker, reviewing the novel in 1929, too often: “For weeks, it seems, [his characters] argue the relative merits of the old world and the new; no one ever falters, no one ever searches for a phrase, no one, God help us all, ever stops” (Parker, 524). But the real thrust of the arguments in a book structured by its arguments and its landscapes is not the old world versus the new but the distribution of power in relationships between men and women. A key and often-cited argument at a dinner party in the last half of the book lays out the terms of the conflict. As Sam defends America, Fran, failing to silence him, announces that American women are unhappy because “there’s no woman living, no real normal woman, who doesn’t want a husband who can beat her . . . She must feel that his work, or his beautiful lack of work, is more important than she is” (253). Praising European husbands who restrict their wives’ freedom because “the wife is a part” of the family and tradition, she blames American husbands for their preoccupation with business, which gives wives a false sense of freedom. Her argument recalls one voiced at a similar dinner party in Edith Wharton’s The CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY (1913). Lewis’s point is not merely to expose Fran’s hypocrisy or to undercut her fallacious argument, for her bullying of the far more sympathetic Sam has already destroyed her credibility for the reader; instead, he attempts to reframe the “two cultures” argument as a flaw inherent in the American industrial system and the separate gendered spheres that have arisen to serve it. Reviewers at the time faulted Dodsworth for its inconsistent characterization of Sam, whose reactions

DOERR, HARRIET 367

were at times more like those of Babbitt than of a Yaleeducated industrialist, but even Parker praised the bittersweet ending. Some, like Lewis’s friend H. L. Mencken of the American Mercury, found Sam’s devotion to the self-absorbed Fran inconceivable, but in her obsession with youth, beauty, and European culture, Fran was for most readers a recognizable, even uncomfortably realistic caricature of a type of American woman of the era. It is for these portraits that Dodsworth is remembered today.

SOURCES Augspurger, Michael. “Sinclair Lewis’ Primers for the Professional Managerial Class: Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth,” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 34, no. 2 (2001): 73–97. Hutchisson, James M., ed. Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. ———. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. Penn State Series in the History of the Book. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Lewis, Sinclair. Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1929. Parker, Dorothy. “And Again, Mr. Sinclair Lewis.” Review of Dodsworth. New Yorker, March 16, 1929. Reprinted in The Viking Portable Dorothy Parker, 522–525. New York: Viking, 1973. Parry, Sally E. “Dodsworth and World So Wide: Sinclair Lewis’s European/American Dilemma.” In Sinclair Lewis at 100: Papers Presented at a Centennial Conference, edited by Michael Connaughton, 27–34. St. Cloud, Minn.: St. Cloud State University, 1985. Puzon, Bridget. “From Quest to Cure: The Transformation of Dodsworth,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 31, no. 3 (1985): 573–580. Williams, James. “Gopher Prairie or Prairie Style? Wright and Wharton Help Dodsworth Find His Way Home.” In Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, edited by James M. Hutchisson, 125–146. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Donna Campbell

DOERR, HARRIET (1910–2002) Harriet Doerr wrote her first novel, Stones for Ibarra (1984), at the age of 73; it won the 1984 American Book Award and the 1985 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award. Her second novel, Consider This, Senora (1993), was another commercial and critical success. In both novels, the swift passing of time

looms large, as does the central significance of wisdom and memory. Doerr also published Under an Aztec Sun (1990), a short story collection, and Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions (1995), a story and essay collection. Born in Pasadena, California, in 1910, Doerr was the granddaughter of Henry Edwards Huntington, the railroad magnate whose estate now includes the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Doerr matriculated at Smith College in 1927, transferred to Stanford University the following year, then left to marry Albert Edward Doerr, an engineer, on November 15, 1930. After his death in 1972, Doerr returned to Stanford and earned her bachelor’s degree in 1977. Stones for Ibarra is set in Mexico, a country where Doerr and her husband had lived for a number of years. In spare but highly original, often memorably lyrical prose, she writes of the experiences of American expatriates and their Mexican counterparts. Here, Sara and Richard Everton move to Mexico from California, where they learned that Richard has leukemia and that his years are limited. They decide to settle into the small town of Ibarra and to experience the “foreignness” of their neighbors as well as the universality of their moods, tragedies, births, and deaths. Their heightened sense of time gives both of them, especially Sara, a vividly rendered sense of individual people and individual moments. For instance, when Richard dies, the villagers bring stones for remembrance. The book was later turned into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie starring Glenn Close. Doerr’s other novel, Consider This, Senora, extends the ideas of the first, examining the ideas of life, death, and fate through the perspective of Sue Ames. She is an artist who has left her husband and who joins Bud Loomis, an American businessman, in a real estate venture in Amapolas. Other characters in the novel buy land from Ames and Loomis, learn to appreciate the cultural differences, and to live their lives at a less frenetic pace. Harriet Doerr died of complications from a broken hip, on December 5, 2002. Her papers are housed in the Department of Special Collections in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University.

368 DOG SOLDIERS

NOVELS Consider This, Senora. New York: Harcourt, 1993. Stones for Ibarra. New York: Viking, 1984.

SOURCES Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine U. Henderson. “Harriet Doerr.” In Interview: Talks with America’s Writing Women, 163–169. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. York, Pat. Going Strong. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991.

DOG

SOLDIERS ROBERT

STONE (1974)

Robert STONE’s second novel, Dog Soldiers, is, on the surface, a fictional account of the impact of the Vietnam War on the American psyche. It also stretches beyond this to examine the violence endemic in American culture so that the war becomes a metaphor for internal national conflict. It won the National Book Award and was later adapted to film as Who’ll Stop the Rain? in 1978, which starred Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld. The epigraph of Dog Soldiers is drawn from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and acts as a knowing allusion to the disastrous effects of colonial power. These effects are extended by Stone to encompass the site of war as well as the United States. Because of this, the war becomes a figurative means to describe the breakdown of both the American psyche and society. This examination of how the violence in Vietnam is reflected in the United States is brought about through the plot of smuggling heroin from Vietnam to California. John Converse and Ray Hicks are the central protagonists who organize and attempt to carry out this plan. State-approved violence in the war highlights the earliest stages of the novel. Converse has been working as a journalist in Vietnam (as did Stone), and the theme of fear is introduced through his characterization: “It was the medium through which he perceived his own soul” (Stone, 42). Through his involvement with bringing heroin into the country, Converse is drawn out of his depth, as a writer who has been emasculated in war and at home. The decision to smuggle drugs back home, via his wife, Marge, is conceived initially as an adventure, but it is the involvement of crooked narcotic agents that precipitates the violence on home soil that culminates in the death of Hicks. This death, and Converse’s emasculation and desire for

adventure also act as warnings against violence on macro and micro levels. The novel progressively explores how the backdrop of Vietnam symbolizes the erosion of values in the United States. Critic Frank W. Shelton develops the point that Stone portrays the Vietnam War as revealing rather than causing internal conflict in the United States: “Stone presents a mirror for our times: a time when corruption seems omnipresent, action is futile, human fellow feeling is dead—when peace or happiness can only come through either drugs or death” (Shelton, 81). This nihilism sets the tone of the novel. No solutions are offered to soften the descriptions of selfishness and corruption. In addition, Tony Hilfer points out how Stone uses the realist novel to bring the war “home,” and describes Dog Soldiers as “. . . one of several Stone novels that use adventure story plots to examine the causes and consequences of the American penchant for violence” (Hilfer, 186). By using realism, Stone is able to engender a sense of reality into situations that could be regarded as preposterous. It consequently exposes the lie of the American dream, which appears to be understood as individualistic rather than communal. It is with the character of Hicks in particular that the reader is able to trace a direct (rather than symbolic) attack on American culture as he attempts to flee from the narcotic agents. He remembers his childhood in a Salvation Army women’s shelter and attending training school, which is described as a recruiting ground for the marines (326). This glance at Hicks’s childhood is an indictment of the cycle that raises boy children to be violent and occurs only in the final pages. It is arguably all the more powerful as, up to this stage, little has been revealed about any of the characters’ lives outside the initial frames of reference for piecing together their relationships with each other. On a sociohistoric level, Hicks’s brutal upbringing can be associated with his country’s participation in war and, more locally, with the willingness to destroy others. Stone utilizes current events and culture at the time of writing as a frame of reference for the novel. The early 1970s and the influence of the 1960s are addressed in the novel’s depiction of counterculture going awry. It does so by highlighting the demise of the idealized chal-

DOGEATERS 369

lenge to the establishment that had formed in the Civil Rights movement and antiwar protests. Ideals are described as being redundant, and it is through Marge that this sense of loss and waste is most clearly seen, when she becomes addicted to the heroin they hope to sell. This lack of hope is further exemplified in the breakdown of Dieter’s commune, where Hicks had previously lived when idealism was still possible. As Shelton argues, “the primary reason for its failure was what Dieter calls his succumbing to the American Dream” (Shelton, 79). This failure is entangled with the novel’s overriding premise that continuously demonstrates how individualism underpins conflict. The violence that Marge, Hicks, and Converse become involved in reflects the breakdown of certainties in their own society; the heroin they have smuggled becomes a metaphor for the influence of colonialism on the colonial power as well as on Vietnam, the colonized. Maureen Karagueuzian argues that the parallel between both countries is “complete” when, at the end of the novel, Converse leaves the heroin for the agents with “a white flag of Kleenex” (66). His surrender mimics the one at national level to the war, but it also signifies the renunciation of hope that has colored Dog Soldiers from the outset.

SOURCES Hilfer, Tony. American Fiction since 1940. London: Longman, 1992. Karagueuzian, Maureen. “Irony in Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 24, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 65–73. Shelton, Frank W. “Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 24, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 74–81. Stone, Robert. Dog Soldiers. Boston: Houghton, 1974. Julie L. Ellam

DOGEATERS JESSICA HAGEDORN (1990)

HAGEnovel takes place late in the Philippine dictator Marcos’s regime. She gathers a host of varied characters whose lives converge purposefully and accidentally in the midst of family feuds, political intrigue, assassination, and rebellion. One of the central characters, Rio Gonzaga, is a teenager living in the United States, who remembers her childhood in the Philippines with both DORN’s

nostalgia and antipathy. She lived a life of privilege but is keenly aware that belonging to the upper class includes unpleasant realities such as corrupt relatives and toadies. The other major character, Joey Sands, comes from the other end of the class spectrum; he is the son of a prostitute and an African-American soldier. Joey lives with “Uncle,” a vicious, crafty criminal, who raises Joey and other orphans to be delinquents or worse. Joey becomes a hustler, who strips and prostitutes himself to Western men. Both characters are painfully aware of the effect colonialism and corruption have on their lives. Rio and Joey never quite belong to their families, classes, or lifestyles. The two characters are cynical but not devoid of hope. They are able to revise their identities after experiencing the worst their culture offers them. Rio is able to recount what was good about her childhood in the Philippines only after her move to the United States. Her story begins as she and her boycrazy cousin Pucha go the movies. The girls are fascinated with anything American, especially Hollywood films. They are also both mestizas, girls of Spanish descent. This “white blood” is desired among upperclass Filipino clans, as it makes them seem more Western. Rio’s mother, Delores, is an American, and this allows Rio to return with her to the United States after her mother’s divorce from Freddie Gonzaga, a womanizing businessman. Although in the Philippines the Gonzagas were high society, with Delores occupying her time gossiping with her dressmaker, entertaining ambassadors and their wives, or competing with matrons from the other prominent Manila families for the attentions of the president and the First Lady, Rio largely disdained her mother’s lifestyle and love of all things frilly. Even after many years in the United States, Pucha keeps Rio connected to the Philippines and when she eventually visits her family and childhood home, she realizes how much she missed her family and, though flawed, how important they are to her. Hagedorn explores a much darker side with Joey. While a deejay at a Manila nightclub, Joey gets involved with a German director attending Manila’s first International Film Festival. The director Rainer maintains Joey in privilege as long as Joey stays with him for the weeklong festival. On the day Rainer is to leave Manila, he and Joey have breakfast at a hotel.

370 DOIG, IVAN

Joey decides to steal a bag full of money and drugs from Rainer as an American journalist approaches the director for an interview. As Joey leaves with the cache, he witnesses the brutal assassination of Senator Domingo Avila, a politician critical of the president’s regime. His assailants are unknown, but Joey knows that he could be implicated. He runs to Uncle, who he discovers is eager to betray him. Joey escapes and hides with one of his club friends, Boy-Boy, a stripper with a secret agenda, who arranges to have “friends” help Joey escape from Manila. He is taken to the mountains where he becomes a rebel, joining, among others, the daughter of the assassinated Senator Avila, Daisy, who was tortured by her father’s half-brother General Nicasio Ledesma, and Daisy’s cousin Clarita, an activist artist, and critic of the government. The nationalist group becomes his family. Dogeaters traces Rio’s and Joey’s development. Interspersed through their life stories are a collage of fictionalized news stories of politics, murders, and gossip. Hagedorn also includes quotes from real historical documents, such as McKinley’s 1898 Address to Methodist Churchmen and Jean Mallat’s anthropological account The Philippines (1846).

SOURCE Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York: Penguin, 1990. Patricia J. Nebruda

DOIG, IVAN (1939– ) Ivan Doig, the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, received a National Book Award nomination and a Christopher Award for his memoir, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind in 1979. All of Doig’s novels are either set in his native Montana or feature a Montana character. He is often compared with and viewed as the successor to Wallace STEGNER not only in his evocation of region but in his concern for the American land and its wildernesses. In creating an area called “Two Medicine” (or “Scotch Heaven”) he earns comparisons with William FAULKNER and his Yoknapatawpha country. Ivan Doig was born on June 27, 1939, in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, to Charles Campbell Doig, a ranch worker, and Berneta Ringer Doig. His mother died from heart failure when he was six years old and

he was raised mainly by his father and Bessie Ringer, his maternal grandmother. He chronicled these years in both This House of Sky and its sequel, Heart Dreams. He was educated at Northwestern University, earning bachelor’s (1961) and master’s (1962) degrees in journalism, and at the University of Washington, earning his doctorate in history in 1969. He married Carol Dean Muller, a professor, in 1965, and served for six years in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Like Mark TWAIN or Ernest HEMINGWAY, Doig credited his journalism background with providing a sound basis for his fiction writing; he published The Sea Runners in 1982. It is a mid-19th-century historical novel based on the actual story of four Swedes indentured to the Russian Fur Company in Alaska; they escape the harsh conditions and head to Astoria, Oregon. One Swede is killed by Indians and one drowns. English Creek, the first of Doig’s trilogy about the McCaskill family, is set in pre–World War II Two Medicine country and features 15-year-old narrator Jick McCaskill. Doig tells family stories that critics praise for their historical view, realistic evocation of the West, humor, and artistic presentation. Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), the second in the trilogy, recreates the experiences of Angus McCaskill, the original homesteader who arrived in Two Medicine country in 1899, and takes the reader through Montana’s 1889 entry into the United States. The novel ends just after World War I during the flu epidemic of 1919; much of the tension and conflict in the novel arises from Angus’s passionate love for Anna Ramsay, who marries someone else. The concluding novel, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990), again narrated by the now widowed Jick McCaskill, looks back to his travels throughout Montana with his daughter Mariah and her husband at the time, Riley Wright. Jick learns more about his ancestry through old letters, delivers Montana’s centennial address, and gives his ranch to the Nature Conservancy so that buffalo can be protected. When reviewing Doig’s 1996 novel, Bucking the Sun, critics and readers noted the bleak nature of the tale, which begins with a double murder of an unmarried man and woman, both known only by the same last name: Duff. They are emblematic of the lives of ordinary westerners during the Great Depression year 1938. Mountain Time (1999) features

DOLLMAKER, THE 371

Montana lovers Mitch Rozier and Lexa McCaskill, Seattle professionals who have returned to Montana. Ivan Doig’s most recent novel, Prairie Nocturne (2003) features Susan Duff of Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Here, in Helena, Montana, the flu epidemic, the war, and the Ku Klux Klan intersect. Doig received the Western Heritage Award in 1985 for English Creek; a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association; six Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards for Literary Excellence; four Montana Governor’s awards; and an Evans Biography Award in 1993 for Heart Earth, based on his mother’s letters. Doig and his wife, Carole, live in Seattle, Washington. Shoreline Community College in Seattle, and the University of Washington Libraries, both in Seattle, house collections of Doig’s papers.

NOVELS Bucking the Sun. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Dancing at the Rascal Fair. New York: Atheneum, 1987. English Creek. New York: Atheneum, 1984. Heart Earth. New York: Atheneum, 1993. Mountain Time: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 1999. Prairie Nocturne. New York: Scribner, 2003. Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. New York: Atheneum, 1990. The Sea Runners. New York: Atheneum, 1982.

SOURCES Bevis, William. “Doig’s House of Sky.” In Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West, edited by William Bevis, 161–170. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. Bredahl, A. Carl, Jr. “Ivan Doig.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Thomas J. Lyon et al. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989. ———. “Valuing Surface: The Imagination of Ivan Doig.” In New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon, 135–146. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Morris, Gregory L. Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, 65–80. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. O’Connell, Nicholas. At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers, 296–306. Seattle, Wash.: Madrona, 1987. Rankin, Charles E. “Thoughts on Wallace Stegner.” In Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer, edited by Stuart L. Udall, Charles E. Rankin, and William E. Farr, 35–38. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Robbins, William G. “The Historian as Literary Craftsman: The West of Ivan Doig,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 78 (October 1987): 134–140.

Simonson, Harold Press. Beyond the Frontier: Writer, Western Regionalism, and a Sense of Place. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1989. Simpson, Elizabeth. Earthlight, Wordfire: The Work of Ivan Doig. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1992.

OTHER Lamberson, Carolyn. “Revisiting Old Friends,” Review of Prairie Nocturne, Register-Guard (Eugene, Oreg.; September 28, 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/ library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:110173805. Accessed June 22, 2005.

DOLLMAKER, THE HARRIETTE ARNOW (1954) Preceded by Mountain Path (1936) and Hunter’s Horn (1949), The Dollmaker is the final novel in ARNOW’s Kentucky Trilogy. It remained on the best-seller list for 31 weeks, edging out William FAULKNER’s A Fable and Eudora WELTY’s The PONDER HEART to tie for best novel of the year in the Saturday Review’s national critics’ poll, and was runner-up to A Fable for the National Book Award. Nearly 15 years later, novelist and critic Joyce Carol OATES was so moved by The Dollmaker that she stated in the New York Times that “criticism seems almost irrelevant” for such a “masterpiece” (Oates, 57). The novel details the journey of Gertie Nevels and her family from their hardscrabble existence in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky to the defense plants in Detroit during World War II. The Detroit scenes of the novel suggest an affinity between Arnow and such earlier writers as Rebecca Harding DAVIS, Upton SINCLAIR, and Tillie OLSEN, all of whom wrote about the horrendous plight of urban workers. As numerous critics point out, Arnow’s portrait of Gertie, a woman of Amazonian proportions with the accompanying physical and psychological strength, reached the American public in an era when strong images of women were almost nonexistent. In the opening chapters of the novel, set in Kentucky, Gertie’s uncommon courage and character are immediately apparent: Since her husband is absent and her infant son Amos is in danger of dying from diphtheria, Gertie sets out to carry the baby 15 or 20 miles over muddy and mountainous terrain to reach a doctor. When she sees a car carrying an army officer and enlisted man, she stops it, pleads with them to take her, hurls herself and Amos into the backseat,

372 DOLLMAKER, THE

pulls out a knife, and performs a crude tracheotomy on the child. The boy lives. The difference between Gertie and her husband Clovis becomes apparent later in the novel when he cannot bring himself to look at the awful wound on Amos’s throat. In these chapters, too, we learn that Gertie has her own version of the American dream: longing for her own land, she wants the Tipton Place, a farm that she is able to buy when her brother Henley is killed in battle. The money he leaves her, coupled with the money she has hoarded for years, gives her enough to realize her dream. At the Tipton Place, Gertie will be able to raise her children, make a living, remain close to her father, and commune with nature, which she also loves in an almost transcendentalist way (Eckley, 90). Gertie has nothing to do with organized religion, but derives spiritual strength from gazing at the stars or drinking fresh spring water, “cold with faint tastes of earth and iron and moss and the roots of trees” (76–77). Gertie’s happiness and self-sufficiency in the absence of her husband Clovis, who she believes has been drafted into the army, is evident in her statement to the storekeeper, Mrs. Hull: “I reckon I’ll have to be the man in this settlement” (97). She easily swings a 100pound sack of feed across her shoulders. Unfortunately, the dreams of this thoughtful, intelligent, and talented woman are doomed. She learns that Clovis’s induction into the army has been delayed, and that he has moved to Detroit where he has long hoped to find work in a munitions plant. The weak and self-centered Clovis is very much like Gertie’s unloved mother, but Gertie sees no recourse. She sells the Tipton Place and takes the children to Detroit. Detroit, as nearly every reader and critic of this novel has noted, is Arnow’s version of hell; moreover, it closely resembles the fiery pit about which Gertie’s narrowly religious mother and her friend, the preacher Battle John Brand, keep warning Gertie. Clovis, Gertie, and the five children settle into the tiny three-bedroom tenement apartment on Detroit’s ironically named Merry Hill and, like other literary families before them—John STEINBECK’s Joads, for instance—realize that Detroit is not the Promised Land. Three of the children—Clytie, Enoch, and even little Amos—adjust

to city living, meaning that they become corrupted. Clytie listens to soap operas and becomes sexually aware at a young age, and Enoch becomes a cynical, streetwise urchin who enjoys getting into fights. Reuben, on the other hand, is so miserable that he finally runs away from home, returning to Kentucky where, as his mother acknowledges to herself, he can at least maintain his individuality. The saddest and most emotionally moving scene in the novel regards Cassie, whose imaginary friend Callie Lou is her counterpart to her mother’s carving of dolls. Callie Lou has prevented Cassie from feeling lonely and has provided the companionship without which she might not have survived the move to the city. In a weak moment, however, Gertie tells Cassie that Callie Lou really does not exist. Too late, she realizes her mistake: in seeking a private place for herself and Callie Lou, Cassie, while playing on the train tracks, is violently killed by a railroad boxcar and dies in her mother’s arms. In the final chapters, after the death of her daughter, Cassie, Gertie shows herself capable of adapting (Lee 98), unpleasant as the process proves to be. She adds to the family income by using her wood-carving talent to create and sell dolls. After her husband uses her whittling knife to kill a man in a brawl (the wrong man, as it transpires, not the man who had insulted and beaten him), Gertie adapts an automated tool, a jigsaw, to mass-produce her dolls. Even though she knows she will never realize her dream, which was to carve the face of Christ on the fine Kentucky cherry that she brought with her, or return to Tipton Place, Gertie learns that in the midst of the noise and the grime and the poverty of the factories and the tenements, in the midst of the name-calling and religious prejudices, there exist those who exude goodness and generosity. Critics disagree over the meaning of the scene in which Gertie finally and symbolically splits her piece of cherry wood: does her action signify capitulation or adaptation? In critic Wilton Eckley’s view, “she does not destroy her Christ, but brings him alive—for he cannot be abstracted or fixed; He must live in people” (Eckley, 100). Woven into Arnow’s unflinching realism is the human sense of continued possibility and hope.

DONALD DUK 373

SOURCES Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Chung, Haeja K., ed. Harriette Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Eckley, Wilton. Harriette Arnow. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Green, Amy. “Harriette Simpson Arnow: Overview.” In Feminist Writers, edited by Pamela Kester-Shelton. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1996. Lee, Dorothy. “Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker: A Journey to Awareness,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 20, no. 2 (1978): 92–98. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Joyce Carol Oates on Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker.” In Rediscoveries, edited by David Madden, 57–67. New York: Crown, 1971.

DONALD DUK FRANK CHIN (1991) In pioneering playwright and polemicist Frank CHIN’s first novel, Donald Duk, the 12-year-old eponymous protagonist, Donald, lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown and suffers from a severe case of ethnic self-hatred. He is embarrassed and ashamed by all things Chinese—his family, his neighborhood, his culture, and most of all, his name—and wishes he could escape into the blackand-white films of Fred Astaire, Donald’s hero and imaginary friend. Although Chin has previously decried Asian-American writers and novels that deal with themes of identity crisis, he apparently changed his mind and decided to write a narrative focused on a Chinese-American boy’s coming-of-age and coming to terms with his Asian–ethnic American identity. Chin weaves characters, allusions, and tropes from classical Chinese literature, American pop culture, 18th-century British literature, and the history of the American West into this novel, as the omniscient narrator charts the journey that Donald undertakes to discover his manhood and his heritage. The novel opens on the eve of the Chinese lunar New Year celebrations, and this year marks Donald’s first full lunar cycle. In honor of this momentous event, King Duk, Donald’s father, has arranged for Donald’s namesake, his Uncle Donald Duk, to perform a special opera featuring Kwan Kung, the god of war and literature. Donald’s adventures begin when he is caught by his Uncle Donald burning one of the 108

model airplanes that his father is building in commemoration of the upcoming New Year. Previously, Donald’s knowledge about the Chinese in America was limited to the negative stereotypes that his history teacher, Mr. Meanwright, inculcated in the minds of all his students: that Chinese are passive, noncompetitive, and in Donald’s words “chickendick” (3). However, when Uncle Donald introduces him to his family’s history and their role in building the transcontinental railroad, Donald is forced to re-evaluate history and his disparaging opinion of the Chinese. During the two-week celebration of the Chinese lunar New Year, Donald experiences a series of dreams along with a series of cultural experiences that enable him to gain an appreciation of his ethnic identity and his Chinese-American heritage. Dreaming about the first “Duk” who helped to build the transcontinental railroad by working for the Central Pacific company, Donald embodies the spirit and character of his ancestor in his dream. He witnesses Chinese-American history in the making: the backbreaking labor of the Chinese tracklayers, the historic tracklaying contest won by the Chinese laborers, and the exclusion of Chinese Americans in American textbooks and history books. Along with the lessons he learns in his dreams, Donald also becomes educated about both classical Chinese icons, like the 108 outlaw heroes of the Water Margin, and about Chinese-American culture, such as Uncle’s Café, a mainstay of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Accompanying Donald in both his waking and dream adventures are his mother, Daisy Duk, his twin sisters, Venus and Penelope, a pair of indigent Chinese sisters, the Frog twins, and his best friend, Arnold Azalea, a rich white boy who proves to be a valuable ally for Donald in his coming-of-age. But it is particularly through the lessons of King Duk, successful restaurateur, talented chef, renowned opera performer, local model-plane hobbyist, and repository of all Chinese and Chinese-American cultural knowledge, that Donald gains pride in his heritage. By embracing three different role models, his father, the foreman of his dreams, Kwan, and the god of war and literature, Kwan Kung, Donald rejects the stereotype of the effeminate Chinese coolies that his history teacher and popular culture have promoted. At the end of the

374 DONLEAVY, J. P.

novel, Donald has replaced Fred Astaire with Kwan Kung and celebrates his first lunar year cycle in the midst of his family and friends, finally accepting his place in Chinatown as a Chinese-American boy who is proud to be a Duk.

SOURCES Cheung, King-Kok. “Of Men and Men: Reconstructing Chinese American Masculinity.” In Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color, edited by Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, 173–199. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Chin, Frank. “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake.” In The Big Aiiieeeee! edited by J. Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, 1–92. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. ———. Donald Duk. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1991. Eng, David. “I’ve Been (Re)Working on the Railroad: Photography and National History in China Men and Donald Duk.” In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “The Remasculinization of Chinese America: Race, Violence, and the Novel,” American Literary History 12 (2000): 130–157. Fung, Eileen Chia-Ching. “ ‘To Eat the Flesh of His Dead Mother’: Hunger, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Frank Chin’s Donald Duk,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 10 (1999): 255–274. Richardson, Susan B. “The Lessons of Donald Duk,” MELUS 24 (1999): 57–76.

OTHER Goldstein-Shirley, David. “ ‘The Dragon Is a Lantern’: Frank Chin’s Counter-Hegemonic Donald Duk,” 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies 6 (2000). Available online. URL: http://www.49thparallel. bham.ac.uk/back/issue6/goldsteinshirley.htm. Accessed June 22, 2005. Jennifer Ho

DONLEAVY, (1926–

J(AMES)

P(ATRICK)

) An American expatriate author who

wrote his most famous novel, THE GINGER MAN, in 1955, J. P. Donleavy was further honored when this novel was included in the Scribner Top 100 Books of the Twentieth Century. Virtually all 14 of his novels, along with a large number of plays and essays and a collection of short fiction—derive from the English picaresque tra-

dition with its comic and often bawdy overtones. Donleavy’s work features rebellious protagonists madly fleeing conventionality and leading lustful, amusing lives that are, ultimately, lonely and marginalized. J. P. Donleavy was born on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York, to James Patrick Donleavy and Margaret Donleavy, both Irish immigrants. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II; both his marriages, to Valerie Heron and Mary Wilson Price, ended in divorce. Donleavy became an expatriate while attending Trinity College from 1946 to 1949, published The Ginger Man in 1955, and became an Irish citizen in 1967. The novel was hailed as a postmodern masterpiece that placed Donleavy alongside such post–World War II experimental writers as Saul BELLOW and Thomas PYNCHON. The novel, deemed outrageous and obscene by some early critics, features the audacious Sebastian Dangerfield, married law student, charmer, pub devotee, and womanizer extraordinaire. Donleavy followed with A Singular Man (1963) and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966), both of which depict iconoclastic figures unable to reconcile themselves to the modern American world. In the first, the Howard Hughes figure, George Smith, barricades himself in his fabulously wealthy estate, and in the second, Samuel S tries psychoanalysis in an unsuccessful attempt to become more ordinary. In The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), a young French nobleman is featured in an antitraditional coming-of-age story; he finds that love is difficult to find, loneliness a way of life. The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman (1977) blends an 18th-century picaresque tale with a modern one as Darcy Dancer tries and fails at love; its sequel is Leila (1983). The Onion Eaters (1971) seemed to ratchet up the scandalous and oversexed nature of the characters, presenting Clayton Claw Cleaver Clementine, the sexually overendowed protagonist of this absurdist, surrealistic comedy. A Fairy Tale of New York (1973) is the written version of Donleavy’s successful play, centering on Cornelius Christian, assumed by most readers to be Donleavy’s alter-ego, who expresses his creator’s disenchantment with the United States. Schultz (1979) continues to portray Donleavy’s madcap, womanizing protagonists, this time as a JewishAmerican theatrical producer; its sequel, Are You

DON QUIXOTE: WHICH WAS A DREAM

Listening, Rabbi Loew?, followed in 1987. Leila describes the way the title character is, typically, attracted to another man, leaving Darcy in the lurch. The sequel to Leila, That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman (1990), finally reunites the pair in the only happy ending in a Donleavy novel. Recently, Donleavy has written some New York–based novels, The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms: The Chronicle of One of the Strangest Stories Ever to Be Rumored About Around New York (1997), and Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton (1998). J. P. Donleavy lives and writes at his 200-acre estate in County Westmeath, Ireland. On the basis of The Ginger Man, and some of his later novels, Donleavy has developed a cult following.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Are You Listening, Rabbi Loew? New York: Viking, 1987. The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1968. The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman. Illustrations by Jim Campbell. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1977. A Fairy Tale of New York. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. The Ginger Man. Paris, France: Olympia Press, 1955. The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms: The Chronicle of One of the Strangest Stories Ever to Be Rumored About Around New York. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Leila: Further in the Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1983. The Onion Eaters. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1971. The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1966. Schultz. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1979. A Singular Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman. New York: Viking, 1990. Wrong Information Is Being Given Out at Princeton. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1998.

SOURCES Alsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties. London: Owen, 1958. Cohen, Dean. “The Evolution of Donleavy’s Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 12 (1970): 95–109. Corrigan, Robert A. “The Artist as Censor: J. P. Donleavy and The Ginger Man,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 8 (Spring 1967): 60–72. Donleavy, J. P. Donleavy’s Ireland: In All Her Sins and in Some of Her Graces. New York: Viking, 1986.

375

———. The History of the Ginger Man. Boston: Houghton, 1994. ———. A Singular Country. Peterborough, England: Ryan, 1989; New York: Norton, 1990. Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Johnson, John. “Tears and Laughter: The Tragic Comic Novels of J. P. Donleavy,” Michigan Academician 9 (Summer 1976): 15–24. Masinton, Charles G. “Etiquette for Ginger Man: A Critical Assessment of Donleavy’s Unexpurgated Code,” Midwest Quarterly 18 (January 1977): 210–215. ———. J. P. Donleavy: The Style of His Sadness. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975. Podhoretz, Norman. “The New Nihilism and the Novel.” In Doings and Undoings, 159–178. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. Sharma, R. K. Isolation and Protest: A Case Study of J. P. Donleavy’s Fiction. New Delhi: Ajanta, 1983; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983. Shaw, Patrick W. “The Satire of J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man,” Studies in Contemporary Satire 1 (1975): 9–16.

OTHER J. P. Donleavy Compendium. Available online. URL: http://www.jpdonleavycompendium.org/. Accessed September 3, 2005.

DON QUIXOTE: WHICH WAS A DREAM KATHY ACKER (1986) Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream along with Empire of the Senseless (1988), marks the middle point of Kathy ACKER’s short, masochistic career as a literary artist, which began after the suicide of her mother in 1974 and ended with her own premature death in 1997 from breast cancer. Like most of her work (she wrote poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, rock lyrics, and even an opera libretto), Don Quixote is filled with the same violent and sexual trademarks that highlight her own life from suicides to abortions. The story of a woman on a quest to become a knight, Don Quixote takes the reader on a mental and physical trip through the highlights of western European and American history and literature to arrive where Cervantes’s hero ends his own journey, on the road back to La Mancha. Don Quixote utilizes the valuable emotional baggage of Acker’s past decade to describe a new kind of literature: one that has since been called “punk.” Like so many of

376 DON QUIXOTE: WHICH WAS A DREAM

her literary contemporaries, for Acker, writing is not a profession, but a way of understanding and making sense of the world in which she finds herself. For Acker, writing is a therapeutic lifeline that ties her eclectic, fragile life together. And this is what makes a novel like Don Quixote so valuable: On every page, readers feel the tenuousness of the literary artifact in front of them. Because Acker is so adept at dismantling and reconfiguring language on the level of syntax and grammar, the reader comes to understand the intrinsic and delicate value of every comma and every shift in verb tense. When taken as a whole, Don Quixote is a massive reinvention of language itself, seen through the blackened eyes of its protagonist. Bordering on plagiarism, Acker follows a long line of literary terrorists such as William BURROUGHS who do not use the masterpieces of literature to justify their own position. Rather, Acker works her way through the greats of Western literature like Dante and Cervantes not to destroy them, but to recast them in a new “postmodern” way, one step beyond the project of modernism that culminated in the deification of the literary artist. Failing to grasp the extent of her postmodern quest, St. Simeon, the dog that plays the role of the practical and opportunistic Sancho Panza, reminds Don Quixote, “So if you attack those miserable moderns or modernists, knight, you’ll be making a miserable historical mistake. You will be preventing whites from hating their own whiteness” (179). Like her literary namesake, Don Quixote recasts her world in a new light, changing all that has come before her so that in her case, the female has a chance to speak for herself. As homage to arguably the greatest female modernist, Virginia Woolf, Don Quixote begins with a vision: a vision of a world where women can love. But while this seems a simple quest, Acker reveals all the logical difficulties imposed on such a quest from modernism itself, particularly the psychological theories of Freud and Nazi racial theories. The fuel for Acker’s quest narrative is the syllogism of Freudian desire, whereby love must have an object. If women are traditionally seen as the objects of love, rather than as loving subjects, then categorically, women cannot love. The novel itself is saturated with the stern and immov-

able syntax of logic and deduction in order to both emphasize the unyielding nature of the Freudian syllogism that imprisons women to men and objects to subjects and to echo the cold rhetoric of the Nazis. It is for this reason that Don Quixote decides to become a knight in search of love: to prove that the subjectobject logic of Freudian desire and Nazi eugenics fails to describe her human condition. The novel begins with both Don Quixote’s literal and figurative abortion of the unwanted baggage of patriarchy that objectifies women, which, she claims, literature itself causes (10). While this abortion will be a central theme of the entire narrative, initially the abortion serves to teach her to love herself, rather than an object. She refuses to be the kind of woman she is told to be: what male-dominated, Western literature calls a coquette, but which she fittingly calls a “bitch” (11). This patriarchy is characterized in the novel as both a character, Freston, the lying enchanter from Cervantes’ novel who is most famous for masking the “real” world of giants as an “artificial,” quotidian world of simple windmills, and as a cadre of characters she calls Religious White Men. These charlatans are not merely Don Quixote’s continual antagonists throughout the novel. They also serve as her very raison d’etre, since they alone caused her abortion in the first place, without which she would be unable to love at all. The abortion also signals Don Quixote’s own death, which is crucial for her quest. Don Quixote’s quest is to love herself and since she is a woman (and therefore, incapable of love), she must die at the outset of the novel so that the new kind of love she envisions can become possible. Her quest, then, can be seen as the lucid dream she has while bleeding out after her back alley abortion on the first page of the novel. Moreover, the novel is filled with references to leaking blood as the leaking of subjectivity, which implies that once the blood ceases to flow, the Freudian subject will be no more. As the section headings of the book corroborate, her narrative begins at “the beginning of night” and finishes at “the end of night,” and in between, we have the massive project of rewriting Western literature simply entitled “Other Texts.” This progression from death to life, then, amounts to her quest for love, a quest that can only begin once the objectified female is dead.

DORRIS, MICHAEL 377

The main raw material of Acker’s narrative—the “other texts”—then, is a transformation of a large cross-section of Western literary history into a consumable form for an already-dead heroine, encompassing such diverse literature as the love poems of Catullus, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Cervantes’s romance novel, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Andrey Biely’s St. Petersburg. Likewise, the syntax she uses to narrate this middle section of the novel mimics the initial always-alreadiness of her own death by incorporating the subjunctive mood in her verb tense, which indicates neither continuing nor completed action, but future action, action that textually speaking, will always have been. This middle section is certainly the most difficult part of the book, not only because the English language lacks a proper subjunctive tense, but also because Acker freely associates from text to text as well. It becomes a very difficult exercise to separate one transformed text from another, which indicates that the exercise itself may no longer be of any use in such a quest and indeed, such a novel. After this multilayered, Chinese-box-like portion of the text, Don Quixote is ready to engage the world for the first time as a female knight on the quest for a new kind of love. The final section of the book, while culminating in both the end of the night and the literal end of the knight, actually acts as a new beginning for the selfless female: the female who is no longer bound by the male gaze, who emerges from the dead body of the objectified woman in the back alley. In order to figure out what she wants as this new woman, Don Quixote works through the fears of modern man by experiencing them herself (she dresses in a Nazi uniform and violates an innocent girl). But rather than prescribing what she wants based on the experience of modern man, Don Quixote instead aims in the opposite direction, happy with whatever that direction may be. Walking through the same dark wood of Dante’s pilgrim, she boldly refigures Descartes’s maxim for herself: “In the beginning of me, I am. Therefore I am” (179). As she heads down the road with her old horse Rocinante by her side, she realizes that there are no more stories and no more memories, only herself, drunk with the new purpose of what this other world will bring (207).

SOURCES Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Freidman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Pitchford, Nicola. “Flogging a Dead Language: Identity, Politics, Sex, and the Freak Reader in Acker’s Don Quixote,” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 1 (2000). Brent M. Blackwell

DOOLITTLE, HILDA

See H. D.

DORRIS, MICHAEL (MICHAEL ANTHONY DORRIS) (1945–1997) Founder of the Native American Studies Department at Dartmouth College and collaborator, with his wife, the writer Louise ERDRICH, Michael Dorris was a respected novelist, essayist, short-fiction writer, and memoirist before his suicide in 1997. Author of 14 books and more than 100 articles, he is best known for his first novel, A YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER (1987), and for A Broken Cord: A Family’s Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (1989), his nonfiction account of his adopted son’s struggle with that disorder. This memoir brought the syndrome to national attention; it won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was produced for television in 1992 by Universal Television and ABC-TV; Jimmy Smits starred as Dorris’s son. Although Dorris and Erdrich noted that they collaborated on all their books, their names appear together only on the novel The Crown of Columbus, and on Route Two and Back, a travel narrative, both published in 1991. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water received enthusiastic reviews. Winner of a 1988 best book citation from the National Library Association, the novel is studied in numerous American literature courses. Set in Montana and Washington, it chronicles the complex family relationships of three Native American women: Rayona, also of African-American and European-American parentage; her mother, Christine; and her grandmother Ida, whose preference for being called “Aunt Ida” constitutes one of many family secrets. Dorris’s fiction deals with mixed-blood characters in search of their identity, and consciously avoids the

378 DORRIS, MICHAEL

old stereotypes that have isolated Native Americans. He also wrote fiction for children and young adults, and edited, with Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Mary Gloyne, A Guide to Research on North American Indians (1983). Michael Dorris was born on January 30, 1945, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jim Dorris, a member of the Modoc tribe, and Mary Besy Burkhardt Dorris, of Irish and French extraction. His father, an army lieutenant, was killed in a car accident when Dorris was two years old, and Dorris was raised by his mother, grandmothers, and aunts. He was educated at Georgetown University, where he graduated in 1967 cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy at Yale in 1970. He married Louise Erdrich in 1983, and they published several short stories under the pseudonym Milou North, a combination of their first names and the word “North” referring to their New Hampshire location. Dorris’s second novel, The Crown of Columbus, follows two Dartmouth professors—Roger Williams, a tenured white American poet, and Vivian Twostar, part Coeur d’Alene, Navajo, Irish, and Hispanic— seeking new perspectives on Christopher Columbus. In the course of their research they uncover the sources of numerous myths and misnomers; indeed, the novel becomes an academic satire and an Indian version of American history. His last novel, Cloud Chamber (1977), reintroduces Rayona and the extended families of A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and traces her history back to her great great grandmother in 19th-century Ireland. Dorris also published a well-received collection of short stories, Working Men, in 1993. When Michael Dorris committed suicide by mixing vodka with pills buried in tapioca pudding, he was in the process of a divorce, and his reputation had been clouded by allegations of child abuse. As Newsweek writer Brad Stone notes, “Dorris and Erdrich were probably America’s best-known literary couple,” and notes Erdrich’s refusal to criticize him: “Erdrich simply says, ‘The be-all of our relationship is that I loved him, he loved me and we had children, and that’s how it is’ ” (Stone). Dorris’s literary legacy will rest on his three novels.

NOVELS Cloud Chamber. New York: Scribner, 1997. The Crown of Columbus with Louise Erdrich. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. New York: Holt, 1987.

SOURCES Bevis, William. “Native American Novels: Homing In.” In Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 580–620. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Coltelli, Laura. “Interviews with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” In Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine”: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 155–160. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Dorris, Michael. A Conversation with Michael Dorris. Interview by Daniel Bourne. Artful Dodge 30–31 (1996): 20–32. Erdrich, Louise. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. ———. “Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” Interview by Kay Bonetti. In Conversations with American Novelists: The Best Interviews from the Missouri Review and the American Audio Prose Library, edited by Kay Bonetti, Greg Michalson, et al., 76–91. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997. Matchie, Thomas. “Exploring the Meaning of Discovery in The Crown of Columbus,” North Dakota Quarterly 69 (Fall 1991): 243–250. Milne, Kirsty. “Sins of Mothers . . . and Fathers,” in New Statesman & Society (September 7, 1990): 44. Owens, Louis. “Erdrich and Dorris’ Mixedbloods and Multiple Narratives.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, 192–224. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Pollitt, Katha. “ ‘Fetal Rights’: A New Assault on Feminism,” Nation, 26 March 1990, pp. 409–418. Robins, Barbara K. “Michael (Anthony) Dorris.” In Dictionary of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 417–422. New York: Garland, 1994. Rosenberg, Ruth. A Teacher’s Guide to A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Jacksonville, Ill.: PermaBound, 1994. Stange, Margit. “The Broken Self: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Native American Selfhood.” In Body Politics: Disease, Desire, and the Family, edited by Michael Ryan and Avery Gordon, 126–136. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993. Weil, Ann. Michael Dorris. Austin, Texas: Raintree SteckVaughn: 1997. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. “Interviews with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” In Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine”: A

DOS PASSOS, JOHN 379

Casebook, 107–112. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

OTHER Rawson, Josie. “A Broken Life: Literary Saint or Abusive Father? What Will Be the Legacy of Michael Dorris?” Salon. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ april97/dorris970421.html. Accessed December 5, 2005. Stone, Brad. “In the best of families: two months after the death of troubled writer Michael Dorris, his story takes an ugly new turn.” In Newsweek (June 16, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3asp?DOCID=1G1:19482714. Accessed September 3, 2005.

DOS PASSOS, JOHN (1896–1970) One of the foremost writers of the 1920s and 1930s, John Dos Passos—novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist— earned his reputation by analyzing what he saw as the failure of the American dream. He published the antiwar novel One Man’s Initiation—1917 in 1920, followed by Three Soldiers in 1921. With the strikingly original Manhattan Transfer (1925), however, he became linked with the leading modernist writers of his day. At that time sympathetic to the working class, Dos Passos contrived new ways of expressing the promises and failures of capitalism, culminating in his three-volume U.S.A. TRILOGY. Using a montage of techniques, including the kaleidoscope of initially unrelated scenes and episodes, Dos Passos introduced nonfictional as well as fictional characters through brief biographies, and used song lyrics, advertisements, newspaper and newsreel headlines to convey the setting and background, and invented the “camera eye” technique, an impressionistic stream of consciousness intended to convey the narrator observer’s perspective with a sense of immediacy and verisimilitude. Born in a Chicago hotel room on January 14, 1896, to Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison, a widow, and John Roderigo Dos Passos, a corporate lawyer from Philadelphia who did not acknowledge his paternity until 1916, Dos Passos traveled throughout Europe with his mother. She became the elder Dos Passos’s legal wife in 1910 after his first wife died. Dos Passos was educated at Choate and Harvard, from which he received his bachelor’s degree in 1916. By 1917, both parents had died and Dos

Passos joined the famous Morton Harjes Volunteer Ambulance Corps, serving in France and Italy. Not surprisingly, One Man’s Initiation—1917 features Martin Howe, a young World War I ambulance driver. Three Soldiers was praised by such critics as H. L. Mencken for its realistic depiction of the horrors of war; its hero, John Andrews, is arrested for desertion. In his next two works Dos Passos continued to explore the psyche of his young protagonists. Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), a somewhat fictionalized essay collection, follows Telemachus and Lyaeus as they travel through Spain, and Streets of Night (1923), sometimes compared to F. Scott FITZGERALD’s This Side of Paradise, examines the painful experiences of young Fanshawe, the autobiographical main character. Manhattan Transfer takes its title from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s New Jersey station where passengers changed trains. In the novel, Dos Passos abandons chronology, using instead abrupt shiftings of scenes similar to those of a newsreel. In this novel, Dos Passos presents the position of the American political Left. In The 42nd Parallel (1930), the first volume of his U.S.A. Trilogy, America is the most significant character, although the sailor Joe Williams appears in several of the grim stories of individuals. Here Dos Passos uses nonfictional characters: Eugene Debs, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie. The novel ends on the eve of America’s entry into World War I in 1917. The second volume, 1919 (1932), continues the stories of characters in The 42nd Parallel and adds several new ones, including Anne Elizabeth Trent, a relief worker, anarchist Ben Compton, and an unknown soldier known as “Body of an American.” Here Dos Passos uses the techniques of the newsreel and the camera eye. The final novel of the trilogy, The Big Money (1936), inspired by economist Thorsten Veblen, focuses on the exuberant, hedonistic, and materialistic 1920s. Particularly memorable are portraits of Isadora Duncan and the Wright Brothers, as well as the fictional returning war hero Charley Anderson, and the symbolic Vag, a young man who, at novel’s end, prepares to hitchhike across America. The groundbreaking modernist trilogy catapulted Dos Passos into the ranks of Ernest HEMINGWAY and William FAULKNER and made him a hero of the marxists and the communists, although Dos Passos, eschewing politics, was chiefly concerned with individual opportunity and justice.

380 DREAMING IN CUBAN

Increasingly conservative as he grew older, Dos Passos continued to write into old age. After the death of his wife Katy in 1947, he married Elizabeth Holdridge. That same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 1957 he was presented with the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. John Dos Passos died on September 28, 1970, in Baltimore, Maryland. The majority of his papers are collected at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.

NOVELS Adventures of a Young Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. The Big Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936. Chosen Country. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951. The 42nd Parallel. New York and London: Harper, 1930. The Great Days. New York: Sagamore Press, 1958. In All Countries. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Manhattan Transfer. New York and London: Harper, 1925. Midcentury. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. 1919. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Number One. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. One Man’s Initiation—1917. New York: Doran, 1920. Republished as First Encounter, New York: Philosophical Library, 1945; republished as One Man’s Initiation—1917, unexpurgated edition, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. Streets of Night. New York: Doran, 1923. Three Soldiers. New York: Doran, 1921. U.S.A. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938.

SOURCES Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left, Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961. Becker, George J. John Dos Passos. New York: Ungar, 1974. Belkind, Allen, ed. Dos Passos, the Critics, and the Writer’s Intention. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Brantley, John D. The Fiction of John Dos Passos. The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton, 1968. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Dos Passos: A Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Clark, Michael. Dos Passos’s Early Fiction, 1912–1938. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1987. Colley, Iain. Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair. London: Macmillan, 1978. Davis, Robert Gorham. John Dos Passos. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Dos Passos, John. The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Hook, Andrew, ed. Dos Passos, A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. Landsberg, Melvin. Dos Passos’ Path to U.S.A.: A Political Biography 1912–1936. Boulder, Colo.: Associated University Press, 1972. ———. John Dos Passos’s Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb, or, “Learn to Sing the Carmagnole.” Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991. Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. New York: Dutton, 1980. ———. The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos. Boston: Gambit, 1973. Maine, Barry. Dos Passos, The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1988. Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’s U.S.A.: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Rohrkemper, John. John Dos Passos, A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Rosen, Robert C. John Dos Passos, Politics and the Writer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Sanders, David. John Dos Passos: A Comprehensive Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Wagner, Linda W. Dos Passos, Artist as American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Wrenn, John H. John Dos Passos. Boston: Twayne, 1961.

DREAMING IN CUBAN CRISTINA GARCIA (1992) Images of the ocean pervade Cristina GARCIA’s

debut novel, Dreaming in Cuban, setting the stage for her examination of the dynamic ebb and flow of relationships between several female generations of the Cuban del Pino family. Not coincidentally, this novel opens and closes with the image of Celia, the family matriarch, staring at the sea as she contemplates her life in Cuba. For her, the sea represents both literally and figuratively the distance between her and her daughter, Lourdes, who lives in New York City with her daughter, Pilar. Unlike her daughter who gratefully traversed the Atlantic Ocean in order to secure her freedom from Cuba’s communist dictatorship, Celia is content to stare at the sea, never daring to cross it. She explains this to her granddaughter, stating that “For me, the sea was a great comfort, Pilar. But it made my children restless” (240). The ocean, with its rising and ebbing tides is also an appropriate metaphor for the book’s narrative structure, as Garcia weaves together various points of view and shifting time settings begin-

DREAMING IN CUBAN 381

ning in 1972, reflecting back to the 1930s, and finally ending in the early 1980s. Like the tides, the novel’s nonlinear structure is cyclical in nature and accurately captures the breaking apart and coming together experiences natural to human relationships. Garcia particularly focuses on the hardships endemic to mother-daughter relationships as compounded by the immigrant experience. These relationships serve as a means for exploring intergenerational political conflicts as the del Pino women exhibit varying degrees of support for the Cuban revolution. Through her depiction of Lourdes, who upon fleeing Fidel Castro’s despotic regime immigrated with her infant daughter and husband to the United States, and Pilar, who idealizes Cuba and dreams of returning to her birthplace, Garcia explores the fractious connection many Cuban-Americans exhibit towards their island homeland. For example, Lourdes fully embraces American culture, going so far as to name her bakery “the Yankee Doodle Bakery” and is “convinced she can fight Communism from behind her bakery counter” (136). Celia, on the other hand, remains true in her support of El Lìder (Fidel Castro), looking past the poverty instigated by his economic policies, and serves his regime as a volunteer mediator, lookout, and worker in the sugarcane fields. She takes particular pride in her position as lookout: “Celia is honored . . . From her porch, Celia could spot another Bay of Pigs invasion before it happened. She would be feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by El Lìder himself on a red velvet divan” (3). The juxtaposition of Lourdes’s palpable hatred for Castro’s dictatorship with her mother’s unwavering loyalty to and unrequited love for El Lìder effectively illustrates the ambivalent tensions within the Cuban community regarding the Cuban revolution and the subsequent implementation of communism in the country. To her credit, Garcia is remarkably adept at capturing the various voices of the del Pino women, ranging from the defiant 13-year-old Pilar, a Cuban-American living in New York City, to the fractured musings of her aunt Felecia, who suffers from dementia as a result of being infected with syphilis by her unfaithful husband, to the laconic reminiscences of Celia, the family matriarch, whose romanticized version of El Lìder led her to

support communism wholeheartedly. The novel also moves between third- and first-person narrative voices. This shift is noteworthy in that only three characters use the first-person narrative voice—Pilar, Celia’s granddaughter, Herminia Delgado, Felecia’s AfroCuban best friend, and Ivanito, Felecia’s son and Celia’s only grandson. Garcia’s choice of narrative voice is significant in that it is the youngest generation or those who are considered outsiders in Cuba, as most persons of Afro-Cuban descent are, who speak in the first person. They are the ones disconnected from a crucial part of Cuban history as they were too young or culturally distant to clearly remember the revolution, although it still drastically altered their lives. Consequently, Garcia’s use of the first-person narrative voice here might suggest that their voices are more significant as they represent the future of the Cuban community. As befits a matriarch, Dreaming in Cuban opens and closes with the narrative of Celia who serves as the backbone of the family—rescuing her wayward daughters and caring for her grandchildren. Celia also serves as the preserver of the family’s cultural heritage; a position she intends to pass on to her granddaughter, Pilar. Significantly, the book ends not in the present, but in the past with Celia’s prescient reflection, upon hearing of Pilar’s birth (not coincidentally Celia’s birthday and the 11th day of the Cuban revolution), that “She will remember everything” (245). Pilar does indeed take Celia’s place as the bearer of her family heritage; although she has spent most of her life in the United States, she has the closest connection to her grandmother, having communicated telepathically with her across the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, and she insists on returning to her family’s island homeland. However, although she exhibits an unusually close connection to her grandmother and is determined to remain connected to her Cuban roots, Pilar recognizes the problems inherent in Cuban society. In a sense, she represents the middle ground between the extremes of both Lourdes’s and Celia’s nationalism. She appreciates and remains grounded in her Cuban cultural heritage, yet she recognizes the benefits of living in the United States. Towards the end of her Cuban pilgrimage, Pilar ultimately concludes that, although she is “afraid to lose” her Cuban heritage, she recognizes

382 DREISER, THEODORE

that “sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong—not instead of here, but more than here” (236). Accordingly, Pilar aids her mother in enabling her Cuban cousin, Ivanito, to join the crowd at the Peruvian embassy waiting to be deported to Lima, Peru, en route to their pursuit of freedom in the United States. Through her portrayal of Pilar, Garcia suggests that the extreme blind loyalty of both Celia and Lourdes, albeit to two different countries, is self-destructive and impractical. Although Garcia’s novel concludes in an open-ended manner, it is clear that the Cuban Revolution has irrevocably shaped the lives of all Cubans— both those who remained behind on the island and those who immigrated to the United States in the hopes of a better life. Pilar represents hope as she attempts to remain connected to her cultural roots while living in another country. Not inconsequentially, her part of the novel is written in the first person, suggesting that hers is the voice with which Garcia most closely identifies a point that she has corroborated in several interviews with her admission that Pilar’s character most closely resembles her own immigrant experience. In a sense, all of Garcia’s characters are “dreaming in Cuban,” as the book is centered on the various ways in which these characters recollect their experiences in Cuba. Notably, in keeping with postmodern understandings of truth, Garcia presents all of these reminiscences as fractured and suggests that no recollection can ever be deemed completely accurate as human emotion and time alter their veracity. In the end, like the sea, one’s memories of the motherland are dynamic and ever-changing—ebbing and flowing like the tides.

SOURCES Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Gomez Vega, Ibis. “The Journey Home: Defining Identity in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Voces: A Journal of Chicana Latina Studies 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 71–100. Socolovsky, Maya. “Unnatural Violences: Counter-Memory and Preservations in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters,” Literature 11, no. 2: 143–167. Viera, Joseph M. “Matriarchy and Mayhem: Awakenings in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” The Americas Review:

A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 24, no. 3–4 (1996): 231–242. Fiona Molls

DREISER, THEODORE (HERMAN ALBERT) (1871–1945) Generally acknowledged as the most significant American practitioner of naturalism in the last century, Theodore Dreiser wrote eight novels as well as short stories, plays, and poetry. His name is synonymous with two classic American tales, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925) and SISTER CARRIE (1900). Dreiser’s reputation has remained remarkably consistent over the last several decades, suggesting that his insights into the American psyche remain accurate as well as eloquent. His dark view of American possibility and potential ran counter to the optimism of other writers; influenced by Herbert Spencer’s philosophy that human free will counted for little, and later by Freud and his belief in the dominance of sexual urges, Dreiser’s characters’ roles are determined by their initial poverty and obscurity. Nonetheless, both scholars and readers have been struck by his sympathetic treatment of those characters as they confront a hostile universe. His large, sprawling vision was well suited to the novel and was acknowledged when he emerged as a finalist for the 1930 Nobel Prize in literature, and received the Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1945. Theodore Dreiser was born on August 27, 1871, in Terre Haute, Indiana, to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Schaenaeb Dreiser. His early years were marked by extreme poverty. After one year at Indiana University (1889–90), he embarked on a career in journalism as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest that led to New York City editorships of such prominent magazines as Delineator (1907–10) and American Spectator (coeditor, 1932–34). His marriage to Sara Osborn White on December 18, 1898, ended in divorce in 1910; he married his long-term mistress, actress Helen Parges Richardson, in 1944. Dreiser’s first novel, Sister Carrie, depicts the rise and fall of Carrie Meeber, an 18-yearold midwestern girl who finds work in a Chicago sweatshop. She enters into relationships with Charles Drouet, a “drummer,” and, as she moves up the social

DREISER, THEODORE 383

ladder, with George Hurstwood, a restaurateur who takes her to New York where she becomes a star of Broadway musical comedy. Although Hurstwood goes broke, Carrie’s social transgressions earn her success rather than punishment. This angered many readers of the era. Dreiser followed Sister Carrie with Jennie Gerhardt (1911), a novel about another midwestern woman: unlike Carrie, however, Jennie has no social aspirations; indeed, she flouts convention. After she is seduced by an older man, she gives birth to an illegitimate child, lives openly with a wealthy man, Lester Kane, and then leaves him to devote herself to the welfare of two adopted children. Dreiser turned his attention to the world of American finances in a trilogy: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947), later published together as the Trilogy of Desire. The towering protagonist of these novels, the openly amoral Frank Cowperwood, is based on Frank T. Yerkes, one of the 19th-century American captains of industry at the turn of the century. The Financier portrays Cowperwood’s youth in Philadelphia and his rise from the middle class to extreme wealth through ruthless stock market trading. When the already married Cowperwood angers Butler, one of the city’s most powerful politicos, by having a love affair with his daughter Aileen Butler, the outraged father ruins him. Cowperwood survives imprisonment and the loss of his fortune, to rise to the top once again, exiting Philadelphia, with Aileen, at novel’s end. The second novel, The Titan, depicts Cowperwood in Chicago where he has married Aileen but indulges himself in a series of affairs, settling finally on the very young Berenice Fleming, daughter of a brothel owner. Once again, he rises and falls, courtesy of a group of citizen activists who prevent his takeover of the city transportation system; Cowperwood, still psychologically undefeated, plans to divorce Aileen, marry Berenice, and move to New York. By the time of Cowperwood’s reappearance in The Stoic, although he still has energy, entrepreneurial zest, and a ruthless compulsion to acquire power, his plans for a subway monopoly in London succeed just as he is stricken with a terminal illness. His wife, Aileen, and mistress, Berenice, are both ensconced in New York mansions. As many critics have observed, The “Genius,” (1915),

written just a year before The Titan, features a protagonist, Eugene Witla, who is very much like his creator. When attempts were made to suppress the book because of Witla’s bohemian lifestyle and commitment to sexual freedom, numerous writers—including Ezra Pound, Sinclair LEWIS, and H. G. Wells—came to Dreiser’s defense and helped spur a significant defeat of American censorship. An American Tragedy, Dreiser’s masterpiece, illustrates the calamitous results of the American dream gone wrong; numerous critics point out that Dreiser is reversing the Horatio Alger myth. When his protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, on the run from a hometown auto accident in which he killed a pedestrian, and eager for the good life represented by heiress Sondra Finchley, plans to murder his factory-worker mistress, Roberta Alden, who is pregnant with his child. Ironically, Roberta dies accidentally—or at least ambiguously. After her fall into the water, Clyde refrains from helping her—but, using the circumstantial evidence of his poverty and social aspirations, the jury convicts Clyde of her murder. As with The Trilogy of Desire, Dreiser found the germ of his fiction in contemporary American fact: the real-life story involved the ambitious Chester Gillette who was convicted of murdering his pregnant girlfriend, Grace Brown, when prosecutors learned that he was in love with a wealthy woman in Cortland, New York. The Bulwark (1946), Dreiser’s penultimate novel, juxtaposes the Quaker Solon Barnes and his family against the bulk of American society as Dreiser saw it: greedily lusting after wealth, power, and luxury. Solon marries Benecia Wallin, daughter of a Philadelphia Quaker banker, and, neither their five children when they become adults, nor these parents, nor their Quaker community can hold out against the temptations of modern life; they all succumb to sex, alcohol, theft, and, in Solon’s case, the cancer that is so clearly a metaphor for the urban wasteland that defeats them all. Theodore Dreiser died in Hollywood on December 18, 1945. Both The Bulwark and The Stoic were published posthumously. In 1951, Paramount Pictures produced a movie adaptation of An American Tragedy (titled A Place in the Sun); it starred Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters. Most of his papers are housed in the University of Pennsylvania.

384 DUBUS, ANDRE

NOVELS An American Tragedy. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. The Bulwark. New York: Doubleday, 1946. The Financier. New York and London: Harper, 1912. The “Genius”. New York: Lane, 1915. Jennie Gerhardt. New York: Harper, 1911. Sister Carrie. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900. The Stoic. New York: Doubleday, 1947. The Titan. New York: Lane, 1914.

SOURCES Algeo, Ann M. The Courtroom as Forum: Homicide Trials by Dreiser, Wright, Capote, and Mailer. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Atkinson, Hugh C. Theodore Dreiser: A Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1971. Bloom, Harold, ed. Theodore Dreiser. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Dreiser, Helen. My Life with Dreiser. New York, Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, 1951. Elias, Robert H. Theodore Dreiser: Apostle of Nature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Dudley, Dorothy. Dreiser and the Land of the Free. New York: Beechhurst, 1946. Eby, Clare Virginia. Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Fleischmann, Fritz, ed. American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Gammel, Irene. Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 1994. Gogol, Miriam. Theodore Dreiser: Beyond Naturalism. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Young Dreiser: A Critical Study. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1980. Orlov, Paul A. An American Tragedy. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1998. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Moers, Ellen. Two Dreisers. New York: Viking, 1969. Sloane, David E. E. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy. New York: Twayne, 1992. Swanberg, William Andrew. Dreiser. New York: Scribner, 1965. Szekely, Yvette. Dearest Wilding: A Memoir: With Love Letters from Theodore Dreiser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Tjader, Marguerite. Love That Will Not Let Me Go: My Time with Theodore Dreiser. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Waldmeir, John Christian. The American Trilogy, 1900–1937: Norris, Dreiser, Dos Passos, and the History of Mammon. West Cornwall, N.Y.: Locust Hill Press, 1995. West, James L. W. Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt: New Essays on the Restored Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. ———. A Sister Carrie Portfolio. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985.

OTHER Books and Writers. “Theodore Dreiser.” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/dreiser.htm. Accessed September 3, 2005.

DUBUS, ANDRE (1936–1999)

Hailed by many critics as one of the most significant writers of the late 20th century, Andre Dubus is best known as a short-story writer. Nearly every collection, however, contains at least one novella, a form he preferred, although his first publication was a novel entitled The Lieutenant (1967). Critics call Voices from the Moon (1984) both a novel and a novella, and one, Steve Yarborough, uses the term “compressed novels” to describe Dubus’s work. Where ideas are concerned, Dubus is compared often with Ernest HEMINGWAY, with whom he shares a focus on failed relationships between friends and/or spouses, and the inability of women and men to understand each other. His compassion for his characters, however, and his clear admiration for their ability to endure, is more reminiscent of William FAULKNER, an influence whom Dubus publicly acknowledged. Andre Dubus was born on August 11, 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Andre Jules and Katherine Burke Dubus. Reared in Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana, Dubus earned his bachelor’s degree from McNeese State College, married Patricia Lowe, and received his commission in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1958. In 1965, Dubus earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa and, with the publication of somewhat autobiographical The Lieutenant, began a writing career that spanned three decades. Dubus published Separate Flights (1975), a collection of stories that included the novella We Don’t Live Here Anymore. That novella, along with Adultery and Other Choices (1977) and Finding a Girl in America (1980),

DUBUS, ANDRE, III 385

became a novella trilogy published in 1984 as We Don’t Live Here Anymore: The Novellas of Andre Dubus. Through the perspectives of both husbands and wives, these novellas focus on the crumbling marriages of academics: those of Jack and Terry Linhart and Hank and Edith Allison. Both Jack and Hank, with varying degrees of guilt, engage in affairs with younger women, even, in the case of Hank, teenage girls. Edith Allison responds by having an affair with a local priest. They raise critical questions about Dubus’s sensitivity to a woman’s point of view. Some critics praise him and others dismiss him as insensitive. Voices from the Moon (1984), whether novel or novella, includes themes from Dubus’s previous fiction, particularly the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood and the painful relationships between husbands and wives. Greg and Joan Stowe divorce so that Greg can marry Brenda, the ex-wife of his son Larry. Dubus tells the story through the perspectives of various family members, most notably that of 12-year-old Richie Stowe, who overhears his father’s plans. After divorcing his first wife in 1970, Dubus was married to Tommie Gale Cotter from 1975 to 1978, and to Peggy Rambach, from whom he was divorced shortly after the 1986 freeway accident in which he lost his leg. After publishing what would be his final short fiction collection, Dancing After Hours (1996), tales of both physical and emotional crippling, Dubus won the Rea Short Story Award for career achievement. His work, often characterized as New Realism or Dirty Realism, continues to earn praise for its craftsmanship and its insights into the contemporary American psyche. Almost all of his fiction takes place either in the South or in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, where he lived from 1966 until his death in 1999. His son, Andre DUBUS III, is now a writer as well known, if not better known, than his father.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Adultery and Other Choices. Boston: Godine, 1977. Blessings. Elmwood, Conn.: Raven, 1987. Broken Vessels. Boston: Godine, 1991; London: Picador, 1993. Dancing After Hours: Stories. New York: Knopf, 1996. Finding a Girl in America: Ten Stories & a Novella. Boston: Godine, 1980.

The Last Worthless Evening. Boston: Godine, 1986. The Lieutenant. New York: Dial, 1967. Separate Flights. Boston: Godine, 1975. The Times Are Never So Bad. Boston: Godine, 1983. Voices from the Moon. Boston: Godine, 1984; London: Picador, 1987. We Don’t Live Here Anymore: The Novellas of Andre Dubus. New York: Crown, 1984; London: Pan, 1984.

SOURCES Breslin, John B. “Playing Out the Patterns of Sin and Grace: The Catholic Imagination of Andre Dubus,” Commonweal 115 (December 2, 1988): 652–656. Hathaway, Dev. “A Conversation with Andre Dubus,” Black Warrior Review 9 (Spring 1983): 86–103. Kennedy, Thomas E. Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Kornbluth, Jesse. “The Outrageous Andre Dubus,” Horizon 28 (April 1985): 16–20. Nathan, Robert. “Interview with Andre Dubus,” Bookletter 3 (February 14, 1987): 14–15. Rowe, Anne E. “Andre Dubus.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 101–111. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

OTHER Salon Books: “The Heartbeat of Conscience.” Review of Dancing After Hours. Available online. URL: http://www.salon. com/10/reviews/dubus1.html. Accessed June 23, 2005.

DUBUS, ANDRE, III (1959– )

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (1999), Andre Dubus’s best-selling novel, was a finalist for five awards, including the National Book Award and inclusion on the Los Angeles Times notable novels list. Dubus, the son of celebrated short-fiction writer Andre DUBUS, has also written one collection, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories (1989), and an earlier novel, Bluesman (1993). Andre Dubus III was born on September 11, 1959, in Oceanside, California, to Andre Dubus, writer and teacher, and Patricia Lowe Dubus, a social worker. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1981. After trying bartending and prison counseling, Dubus chose to be a writer and teacher, echoing his father’s career choices. He published stories in periodicals, and won a National Magazine Award for Fiction. In June 1989, he married Fontaine

386 DUNBAR, PAUL LAURENCE

Dollas, a dancer, and in 1993 published Bluesman, a coming-of-age novel set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. A slow, careful writer, Dubus then spent four years writing House of Sand and Fog, a novel entirely of his imagination but born of a college friendship with an Iranian (Keuffer). The three major characters include Kathy Nicolo, a young divorcee bound to a past of drug and alcohol abuse; Colonel Behrani, an Iranian immigrant; and Lester Burdon, a policeman. Both Behrani and Burdon become involved in Nicolo’s life as she tries to reclaim the house from which she was evicted. It is Behrani who has bought the house at auction; he plans to use it to regain the status he held in prerevolutionary Iran. Dubus expresses the mounting anger that erupts in tragedy at novel’s end. Andre Dubus III lives with his wife in Newberryport, Massachusetts, where he writes and teaches at Tufts University and at Emerson College. He does not believe in talking about his current work: “I tend to keep it absolutely quiet. It’s like I tell my young writers: you are pregnant with stories, and you want to keep the womb closed and dark; keep feeding it” (Dubus, Keuffer interview). House of Sand and Fog, which has been translated into more than 22 languages, was an Oprah Book Club selection and was made into a DreamWorks feature-length film directed by Vadim Perelman. It starred Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley and was nominated for three Oscars after its release in December 2003.

NOVELS Bluesman. New York: Norton, 1993. House of Sand and Fog. New York: Norton, 1999.

SOURCES Burkhardt, Joanna. Review of House of Sand and Fog, Library Journal 126, no. 8 (May 1, 2001): 145. Hitchings, Henry. Review of House of Sand and Fog, Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 2000, p. 28. Pearl, Nancy. Review of House of Sand and Fog, Library Journal 126, no. 9 (May 15, 2001): 192. Review of Bluesman, Publisher’s Weekly 240, no. 13 (March 29, 1993): 36. Sharp, Bill. Review of House of Sand and Fog, New York Times, 15 April 1999, p. 104. Wilkinson, Joanne. Review of House of Sand and Fog, Booklist (June 1, 2001): 1836.

OTHER Dubus, Andre. “Interview with Andre Dubus.” By Liz Keuffer. Bookreporter.com, February 11, 2000. Available online. URL: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-dubus-andre. asp. Accessed June 23, 2005.

DUNBAR, PAUL LAURENCE (1872–1906) Paul Laurence Dunbar, son of former slaves, died of tuberculosis at 34, having earned impressive accolades for his four novels, four collections of short stories, and six volumes of poetry. A number of critics have credited Dunbar, along with James Weldon JOHNSON, with pioneering the African-American novel. Although some contemporary readers may be disturbed by his sentimentalized views of antebellum plantation life, others will see the social protest in his novels, essays, and in some of his stories. His last novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), the story of a black family that flees the South because of a white family’s oppression, is generally viewed as his major fictional achievement, the first major protest novel by an African-American writer. Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio, to two former slaves, Joshua Dunbar (a former Union soldier) and Matilda Murphy Dunbar. He graduated from high school in 1891, and was helped by several famous people who admired his writing. Orville and Wilbur Wright, friends from high school days, helped him publish his first book of verse; Frederick DOUGLASS hired him at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition; and noted actor James A. Herne introduced him to William Dean HOWELLS, who reviewed his poetry in the June 27, 1896, Harper’s Weekly. He married Alice Ruth Moore, a writer and educator, on March 6, 1898, but the couple divorced in 1904. The Uncalled, Dunbar’s first novel, appeared in the May 1898 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly magazine, and was published that same year. Populated entirely by white characters and set in Dexter, Ohio, the novel focuses on Frederick Brent, who is abandoned by his alcoholic father, joins the Congregational Church, has an illegitimate child, and ultimately marries Alice, the woman he loves. Dunbar’s second novel, The Love of Landry, was published two years later. Set in the West and peopled again with white characters, Mildred

DUNBAR, PAUL LAURENCE 387

Osbourne falls in love with Landry Thaler, a cowboy; they marry after Landry rescues Mildred from a cattle stampede. The Fanatics (1901), Dunbar’s third novel, features both black and white characters. Set during the Civil War, Dunbar explores the reasons why the white Van Buren family supports the Union while the white Van Dorens support the Confederacy. The appearance of escaped slaves, however, unites the two white families. Dunbar’s last novel, The Sport of the Gods, demonstrated that blacks received unjust treatment not just from white southerners in Virginia, but also from white northerners in New York’s Harlem. There Joe Berry, his wife Fanny, and their two children are exposed to crime, poverty, and decay and are literally tossed about by the gods for whom they are mere playthings. Joe’s proud son, Hamilton, is Dunbar’s version of a black man who will both realize his own talent and effect the Harlem Renaissance. Dunbar’s poem “Symphony” (1899) contains the line made famous by Maya ANGELOU; she used it as the title of her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus, Ohio, holds the major collection of Dunbar manuscripts, letters, related documents, and correspondence. His personal library is maintained at the Dunbar home in Dayton, and his correspondence is held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. Dunbar died on February 9, 1906, in Dayton, Ohio.

NOVELS The Fanatics. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901. The Love of Landry. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900. The Sport of the Gods. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902. The Uncalled: A Novel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898.

SOURCES Brawley, Benjamin. Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Cunningham, Virginia. Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947. Gayle, Addison, Jr. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Gentry, Tony. Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Chelsea House, 1989. Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Metcalf, E. W., Jr. Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975. Revell, Peter. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Turner, Darwin T. Introduction to The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

OTHER Paul Laurence Dunbar Website. Available online. URL: http:// www.daytonsite.org./. Accessed June 23, 2005. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature. “Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Available online. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/english/ reuben/pal/chap6/dunbar.html. Accessed June 23, 2005. Poets.org from The Academy of American Poets. “Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/ poet.php/prmID/302. Accessed June 23, 2005.

C EASTLAKE,

WILLIAM

ED

(DERRY)

(1917–1997) William Eastlake wrote four novels about the Navajos of New Mexico and the southwestern United States, where he made his home for more than four decades. Characteristic of these early novels is the concept of time as viewed by Native Americans; this concept links together nature, humanity, death, and art. He also wrote three war novels, about the Revolutionary War (The Long Naked Descent into Boston [1977]), World War II (Castle Keep [1965]), and the Vietnam War (The Bamboo Bed [1969]); there he combines fragments of grimness, absurdity, satire, and parody with black humor, and this combination has won him an admiring following of readers. William Eastlake was born on July 14, 1917, in New York City, to Gordon Opie Eastlake and Charlotte Derry Eastlake, both from England, and he was reared in New Jersey. He married Martha Simpson, a painter in 1943, and, during World War II, served in the U.S. Army for more than four years, during which time he received the Bronze Star for bravery and attained the rank of staff sergeant. After settling in New Mexico near both the Apache and Navajo reservations, he published Go in Beauty (1956), the story of Alexander Bowman, an expatriate writer who runs off with Perrette, the wife of his brother, George. Alexander writes about New Mexico’s Native Americans and its landscape, while George devotes his life to ministering to the Indians and outwitting the white bureaucrats. In The Bronc People (1958), Big Sant Bowman and his

wife, Millicent, raise Alistair Benjamin, who, in complex twists of plot, was captured by the Indians My Prayer and President Taft, in a fire set by Bowman himself. Alistair, who is black, fulfills Bowman’s dreams of education and success, while Bowman’s son Sant, who is white, identifies with the Indians and achieves success as a bronco rider. Portrait of an Artist with TwentySix Horses (1963) continues Eastlake’s southwestern stories, featuring at its center the young Ring Bowman who contemplates his place in the scheme of things as he finds himself drowning in quicksand. Then his black horse, symbol of evil, suffers a rattlesnake bite, falls into the quicksand, and becomes the bridge onto dry ground that saves Bowman. In 1970, Eastlake graduated with a law degree from the University of Albuquerque in 1970; he and his wife divorced in 1971. His fourth New Mexico novel is Dancers in the Scalp House (1975), a satirical view of the plight of Indians at the mercy of white people, all of whom, with the exception of Mary-Forge (who sides with the Indians), are greedy and unscrupulous. The plot involves the Atlas Dam, purposely designed to flood the Checkerboard region of the state, annihilating wildlife and forcing the Indians from the reservation. Castle Keep, set in World War II France, depicts American soldiers occupying the castle of a duke who is desperately trying to produce an heir and save his priceless art collection. The art and music in the castle temporarily draw together the French duke, the Germans, and the Americans in brief moments of

388

EAST OF EDEN 389

peace; each major character, frequently compared to those in William FAULKNER’s AS I LAY DYING, narrates a chapter that reveals his thoughts about war. The Bamboo Bed is not only the title of a novel but the name of a helicopter that picks up the remains of soldiers. It becomes a metaphorical bed during trysts between the pilot and various nurses. Similarly, the perspective in The Long Naked Descent into Boston, is that of three British journalists in a hot-air balloon, observing the struggles between the English and the Patriots that lead to the American Revolution. Eastlake’s last novel, Prettyfields: A Work in Progress (1987) depicts the unpleasant experiences at a New Jersey private school for boys. Castle Keep was adapted as a feature-length film starring Burt Lancaster. Eastlake also published a number of essays and a short story collection, Jack Armstrong in Tangier. William Eastlake died on June 1, 1997, in Cuba, New Mexico.

NOVELS The Bamboo Bed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969. The Bronc People. New York: Harcourt, 1958. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1975. Castle Keep. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965. Dancers in the Scalp House. New York: Viking, 1975. Go in Beauty. New York: Harper, 1956. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980. The Long Naked Descent into Boston. New York: Viking, 1977. Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980. Prettyfields: A Work in Progress (bound with The Man Who Cultivated Fire by Gerald Haslam). Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1987.

SOURCES Angell, Richard C. “Eastlake at Home and Abroad,” New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 204–209. Eastlake, William. Interview by W. C. Bamberger, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 216–220. “Interview with William Eastlake,” by John O’Brien. Review of Contemporary Fiction 3 (Spring 1983): 4–17. Graham, Don. “William Eastlake’s First Novel: An Account of the Making of Go in Beauty,” Western American Literature 16 (Spring 1981): 27–37.

Haslam, Gerald. William Eastlake. Austin, Tex: SteckVaughn, 1970. ———. “William Eastlake: Portrait of the Artist as Shaman,” Western Review 8 (Spring 1971): 2–13. McCaffery, Larry. “Absurdity and Oppositions in William Eastlake’s Southwestern Novels,” Critique 19 (1977): 62–76. Milton, John R. “The Land as Form in Frank Waters and William Eastlake,” Kansas Quarterly 2 (Spring 1970): 104–109. Phelps, Donald. Covering Ground: Essays for Now. New York: Croton Press, 1969. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, special issue on Eastlake and Aidan Higgins 3 (Spring 1983). Wylder, Delbert W. “The Novels of William Eastlake,” New Mexico Quarterly 34 (Summer 1964): 188–203.

EAST OF EDEN JOHN STEINBECK (1952) Although most critics have designated The GRAPES OF WRATH (1939) as John STEINBECK’s masterpiece, the author himself considered East of Eden as the zenith of his literary career, a novel that was to serve as a symbol for his genius and a work for which he felt all the others were merely practice. “I have written each book as an exercise, as practice for the one to come. And this is the one to come,” he wrote in Journal of a Novel (8–9). After originally entitling the novel “My Valley” and later “The Salinas Valley,” Steinbeck decided upon the title East of Eden, on June 11, 1951, after rereading the Genesis account of Cain’s banishment from the perfect garden to the land of Nod, located “east of Eden.” Considering this event took place after the murder of Abel and that the author considered the recounting of the first murder to be “the symbol story of the human soul,” Steinbeck seems to have selected the title because it suggested that all the novel’s characters (as well as its readers) are the descendants of Cain and thus inherited a belief that they have been permanently exiled from any idyllic garden and any hope of regaining the perfection Adam and Eve experienced there. The 602-page East of Eden was published in September 1952 in a limited, signed edition of 1,500 copies and a trade edition of 112,621 copies. Because East of Eden was written in counterpoint, or contrapuntally, with several strands of the story occuring simultaneously and without such typical novel traits as

390 EAST OF EDEN

chronological order and a singular narrative focus, Steinbeck predicted he would catch critical hell for it. Yet Steinbeck still took pride in its experimentation, writing to his editor, Pat Covici: “Since this book is about everything, it should use every form, every method, every technique. I do not think I will make it obvious because even though I bring most everything to the surface, there will still be the great covered thing” (Journal, 56). Despite the author’s fear regarding whether the critical establishment or his reading public would understand his new work, the novel sold vigorously and was reviewed widely, though reactions regarding the success of Steinbeck’s “magnum opus” varied. Some early critics indeed missed “the covered thing” and labeled the work as a didactic moral tale that merely simplified the differences between good and evil and reduced the complexity of human life to unbelievable extremes. In fact, however, by combining the story of America with his own experience of California’s Salinas Valley, Steinbeck produced an allegory that stressed the moral sense that had shaped the growth of the nation and still influenced the world of the present. Intriguing because of its unique characters and the complex interweaving of plotlines and themes, East of Eden has continued to fascinate readers ever since and has never been out of print. The central theme of the novel was the universal war of good and evil, the eternal battle of virtue and vice. Steinbeck’s fascination with the biblical story of Genesis 4: 1–16, had been explicitly on his mind at least since 1946, especially the tragic tale of brothers Cain and Abel, a story that provides the thematic backbone for the novel. Using a time frame that encompasses the Civil War to World War I, Steinbeck depicts three generations of the Trask family and brings them west to California from their original residence in Connecticut. Through it all, they seek some sort of Edenic solution to their bleak existence. However, no Trask descendant ever quite escapes being visited by the rigid Puritan concepts of original sin and predestination, or ever quite fully resolves the burden caused by parental neglect, and abandonment, or misplaced love. The Trask plot of Steinbeck’s novel attempts to confront head-on the unspeakable horror

of childhood rejection, dysfunctional parenting, and wayward, irrational affection. The main thread of this multilayer history concerns Cyrus Trask’s favored son, Adam. In the early Trask history, he has been his father’s favorite and has suffered at the hands of his jealous brother Charles, whose search for love and acceptance from his parents, especially his father, is continuously blocked by his father’s prejudicial preference for his younger son. As the story continues, Adam follows his father’s chosen pattern for his future, despite the fact that it includes enlisting in the army and practicing a violence he is uncomfortable with. His sibling, on the other hand, whose innate attraction to violence is depicted in an attempt to kill Adam in their early childhood, is forced to stay at home and tend the family farm. After the war concludes, Adam wanders aimlessly, paradoxically depicted as a revered veteran and a scorned petty thief. Despite his simultaneous attraction to both good and evil, he is generally depicted as a typical unsuspecting American innocent. Steinbeck continued the tale by interweaving the Trask plotline with the story of another family, the naïve Ameses. Ironically, their “lovely” daughter Cathy has been responsible for the death of one of her teachers after a sexual liaison and has further implicated two young classmates in a rape. The parents suspect nothing regarding the innate evil in their offspring. By merging C and A in Cathy’s first and last names and further joining her with the Trask family’s Cain and Abel symbolism, Steinbeck confronts the dual heritage of all men head-on. Having discovered Cathy almost bludgeoned to death outside the family home (she has earlier killed her parents, run away, served as a prostitute, and been beaten by her whoremaster), Adam chooses to ignore her obvious potential for evil and instead to impulsively join their fates through marriage. On their wedding night, this serpentlike woman betrays Adam’s good-heartedness by having intercourse with his brother, Charles. Later in an attempt to escape the traumatic memories of his past and to find a potential renewal in a new land, Adam then moves from the East Coast to the West, settling in the King City area of California’s Salinas Valley, where unfortunately he remains ignorant of Cathy’s real nature. Here in the pseudo-

EAST OF EDEN 391

Edenic environs, Adam intends to build a family dynasty. However, Cathy, desperate to be free, tries to abort her dual pregnancy and shoots Adam in the shoulder with his own Colt pistol, and shortly thereafter, she rejects the confining “goodness” of his character and abandons their twin sons. Encouraged by Samuel Hamilton to stop wallowing in self-pity and inertia after Cathy abandons him, Adam eventually names the two boys, Aaron and Caleb, selecting biblical heroes for namesakes and maintaining the telltale A and C initials for another generation. Both boys adopt nicknames to deny their biblical heritage, one changing the spelling of his name to Aron and the other shortening his to Cal. In the meantime, their mother Cathy also has tried to escape her identity by assuming the name of Kate and becoming the sadistic madame of a notorious Salinas brothel. Cathy attains this powerful position by poisoning the original owner, Faye, despite the fact that Faye has treated her kindly, almost as if she were her own daughter. Cathy/Kate is the very image of the depravity that all people have in themselves. Nevertheless, as the book draws to a close, she does see her own insufficiency, despite the power she wields. Her unexpected suicide is designed to hurt both her sons, but especially Aron because she hopes that his deep religiosity will be shattered by the genetic ties he will be forced to acknowledge. In her death, however, Cathy/Kate also seems to confront her isolation and loneliness and the fact that the power of evil cannot always destroy. In Adam’s final confrontation with his estranged wife, he finally accepts and denounces Cathy for the true demonic influence she has tried to implant in his own existence and that of his sons. This dynastic, gothic tale of betrayal, corruption, and suffering among the Trasks is juxtaposed with the more socially normative, pastoral tale of the Hamilton family in the Salinas Valley. The nimble-minded Samuel Hamilton, his wife, Liza, and their children, including four boys—George, Will, Tom, and Joe, and five girls—Una, Lizzie, Dessie, Olive, and Mollie—are each sketched in varying detail throughout the book. Readers continue to be intrigued with the meaning of the term timshel in the novel, and it is Samuel, along with Lee (Adam’s trustworthy intellectual Chinese ser-

vant), who, in a symbolic way, grant an identity to the abandoned twins by urging their naming. As Samuel, Lee, and Adam discuss the Cain and Abel story in chapters 23–33 of the novel, they debate the meaning of various translations, particularly the Hebrew word timshel (actually timshol), which Lee translates as “thou mayest.” According to Lee’s research, the word indicates that, rather than ordering or promising man to triumph over sin, God gave humans a choice. “It might be the most important word in the world,” Lee says. “That says the way is open. That throws it right back on man. For if Thou mayest, it is also true that Thou mayest not. . . .” Since Steinbeck’s emphasis on intelligent, pragmatic choice as a creative action radiates throughout the novel, when Samuel dies his legacy as a fixer, a nurturer, is not completely lost. His belief in humans’ freedom to choose, even if he makes mistakes, eventually rubs off on his neighbor who is able to courageously acknowledge and accept his deficiencies and live with them. In the fourth and final section of the novel, chapters 34–55 (the basis for Elia Kazan’s film version in 1955), the focus shifts to Cal, whom Steinbeck thought of as a kind of Everyman figure. With Cal, however, the drama is given a realistic rather than mythic dimension. The animosity of brothers Adam and Charles over their father’s love is here repeated in Aron and Cal’s competitive feelings for Adam’s inconsistent affection. Confused by Adam’s differing expectations for each boy, the brothers often find themselves at odds. Fair-haired, high-minded Aron, who resembles Adam, turns out to be defeated by what life deals him—he is too rigid to roll with the punches. His brother, moody, dark Cal, who resembles Charles, struggles to resolve whether his mother’s genes make him a Cain as well. In short, Cal’s path to self-identity is painful and troubled because it continually forces him to redefine himself with candor and honesty. Both boys also compete for the affection of a neighbor, Abra Bacon, who first falls for Aron but later chooses the more vulnerable Cal. Her ultimate disenchantment with the older twin and her eventual love for Cal revolves around the latter’s capacity for self-doubt, his uneasiness with his own “badness.” Since Abra’s own father is revealed to have a sinful side, she finds Aron’s

392 EAT A BOWL OF TEA

self-aggrandizement and judgmental attitude regarding evil to be unacceptable. Conversely, Cal’s constant struggle with the evil nature that lurks beneath his surface seems much more honest to Abra and reflects her own dual nature as well. As the brotherly struggle over paternal approval continues, Cal mistakenly tries to prove his love for Adam by giving him money earned from a crop sales scheme engineered by Will Hamilton (Adam rejects the $15,000 gift, which Cal later burns). Offended by what he perceives to be Adam’s preferential treatment of Aron (Adam tells Cal he would be better off if he could mirror his brother’s gift of an upright life) Cal devises a vengeful plan to destroy Aron’s pompous, self-righteous image by unmasking their mother Cathy as a whore. When Aron is shown who his mother really is, he quits college, enlists in the World War I army, and shortly afterward is killed. Learning the news of Aron’s death, Adam has a stroke. Cal, believing he has, in effect, murdered his brother and simultaneously destroyed the only thing his father loved, is beside himself with guilt until Lee intercedes and implores Adam to bless his son, which he does: “His whispered word seemed to hang in the air: Timshel!, His eyes closed and he slept,” Steinbeck concludes. Just as Steinbeck had done at the end of The Grapes of Wrath when Rose of Sharon gave her breast to the dying man, this final tableau scene draws a picture of a new kind of household: Here Cal, Lee, Abra (outsiders with social, racial, or gender differences) come together in mutual love and concern over Adam’s deathbed and symbolically subvert the legacy of Cain (original sin or propensity to choose evil over good) that has propelled the novel since the days of Cyrus Trask and Samuel Hamilton. Recognition of this subtle transformation in the power structure of the American family may have been the greatest lesson Steinbeck wished to impart to his nation as well as to his own children. Despite nearly five decades of steady critical conversation, no thorough consensus regarding its rank in Steinbeck’s canon has been reached, and in fact a great deal remains to be investigated in this work. Matters of critical taste aside, Steinbeck’s immersion in a matrix of internal and external forces gave East of Eden a contextual richness and helps explain why he considered it

“the book” with “all the things I have wanted to write all my life” (Life in Letters, 431).

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. ———. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. ———. “The Story of a Writing: Narrative Structure in East of Eden.” In Rediscovering Steinbeck: Revisionist Views of His Art, Politics, and Intellect, edited by Cliff Lewis and Carroll Britch, 60–76. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Steinbeck, John. Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters. New York: Viking, 1975. ———. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Walsten. New York: Viking, 1975. Michael J. Meyer

EAT A BOWL OF TEA LOUIS HING CHU (1961) Louis CHU’s Eat A Bowl of Tea is a landmark novel about Chinese Americans. Instead of using New York’s Chinatown as an exotic backdrop, as earlier novels did, it presents an insider’s view of the community, exposing the problems of racism, sexism, patriarchy, and the sterility of the “bachelor society” created by repressive immigration laws. The novel was unsuccessful when it appeared in 1961 (Chu died before the initial print run sold out), receiving poor reviews as its original readers disliked its unromanticized, drab Chinatown of gamblers who exclaim “Wow your mother” and other translations from the earthy Cantonese ver-

EAT A BOWL OF TEA 393

nacular. It was rediscovered and reissued, first in 1979, and again in 1995. Contemporary readers may be troubled by the portrayal of the female protagonist, Mei Oi, as stereotyped and doll-like. Current debates on this novel focus on its depiction of sexism, male-female roles, and patriarchy. Eat a Bowl of Tea shows a changing New York Chinatown in the late 1940s, after the repeal of the Chinese exclusion acts made way for Chinese women to enter the United States. The action revolves around two “bachelor” friends, Wang Wah Gay, who brought his son Ben Loy over from China some years before, and Lee Gong, whose wife, and daughter Mei Oi, are still in China. Wah Gay runs a gambling club, but to keep Ben Loy from gambling and womanizing he has him work in a restaurant in a small town in nearby Connecticut. Pressured by their wives, the “old rice cookers” back in China, the fathers try to fulfill their parental obligations and send Ben Loy to China to marry Mei Oi and bring her back to New York. Expecting idyllic happiness, Ben Loy nonetheless finds himself impotent; the frustrated Mei Oi is seduced by Ah Song, an aging playboy, and becomes pregnant. As word of the affair spreads through Chinatown, leaving the men of the family enraged, Wah Gay takes matters into his own hands, cutting off Ah Song’s ear. The community association pressures the unpopular Ah Song to withdraw police charges and exiles him from Chinatown, but the fathers and the young couple leave too, trying to make a new start. In San Francisco, Ben Loy visits an herbalist who has him “eat a bowl of tea” (and many more bitter herbal brews), recovers his potency and accepts Mei Oi’s child as his own. Reconciled, the two look forward to inviting their fathers to celebrate the birth of their second child. While Ben Loy attributes his impotence to his past experiences with prostitutes and venereal disease, his “sexual incompetence” (as the novel repeatedly terms it) also reflects the sterile pattern of human relationships fostered by the mores of Chinatown. The maledominated bachelor society has created a life that keeps women at a distance, supposedly faithful far away in China, while the men in America have fleeting, impersonal encounters with prostitutes. Mei Oi is brought from China with the expectation that she will

continue the pattern of purity, marital fidelity and fecundity, and not act like an Americanized jook sing (“hollow bamboo,” referring to children of immigrants who have lost respect for their roots). Yet she feels completely isolated in New York; the community cannot provide her with support that might enable her to live up to its expectations. While Ben Loy and Mei Oi express their ambitions to achieve the American dream of financial success and independence, they also find themselves isolated and alone, unable to negotiate between competing cultural values. Tellingly, while the life of Chinatown, which determines the novel’s action, is shaped by the laws and mores enforced by white society, there is little interaction with the world outside. Apart from dealings with prostitutes and the incursion of the police detective who comes after Wah Gay, it is a self-enclosed society. This enclosure leads to cultural stagnation, to the preservation of roles and mores that are no longer viable. This is a helpful context to understand the debate about the character of Mei Oi: some view her as an irretrievably flawed product of a writer who, while exposing the sterility of the old standards, still cannot see beyond male-dictated images of women. Others see her as an independent woman who, despite the shallowness of her characterization, refuses to submit to a sexless marriage and steps beyond the limits of the code. The novel stresses the issue of roles played—by the fathers, the young couple and by the community that watches them. Ben Loy and Mei Oi are circumscribed by boundaries, oppressive family structures and expectations, constantly under the scrutiny of their communities, both in their Chinese village and in Chinatown, which look to them to fulfill their roles. They are virtually celebrities, initially fitting in with the idealized picture of the lucky man who is making his fortune in America and the beautiful, educated girl who is his counterpart, and then appearing as a happy, healthy couple who will produce many sons and daughters. When the gossip about Mei Oi’s affair and Ben Loy’s shame circulates, they appear to play unexpected yet time-honored roles from the Chinese romances—the unfaithful wife, the betrayed husband (in traditional parlance, one who “wears the green

394 EDGERTON, CLYDE

hat”), while the fathers find themselves acting as the avengers of these romances. At the end of the novel the couple seems finally to be playing up to the assigned role, but at the same time they can be seen as rewriting scripts and standards: Ben Loy scarcely questions whether Mei Oi’s child is his own and accepts it with pride, in flat opposition to the conventional importance of the biological tie. This is one area of current critical debate, with some finding that patriarchy is a fatal flaw in this novel that keeps every character trapped in unresolved conflicts and futile roles, while others see a regeneration and growth in a movement toward formulating new roles and possibilities for relationships.

SOURCES Chin, Frank, et al., eds. “An Introduction to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature.” Aiiieeeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Chu, Louis. Eat a Bowl of Tea. Secaucus, N.J.: Stuart, 1961. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Reprint, New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995. Hsiao, Ruth Y. “Facing the Incurable: Patriarchy in Eat a Bowl of Tea.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 151–162. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford, 1998. Shih, David. “Eat A Bowl of Tea by Louis Chu.” A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Wong and Stephen Sumida, 45–53. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001. Dolores de Manuel

EDGERTON, CLYDE (1944– ) Author of seven novels, Clyde Edgerton, a North Carolina writer, evokes the particularities of the South while endowing those details with universal appeal. His characters wrestle with the problems of love, connection, family, community, culture, morality, and history; the subjects of his novels range from married life, racial issues, storytelling, and religious hypocrisy, to the Vietnam War and 19th-century Colorado Indian cliff dwellings. He has

been praised often for his fine storytelling abilities and his sense of humor and has a large following among readers in the American South. Clyde Edgerton was born on May 20, 1944, in Durham, North Carolina, to Ernest Edgerton, an insurance salesman, and Susan Truma, a writer, editor, and teacher. After earning his bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966, he spent four years in the U.S. Air Force flying reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam War. On his return to Chapel Hill, he earned both a master’s degree in teaching (1972) and a doctoral degree in English (1977). After working as a teacher and professor, Edgerton published his first novel, Raney, in 1985. The story centers on Raney Bell, whose marriage to Charles Shepherd, a librarian, is fraught with divisions and difficulties. Raney leaves Charles early in the marriage but eventually returns at the novel’s end. Edgerton followed with Walking across Egypt (1987), a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which tells the story of Mattie Rigsbee, a widow who adopts the troubled young Wesley Benfield and provides him with a family. The Floatplane Notebooks (1988), less humorous than the preceding novels, focuses on several generations of the Copeland family, whose 20th-century members include Mark, a pilot during the Vietnam War, and Meredith, wounded in that same conflict. In the next decade, Edgerton published Killer Diller (1991), a continuation of the story of Wesley Benfield, now intrigued with religion and ministry, followed by In Memory of Junior (1992), a somewhat humorous treatment of family disagreements. His most recent novels are Redeye: A Western (1995), about the changes in one rancher’s life once he discovers ancient Indian dwellings on his property, and Where Trouble Sleeps: A Novel (1997). Here Edgerton returns to the comic mode as he traces the impact of a stranger on a small 1950s North Carolina town. Clyde Edgerton’s papers, manuscripts, and correspondence are collected in the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

NOVELS The Floatplane Notebooks. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1988. In Memory of Junior. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1992. Killer Diller. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1991. Raney. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1985.

EDMONDS, WALTER D.

Redeye: A Western. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1995. Walking Across Egypt. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1987. Where Trouble Sleeps: A Novel. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin, 1997.

SOURCES Grimshaw, James A., Jr. “Clyde Edgerton: Death and Dying.” In Southern Writers at Century’s End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folkes and James A. Perkins, 238–246. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Ketchin, Susan. “Clyde Edgerton: A Garden of Paradoxes.” In Susan Ketchin, The Christ-Haunted Landscape: Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction, 352–370. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Powell, Dannye Romine. “Clyde Edgerton.” In Dannye Romine Powell, Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers, 82–91. Winston-Salem, N.C.: J.F. Blair, 1994.

EDMONDS,

WALTER

D(UMAUX)

(1903–1998) Walter D. Edmonds wrote historical novels almost exclusively about the central New York, Erie Canal, and Mohawk Valley region where he was reared. His best-selling novel, Drums Along the Mohawk (1936), a tale of the violent struggle between the American Revolutionary War rebels and the British Tories (often supported by Native American allies) was made into the now classic 1939 film directed by John Ford. Author of more than 20 novels, 60 short stories, and three histories, Edmonds has been widely praised for his realistic and vivid depictions of the people and topography of his region, and for his historical chronicle of several generations of the pioneers and settlers of New York state. In addition to the inevitable comparisons with James Fenimore COOPER, his work has been compared to Willa CATHER’s descriptions of the people and landscape of Nebraska. Walter Edmonds was born on July 15, 1903, in Boonville, New York, to Walter Dumaux Edmonds, a lawyer, and Sarah May Edmonds. He was educated at Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1926. He married Eleanor Livingston Stetson in 1929; after her death in 1956, he married Katharine Howe Baker-Carr. In 1929 Edmonds published his first novel, Rome Haul, a story of young Dan Harrow who leaves the family farm to seek his fortune on the Erie Canal; he falls in love with Molly, a cook on a

395

canal boat, and meets others living unusual lives on the canal. He realizes that his future lies on the farm, and he returns to it. His second novel, The Big Barn (1930), focuses on the divisions that are occurring in families throughout the country. The barn-raising episode symbolizes Ralph Wilder’s vision, but his quarreling sons, Henry and Bascomb, divert him from his goals; as the novel draws to a close shortly before the Civil War, only his daughter-in-law, Rose, understands his dream. Erie Water (1933), set in the early 19th century, tells the tale of the building of the Erie Canal. The romance between youthful carpenter Jerry Fowler and freed servant Mary Goodhill, dramatizes the building of the canal over an eight-year period. Against the backdrop of the Battle of Oriskany and the Cherry Valley massacre, Drums Along the Mohawk presents the realistic account of settlers drawn into Revolutionary War fighting despite their wish to ignore politics, raise families, and tend to their farms. Focusing on Gil and Lena Martin, Edmonds presents the remarkable contributions of those upstate New York farmers who helped win the American Revolution. Chad Hanna (1940), a more lighthearted novel, won praise for its depiction of life in mid-century New York state through an Erie Canal stableboy. Chad is bored with his job but helps a runaway slave; the bounty hunters are chasing him, so he joins a traveling circus. On October 30, 1934, Rome Haul premiered on Broadway as “The Farmer Takes a Wife,” an adaptation by Marc Connelly and Frank B. Elser from the novel. It was later made into a feature-length film by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1935. Along with Drums along the Mohawk, the novel Chad Hanna was filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1940. Edmonds’s autobiography, Tales My Father Never Told (1995), was published shortly before his death. Walter Edmonds died on January 24, 1998, at his home in Concord, Massachusetts. Edmonds won a Newberry Medal for The Matchlock Gun (1942) and the National Book Award for Bert Breen’s Barn (1976). He also wrote They Fought with What They Had: The Story of the Army Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific, 1941–1942, a historical account of the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific during World War II, published in 1951 and reissued in 1982.

396 EL BRONX REMEMBERED: A NOVELLA AND OTHER STORIES

NOVELS The Big Barn. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1930. The Boyds of Black River. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953. Chad Hanna. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1940. Drums along the Mohawk. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1936. Erie Water. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1933. In The Hands of the Senecas. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1947. Moses. Toronto: Bush, 1939. Mostly Canallers. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1934. Rome Haul. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1929. The South African Quirt. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. The Wedding Journey. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1947. Young Ames. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1942.

SOURCES Gay, Robert M. “The Historical Novel: Walter D. Edmonds,” Atlantic Monthly 165 (May 1940): 656–658. Kohler, Dayton. “Walter D. Edmonds: Regional Historian,” English Journal 27 (January 1938): 1–11. Wyld, Lionel D. “At Boyd House: Walter Edmonds’ New York State,” English Record 20 (December 1969): 69–72. ———. “Canallers in Waste Land: Considerations of Rome Haul,” Midwest Quarterly 4 (Summer 1963): 335–341. ———. “Fiction, Fact, and Folklore: The World of Chad Hanna,” English Journal 56 (May 1967): 716–719. ———. Walter D. Edmonds, Storyteller. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1982.

EL BRONX REMEMBERED: A NOVELLA AND OTHER STORIES NICHOLASA MOHR (1975) Nicholasa MOHR is one of the best Puerto Rican authors in the United States. She was born in Spanish Harlem in 1935 of Puerto Rican immigrants. Her fiction, sometimes based on firsthand information from her own experience, usually narrates the common life of Puerto Rican immigrants in New York barrios. El Bronx Remembered (1975), Nicholasa Mohr’s second literary work, follows Nilda in time, an accumulation of 11 short stories and a novella dealing with postwar years and a period of great migration from Puerto Rico. As in other works by Mohr, such as Nilda and In Nueva York, the northern barrio is again the predominant space. Nicholasa Mohr explores the experience of Puerto Ricans as they struggle to adjust to their new cultural and social situation in the northern barrios, their cultural clashes, daily problems, and poor

surroundings. In every story there are some elements that help describe the sense of community among Puerto Ricans and the different strategies they develop to survive negative circumstances and problems of cultural adjustment and interethnic conflict. Each story adds a different human quality to the somber landscape of the Bronx where there is racism and injustice but where the community is not always characterized by violence and drugs but where solidarity and human relationships can also be explored. In “A Very Special Pet,” a family keeps a live chicken in their house to have fresh eggs every day. The story presents the disorientation of a poor family of 10 after arriving in the United States. They keep dreaming of going back to the island, but the family situation gets worse, and Graciela, the mother, decides to sacrifice the chicken to feed the children. However, the children, who consider Joncrofo more a pet than a simple chicken, convince her not to do it. For them the chicken has become a symbol of that heritage left behind, of those dreams about going back to Puerto Rico, and killing the chicken means killing their dreams. “Shoes for Hector” tells the story of a young boy from a poor family who is given a pair of orange shoes for his graduation by his uncle, but he is too embarrassed to wear them. In the end he wears them because he has no other shoes and hopes that nobody notices them. After the graduation party he promises to spend his graduation money on a new pair of shoes to avoid any more embarrassing situations. Other stories where the negative environment characterizes daily life among Puerto Ricans are “A New Window Display,” about a young boy who dies after suffering an illness which gets worse because of the northern weather, and “Once Upon a Time,” about two girls who discover a young boy from a Hispanic gang dead on a roof. “Mr. Mendelson” is a positive story about successful interethnic relations as it tells of an old Jewish man living alone among Hispanic people. Mr. Mendelson spends every Sunday with the Suarez family but when he is taken to a residential hotel and they come to visit, a nurse thinks they are delivery people. This shows a lack of understanding about interethnic relations and the fact that they had become a second family for him, overcoming ethnic difference and distance.

ELKIN, STANLEY 397

The novella, “Herman and Alice” tells the story of two people struggling for love and understanding. Alice is a girl who gets pregnant and whose insensitive mother tells her to keep helping in the house since she is the oldest in the family. Her mother rejects her because in some way her daughter has not been able to break the family chain of unwanted pregnancies and a life of sacrifice. Alice has to help clean the house and take care of her brothers and sisters as always and she feels tired and depressed. Alice falls in love with Herman, a middle-aged man who lives in the same apartment building and who helps her during her pregnancy and they end up getting married. However, they finally break up, Herman goes back to Puerto Rico, she returns to her old boyfriend and she ends up getting pregnant again. This is a story of characters trapped in their own tragedies and circumstances, searching for purpose in another person. Mohr’s style in El Bronx Remembered is clear and concise and her realistic narration helps describe the atmosphere and situation of Puerto Ricans living in the Bronx. Her storytelling is direct and accessible, especially to young readers (Mohr was a National Book Award for Children’s Literature finalist in 1976). In this collection Mohr explores important aspects of the Puerto Rican community of the time, such as adjusting to the new environment and culture, the development of a new identity which is increasingly tied to North American ways, changing gender roles in the new situation, and social and ethnic conflicts. In the story “Uncle Claudio,” the clash between cultures provokes Uncle Claudio’s return to the island where he can “get respect.” He cannot understand young people’s behavior—he “lives in another time” and “he is dreaming instead of facing life” (139). The distance between Puerto Ricans from the island and U.S. Puerto Ricans becomes more visible through this collection of stories, in which Mohr also tries to make readers understand the deep changes and problems this community has to face after immigration and settlement in northern barrios.

SOURCES Flores, Juan. “Back Down These Mean Streets: Introducing Nicholasa Mohr and Louis Reyes Rivera,” Revista ChicanoRiqueña 8, no. 2 (1980): 51–56.

Miller, John. “The Emigrant and New York City: A Consideration of Four Puerto Rican Writers,” MELUS 5, no. 3 (1978): 82–99. Mohr, Eugene V. The Nuyorican Experience. Literature of the Puerto Rican Minority. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Mohr, Nicholasa. El Bronx Remembered. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. ———. “An Interview with Author Nicholasa Mohr,” by Myra Zarnowski. Reading Teacher 45, no. 2 (October 1991): 100–106. Sánchez González, Lisa. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Antonia Domínguez Miguela

ELKIN,

STANLEY

(LAWRENCE)

(1930–1995) Stanley Elkin’s unconventional writings—10 novels, two novellas, three story collections, and one essay collection—focus on the ordinary individual who feels unlucky and second-rate and therefore lacks dignity. Postmodern and postexistentialist in conception, his painstakingly crafted novels are absurdist in the extreme and often hilarious as well. His novels typically feature orphaned and dissatisfied male protagonists who, sometimes obsessively, seek understanding of both the frailties and the possibilities inherent in their personalities; they spend a good deal of time contemplating death. Elkin’s admirers praise his verbal pyrotechnics and the vitality of his prose. Although more admired by critics than by the general public, Elkin won a 1974 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award and two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the first for George Mills (1982), and the second for Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995). Stanley Elkin was born on May 11, 1930, in New York City, to Phil Elkin, a traveling salesman, and Zelda Feldman Elkin. He was educated at the University of Illinois, where he received his bachelor’s (1952) and master’s (1953) degrees before marrying Joan Marion Jacobsen, an artist (1953), and serving in the U.S. Army (1955–1957); on his return, he earned a doctoral degree (1961), also from the University of Illinois. In his first novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), a character named James Boswell (after the sycophantic 18th-century biographer of British author Dr. Samuel

398 ELKIN, STANLEY

Johnson) acts out one of Elkin’s recurring themes, that of obsession with celebrity. The egocentric Boswell, dissatisfied with his marriage to the wealthy Countess Marguerite, becomes a professional wrestler and faces John Sallow, known as the Grim Reaper. Boswell is knocked out but not killed and, on his revival, eschews the lives of the rich and famous that had previously consumed him. A Bad Man (1968) features Leo Feldman, department store owner, who tests his strength by arranging to do prison time to atone for the illegal favors he has provided his customers. Like Boswell, Feldman faces death in various guises, including that of prison warden Fisher who, Feldman discovers, is also corrupt. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) centers on a radio newscaster and talk show host who relates to the despairing callers; the empathetic communication flows both ways, and Dick finds in his audience a substitute for the family he has never had. The novel has been repeatedly praised for the way the author uses often hilarious scenes to address his serious concern with post–World War II loneliness. Searches and Seizures (1973) contains three novellas, all of which feature the lives of three lonely males: Alexander Main of The Bail Bondsman, Brewster Ashenden of The Making of Ashenden, and Marshall Preminger of The Condominium. Despite various experiences and experiments outside bachelordom, all remain single; Brewster is bizarrely seduced by a bear in heat at the zoo, and Marshall jumps to his death. Ben Flesh, the protagonist of The FRANCHISER (1976), has been compared to playwright Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman of Death of A Salesman. Another of Elkin’s orphans, Flesh contributes to homogeneity in the United States through the franchises he establishes. Although he has peppered the country with one-hour dry cleaning and fast food establishments, and although he learns humility through suffering the pain of multiple sclerosis (the disease that afflicted Elkin himself), Flesh is ultimately hopeful about America’s future. The First George Mills (1980), considered one of Elkin’s best books, tells the tale of the grandfather of the George Mills of George Mills (1982). The first George Mills tells of his capture by Turks and his forced labor in the salt mines before escaping to Europe; he becomes the first of a family mired in a working-class tradition. George

Mills concentrates on four subsequent generations of the first Mill’s descendants. The main character, the contemporary George Mills, also a blue-collar worker, finally breaks the tradition by declaring it invalid: it was only the family’s acquiescence to their working-class status that validated it. The Living End (1979) contains three novellas, all of whose titles express Elkin’s interest in cliché and its hold on reality: The Conventional Wisdom, The Bottom Line, and The State of the Art. Ellerbee, a good man, who is a Minneapolis liquor store owner and another of Elkin’s orphans, is sent to Heaven and Hell and finds both of them exaggerated versions of life on earth. Through his presentation of God as a comedian and a whiner, Elkin upsets traditional religious views. Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom (1985) demonstrates Elkin’s opposition to the grant-a-last-wish treatment of children with terminal diseases. Instead, the novel illustrates and protagonist Eddy Bale (whose son died of a terminal disease) learns that dying people, even children, need privacy and the love exemplified by their understanding nurse, Colin Bible. Elkin’s later novels include The Rabbi of Lud (1987), about Jerry Korngold, who is such a fearful person that he buries himself in the New Jersey town of Lud. There he remains uninvolved in others’ lives because he is afraid to expose himself to the real lives of his congregation. Based on film director Alfred Hitchcock’s name for a device that jumpstarts the action, The MacGuffin (1991) is the story of retired commissioner Robert Druff who comes to believe that life is an adventure and, by inventing an alternate self with whom he can converse, he saves himself from facing the random aspect of existence. Van Gogh’s Room at Arles: Three Novellas (1993) contains Her Sense of Timing, about Claire Schiff, the wife of a professor who suffers from multiple sclerosis and “Town Crier” Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué, a satiric look at royalty and the media. Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), Elkin’s final novel, portrays a recently widowed woman, Dorothy Bliss, who comes into her own after her husband’s death. Her discovery that his Buick LeSabre is worth much more than she imagined is the springboard for her unwitting involvement with a drug gang. She learns, unfortunately, that her late husband Ted was also an unsavory character.

ELLISON, RALPH WALDO 399

Stanley Elkin taught at Washington University from 1960 until his death from heart failure in 1995 in St. Louis, Missouri. His personal papers are housed at the Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. One of his novellas, The Bailbondsman, was adapted to the screen under the title Alex and the Gypsy.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS A Bad Man. New York: Random House, 1967; London: Anthony Blond, 1968. Boswell: A Modern Comedy. New York: Random House, 1964; London: Hamilton, 1964. The Dick Gibson Show. New York: Random House, 1971; London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. The Franchiser. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976. The First George Mills. Dallas, Tex.: Pressworks, 1980. George Mills. New York: Dutton, 1982. The Living End. New York: Dutton, 1979; London: Cape, 1980. The MacGuffin. New York: Linden Press, 1991. Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom. New York: Dutton, 1985. Mrs. Ted Bliss. New York: Hyperion Press, 1995. The Rabbi of Lud. New York: Scribner, 1987. Searches and Seizures. New York: Random House, 1973; republished as Eligible Men: Three Short Novels. London: Gollancz, 1974; republished as Alex and the Gypsy: Three Short Novels. New York: Penguin, 1977. The Six-Year-Old Man. Flint, Mich.: Bamberger Books, 1987. Van Gogh’s Room at Arles: Three Novellas. New York: Hyperion Press, 1993.

SOURCES Bailey, Peter J. Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. ———. “Stanley Elkin’s Tales of Last Resorts,” Mid-American Review 5 (1985): 73–80. Bargen, Doris. The Fiction of Stanley Elkin. Frankfurt, Germany: Lang, 1980. Coover, Robert. Preface to Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits. New York: Dutton, 1980, pp. ix–xii. Delta, special Elkin issue, 20 (February 1985). Dougherty, David C. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ———. “A Conversation with Stanley Elkin,” Literary Review 34 (1991): 175–195. Elkin, Stanley. “ ‘A Hat Where There Never Was a Hat’: Stanley Elkin’s Fifteenth Interview,” by Peter S. Bailey. Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Summer 1995): 15–26.

———. “An Interview with Stanley Elkin,” by Jay Clayton. Contemporary Literature 24 (1983): 1–11. ———. “An Interview with Stanley Elkin in Saint Louis,” by Richard B. Sale. Studies in the Novel 16 (1984): 314–325. ———. “Stanley Elkin on Fiction: An Interview,” by Phyllis and Joseph Bernt. Prairie Schooner 50 (1975): 14–25. ———. “Stanley Elkin: The Art of Fiction LXI,” interview by Thomas LeClair. Paris Review 17 (Summer 1976): 53–86; republished in Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary Authors, by Thomas LeClair and Larry McCaffery, 106–125. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. ———. “Stanley Elkin: A Bibliography 1957–1977,” Bulletin of Bibliography 34 (1977): 73–76. ———. “Stanley Elkin’s Recovery of the Ordinary,” Critique 21 (1978): 39–51. LeClair, Thomas. “The Obsessional Fiction of Stanley Elkin,” Contemporary Literature 16 (1974): 146–162. Robbins, William M. “A Bibliography of Stanley Elkin,” Critique 26 (1985): 169–184. “Stanley Elkin and William H. Gass: A Special Feature,” Iowa Review 7, no. 6 (1976): 48–140.

ELLISON, RALPH WALDO (1914–1994) Contemporary American literature scholars contend that no author other than Ralph Ellison has left such an enduring mark on literature with only one novel: when the 38-year-old Ellison published INVISIBLE MAN in 1952, a classic was born. For that novel he won the National Book Award. Twenty years after publication, Invisible Man was judged “the most distinguished work” published since the end of World War II, and 50 years later it was listed among the 100 best of Modern Library’s 20th-century novels. It remains an integral part of American literature courses and continues to stimulate new readers and new scholarship. Ellison also wrote short stories, essays, and reviews, but he did not publish the 2,000-page novel on which he had worked for nearly half a century before his death in 1994. His friend and literary executor, Professor John F. Callahan, edited the manuscript, and it was published as JUNETEENTH in 1999. Ralph Waldo Ellison, the grandson of slaves, was born on March 1, 1914, in Oklahoma City, to Lewis Alfred Ellison, a former U.S. Army soldier, and Ida Millsap Ellison of Georgia. When Ellison was three, his father died; his mother worked as a domestic in white homes and black churches until Ellison won a scholarship to

400 ELLISON, RALPH WALDO

Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). Lack of finances caused him to leave school at the end of his junior year, but he worked in Harlem and studied the writers who most influenced him: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest HEMINGWAY, James Joyce, Gertrude STEIN, and T. S. Eliot. He had already read the works of the major Harlem Renaissance writers Langston HUGHES, Claude McKAY, and James Weldon JOHNSON. He became close friends with Richard WRIGHT, worked for the Federal Writers Project, and, at the outbreak of World War II, joined the U.S. merchant marine, serving as a cook on a troop ship. In 1946, Ellison married Fanny McConnell, an Iowa University graduate. From 1945 to 1952, he worked on Invisible Man, writing most of it in Harlem. The book won instant critical acclaim and remained on the best-seller lists for 13 weeks. He uses a nameless narrator (who is in part Ellison) who moves from boyhood to manhood, north to south, from naiveté to political awareness. As many critics have pointed out, there are numerous models for this narrator: James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, for instance. What distinguishes Ellison’s narrator, however, is his invisibility to the white world, which thus far has failed to see black people as individuals and to credit black culture for its contributions to the larger American culture. Ellison was well read, and multiple influences are apparent in Invisible Man, especially that of T. S. Eliot. Ellison also blended classical mythology with contemporary slave tales, and spirituals with allusions to Emersonian transcendentalism; he used Freud and Christianity. Above all, Ellison weaves the motif of jazz and the blues throughout the narrator’s quest for identity, a quest peculiar to African Americans, but one also shared with white Americans. In Juneteenth, Ellison, in ways again clearly evocative of Joyce and Faulkner, describes the evolution of two former slaves, Hickman and Bliss. The title refers to June 19, 1865, the day when slaves in Texas learned of their emancipation. The novel, which represents a fraction of Ellison’s original manuscript, suffers from charges similar to those levied at Hemingway’s posthumously published and heavily edited novel, The Garden of Eden. As other versions of his final opus are published, his reputation can only be enhanced. Ellison spent the rest of his life teaching and lecturing. He was Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Human-

ities at New York University from 1970 to 1979, and professor emeritus until his death, of pancreatic cancer, on April 16, 1994. Ellison, in most critical estimates, ranks with the American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark TWAIN, and Herman MELVILLE.

NOVELS Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Invisible Man, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction by Ellison. New York: Random House, 1982. Juneteenth: A Novel. Edited by John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1999; London: Hamilton, 1999.

SOURCES Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ———. “The Significance of the Frontier in Contemporary American Fiction.” In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream, edited by Mark Busby, David Mogen, and Paul Bryant, 95–103. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1989. Butler, Robert J. The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Carson, David L. “Ralph Ellison: Twenty Years After,” Studies in American Fiction 1 (Spring 1973): 17. Ellison, Ralph. “ ‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph Ellison.” Interview by John Hersey. In Speaking for You, edited by Kimberly W. Benston, 285–307. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. ———. “Study and Experience: An Interview with Ralph Ellison,” by Michael S. Harper, and Robert B. Stepto. In Chant of Saints, edited by Harper and Stepto, 451–469. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Garrett, George, ed. The Writer’s Voice: Conversations with Contemporary Writers, 221–227. New York: Morrow, 1973. Graham, Maryemma, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Harris, Trudier. “Ellison’s ‘Peter Wheatstraw’: His Basis in Black Folk Tradition,” Mississippi Folklore Register 6 (1975): 117–126. ———. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals, 17, 31, 35, 40–49, 53, 76–77, 119, 184. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Kostelanetz, Richard. “The Politics of Ellison’s Booker,” Chicago Review 19 (1967): 5–26.

ENORMOUS ROOM, THE 401

———. “Ralph Ellison: Novelist as Brown-Skinned Aristocrat.” In Richard Kostelanetz, Master Minds, 36–59. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Lewicki, Zbigniew. The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature, 47–58. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. O’Meally, Robert G. Ralph Ellison: The Craft of Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———, ed. New Essays on Invisible Man. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Parr, Susan Resneck, and Pancho Savery, eds. Approaches to Teaching Ellison’s Invisible Man. New York: MLA, 1989. Schor, Edith. Visible Ellison. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. Trimmer, Joseph, ed. A Casebook on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. New York: Crowell, 1972. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

ENORMOUS ROOM, THE E. E. CUMMINGS (1922) E. E. CUMMINGS may be remembered mostly for his poems, but he also published important prose pieces. His first novel, The Enormous Room, has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1922. That year The Enormous Room joined a core of other benchmark modernist works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Cummings’s novel never achieved the critical and historical acclaim that these other works have, but it is significant for its attempt to extend the limits of prose. Critics have noted that Cummings’s attempt to bring cubism into novel form, and his structural allusions to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress are entirely consistent with the modernist tradition. Another, more concrete, reason for The Enormous Room’s importance is that it was the first novel by an American author to give an account of World War I. The Enormous Room is a semiautobiographical novel in which Cummings narrates his experiences as a prisoner in a French detention camp during World War I. Cummings transposes himself, and his friend William Slater Brown with whom he was also imprisoned, into fictional personae: C (for Cummings) and B (for Brown). As with other semiautobiographical novels,

such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it is hard to discern biographical fact from fiction. The Enormous Room should not be read as an exact account of Cummings’s experiences, but it is helpful for the reader to know a little about Cummings’s experience in the war since it was his inspiration for the book. Shortly after taking a master’s degree from Harvard, Cummings voluntarily joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in April of 1917. He met another recruit, Brown, onboard the ship to Paris to begin service in France. Brown and Cummings evaded their rendezvous with the ambulance corps and spent several weeks in Paris seeing a ballet by Stravinsky, Picasso’s paintings, and otherwise enjoying the rich artistic scene of the city. Cummings and Brown eventually met up with the unit, but it was not long before Brown’s letters to family raised suspicion among the French censors. Brown and Cummings were confronted about the letters and the possibility that they were spies. Brown denied that there was anything in his letters that would constitute espionage, and Cummings refused to dissociate himself from his friend, an act that would have kept him out of prison. This is essentially how the novel begins as well. C and B are taken into custody by the French, and they are separated from each other. The reader then accompanies C on a forced march through the countryside and through a series of small prisons as he gets closer to his destination: La Ferte-Mace in Orne, Normandy, the detention camp where he is to be imprisoned. Arriving at La Ferte-Mace during the night, C is taken to an enormous room where the male prisoners are kept. Here he is reunited with B, and in the morning he is introduced to a motley crew of prisoners. C also has several run-ins with semi-intelligent guards and the cruel director. C narrates the daily goings on of the enormous room and the prison yard, providing lively portraits of his fellow inmates. Throughout the novel Cummings speaks out against the war by exposing the cruel and irrational treatment that the prisoners receive because they are all suspected of espionage or treason. The Enormous Room certainly belongs to the great antiwar tradition of Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, and

402 ELMER GANTRY

the poems of Wilfred Owen. It would be a mistake, however, to read no further into this novel than its ostensible antiwar packaging. There is something more profound under the surface. In The Enormous Room, Cummings develops one of the most important themes that pervades his collected writings: his reverence for the individual human being above all other things. The reader will quickly notice that the war is not present in the novel as it is in other war literature of the time. Cummings chooses not to show the reader the frontlines, speak about the horrors of no-man’s land, or of modern machine warfare. This is partly because Cummings was absent from that environment. This, however, orients the novel inward and provides a frame in which Cummings explores the effect of war on interpersonal relationships and human dignity at the level of the individual. From the moment that C refuses to distance himself from his friend B, Cummings asserts the sanctity of individual kinship over and above what he sees as arbitrary obligations to the state. Paradoxically, imprisonment means total freedom for Cummings. In prison he no longer has to fulfill obligations to the state, and he has nothing left to tend to but the self. He can freely associate with Frenchmen, Belgians, and Germans within the prison walls, whereas outside he would be forbidden to develop interpersonal relationships with these same people because of the war. Inside, it is C’s relationships with his friends, whom he calls the “delectable mountains,” that help him to develop individually and spiritually. People who are mired in duties to arbitrary social constructions cannot develop in this way. This is reiterated even in the naming of the inhabitants of the enormous room and the guards who run it. Cummings names the inmates according to their individual attributes, while the officials are named by their institutional function alone. To Cummings, nationality, war, and religion stand in the way of what he interprets as the real purpose of life: the pilgrimage of individual spiritual development.

SOURCES Cummings, Edward Estlin. The Enormous Room. (A typescript edition with drawings by the author.) Edited by George James Firmage. New York: Liveright, 1978.

Kennedy, Richards S. Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright, 1980. SPRING: The Journal of the E. E. Cummings Society. Jonathan William Senchyne

ELMER

GANTRY SINCLAIR

LEWIS (1927)

Dedicated to H. L. Mencken “with profound admiration,” LEWIS’s novel portrays an American type Mencken particularly detested, “to wit, the malignant moralist, the Christian turned cannibal, the snorting and preposterous Puritan” (Prejudices: Fifth Series, 1926). Mencken had derided evangelical ministers and vice crusaders for years, but following MAIN STREET (1920) and BABBITT (1922), Mencken urged Lewis to write a satirical novel about the Man of God or the Professional Good Man in America, for he knew that it could discredit this type far more effectively than all the profiles and exposés published in his American Mercury since 1924. Mencken was disappointed when Lewis wrote ARROWSMITH (1925) instead, but Lewis, who already shared Mencken’s hostility toward the clergy, seized the opportunity, as he would often do (see, for example, IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE [1935]), to write Elmer Gantry following the sensational Scopes “monkey” trial in 1925. Lewis researched and wrote his novel in 1926; it appeared in March 1927. Gantry, whose name begins with the hard g typical of some of the most odious characters in Lewis’s fiction (for instance, Vergil Gunch in Babbitt or Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch in It Can’t Happen Here), is a ruthless and hypocritical opportunist, who uses his personal charm and extraordinary oratorical skills to rise as a minister. His ascent ultimately brings him to Zenith, where he gains notoriety for his fiery sermons and vice crusades, while he indulges in the same vices himself. His womanizing almost ruins him, but he survives a potential public scandal to be appointed pastor of the Yorkville Methodist Church in New York, and while he solemnly pledges to “yet make these United States a moral nation,” he incorrigibly notices the “charming ankles and lovely eyes” of a new singer in the choir (Ch. 33). Elmer Gantry resembles several real-life evangelists with whom contemporary readers would have been familiar, but he was not based on any one preacher.

ELMER GANTRY 403

Among the obvious models were the Reverend Billy Sunday, whom Lewis had already caricatured as Mike Monday in Babbitt, Reverend William Stidger, whose book Standing Room Only (1922) inspired Lewis in describing how Gantry attracts ever larger audiences to his services, and Reverend John Roach Straton, pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church in New York and famous for his vice crusading. The invited reviews in the New York Evening Post (March 12, 1927) illustrate the polarized reception of Elmer Gantry. For Reverend Straton, the novel was “bunk” and the character “preposterously impossible.” For William Woodward, who had coined the term debunking in his own novel Bunk (1923), the novel was “truth as a study of hypocrisy,” and he predicted the “Elmer Gantrys” would demonize Lewis and dismiss his character as an “isolated” fabrication. In his review in the Socialist monthly New Masses (May 1927), Paxton Hibben listed well-known debaucheries of American clergymen, beginning with Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87). Hibben’s debunking biography of Beecher appeared in September 1927; in his review, Mencken found Hibben’s Beecher to be “Even Worse than Lewis’ ‘Elmer Gantry’ ” (Chicago Sunday Tribune, October 16, 1927). Elmer studies Beecher in Public Speaking class at college (Ch. 1) and later reads all his sermons (Ch. 20). There are remarkable similarities and parallels between Beecher and Gantry, in character traits, career paths, pursuit of power, philandering, adultery, and survival of public scandal. Gantry also resembles Beecher in permitting his “thick hair” to hang, “mane-like, just a bit over his collar” (Ch. 23). The allusion to a physical trait of a horse is but one example of the pervasive animal imagery in the novel, which contrasts ironically with the topic of Elmer’s first sermon: “What is it makes us different from the animals? The passion of love” (Ch. 3). On the question of love, Elmer plagiarizes the agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99) and uses his poetic answer (“Love is the Morning and the Evening Star”) to great effect in sermons throughout his career (Chs. 7, 10, 11, 20, 27), while love to him personally is nothing but sex. The animal imagery is most powerfully ironic, however, in the scene (Ch. 29) where Frank Shallard, who has been forced to resign as pastor of his Methodist

church in Zenith, lectures in a Chautauqua series in 1926 on the significance of the Scopes trial. In the audience there are constant “grunts” of “That’s a lie!” “That’s enough!,” cries someone, and young toughs “gallop” down the aisle toward Frank, “their eyes hot with cruelty, teeth like a fighting dog’s.” Taken to a field, Frank is held down, while a “gaunt” figure “snarls” and whips him repeatedly across the face with “a whip for mules.” Mark Schorer views Shallard as a good but weak character “who presents no challenge to Elmer” (Schorer, 477), but Schorer, who has as little appreciation for literary satire as did Reverend Straton, misses the supreme irony of Christian fundamentalists behaving like vicious animals attacking Shallard, with whom no animal imagery is associated at all in the novel. Shallard was eliminated from Richard Brooks’s film version (1960) of Elmer Gantry, starring Burt Lancaster (who won an Oscar for best actor in a leading role) as Elmer and Jean Simmons as the touring evangelist Sharon Falconer (modeled on Aimee Semple McPherson). Brooks also transformed Elmer’s college roommate Jim Lefferts into a cynical savvy newspaper man (played by Arthur Kennedy), whose model was most likely H. L. Mencken portrayed as E. K. Hornbeck in the play about the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind (1955). Mencken defended Elmer Gantry by clarifying the author’s intention: “Lewis does not argue in it that all evangelical clergymen are like his grotesque hero; he merely argues that such men exist” (Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 24, 1927). “Gantry lives,” Mencken proclaimed the following year, “and I believe that he will live far longer than most of those who dislike him” (American Mercury, June 1928). Indeed, Elmer Gantry is the forerunner of such modern televangelists as Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker, and that is why “Elmer Gantry remains a readable and relevant novel” today (Hutchisson, 148).

SOURCES Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Lewis, Sinclair. Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis. Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.

404 ERDRICH, LOUISE

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Frederick Betz

ERDRICH, LOUISE (KAREN) (1954– ) Louise Erdrich has achieved enormous success. She is credited by numerous Native Americans as the author who made their stories known to a larger public. By telling stories of life, both on and off the reservation, in the unadorned style that has become her trademark, Erdrich satisfies the requirements of history and of the individual voice. Typically, Erdrich narrates her stories through many voices, all of which relate events in a nonchronological way. She is frequently compared to William FAULKNER for the ways she structures narrative, and because she too creates a fictional town (Argus, North Dakota), a terrain both mythical and geographic. Erdrich has populated her “wild reservation brushland” and “weathered edge of the North Dakota prairie” (Owens, 193) with such memorable families as the Kashpaws, Morrisseys, and Lamartines, and such poignantly rendered souls as June Kashpaw, Fleur Pillager, and Sister Leopolda. On their journeys through adolescence, marriage, family, and death, Erdrich’s characters—mainly marginalized mixedbloods—encounter or embody such Native figures as Trickster or Spiderwoman or such rituals as healing ceremonies. They are seeking their identities in a land no longer their own. For her first novel, LOVE MEDICINE (1984), Erdrich received the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other award winners include The BEET QUEEN (1986), The ANTELOPE WIFE, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Many of Erdrich’s novels are routinely taught in high school and university level courses. Louise Erdrich was born June 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Montana, to Ralph Louis Erdrich, a teacher, of German ancestry, and Rita Joanne Gourneau, a teacher and daughter of a Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal chair. Reared for most of her life in North Dakota, off the Belcourt, North Dakota, reservation but with frequent visits there, Erdrich was educated at Dartmouth College, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1976, and at Johns Hopkins University, earning her master of arts

degree in 1979. On October 10, 1981, she married Michael DORRIS, a Native American studies professor and writer with whom she collaborated closely, until his death on April 11, 1997. Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, is a linked collection of 14 stories and the first of the quintet comprising The Beet Queen, TRACKS (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996). In this novel she introduces the families that will appear from 1912 through the 1980s: Lazarres, Lamartines, Kashpaws, and Morrisseys. Although readers come to know all the individual characters in their differing degrees of wit, stoicism, and loss, the overall effect, as critic Louis Owens points out, is of “the greater anguish of lost communal/tribal identity and the heroic efforts of a fragmented community to hold on to what is left” (Owens, 194). Erdrich followed with The Beet Queen, set variously from 1932 to 1972 in the town of Argus, on the reservation, and in Fargo, North Dakota, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It features a cast of Indians, mixed-bloods, and full-bloods, with the mute Russell Kashpaw at the center, a silent testament to his wounding in a white man’s war, and Dot Adare, a minor character from Love Medicine, who now becomes a central figure and narrator; there is also the Beet Queen—associated with Spiderwoman. The novel opens and closes with airplanes, as a mother, Adelaide (also introduced in Love Medicine), abandons her small son and daughter. Tracks is set between 1912 and 1924. The fascination of the tale is intensified by the unreliability of both narrators: Nanapush, a Trickster figure, and Pauline Puyat, who becomes Sister Leopolda. At the center of the tale is the voiceless Fleur Pillager, mixed-blood ancestor of the Lamartines and Kashpaws, possessor of supernatural powers, victim of a gang rape by white men, and witness to the destruction of the Chippewas. The tribe has also been betrayed from within. Erdrich paused to collaborate with Michael Dorris on The Crown of Columbus (1991), a novel that explores assumptions about the “discovery” of America from both Native and European perspectives. It features as protagonists two Dartmouth professors, Vivian Twostar, a Navajo–Coeur d’Alene, and Roger Williams, a Puritan in both ancestry and demeanor; initially they disagree about the values of recounting the story from

ERDRICH, LOUISE 405

the perspective of Columbus or of the Native Americans, but eventually they agree on the latter and vow to “discover America” from their newly refreshed perspective. In 1991 Erdrich returned to her quintet, publishing a revised version of Love Medicine (1993) and The Bingo Palace (1994), in which Love Medicine’s Lyman Lamartine builds a bingo hall on the banks of Matchimanito Lake (featured in Tracks) in a scheme to better his fortunes. In this novel Erdrich focuses on specifically Native American issues, gambling and tribal powwows. In addition to using many familiar characters, she introduces the new young woman, Shawnee Ray Toose, with whom both Lyman Morrissey and his nephew Lipsha are in love; the resulting scenes are both comic and poignant. Characters find innovative ways to adapt to contemporary America. Tales of Burning Love (1996) completes the novel cycle. At the center is Jack Mauser, to whom June Kashpaw was married before she walked into the blizzard in Love Medicine (she died there). The rest of the novel features his four subsequent wives—Eleanor Schlick, Candice Pantamounty, Marlis Cook, and Dot Adare Nanapush (of The Beet Queen)—who, as they sit stranded in a snowbound car after Jack’s funeral (he died in a fire), rely on the healing and salvational power of their “tales of burning love.” Concluding her Argus novels, Erdrich completed her plan, conceived with Dorris, to use the four elements: images of air (The Beet Queen), water (Love Medicine), earth (Tracks), and light and fire (The Bingo Palace and Tales of Burning Love). After the suicide of her husband, Erdrich published The Antelope Wife (1998); numerous critics have noted that, despite Erdrich’s disavowals, the novel contains autobiographical overtones in the self-destructive Richard Whiteheart Beads. He is in love with another man, Rozin Roy, and inadvertently kills one of his children in his own failed suicide attempt. Weaving together time and myth are the Antelope Wife, a mystical woman who moves in and out of urban Minneapolis homes, and Almost Soup, an immortal windigo dog. Louise Erdrich has returned to the Midwest after a two-decade-long sojourn in the Northeast. She recently published The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001), an intriguing novel demonstrating the

interstices between Catholicism and Native beliefs; and also featuring the character Fleur Pillager (from Tracks). Her 2003 novel, The Master Butchers Singing Club, is set in North Dakota. Her most recent novel is Four Souls.

NOVELS The Antelope Wife. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, 1986. The Bingo Palace. New York, HarperCollins, 1994. The Crown of Columbus with Michael Dorris. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Four Souls. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Grandmother’s Pigeon. New York: Hyperion Press, 1996. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984. Rev. ed., New York: Holt, 1993. The Master Butchers Singing Club. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. The Range Eternal. New York: Hyperion, 2002. Route Two with Michael Dorris. Northridge, Calif.: Lord John, 1991. Tales of Burning Love. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Tracks. New York: Holt, 1988.

SOURCES Bataille, Gretchen M. “Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen: Images of the Grotesque on the Northern Plains.” In Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction, edited by Richard F. Fleck, 277–285. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents, 1993. Bird, Gloria. “Searching for Evidence of Colonialism at Work: A Reading of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Indian Studies 8 (Fall 1992): 40–47. Brogan, Kathleen. “Haunted by History: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 21: 169–192. Burdick, Debra A. “Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks: An Annotated Survey of Criticism through 1994,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20, no. 3 (1996): 137–166. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Cornell, Daniel. “Woman Looking: Revis(ion)ing Pauline’s Subject Position in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4 (Spring 1992): 49–64.

406 ETHAN FROME

Erdrich, Louise. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich,” by Jan George. North Dakota Quarterly 56 (Winter 1988): 240–247. Erdrich, Louise, and Michael Dorris. “An Interview with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, by Kay Bonetti. Missouri Review 11 (1988): 79–99. Holt, Debra. “Transformation and Continuance: Native American Tradition in the Novels of Louise Erdrich.” Entering the 90s: The North American Experience: Proceedings from the Native American Studies Conference at Lake Superior University, October 27–28, 1989. Saulte Ste. Marie, Mich.: Lake Superior University Press, 1991. Lansky, Ellen. “Spirits and Salvation in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine,” Dionysos: The Literature and Addiction TriQuarterly 5 (Winter 1994): 39–44. Larson, Sidner. “The Fragmentation of a Tribal People in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17, no. 2 (1993): 1–13. Maristuen-Rodakowski, Julie. “The Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota: Its History As Depicted in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and Beet Queen,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 12, no. 3 (1988): 33–48. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 192–224. American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Schumacher, Michael. “Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris: A Marriage of Minds,” Writer’s Digest, June 1991, pp. 28–31, 59. Scott, Sten D. The Gamefulness of American Postmodernism: John Barth and Louise Erdrich. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Towery, Margie. “Continuity and Connection: Characters in Louise Erdrich’s Fiction,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16, no. 4 (1992): 99–122. Van Dyke, Annette. “Questions of the Spirit: Bloodlines in Louise Erdrich’s Chippewa Landscape,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 4 (Spring 1992): 15–27.

OTHER Erdrich, Louise. “The Creative Instinct.” Interview by Robert Spillman. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www. salon.com/weekly/interview960506.html. Accessed August 30, 2005. Voices from the Gaps. “Louise Erdrich.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/bios/entries/erdrich_ louise.html. Accessed June 24, 2005.

ETHAN FROME EDITH WHARTON (1911)

In 1906 or 1907 in Paris, Edith WHARTON hired a tutor to

help perfect her French. As an exercise, she wrote a simple, eight-page short story about a rugged New Englander named Ethan Hart (Wolff, 161). Ethan Hart later became Ethan Frome and continued to surprise his creator by supplying her with rich material that she converted into a novel, published serially by Scribner’s from August to October 1911, and in book form in September 1911 (Lewis, 308). According to biographers and critics, the novel continued to grow because the author’s psyche resonated with the psyches of the characters she called “my granite outcroppings” (Wharton, vii, author’s italics), who articulated for Wharton the beguiling effect of the New England landscape during her years in Lenox, Massachusetts (Lewis, 309). Included in the text are passages from her 1908 personal journals (Lewis, 309–310). Carol Singley claims that Ethan Frome presents “a thinly disguised account of the emotionally divisive relationships between Wharton and loyalties to her husband Teddy as well as Wharton and her lover Fullerton” (Singley, 108). R. W. B. Lewis contends that the novel suggests her “appalling” glance at the possible future (Lewis, 310). The affair ended soon after Wharton finished the novel. She continued to live in Paris without her husband, who, like Zeena in the novel, had become an invalid. Their marriage later dissolved, but not before darkly coloring Wharton’s artistic vision. In her autobiography A Backward Glance, Wharton condemned “the rose and lavender pages” of New England authors she considered sentimental (Goodman, 67). Her own New England palette utilized the black of funereal cypress trees and the white of wide expanses of snow. Starkfield is a fitting name for the story’s bleak setting. A real tragedy, a 1904 sledding accident in Lenox, suggested the novel’s horrific climax. The work has been said to reflect the “chill” of Hawthorne (Lewis, 309) and the entrapment motifs of Poe (Singley, 109). Frome’s environment, forbidding and foreboding, appears muted but strongly delineated. As Cynthia Griffin Wolff has noted, frozen tableaux (Zeena at the doorway, the narrator on the threshold, Mattie making coffee over a campfire) characterize the style, contributing an eerie stillness to the desolate canvas (Wolff, 172).

EUGENIDES, JEFFREY 407

Frome ekes out a subsistence for himself and his wife Zeena from an “arid” Berkshire farm (5) and a “failing saw-mill” (25). Ethan has married Zeena partly out of gratitude (she cared for his sick mother, Endurance), partly out of loneliness (she has broken the silence of his surroundings). He has studied engineering and has promised to move Zeena to the city, but, enveloped by inertia and paralyzed by poverty, the couple remain in Starkfield. Frome defensively blames his wife. Speaking from Ethan’s point of view, the narrator claims that Zeena “chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her” (30). Craving attention, Zeena becomes a hypochondriac. Mattie Silver, Zeena’s orphaned and penniless younger cousin, is hired to care for Zeena, and she and Ethan fall in love. They spend one guilty evening alone together at home, wishing they were husband and wife, and Ethan walks Mattie home from the church socials. When Zeena discovers their romantic feelings for one another, she dismisses Mattie, and catastrophe ensues. Deciding he cannot in good conscience leave Zeena, Ethan takes Mattie to the train; but, on the way, they decide to take a sled down School House Hill, a decision that suggests to them a suicide pact. Ethan steers the sled toward a huge elm tree but the resulting “accident” kills neither Ethan—who ends up with a bad leg—nor Mattie—whose spinal injury leaves her permanently disabled. Zeena, Mattie, and Ethan, their options foreclosed, live out their lives in what Wolff aptly calls an “eternal, infernal triangle” (Wolff, 162), Zeena nursing Mattie, Mattie becoming “querulous” (Wolff, 74), and Ethan meagerly providing for them. This elemental story, presented to previous generations of students as a quaint example of local color, has been resurrected by feminists and other contemporary critics as a classic American tragedy. Ethan Frome bears reading and rereading, not only to understand Zeena, but to grasp the book’s full import. In it, Wharton anticipates naturalism’s emphasis on environmental factors and their influence on human destiny. She also anticipates modern irony, ambiguity, psychology, and feminism (Singley, 125–126). However, the novel questions the modernist valorization of individualism

at the expense of the social fabric. Its author seeks to find a balance between the public and the private. In this respect, Ethan Frome is a classic realist text, which mirrors the themes of Henry JAMES, William Dean HOWELLS, and Ellen GLASGOW. Isolation from society and exclusion from meaningful societal roles destroy its three main characters. Ethan should have escaped Starkfield, entered his profession, and shared with his wife a larger life long before Mattie came to town.

SOURCES Ammons, Elizabeth. “Edith Wharton and Race.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, edited by Millicent Bell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 68–86. Fedorko, Kathy A. Gender and the Gothic in the Fiction of Edith Wharton. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1990. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Reprint, New York: Fromm International, 1985. Lewis, R. W. B., and Lewis, Nancy. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Macmillan, 1988. Singley, Carol. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. New York: Scribner, 1911. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1991. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Gwen Neary

EUGENIDES, JEFFREY (1960– )

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of two novels, both of which received laudatory reviews and awards: The Virgin Suicides (1993), excerpted in the Paris Review, won an Aga Khan Prize in 1991, and MIDDLESEX won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Eugenides, intrigued with the erotic and sometimes destructive powers of sex, limits the scope of both his novels to adolescence, which for many people is a time of pain, bewilderment, and angst. Most critics take special note of his poetic style, often combined with a dreamlike tone accented by the author’s sense of humor. Jeffrey Eugenides was born in 1960 in Grosse Point Park, Michigan, to Constantine Eugenides, a mortgage banker, and Wanda Eugenides. He earned a bachelor’s

408 THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

degree (magna cum laude) from Brown University in 1983, where he studied with novelist John HAWKES, and a master’s degree from Stanford University in 1986. Readers responded with fascination to The Virgin Suicides, the compelling story of five sisters, immigrants from Lisbon, Portugal, told from the perspective of a group of middle-aged men, who were once the neighborhood boys. As they watch helplessly, the sisters commit suicide, one by one: perhaps this author’s disenchanted commentary on 1970s American suburbia. Middlesex, a novel about dual sexuality, features Calliope Stephanides, also called Cal Stephanides, a GreekAmerican hermaphrodite who lives in Detroit. Eugenides describes the sense of adolescent ignorance and embarrassment embedded in Calliope, the immigrant girl who begins growing a mustache as she simultaneously faces issues of assimilation and upward mobility. Later, as Cal, she/he works for the State Department in Berlin, Germany. Speaking to interviewer Dan Cryer, who calls the novel a “comic epic,” Eugenides remarked, “I used the hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us, but as a correlative for the sexual and [identity] confusion” common to adolescence (Welch). Jeffrey Eugenides is married to Karen Yamauchi, an artist. They left New York City, Eugenides’ home for more than a decade, for Berlin, Germany, where they have been living for five years. The movie version of The Virgin Suicides, written and directed by Sofia Coppola, and starring Kirsten Dunst, was issued by Paramount Pictures in 2000.

NOVELS Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. The Virgin Suicides. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993.

SOURCES Berne, Suzanne. “Taking Turns at Death.” New York Times Book Review, 25 April 1993, p. 13. Collins, Rachel. Review of Middlesex, Library Journal (July 2002): 116. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Interview, Library Journal (July 2002): 121. Kakutani, Michiko. Review of The Virgin Suicides, New York Times, 19 March 1993, C23. McCloy, Kristin. Review of The Virgin Suicides, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 20 June 1993, pp. 2, 5.

Mesic, Penelope. “Identity Crisis,” Book (September–October 2002): 70. Prince, Tom. Review of The Virgin Suicides, New York, 26 April 1993, pp. 54–58. Schwarzbaum, Lisa. “Work of Genes,” Entertainment Weekly, 13 September 2002, p. 146. Truax, Alice. Review of The Virgin Suicides, New York Review of Books, 10 June 1993, pp. 45–46.

OTHER Eugenides, Jeffrey. Interview by Jonathan Safran Foer. Available online. URL: http://www.bombsite.com/eugenides/ eugenides.html. Accessed June 24, 2005. ———. “Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides.” By Laura Miller. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/audio/ interview/2002/10/15/eugenides/. Accessed June 24, 2005. ———. “Jeffrey Eugenides Has It Both Ways.” Interview by Dave Welch. Available online. URL: http://www.powells. com/authors/eugenides.html. Accessed June 24, 2005. Gessen, Keith. “Sense and Sexibility.” Nation (October 14, 2002): 25. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 92233457. Accessed March 14, 2006.

THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG NORMAN MAILER (1979) Norman MAILER’s The Executioner’s Song, which won the Pulitzer Prize, merges two of the writer’s career-long preoccupations: murder and celebrity. Neither novel nor journalistic reportage, as these forms have been traditionally understood, this pioneer docufiction about the life and death of the murderer Gary Gilmore can be seen in retrospect as the nexus linking early work, such as the deliberately sensationalistic novel An American Dream (about a celebrity who murders his wife [1966]) and such exercises in and about self-promotion as Advertisements for Myself (1959), with latter-day work like his psychobiographical inquiry into a murder that made for celebrity, Oswald’s Tale (1995). The book is divided into two parts. The first, “Western Voices,” chronicles the life, particularly the inner life, of Gilmore and those who knew him prior to his final crimes. The descriptions of Gilmore’s clumsy attempts to get laid just after getting out of another stretch in prison, of the tribulations of his long-suffering mother and frustrated brother, and of the terrible contingencies that snuff the quiet daily labors of his

THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG 409

hapless victims tend to ennoble rather than degrade what is nevertheless portrayed as the nihilistic chaos generated and endured by the lumpenproletariat. This affect is partly due to the fact that Mailer portrays Gilmore very much in terms of some of his own conceptual predispositions. If Gilmore is white trash, he is also a theologian manqué: his meditations on destiny, on the possibility of malign design, on acts of selfdamnation and the soul’s necessary exculpation through reincarnation can be compared to ideas taken up by Mailer himself in his metaphysical novel Ancient Evenings (1983). Gilmore’s behavior and speculations are also couched in the terms of the existentialist/Hemingwayesque question of how one responds to fear—a preoccupation already present in Mailer’s first novel, The NAKED AND THE DEAD, and one increasingly linked to his understanding of evil, as it is in his account of Gilmore’s intimations and speculations. Mailer also portrays Gilmore as a combative master of public manipulation determined to stage-manage the construction of his own persona through the exercise of charming wit and selfish cruelty—a persona recognizable to anyone who has followed Mailer’s own public life or witnessed any of his interviews (compare for example the way Mailer has dealt with the press regarding his notorious stabbing of his first wife). For these reasons and much more, it is best to speak not of Gilmore, but of Mailer’s Gilmore (just as we would of any character in a novel). This remains the case even though the book is ostensibly concerned with Gilmore’s attempt to make and define himself over and against the judiciary’s version, the media’s version, the promotional industry’s version, of who he is and what he stands for in social and cultural terms. A particularly satisfying irony (thoroughly worked out in the second part of the book, “Eastern Voices”) is generated by the fact that Gilmore’s agenda can take place only through the venues provided by those other agendas with which he is in adversarial struggle. Without doubt, Mailer sets out to make his Gilmore—charismatically irresponsible, frighteningly mercurial, ultimately enigmatic—appealing to literary and intellectual readers. But this need not be judged as either an act of artistic insincerity or ethical inauthenticity. One of the more compelling yet credible elements

of the book, for example, is the intense amour fou (crazy love) between Gilmore and Nicole, which becomes a romantic fantasia of Liebestod (love/death) when they attempt a double suicide in order to be together in eternity. But what gives all this a postmodernist edge is Mailer’s subtle suggestion that behavior reflecting sincerely held thoughts and feelings and reflecting deepseated psychological compulsions is nevertheless inextricably interwoven with hyper-self-consciousness. That is, the outlaw-outsider’s attempt to live out the terms of romantic and existentialist myths is also in part dictated by an egoistic concern for appearances: Mailer’s Gilmore has a sense of an audience, knows how this will play out, recognizes its potential legacy as legend. At the same time, Mailer’s Gilmore is also portrayed as having greater-than-average capacity for harsh self-analysis despite his compulsive predilections, romantic posturings, and naïveté about the world after a life spent in an authoritarian system geared to keeping people childish. The manifestation of Gilmore’s dialectic of self-justification and self-condemnation is facilitated by a ventriloquism that blurs the demarcation between the authorial voice and the voice of the protagonist. Through this strategy, Mailer exposes the immature manipulative selfishness that allows Gilmore to seduce Nicole into attempting suicide after learning she’s been having sex with other men while he’s been campaigning to die. The theme of manipulation is the very fiber of the book that flowers again and again into the brilliant displays of personality-analysis that serve to attract and sustain the reader’s interest. Thus Mailer’s evocative rendering of the assailing noise and soul-killing regimentation that characterizes prison life becomes a partial explanation of why the cons spend most of their time manipulating themselves and each other through self-aggrandizing lies and fanciful delusions. The theme of manipulation goes well beyond Mailer’s depictions of how narrative constructs serve in turn to construct the understandings, delusions, fantasies, and aspirations of oneself and other people. The struggle in the courts to keep Gilmore from becoming the first man to be executed by the State following the Supreme Court’s banning of capital punishment in 1972, is depicted, in typical Maileresque terms, as rhetorical

410 EXPENSIVE PEOPLE

pugilism and feats of gamemanship. Indeed, Mailer suggests that what drives Gilmore’s demand to be killed is sheer obstinacy and an extreme class-born resentment of authority, which will be made to suffer, under his perverse plan, by being forced into the unseemly act of murdering the murderer. Finally, Gilmore aside, the closest thing to a hero in the book is Mailer’s version of Gilmore’s friend Larry Schiller, defrocked journalist turned publicist/producer, who manages, just barely, to retain his ethical integrity in the process of getting an audience for Gilmore’s personality, attitudes, and values—not the least by contracting Mailer to write his book. “It’s fascinating, it’s ugly, and it’s complicated” (610). This description of the Gilmore story pitched by a promoter to a prospective TV producer could equally describe Mailer’s book-length version of events. If it does not quite achieve the epic function that its massive length (1,056 pages) would seem to promise, Mailer’s account of the court battles and meretricious media skirmishes does provide a complex, multifaceted socialpsychological portrait of the politics of spectacle and the cultural pathologies that require it. Mailer’s portraits of all the performers in this national circus constitute a veritable typology of American hustlers of every sort and agenda, whose lack of the novelist’s awareness of psychological, moral, and metaphysical complexity bestows upon them an ignorance, approximating innocence, that authorizes and permits their relentless drive toward narrowly focused objectives. In these depictions, Mailer deploys a strategy used in his earlier dissections of the psychodynamics of ambition and the pathological turf wars of American politics (see his essays on Kennedy, his coverage of the 1969 conventions in Miami and the siege of Chicago, and his Pulitzer Prize–winning account of an anti–Vietnam War rally in Armies of the Night [1968]). In summary, The Executioner’s Song has become a classic of “true crime” writing because its panoramic scope takes in more than just crime reconstruction and the requisite provision of motives (though it does this too). It is an extended character-study of the central figure studded with multiple briefer but equally revealing character-studies of a constellation of satellite participants, who, despite their idiosyncrasies, are

recognizable American social types. In addition the book offers a provocative analysis of the court, prison, and hospital systems and a backstage exposé of how journalists and media producers develop the storylines and characters that we naively term “the news.”

SOURCES Duncan, Martha Grace. Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: the Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. New York and London: New York University Press, 1996. Lesser, Wendy. Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry Into the Subject of Murder. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Rollyson, Carl. The Lives of Norman Mailer—A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987. David Brottman

EXPENSIVE PEOPLE JOYCE CAROL OATES (1968) Expensive People is a significant variation from OATES’s typical style of writing, for it is written in first person, and Oates also uses satire to develop her commentary on suburban culture rather than relying on plot and characters’ actions. The narrator, Richard Everett, drives the plot of the story forward while remaining seated at his typewriter throughout the novel. His “memoir” serves not only as a medium for expunging guilt about events of his life but also expands to describe a critical, though exaggerated, picture of American suburban culture. Beginning his memoir with the simply stated yet deeply loaded words “I was a child murderer,” Richard has already stated the climax and focus of the novel in the first sentence. The remainder of his memoir weaves back and forth through time, working from flashbacks to giving present information about himself (“I weigh two hundred and fifty pounds—and if I told you how old I am you would turn away”—[4]). The purpose of his memoir, Richard says, is unknown. “My memoir is not a confession and it is not fiction to make money; it is simply—I am not sure what it is. Until I write it all out I won’t even know what I think about it” (4). Richard guides readers through what he considers his most formative ages: 10–12. He introduces readers to his parents, Elwood Everett and Nada (Natashya)

EXPENSIVE PEOPLE 411

Romanov. Elwood is a businessman and Nada is an amateur writer. Richard makes no secret of his abnormal adoration for his mother. His confused state of mind combined with his plan to commit suicide at the end of his memoir force an almost discombobulated feel to the memoir—as if the incidents to which Richard refers are being written down as they pop into his mind, rather than in order of importance, impact, or time. Several incidents stand out from this threeyear time period as being particularly significant to Richard’s life and planned death: his enrollment in Johns Behemoth Boys’ School, Nada’s tendency to pack up and leave the family with no notice and be gone for months at a time, and, the reason for Richard’s proclamation in the first line, Nada’s death. Beyond being simply a memoir of a disturbed boy (Richard is only 18 years old at the time of his writing), his work is Oates’s vehicle for commentary on the social issue of suburban culture. In Expensive People Oates reveals “the general absurdity of a brutally competitive and relentlessly materialistic culture” (Johnson, 64–65). Both of Richard’s parents are individual stereotypes of suburban culture. A description of Richard’s father says that he comes from money. “Yes, you could almost guess that from Father’s fluctuation between superb and bestial manners, his inches of exposed hairy skin when he crossed his legs, the way he sampled and rejected chocolate candies—spoke of friends with an anxious condescension (‘He’s only a doctor, but—’ ‘He’s only with KRH, but—’), the way he bossed us around even when we weren’t listening . . .” (18). Richard’s father believes, as the stereotype goes, that money and appearance are more important than the internal family structure. As long as food is provided, the family name is solid, and all of the whims of the wife and children are met, everyone is happy. Elwood is blissfully unaware (or he pretends to be) of Nada’s infidelity. His characterization in the novel is Richard’s constant perception and preoccupation, since Nada was constantly running away to be with one man or another. Richard loves his father but holds him responsible for the breakup of the family. Nada is the most complex character in the novel, likely due to Richard’s Oedipal attraction to her, based

less on his mother’s stunning beauty than his knowledge that she is desired by nearly every man she meets. “My dentist in Wateredge, who kept calling me back in order to check my cavities, my gums, who knows what, and to discuss me in detail with Nada—and many others, many others, had looped their snaky necks around me to see past me and ogle my mother” (41). Nada knows the power she has over men and uses it to advantage for both herself and Richard (admission to Johns Behemoth Boys’ School, for example). Her desire to be an accepted member of society in actuality shows her to be extremely shallow. She forces Richard to call her “Nada,” and is constantly focused on his appearance. Nada’s secret is that she is quite ordinary. She doesn’t come from money; her family is middle class. Her name isn’t Natashya, but Nancy. To compensate for her reality, Nada becomes the perfect suburban housewife. She gets her hair done weekly at the salon where all the housewives go, and holds elaborate parties where she can show off her possessions, her home, and her perfect family. The most comical display of her character occurs when the family moves into a new house. Nada must make a few phone calls to set up their new life. She calls for a maid, a plumber, lawn service, the gas company, the insurance company, the garbage disposal service, the sanitation department, Good Will, the local junior high school, the bank, the dentist, the eye doctor, the skin doctor, the electric company, the water company, and, even though she’s using the phone at the time, the phone company. This episode is a family affair, with Richard looking up phone numbers and Elwood massaging Nada’s feet. Oates takes several pages for this incident, demonstrating how the truly suburban really do need a service for everything. Nada’s friends are also a clear criticism of suburbia: Scholar G. F. Waller observes, “We smile at the rather obvious allegory of Oates’s vacuous characters’ vacuous names—Howie Hanson the real estate man, Dr. Hugg the psychiatrist, Dr. Bellow the dentist, the Everetts’ friends the Bones, Bodys, Veals, Spoons, and Voyds” (Waller, 117). Shortly after the move that required all the phone calls, Nada decides to throw a party. She and Elwood have a discussion about inviting the Veals, who may or may not be dead. Nada remembers them dying

412 EXPENSIVE PEOPLE

in a plane crash, while Elwood seems to remember running into them “the other day at Vernon White’s” (146). The most tragic commentary of suburban culture is Richard himself, whom Oates depicts as the manifestation of all the negatives of this shallow culture. Richard is constantly ill; he is known to the family and all their friends as a sickly child. He has spent years virtually abandoned by his mother, living in a house designed for adults with little regard for him as a child. When his mother leaves, his father takes him out drinking and proceeds to describe each of Nada’s flaws and how the two men are better off without her. Richard is trying to survive in a situation where no one is surviving—the adults by choice, Richard by misfortune. The ending of the novel is ambiguous. Did he kill his mother? Possibly, although everyone tells him he

did not. His suicide, which he says will follow the completion of his memoir, will be accomplished by eating himself to death as did one of Nada’s uncles. Expensive People is a novel that combines Oates’s use of violence (both physical and mental) and strong critical skills to bring to light the negative aspects of a culture to which many people wish they could belong.

SOURCES Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. Oates, Joyce Carol. Expensive People. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1968. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Kelly Flanagan

C

FD

FACE OF AN ANGEL DENISE CHAVEZ (1994) Face of an Angel (1994) won the 1995 American Book Award, the Puerto del Sol fiction award, and the 1994 Premio Aztlan award. This great novel is a tribute by a contemporary Chicana writer to a line of women whose voices have given substance and creativity to Chicana literature. This tribute to women also becomes Denise CHAVEZ’s narration of a conflict and its development, since these women have played a paradoxical role as transmitters of Chicano culture’s oppressive patriarchal dictates. Soveida Dosamantes, a waitress at “El Farol,” a New Mexican restaurant, recovers the stories of pain and endurance of her female relatives. Face of an Angel is at the same time a bildungsroman and the progressive discovery of Soveida’s own Chicana self as she explores Chicana women’s history, their daily realities, their miseries and virtues. The novel is structured around different stages of a process in which we find generational clashes among women caused by the oppressive roles and values that some women accept while others reject. Fifteen-yearold Soveida does not understand why she cannot go out with boys, why anything related to a woman’s body is avoided and silenced, why she is supposed to become a docile and submissive woman. The causes for women’s betrayal can be found only in women’s stories but until now they have been unheard. The story of Soveida’s mother is that of a woman condemned by her huge breasts, trapped within her own body that she hates for its connection to sex. She

would do her best to prevent Soveida’s early entrance in the world of sex and womanhood, but, as in her own case, this is impossible. Mamá Lupita, Soveida’s grandmother on her father’s side, also tries to convince the young Soveida that she should become a nun, to spare her the sufferings and dangers of marriage and sex. The fate of women seems to be fixed through generations, mainly because the mothers are the ones who impart the lessons of a feminine identity that the young Chicana is compelled to imitate, as happens to Soveida, and as happened to her grandmother. Women’s betrayal regarding the perpetuation of gender roles is the main starting point in the conflict between mothers and daughters. Betrayal usually takes the form of mothers controlling their daughter’s lives, transmitting their own guilt and curse as women, and not supplying the same self-confidence given to their sons. The home becomes a paradoxical site for women: on the one hand it is the source of nurturance and safety that cannot be found outside in a dominant culture that labels them as illegal aliens, but on the other hand it can be suffocating and manipulative for women. Soveida approaches the idea of service from a double perspective: she addresses service as a constraining role paradoxically enforced by women themselves who teach their sons to be masters of their future wives. But service is also a source of ethnic nurturance and humanity, a sign of women’s spiritual strength to help other people. This second approach is connected to Soveida’s decision to write the “Book of Service,”

413

414 FACE OF AN ANGEL

apparently for waitresses. Women’s service is related to patience and waiting. Adult lonely women are always waiting for their men to come home, and most younger women also wait, but for a man to escape from his mother’s suffocating sphere. But when the young Chicanas grow up and experience the same as their mothers, they feel the need to reconcile with their mothers, as in the case of Sovieda who, unwilling to whisper feelings of guilt, pain or passivity, rejects a tradition of betrayal. Her mother, Dolores, will break with her past, divorcing Soveida’s father, Luardo. She is a new woman and wants to be called Dolly. She meets an American man, and though she may have been considered a Malinche—a negative metaphor to describe both women and the culture—within her Chicano community, for Soveida she becomes an inspiration of strength and energy to fight for herself. Both women will try to break the perpetual silences between mothers and daughters. After having a series of frustrating encounters with sex, love, and marriage, Soveida begins to find her true self, loving herself and the women around her. It is by recovering the stories of the women in her family that Soveida begins to understand the reasons for women’s betrayal of daughters, but she also recovers the bonds that will always keep them together. As she rediscovers herself and becomes independent, she feels the need to find her ethnic identity within her community and at home. She asks Oralia, Mamá Lupita’s maid, to tell her stories about her family and ancestors in an attempt to recover her cultural Chicana roots. Now a woman in her forties, she needs to come back to the only source of true love and relief she has known, female relatives. There is no better way for Soveida to heal her pain than to be surrounded by the women who understand that pain: Mamá Lupita, Dolly (Dolores), Oralia, and Mara. In the last chapters we hear the inner voice of these women. They return to their early memories when women combed their mothers’ hair and felt full and complete. When Mamá Lupita thinks she is dying she prays for a return to the origins of women when all her pains are healed. Dolly is afraid of losing Soveida’s love because she is getting married again, but Soveida has returned to her after realizing her mother’s real value and feelings: “When I was growing up, I hated her need, her pain. Now that she is happy, neither mamá Lupita

nor I recognize her. I want to wish her happiness. The same thing I want for myself. . . . My first role of server was to my mother and her needs. Dolores was my training for service. . . . And yet now I would like to sit down with Dolly and roll her hair the way I used to” (398). The event that finally brings all the women together is Oralia’s death. The roles reverse and now it is Oralia who is nursed and served by the three women. All of them find a new source of strength in recovering the bonds, healing their wounds. The reconciliation will be embodied in the future when Soveida gets pregnant and decides to become a single mother. Soveida and her baby become the hope for the future. The book of service Soveida has been writing and intermingling with her family’s stories, is not only dedicated to the new waitresses but to all female readers. Female service is something more than serving men, it is a source of strength for your own self. The book Soveida writes, like Face of an Angel, becomes a book of service for all women. At the end of the novel Soveida acknowledges her role as a writer and transmitter of female knowledge. Oralia and the other women whose voices are heard telling stories are acknowledged as representatives of the only available female literary tradition. It is among these women that the Chicana writer finds an authentic creative voice as her literary source.

SOURCES Chavez, Denise. “Interview with Denise Chavez,” by Annie O. Eysturoy. In This Is about Vision. Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, 157–169. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. ———. “Interview with Denise Chavez,” by Lynn Gray. Short Story Review 5, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 2–4. Domínguez Miguela, Antonia. Esa imagen que en mi espejo se detiene: La herencia femenina en la narrativa de Latinas en Estados Unidos. Huelva, Spain: University of Huelva, 2001. Eysturoy, Annie O. Daughters of Self-Creation. The Contemporary Chicana Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Gonzalez, Maria. “Love and Conflict: Mexican American Women Writers as Daughters.” Women of Color: MotherDaughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature, edited, and with introduction by, Guillory Elizabeth Brown, 153–171. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

FAHRENHEIT 451 415

Quintana, Alvina E. Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices, 93–111. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996. Socolovsky, Maya. “Narrative and traumatic memory in Denise Chavez’s Face of an Angel,” MELUS (Winter 2003): 187–205. Antonia Domingo Miguela

FAHRENHEIT 451 RAY BRADBURY (1953) Ray BRADBURY’s most widely read novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), has sometimes been compared to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but it has more in common with George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a classic examination of the manipulation of the human mind. All three works express fears of modern, technologically advanced societies by extrapolating contemporary authoritarian and antihumanist trends into the future, not necessarily to predict the inevitable but to sound the alarm. Fahrenheit 451, conceived while the McCarthy hearings were at their height, reflects the paranoid atmosphere of the period, without being or trying to be an allegory of cold war politics. Notably, Bradbury’s “Big Brother,” President Winston Noble, is a minor character, though his first name is a nod to Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith. The story evolved from the novella “The Fireman,” published in Galaxy in February 1951. Its idea can be crystallized into a simple “what if” question: “what if books were banned,” or to follow the storyline: “what if firemen were burning books?” However, the main subject of the novel is not censorship as it often has been claimed, in spite of the fact that the publishing history of the book appears to confirm this ironically— swearwords and all references to nudity, drinking, and abortion were secretly removed from the Bal-Hi editions of the 1960s and 1970s for high schools. The original text was restored in 1979 with Bradbury’s afterword, in which he noted that there is more than one way to burn a book. At one level, Fahrenheit 451 is an insightful analysis of mass culture, or cultural industry, to use the term of Theodor Adorno, a decade before Marshall McLuhan made media studies fashionable. Bradbury’s stance on the impact of television is critical. Books represent individualism, reason, and quality of information: they “show the pores in the face of life,” whereas we cannot

argue with a wall-size screen that substitutes sensations for thinking. In general, Bradbury considers television the technology of control and manipulation. Another remarkable feature of the work since its publication has been the seriousness with which readers have taken its prophecies, the end of the book particularly. Not too many science-fiction novels from the 1950s have survived the test of time and continue to enjoy a similar following. The story is set in a possible future in America, where the pursuit of happiness has displaced liberty, and pleasure means not to think about anything. Books have been outlawed by the government. The public itself has stopped reading—“technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick.” (This is a new type of barbarism introduced into science fiction.) Also, history, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, has been rewritten. We are informed that the Firemen of America was established in 1790 to burn Englishinfluenced books in the colonies. The first Fireman was Benjamin Franklin. The chief protagonist of the dystopia, Guy Montag, is a surrealistic figure: a fireman who has been trained to seek out and burn books and libraries. “It was a pleasure to burn,” he says in the opening line. His journey from false identity into self-discovery begins when he meets a young woman, Clarisse, a kind of Muse. Full of zest for life, she is the opposite of Montag’s wife, Mildred, whose empty, suicidal existence becomes a metaphor for the whole self-destructive society. Mildred is a truly tragic figure, cruel and narcissistic, as authentic as her “family” on her three-wall television. Beatty, the fire chief, is Montag’s antagonist and the first of three opponents or mentors, who engage Montag in lengthy philosophical debates. Others are Faber, a retired English teacher, and Granger, the leader of the “memorizers.” Beatty is a Nietzschean nihilist without any real values to cling to; he accepts only trivial facts and rejects the notion of a writer as an indispensable teller of truths. Clearly, he is not the author’s mouthpiece. The fire chief fully embraces the tyranny of “political correctness”—in practice, censorship. Literary references and allusions, incorporated into the narrative, are an inseparable part of the texture of the novel. Beatty plays with contradictory quotations

416 FAHRENHEIT 451

from classics, truths and untruths, like a juggler and concludes that one cannot learn anything from books. His passionate rhetoric alternates between serious and nonserious and contains all the typical features of carnivalization, which Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce regard as the central focus of Bradbury’s fiction (Eller and Touponce, 3). Behind his mask of conformity, Montag gradually undergoes a change of values. Montag realizes his life has been meaningless without books. He contacts Faber, who starts to teach him. “The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are,” Faber says. Incidentally, Faber’s name refers both to pencils and a publishing company, and Montag is named after a paper manufacturing company. Faber is an archetypal old wise man, a guru and theoretician, whose weakness is the usual—cowardice, inability to stand by one’s principles. He gives Montag a Seashell Radio, a small transceiver. Thus he turns into a voice in Montag’s head, perfecting his student’s schizophrenic state of mind. Mildred informs on Montag, who is forced to burn his own home. After killing Beatty with a flamethrower, Montag flees to the countryside. There he joins a group of dissidents, keepers of knowledge, who preserve texts in memory, not on paper. In a sense, they represent a return to the oral tradition, the time before Gutenberg. Granger, their spokesman, is a realist, as opposed to Faber. He compares the outcasts, professors, and intellectuals to dust jackets for books, who have no significance otherwise. His words echo the celebrated plea for a free press and free speech from 1644, in John Milton’s Areopagitica: books are not dead things, they “preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect bred in them.” Granger angrily calls the phoenix the first cousin of man and introduces the idea of cultural cycles, similar to those examined by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1918–22). When the apocalyptic final destruction comes, Montag repeats in his mind words from Ecclesiastes, which he has memorized. Bradbury withholds the exact lines but they could be from the first chapter: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” The very end of the story, with its image

of the tree of life, can be interpreted in many ways. It suggests the restoring of the old myths and ideals, and the emergence of a fresh vision of the world. Bradbury returned to the characters of Fahrenheit 451 again in his stage adaptation of the novel. It premiered in Los Angeles in 1979. The play included new scenes and revealed that Beatty owns a huge library; he has loved books, devoured them, but due to disappointments in life, he stopped reading. Provocatively, he calls Montag the young torchbearer of truth and gives him Machiavelli’s The Prince, to start his private library of unread books. Fire is, of course, the major symbol of the novel. Its title refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire and burns. Phoenix, an official symbol of the firemen, refers to periodic destruction and re-creation; the myth is one of the oldest and is known from ancient Egypt to China. Curiously, in Nazi Germany the myth served as an apology for bookburnings. In May 1933, when more than 20,000 books were thrown into the flames in Berlin, the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels declared that from their ashes will rise the phoenix of the new spirit. In Bradbury’s fiction, a metaphor regularly leads into another metaphor as in a word-association process. The phoenix is the symbol of Montag’s resurrection. The mythical basis of his spiritual transformation distinguishes the tale from “hard” science fiction. Moreover, nearly all of its technological inventions, ostensibly symptoms of deeper social problems, refer to mythological backgrounds, starting from the Electronic-Eyed Snake machines, built for would-be suicides. Mildred, after her suicide attempt, is brought back to life by two technicians operating the machine, not by doctors, as nonchalantly as if they were repairing a broken toy. The most menacing machine is the Mechanical Hound, which stalks Montag like a bad conscience. But even the hound has its literary source, obviously the Hound of the Baskervilles. His consistency in relying on the unconscious and its transformational power separates Bradbury from other grand masters of science fiction such as ASIMOV and Arthur C. Clarke, both strongly technology-oriented. Indeed, Bradbury’s literary precursors do not stop at H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, but continue to Herman

FALCONER 417

MELVILLE, Edgar Allan POE, Henry David Thoreau, and the romantic poets. The theme of separateness and loneliness recurs throughout Bradbury’s oeuvre. Montag’s nostalgia for the past, his lost childhood, forms the basis of his personal growth. And to follow the cues of the story, nostalgia also invites readers, in an inconspicuous way, to recall their own early magical reading experiences, whatever they are, Buck Rogers comic strips, Burroughs’s Tarzan adventures, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and others of the same type. Undoubtedly no other science-fiction novel has contributed more to the appreciation of literature than Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury’s tale inspired the French director François Truffaut’s ambitious, low-keyed film adaptation in 1966. The filmmaker Michael Moore utilized the novel’s famous title in his propagandist film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), “the temperature at which freedom burns.”

SOURCES Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003. ———. Zen in the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Joshua Odell Editions, 1994. Eller, Jonathan R., and William F. Touponce. Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2004. Weist, Jerry. Bradbury: An Illustrated Life. New York: William Morrow, 2002. Petri Liukkonen

FALCONER JOHN CHEEVER (1977)

Ezekiel Farragut, the protagonist of Falconer, would seem to be one of John CHEEVER’s prototypical characters; he has wealth, the suburban home, a beautiful wife, friends, education—all of the ingredients our society requires for success. These ingredients, however, leave him profoundly alienated; his family bequeaths to him a legacy of denial, his friends and marriage are a disaster of superficiality and lies, and “glamour” or adultery, and alcohol and drug abuse are the tools he chooses to escape his life. We meet him, thus, as #734-508-32, an inmate at Falconer Prison, found guilty of fratricide, a heroin addict on a methadone maintenance regimen. Ironically, it is only his experience at the Department of Corrections, his connection with the wayward and dis-

placed, that enables Farragut to finally experience a true sense of his own identity and to find the humanity in himself and others. Initially, Farragut eyes everyone and everything in prison with a sense of detachment, seeing himself as a worldly man shuffled haphazardly among the unworthy. He readily accepts prison stereotypes, referring to his fellow inmates by their nicknames—Tennis, Chicken Number Two, Bumpo, Stone, Ransome, and their obese guard, Tiny—but refers to himself only by his prison number. He recounts in grim detail the daily privations that rob such prisoners of their humanity: the cell toilet that flushes at will all day long, the bars worn at the height where the prisoners grasp them, a sickening prison cat massacre inflicted by a guard whose dinner was stolen, and the entertainment that other guards derive from denying Farragut his methadone and watching his antic withdrawal. Yet these observations seem no less disturbing than Farragut’s brief visit from his bitter, adulterous wife, Marcia, who says of his absence, “Well, it’s nice to have a dry toilet seat” (28), or his recollection of his brother Eben who, as he tells Ezekiel that their father had wanted him aborted, says nonchalantly, “Don’t take it seriously. Don’t blame yourself. Do sit down and let me get you a drink” (193). Farragut’s detachment, his seeming composure, crumbles in a truly cathartic, though slowly believable, manner. How is this composure violated? Perhaps it is when Farragut finds true emotional solace in a homosexual relationship in prison. Perhaps it is when he realizes that the Department of Corrections has rid him of his drug addiction, something three blue-ribbon treatment centers were unable to cure. Perhaps it is when he realizes his own complicity in his family disaster. Or perhaps it is when he acknowledges that, despite wealth, class, and education, he is not different from the other dispossessed men with whom he shares cell block F. In the end, when he rigs an escape only after compassionately bathing the dead body of a fellow inmate and accepting the disguise of another lonely man, Farragut’s composure in self-deception and denial is finally shattered and replaced with another type of composure: one based on grace, compassion, and fortitude. In a novel that would seem to

418 FAMILIAR HEAT

recount only the bleakest of man’s conditions, Cheever ends on a note of unexpected freedom: “Rejoice, [Farragut] thought, rejoice” (211).

SOURCES Cheever, John. Falconer. New York: Knopf, 1977. Johnson, Glen M. “The Moral Structure of Cheever’s Falconer,” Studies in American Fiction 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 21–31. Waldeland, Lynne. John Cheever. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Patricia Becker Lee

FAMILIAR HEAT MARY HOOD (1995) When Mary Hood published her novel Familiar Heat in 1995, she was already an established short-story writer with two award-winning collections, How Far She Went and And Venus Is Blue. Since her stories often leave readers wanting to discover more about her soulful characters, it made sense that Hood would develop into a talented novelist as well. Unlike the early short stories, which were set primarily in Hood’s Georgia surroundings, Familiar Heat takes place on the Florida coast where most of the main characters have immigrated to the small community of Sanavere. In an interview since the novel’s publication, Hood admits, “When I go back to the coast now, I have a strong sense of being where I really belong. . . .” (Hood, Gretlund interview, 69). Familiar Heat centers on Faye, a substantive young woman who falls in love with and marries Captain Vic Rios despite her mother’s warnings about his “devil in a white shirt reputation” (7). Readers are spellbound as Faye survives one life challenge after another—kidnapping, rape, marital problems, and a paralyzing car accident. Faye must learn the basics of life all over again. The Catholic faith plays significantly in this novel; sometimes the church provides comfort for Faye and the other characters, and sometimes church representatives do not seem understanding enough since they have problems of their own. All of the novel’s tragedies and successes are intertwined through this small Florida community. Although they experience many happy moments, Hood’s characters often learn their lessons best through the difficulties they overcome. Familiar Heat seems peopled with careless individuals—characters who arrange certain aspects of their lives carefully but who simultaneously neglect the peo-

ple that matter to them most. One character, Cassia, carefully puts her wedding rings in a cup on the sink not only when she washes dishes but also when she feels she must leave her family for a night or two to seek comfort with strangers. She learns later that the man (Agapito) she married when she was already pregnant with Cristo had known about the situation she kept secret all along. Agapito had come to believe that when Cassia took those bus trips, she was seeing their son’s biological father, yet he cared for her so much that he never complained. Sometimes being careful with those you love means sacrificing some of yourself. Hood clearly does not shy away from issues that might be controversial: Familiar Heat takes on a number of relevant issues without exaggeration. Cristo has grown up to be a professional baseball player, and his Florida hometown adores him. However, Cristo is in love with Faye, whose marriage is on the rocks despite all her efforts. The parish priests are little help to Faye since they are more concerned with watching Cristo’s games on television or with giving her one-size-fits-all advice for making her marriage work even though her husband has left her. Hood’s criticism of the church on certain issues is subtle but important, despite the fact that “beneath the surface . . . lurks a powerful spiritual dimension” (Farmer, 91). Hood’s purpose seems to be more thematic than aesthetic. David Aiken aptly notes, “Focused as they are on our common humanity, [Hood’s] stories bypass the issue of blame and carry the reader to a point where forgiveness is not only desirable but possible” (Aiken, 31). After Faye’s accident leaves her so damaged she has to start again as a child would, learning basic concepts, her estranged husband’s brother Tom begins to help her and eventually forms a second love triangle with Faye and Vic. Even though Tom is careful with Faye and values her just as she is, her husband Vic cannot deal with all that has happened to Faye and therefore feels justified in neglecting her. Still, Faye longs to understand the meaning of her marriage and the concept of love in general. Hood sustains the contrasts of caring and carelessness for the length of the novel, and readers come away convinced of their own carelessness. Hood says, “ ‘Love one another’ is the text I live by” (Hood, Gretlund interview, 79). This hopeful but

FANNY 419

potentially grim message resonates within the remarkably powerful plot of Familiar Heat. Hood’s presentation of time in the novel is unique. As a stereotypical southerner might tell a story with numerous asides and digressions, the third-person narrator of Familiar Heat teases the reader with a line or two about the wedding photo the FBI would use to look for Faye after her kidnapping when the reader does not yet know the story of Faye’s falling in love with Vic Rios. Readers get a taste of the whole picture before discovering the details. However, Hood keeps readers wanting more; the novel sustains suspense throughout, keeping us hooked on the romantic possibilities in addition to the very survival of the main characters. The underlying message to be careful with those we love remains clear. Stylistically, Hood’s humorous way with words makes her fiction a pleasure even at mere sentence level. She captures the informal speech of individuals and the comic use of brand names with a power that rivals Mark TWAIN’s regional writing. Indeed, several critics have noted the connection between her characters’ speaking patterns and those of 19th-century southern local-color writers. Hood’s style makes reading any of her fiction a pleasure, but her first full-length work Familiar Heat gives readers that much more opportunity to enjoy her verbal dexterity and her innovative storytelling ability. Like Kate CHOPIN, Hood is able to detail her settings vividly without sacrificing character development or plot. What happens to Faye and to the whole community in Familiar Heat is riveting, but the style Hood employs to tell it is also remarkable, for she believes that everyone should be able to read her fiction. In Familiar Heat, Mary Hood blends important but realistic themes with beautiful form. Such a marriage of art and meaning comes naturally for a writer whose personal convictions match her life’s work.

SOURCES Aiken, David. “Mary Hood: The Dark Side of the Moon.” In Southern Writers at Century’s End, edited by Jeffrey Folks and James Perkins, 21–31. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Farmer, Joy A. “Mary Hood and the Speed of Grace: Catching up with Flannery O’Connor,” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 91–100.

Hood, Mary. And Venus Is Blue: Stories. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1986. ———. Familiar Heat. New York: Knopf, 1995. ———. “Fiction Is Like Fire,” interview by Jan Nordby Gretlund. American Studies in Scandinavia 33, no. 2 (2001): 69–82. ———. How Far She Went: Stories. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. ———. “Virga.” In After O’Connor: Stories from Contemporary Georgia, 149–163. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Rachel Wall

FANNY, BEING THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF FANNY HACKABOUT-JONES ERICA JONG (1980) With her 1980 picaresque novel Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, Erica JONG showed the public and literary establishment that she was more than Isadora Wing and the Zipless Fuck from her novel Fear of Flying. Putting her 18th-century English literature education from Columbia University to full use, Jong birthed a new (or not-so-new) character from centuries ago, creating perhaps her best novel so far in her long career of letters. Jong composed the novel, the reader learns at its end, as Fanny’s accurate autobiographical account for her adult daughter Belinda who “ ’wisht to make a Grand Tour of the Globe . . .”, serving not only as a travel guide but also a life guide (495). The importance placed on prescribed gender roles and their ultimate silliness stands at Fanny’s forefront. Through her 18th-century heroine, Jong evaluates and dismisses the significance men and women attach to their respective sexual placement, not just in the 18th century but also in the modern world. The time of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift acts as mirror and stage for Jong’s own feminism and humanism. With Fanny’s adventures occurring in a witch’s coven, a brothel, a pirate ship, and with the sexually perplexed character of Lancelot, Jong offers readers a page-turner as well as an intellectual read. Women have often been thought of in all artistic forms as simple muses for their male creators, such as Picasso with Dora Maar and Françoise Gilot; and

420 FANNY

Auguste Rodin with Camille Claudel, all considered devoid of substance. Sylvia PLATH even addressed this in The BELL JAR through her character Esther Greenwood, who futilely disagrees with the idea Buddy Willard often recites from his mother about women acting as the bow that “shoots off” the arrow that symbolizes men (Plath, 58). In Fanny, Jong gives this outlook to Alexander Pope who tells Fanny, “ ‘Men are Poets; Women are meant to be their Muses upon Earth. You are the Inspiration of the Poems, not the Creator of Poems, and why should you wish it otherwise?’ ” (41). But Jong has the last laugh, depicting Pope as unable to handle his manhood by having him prematurely ejaculate onto Fanny’s underskirt. Often throughout her novel, Jong plays with the roles of literary heavyweights to underscore Fanny’s intelligence, independence, and strength. Fanny carries literary ambitions herself. Throughout the novel, Jong displays Fanny’s quick wit and acumen. Early on Fanny states, “I was e’er a Bookworm, loving to read almost from the Time I was given my first Alphabet” (21). Her eagerness to learn through books and ultimately her own adventures allows Fanny to mature and prevail from the pains of her young womanhood. Despite being an orphan tolerated by her step-family, patronized by the male society, and raped at the hands of her stepfather/father Lord Bellars in addition to the birth, kidnapping, and rescue of her daughter, Belinda, Fanny never relents. Other literary heroines from centuries past who have encountered sex have not fared so well, notably Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier, and Emma Bovary. But like Isadora Wing in Jong’s Fear of Flying, Fanny’s tenacity allows her to emerge triumphant and ultimately have her own voice heard. Fanny claims she served as the model for the character in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. It is at the London brothel where she temporarily works that she meets up with Cleland. However, Fanny makes it clear that Cleland misrepresented her story, angrily stating: “I read this so-called ‘Memoir’ and my Blood boil’d! To think that Cleland, to whom I’d been so kind, would slander and defile me for his Bread alone! For he wrote the bloody Thing merely to slither out of Debtor’s Prison—where

he might have rotted for Eternity for all I car’d!” (493). In his Fanny Hill, Cleland demonstrates not only his own shallow portrayal of a woman but reflects “man’s incapacity to capture a woman’s character” (Friedman, 211). Like Pope, Cleland only sees Fanny as simply the bow Plath notes in her 1963 classic. By having Fanny tell her own story, Jong reveals the role of women today as those who strive to become arrows instead of bows. Fanny somewhat parallels the tale of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando in the sense that both characters carry a love of the written word and manipulate genders. Unlike Orlando who physically changes from a man into a woman, Fanny uses male garb to disguise herself. In 1981 Jong told Diana Cooper-Clark that she used Fanny’s continuous male dress in the novel to show the superficiality of “ ‘sexual roles’ and society’s emphasis on the physical body in regard to power and powerlessness” (Cooper-Clark, 108). Going against the grain of 18th-century religion as well as the male-dominated Judeo-Christian faithbased emphasis still alive in modern times, Jong has witches serve as major sympathetic characters. Fanny’s biological mother is the witch Isobel White. Witches are among the first characters Fanny meets after she runs away from Lymeworth, when Jong refers to Isobel and Joan Griffith in her chapter 10 title as “ two Wise Women of the Woods” (70). Jong stretches her literary abilities by writing in the language of an 18th-century scribe. In his book The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque, scholar Edward H. Friedman notes how Jong’s novel is “ ‘a self-conscious manifestation of the narrative craft and a self-conscious feminist manifesto” (Friedman, 204). Much like English novels of old, Jong sets up each chapter with a brief hint of what Fanny encounters. The novel begins with a twopage 20th-century introduction in terms of tone and style before delving into the challenging 18th-century voice. Fanny even features a “Dramatis Personae (in Order of Appearance)” before the story commences, introducing the reader to short descriptions of the characters and the roles they play (3). Utilizing the 18th century’s literature and writers, Jong manipulates the canon to shed light on the story of a woman not

FAREWELL TO ARMS, A 421

much different from women today. Jong’s depiction of Pope as a libidinous sexist and Cleland as a fabulist demonstrates that Fanny not only has to fight off her father but also the literary establishment. Since Fanny sets true Cleland’s lies, it shows that this “muse” is not a malleable figure for the imagination of man. For some, Fanny may stand solely as a work of Jong’s feminist viewpoints. But the imaginative plot construction and use of characters as well as her success in writing within a literary voice long past gives the reader a glimpse not only into 18th-century history but also its literature and sexual politics, the latter of which remains relevant today.

SOURCES Friedman, Edward H. The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Jong, Erica. “Erica Jong,” interview by Diana Cooper-Clark. In Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, 115–143. London: Macmillan, 1986. Reprinted in Conversations with Erica Jong, edited by Charlotte Templin, 86–109. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. ———. Fanny, being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. New York: New American Library, 1980. Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. 1963. Reprint, New York: Bantam Books, 1983. Laura Durnell

FAREWELL TO ARMS, A ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1929) The second of Ernest HEMINGWAY’s bestknown novels (the others are The SUN ALSO RISES [1926], FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS [1940], and The OLD MAN AND THE SEA [1952]), A FAREWELL TO ARMS did much to consolidate his reputation as one of the greatest stylists who transformed fiction writing in the 20th century. In 1954, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in literature, citing his “powerful style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration.” Like his first novel, A Farewell to Arms was well received upon publication, but it also caused some indignation among readers who objected to his candid depiction of the sexual mores of the “lost generation” and his use of profanities. In fact, when the novel was first serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in 1929, it was banned by the superintendent of the

police in Boston. However, in the next seven decades after publication, A Farewell to Arms has continued to fascinate both readers and critics, selling millions of copies and becoming the sole subject of several books of criticism and dozens of critical essays. It is one of the most frequently taught and discussed novels in the American literary canon. Loosely based on Hemingway’s World War I experience as a volunteer ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy, A Farewell to Arms accurately captures the confusion and despair of a generation whose system of beliefs and moral values was profoundly shaken by the unprecedented destruction of modern warfare. The machine gun, the airplane, poison gas, and the tank were first used extensively in that war, killing 10 million and wounding 22 million. Like Hemingway himself, the novel’s protagonist Frederic Henry is wounded in action and, while convalescing in a Milan hospital, falls in love with his nurse, Catherine Barkley. Unlike Hemingway, however, Lieutenant Henry makes his separate peace by deserting the Italian army and escaping to Switzerland with his pregnant lover, who subsequently dies in childbirth. Like characters in Hemingway’s early short stories and The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry rejects traditional social values and seeks to replace them with his own code of behavior. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain,” he confides. “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates” (184–85). Disillusioned by the war propaganda and suspicious of all institutional indoctrination, Frederic Henry values action over theory and tough-mindedness over sentimentality. He actively pursues life’s sensual pleasures such as alcohol and sex and seeks to maintain stoic composure in the presence of danger and death. The characterization of Catherine Barkley also fits in this code behavior, although her long hair and complete devotion to Frederic Henry suggest a more traditional femininity, especially compared with the heroine of The Sun Also Rises, Brett Ashley. In a sense, Catherine Barkley is a stricter follower of the Hemingway

422 FARMING OF BONES, THE

code. She rejects the idea of marriage as well as baptism for their child when Frederic Henry mentions them because both marriage and church have become abstract institutions devoid of meaning. In recent years, Catherine Barkley has received considerable critical attention from feminist scholars. Some, building on earlier criticism of her as an underdeveloped character, charge that she is merely the product of a male fantasy of female sexuality, while others argue that she is a more mature, passionate, and fully constructed character than previously realized. Parallel to the novel’s existential underpinnings that challenged Victorian morality and beliefs are its stylistic innovations that valued understatement over excess, irony over sentiment, and repetition of nouns and unsubordinated sentence structures over adjectives and abstract diction. In this respect, Hemingway is said to have been influenced by fellow expatriate writers such as Gertrude STEIN and Ezra Pound in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway’s practice of omission is often referred to as his “iceberg theory,” which he first articulated in Death in the Afternoon (1932): “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (Hemingway, Death, 192). Two paragraphs in the novel have often been singled out to illustrate Hemingway’s style at its best. The first instance is the opening paragraph that famously begins, “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains” (3). Critics have remarked on the poetic quality of the paragraph, its imagery and its rhythm. Hemingway’s simple description of the concrete objects such as the village, the river, the mountains, the pebbles, the leaves, and the marching troops are powerfully evocative of the subject matter and the tone of the whole book. Perhaps more famous is the 47-word ending paragraph that Hemingway revised more than 40 times to capture precisely Frederic Henry’s grief over Catherine Barkley’s death. To enhance readers’ appreciation for Hemingway’s subtractive art, Bernard Oldsey discusses some of the

abandoned versions in a chapter entitled “The Sense of an Ending in A Farewell to Arms.”

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: A Farewell to Arms. New York: Chelsea, 1987. Donaldson, Scott, ed. New Essays on A Farewell to Arms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gellens, Jay, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1970. Hemingway, Ernest. Death in the Afternoon. 1932. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1960. ———. A Farewell to Arms. 1929. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1957. Lewis, Robert W. A Farewell to Arms: The War of the Words. New York: Twayne, 1992. Monteiro, George, ed. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. New York: Hall, 1994. Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway’s First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. Wenxin Li

FARMING OF BONES, THE EDWIDGE DAN(1998) In The Farming of Bones, her third book, Edwidge DANTICAT dramatizes the 1937 massacre of Haitian sugarcane workers in the Dominican Republic under the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo. Danticat had earlier written about this event in her short story “Nineteen Thirty-Seven,” included in the collection Krik? Krak! (1995), a National Book Award finalist. The novel’s genesis was a 1995 trip by the author to the site of the massacre, the river that forms the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, now called Massacre River. “I felt like I was standing on top of a huge mass grave, and just couldn’t see the bodies,” says Danticat in a Publishers Weekly interview, “It’s part of our history as Haitians, but it’s also a part of the history of the world. Writing about it is an act of remembrance.” Danticat researched the massacre through numerous textual and historical sources; she also made several trips to Hispaniola, visiting sites important to the story and interviewing survivors of TICAT

FARMING OF BONES, THE 423

the massacre and their families. Farming of Bones is, Danticat says in the novel’s acknowledgements, “a work of fiction based on historical events” (311). The novel takes its title from the practice of cane cutting, called “the farming of bones” not only because of the appearance of cane stalks but also because of the brutal way in which cane stalks sliced at the flesh of those who worked in the fields, figuratively paring them down to the bone. But the title also evokes the massacre itself, the bodies of slain Haitian workers buried in fieldlike mass graves. As Susan Strehle argues, “Danticat’s novel undoes history as it has been written” (29). Farming of Bones works against early official accounts of the massacre, which denied any governmental or military involvement and instead blamed a small band of farmers and listed few casualties. Farming of Bones emphasizes a rising mood of race and class tensions between Dominican owners and Haitian workers preceding the massacre, excessive military brutality and torture, and extensive casualties and deaths; Danticat has cited estimates that between 14,000 and 40,000 Haitians were actually killed (Barsamian, 3). In addition, the novel shows the aftermath of the massacre: eyewitness accounts ignored, families fragmented, bodies crippled and lives irreparably changed. Amabelle, the novel’s heroine, is uniquely positioned as narrator to give a complex account of the events leading up to and following the massacre. Orphaned as a child when her parents drown in the river that would later become the site of the massacre, Amabelle is taken in by the wealthy Dominican Don Ignacio and serves as a domestic laborer and a companion to his daughter, Valencia. Thus Amabelle lives between worlds, passing across divides between workers and owners, Dominicans and Haitians, men and women, life and death. The structure of the novel itself reflects Amabelle’s duality, shifting between long, pasttense passages of first-person narration that recount the events surrounding the massacre and short, dreamlike fragments in the present tense recounting Amabelle’s feelings, dreams, and memories. The novel is also a powerful love story. Amabelle loves a Haitian cane cutter named Sebastien, and the two find a profound solace and comfort in one

another, escaping the day’s labor and oppression in their nights together. In each other’s presence they share memories of lost parents and lost homes, and they dream of their future together. The two intend to marry, and when rumors of the coming violence become too serious to ignore, they hastily plan to return to Haiti. Though Amabelle and Sebastien’s best friend, Yves, survive the journey, Sebastien and his sister are captured and killed at the initial rendezvous point. Danticat uses the love of Amabelle and Sebastien, the devastation of their lost possibilities, to show the individual human costs of historical events. Amabelle never marries, never ceases loving Sebastien, believing that as long as she remembers his name, he is never truly dead. Language, too, is implicated in the novel’s treatment of violence and oppression. Trujillo’s troops forced captured cane workers to say the Spanish word for parsley, perejil; the Haitians, who spoke a French creole, were identified by their inability to trill the r in the Spanish fashion and were killed. Danticat presents and ponders this linguistic violence in the novel, a subject also taken up by poet Rita Dove in her well-known 1983 poem “Parsley.” In a sense, the novel is Danticat’s means of retaking power through language. Through Amabelle, Danticat bears witness to the offenses against the Haitian people, keeping their names, and their story, alive.

SOURCES Danticat, Edwidge. “Edwidge Danticat.” Interview by David Barsamian. In Louder than Bombs: Interviews from The Progressive Magazine, 1–9. Cambridge, Mass.: South End, 2004. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “Both Sides of the Massacre: Collective Memory and Narrative on Hispaniola,” Mosaic 36, no. 2 (2003): 75–91. Shea, Renee. “The Hunger to Tell: Edwidge Danticat and The Farming of Bones,” MaComere 2 (1999): 12–22. Shemak, April. “Re-membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones,” MFS 48, no. 1 (2002): 83–112. Strehle, Susan. “History and the End of Romance: Danticat’s Farming of Bones.” In Doubled Plots: Romance and History, edited by Susan Strehle and Mary Paniccia Carden, 24–44. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. April Gentry

424 FARRELL, JAMES T.

FARRELL, JAMES T(HOMAS) (1904–1979) Famously associated with his fictional characters Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill, Farrell was one of the first significant novelists to depict in detail both ethnic characters, usually working-class Irish Catholics, and urban life. With the exception of the Bernard Clare cycle, Farrell’s novels are set in Chicago. Although Farrell is associated with literary naturalism and left-wing politics and often considered to be didactic, he believed firmly in producing literature for the “assimilation and presentation of life, not the tracking down of social and cultural movements to their economic source” (Glickberg, 427–428). Although Farrell is most often considered a “writer of the 1930s,” he wrote for half a century and, in the minds of many contemporary critics, has been unfairly neglected. His 50th book and 23rd of 24 novels, The Dunne Family (1976), spurred a revival of interest in his work that continues to grow. James T. Farrell was born on February 27, 1904, in Chicago, Illinois, to James Francis Farrell, a teamster, and Mary Daly Farrell, a maid. He attended De Paul University, the University of Chicago, and New York University without taking a degree; although his achievements eventually brought him honorary degrees from six universities. He married Dorothy Patricia Butler in 1931; after their divorce, he married Hortense Alden, whom he divorced in September 1955. He remarried Dorothy Butler Farrell that same month, but they separated in 1958. His first novel, Young Lonigan (1932) began what would evolve into the Studs Lonigan trilogy (The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan [1934] and Judgment Day [1935]), novels that became the first of four cycles for Farrell. (He considered these cycles to be parts of one story.) STUDS LONIGAN tells the tale of Studs, whose belief in the upward potential of the American dream is dashed by the Great Depression. As many critics have pointed out, the downward movement described in the Studs Lonigan trilogy is counterbalanced by the Danny O’Neill pentalogy—A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953)—in which Danny, also born in poverty, and more sensitive and intelligent than Studs, grows both intellectually and socially. The

Danny novels were followed by the Bernard Carr trilogy, which takes place in New York (Bernard Clare [1946], The Road Between [1949], and Yet Other Waters [1952]). The final sequence, referred to as The Universe of Time cycle, focuses on Chicago writer Eddie Ryan who, critics agree, is the most autobiographical of the four cycles. The novels include The Silence of History (1963), What Time Collects (1964), When Time Was Born (1966), Lonely for the Future (1966), A Brand New Life (1968), Judith (1969), Invisible Swords (1971), The Dunne Family, and The Death of Nora Ryan (1978). Farrell also wrote a number of novels that are not part of the various cycles and which constitute the part of his oeuvre that is increasingly fascinating to scholars. He died on August 11, 1979, in New York City. Studs Lonigan was filmed by United Artists in 1960. The Farrell Archives at the Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania contain Farrell’s manuscripts, correspondence, and other papers. Others are held at the University of Delaware Special Collections Department.

NOVELS An American Dream Girl. New York: Vanguard, 1950. Bernard Clare. New York: Vanguard, 1946; London: Routledge, 1948. Boarding House Blues. New York: Paperback Library, 1961; London: Panther, 1962. The Death of Nora Ryan. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. The Dunne Family. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976. Ellen Rogers. New York: Vanguard, 1941; London: Routledge, 1942. The Face of Time. New York: Vanguard, 1953; London: Spearman, 1954. Father and Son. New York: Vanguard, 1940; London: Routledge, 1943. Gas-House McGinty. New York: Vanguard, 1933; London: United Anglo-American Book Company, 1948. Invisible Swords. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. Judith. Athens, Ohio: Duane Schneider Press, 1969. Judgment Day. New York: Vanguard, 1935. My Days of Anger. New York: Vanguard, 1943; London: Routledge, 1945. No Star Is Lost. New York: Vanguard, 1938; London: Constable, 1939. The Road Between. New York: Vanguard, 1949. Sam Holman. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1983. Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy. New York: Vanguard, 1935; London: Constable, 1936.

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 425

This Man and This Woman. New York: Vanguard, 1951; London: Panther, 1961. Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade. New York: Vanguard, 1939. When Boyhood Dreams Come True. New York: Vanguard, 1946. A World I Never Made. New York: Vanguard, 1936; London: Constable, 1938. Yet Other Waters. New York: Vanguard, 1952. Young Lonigan. New York: Vanguard, 1932. The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan. New York: Vanguard, 1934.

SOURCES Branch, Edgar Marquess. James T. Farrell. Boston: Twayne, 1971. ———. “James T. Farrell: Four Decades after Studs Lonigan,” Twentieth Century Literature 22 (February 1976): 28–35. ———. “The 1930’s in James T. Farrell’s Fiction,” American Book Collector 21 (March–April 1971): 9–12. Casey, Daniel J., and Robert E. Rhodes, eds. Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism, 201–214. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Glicksberg, Charles I. “James T. Farrell.” In American Literary Criticism 1900–1950, 427–429. New York: Hendricks House, 1951. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds, 296–300. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. Pizer, Donald. “James T. Farrell and the 1930s.” In Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s, edited by Ralph F. Bogardus and Fred Hobson, 69–81. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the University. New York: Hill & Wang, 1966. Twentieth Century Literature, special Farrell issue 22 (February 1976). Walcutt, Charles C. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, 240–257. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Wald, Alan M. James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

FAULKNER, WILLIAM (CUTHBERT) (1897–1962) The 1949 Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner is arguably the most important American writer of the 20th century; he is certainly among the top five writers in American literary history. Although he wrote mainly about his own locale, Mississippi and the American South, his universal appeal and influence is evidenced in the respect and admira-

tion accorded him in France and Japan, Russia and Spain. Faulkner is now seen as a towering figure of modernism who advanced the novel in ways that electrified some readers and disturbed others; he included the violent racial past of the South, secrets and shadows, myth and legend, outrageous humor, and sensitive portrayals of blacks and women, the victims of the plantation system. In addition to his interest in exploring the “human heart in conflict with itself,” as he said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner always sought new ways to tell a story: to that end, he was one of the century’s greatest experimenters, using new techniques to evoke point of view, dialogue, the movement from past to present, and interior monologue. He invented, moreover, an entire county that he called Yoknapatawpha, peopling it with hundreds of folks, from the aristocratic white Compson and Sartoris families to the poor white Bundrens and Snopeses, both white and black McCaslins, the poor black Beauchamps, and the agonized Joe Christmas, who could not determine whether he was black or white. Faulkner’s numerous awards include: the William Dean Howells Medal (1950), the National Book Award (1951) for Collected Stories, and (1955) for A Fable; the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for A Fable and the 1963 Pulitzer for The Reivers, a Reminiscence, as well as membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, to Murry Cuthbert Faulkner and Maud Butler Faulkner. His father held many jobs, from railroad worker to livery stable operator to University of Mississippi business manager. After a stint in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the last months of World War I, and after taking a number of courses at Ole Miss, he became a full-time writer in 1925, and married Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin on June 20, 1929. According to the now-famous anecdote, Sherwood ANDERSON offered to send Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), to his own publisher provided he didn’t have to read it. The World War I novel focuses on Donald Mahon, an injured veteran who provides the novel’s focus. Every character bears a scar, physical or emotional, from the war. Mosquitoes (1927) satirizes 1920s New Orleans literati and their patrons, unmasking their ennui and their artistic pre-

426 FAULKNER, WILLIAM

tensions, which he sets against Gordon Hawk, a serious sculptor and Dawson Fairchild, a writer. Sartoris (1929) is generally said to be Faulkner’s first serious novel and it introduces Yoknapatawpha County and the Sartoris family. Set during World War I, the original, uncut version (edited by Douglas Day as Flags in the Dust [1974]) is now considered the longer and more detailed version that Faulkner preferred. The SOUND AND THE FURY (1929) brought Faulkner to the attention of serious readers. Experimental in form, it is told from the perspectives of the Compson children, one of whom is an idiot, in an effort to explain their dysfunctional family and, at another level, equate its demise with that of the postbellum South. The final section of the novel is narrated in the third person but focuses on Dilsey, the black woman both involved in and removed from the sound and the fury of the white family. AS I LAY DYING (1930), composed of 59 interior monologues, follows the Bundren family through flood and fire, mother love and motherhood, as father Anse and his five children take Addie Bundren’s corpse home to Jefferson where she can lie peacefully at last. Brutal and shocking even by today’s standards, SANCTUARY (1931) was the novel that thrust Faulkner before the general reading public. Centering on the horrific rape of a University of Mississippi coed, Temple Drake, the novel examines the nature of evil in its clear incarnation, the rapist Popeye, in the house of prostitution to which Temple is consigned, and in the court system of judges and lawyers with which the novel ends. Another major novel, LIGHT IN AUGUST (1932), narrated in a long flashback, reveals Joe Christmas’s past in an attempt to explain his violent relationships with women, his murder of the white abolitionist Joanna Burden, and his desperate attempt to determine his race. Pylon (1935), set in New Orleans, features an ungainly central figure known as the Reporter, who interacts with the courageous or foolhardy out-of-town stunt fliers and contrasts them with the indigenous Mardi Gras revelers; both groups defy death but also harbor a profound sense of intransigence and despair. ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936), perhaps Faulkner’s most difficult novel in terms of structure and point of view, focuses on Thomas Sutpen, who built the antebellum plantation from which he attempted to create a dynasty, only to see all his efforts

fail and the family disintegrate. A series of interrelated Civil War tales, The UNVANQUISHED (1938), focuses mainly on the Sartoris women and children at home during the war, who attempt to find solutions to the violence-ridden history of the South. Another experimental novel, The Wild Palms (1939), is actually two stories: The title story follows the doomed love affair of Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne and counterpoints it, alternating chapter by chapter, with Old Man, a story of a nameless convict and a pregnant woman during a Mississippi River flood. GO DOWN, MOSES (1942) is often regarded as a collection of stories, though Faulkner called it a novel. The Hamlet (1940) was the first of what would become the Snopes Trilogy. The Hamlet, The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959) focus on Flem Snopes, a representative of the poor whites who live miles out of town. His rise to power supplants the older families when he becomes president of the bank and mayor of Jefferson, county seat of Yoknapatawpha. In Intruder in the Dust (1948), Miss Haversham, an elderly white woman, Chick Mallison, a young white boy, and Aleck Sander, his black friend, solve a murder mystery and help free Lucas Beauchamp, the falsely accused black man. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a novel written as a play, features Temple Drake from Sanctuary. Now married, she examines her life and concludes that no one escapes her past. A Fable (1954), which Faulkner considered his best work, features Christ as a corporal during World War I; when he refuses to fight, he is court-martialed and executed. His final novel, published posthumously, is a delightful romp through previously dark areas of Yoknapatawpha County: The Reivers (1962), set during the days prior to World War I, is a child’s innocent recollections of a past rich in myth, comedy, and communal values. During the last years of his life, from 1957 to 1962, Faulkner was Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia. Numerous novels by Faulkner have been adapted for movies, including Intruder in the Dust, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1949; Tarnished Angels (based on Pylon), Universal, 1957; The Long Hot Summer (based on The Hamlet), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1958; The Sound and the Fury, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1959; Sanctuary (also includes parts of Requiem for a Nun),

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 427

Twentieth Century-Fox, 1961; The Reivers, Cinema Center Films, 1969. The Sound and the Fury was adapted for television in 1955. The majority of his papers are housed at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.

NOVELS Absalom, Absalom!. New York: Random House, 1936. As I Lay Dying. New York: Cape & Smith, 1930. A Fable. New York: Random House, 1954. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories. New York: Random House, 1942. The Hamlet. New York: Random House, 1940. Revised edition, New York: Random House, 1964. Intruder in the Dust. New York: Random House, 1948. Knight’s Gambit. New York: Random House, 1949. Light in August. New York: Smith & Haas, 1932. The Mansion. New York: Random House, 1959. Mayday. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. Miss Zilphia Gant. Dallas: Book Club of Texas, 1932. Mosquitoes. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. Pylon. New York: Smith & Haas, 1935. The Reivers. New York: Random House, 1962. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951. Sanctuary. New York: Cape & Smith, 1931; unrevised version, edited by Noel Polk as Sanctuary: The Original Text. New York: Random House, 1981. Sartoris. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929; original, uncut version, edited by Douglas Day as Flags in the Dust. New York: Random House, 1974. Soldiers’ Pay. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1926. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Cape & Smith, 1929. The Town. New York: Random House, 1957. The Unvanquished. New York: Random House, 1938. The Wild Palms. New York: Random House, 1939.

SOURCES Bassett, John E. Faulkner in the Eighties: An Annotated Critical Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1991. Blotner, Joseph L. Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1974. ———, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1976. Brodsky, Louis Daniel. The Bibliography, vol. 1 of Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Brodsky, Louis Daniel, and Robert W. Hamblin, eds. The Letters, vol. 2 of Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brod-

sky Collection. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. ———. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978. Clarke, Deborah. Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944–1962. New York: Viking, 1966. Creighton, Joanne V. William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision: The Snopes Trilogy, “The Unvanquished” and “Go Down, Moses”. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Dasher, Thomas E. William Faulkner’s Characters: An Index to the Published and Unpublished Fiction. New York: Garland, 1981. Davis, Thadious M. Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Falkner, Murry C. The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Faulkner, John. My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence. New York: Trident, 1963. Gray, Richard J. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Gresset, Michel. A Faulkner Chronology, translated by Arthur B. Scharff. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Howe, Irving. William Faulkner: A Critical Study, 3d ed., revised and enlarged. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Karl, Frederick R. William Faulkner: American Writer. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Compson Family. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Massey, Linton R. William Faulkner: “Man Working,” 1919–1962, A Catalogue of the William Faulkner Collections at the University of Virginia. Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society, University of Virginia, 1968. Matthews, John. The Play of Faulkner’s Language. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. McHaney, Thomas L. William Faulkner: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1975. Meriwether, James B., and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926–1962. New York: Random House, 1968. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage, 1966. Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

428 FAUSET, JESSIE REDMON

Polk, Noel. An Editorial Handbook for William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. New York: Garland, 1985. Polk, Noel, and John D. Hart, eds. The Unvanquished: a Concordance to the Novel. West Point, N.Y.: Faulkner Concordance Advisory Board, 1990. Ross, Stephen. Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice: Speech and Writing in Faulkner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Schoenberg, Estella. Old Tales and Talking: Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! and Related Works. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1977. Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Father, 1918–1925. New York: Norton, 1992. Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Volpe, Edmond L. A Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. Weinstein, Philip M., ed. The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wilde, Meta Carpenter, and Orin Borsten. A Loving Gentleman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976. Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wollf, Sally, and Floyd C. Watkins. Talking about William Faulkner: Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner, and Others. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

OTHER The Faulkner Journal. Available online. URL: http://www. english.ucf.edu/faulkner/. Accessed September 4, 2005. The William Faulkner Society. Available online. URL: http:// www.english.ufl.edu/faulkner/. Accessed September 4, 2005. William Faulkner on the Web. Available online. URL: http:// cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html. Accessed September 4, 2005. Center for Faulkner Studies. Available online. URL: http:// www6.semo.edu/cfs/. Accessed September 4, 2005. William Faulkner. Available online. URL: http://www.nobel. se/literature/laureates/1949/. Accessed September 4, 2005. William Faulkner. Available online. URL: http://www. nerdworld.com/nw10370.html. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FAUSET, JESSIE REDMON (1882–1961) Jessie Redmon Fauset wrote four novels, as well as poems, short stories, and essays, and was editor of the influential magazine Crisis from 1919–26, giving her

an important role in the Harlem Renaissance. Her subject matter was unique for her era, in that her fiction was peopled by young, middle-class African-American women, rather than the exotic and uninhibited primitives that white readers had come to expect. Many of her characters had light skin, enabling them to “pass” as white, and thereby giving Fauset a springboard to examine racism and prejudice against both blacks and whites. She discussed miscegenation, and the nature of respectability, success, and individual happiness. Most frequently compared with Harlem Renaissance writer Nella LARSEN, Fauset should also be compared to Zora Neale HURSTON and Dorothy WEST. Born on April 27, 1882, in Camden County, New Jersey, to Annie Redmon Fauset and Redmon Fauset, an African-American Methodist Episcopal minister, Fauset graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University in 1905, the first black American woman to graduate from Cornell. She taught French in Washington, D.C., before she earned a master of arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania and moved to New York to become editor of Crisis. Discovering or fostering the talents of such Harlem Renaissance luminaries as Countee Cullen, Jean TOOMER, Langston HUGHES, and Claude McKAY, Fauset also published her own work, including the novels for which she is best known today: There is Confusion (1924), Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929), The CHINABERRY TREE: A Novel Of American Life (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933). There is Confusion typifies many of Fauset’s thematic concerns. Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye face racial bias on the part of both the white and the black middle class, exposing Fauset’s belief that environment, not heredity, is responsible for racial constructs. Bye’s reaction to the discovery of his mixed heritage deters his efforts to obtain a medical degree, and his white cousin—who bears the same surname—dies on the battlefield. Plum Bun features Angela Murray, a young, middle-class, black woman who passes for white and succeeds as an artist; she eventually decides to claim her heritage and her pride in it. The Chinaberry Tree is about Laurentine, a young mulatta who falls in love with a classmate in school but is stopped from marrying him by the revelation that they are brother and sister. Comedy, American Style also has a light-skinned

FEAR OF FLYING 429

protagonist, Olivia Cary, whose obsession with whiteness and with the importance of “passing” leads her to ruin the lives of her two children, one of whom she forces into a disastrous marriage; the other commits suicide. Jessie Redmon Fauset died on April 30, 1961, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

NOVELS The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life. New York: Stokes, 1931. Comedy, American Style. New York: Stokes, 1933. Plum Bun. New York: Stokes, 1929. There Is Confusion. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924.

SOURCES Austin, Rhonda. “Jessie Redmon Fauset.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 101–106. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin. Jessie Redmon Fauset: Black American Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1981.

FEAR OF FLYING ERICA JONG (1973)

Creating one of the most enduring literary colloquialisms in the late 20th century, Erica JONG’s Fear of Flying remains as polarizing today at it did during its initial 1973 publication. The novel marked Jong’s emergence from poet to novelist and opened the doors for women writers everywhere to showcase their own emotions, thoughts, and exploits no matter how sexually explicit and intellectually unorthodox. Jong opened the door for women writers to explore and address desires housed in the female mind and body. Perhaps no other novel written by a woman before or since has captured the mainstream and literary public’s attention as brusquely as Fear of Flying. Jong’s writing awards include the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. While Fear of Flying remains best known for its phrase the “Zipless Fuck,” upon closer examination, Jong’s first foray into fiction addresses the issues of feminism, self-liberation, the Holocaust, Judaism, as well as women and their relationship to art. The publishing

phenomenon and controversy over the novel’s use of sex is well known, unfortunately clouding its themes, honesty, and humor, as well as Jong’s literary abilities. A former Ph.D. candidate in 18th-century English literature, Jong uses her literary education to its fullest by opening her novel with a passage from Byron’s “Don Juan” and tags each chapter with epigrams from writers such as Cole Porter, Colette, Sylvia PLATH, Madeline Gray, Anne Sexton, and William Blake, diversely talented writers in whose company Jong’s many admirers would say that she belongs. With this as well as her references to the Talmud, Doris Lessing, Colette, and Martin Buber at various points throughout the novel, Jong shows her protagonist Isadora’s intelligence and allows the reader to expand his or her literary education. In an interview with Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith, Jong said flying evoked many issues for her, among them themes she encounters and plumbs within the novel (Jong, Showalter-Smith interview, 27). Surrounded by psychoanalysts, some of whom have treated her, Jong’s protagonist Isadora Wing sets forth on the now defunct Pan Am airline to Vienna where her husband, the psychoanalyst Bennett Wing, is attending a conference. The plane serves as a metaphor for Isadora’s fear, not only of flying but also of living life as a woman, an artist, a lover, a Jew, a sister, and a childless 29-year-old poet. She is torn between settling into the perceived role of wife and her own desire to live as a writer. Early in the novel Isadora comments that she believes a woman’s desire to live by herself will never be fully recognized by those around her, especially by American society (17). The opening chapter “En Route to the Congress of Dreams or the Zipless Fuck” serves as the catalyst for Isadora’s longing and eventual search for the “Zipless Fuck,” unknowing that her journey will lead her to recognize and further understand her own life. Isadora tells the reader that she has now reached the point in her marriage of five years where “the sheets [she] got as wedding presents have just about worn thin” (12). It is also the point where she questions and pontificates on the cultural role of women in early 1970s society, the decade that saw the second wave of feminism emerge and brought to light the work of women writers such as Plath, Sexton, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer. In

430 FEAR OF FLYING

addition to her gender role, she wonders about her decision as a Jew to report on the Vienna Congress for a magazine, appropriately entitled Voyeur, in a city where “Freud fled his famous consulting room on the Berggasse when the Nazis threatened his family” (8). With her “platonic ideal” of the Zipless Fuck, Isadora imagines sex with a man who provides the life and happiness she craves (17). At the conference she believes she has met her Zipless Fuck, the English Langian analyst Adrian Goodlove who upon their first meeting grabs a piece of Isadora’s behind showing “the promise of sensual love” (Mickelson, 36). To her disappointment, Goodlove turns out impotent. However, Isadora takes off with him for a 28day journey around Europe. But the novel goes beyond sex and metaphors. During her journey Isadora looks back on her life, most particularly her first marriage, to a schizophrenic, her relationships with her mother and sisters, and her past sexual experiences. After Adrian leaves her to go back to his family that awaits him in France, Isadora finds a hotel room in Paris and conducts an inner dialogue about the wants and perils of living alone. She travels to London to meet Bennett after leaving him in Vienna for Adrian and runs herself a bath in Bennett’s hotel room. Bennett discovers her in the tub at the novel’s conclusion. Her journey to self-realization begins in chapter 3, “Knock, Knock,” where she dreams of Adrian and Bennett on a seesaw with Bennett suggesting that Isadora be analyzed in England. This scene serves as a demonstration that two men are in charge of Isadora’s own mental health. It also shows that despite her attraction to Adrian she still cares for Bennett and worries about destroying him with her adultery. When Adrian agitates the seesaw’s motion, Isadora screams up to him in concern for Bennett’s well-being, “ ‘Don’t you see you’re hurting him! Stop it!’ ” (52). One critic has noted that the 28 days Isadora and Adrian spend together mirrors the same cycle for menstruation (Reardon, 300), and in fact, toward Fear of Flying’s end Isadora does experience her period. With the ending scene of her in the bathtub, both menstruation and water symbolize Isadora shedding her own fears and being baptized into a new phase of womanhood. All the naive thoughts about the Zipless Fuck have dissi-

pated, leaving her with a more mature understanding of herself as a woman and a writer. Charlotte Templin, a scholar at the University of Indianapolis who has written about Jong and her work, points out that Fear was not an immediate phenomenon. Amazingly, Jong’s “publisher acquired the novel for a relatively modest $25,000 and did not see it as a potential best-seller” (Templin, 27). It was not until the novel’s paperback release that it made its mark with the public and the annals of American literature. Respected author John UPDIKE wrote a now storied review in The New Yorker, and Henry MILLER, most famous for Tropic of Cancer, became one of Jong’s most energetic advocates. After its 1974 paperback publication by New American Library, “[Fear of Flying] sold three million copies in the first year” (Templin, 29). In her memoir Fear of Fifty, Jong mentions that originally the novel she was to produce for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, which published her first two poetry collections Fruits and Vegetables and Half-lives, was entitled “The Man Who Murdered Poets.” Her editor Aaron Asher told her “to write a novel in the voice (her) poems had discovered” (Jong, Fear of Fifty, 148). To this day Jong thanks her editor for this advice but now questions why she didn’t do so until a man sanctioned it (435–436). With Fear of Flying Jong not only broke the mold for women writers to use language typically thought unladylike but also created a female protagonist bold enough to explore her sexuality without the repercussion of death, as with Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. Unlike Edna, who drowns herself at the end of her own sexual “awakening,” Isadora merely slips into her bath, allowing the water to transform instead of kill her.

SOURCES Jong, Erica. Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. ———. Fear of Flying. 1973. New York: Signet, 2003. ———. “Happy Thirtieth Birthday, Fear of Flying,” afterword to Fear of Flying. 1973. Reprint, New York: Signet, 2003, 427–438. ———. “An Interview with Erica Jong,” by Elaine Showalter and Carol Smith. The Columbia Forum (Winter 1975): 12–17. Reprinted in Conversations with Erica Jong, edited

FEMALE AMERICAN, THE 431

by Charlotte Templin, 25–35. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Mickelson Anne Z. Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Reardon, Joan. “Fear of Flying: Developing the Feminist Novel,” International Journal of Women’s Studies 1, no. 3 (May–June 1978): 306–320. Templin, Charlotte. Feminism & the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” Women and Writing, edited and with introduction by Michelle Barrett, 57–63. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest-Harcourt Brace, 1979. Laura Durnell

FEMALE AMERICAN, THE UNCA ELIZA WINKFIELD (1767) When The Female American was first published, it was dismissed as a Robinson Crusoe spin-off (a criticism still leveled today). Daniel Defoe’s popular tale of one man’s 28-year sojourn on a desert island (1719) had plenty of imitators throughout Europe, so it wouldn’t be surprising to find an American colonial writer hoping to add another twist to the tale. But as Michelle Burnham explains in her introduction to the novel, the author’s name, nationality, and gender remain a mystery though the novel’s protagonist, Unca Eliza Winkfield, is generally named as the author. This becomes particularly important in an encyclopedia about the “American” novel. Published first in London and later in two American editions (1800 and 1814), this story of a woman of Native American and English heritage who traverses the Atlantic Ocean multiple times until she lands permanently on an island in between shows some of the difficulty in categorizing any text as “American” or “English,” especially in the mid-18th century. Someone—woman or man—writing in America could have chosen London as a place of publication since as of 1767 no novel had been published in the American colonies. Just as easily, an English native could have written about a fantastic American journey. America had been the subject of much romantic speculation since word of Columbus’s exploration reached Europe. In the 17th century exciting stories of a strange new world abound in travel narratives, some

of them based on actual places and events, but just as often they were heavily embellished for a fascinated European audience. Because of its vast landscape and exotic people, America became a space to imagine a different kind of world. In The Female American that world became a religious utopia with a woman at its head and center. As part of a new 18th-century genre, the novel includes elements such as the travel narrative, autobiography, religious catechism, drama, adventure tale, and colonial promotion tract, to explore the personal life of its female protagonist. For example, The Female American borrows from Captain John Smith’s Generall History the story of a Indian princess rescuing an Englishman from death. The narrator’s father, William Winkfield, has inherited a flourishing Virginia plantation from his father, Edward Maria Winkfield (based on an actual historical figure, Edward Maria Wingfield, first president of the Virginia colony), but appears likely to lose it all when taken captive in an Indian raid (36). Because he is handsome, he attracts the attention of the king’s daughter, Unca, who takes him to live with her where he learns her language and loves her despite her complexion. They are married only after Unca agrees to convert to Christianity, and it is a happy marriage, although they are forced to leave the Indian village when Unca’s sister Alluca vows to kill her sister and have William Winkfield for herself. The author rewrites Smith’s story to focus on a man’s beauty, not his strength, and to reverse the usual love triangle, making the man a pawn between two powerful females. Similar strategies are used throughout the text. When Alluca becomes queen, she sends men to kill her sister. Devastated, William Winkfield takes his young daughter and returns to England. The narrator describes her treatment there as royal: “My uncommon complexion, singular dress, and the grand manner which I appeared, always attended by two female and two male slaves, could not fail of making me much taken notice of. I was . . . treated in a degree little inferior to that of a princess, as I was always called” (49). Pocahontas, the heroine in John Smith’s tale, is similarly feted when she visits England years after saving the life of Smith. But unlike the historic Indian princess who died in England from a disease after only

432 FEMALE AMERICAN, THE

a few years, the protagonist Unca Eliza Winkfield thrives there and receives religious instruction that anchors her, and the rest of the text, solidly in Christianity and the Church of England. Winkfield returns briefly to America where her father dies, leaving her an orphan. She naturally plans to return to her uncle’s family in England and hires a ship for this purpose. But the captain of the ship, seeing her great wealth, tries to force her to contract a marriage with his son. Winkfield adamantly refuses. When the wicked captain realizes he cannot force Winkfield to surrender her life in marriage, he puts her and her clothing on a desert island and departs. Winkfield must then learn to survive without the help of slaves and servants. It is not such a difficult task since a man was stranded on the same island for 40 years before her and left shelter, supplies and a journal with instructions on how to live quite well on the island and how to avoid the native people who gather once a year on the island to worship their idol. Instead of hiding from the natives (as the man had done) when they come to worship their false god, Winkfield plots to teach them the true faith. She (fortuitously) stumbles upon a secret underground passage that leads up into the body of the idol and conceives a plan to speak as if from the idol and teach them Christian principles. Since she is half Indian, she understands their language, and, as she suspected, the natives willingly believe what the idol tells them. Eventually Winkfield tells them, through the idol, to accept a woman as a spiritual leader and apostle of Christ. Thus, in one decisive move Winkfield displaces both their native religion and their all-male priesthood. The Indians welcome her to live among them and soon a Christian utopian society is established. Through another set of extraordinary circumstances Winkfield’s cousin, who has come looking for her, joins her in this community and happily relinquishes his English heritage. John Winkfield has searched so diligently for his cousin because he loves her and asks her hand in marriage. Throughout the text Winkfield is completely indifferent to the idea of marriage to anyone. Unlike contemporary novels that centered on women’s domestic concerns, with worthy matrimony the ultimate reward for a virtuous woman, The Female Ameri-

can, as a female adventure tale, treats marriage marginally. Though Winkfield receives several proposals, and eventually accepts her cousin’s relentless petitions, she remains decidedly uninterested about circumscribing her life to another. And John Winkfield is a great catch by sentimental novel standards: he is wealthy, pious, and sincerely adoring. Still, Winkfield feels “obliged to give [her] hand” (140–41) only because as partners in converting the Indian tribe they have committed to live with, it would “hurt [her] modest” to spend so much time with a male cohort while not married (139). The novel offers an alternative to the narrow existence most women faced in fact and fiction in the 18th century. For though she, too, eventually capitulates to societal pressure, marriage is neither her aspiration nor her existence. This is due in large part to the fact that, unlike most women, Winkfield has economic options because of her inherited wealth. The novel itself glosses over that fact and all the extraordinary events—shipwreck, survival, missionary work, rescue—that shape her life. For example, Burnham points out Winkfield does not have the masculine responsibilities left to Robinson Crusoe like constructing a home, foraging for food, and so forth, and is, therefore, able to maintain her femininity (15) as well as her credibility for 18th-century readers. But even though a man, the previous island dweller, provides her an easy, comfortable existence, he is primarily absent (he shows up briefly just before he dies), so the author can focus the story on a woman. Moreover, distancing the heroine from physical labor illustrates that this woman’s story is only marginally about physical survival. Though there are moments it appears Winkfield’s life is in danger, it is not due to the harsh island elements, but rather her attitude. The one time she is on her deathbed is because her faith has faltered and she has despaired of surviving. Once she submits to God’s will and chastens herself (through the voice of her uncle) for her lack of faith, her health returns and her physical trials are virtually over. The focus of Winkfield’s narrative is not physical but spiritual, and always, despite some narrative tangents, on a woman. This is further emphasized by the fact that John Winkfield’s joining her in her missionary efforts alters little within her life or the com-

FEMALE MAN, THE 433

munity she has established, beyond his being able, as an ordained minister, to perform the sacrament (Winkfield already performed the baptisms herself). Though the text often conforms to ethnocentric ideals and uses religion as an acceptable form of imperialism, it still manages to shake up both imperialistic and sexist beliefs. First, for example, Winkfield’s pious uncle tells his brother before he embarks for America, “We have no right to invade the country of another” (37). Few texts before the 20th century question the right of Europeans to settle American land, let alone acknowledge that the continent belonged first to “another,” making this an extraordinary claim. Second, as already mentioned, The Female American questions some key beliefs about women’s abilities and goals in the 18th century. More important, perhaps, the novel challenges readers today to reexamine our own ideas about women’s options and experiences “back then.” The title, The Female American, would suggest that the way to expand the boundaries of a woman’s sphere of existence is to be an American, or of mixed Native American and English heritage. The novel implies that not only do American women have greater opportunities, but also that the very definition of what it means to be an American is to acknowledge racial meshing. We may be tempted to dismiss all these claims as an extreme anomaly; even the narrator acknowledges her story is incredible, but she insists—and we must believe—it does “not exceed the bounds of probability” (35).

SOURCES Burnham, Michelle, ed. The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield by Anonymous (Unca Eliza Winkfield). London: 1867. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 2001. H. L. Johnsen

FEMALE MAN, THE JOANNA RUSS (1975) RUSS’s science-fiction novel has come to be highly esteemed and influential for the very qualities that kept it from being published for almost four years. First, its biting tone gives voice to an aggressive form of feminism that was alien to the male-dominated science fiction of the time, which was only just coming to terms with more pacific feminist alternative worlds, such as those con-

ceived by Ursula LE GUIN. Secondly, its convoluted plot is not only secondary to its “literary” style, in the then controversial manner of 1960s “New Wave” science fiction, but this stylistic experimentation serves to convey a self-reflexive, postmodernist sensibility concerned with foregrounding the process of writing itself. This concern, which in mainstream experimental writing was being called “metafiction” (that is, fiction about the making of fiction), can be seen in the way Russ incorporates and displays the relation between an authorial—or authorizing—persona and other characters whose ontological status seems to be that of alternative personae. As a whole (if that phrase is not too misleading), the book functions as a bitterly comic dialogue on the (im?)possibility of reuniting different tendencies within the feminine psyche, which has been fragmented—archetypal impulses isolated each from each—by the seductions and batterings of patriarchal culture. Each of the four female characters (Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael) inhabits a different alternative Earth, which can be distinguished on the basis of the type and degree of dysfunction that defines gender relationships. Joanna lives in what is recognizably the reader’s own world, and it is she who delivers extended commentary on matters social, sexual, and ideological. As her name suggests, she can justifiably be associated with (but not identified as) the author. Janet is a time traveler from a future alternative world, Whileaway, where war and poverty have been extinct almost as long as males have (compare the genetrix of this kind of utopia, Charlotte Perkins GILMAN’s HERLAND). Janet functions within the tradition of anthropological satire, which goes back at least to the 18th century and has been a staple of science fiction. She is the superior innocent of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, with more than a touch of Gulliver’s nauseated repulsion at the grotesque barbarity of men. The questions she puts to Jeannine and Joanna about the accepted conditions of their world function, of course, as a series of challenges to defend the indefensible. But all three female characters are grotesques to the degree that they have become imbalanced in one way or another: excessive timidity, passivity, servility, indecisiveness. Later sections of the book introduce a new, simultaneously frightening and exhilarating character, Jael, who is perhaps the most salient

434 FERBER, EDNA

reason for the book’s sustained popularity and reputation among both sexes. Jael, a highly skilled, bionic assassin, delights in killing or enslaving males, who live in a society, an armed camp, completely segregated from women, their permanent antagonists. Jael exerts an ambiguous fascination over the other women, as well as over the reader, with her will to power. She has literally taken fate into her own hands by transforming those hands into lacerating weapons. Possibly the daughter of “Mrs. Peel” (of The Avengers television series) and other 1960s masochistic male fantasies, Jael has almost certainly given birth to the humanoid and cyborg assassins that populate the film Blade Runner, countless cyberpunk novels, and, in the downward spiral of pop culture, contemporary TV and video games. A sex scene between Jael and her enslaved male consort provides one of the two inevitable erotic moments in the book; the other entails, with equal inevitability, a lesbian liaison between Janet and a teenage girl that in its tender reverie is meant to encapsulate the essence of Whileaway. That each of these women’s names begins with “J” signifies at the level of discourse a range of possibilities: that they are constituent aspects of the narrator, latent or suppressed possibilities of the author, alienated and deformed but perhaps recuperable variants of the self. Contemplated as a group, they suggest possibilities of being that are as yet barely perceptible to the reader—regardless of gender—who must remain struck in the “sexual politics” that Russ’s sustained satire so relentlessly exposes. The unsuccessful attempts by the characters/personae to join forces or to forge a common objective constitutes a parable about the difficulty and desirability of creating something that is at once a communal identity (that is, a unified psyche) and the identity of a community (sisterhood). This might be said to place Russ’s book outside the focus of both those feminist writers who spin fantasies around the trope of telepathic tribalism and the dominant figures of recent Continental literary feminism, such as Helene Cixous, Catherine Clement, and Luce Irigaray, who celebrate, rather than bemoan, the impossiblity of feminine psychological cohesion (which, for them, is an unduly restrictive, indeed castrating, expectation perpetrated by a phallocentric

ego). It would be particularly useful to place the characters in The Female Man in dialogue with Cixous and Clement’s The Newly Born Woman, a roughly contemporary, brilliantly provocative, polemic that, among other things, sets up a dichotomy between the hysteric, who turns her subversive aggressions against her own body, and the witch, who turns them outward at her masculine persecutors.

SOURCES Barr, Marleen. Feminist Fabulations: Space/Postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1992. Cixous, Helene, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Translated by Betsy Wing. Foreword by Sandra Gilbert. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Donawerth, Jane. Frankenstein’s Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction. Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1997. Lefanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. London: Women’s Press, 1988. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. London: Women’s Press, 1985. ———. “Toward an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction Studies, edited by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin. New York: Gregg Press, 1976. David Brottman

FERBER, EDNA (1885–1968)

Edna Ferber, author of the best-selling SHOW BOAT (1926) and GIANT (1952), was, for more than three decades, one of America’s most famous authors. Show Boat, made into a musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein and translated to film in two versions (1936, starring Irene Dunne; 1951, starring Katherine Grayson), is an American classic—although considered then, and now, to be a popular rather than literary novel. Most of her novels deal with some aspect of the American dream as the nation changed from a rural economy and milieu often marked by poverty (particularly in the South), racial oppression, and social caste, to the equally wicked ways of New York and Chicago. Ferber examined, too, the anti-Semitism that angered her, especially clouded the life of her own family, and caused them to move from Michigan to Wisconsin when Ferber was 12. Ferber wrote 13 novels in addition to 11 collections of stories, 10 plays (with various collaborators), and two autobiographies.

FERN, FANNY 435

Also adapted to film were Cimarron (1930) and Come and Get It (1935). Edna Ferber was born on August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the daughter of Jacob Charles Ferber, a Hungarian-born Jewish merchant, and Julia Neumann Ferber of Milwaukee. Precluded by family financial troubles from attending college, Ferber worked as a reporter first for the Appleton Daily Crescent and later for the Milwaukee Journal. She published her first novel, Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed, in 1911. According to scholar Rhonda Austin, Ferber viewed herself as a “pioneer” in the “male-dominated field of publishing” (Austin, 108). Indeed, her women characters reflect this spirit. She was to write often about women who were superior to the men in their lives. In her second novel, Fanny Herself (1917), the hero not only succeeds in both business and marriage, but also proudly acknowledges her identity as a Jew. In The Girls (1921), characterizing three generations of women, Ferber focuses on Charlotte and Carrie Thrift, the two daughters of a declining Chicago family, and explores such subjects as illegitimacy and the struggle for female independence. In 1924 Ferber captured the public’s imagination with SO BIG, whose hero, Selina DeJong, a gambler’s daughter, wrests victory from a series of would-be disasters. This novel won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize and was made into a popular movie. In Cimarron, too, she explored topics that made some readers uncomfortable; set in Oklahoma from the land rush days to the oil-producing 1920s, the novel features another strong woman, Sabra Cravat and her considerably weaker husband Yancey, and describes the theft by the American government of the Osage Indian land and their removal from it. American Beauty (1931), largely about Polish immigrants, examines the emotional relationship of Jude Oakes and her niece Temmie; Come and Get It (1935), set in Wisconsin, contrasts the Great Depression era with the past through the story of Barney Glasgow, wealthy lumberman, and his infatuation with Lotta, a much younger woman. In Saratoga Trunk (1941), Ferber writes openly about sex; a mixed-blood woman, Clio Dulaine, marries the gambler Clint Maroon, defying convention and achieving the American dream, 1880s style. Great Son (1945), presents life

through characters in the Klondike gold rush days, while Giant features the wealthy Texas Benedict family, contrasting them with the more traditional and genteel Virginia-bred Leslie Lynnton and focusing on the Texas bias against Mexicans. In Ice Palace (1958), Ferber focuses on political issues of Alaskan statehood through her character Christine Storm. In addition to her success as a novelist, in the early 1920s Ferber began to collaborate with playwright George S. Kaufman, producing such plays as Minick (1924), The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), Stage Door (1936), The Land Is Bright (1941), and Bravo! (1949). Her many short-story collections include the popular Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney (1913) and Emma McChesney & Co. (1915). Edna Ferber died of cancer on April 16, 1968, in New York, her home since the 1930s.

NOVELS American Beauty. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1931. Cimarron. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1930. Come and Get It. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1935. Dawn O’Hara: The Girl Who Laughed. New York: Stokes, 1911. Fanny Herself. New York: Stokes, 1917. Giant. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952. The Girls. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1921. Great Son. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1945. Ice Palace. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. Saratoga Trunk. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1941. Show Boat. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1926. So Big. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1924.

SOURCES Austin, Rhonda. “Edna Ferber.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Edited by Laurie Champion, 107–112. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Shaughnessey, Mary Rose. Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon Press, 1977. Kurt Meyer

FERN, FANNY (PSEUDONYM OF SARA PAYSON WILLIS PARTON) (1811–1872) Fanny Fern, one of the most popular writers of her day,

436 FERN, FANNY

and one of the most outrageous, coined the phrase, “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” She wrote newspaper columns, primarily for the New York Ledger, essays collected in six volumes, three novels, and a novella. Her best-selling, largely autobiographical, novel, Ruth Hall (1855), threatened a considerable segment of the reading public because it clearly demonstrated the need for women’s financial independence. Her other novels include Rose Clark (1856) and Fresh Leaves (1857). The novella Fanny Ford appeared serially in the Ledger in 1855. Although barely remembered during most of the last century, 21st-century readers view her as an avant-garde writer undervalued by her contemporaries. Fanny Fern was born Sarah Payson Willis on July 9, 1811, in Portland, Maine, to Nathaniel Willis, founder of Youth’s Companion, the first American children’s magazine, and Hannah Parker Willis. Reared in Boston, the future Fanny Fern graduated in 1831 from Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary. She married Charles Eldredge in 1837, and when he died of typhoid fever nine years later, he left her with three children and no money. She was pressured by her father in 1849 into marrying Samuel Farrington, a widower with two children, whom she did not love. She left two years later; that caused a scandal and violated the social customs of her era. Her family’s refusal to help her led directly to her success as a writer. She adopted the pseudonym of Fanny Fern, moved to New York, and by 1855 had become the highest-paid newspaper columnist of her era. She had already published the best-selling Ruth Hall, which chronicled the unsympathetic behavior of her father and brother when she was financially destitute. Ruth, the protagonist, remarkable at this time for her ambition and selfreliance, proves herself an adept businesswoman and does not marry. Fanny Fern jettisoned the sentimental endings typical of women’s novels of the time. She followed with a second best-seller, Rose Clark. The eponymous hero, Rose, scandalized some critics because through her character Fern dared to address husbands’ tactics of sexual humiliation. That same year, Fern published the novella Fanny Ford, again undercutting sentimental traditions such as the beautiful heroine, who is here both satirical and passive, and

the handsome good hero, whom Fern presents as dishonest. Moreover, the novel addresses the need for prison reform, and the reform sorely needed in marriage, in childrearing, and in such impecunious women’s professions as sewing and tailoring. In 1856, Fern married James Parton, the biographer of such historic figures as Horace Greeley and Andrew Jackson. She died of cancer on October 10, 1872. Her papers are collected in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Fanny Ford. In Fanny Fern’s Fresh Leaves. New York: Mason, 1857. Fresh Leaves. New York: Mason, 1857. Rose Clark. New York: Mason, 1856. Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time. New York: Mason, 1855.

SOURCES Adams, Florence Bannard. Fanny Fern, or a Pair of Flaming Shoes. West Trenton, N.J.: Hermitage Press, 1966. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to the Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870, 251–252. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Berlant, Lauren. “The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 265–281. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Hamilton, Kristie. “The Politics of Survival: Sara Parton’s Ruth Hall and the Literature of Labor.” In Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797–1901, edited by Sharon M. Harris, 86–108. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Harris, Susan K. “Inscribing and Defining: The Many Voices of Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall. In 19th-Century American Women Writers: Interpretive Strategies, edited by Susan K. Harris, 111–127. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern. New York: H. Long & Brother, 1855. Tonkovich, Nicole. Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Walker, Nancy. Fanny Fern. New York: Twayne, 1993.

FIELD OF VISION, THE

Warren, Joyce W. “Domesticity and the Economics of Independence: Resistance and Revolution in the Work of Fanny Fern.” In The Other American Traditions: NineteenthCentury Women Writers, edited by Joyce W. Warren, 73–91. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. ———. Fanny Fern: An Independent Woman. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. ———. “Fanny Fern’s Rose Clark,” Legacy 8 (Fall 1991): 92–103. ———. “Subversion versus Celebration: The Aborted Friendship of Fanny Fern and Walt Whitman.” In Patrons and Protégées, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 59–93. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. ———. “Text and Context in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall: From Widowhood to Independence.” In Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in America, edited by JoAnna S. Mink and Janet D. Ward, 61–76. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1991.

FIELD OF VISION, THE WRIGHT MORRIS (1980) For this novel, Wright Morris received the National Book Award. It was an early high point in a long and consistently impressive career that warranted more extensive critical attention than it has received. For more than three decades, Morris regularly produced novels of great technical and thematic subtlety and range. Although his work is most associated with the isolated communities on the Nebraskan plains, it is a misconception that he is primarily either a rural or a regional novelist. Morris set many of his novels in other locations in the Midwest, in New England, in the Deep South, in the Southwest, in California, in Mexico, and in several European countries. Many of his characters are academics and artists, and even in the Nebraska novels, relatively few of the characters are farmers or true rustics. Morris’s vision is quintessentially cosmopolitan, not rural. What he brings to cultural attention is the shift in American society and culture from the rural heartland to the extensive metropolises of the coasts, from the traditions and values associated with agrarian self-reliance to the rapid modifications in lifestyle and mores associated with urban mass society and mass culture. The Field of Vision features a bullfight at the center of its action, and in many ways it is the narrative obverse

437

of HEMINGWAY’s The SUN ALSO RISES. Whereas Hemingway’s novel features youthful Anglo-American expatriates drifting around Paris and making a romantic pilgrimage of sorts to the festival of the bulls at Pamplona, Spain, The Field of Vision features the accidental reunion of middle-class, middle-aged midwesterners who have traveled to Mexico for the Christmas holidays. Whereas Hemingway’s characters have been physically and psychologically damaged by their experiences in the trenches or more broadly by the cultural trauma caused by the Great War, the lives of Morris’s characters have turned on small moments of surprise that have served more to define the limits to their possibilities than to suggest missed possibilities that might have transformed their lives. In The Sun Also Rises, there is a dignity in Jake Barnes’s consistent attitude toward the world, in his refusal to be undone by his disfigurement, by his consequent disappointments, and by his acquaintances’ sometimes ugly self-indulgence. The “Lost Generation” finds its “antiheroic” embodiment in his stoic persistence. In The Field of Vision, the characters seem more at a loss than lost. Very little actually occurs in Mexico, and what does occur does not transform anyone in any appreciable way. In fact, there is more narrative interest in the events that are depicted in flashback to fill in the major characters’ backgrounds. If The Sun Also Rises is a novel about the continuing need for a heroic attitude in an era in which heroism has been exposed as an illusion, The Field of Vision is a novel about the extraneousness and even silliness of the heroic gesture within the context of ordinary lives in which there is little need for heroism and very few genuine opportunities to exhibit it. The Field of Vision is told through the alternating points of view of five main characters: McKee; his wife, Lois; her father, Scanlon; McKee and Lois’s old acquaintance, Boyd; and Boyd’s psychiatrist, Lehmann. McKee is a Chamber of Commerce type who is not so much truly contented as too unimaginative to be pointedly discontented. In most respects, he and Lois have been well-matched. She is a regular churchgoer with a rigid outlook and a stiff sense of propriety. Scanlon is a relic, a frontier persona now so far removed from the formative events of his life and of his region’s history that they have become like daydreams. Boyd is

438 FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER

a failed writer, which ironically seems to mean that he has failed at what one does when one has failed at everything else. Lehmann has become something of a caricature of the professional who has degenerated into dilettantism. Two other major characters are Gordon, McKee and Lois’s grandson, an archetypally American boy in the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer mold, and Paula Kahler, Lehmann’s personal assistant and patient, a transvestite who was apparently saved from a lengthy prison sentence for murder by the adoption of a female identity. Gordon and Paula seem to be counterpoints, representing, respectively, the American folk ideal and the social margins within which even seemingly fixed concepts such as gender identity are amorphous. Boyd imagines himself to be a personality with dynamic possibilities, and it is a testament to the staidness of the McKees’ lives that they view him in much the same way. When he was young, Boyd once tore a pocket from the pants of Ty Cobb’s baseball uniform because the cantankerous star had refused to provide him with an autograph. Somewhat pathetically, this moment of audacity has remained the focal point of Boyd’s self-perception. McKee remembers fondly Boyd’s astonishing declaration that he would walk across water. Boyd’s inability to deliver on the claim seemed ultimately less important to McKee than his conviction that he could do it. Lois McKee’s most private secret is of a kiss that she once stole with Boyd. Over the decades her recollection of that moment has become invested with romantic and illicit suggestions that betray the straitlaced persona that she presents to McKee and to the world. Boyd’s brief reintroduction into the McKees’ lives makes him desperate to make some sort of dramatic gesture at the bullfight, but in the end it is Gordon who lands in the bullring wearing his Davey Crockett hat and seizes the moment much as Boyd seized his with Cobb.

SOURCES Bird, Roy K. Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Bredahl, A. Carl. “ ‘What’s ‘Western’ about Morris’s The Field of Vision?’ My Students Ask.” Midwest Quarterly 45 (Summer 2004): 354–368. Crump, Gail Bruce. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978.

———. “Wright Morris.” In A Literary History of the American West, edited by Max Westbrook, 777–791. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Hall, Joe. “Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision: A Re-Reading of the Scanlon Story.” Journal of American Culture 14 (Summer 1991): 53–57. Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses, 153–167. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Madden, David. Wright Morris. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Morris, Wright. Field of Vision. 1980. Boston: Godine, 1991. Wydeven, Joseph J. “Wright Morris: An Update.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook, 685–692. Fort Worth: Western Literature Association/Texas Christian University Press, 1997. ———. Wright Morris Revisited. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 703. New York: Twayne, 1998. Martin Kich

FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER JADE SNOW WONG (1945) Contemporary readers credit Maxine Hong KINGSTON as the first “woman warrior” in Asian-American letters. Hong Kingston’s “talk-stories” might be claimed to be the representative autobiographic account of a Chinese girlhood, but Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) was written before the war in Asia ended, almost three decades prior to the publication of Hong Kingston’s The WOMAN WARRIOR (1971). In the tradition of Chinese-American women’s writing, Fifth Chinese Daughter is acclaimed as the mother text to The Woman Warrior, since Hong Kingston herself has referred to Wong as one of her literary mentors. Fifth Chinese Daughter enjoyed immense popularity in the 1940s and 1950s in American readership; in 1952 Wong was sent on a State Department–sponsored tour of Asia to speak on behalf of American democracy (Kim, 60). Wong, born in 1922 in San Francisco’s Chinatown, represents the transition of second-generation Chinese-American identity that became visible in mainstream American culture after World War II. It is also noteworthy that Wong’s autobiography was published before the Asian-American consciousness movement in the mid-1960s, when Asian-American cultural production was burgeoning, Asian-American literary studies had been instituted as a force in cultural politics, and Asian-American critics

FIFTH CHINESE DAUGHTER 439

started to define a new literary canon. Although Wong’s classic autobiography has been dismissed by contemporary readers and Asian-American critics, Fifth Chinese Daughter heralds critical notions pertaining to racialization, gender, and acculturation, which have been so heatedly debated a half-century later. Wong’s achievement as an independent minority woman who succeeds in a white male–dominated professional world epitomizes the subversion of stereotyped Chinese women as silenced victims of racial discrimination and patriarchal domination. Fifth Chinese Daughter, written in third-person narrative, recounts Wong’s Chinese upbringing in American society. Wong writes the narrative biography of Jade Snow; the singular “I” slips over into the narrative and re-emerges as a third-person “she.” The bicultural background allows the protagonist to act as an interpreter negotiating two worlds. In the first chapter, the putative daughter shows the gap between Chinese education and American life: “life was a constant puzzle. No one ever troubled to explain” (3). This “constant puzzle,” the struggle between Chinese modalities of silence and American exigencies of assertiveness, prompts her to articulate cultural and racial silences throughout the rest of her life. Brought up in an austere patriarchal Chinese family, Jade Snow broadens her horizon at Mills College (a women’s college in Oakland, California) that affords her an opportunity to expand beyond Chinese restrictions. As Elaine Kim points out, the popularity of Fifth Chinese Daughter grows out of three contexts, which also thematize the entire narrative. First, it promotes a new receptivity in the American literary market to depictions of the lives of Chinese families in Chinatown from the mid 1930s through the late 1940s. Second, it interrogates America’s political emphasis on a national tradition of racial tolerance and equality of opportunity. Third, the autobiographic writing creates an ethnicity paradigm for immigrant acculturation, a paradigm that Asian Americans have adopted to subvert the “unassimilable” imposition and to reify the rhetoric of American dream. The autobiography further centralizes a racial minority woman’s individual accomplishments despite her gender in both Chinese and American societies.

The story seems at first like a guided Chinatown tour, where Jade Snow Wong plays the interpreter and tour guide for westerners. The Americanized daughter serves as an unobtrusive stand-in for the Caucasian sightseers; as a cultural attaché “to interpret both language and the meaning of these new experiences” (209), Wong leads western spectators—their voyeurism concealed and their curiosity indulged by the native informant’s naturalized explanations—to enjoy Chinese life as a depoliticized spectacle. Fifth Chinese Daughter thus provides an open window onto the study of the cultural bridge as an operative framework in the invention of Chinese-American identity and culture in the 1940s. In an interview, Wong herself states that “creating better understanding between Americans and the Chinese” has been “the guiding theme of her life and her writing” (quoted in Chun, 61). However, conventional Asian-American male critics, among them Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, and Shawn Wong, the editors, with others, of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), disparage Jade Snow Wong for promoting Chinese Americans as stereotypically exotic and foreign through her highlighted descriptions of peculiar rituals (for instance, in cooking) and twisted accounts of cultural authenticity. On the ground of Asian-American women writers’ misrepresenting “authenticity,” these male critics trivialize Chinese-American women’s life stories as light literature. It would be simplistic to view Jade Snow as a mediator between two cultures and as a false native informant. Throughout her upbringing, Jade Snow tries to achieve personal success in a white society that sees her as an outsider. In negotiating Chinese and American cultures, she participates in a mode of transgression and transition, something to bridge these two realms of the material and the imaginary and to create an assimilating Asian-American selfhood. The initiation into American education changes Jade Snow’s Chinese outlook. For Jade Snow, who has had to battle against Chinese patriarchy from a young age, American individualism particularly attracts her, and she rebels against her authoritarian parents, whose Chinese values clash with her American attachment. As David Palumbo-Liu suggests, Wong’s autobiography converges two narrative strands: “the imperative of highly

440 FIGHT CLUB

individualized self-expression meets the need for a cultural representative (Palumbo-Liu, 143). In striving for success in a white man’s world, Jade Snow reveals her hidden agenda in her writing: to compel her family to recognize her as a successful daughter and to prove herself as a model minority in American society. Winning the essay competition run by the War Department, for example, manifests Jade Snow’s striving for recognition: “this was the first occasion when the entire Wong family was assembled in pride of their fifth daughter” (198). In the transformation of Americanization, Wong’s story exemplifies the American dream narrative: beginning with immigrant hardships and ending with American-style success. Its popularity in the 1940s acknowledged its demonstration of the greatness of America in that even a minority woman much repressed by her family could attain the American dream: the pursuit of freedom, wealth, and happiness in the land of opportunity. The fifth Chinese daughter, in a male-constituted society, defines herself against and through negotiations with paternal definitions. Without abandoning her Chinese heritage (she is above all the patriarch’s daughter), Jade Snow Wong maintains that one can be thoroughly Chinese and a modern American. Wong utilizes her creativity and independence not only to reiterate the American dream but also to mold, like crafting her clay work (174–181), a distinctive Asian-American identity that one does not need to shed the ethnic heritage to become a bona fide American. Such bicultural formation, instead of stressing its conflicts, represents an identity that turns a marginalized status into a strengthening image of the cultural ambassador.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Asian American Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1997. Chin, Frank, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Chun, Gloria Heyung. Of Orphans and Warriors: Inventing Chinese American Culture and Identity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Kim, Elaine. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “The Tradition of Chinese American Women’s Life Stories: Thematics of Race and Gender in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.” In American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Long, Elizabeth. The American Dream and the Popular Novel. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Motooka, Wendy. “ ‘Nothing Solid’: Racial Identity and Identification in Fifth Chinese Daughter.” In Racing and (E)Racing Language: Living with the Color of Our Words, edited by Ellen Goldner and Safiya Henderson, 207–232. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. 1945. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989. Bennett Fu

FIGHT CLUB CHUCK PALAHNIUK (1996)

The 30-year-old narrator of Chuck PALAHNIUK’s Fight Club feels alive only when surrounded by decrepitude and death. He attends testicular cancer support groups in order to enhance his vitality: by distinguishing himself as much as possible from the sick, he attempts to wrest himself away from a consumerist culture that suppresses death; by exposing himself to the mortality of others (which grants him the knowledge that he also is going to die), every moment of his life becomes more valuable. One of the infinite number of go-betweens in this culture (his job is to determine the expenses of recalling lethally defective automobiles), the narrator yearns to die in an airplane crash in order to free himself from the superficiality of a capitalist world that trivializes death and immortalizes the commodity. Only what he imagines to be a direct experience of death grants him a real and intense sense of life, and, as the novel proceeds, violence will come to be his salvation. And yet western culture manufactures not merely inclinations and proclivities, but also aversions and forms of disgust: particularly relevant for a discussion of Palahniuk’s novel is the aversion toward

FIGHT CLUB 441

violence and mortality that the narrator attempts to unlearn. The narrator’s desires are prefabricated. Like countless others in a consumerist society, his selfhood is defined by the merchandise that he purchases: his “perfect life” is constituted by “his” Swedish furniture, “his” quilt cover set, “his” Hemlig hatboxes, and the IKEA catalogues that serve as the foundation of his identity. He is a member of a generation of men who identify themselves solely in relation to the world of commodities (“Everything, the lamp, the chairs, the rugs were me” [111]), commodities that, according to the Marx of the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, serve as extensions of one’s personality in the capitalist world. Enter Tyler Durden (a man who is apparently the same age as the narrator). Aggressive, virile, and charming, Durden represents alternative possibilities that the narrator could adopt. Tyler is radically opposed to the progressive “improvement” of the self that has been so valorized by capitalist societies; he claims that the drive toward “perfection” has led to the loss of manhood, and has transformed men into a limitless army of purchasers and consumers who slave away in life-draining jobs: “Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer” (49). By randomly destroying property (with which members of consumerist societies identify), Tyler intends to explode the foundation of capitalist identity. Since Rousseau and Hegel, it has been assumed that the bourgeois self is divided into civil and private dimensions: the citizen and the “true” individual. Here we encounter two analogous versions of a single self: whenever the narrator (who subserves capitalist society) falls asleep, Tyler Durden (who represents the “authentic” self) inhabits his body. Tyler and the narrator form a masculine unit that exists apart from the feminized support groups, which are populated by man-women such as Bob, an estrogen-saturated former weight lifter who sprouts what appear to be mammary glands (“new sweating tits” [17]), as well as Marla Singer (associated with the narrator’s mother) who appropriates the narrator’s support groups and eventually unsettles their homosocial bond. With the narrator, Tyler founds “fight club,” an under-

ground boxing organization and a perverse version of the support group attended by the narrator. The split between the bourgeois and authentic selves is replicated in the difference between one’s work existence and fight club: “Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows” (49). Whereas the narrator’s bureaucratic life is circumscribed by the hours of day, fight club exists only during those nocturnal hours between “when fight club starts and when fight club ends” (48). Fight club thus opens up a separate space that is divorced from the dependency and servility of the (capitalist) world of exchange; it posits a self-sufficient universe in which control and mastery, sovereignty and force are achieved, paradoxically, through self-destruction. The fights are not based on personal acrimony but the exercise of power; it is the fight that is pure; it is through the fight that one’s human implications and virility are drawn out. Norms learned from television (that mass accumulation is one’s life’s goal, that success may be equated with financial success, that violence must be shunned)—all of these values are reversed in fight club, the sole objective of which is the reclamation of one’s manhood, which has been diminished in the capitalist world (hence the phallic imagery that crystallizes throughout the novel: Tyler inserts his penis into a dish of orange mousse, he splices images of penises into family films, and so on). The constituents of fight club (copy center clerks, box boys, etc.) are members of the Lumpenproletariat who labor without a productive or positive relation to work, who are alienated from their own slavery, and who are excluded from every social totality. Even those on the higher levels of the bourgeoisie conform to the same model: they work at “chickenshit jobs” (83), their strength is vitiated, and they function only as the refuse of a society that will not acknowledge them. Dying in offices where their lives are never challenged (and therefore lacking anything to contrast with life), they are the mere shadows of the proletariat, deprived of access not merely to the fortunes of the capitalist world, but also to consciousness of their own oppression: they are “[g]enerations] [that] have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need” (149).

442 THE FIRM

Eventually, fight club transcends and operates independently of the individuals who produced it (following Tyler’s anti-individualist creed) and becomes wholly headless: “The new rule is that nobody should be the center of fight club” (142). Fight club transmutes into Project Mayhem, a revolutionary group that begins with acts of vandalism and food contamination and eventually expands into full-blown guerrilla terrorism. Its aim is regression: to reduce all of history to ground zero. Project Mayhem wants to blow the capitalist world to smithereens to give birth to a new form of humanity. What fight club did for selfhood and individuality (the formation of a new identity apart from the one mandated by capitalist society), Project Mayhem would do for capitalist society itself. In the same way as fight club destroys capitalist identity, Project Mayhem is to destroy western civilization to “make something better out of the world” (125)—a world in which manhood would intensify through a non-moral relation to violence. Washing oneself clean, returning to one’s hidden origin, primitivism, regressionism, cleansing, and sacrifice . . . soap, which Freud named “the yardstick of civilization,” is here emblematic of a reduction to primal manhood. The meaning of soap is not, in this context, propriety, as Freud would have it, nor the ebullitions of language (Francis Ponge), nor, as Roland Barthes would have one believe in his Mythologies, does it signify the luxury of foaminess. Soap is indissociable from sacrifice. Tyler “sacrifices” the narrator in an initiation ritual (in order for the latter to “hit bottom”) by scarring the back of his friend’s hand with a solution of saliva and lye (one of the chief ingredients of soap). “Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand” (75), Tyler explains: lye mingled with the fat of human sacrifices in order to produce soap in primitive societies (Tyler desires to “blast the world free of history,” but lectures on the history of soap). If western culture (as Freud claims in Unbehagen in der Kultur [Discomfort in culture]) is a culture of soap (sanitizing one from the awareness of death), the accustomed meaning of soap is here transformed into its opposite. Western culture represses the sacrifices that were its origins through a process of cleansing: soap here would indicate a return to those repressed sources. Violence must be revived in order to reclaim oneself, now unclean.

“We wanted to blast the world free of history” (124), Tyler declares. The dream of capitalism complements the dream of fascism: their common project is dehistoricization. By attempting to destroy history, Project Mayhem pretends to break with the capitalist world but ends up mirroring it. Capitalist culture homogenizes all of its inhabitants until individuality is lost—its alternative, communism, would lead, hypothetically, to the redistribution of wealth and the elimination of class distinctions. Neither is accepted by fight club. Nor for that matter are the utopian primitivism and the fascistic terrorism represented by Project Mayhem. Palahniuk’s refusal of the capitalist/communist/fascist alternatives does not imply nihilism (a term that has been often enough misapplied to his work). Fight Club posits nothing other than the impossibility of finding a way out and denies one the simplicity of an easy resolution. This is evident at the novel’s close. When the narrator attempts to commit suicide to demolish the fascist version of his self, his phantom double reemerges. Neither capitalism nor its other are overcome. Tragedy is not death (which would result in the liberation from all forms of the political); it is rather the impossibility of dying.

SOURCES Duge, Brenda J. “Floundering: Fight Club and the Postmodern Masculine Identity Crisis,” master’s thesis, Southwest Texas State University, 2001. Fincher, David. Director. Film version of Fight Club (1999). Pistors, Patricia. “Glamour and Glycerine: Surplus and Residual of the Network Society: from Glamorama to Fight Club.” In Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Patricia Pistors and Catherine M. Lord. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2001. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. Uhl, Jim. Fight Club [Screenplay]. Southwold, Sussex, U.K.: Screen Press Books, 1999. Joseph Suglia

THE FIRM JOHN GRISHAM (1991)

Much of what maintains John GRISHAM’s best-seller status is that his characters ring true as morally admirable. Grisham’s protagonists are far from perfect; in fact, many give in to the temptation of marital infidelity or break the law in some way. However, readers sense a

THE FIRM 443

moral superiority in Grisham’s main characters, and we come to understand their mistakes. In Mitch McDeere of The Firm, readers recognize a good guy with normal goals who learns that his employers are criminals. As usual, Grisham’s portrayal of the FBI offers a fairly negative view of government agencies as well-meaning but rather incompetent, as McDeere runs for his life due to an FBI leak. By the novel’s end, the principled individuals win out, and right and justice prevail. Grisham does include violent episodes in his fiction, but “the Law reestablishes itself at the end” (Black, 37). Many critics and artists consider Grisham “hypocritical” for his printed accusation that Oliver Stone’s film Natural Born Killers fails to admonish senseless crime in any way and is therefore a harmful product subject to liability litigation (Black, 38). A closer look at the heart of Grisham’s fiction reveals that this author’s literary themes and personal beliefs are consistent, and his extreme popularity with college readers (Goodnight, 269) actually says something hopeful rather than negative about the values of younger generations. In The Firm, which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise, Mitch McDeere is lured by the promise of wealth, comfort, and warm weather by a Memphis law firm. Mitch had to turn down great offers from New York and Chicago because this southern firm had so much more to offer one of Harvard’s top graduates. Mitch and his wife, Abby, will learn that what seems too good to be true generally is, but the reader sympathizes with their quest for both material gain and small-town atmosphere as they make their plans for this new life. Intriguingly, Grisham’s portrayal of the main character’s ambition makes Mitch more and more likable and seems to parallel our views of Grisham as a tremendously successful author who still has a meaningful message to send. Grisham’s novels reveal the gamut of individual morality and even offer details of how people break the law and get away with it, but at the core, there is a foundation of right and wrong that remains solid. As in many of Grisham’s other novels, the main character of The Firm stumbles upon the truth (Runyon, 46), but this knowledge puts him in a dilemma between the FBI and professional criminals. Grisham himself has “tended to deprecate the literary value of his bestsellers” (Runyon, 44) particularly

when speaking of The Firm in interviews. In contrast, critics have analyzed various literary patterns in Grisham’s books, and many argue that his popularity says a great deal about contemporary society. One critic notes that Grisham’s legal thrillers can be “read in [an] oedipal light” (Runyon, 59). For instance, Mitch McDeere never speaks to his mother in The Firm, but he checks on her and leaves her a great deal of money at the end. In many Grisham works, fathers are abusive or absent, and The Firm is no exception. Other older male characters emerge as stand-in fathers for Mitch but eventually disappoint him. However, he and his brother Ray maintain a close relationship even while Ray is in prison. Looking at family connections across several Grisham novels does reveal some interesting twists and many telling character names, but what seems most significant about The Firm’s protagonist is that he rises above his lowly background with forgiveness rather than revenge. In Grisham’s novels, there is obvious criticism of the legal system and of government agencies that are supposed to protect law-abiding citizens. The novel also privileges intelligent, ambitious, and confident characters; what makes Mitch stand out and prevail is not only how smart he is but also that he has a chip on his shoulder. His favorite question is “Why is that important?” implying that his business is his own (66). His sarcasm seems appropriate and amusing, but it pervades the novel. However, the novel’s main emphasis is on the moral distinctions between the main characters and the numerous immoral figures who challenge them. There are gray areas highlighted by Grisham’s choices of plotline, because Mitch gives in to temptation and sleeps with another woman while on a business trip in the Caymans. Even though readers know this encounter was set up by Mitch’s devious employers, his breach of conscience shows that Mitch is not perfect. On the other hand, it is interesting that Mitch’s unfaithfulness is never exposed to his wife in the novel. Readers know the guilt Mitch feels, but Grisham allows the protagonist to escape the consequences for this error in judgment just as he escapes with millions of dollars with the implication that he deserves it. Grisham’s long-lived literary success benefits from his easy-to-read style. Dialogue dominates The Firm,

444 FISHER, DOROTHY CANFIELD

portraying characters primarily through what they say. The plot is pretty complicated yet understandable in Grisham’s lucid style despite numerous character names to keep track of and even several aliases. It is interesting how The Firm focuses on the “dissemination of text” (Runyon, 49). Finding, copying, and storing incriminating legal files pervade this book but in a way that makes sense and is exciting for readers. The Firm entertains because it is suspenseful and fairly plausible, but its moral theme and provocative characterization make it worthy of scholarly analysis.

SOURCES Black, Joel. “Grisham’s Demons,” College Literature 25, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 35–40. Goodnight, G. Thomas. “The Firm, the Park and the University: Fear and Trembling on the Postmodern Trail.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (August 1995): 267–290. Grisham, John. “Book ’Em.” Interview by Tom Matthews. Newsweek, 15 March 1993, pp. 32–44. ———. The Firm. New York: Doubleday, 1991. ———. “The Rise of the Legal Thriller: Why Lawyers Are Throwing the Book at Us.” New York Times Sunday Book Review, 18 October 1992, pp. 33. ———. “Unatural Killers,” The Oxford American 9 (1996): 2–5. Runyon, Randolph Paul. “Obsessive Imagery.” In Southern Writers at Century’s End, 44–59. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Rachel G. Wall

FISHER,

DOROTHY

CANFIELD

(1879–1958) In addition to writing 11 novels, several short-story collections, and 12 books of nonfiction, Dorothy Canfield Fisher was a cultural pace-setter, a committed social activist, and a literary tastemaker for a quarter of a century. She helped introduce the Montessori method of education to the United States and judged selections for the Book-ofthe-Month Club for many years. One of her novels, The Home-Maker (1924), a best-seller, was made into a silent film of the same title in 1925. Her novels examine the vicissitudes of war, marriage, racism—particularly anti-Semitism, and gender roles. As scholar Elizabeth Wright notes, despite the fact that Eleanor

Roosevelt called Fisher one of the 10 most influential women in the United States, her reputation diminished after her death and is only now being revived through scholarly attention and such avenues as the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Society (Wright, 115). Fisher was born on February 17, 1879, in Lawrence, Kansas, to James Hulme Canfield, a professor of political economy and sociology, and Flavia A. Camp Canfield, an artist. Reared in the Midwest because her father was teaching there, as well as in Europe, where her mother maintained a studio in Paris, Fisher learned five languages. She graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in 1899. In May 1907, Canfield married John Fisher, a fellow student at Columbia University, from which she received her doctoral degree in romance languages in 1904. Although both were writers working from their home in Vermont, she was the more popular and prolific, and therefore her husband cared for their children. This situation is recreated in The Home-Maker, where Evangeline Knapp’s husband, Lester, stays home to raise their children while she becomes the breadwinner; the role reversal suits both Lester and Eva. Among Fisher’s other novels, The Bent Twig (1915), The Deepening Stream (1930), and Seasoned Timber (1939) all depict self-reliant Vermonters who refuse to relinquish their own beliefs and values or to become corrupted by outside sources. In Seasoned Timber, on the eve of World War II, a Vermont school principal refuses the money he desperately needs because of the strings attached: he can have the money only if he agrees to admit no Jews into his school. Her subject matter, the clash and change of values as the world moves from the 19th to the 20th century is underscored in her interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement, Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy, and Freudian psychology. In The Squirrel-Cage (1912), for example, Fisher introduces a protagonist, Daniel Rankin, modeled on William Morris, an Arts and Crafts adherent who urged people to consider art as a part of daily life. In this novel Lydia Emery epitomizes the frustration of women who must confront their status as second-class citizens; Lydia ultimately murders her husband. The Home-Maker, The Brimming Cup (1921), and Rough-Hewn (1922) also address the

FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT 445

restrictions of marriage roles. Dorothy Canfield Fisher died on November 9, 1958 in Arlington, Vermont.

NOVELS The Bent Twig. New York: Holt, 1915. Bonfire. New York: Harcourt, 1933. The Brimming Cup. New York: Harcourt, 1921. The Deepening Stream. New York: Harcourt, 1930. Gunhild: A Norwegian-American Episode. New York: Holt, 1907. Her Son’s Wife. New York: Harcourt, 1926. The Home-Maker. New York: Harcourt, 1924. Rough-Hewn. New York: Harcourt, 1922. Seasoned Timber. New York: Harcourt, 1939. The Squirrel-Cage, illustrations by John Alonzo Williams. New York: Holt, 1912. Understood Betsey. New York: Holt, 1917.

SOURCES Washington, Ida H. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Shelburne, Vt.: New England Press, 1981. Wright, Elizabeth. “Dorothy Canfield Fisher.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 113–117. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Yates, Elizabeth. Pebble in a Pool: The Widening Circles of Dorothy Canfield’s Life. New York: Dutton, 1958.

FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT (FRANCIS SCOTT KEY FITZGERALD) (1896–1940) F. Scott Fitzgerald remains one of the major novelists of the 20th century, an author with the ability both to evoke an era and create an instantly recognizable vision of America, past or present. Nearly a century after the publication of his novels and stories chronicling the rootlessness and dissipation of what Gertrude Stein called “the lost generation,” one that survived World War I with misplaced values, The GREAT GATSBY (1925), his masterpiece, remains an international as well as an American classic. In 2003, the British public voted it one of their “nation’s best-loved novels.” Numerous readers and some critics in both countries consider Tender Is the Night (1934), his expatriate novel, as his most ambitious. Fitzgerald, who was also a playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and poet, published 10 volumes of short stories, a number of which have been filmed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Edward Fitzgerald, a businessman, and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, an heiress, both of Irish stock, he of an impoverished but genteel ancestry in the South, she of northern midwestern “potato famine Irish” who had money. Scott was educated at Princeton University, where he wrote The Romantic Egoist, an early version of This Side of Paradise. That novel brought Fitzgerald respectability and security and persuaded Zelda Sayre’s parents to agree to their marriage on April 3, 1920, one week after This Side of Paradise appeared to uniformly positive reviews. (The couple met when Fitzgerald was serving in the U.S. Army, as a second lieutenant, from 1917 to 1919.) This Side of Paradise centers on Amory Blaine, an American college student, versed in the old ways but primed for the new. Rosalind Connage is the young woman who rejects him because, like their real-life prototypes, Ginevra King and F. Scott Fitzgerald, she could not marry a man with no prospects of money and success. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922), relates the bleak wasting away of the glamour and potential of young Anthony and Gloria Patch. By the time their lawsuit for Anthony’s inheritance succeeds, Anthony has lost his mind and Gloria her beauty. The Great Gatsby, begun as the Fitzgeralds moved to the French Riviera, became the most American of novels, taking as its subjects love, money, murder, and the corruption of innocence. Set on Long Island, New York, the novel describes transplanted midwesterners who, immersed in the postwar rush for financial success and high society, have lost the ideals of their youth. Ironically, only Jay Gatsby, involved with corrupt friends and shadowy deals, retains the innocence of his prewar self. His innocence about love results in his death at novel’s end. Fitzgerald, influenced by the earlier British writer Joseph Conrad, is still praised for his innovative use of the narrator Nick Carroway, a childhood friend of Gatsby’s. Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald’s fourth novel, focuses on Dick and Nicole Diver, the Fitzgerald-like couple living on the French Riviera. Their beauty, fame, and wealth are dissipating from the beginning of the novel. Dick is the self-confident one; Nicole, who has suffered mental and emotional problems, the weaker spouse.

446 FITZGERALD, F. SCOTT

However, as they encounter—and Dick partakes of— increasing instances of corruption, confusion, and perversion, Nicole gains strength while Dick declines into alcoholism. He returns to the United States and is last seen in a tiny town somewhere in upstate New York. Fitzgerald’s final novel, The LAST TYCOON, was published posthumously. It portrays Hollywood in the 1930s, focusing on Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald’s example of a flawed but effective studio head, and his love for a young woman named Kathleen Moore. Although unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death, close friend and literary critic Edmund Wilson pieced together Fitzgerald’s many notes and outlines with excellent results; many critics believe this novel exemplifies Fitzgerald at his best. This time the narrator is Cecilia Brady and, as the story draws to a close, the reader finds in the ultimate failure of Stahr a touch of grandeur. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who drank too much for too long, died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, California. His burial place is in St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. His books still sell more than a half million copies a year, and films have been made of The Beautiful and Damned (Warner Bros., 1922), Tender Is the Night (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1962), The Great Gatsby (Players-Lasky-Paramount, 1926, Paramount, 1949 and 1974; and a TV movie in 2001), and The Last Tycoon (Paramount, 1976). Fitzgerald’s papers are housed at the Firestone Library at Princeton University.

NOVELS The Beautiful and Damned. (first published serially in Metropolitan Magazine, September 1921–March 1922). Rev. ed. of original text, New York: Scribner, 1922. Reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1982. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925. The Last Tycoon. First published as The Last Tycoon: An Unfinished Novel, Together with “The Great Gatsby” and Selected Stories (includes notes for The Last Tycoon), with additional notes by Fitzgerald, foreword by Edmund Wilson. New York: Scribner, 1941. Tender Is the Night: A Romance. New York: Scribner, 1934; new edition with Fitzgerald’s final revisions, preface by Malcolm Cowley. New York: Scribner, 1951. This Side of Paradise. New York: Scribner, 1920. Reprint, New York: Scribner, 1971.

SOURCES Berman, Ronald. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. ———. The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s World of Ideas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Chelsea House, 1999. ———. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Bruccoli, Matthew J. The Composition of “Tender Is the Night”: A Study of the Manuscripts. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. ———. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. ———. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography. Rev. ed. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. ———. Reader’s Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. ———. Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt, 1981. ———, ed. Fitzgerald Newsletter, nos. 1–40 (Spring 1958–Winter 1968). Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Jennifer McCabe Atkinson, eds. As Ever, Scott Fitz—: Letters Between F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Literary Agent, Harold Ober, 1919–1940. Foreword by Scottie Fitzgerald Smith. New York: Lippincott, 1972. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Margaret Duggan, eds. Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Random House, 1980. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Judith S. Baughman, eds. Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Bruccoli, Matthew J., Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr, eds. The Romantic Egoists: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1974. Bryer, Jackson R. The Critical Reputation of F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Bibliographical Study, supplement. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984. ———. New Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Neglected Stories. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. ———. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: New Approaches to Criticism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. ———, and Cathy W. Barks. Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. Buttitta, Tony. After the Good Gay Times. New York: Viking, 1974. Cowley, Malcolm, and Robert Cowley, eds. Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age. New York: Scribner, 1966. de Koster, Katie. Readings on F. Scott Fitzgerald. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997.

FITZGERALD, ZELDA 447

———, ed. Readings on the Great Gatsby. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Elbe, Kenneth. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Rev. ed., Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Scott Fitzgerald: Letters to His Daughter. Edited by Andrew Turnbull. Introduction by Frances Fitzgerald Lanahan. New York: Scribner, 1965. Gale, Robert L. An F. Scott Fitzgerald Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1998. Gross, Dalton, and Maryjean Gross. Understanding the Great Gatsby: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Higgins, John A. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study of the Stories. New York: St. John’s University Press, 1971. Kazin, Alfred, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work. New York: World Publishing, 1951. Kennedy, J. Gerald, and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Lanahan, Eleanor Anne. Scottie, the Daughter of—: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith. New York: HarperCollins 1995. Mellow, James R. Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Meyers, Jeffrey. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1970. Mizener, Arthur. The Far Side of Paradise. 2d ed. Boston: Houghton, 1965. Ring, Frances Kroll. Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1985. Roulston, Robert. The Winding Road to West Egg: The Artistic Development of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. ———. Tender Is the Night: The Broken Universe. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994. Sufrin, Mark. F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994. Tate, Mary Jo. Fitzgerald A to Z. New York: Facts On File, 1997. Tredell, Nicolas, ed. F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Gatsby. Columbia Critical Guides. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1962. ———, ed. The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1963. Reprint, 1981. Washington, Bryan R. The Politics of Exile: Ideology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Westbrook, Robert. Intimate Lies: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilah Graham: Her Son’s Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Wilson, Edmund. Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, edited by Elena Wilson, introduction by Daniel Aaron, foreword by Leon Edel. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977. ———, ed. “The Last Tycoon”: An Unfinished Novel. New York: Scribner, 1941. Zhang, Aiping. Enchanted Places: The Use of Setting in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

FITZGERALD, ZELDA (SAYRE) (1900– 1948) Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, a belle of the ball, was born on July 24, 1900, in Montgomery, Alabama, to Anthony Dickinson Sayre, a legislator and judge, and Minnie Buckler Machen Sayre. She was a popular beauty who enjoyed a privileged life, but like many similar women of her era, she had no formal education past her graduation from Sidney Lanier High School in 1918. She met F. Scott FITZGERALD that same year, married him in New York City on April 3, 1920, and lived with him in both the United States and Europe. As Nancy Milford, her first biographer, characterized her, she was “the American girl living the American Dream, and she became mad within it” (Milford, xiv). From the late 1920s onward, she studied painting and ballet, suffered a series of breakdowns that were later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and was hospitalized and intermittently institutionalized for the rest of her life. In addition to exhibiting her paintings in galleries in Baltimore, New York, Asheville, North Carolina, and Montgomery, however, from 1926 to 1932, she wrote and published “a small but in many ways exquisite body of writing” (Shurbutt), including the incomplete and unpublished novel, “Caesar’s Things,” and culminating in her autobiographical novel SAVE ME THE WALTZ (1932). The hero, Alabama Beggs, daughter of a south-

448 FLANAGAN, THOMAS

ern judge, is married to David Knight, a handsome artist; when he ignores Alabama, she seeks solace with a French aviator. Zelda Fitzgerald’s play, Scandalabra, was produced in Baltimore in 1933, and published in 1980. She began her new novel, “Caesar’s Things,” in 1942, two years after Scott’s death. It was destroyed in 1948 when a fire raged through Highland Hospital of Nervous Diseases. That fire consumed her as well since she was in a locked room on the top floor of the institution. New biographical material has recently been discovered at Princeton University and some of her medical records have been released, and the recovery of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life as well as her writings continues. She is emerging from the shadow of her husband and is increasingly the subject of scholarly research that seeks to determine the extent of her contributions to her husband’s published work. With the publication of Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings in 1991, more readers can judge her work for themselves. In the opinion of the scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli, they can be read not only as autobiography, social history, and literary history, but as “the expression of a complex sensibility” (Zelda Fitzgerald, xi).

NOVELS “Caesar’s Things.” [novel left incomplete at time of death] Save Me the Waltz. New York: Scribner, 1932.

SOURCES Fitzgerald, Zelda. Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner, 1992. Hook, Andrew. F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Mayfield, Sarah. Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Delacorte Press, 1971. Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1970. Taylor, Kendall. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda And Scott Fitzgerald—A Marriage. London: New Robson, 2002.

OTHER Herman, Carol. “The troubled belle who was Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald.” (Review of Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, by Sally Cline), Washington Times. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:100048105. Accessed September 4, 2005.

Geracimos, Ann. “Mailer proves that words matter.” Washington Times. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 81757840. Accessed September 4, 2005. Moore, Lucy. “The long twilight.” (Review of Taylor, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald—A Marriage.) New Statesman (1996). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:92543675. Accessed September 4, 2005. Shurbutt, Sylvia Bailey. “Creating a woman’s life through words: a language of their own.” Women and Language. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:16617850. Accessed September 4, 2005. Whittington-Egan, Richard. “The Fitzgeralds: the beautiful and the damned.” (Review of Hook, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Literary Life and Taylor, Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald—A Marriage.) Contemporary Review. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http:// www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 98184527. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FLANAGAN, THOMAS (JAMES BONNER) (1923–2002) Best known for his historical novels about Ireland, Thomas Flanagan was a novelist and short-story writer who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Year of the French (1979), a dramatization of the 1798 Irish rebellion against the British. Flanagan was praised for his ability to transport the reader into the past and for his use of a multiplicity of styles. Critic Denis Donoghue, in a review of The Year of the French, notes that Flanagan examines “conflicts of class, religion, tradition, and self-interest”; he also praises Flanagan’s “knowledge of Irish history, mythology, religion, [and] local customs” (Donoghue, 22, 23). Thomas Flanagan was born on November 5, 1923, in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Owen de Sales Flanagan and Mary Helen Bonner Flanagan. After serving from 1942 to 1944 with the U.S. Naval Reserve in the Pacific, he was educated at Amherst College, earning a bachelor’s degree (1945), and Columbia University, earning both a master’s and a doctoral degree (1949, 1958). In 1949, he married Jean Parker and that same year began an academic career that lasted more than half a century. His first novel, The Year of the French, depicts the arrival of the French in County Mayo, Ireland, ostensibly to help the Irish but, the novel implies,

FLOATING WORLD, THE 449

apparently more focused on humiliating their old enemies the British. Singled out for praise are Flanagan’s use of multiple points of view, realistic period language, and integrating intriguing fictional characters such as Anglican clergyman Arthur Broom and French general Jean-Joseph Humbert with real-life persons such as British general Lord Cornwallis and novelist Maria Edgeworth. The Tenants of Time (1988) features schoolmaster Hugh MacMahon, the Irish hero Charles Stewart Parnell and an important 19th-century Irish event, the 1867 Fenian Rising in Kilpeder. Particularly effective, according to critic George Garrett, is Flanagan’s “choice to end his story with the terrible future of Ireland and the rest of the world just out of sight and beyond the imagination of everyone except the reader” (Garrett, 26). With The End of the Hunt (1994), Flanagan turned to the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the skirmishes and guerrilla warfare between Irish and British forces and among the Irish themselves. Again Flanagan interweaves into the tale historical figures who include Sir Winston Churchill and rebel leader Michael Collins. Also the author of Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World” (1996) and, most recently, Dangerous Edge of the Thing (1999), Thomas Flanagan died of a heart attack on March 21, 2002, in Berkeley, California.

NOVELS Dangerous Edge of the Thing. New York: NAL/Dutton, 1999. The End of the Hunt. New York: Dutton, 1994. Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World.” Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. The Tenants of Time. New York: Dutton, 1988. The Year of the French. New York: Holt, 1979.

SOURCES Donoghue, Denis. “The Stains of Ireland,” The New York Review of Books 26, no. 10 (June 14, 1979): 21–23. Garrett, George. “Young Genians in Love and History,” New York Times Book Review, 3 January 1988, pp. 1, 26–27.

FLOATING WORLD, THE CYNTHIA KADO(1989) The Floating World, Cynthia KADOHATA’s first novel, offers a portrait of a Japanese-American family and the protective sense of space they continually recreate as they travel through the western United States of the 1950s, seeking work, community, family

HATA

connections, and reconciliation with the past. Presented in first-person voice through the perspective of Olivia, who is her mother’s daughter from a former lover, the narrative follows the migrations of Olivia, her mother, Mariko, the mother’s husband, Charlie-O, their three young sons, and a fiercely spirited yet cantankerous grandmother, Obasan. As Olivia notes, there were three reasons for the family being constantly on the move: bad luck, the difficulty for Japanese Americans in the 1950s in getting good jobs, and the tensions of her parents’ marriage. The “floating world,” created through the enclosed space of the car, provides the basis for working through and consolidating their relationships with one another, even as they must continually renegotiate their relationship to the outside world. The “floating world,” a translation of the Japanese term ukiyo, evokes the immediacy, creative energy and eroticism of the arts and geisha life that held sway in Japan from the mid-17th to the mid-19th centuries while Japan was “closed” to the West. The term also resonates with an earlier Buddhist meaning from the 12th to 14th centuries, referring to the transient nature of life. Kadohata’s character Obasan evokes this term to refer to the transitional life the family led on the road, and, as Olivia explains it, “it also referred to change and the pleasures and loneliness change brings. For a long time, I never exactly thought of us as a part of that, though. We were stable, traveling through an unstable world while my father looked for jobs.” For Kadohata’s book, the “floating world” conveys the sense of suspension that the family often experiences. This world, marked by a hyperawareness of the present moment and a sense of the supernatural, works to shape meaning and create beauty in their lives, even as it provides a protective sense of enclosure. Scholars have referred to this aspect of the text as a type of magic realism. The book has been described as Olivia’s coming-ofage story, a bildungsroman, and while the narrative does not maintain a chronological framework, as it leaps in time and memory from one episode to another (a feature that leads some scholars to label the book “postmodern”), the reader does trace Olivia’s development from a 12-year-old girl to a young adult. The narrative is driven by her desire to understand the forces

450 FLOATING WORLD, THE

that have shaped the lives of her parents and grandmother and that continue to shape her own life. A consistent concern is her mother’s relationship with Charlie-O, whom she loves as her own father. Because Obasan forced Mariko to marry Charlie-O after she became pregnant with a married man’s child, it is uncertain to what extent Olivia’s mother loves CharlieO and to what extent their lives are marked by a sense of loss and regret. For the young Olivia, this uncertainty not only threatens the strength and stability of her world, but it also leads her to meditate on love, desires, and the effects of life choices as she herself works to shape her own life. In this way, the novel charts Olivia’s attempts as she grows up to reconcile her need for safety and support with her increasing awareness of the chaos, unpredictability, and possible pain of the larger world. As Olivia moves from childhood into early adulthood, she also moves from the family’s floating world, with the strongest buffer, to the Japanese-American community in Arkansas with its own protective measures, to Los Angeles where she must create on her own a sense of identity and belonging. Finding Olivia’s formative teenage years to be relatively free of heavy gender proscriptions and marked by what she calls a “guilt-free” attitude toward sexuality, Phillipa Kafka finds the text to be more or less free of gender asymmetry, thereby leading her to label it “postfeminist.” It is notable that Olivia is able to find strength in her sexuality; after her grandmother’s death, Obasan’s diaries offer her advice about sex, understanding desire to be a form of power. By shifting the focus to the mother, however, Traise Yamamoto situates the mother-daughter relationship within a gendered framework and argues that it is through witnessing the mother’s struggle to reconcile her love and desires with the socially sanctioned family structure, and through the mother’s transgressive intellectual pursuits, that Olivia is offered an alternative model in developing a gendered identity. Elaine Kim also foregrounds the mother-daughter relationship, noting that it is through Olivia’s identification with her mother’s desire that, at the text’s conclusion, she is able to find peace with the ghost of her biological father and the way he has always come between her mother and Charlie-O.

Olivia comes to understand that it is her familial obligation to be happier than her parents have been; this obligation stems from their position as a workingclass family whose history carries the mark of recent immigration and, more important, has been shaped by the racial injustices against Japanese Americans during World War II. While some reviewers have expressed surprise that race and racism do not play a more overt role in Kadohata’s narrative or that the Japanese-American internment during World War II receives only the briefest mention, issues of race and racism do structure the lives of the characters. Confronting racism may not be the focus of the narrative, but the power of racism is implied through the father’s difficulty in obtaining a steady job, in the family’s tendency to travel with other Japanese-American families, in the fear of being too loud or visible among white people, and in the parents’ emphasis on assimilation. Obasan perhaps does more than any other character to make Olivia aware of the workings of racism. At times, Obasan expresses fear of white people’s possible reactions, and at other times, she is quietly defiant, encouraging Olivia to taunt them: “Smile at them, she would say. Hakujin don’t know when a smile is an insult.” Olivia works to move beyond the fear that, she finds, her parents have unwittingly taught her due to their experiences during the war and their transient life. As Olivia moves from the more protected “floating world” of her childhood to the more chaotic realm of Los Angeles, where it could seem at times as if “all the rules had been rendered arbitrary and irrelevant,” she is able to draw on the survival skills of her youth. Youme Park and Gayle Wald, in their reading of Kadohata’s text, find in Olivia a young woman who can draw on the ambiguities that her racialized transient life has afforded her to renegotiate the gendered boundaries of the public and private spheres in Los Angeles. The Floating World appeared in 1989, inevitably situating Kadohata in relation to what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has called the “Amy Tan Phenomenon.” Kadohata, in an interview with Mickey Pearlman, has expressed annoyance with the incessant comparisons to Asian-American women writers such as Amy TAN and Gish JEN, even as she states, “in my heart I do feel that sistership.” Some reviewers have criticized her

FLUTIE 451

for both failing to foreground confrontations with racism as well as representing Japanese Americans as crass and rowdy. Kadohata emphatically denies any obligation on the part of the writer to be representative or to embrace a political imperative. Reviewers such as Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Stan Yogi have commended her for contributing to a more complex portrait of Asian America; Yogi finds that her fiction works to dispel the ultimately disempowering myth of the “model minority.”

Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu, 174–210. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Yogi, Stan. “Japanese American Literature.” An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Edited by Kingkok Cheung, 125–155. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Review of The Floating World. Amerasia Journal 16, no. 1 (1990): 261–262.

SOURCES

Susan Muchshima Moynihan

Kadohata, Cynthia. The Floating World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. ———. Interview with Lisa See. Publishers Weekly (August 3, 1992): 48–49. ———. In the Heart of the Valley of Love. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. ———. Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write, interview with Mickey Pearlman, 112–120. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Kafka, Phillipa. (Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Kakutani, Michiko, “Growing Up Rootless in an Immigrant Family.” Review of The Floating World. New York Times, 30 June 1989, p. 27. Kim, Elaine. “ ‘Such Opposite Creatures’: Men and Women in Asian American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 29 (1990): 68–93. Lee, A. Robert. “Eat a Bowl of Tea: Asian America in the Novels of Gish Jen, Cynthia Kadohata, Kim Ronyoung, Jessica Hagedorn, and Tran Van Dinh,” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 263–280. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Review of The Floating World. Belles Lettres 5, no. 3 (1990): 20. O’Hehir, Diana. “On the Road with Grandmother’s Magic,” New York Times Book Review, 23 July 1989, p. 15. Park, You-me, and Gayle Wald. “Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 607–633. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “The Politics of Mobility.” In Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, 118–165. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. “ ‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon.” In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and

FLUTIE DIANE GLANCY (1998) The critic Stuart Hall has asserted that “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (227). Flutie, the eponymous heroine of Diane GLANCY’s 1998 novel, receives no narratives from either her Cherokee father or her white mother. Neither of her parents can escape the defining limitations of their experience; neither can imagine themselves or their environment more fully. Flutie, however, can. She is beset by stories. For Flutie, everything is alive, everything has a voice; everything tells a story. But, silenced by a traumatic accident in her youth, she cannot articulate the stories that she hears. Glancy’s novel charts Flutie’s struggle to overcome silence, to position herself and be positioned, by claiming those narratives of the past as her own. Flutie’s trauma occurs when, as a young girl, she severely cuts her face and tongue on the sharp edge of a tractor seat. The doctor wraps her in a sheet and has her physically restrained as he stitches her wounds. “The terror” Flutie experiences “unzipped her face. The pain was like the sun” (21). Trauma theorist Judith Herman notes that traumatic pain is “not fully experienced as it occurred” but persists as forgotten or unintegrated memories that “take on a life of their own” (34). Often, the traumatic event returns in a distorted form, perhaps as visions or physical sensations. As a result, trauma sufferers “perceive their bodies as having turned against them” (86). Straitjacketed and engulfed by a sheet as her face and tongue are stitched, a sheet she equates with “white waves of the ocean driving themselves into her

452 FLUTIE

face” (21), Flutie embodies her experience of fear and pain as a sea that rises around her when she tries to speak, choking the words in her throat “before she could say them” (19). She obsessively wraps rocks with string, a reenactment of her trauma and an emblem of her sense of debilitating self-enclosure. Not surprisingly, Flutie uses the story of Ovid’s Philomela to structure her experience. Like Philomela, Flutie has been violated and has suffered a silencing wound to the tongue. Significantly, Philomela transcends her silence, much as Flutie wants “to transcend” the “enormous quiet” (3) that threatens her. Indeed, a desire for transcendence probably accounts for her visions of a haloed Mohawk girl, Kateri Tekakwitha, the first North American Indian proposed for canonization by the Catholic Church. Her body ravaged by smallpox, her life threatened because she embraced Christianity, Tekakwitha nonetheless endures, ministering to Christian Indians at a mission near Montreal. Tekakwitha appears at those times Flutie experiences most acutely the need to transcend the “enormous quiet.” Actually, Flutie can speak to the members of her family and close friends. But faced with speaking to strangers or in front of groups, “fear flooded her throat” (37). All around her are stories she hears and wants to tell but cannot articulate. Flutie knows she has “a voice somewhere inside her. She could feel it moving” (38). Could she activate that voice, she could weave a landscape of stories that tether identity, heritage, and place; stories that would give her a sense of belonging, a way to bring into dialogic exchange her two heritages, in both of which she is a member by blood but in neither of which she feels a cultural belonging. Flutie’s problem, then, is to surmount the trauma-induced, choking fear that she feels as waves are “filling her mouth with salt water” (64) when she tries to speak. There are words “deep in her. She had something to say” (88). How, then, to say them? An answer occurs when Flutie, feeling impelled to help her imprisoned brother Franklin, to “give him hope” and “erase his frustration,” realizes that “Franklin’s story would consume her,” that it would wrap “her with string;” therefore, she “had to pull away.” Franklin made his “own angry world to live in” and was responsible for it (63). In effect, Flutie recognizes that indi-

viduals are not determined by circumstances, that choice is always possible. She must “pull away” or lose her capacity to be self-directing. She must, she begins to see, separate herself from her family, the only group to which she belongs and one of the few to whom she can speak; yet, paradoxically, a group whose “expanding universe” of sorrow and anger threaten to bind her in silence. (74) In a college algebra class, Flutie finally rises to “the power of her voice” (100). She continues speaking in her classes. She will not remain immured in silence. She has to talk. The land talked. The past talked. All that was to come talked. Already she could hear it. She would mimic the talking she heard. She would be a part (97). And only as Flutie becomes self-governing does she achieve what she has most desired: to belong, to be a part. Previously, reading and imagination caused her to envision the world’s strife: “She could feel the whole world fighting. She could watch, but she was not a part of it” (54). At the end of the novel, however, while participating in a sweat lodge ceremony, Flutie remembers those “people from far away on earth,” remembers that she has heard their voices before, and, suddenly, feels “connected to them all” (123–24). Linda Hogan explains that in “a sweat lodge ceremony, the entire world is brought inside the enclosure.” It is a place “to remember that all things are connected” and to heal the “broken connections between us and the rest” (142). Ultimately, Flutie realizes the universality of her struggle for expression, for the words that can raise us above our often anguished and inarticulate longing for meaning, for stories that fashion coherence from the fragments of experience. She decides to return home as a teacher and teach all the students who couldn’t talk. Especially if they’d been sealed up. Those who’d heard the voices of the town. The voices from deep in the earth. She’d place them in front of the class like candles that could not be blown out by the western Oklahoma wind (130). Candles have tongues of fire, a faint but resonant allusion to the descent of the Holy Spirit on Christ’s apostles, opening their words to the understanding of all who heard them. Her own tongue restored, Flutie can help others find theirs, despite the forces that threaten to seal them in silence.

FOOTE, SHELBY 453

SOURCES Glancy, Diane. Flutie. Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1998. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hogan, Linda. “All My Relations.” In Native American Literature: An Anthology, edited by Lawana Trout, 140–143. Chicago: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Group, 1999. Jerome DeNuccio

FOOTE, SHELBY (SHELBY DADE FOOTE, JR.) (1916–2005) Shelby Foote is known widely as the author of an acclaimed three-volume history: The Civil War: A Narrative (1958, 1963, 1974). His novels, Tournament (1949), Follow Me Down (1950), Love in a Dry Season (1951), Shiloh (1952), and September, September (1977), are all set in the Mississippi Delta and, with the exception of Shiloh, take place in Foote’s fictional town of Bristol in Jordan County. In this sense Bristol is similar to William FAULKNER’s mythical town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, or Eudora WELTY’s Morgana, Mississippi. Foote also uses Memphis as a locale in his fiction; he lived there since 1953. He writes often about loneliness and the failure of love. His pointedly fallible characters seem unable to respect their history and traditions—those vital, dynamic sources that imbue life with meaning and renewal. Foote, a native of Greenville, Mississippi, was born on November 17, 1916, to Lillian Rosenstock Foote and Shelby Dad Foote, a meat-packing industry executive who died suddenly when Foote was six. Foote attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for two years, and his close association with the future writer, Walker PERCY, and his adopted father, the poet William Alexander Percy, influenced his decision to be a writer. In 1939 his National Guard unit was mobilized, and although then-Captain Foote was court-martialed in 1944 (for insubordination while courting his first wife), he enlisted in the marine corps for the duration of the war. After his divorce in 1946 from Tess Lavery, he married Marguerite Dessommes (from 1948 to 1953), and his third wife, Gwyn Rainier,

in 1956. He published his first novel, Tournament, which stresses man’s existential nature, while working as a reporter in Greenville. The hero, Hugh Bart, separates himself from Solitaire, the land he and his father had farmed, and follows “the false promises of finance capitalism” (Phillips, 190). Other novels followed in quick succession. Follow Me Down again demonstrates the essential isolation of the individual and the inexorable, naturalistic grip of both environment and heredity against which the characters are ultimately powerless. Luther Dade Eustis truly believes that God approves his murder of a prostitute, but he is humanized for the reader through the character of his lawyer, Parker Nowell. Love In a Dry Season characterizes the present-day South as a modern wasteland; the characters, helplessly and emotionally bankrupt, remain passive and unable to act except from lust, small-mindedness, or weakness. In Shiloh, a notably successful novel, this malaise infects his Civil War characters, who are precursors of the failed moderns of Foote’s more contemporary novels. Shiloh’s success led to Foote’s 20-year project, his Civil War volumes. Three years after the last volume, he published September, September, which takes place in Memphis but features characters with close ties to those in the Mississippi Delta. Its protagonists are a black couple, Eben and Martha Kinship, who survive the kidnapping of their son during the Civil Rights era. Near the end of the 20th century he reached a wide television audience through his commentaries in Ken Burns’s widely acclaimed Civil War series. Shelby Foote died in Memphis on June 27, 2005.

NOVELS Follow Me Down. New York: Dial Press, 1950. Love in a Dry Season. New York: Dial Press, 1951. September, September. New York: Random House, 1977. Shiloh. New York: Dial Press, 1952. Tournament. New York: Dial Press, 1949.

SOURCES Phillips, Robert L. Shelby Foote. Jackson: Mississippi Library Commission, 1977. ———. “Shelby Foote.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 188–195. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

454 FORD, RICHARD

Shepherd, Allen. “Technique and Theme in Shelby Foote’s Shiloh,” Notes on Mississippi Writers 5 (Spring 1972): 3–10. Vauthier, Simone. “The Symmetrical Design: The Structural Patterns of Love in a Dry Season,” Mississippi Quarterly 24 (Fall 1971): 379–403. White, Helen, and Redding Sugg. Shelby Foote. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

FORD, RICHARD (1944– )

Since the publication of The Sportswriter (1986), readers and critics alike have held Richard Ford in high regard. As a “very personal, very introspective writer” (Jordan, 7), his reputation grew even larger after the publication of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1995), the first novel ever to receive both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. (Michael Cunningham’s The Hours received both honors in 1999). Sometimes labeled a minimalist in the tradition of Raymond Carver and Ann BEATTIE, he has also been compared to Tobias WOLFF and his “new” or “dirty” realism. Ford concentrates on working-class people in his native South, in Mexico and Montana, and particularly in New Jersey. His central character, Frank Bascombe, appears in both The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and has been compared to John UPDIKE’s Rabbit Angstrom in his role of commentator on contemporary Americans. It is in The Sportswriter that Frank Bascombe stops writing novels, becomes a sportswriter, and moves to a New Jersey suburb; his new profession allows him to remain the detached observer. Even though Frank Bascombe, like Rabbit Angstrom, invites debate about the goodness of his character, a more cogent analysis of Ford’s character surfaced in a New York Times article: Writers in “the New Jersey school,” of whom Ford is certainly one, “consistently link New Jersey symbols—the working class, the industrial skyline, the shore—with larger American dilemmas and myths in the way Southern writers have grappled with race and class” (Jordan, 7). One of those dilemmas seems to be commitment. Richard Ford was born on February 16, 1944, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Parker Carrol Ford, a traveling starch salesman, and Edna Aiken Ford, who took their son with them on their travels until Ford’s father died of a heart attack in 1956. After graduating from Michigan State University in 1966, Ford married Kristina Hensley, a research professor, in 1968, and earned a

master of fine arts degree from the University of California at Irvine in 1970. He and his wife moved back to Michigan, where he published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976. Set mainly on an island between Arkansas and Mississippi, the novel has elements of the southern gothic as Sam Newell, a law student, returns to Mississippi to rediscover those missing parts of his past. His mirror image, Robard Hewes, has left his family in California. When he returns home to Arkansas his life intersects with Sam Newell’s; Hewes meets the dark violent death to which he seems doomed. The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), set in Mexico, features Quinn, a Vietnam War veteran who attempts to free Sonny, the brother of his former girlfriend, Rae, from a Mexican jail where he has been languishing since his arrest for drug running. Although Quinn is unsuccessful, he learns some valuable lessons about the significance of commitment to others. After publishing Rock Springs (1987), a collection of short fiction, Ford wrote Wildlife (1990), a novel based on the events described in “Great Falls,” one of the Rock Springs stories. When Joe, the 16-year-old boy, witnesses the breakup of his family, he realizes that the inescapable centrality of life is not security but random and constant change. Independence Day reintroduces Frank Bascombe, now a 44-year-old real estate salesman divorced from his wife Ann. On July 4, Bascombe embarks with his girlfriend, Sally, and Paul, his troubled 15-year-old son, on a journey to the Basketball and Baseball Halls of Fame. He is attempting to sort out his confused feelings for these two significant people in his life. Most recently, Ford has turned to the novella form with Women with Men: Three Stories (1997). Like some of the writers he most admires—William FAULKNER, F. Scott FITZGERALD, Ernest HEMINGWAY, Walker PERCY—Ford aims to produce a literature that reflects the current emotional temperature of the United States.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Independence Day. New York: Knopf, 1995. A Piece of My Heart. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. The Sportswriter. New York: Vintage, 1986. The Ultimate Good Luck. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Wildlife. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. Women With Men: Three Stories. New York: Knopf, 1997.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS 455

SOURCES Folks, Jeffrey J. “Richard Ford: Postmodern Cowboys.” In Southern Writers At Century’s End, edited by Jeffrey Folks and James A. Perkins, 212–225. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Ford, Richard. “A Conversation with Richard Ford,” interview by Huey Guagliardo. Southern Review 34 (Summer 1998): 609–620. ———. “An Interview with Richard Ford,” by Kay Bonetti. Missouri Review 10 (1987): 71–96. ———. “Interview with Richard Ford,” by Matthew Gilbert. Writer 109 (December 1, 1996): 9–12. Hobson, Fred. “Richard Ford and Josephine Humphreys: Walker Percy in New Jersey and Charleston.” In The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World, 41–58. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Jordan, Gregory. “New Jersey Writers,” New York Times, 3 August 2003, New Jersey section, p. 7. Lyons, Bonnie. “Richard Ford: The Art of Fiction CXLVII,” Paris Review 140 (Fall 1996): 42–77. Morris, Gregory L. “Richard Ford.” In Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, 102–119. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Shelton, Frank W. “Richard Ford.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 147–155. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Weber, Bruce. “Richard Ford’s Uncommon Characters,” New York Times Magazine, 10 April 1988, pp. 50–51, 59, 63–65.

OTHER Ford, Richard. Interview with Robert Birnbaum, November 2000. Available online. URL: http://www.identitytheory. com/people/birnbaum37.html. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1940) For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest HEMINGWAY’s Spanish civil war novel, takes place in the mountains of Spain over the course of three days. Hemingway’s protagonist, Robert Jordan, a young American college professor fighting on the side of the republic, finds himself enmeshed in both war strategy (blowing the bridge at the right time and under the right conditions) as well the inner workings of a group of guerrilla fighters. As Rena Sanderson points out, the importance of Jordan’s mission magnifies his individual role in the war, making apt the epigraph (and title)

of the novel (Sanderson, 1) in which John Donne reminds, “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine . . . any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Nor could Hemingway be an island. His connection with Spain and Spanish politics was personal—he served as a correspondent there intermittently from 1937 to 1939. For Whom the Bell Tolls, his self-proclaimed “best goddamn book” (quoted in Sanderson, 4), demonstrates his investment in the outcome of the Spanish civil war. Hemingway commented, “For a long time both me and my conscience have known I had to go to Spain” (quoted in Donaldson, 235). Hemingway followed his conscience and went to Spain, taking his pen with him; his time in Spain proved prolific, he returned from overseas with numerous syndicated news dispatches, magazine pieces, a film narration, and a play, in addition to For Whom the Bell Tolls (Donaldson, 235). Like his author, Jordan’s connection to the war also becomes personal, surpassing the liberal, antifascist ideology that initially brought him to Spain. Jordan falls in love with Maria, a young Spanish woman who experienced the cruelties of the war firsthand and was adopted by the Spanish fighters Jordan enlists to help him blow the bridge. Her cropped hair serves as a constant reminder of her personal stake in the war—the humiliation and rape she suffered at the hands of the Fascists who killed her mother and her father, the Republican leader of a small town. Maria looks to the Inglés, the name the fighters call the outsider who joins their band, to erase her past and help her begin a new life. Jordan’s love for Maria complicates his sense of obligation to the Spanish republic. While manning the machine gun and awaiting a Fascist attack, Jordan begins to doubt the depth of his commitment to his mission: “You’re not a real Marxist and you know it. You believe in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. You believe in Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Don’t ever kid yourself with too much dialectics. They are for some but not for you” (305). Jordan’s sense of obligation extends beyond Maria to include the fighters’ leader, Pablo; his wife, Pilar; and the men in their charge. Early in the novel, Jordan

456 FOSTER, HANNAH WEBSTER

debates the level of responsibility he should feel for leading these fighters to probable death. Once more, Jordan debates the issues in his mind, trying to convince himself he lacks culpability: “You have no responsibility for them except in action. The orders do not come from you. They come from Golz. And who is Golz? A good general . . . But should a man carry out impossible orders knowing what they lead to?” (162). The difficulty of reconciling the personal and ideological runs through Hemingway’s novel, dominating Jordan’s many internal dialogues as well as the conflicts surrounding the other characters, especially Pablo. Pablo suffers as Jordan does, torn between abandoning the men who try to accomplish the virtually impossible and fighting for the republic in which he so believes. In his essay “Hemingway’s Spanish Sensibility” in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Allen Josephs remarks that “Robert Jordan is Hemingway’s most complex character and only genuine hero, a man who sacrifices himself for a cause and for the love of a woman” (239). In the mountains, Jordan meets another hero in the wife of Pablo, Pilar. Writing about Hemingway’s complex relationship to gender, Rena Sanderson discusses Pilar in “Hemingway and Gender History”: “Jordan respects Pilar for her solidity and endurance—he compares her to a mountain . . .—but he also fears her as a rival. Her experience makes her a superb teacher, mentor, and leader to the guerrilla band. She epitomizes the mannish woman whose superiority threatens the man’s performance” (Donaldson, 187). Sanderson’s observation connects Jordan with the protagonists from Hemingway’s other fiction, men who are often preoccupied with potency and masculinity. But Jordan accepts that it is Pilar who leads the guerrillas and he gains respect for her as she recounts to him the beginning of the movement in a gruesome tale detailing the slaughter of the town’s Fascists. Pilar’s tale not only serves to explain her and Pablo’s experiences at the start of the war, but also gives the reader the only real taste of the brutality of the war. The tale serves to further complicate Jordan’s involvement in the war, as both the Republicans and the Fascists prove themselves capable of unspeakable brutality. Ultimately, Jordan remains committed to the cause and to the people who fight with him, and they blow

the bridge successfully. Although many are killed in the process, the group remains driven by their liberal ideology, reaffirming the fighter Anselmo’s observation that “We must teach them [the Fascists]. We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity” (328). Jordan proves what he confessed to Maria before the blowing of the bridge: “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. And many have died” (348). In sacrificing himself—for Maria, for Pablo, Pilar, and the other survivors of the raid on the bridge, for the cause— Jordan negotiates his commitment to the personal with his liberal ideology.

SOURCES Donaldson, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Sanderson, Rena, ed. Blowing the Bridge: Essays on Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Strychacz, Thomas. Hemingway’s Theaters of Masculinity. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Zivah Perel

FOSTER, HANNAH WEBSTER (1758– 1840) Under the pseudonym “A Lady of Massachusetts,” Hannah Webster Foster wrote a blockbuster entitled The COQUETTE (1797), a tale of seduction and betrayal that, along with Susannah ROWSON’s CHARLOTTE TEMPLE (1794) and William Hill Brown’s The POWER OF SYMPATHY (1789), became one of the three most popular works of the late 18th century. Although the novel is written in the epistolary style made popular by British novelist Samuel Richardson, Foster created a complex portrait of Elizabeth Wharton, the hero of the novel. Hannah Webster Foster was born on September 10, 1758, in Salisbury, Massachusetts, to Grant Webster, a Boston merchant, and Hannah Wainwright Webster. She was educated at a school that provided

THE FOUNTAINHEAD 457

the setting for her second novel, The Boarding School (1798), became a journalist in Boston, and married Reverend John Foster in 1785. They moved to Brighton, Massachusetts, where she wrote The Coquette, in which Elizabeth (Eliza) Wharton, while being courted by the Reverend J. Boyer, is seduced by the dashing Peter Sanford. The story was based on the actual seduction of John Foster’s cousin, Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut; according to contemporary accounts, the seducer was either Pierpont Edwards, son of the minister and writer Jonathan Edwards, or politician Aaron Burr. Foster’s novel is admired by contemporary critics because Eliza, a pawn between the egos of two vain men, rebels against the concept of marriage and—though doomed by the era in which she lives—emerges as a vibrant, resourceful representative of woman’s potential in the new republic. Contemporary scholars view The Boarding School, with its headmistress, Mrs. Williams, as a novel that advocates the educational and social rights of women. Although it ostensibly tutors women in the domestic and social arts, it mirrors Mary Wollstonecraft’s views in “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” Hannah Webster Foster died on April 17, 1840, in Montreal, Canada. For many years her grave was the site of pilgrimages by young lovers moved by the fate of Eliza Wharton of The Coquette.

NOVELS The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to her Pupils: Consisting of Information, Instruction, and Advice, Calculated to improve the Manners, and form the Character of Young Ladies. To which is added, A Collection of Letters, written by the Pupils, to their Instructor, their Friends, and each other. Boston: Printed by I. Thomas & E. T. Andrews, 1798. The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact. Boston: Printed by Samuel Etheridge for E. Larkin, 1797.

SOURCES Cassuto, Leonard. “The Seduction of American Religious Discourse in Foster’s The Coquette.” In Reform and Counterreform: Dialectics of the Word in Western Christianity Since Luther, edited by John C. Hawley, 103–118. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Harris, Sharon M. “Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette: Critiquing Franklin’s America.” In Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797–1901, edited by Sharon M. Harris, 1–22. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Mulford, Carla. Introduction to The Coquette; bound with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Pettengill, Claire C. “Hannah Webster Foster, 1758–1840,” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 12, no. 2 (1995): 133–141. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America.” In Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, edited by Elaine Scarry, 160–184. Baltimore, Md. & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Tassoni, John-Paul. “ ‘I Can Step Out of Myself a Little’: Feminine Virtue and Female Friendship in Hannah Foster’s The Coquette.” In Communication and Women’s Friendships: Parallels and Intersections in Literature and Life, edited by Janet Doubler-Ward and JoAnna StephensMink, 97–111. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993. Verhoeven, W. M. “ ‘Persuasive Rhetorick’: Representation and Resistance in Early American Epistolary Fiction.” In Making America / Making American Literature: Franklin to Cooper, edited by A. Robert Lee and W. M. Verhoeven, 123–164. Amsterdam and Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1996. Wenska, Walter P., Jr. “The Coquette and the American Dream of Freedom,” Early American Literature, 12 (1978): 243–255.

THE FOUNTAINHEAD AYN RAND (1943) Ayn Rand wrote, “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his own absolute” (709). Ayn RAND, born Alisa Rosenbaum, is known as both a novelist and a philosopher. Through two of her novels, The Fountainhead and ATLAS SHRUGGED, she developed and fine-tuned a set of philosophical beliefs she termed “Objectivism.” While its validity is still argued by scholars and philosophers alike, objectivism has become an accepted school of thought largely due to the, albeit limited, success of

458 THE FOUNTAINHEAD

her novels. Published in 1943, The Fountainhead illustrates one man’s individual battle against the conformist society in which he lives. In Rand’s words, “The book is not about architecture, it’s about [Howard] Roark against the world and about the workings of that thing in the world which opposes him” (Rand, Journals, 207–208). The Fountainhead is divided into four sections, titled for each of the four main male characters; Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, Gail Wynand, and Howard Roark. Rand crafts the novel in such a way that full back story is given for each man without sacrificing the present relationship that they share with each other. The novel begins with Roark and Keating scheduled to graduate from the class of 1922 architecture program at the Stanton Institute of Technology. In spite of his singular talent, Roark is expelled from Stanton on the morning of graduation and does not receive his degree. When both men enter the workforce months later, Keating is granted immediate apprenticeship with one of the top architecture firms in the nation, Francon and Heyer. Roark, without a diploma, has difficulty finding a job but is eventually taken on by Henry Cameron, a has-been in the architecture world. As part 1 concludes, readers have been exposed to Roark’s unwavering dedication to his own beliefs and ideals. In spite of nearly starving, Roark refuses to design buildings in correspondence with the clients’ wishes. Keating, on the other hand, has become the best-known young architect in America. He has achieved overnight success through manipulation and lies. The novel continues stressing the ruin of Roark and the success of Keating as each man struggles to find his place within the world of architecture. Ellsworth Toohey throws obstacles at Roark whenever he is given the chance. Gail Wynand, presented through back story as a young man similar to Roark, tries to help but is not morally strong enough to oppose the social norms. It seems inevitable that Roark will eventually give in to the social pressures as he would surely tire of being nameless and hungry. However, Roark is the hero of the novel. Keating, Toohey, and Wynand fail, Roark succeeds. Structurally, The Fountainhead is a concentrated novel despite its daunting length. Although the story spans several decades, Rand’s attention to detail allows

readers to feel as though they are looking at the characters through a microscope. The four men are supported by a number of secondary but equally strong characters, not the least of which is Dominique Francon, the love interest of all four men to varying degrees throughout the novel. The strength of The Fountainhead, however, lies in its unwavering attention to the overall theme Rand maintains is the basis for writing the novel in the first place: “The theme of this novel is individualism versus collectivism, not in politics, but within a man’s soul” (Rand, Journals, 223). In order to establish this theme, Rand must first challenge accepted connotations of words in the American lexicon: selfishness versus selflessness. Typically one who is considered “selfish” is concerned only with his own needs, advancement, and so on, at the cost of others’. The opposite, one considered “selfless,” is often looked upon positively, in some cases even as altruistic. Rand takes the literal definitions of these words, of which the root is “self” and explains that one who is “selfish” will “choose [these] higher values for himself and for himself alone, i.e., for his own sake and satisfaction, not because of a duty to God, fellow-men, the State or any other fool abstraction outside of himself” (Rand, Journal, 78). According to Rand, one who is “selfless” is, rather than giving of oneself as the connotation suggests, in fact without self, and “a selfless man cannot be ethical” (Rand, Journal, 78). In The Fountainhead, Howard Roark represents the selfish man, Peter Keating and Ellsworth Toohey represent the selfless men. Roark works only for himself, but he does not work against others. Others do not understand his devotion to himself; the selfless individual views Roark as a threat. To illustrate this point as clearly as possible, Rand places the four men as different shades of a moral spectrum. Howard Roark represents the white, true good, selfish, intrinsically motivated man. Gail Wynand follows Roark, light gray, because he truly is good at heart, but he weakened in his adult life and lost his sense of self. Peter Keating is a dark gray. He knows that what he is doing is wrong, yet he sees no other way to succeed save to manipulate and cajole his way to the top. Keating’s lack of “self” prevents him from doing what he knows is essentially right and good. Ellsworth Toohey lies in the black, the opposite

FOX, PAULA 459

of Howard Roark. Toohey knowingly and willfully does the wrong thing because he enjoys seeing people suffer. He is truly the illustration of a self-less man. “He understands fully the basic antithesis, the two principles fighting within human consciousness—the individual and the collective, the one and the many, the ‘I’ and the ‘They’ ” (Rand, Journal, 228). Toohey is the essence of evil as it appears in corporate society. In order to solidify the abstract concepts of “individualism” versus “collectivism,” Rand labeled each type: individualists as “first-handers” and collectivists as “second-handers.” From the conception of the novel, Rand knew her overall compelling theme would be that of the “I” versus the “they” and so titled the working draft of the novel “Second-Hand Lives” (Rand, Journal, 77). She does a compelling job of pointing out first-handers and second-handers in the social, political, and ethical planes. Roark himself describes the difference between the two as he tries to explain the concept to Gail Wynand, the only man he feels is capable of understanding the concept. “They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull—Second-handers have no sense of reality” (606). What Roark leaves unsaid is that he is, in fact, the opposite of this description, a first-hander. He goes about the business of life concerned only with his own actions, his own means to his own end, without any unnecessary involvement from others. Readers are left with the knowledge that the two most evil characters in the book, Keating and Toohey, bear the greatest similarity to most of American society, whereas Roark, who is seen throughout the novel as obstinate and stubborn, is actually the hero and who, Rand suggests, we should all aspire to be. Ayn Rand, both a philosopher and a novelist, combined her interests and talents into The Fountainhead, a well-crafted, tightly plotted novel that not only tells a compelling story, but also judges the roles of individuality and collectivity in society. While The Fountainhead takes place during the 1920s and 1930s, readers today will find startling comparisons to modern political and economic figures. Rand knew that the trend of the self-

ish versus the selfless would continue far beyond her own time, and it will continue beyond ours as well.

SOURCES Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Signet, 1943. Rand, Ayn. The Journals of Ayn Rand. Edited by David Harriman. New York: Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1997. Kelly Flanagan

FOX, PAULA (1923– ) Although best known for her prize-winning children’s books, Paula Fox has written six adult novels. Desperate Characters (1970), depicting a middle-aged couple on the brink of divorce, and The Slave Dancer (1973), a controversial story of a New Orleans boy captured and imprisoned on an Africa-bound slave ship, are particularly celebrated. Paula Fox was born on April 22, 1923, in New York City to Paul Harvey and Elsie de Sola. Because her parents traveled a great deal, Fox lived with friends and relatives in New York state and Cuba. She married Richard Sigerson in 1948, divorced in 1954, and married Martin Greenberg in 1962. Since then she has worked as a full-time writer. In her first adult novel, Desperate Characters, Sophie and Otto Bentwood live in a Brooklyn slum and repress their propensity for violence. A nightmare exists just below the surface of the novel. The Western Coast (1972), called by Carolyn Riley “a bildungsroman of the best sort,” brought Fox comparisons to Joan DIDION and Grace Paley (Riley, 296). It depicts the odyssey of Annie Gianfala, who drifts rather than progresses, until she decides that the United States lacks meaning for her and leaves for Europe in hopes of a future that will provide self-definition. To reviewer Edith Milton, The Widow’s Children (1976) is “the most elegant exploration I have read of the chaos of modern life, and of the inertia and deprivations on which that chaos rests” (Milton, 27). The main characters are Laura Maldonada, her daughter Clara, her son Carlos, Laura’s second husband, Desmond Clapper, and Peter Rice, her old publishing house friend. A Servant’s Tale (1984), like The Western Coast, presents an obscurely drawn but powerless protagonist named Luisa, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy Caribbean plantation owner and a servant. Their lives are interrupted by a revolution and they

460 FRANCHISER, THE

emigrate to New York. Luisa mystifies them by marrying, having a son, and deciding to work as a servant or maid. Near the end of the novel, Luisa returns to the island of Malagita to receive both her financial and psychological inheritances. Paula Fox lives in New York City. Desperate Characters was adapted as a motion picture by Paramount in 1970.

NOVELS Desperate Characters. New York: Harcourt, 1970; published with an afterword by Irving Howe. Boston: Nonpareil, 1980. The God of Nightmares. San Franciso, Calif.: North Point Press, 1990. Poor George. New York: Harcourt, 1967; published with introduction by Jonathan Lethem. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. The Slave Dancer. Scarsdale, N.Y.: Bradbury, 1973. A Servant’s Tale. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1984. Republished with an introduction by Melanie Rehak, New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. The Western Coast. New York: Harcourt, 1972; published with introduction by Frederick Busch. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. The Widow’s Children. New York: Dutton, 1976.

SOURCES Bassoff, Bruce. “Royalty in a Rainy Country: Two Novels of Paula Fox,” Critique 20, no. 2 (1978): 33–48. Birmelin, Blair T. “Novel Conditions,” Nation, 3 November 1984, pp. 459–460. Fox, Paula. “About Language,” Ohio Review (1994): 7–19. Giddings, Paula. Review of A Servant’s Tale. New York Times Book Review, 18 November 1984, p. 9. Milton, Edith. Review of The Widow’s Children. New Republic 15 January 1977, pp. 27–28. Prescott, Peter S. “Taken in Hand.” Newsweek, 25 September 1972, pp. 25–26. ———. “Distress Signals.” Newsweek, 27 September 1976, pp. 100, 102. Riley, Carolyn. Review of The Western Coast. Best Sellers 32, no. 13 (October 1, 1972): 296–297.

FRANCHISER, THE STANLEY ELKIN (1976) In Stanley ELKIN’s comic extravaganza, Ben (son of, in Hebrew) Flesh is bequeathed the ability to borrow money at the prime rate of interest, uses this capacity

to invest in multiple franchises, and becomes afflicted with the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (as Elkin did himself in 1970). But the novel’s real genius resides in the existential and metaphysical changes rung on the conceit of prime interest and its dialectical meditation on the generic and the idiosyncratic, on marvelous singularity and standardized (and predictable) uniformity. Indeed, the major theme of Elkin’s novel is recuperation, in the many senses of the term. For Flesh to recuperate he must recover, through existential acts of engaged, imaginative attention to detail, the miracle of the given, the everyday, the overlooked, the taken for granted, the contingent, the despised. The franchiser’s reliable provision of satisfactions and comforts is recast as devotional activity in the light of the vulnerable, diseased flesh, while clumsy contingency is revealed as gracefulness and grace, as in this exemplary description of a ball Flesh throws at his Fred Astaire dance studio: He was suddenly caught up in a complex and true and magnificent idea. He would have to tell them, but could not bear to break into the music or the gorgeous motions of the dancers. . . . Flesh was touched by the shopping bag [one of the dancers] still carried. In her dreamy mood she held the bag by only one beautiful handle and a bottle of ketchup dropped from it, making a lovely splash on the floor. Their shoes looked so vulnerable as the dancers guided each other through the sticky stuff that Ben wanted to cry. . . . They smeared the ballroom. . . . It was beautiful. . . . Everything was rhythm. . . . the splendid red evidence of the dance. . . . (60–61)

As the dance of life continues (“Dark sauces thick as blood stained the dance floor,” 66), Flesh’s reverie materializes, gives comic flesh to, an almost Heideggerian benediction on, the lived-spaces of bodily being: the ebb and flow of presence. . . . as each couple moved in to take the place other couples had abandoned. . . . lovely close-order drill of ordinary life. . . . So gentle were men. He . . .

FRANCHISER, THE 461

explained how it was possible to re-create from the ordinary shmutz of a broken ketchup bottle . . . that movement . . . but . . . it was impossible to teach what all already knew. Everyone could dance. Every motion snuggled to every rhythm, to any rhythm. . . . He . . . spoke to them from his heart. Please, this is very important. What’s sacred is important. You don’t know this, you’ll not be able to follow it all. Try not to blame yourselves. There’s no blame here. . . . (Don’t sidetrack me, God; let me stick to the point, oh, Lord.) . . . I am going to link the world for you. I am going to have it make sense. . . . “How, if I’m to link the world, can I get sidetracked? Not possible. It’s all relevant. . . . We dance to the rate of prime interest itself. We compound it. Nothing is lost. . . . Ah, God, we thank Thee for Thy do-si-dos, our hithers and yons, the wondrous cake walk and hopfrog of reality. . . . (62) Moving among his fellows like some prime mover, Flesh links them like Eros to the beat of “Fascinating Rhythm,” compounding their prime interest with prophetic exhortation: “ ‘I come from Fred Astaire, everybody dance!’ . . . [He] started them dancing like a spinner of plates on sticks in nightclubs” (65). But Flesh’s exuberance stalls in anxiety and self-doubt: This dancing. I think it may be evil. As comedy is evil. I don’t think salvation has either a sense of humor or a sense of rhythm. Life is the conversion of the individual. God’s piecework. A custom-tailor God, every attention paid to details. . . . I think I may be doing evil with my franchises. . . . like some screwy version of Manifest Destiny. (65)

The expansive spread of ubiquitous franchises across the geographical body of America is stalled (as it was in the mid-1970s) by an energy crisis, whose surges and blackouts are reflected in the unpredictable electric shocks and blackouts that M.S. begins to deliver to the body of the franchiser. Driving across America, and propelled along the

highways and by-ways of his hyper-sensitized neural system in the grips of its own energy crisis, Flesh sings the body electric. His semiotic readings of everything he sees, from the design of cereal boxes to the design of mall architecture, ultimately goes beyond an anthropology of the everyday, beyond the diagnosis of symptoms of economic and cultural pathology, to become a Whitmaniacal project that would revive and vivify through the activity of assenting and rejoicing: And ah, he thought, euphorically, ecstatically, this privileged man who could have been a vegetable or mineral instead of an animal, and a lower animal instead of a higher, who could have been a pencil or a dot on a die, who could have been a stitch in a glove or change in someone’s pocket, or a lost dollar nobody found, who could have been stillborn or less sentient than sand, or the chemical flash of somebody else’s fear, ahh. Ahh! (342)

Flesh experiences the “surge of vital feeling” that for the philosopher Susanne Langer defines the comic mode (Langer, 340). This surge goes beyond any meaningful distinction between pain and joy, crying and laughing. The “ah!” of semiological recognition becomes not just the “ah!” of excruciating pain, but also the “ah!” of ecstasy—an amplification of existential awareness that takes him beyond gratitude to wonder at contingency within the prodigious cosmos. By randomly enumerating some of the multiform modalities of beings, Flesh’s catalog of possibilities ultimately serves, as all such catalogs do, to celebrate Being as such, their shared common denominator. Flesh’s remarkable gift for appreciating that eternity is in love with the products of time gives him his vocation: to transform the disintegrating body of the America psychic landscape into a continuum by means of identical units of convenience and safe haven: “goodness living in the pores of the System, and Convenience, thank you, God, the measure of mankind. Nobody, nobody, nobody ever had it so good. Take heed. A franchiser tells you” (Elkin, 64).

462 FRANZEN, JONATHAN

He becomes a seer and prophet of profit-sharing, making his own “eyewitness news” the gospel good news of renewed membership within the corporate body, which is constantly evidenced by the fact that “the weather report touches us all” (64). For Flesh, we derive immunity from community; we enfranchise each other, unburdening and exempting each other from unpleasant contingencies and unnecessary impingements because of an inherent solicitude for well-being growing out of fellow-feeling. Each franchised convenience bespeaks a We-ness, its familiarity, commonality, ubiquity effecting and reflecting a communality—the franchise-feel, the feeling of being at home within continuum, of belonging, of remaining grounded, not despite, but by virtue of, the flow of one’s restless movement. Flesh and the reader enter an expansively opened clearing in an abiding sense of being at home in the cosmos. The electrochemical flashes that are the vivifying signs of Flesh’s existence are redoubled in the signs of his vocation as franchiser, revealing something “under the chemicals” of his “symptomatic” “happiness” and “disease.” As night falls, the “neon logos” of America’s corporate bodies flicker and surge, signaling their redemptive affirmation and invitation: Why he belonged everywhere, anywhere! . . . Nope, he couldn’t complain . . . [he would] watch out for his signs as they came on . . . all the . . . electric extravaganzas that stood out sharp against the sky and proved that every night Broadway opens everywhere (342).

SOURCES Bailey, Peter J. Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Bargen, Doris G. The Fiction of Stanley Elkin. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang, 1979. Dougherty, David C. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Elkin, Stanley. The Franchiser. 1976. Reprint, with foreword by William Gass. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1980. Langer, Susanne K. “The Great Dramatic Forms: The Comic Rhythm.” In Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1953. David Brottman

FRANZEN, JONATHAN (1959– ) Jonathan Franzen’s third novel, The CORRECTIONS, clearly one of the best-known novels of the early 21st century, won the National Book Award, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, but it was his disdainful attitude about the book’s selection for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and his subsequent disinterest in popular TV shows that brought him worldwide attention, and, in fact, started a national debate about reading, book clubs, and popular culture. Although The Corrections has been praised for its realistic character depiction of dysfunctional family members, Franzen’s description of himself as a “Midwestern Protestant with a Puritan streak” (quoted in Franzen, Bearn interview) tells the reader volumes about his fiction and his point of view. Jonathan Franzen was born on August 17, 1959, in Western Springs, Illinois, to Earl T. Franzen, a civil engineer, and Irene Franzen. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1981. He was married to Valerie Cornell, a writer and Swarthmore graduate, in 1982; the marriage lasted five years. His first novel, The Twenty-seventh City (1988), set in St. Louis (America’s 27th largest city), depicts an Indian woman who becomes chief of police. The Twenty-seventh City was “drenched in irony,” said Franzen, but he told interviewer Michael Coffey that he wanted his second, Strong Motion (1992), to be less fictional and more concerned with the sorts of people he knows personally. Franzen found himself “going back and writing the coming-of-age story I hadn’t written in the first book” (Franzen, Coffey interview). The title Strong Motion refers to a series of earthquakes that shake the city of Boston and kill the grandmother of the protagonist, Louis Holland. The earthquakes set in motion a quarrel over the inheritance, Louis’s romance with Renée Seitchek, a Harvard seismologist, and various social issues, including environmentalism and abortion. The Corrections (2001), set in the 1990s in the town of St. Jude in an unidentified midwestern state, depicts the Lambert family of five. Because their father, Alfred Lambert, is afflicted with Parkinson’s disease-induced dementia and their mother, Enid, wants one last family reunion at Christmas time, the three adult children—Gary, a banker; Chip, a writer-

FRAZIER, CHARLES 463

professor fired because of a sexual harassment charge; and Denise, a professional chef fired for her dual affair with her boss and her boss’s wife—return home from New York and Philadelphia. All family members are adept at identifying those character traits that need “corrections” in other family members, if not in themselves. The Corrections has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. In an interview with Emily Bearn, Franzen recognizes that, in Bearn’s words, The Corrections “marked some sort of watershed,” and, he says, with less need to prove his “erudition” he feels he can write about the more “domestic and personal” issues that really interest him. “That’s a significant change. I think I will always write the same book over and over,” eliciting a “tension between a meaningful domestic experience and some weird contemporary public reality” (quoted in Franzen, Bearn interview).

NOVELS The Corrections. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2001. Strong Motion. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992. The Twenty-seventh City. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1988.

SOURCES Blincoe, Nicholas. “High Art Lite: Nicholas Blincoe Deconstructs the Most Hyped Novel of the Year,” New Statesman 130, no. 4567 (December 10, 2001): 52–53. Craven, Peter. “Perils of the Popular,” Meanjin 62, no. 1 (March 2003): 133–144. Miller, Nolan. Review of The Corrections. The Antioch Review 60, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 709. Strecker, Trey. Review of The Corrections. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 22, no.1 (Spring 2002): 122–123.

OTHER Franzen, Jonathan. “Jonathan Franzen: A Distinct Turn to More Personal Issues Marks His Second Novel.” Interview by Michael Coffey. Publishers Weekly Interviews, Publishers Weekly (December 6, 1991). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:11660815. Accessed September 4, 2005. ———. “The Reluctant Genius Interview,” by Emily Bearn. Sunday Telegraph (November 3, 2002). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:80877729. Accessed September 4, 2005.

“The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen,” Oprah’s Book Club. Available online. URL: http://www.oprah.com/. Accessed September 4, 2005. French, Kate. “All in the Family: Franzen Almost Lives Up to His Own Standards,” Yale Review of Books 6, no. 3 (Fall 2001). Available online. URL: http://www. yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/fall01/review06.shtml. htm. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FRAZIER, CHARLES (1950– )

Charles Frazier won the National Book Award, the Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Cold Mountain, in 1997, a book that topped the New York Times best-seller list for several months. The novel received critical acclaim as well as popularity with readers for a number of reasons, not only Frazier’s eloquent story-telling abilities, but also his original approach to the Civil War, that perennially popular topic. Instead of focusing on the war or its heroes, Frazier transforms the war into the backdrop of the novel and focuses on a Confederate deserter, on the one hand, and two women managing a North Carolina mountaintop farm, on the other. The book has been praised for its poetic and mythic qualities along with its realistic use of 19th-century implements and speech patterns, and has earned Frazier comparisons with writers from Ernest HEMINGWAY to Cormac McCARTHY. Charles Frazier, who remains a very private person, was born in 1950 in Asheville, North Carolina, the son of a high school principal. He was educated at the University of North Carolina, where he earned a doctoral degree, and met and married his wife, Katherine, an accounting professor, in 1976. After a career of university-level teaching, Frazier left academe in 1990 to become a freelance writer. Cold Mountain features Inman, the wounded Confederate foot soldier, whose journey home to the North Carolina mountains constitutes an odyssey that includes what scholar Ed Piacentino calls “cross racial bonding”: Inman is helped by his Cherokee friend Swimmer and by a slave who saves his life, and inspired to reach home and Ada by the story of the white privileged Odell who defies his father in his ardent love for the slave Lucinda. It is also a novel that crosses class boundaries as the Charlestonbred Ada runs her Cold Mountain farm with the help

464 FREDERIC, HAROLD

of her friend Ruby, and presents the tale of the relationship between two strong, accomplished, and morally sensitive women. The film Cold Mountain, based on Frazier’s novel, was released by Miramax Films in December 2003, and included an Oscar-winning performance by Nicole Kidman as Ada. Charles Frazier lives with his wife on a farm near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he raises horses and is reportedly writing another novel set in North Carolina.

NOVELS Cold Mountain. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

SOURCES Berona, David A. Review of Cold Mountain, Library Journal, (May 15, 1997): 100. Carroll, Mary. Review of Cold Mountain, Booklist (June 1/15, 1997): 1656. Polk, James. “American Odyssey,” The New York Times Book Review, 13 July 1997, p. 14.

OTHER Gifford, Terry. “Terrain, character and text: is Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier a post-pastoral novel?” Mississippi Quarterly. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:91040738. Accessed September 4, 2005. Piacentino, Ed. “Searching for home: cross-racial bonding in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.” Mississippi Quarterly. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:91040739. Accessed September 4, 2005. Scheer, Robert. “Film Review: Civil War epic ‘Cold Mountain’ lacks emotion.” University Wire. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:88490226. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FREDERIC, HAROLD (1856–1898)

Harold Frederic was “rediscovered” in the 1950s, after having disappeared from the American literature canon following his death in England in 1898. Today he is seen as a significant contributor of realistic American fiction at the turn of the century, and as one who mapped out a fictitious literary niche for the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York where he was reared. Significant today, too, are his frank treatment of sexuality and his

portraits of strong women. Although a number of his novels are set in Europe and England, his four Mohawk Valley novels including The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and several stories are set in Octavius, his fictitious name for Utica, a city beset with poverty and social upheaval as it is transforming from a rural village to an industrialized town. Indeed, as scholars have noted, Frederic’s work features rebellious individuals who must face hostility and condemnation in their small communities. Harold Frederic (he dropped the “k” from his surname about 1878) was born on August 19, 1856, in Utica in New York’s Mohawk Valley, to Henry DeMott Frederick, of a Dutch immigrant family who had settled near Albany, New York, in 1633, and Frances Ramsdell Frederick. His mother became a seamstress after she was widowed when Frederic was 18 months old. After completing his education in the local public schools, he married his neighbor, Grace Williams, in 1877. In 1884 the family sailed for England, where Frederic became the London correspondent for the New York Times. His first novel, somewhat autobiographical, was serialized in Scribner’s Magazine and published as Seth’s Brother’s Wife; A Study of Life in the Greater New York in 1887. Seth Fairchild, like Frederic, wants to leave journalism and the narrow confines of the Mohawk Valley; in the meantime, he becomes his brother’s rival in both politics and love. In the Valley, also serialized in Scribner’s Magazine, is set during the American Revolution and presents the various factions in upstate New York before the Battle of Oriskany in August 1777. In The Lawton Girl (1890), Jessica Lawton is seduced and shamed by Horace Boyce, who attempts to swindle a mother and her daughters out of the ironworks they have inherited. But the centerpiece of these regional novels is The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), published to universal acclaim and topping the best-seller lists from Boston to Los Angeles (O’Donnell and Franchere, 109). The compelling tale features a young married minister, Theron Ware, both naive and corrupt, who moves from a New York state ministry to a Seattle real estate firm. He enters politics, and his actions mirror the flaws in both the American character and the human soul. Frederic’s private life caused scandal and, most likely, stress, since he had responsibility for two house-

FREED, LYNN 465

holds: he fell in love with Kate Lyon, a young teacher from Oswego, New York, had three children with her, and lived with her at Homefield, in Surrey, during the week; on weekends, he returned to his wife and their four children at their Bedford Square mansion in London. Grace Frederic refused to give him the divorce he sought. The hero of his novel The Return of the O’Mahony (1892) is named Kate Lyon and Frederic depicts their love for each other in March Hares (1896). No less a writer than Stephen Crane praised Frederic’s Civil War writing, particularly The Copperhead (1893), a novella. Indeed, among Frederic’s and Kate Lyon’s closest friends were Stephen and Cora Crane, with whom they vacationed and worked. Harold Frederic wrote two more novels that were published posthumously: Gloria Mundi (1898) focuses on Christian Tower, who grapples with his sudden inheritance of an English title and a fortune; and The MarketPlace (1899), an increasingly well-regarded tale of Joel Stormont Thorpe, an American who marries into the crumbling British aristocracy on his quest for power. Frederic died on October 19, 1898, at Homefield, probably of a brain embolism (O’Donnell and Franchere, 71), having lived only two months past his 42nd birthday.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Copperhead. New York: Scribner, 1893. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1896. Republished as Illumination. London: Heinemann, 1896. Gloria Mundi. Chicago and New York: Stone, 1898. In the Valley. New York: Scribner, 1890. The Lawton Girl. New York: Scribner, 1890. March Hares. (George Forth, pseud.). New York: Appleton, 1896. The Market-Place. New York: Stokes, 1899; London: Heinemann, 1899. Marsena. London: Unwin, 1896. The Return of the O’Mahony. New York: Bonner, 1892. Seth’s Brother’s Wife; A Study of Life in the Greater New York. New York: Scribner, 1887.

SOURCES Briggs, Austin, Jr. The Novels of Harold Frederic. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism, 239–245. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.

Garner, Stanton. Harold Frederic. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Johnson, George W. “Harold Frederic’s Young Goodman Ware: The Ambiguities of Realistic Romance,” Modern Fiction Studies 8 (Winter 1962–1963): 361–374. O’Donnell, Thomas F., and Hoyt C. Franchere. Harold Frederic. Boston: Twayne, 1961. Raleigh, John Henry. Introduction to The Damnation of Theron Ware, vii–xxviii. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960. Stein, Allen F. “Evasions of an American Adam: Structure and Theme in The Damnation of Theron Ware,” American Literary Realism 5 (Winter 1972): 23–36. Wilson, Edmund. The Devils and Canon Barham, 48–76. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. Woodward, Robert H. “A Selection of Harold Frederic’s Early Literary Criticism, 1877–1881,” American Literary Realism 5 (Winter 1972): 1–22.

OTHER Organization for Community Networks. The Damnation of Theron Ware. Available online. URL: http://www.ofcn.org/ cyber.serv/resource/bookshelf/dware10/. Accessed June 30, 2005. William Dean Howells Society. “Harold Frederic” links, bibliography. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/~ campbelld/howells/frederic.htm. Accessed June 30, 2005.

FREED, LYNN (R.) (1945– )

Lynn Freed is the author of five novels, the last of which, House of Women (2002), received the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Although she lives in California, her novels are set in her native South Africa. In Heart Change (1982) and Home Ground (1986) the young Jewish girl, Ruth Frank, and her family, are emblems for white citizens of that nation. Lynn Freed was born on July 18, 1945, in Durban, to Harold Derrick Freed, an actor, and Anne Moshal Freed, a theater director. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Witwatersrand in 1966 and the following year emigrated to the United States, earning a master’s (1968) and a doctorate (1972) at Columbia University. She became a naturalized citizen in 1977. Her first novel, Heart Change (republished in 2000 as Friends of the Family), featured Marion, the married protagonist

466 FREEMAN, MARY E. WILKINS

who becomes involved in an affair with her daughter’s music teacher. In Home Ground, Ruth Frank’s coming of age is complicated not just by her emerging sexuality but by the racial issues that cloud South Africa. Ruth reappears in The Bungalow; having married and moved to the United States, she returns to South Africa and resumes her childhood romance with Hugh Stillington. He is murdered and she must face her pregnancy alone. She feels she is an outsider in both countries. The Mirror (1997) is about a working-class Englishwoman, Agnes La Grange, who arrives in Durban in 1920 as housekeeper to a Jewish family. She acquires enough money to buy a hotel and become financially independent, never allowing motherhood or grandmotherhood to interfere with her independence and self-absorption. Her most recent novel, House of Women, is based on the mother-daughter relationship originally outlined in the Demeter-Persephone myth. Thea is in thrall to her powerfully sexual mother Naim until she is kidnapped by a man known only as “the Syrian”; by age 20, she has moved from one metaphorical prison to another. Lynn Freed is a professor of English at the University of California. Of the writing process, she remarked to interviewer Sarah Anne Johnson, “I make notes all the time. It’s amusing for me to look back, after a book is finished, and see how desperately I was trying to know what I was going to write” (Johnson, 31). Home Ground, The Bungalow (1993), and The Mirror were selected as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review.

NOVELS The Bungalow. New York: Poseidon Press, 1993. Heart Change. New York: New American Library, 1982. Republished as Friends of the Family. Ashland, Oreg.: Story Line Press, 2000. Home Ground. New York: Summit Books, 1986. House of Women. New York: Little, Brown, 2002. The Mirror. New York: Crown, 1997.

SOURCE Johnson, Sarah Anne. “Mythic Journey,” The Writer 115, no. 6 (June 2002): 29–32.

OTHER LynnFreed.com. Available online. URL: http://www.lynnfreed. com/. Accessed June 30, 2005.

FREEMAN, MARY E(LEANOR) WILKINS (1852–1930) Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, along with Edith WHARTON, was among the first women elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters; she won the Howells Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters in 1926. Renowned for her 14 short-story collections, Freeman was also admired for her 13 novels, the most successful of which include JANE FIELD (1893) and PEMBROKE (1894). Her novels, like her short fiction, usually take place in New England villages, and contain realistic characters, several generations removed from their Puritan ancestors, who reflect concerns with duty, justice, self-reliance, and the righting of social wrongs. In her portraits of 19th-century women, moreover, one sees glimmerings of the 20th-century woman who often rejects marriage in favor of a career. Moreover, feminist critics who have scrutinized both her fiction and her life, find many depictions of lesbian relationships. Of recent interest to both general readers and scholars are also The Portion of Labor (1901), By the Light of the Soul (1907), and The Shoulders of Atlas (1908). Mary Eleanor Wilkins was born on October 31, 1852, in Randolph, Massachusetts, to Warren Wilkins, a builder, and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins. Reared in both Massachusetts and Brattleboro, Vermont, she began to publish in the 1880s. Her reputation soared in the decade of the 1890s and into the 20th century, and she received praise from William Dean HOWELLS, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Henry JAMES. Jerome, A Poor Man (1897), focuses on poverty, preparing the way for her most arresting treatment of social ills in The Portion of Labor, about a strike in a shoe factory. Ellen Brewster, the working-class protagonist, gives up the chance to attend Vassar College and to marry the nephew of the factory owner. Instead, she works in the factory and, when management reduces the wages of the employees, Ellen, who enjoys an intriguing relationship with Cynthia Lennox, a similarly emancipated woman, organizes a strike. Of interest to contemporary readers and scholars are the issues of race and gender central to Madelon (1896) and The Heart’s Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (1900). In the former, Madelon Hautville, a French-Canadian

FRENCH, MARILYN 467

and Iroquois beauty, loves Burr Gordon, but he eventually chooses to marry Dorothy Fair, a white American. Madelon’s passionate anger and jealousy lead to the attempted murder of her former lover. In The Heart’s Highway, Harry Wingfield, the narrator, falls in love with his pupil, Mary Cavendish. Harry’s apparent acquiescence to the era’s condescending stereotypes of African slaves and unmarried women, however, raise intriguing questions about Freeman’s possible use of the unreliable narrator. By the Light of the Soul was written after Freeman’s 1892 marriage to the handsome and cavalier Charles Freeman and their move to his house in Metuchen, New Jersey. Numerous critics debate whether this novel, believed to be Freeman’s most autobiographical, suggests that Freeman had reconsidered the wisdom of her decision to marry. Her last widely discussed novels were The Shoulders of Atlas, with its complicated lesbian subtexts, and The Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors (1908). Freeman annoyed some of her coauthors—who included William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Elizabeth Stuart PHELPS—by transforming a Howells character into a new woman. In 1919 she committed her alcoholic husband to a sanitarium and in 1922 obtained a legal separation. Freeman died of a heart attack on March 13, 1930, in Metuchen, N.J., and was buried in nearby Plainfield.

NOVELS The Butterfly House. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912. By the Light of the Soul. New York: Harper, 1907. The Debtor. New York: Harper, 1905. “Doc” Gordon. New York: Authors and Newspaper Association, 1906. The Givers. New York: Harper, 1904. The Green Door. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910; London: Gay & Hancock, 1912. The Heart’s Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900. Jane Field: A Novel. New York: Harper, 1893. Jerome, A Poor Man. New York: Harper, 1897. Madelon. New York: Harper, 1896. Pembroke. New York: Harper, 1894. The Portion of Labor. New York: Harper, 1901. The Shoulders of Atlas. New York: Harper, 1908. Six Trees. New York: Harper, 1903. Understudies. New York: Harper, 1901.

The Whole Family, A Novel by Twelve Authors, includes a chapter by Freeman. New York: Harper, 1908. The Yates Pride. New York: Harper, 1912.

SOURCES Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition. New York: Continuum, 1988. Foster, Edward. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. New York: Hendrick House, 1956. Glasser, Leah Blatt. In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Hamblen, Abigail Ann. The New England Art of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. Amherst, Mass.: Green Knight Press, 1966. Johns, Barbara. “Some Reflections on the Spinster in New England Literature.” In Regionalism and the Female Imagination, edited by Emily Toth, 29–64. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1985. Marchalonis, Shirley, ed. Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Reichardt, Mary R. A Web of Relationship: Women in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Westbrook, Perry D. Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 86–104. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981. ———. Mary Wilkins Freeman. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

FRENCH, MARILYN (1929– ) Marilyn French shocked the literary community with the publication in 1977 of her first novel, The Women’s Room. Since then, the novel has become an exemplar of the 20th-century women’s movement and the American feminist canon, as it decries the sexist attitudes in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s. French wrote four additional novels, all of which examine an aspect of women’s role in a patriarchal culture: The Bleeding Heart (1980) depicts the unequal and therefore doomed male-female relationship; Her Mother’s Daughter (1987) examines the situation of women through four generations; Our Father (1994) reveals a dying man’s secrets to his daughters; and My Summer with George (1996) depicts a summer romance. Although none achieved the widespread popularity of The Women’s Room, which was translated into 20 languages, Marilyn French remains one of feminism’s most significant voices.

468 FRIEDMAN, BRUCE JAY

Marilyn French was born Marilyn Edwards on November 21, 1929, in New York City, into an impecunious Polish-American family. She earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951, married Robert M. French, Jr., divorced him in 1967, and enrolled at Harvard University, receiving her doctoral degree in 1972. In The Women’s Room, Mira, trapped in the dull life of a suburban marriage, follows Marilyn French’s own trajectory as she too divorces her husband, returns to higher education, and becomes independent. The novel includes a number of stories of women who try to resist male oppression, culminating in the story of Mira’s friend Val, whose independence is illusory. The Bleeding Heart focuses on Delores, a divorced woman whose daughter has committed suicide, and her romance while on sabbatical with Victor, a married man with traditional attitudes toward women. The battle of the sexes shows no signs of abating in this novel. In French’s third novel, Her Mother’s Daughter, the protagonist, Anastasia, cannot see the possibility of women combining a career with a successful marriage. From the Polish great-grandmother through Anastasia’s silenced mother, to Anastasia herself and her daughter Franny, French writes about a mother’s responsibility for loving and teaching her daughter and the way responsible mothering must be passed on to each generation; wholly successful mothering, however, as in The Bleeding Heart, seems unlikely. In Our Father, the four previously estranged daughters of Stephen Upton, the dying presidential adviser, discover that their father committed incest with each of them. French’s most recent novel, My Summer with George, like The Bleeding Heart, depicts a doomed summer romance between the romance writer Hermione Beldame and George Johnson, a newspaper editor. Marilyn French has written numerous nonfiction books and articles that amplify her feminist themes. A cancer survivor, French lives and writes in New York City. The Women’s Room was produced as a television movie in 1980.

NOVELS The Bleeding Heart. New York: Summit Books, 1980. Her Mother’s Daughter. New York: Summit Books, 1987. My Summer with George. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Our Father. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. The Women’s Room. New York: Summit Books, 1977.

SOURCES Bannon, Barbara A. “Marilyn French,” Publishers Weekly 217, no. 9 (March 7, 1980): 6–7. Dever, Carolyn. “The Feminist Abject: Death and the Constitution of Theory,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 185–206. Dunlap, Lauren Glen. Review of The War against Women, by Marilyn French. Belles Lettres 8: no. 1 (Fall 1992): 20–21. French, Marilyn. A Season in Hell: A Memoir. London: Virago Press, 1999. ———. “Woman: Mother Courage: Maureen Freely Talks to Marilyn French,” by Maureen Freely. Guardian (October 22, 1998): 4. French, Marilyn, and Janet Todd. “Marilyn French.” In Women Writers Talking, edited by Janet Todd, 69–78. New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1983. Jones-Davis, Georgia. “Soup’s On,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 27 February 1994, p. 12. McDaniel, Maude. “Sisters and Other Strangers,” Chicago Tribune Books, 2 January 1994, section 14, p. 5. Peat, Irene M. Review of A Season in Hell, British Medical Journal 318, no. 7179 (January 30, 1999): 336. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Feminism, Eros and Coming of Age,” Frontiers 22, no. 2 (June 2001): 1–19. Selway, Jennifer. “Dad’s the Word,” Observer (May 1, 1994): 23. Thomas, Clara. “Journeys across Time and Water,” Books in Canada 31, no. 6 (September 2002): 29. Wheelwright, Julie. “The New Avengers,” New Statesman and Society 5, no. 196 (April 3, 1992): 44–45. Woodward, Kathleen. “In Sickness and Health,” Women’s Review of Books 16, no. 4 (January 1999): 2–4.

OTHER Marilyn French. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto. sci.fi/mfrench.htm. Accessed September 4, 2005.

FRIEDMAN, BRUCE JAY (1930– )

Bruce Jay Friedman, who coined the term “black humor,” writes seriocomic novels, plays, and short stories about marginalized Jewish Americans living in a fragmented and frequently absurd America, an America that interviewer Michael Elkin calls “the less-than-genteel gentile world.” The alienated, culturally conflicted title character of Stern (1962), the adolescent Joseph and his overbearing mother Meg of A Mother’s Kisses (1964), and the

A FROLIC OF HIS OWN 469

lonely, symbolically scarred misfit Kenneth Sussman in The Dick (1970) (who changes his surname to LePeters) are typical Friedman caricatures. In his first novel, for instance, Stern, often compared by critics to Walter Mitty, survives suburbia, anti-Semitism, a nervous breakdown, and his own ethical and sexual peccadilloes. In A Mother’s Kisses, often compared to Philip ROTH’s PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, the Brooklyn-born Joseph tries to fit in with the country-bred students at his midwestern agricultural college, a task made more difficult by his mother’s constant interferences. In The Dick police department public-relations officer Kenneth LePeters leaves his philandering wife, and, buoyed by the 1960s mores of freedom, seems to succeed better than his predecessors. In About Harry Towns (1974) the title character, having left his wife and lost his parents, leads the life of a party-going American male who has lost his moorings. In Tokyo Woes (1985) Mike Halsey of upscale Greenwich, Connecticut, repeatedly leaves his wife for exotic climes, this time Tokyo. The Current Climate (1989) is a sequel to About Harry Towns, set 15 years later. Friedman’s most recent novel, A Father’s Kisses (1996) depicts William Binny, a poultry man turned international hit man. Bruce Friedman was born on April 26, 1930, in New York City, to Irving Friedman, a manufacturer, and Molly Liebowitz Friedman. He was educated at the University of Missouri, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1951, served in the U.S. Air Force as a correspondent and feature writer from 1951 to 1953, and married Ginger Howard, an actress and a model, in 1954. After his divorce from his first wife in 1978, he married Patricia J. O’Donohue in 1983.

NOVELS About Harry Towns. New York: Knopf, 1974. The Current Climate. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. The Dick. New York: Knopf, 1970. A Father’s Kisses. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1996. A Mother’s Kisses. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Stern. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. Tokyo Woes. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1985.

SOURCES Friedman, Bruce Jay. “An Interview,” Notre Dame Review, 1 (March 1, 1974): 16–19. Kaufmann, Stanley. “Frightened Writer,” New Republic, (October 8, 1966): 20–37.

Schulz, Max F. Bruce Jay Friedman. New York: Twayne, 1974.

OTHER Elkin, Michael. “Bruce Jay Friedman: An Iconoclast Remains Untamed. Jewish Exponent (February 17, 1995). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:2304668. Accessed September 4, 2005. Gray, Paul. Review of Tokyo Woes. Time (April 22, 1985). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:3737355. Accessed September 4, 2005. Nesviky, Matt. “The collected Short Fiction of Bruce Jay Friedman: A Father’s Kisses.” Jewish Exponent (May 29, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:3984114. Accessed September 4, 2005. Unsigned. Review of The Current Climate. Time (October 16, 1989). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:8001943. Accessed September 4, 2005.

A FROLIC OF HIS OWN WILLIAM GADDIS (1994) Satirical and sprawling, William GADDIS’s fourth novel—A Frolic of His Own—directs its energy and focus toward highlighting the absurdity and uncontrolled pervasiveness of the American legal profession/culture during the 1980s. The second of Gaddis’s novels to win the National Book Award (1994)—the other, J R in 1975—A Frolic of His Own likewise secured Gaddis the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for fiction (1995). In the same vein as his other fictional works, A Frolic of His Own portrays an American society driven by financial and social greed; yet this novel aptly places this within the machinations of the legal profession, problematizing an individual’s actions when immersed in such a complex web of discourse and powerful institutions. The main individual under Gaddis’s gaze within the novel, Oscar Crease, fares about as well as anyone could: not very well at all. The title of the novel derives from an aspect of English common law, the designation of a “frolic of his own,” which Harry, Oscar’s brother-in-law defines as: “Just a phrase, comes up sometimes in cases of imputed negligence, the servant gets injured or injures

470 A FROLIC OF HIS OWN

somebody else on the job when he’s not doing what he’s hired for, not performing any duty owing to the master, voluntarily undertakes some activity outside the scope of his employment” (348). Interestingly, the “frolic” in this case refers to a play written by Oscar entitled “Once at Antietam,” which Crease wrote while employed as a history professor and indirectly based upon the life of his grandfather. At the novel’s beginning, Oscar has already initiated one legal suit, a case where he attempts to claim injuries and reparations from an accident in which his own car (with the apt fictional maker’s mark of “Sosumi”) ran over him while he was working under the hood, eventually placing him in the simultaneous role of plaintiff and defendant. Yet, when Oscar learns that the director Constantine Kiester has released the film The Blood in the Red White and Blue, which appears to plagiarize the basic plot structure of Crease’s as yet unpublished and unperformed play, “Once at Antietam,” he brings suit against both Kiester and the production studio. Though Oscar has documentation demonstrating that he submitted the work earlier to a certain Jonathan Livingston Siegal (Kiester’s former identity) the resulting legal mess—featuring depositions, opinions, decisions, appeals, briefings, etc.—proves next to impossible to sort through for Oscar. In the events surrounding Oscar’s legal battles, Gaddis introduces the reader to a large cast of characters, including his father Judge Crease (likewise involved in a divisive federal legal decision in the case of Szyrk v. the Village of Tantamount, which rests on whether to destroy the sculpture “Cyclone Seven” in order to saved a trapped dog, Spot), his half-sister Christina (Teen), her husband Harry, and his on-and-off girlfriend Lilly. Frustratingly, perhaps, the characters in the novel show little, if any, development over the course of the novel. Critic Sven Birkerts even argues that “The most injurious flaw of Gaddis’s book is the relative inertness of its central characters” (Birkerts, 29). However, perhaps instead of viewing this as a “flaw,” readers should note the social critique embedded in Gaddis’s decision: that our litigious contemporary society may prove incapable of depth in such an age of superficiality. This might be further evidenced by the observation that though much dialogue takes place

within the confines of Oscar’s crumbling estate outside of New York City, this novel—unlike Gaddis’s other work—relies heavily on other forms of discourse for plot development. Shot through with numerous types of discourse (each offset by a change in font and arrangement on the page) including dialogue, legal briefs and opinions, play scripts, court decisions and transcribed depositions, the novel takes great pains to capture the legalese and parrying dialogue in equal stride, which challenges the bounds of the novel as a form. By no means a short, easy read, readers will perhaps find A Frolic of His Own Gaddis’s “most accessible novel” (Birkerts, 27). Nonetheless, like many American postwar works, the novel challenges traditional linear plot development and characterization in a work that circles in upon itself without reprieve. As Gaddis himself noted in his acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award for A Frolic of His Own: “I’m not reader friendly. I do ask something of the reader—I think that a reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page” (Gaddis, “On Receiving,” 130). In this sense, the novel demands a certain amount of reader participation and immersion, as even the dialogue—never set off with quotes—requires that the reader remain entirely conscious of which character speaks, the text giving away no such markers. Ambitiously, A Frolic of His Own does not simply concern itself with Oscar’s legal battles and familial relationships; more to the point, Gaddis takes on contemporary American society and culture at large. American law, the legal establishment, neither fare well under Gaddis’s treatment. The novel’s characters, effectively immobilized—physically remaining in Oscar’s home through most of the novel and, metaphorically, remaining bound within the never-ending locutions of the legal system—garner no hope for release, for finding an outside perspective. Though Gaddis punctuates the novel throughout with pointed satire, which remains indelibly funny to the reader (each of the legal issues at hand resound in their hilarity and absurdity), the characters, tragically, never see their lives in the same farcical manner. Perhaps, for Gaddis, this describes the norm for contem-

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY 471

porary, litigious American society. A dark critique, but unerringly and dizzyingly articulated by the novel.

SOURCES Birkerts, Sven. “Down by Law,” review of A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis. New Republic 210, no. 6 (1997): 27–30. Comnes, Gregory. The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994. ———. “The Law of the Excluded Muddle: The Ethics of Improvisation in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own,” Critique 39, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 353–366. Gaddis, William. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Scribner, 1995. ———. “On Receiving the National Book Award for A Frolic of His Own.” In The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings. New York: Penguin, 2002. Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Zach Weir

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY JAMES JONES (1951) James JONES drew from his own army experience as a soldier with a boxing background to write his enormously successful first novel, From Here to Eternity, winner of a National Book Award. The novel is perhaps the quintessential depiction of the preWorld War II army and portrayal of the men who constituted it. Set in Hawaii in the months leading to the Japanese attack, the novel features Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, son of a coal miner, who leaves Harlan, Kentucky, after his parents die and goes “on the bum” until his enlistment. A natural soldier, extraordinary bugler, and excellent boxer, Prewitt believes he has found a home in the military, and becomes a professed “30 year man” determined to make the army his career. But his personal sense of honor and stubborn individualism often cause him to make decisions that conflict with those of his superiors, and, in the end, these traits lead to his downfall. Prewitt and many other characters in the novel struggle to survive in a world ruled by both strict reg-

ulations and the often whimsical goals of the officers. These themes contribute to the sense of naturalism where humans respond to external forces and internal stresses but do not understand the reasons for their actions. In this sense the characters are victims of fate, rather than controllers of their own destinies. In the tense world that was Hawaii, culminating in the disaster at Pearl Harbor, this lack of control is all the more striking. Jones’s use of vulgar and colloquial dialect and syntax contributes to the novel’s sense of realism and the credibility of the characters. Jones has a singular ability to relate the humanness of the characters through their many flaws. First Sergeant Milton Warden, both cynical and competent, is able to navigate the shoals of army demands and satisfy himself as well, in his case by having an affair with the commanding officer’s wife. He is also able to understand and begrudgingly admire Prewitt, but knows that soldiers unwilling to bend to accommodate events are not welcome in the army. Prewitt arrives at the company and explains to the commanding officer (who desperately wants his company to win the regimental boxing championship) why he has quit boxing forever. After the distinctly displeased officer leaves, Warden tells him, “You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Prewitt? . . . Haven’t learned a thing. Fools rush in where angels refuse to re-enlist. . . . All a man has to do is to leave it up to you and you’ll put your own head in the noose for him” (45). Jones takes an objective view of his characters and their actions, allowing a cruel fate to hand out punishment and reward. Prewitt’s refusal to box results in his being given “the treatment”—a concerted regime of physical hazing by the NCOs to break him and make him change his mind. Determined to withstand this punishment, he is unable to forestall the incident that results in his being court-martialed. As in other cases, Jones is able to portray Prewitt’s action as “right” both morally and perhaps legally, but “wrong” according to army regulations. His ironic death at the hands of fellow soldiers is Jones’s final naturalist statement of the futility of men’s attempts to control their own destinies. From Here to Eternity is the first in a trilogy of World War II novels completed by The Thin Red Line and Whistle, the latter of which Jones did not finish before

472 FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

his death in 1977. As the first of this trilogy, From Here to Eternity deals with the “evolution of the soldier,” or the molding of an individual soldier into the whole that is the army. Much of the internal clashing between Prewitt and Warden is their fight to retain identity and repel anonymity (Mullen, 2004). When published in 1951, the novel was considered extremely racy for its explicit sexual scenes and profane dialogue. These aspects only helped to humanize the novel’s portrayal of authentic army life. The basic strength of Jones’s work is that it creates a sense of humanity so powerful that only something as traumatic as the attack on Pearl Harbor can serve as the anchoring event. The 1953 movie starred Montgomery Clift as Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, Burt Lancaster as Sgt. Milton Warden, and Deborah Kerr as Karen Holmes. Frank

Sinatra and Donna Reed won Academy Awards for best actor and actress in supporting roles as Pvt. Angelo Maggio and Alma “Lorene” Burke, respectively. The film also received several other Academy Awards and nominations.

SOURCES Garrett, George P. James Jones. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1984. Giles, James, R. James Jones, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Jones, James. From Here to Eternity. New York: Scribner, 1951.

OTHER Mullen, Michael. “From Here to Eternity.” Available online. URL: http://rking.vinu.edu/ETERN.HTM. Accessed June 30, 2005. Morgan Adams

T H E FA C T S O N F I L E COMPANION TO THE

AMERICAN NOVEL VOLUME II G–O

CD EDITED BY ABBY H. P. WERLOCK ASSISTANT EDITOR: JAMES P. WERLOCK

To my father, Thomas Kennedy Potter, Jr. (1917–2003)

The Facts On File Companion to the American Novel Copyright © 2006 by Abby H. P. Werlock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Facts On File companion to the American novel / [edited by] Abby H. P. Werlock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-4528-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Encyclopedias. 2. American fiction—Bio-bibliography. 3. American fiction— Stories, plots, etc. I. Title: Companion to the American novel. II. Werlock, Abby H. P. III. Facts on File, Inc. IV. Title. PS371.F33 2005 813′.003—dc22

2005012437

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design adapted by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Cathy Rincon Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS CD VOLUME I ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION vi ENTRIES A TO F 1 VOLUME II ENTRIES G TO O 473 VOLUME III ENTRIES P TO Z 1013 SUBJECT ENTRIES 1417 THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1417 THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1421 THE LATINO NOVEL 1426 THE DETECTIVE NOVEL 1434 THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL 1437 APPENDICES I. LIST OF MAJOR PRIZEWINNERS 1441 II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1449 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 1453 INDEX 1455

C

GD

GADDIS, WILLIAM (THOMAS) (1922– 1998) In the 1998 obituary he wrote on William

Island. He was educated for three years at Harvard University, then lived in New York and Europe for five years until he published the 1,000-page-long The Recognitions. The novel covers 30 years and several continents. The protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, one of several narrators, mirrors the historical, social, and spiritual difficulties of the 20th century. Here Gaddis blends several different genres as Gwyon attempts to peel away the usual cultural layers to reach an elusive truth. That same year, 1955, Gaddis married Patsy Black, an actor and art expert. They were divorced in 1967. Gaddis then married Judith Thompson; this second marriage lasted 10 years. With the 700+-page J.R., Gaddis traces the rise to financial power of an 11-year-old boy, J. R. Vinsant. According to scholar Steven Moore, Gaddis’s use of comedy in this satire of corporate America “has been consistently underrated,” resulting in undue emphasis on his “negativity” (Moore, 12). Much of J.R.’s comedy lies in Gaddis’s use of cliché and jargon to emphasize the “contemporary American crisis” (Moore, 88). Nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, Carpenter’s Gothic features Elizabeth (Liz) Booth, a Grosse Point, Michigan, debutante. She is seduced by Paul Booth, a Vietnam veteran with financial ambitions. While they move to a “Carpenter’s Gothic” house outside New York to save money, Liz, bored with Paul’s constant absences, meets and has an affair with ex-CIA agent McCandless, hears of her brother’s death, and dies of a

Gaddis for the New York Times, Mel Gussow observed, “He was often considered one of the least read of important American writers. But his books have become contemporary classics” (Gussow, C22). Indeed, since his death, despite the difficulties one encounters in reading his lengthy experimental novels, William Gaddis is increasingly considered one of America’s most original postmodernist novelists. His first novel, The Recognitions (1955), is repeatedly described as encyclopedic, a satire of modern life. J.R. (1975), a pessimistic parody of modern materialism and its resulting wasteland, won the National Book Award. Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), generally regarded as more accessible than the first two novels, depicts our ignorant, valueless contemporary age as lacking in any of the moral and spiritual beliefs of previous eras. A FROLIC OF HIS OWN, somewhat less dismal than the previous novels, focuses on the American judicial system and earned Gaddis his second National Book Award and his first National Book Critics Circle Award. All four novels address Gaddis’s vision of a corrupt modern society that chooses materialism over human commitment. William Gaddis was born on December 29, 1922, in New York City, to William Thomas Gaddis, a financier, and Edith Gaddis, a corporation executive. His parents separated when Gaddis was three years old, and thereafter he was reared by his mother in Massapequa, Long 473

474 GAINES, ERNEST J.

heart attack; at her funeral, Paul, certain he will inherit her money, uses the same seduction techniques on Liz’s best friend, Edie, that he had previously used on Liz. In A Frolic of His Own, Gaddis satirizes the American legal system through his protagonist, Oscar Crease, a community college professor. Oscar is involved in two lawsuits, in one of which he is both driver and victim. The other lawsuit concerns his idea for a play about the Civil War that Hollywood has stolen. The novel addresses the absence of justice in any individual’s life. Having completed his “scathing indictments of capitalism’s facelessness” (Conley), William Gaddis died of prostate cancer in East Hampton, Long Island, and is buried at the Sag Harbor Oakwood Cemetery. His papers are housed at Washington University in St. Louis.

NOVELS Carpenter’s Gothic. New York: Viking, 1985. A Frolic of His Own. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. J.R. New York: Knopf, 1975. The Recognitions. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955; corrected edition, New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. In Search of Heresy. New York: McGraw Hill, 1956. Comnes, Gregory. The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic Books, 1978. Gussow, Mel. “William Gaddis, 75, Innovative Author of Complex, Damanding Novels, Is Dead,” New York Times, 17 December 1998, p. C22. Knight, Christopher J. Hints and Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984. Madden, David. Rediscoveries. New York: Crown, 1971. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Postmodern Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Moore, Steven. A Reader’s Guide to William Gaddis’s “The Recognitions.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Tanner, Tony. City of Words. New York: Harper, 1971. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

OTHER Beer, John. “William Gaddis.” Review of Contemporary Fiction (September 22, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:79828499&num=3. Accessed August 22, 2005. Conley, Tim. “William Gaddis Calling: Telephonic Satire and the Disconnection of Authority,” Studies in the Novel (December 22, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 114128559&num=1. Accessed September 3, 2005. New York State Writer’s Institute. “William Gaddis, New York State Author, 1993–1995.” Available online. URL: http:// www.albany.edu/writers-inst/gaddis.html. Accessed August 22, 2005.

GAINES, ERNEST J(AMES) (1933– ) Born on the River Lake Plantation in Point Coupée Parish, Louisiana, the eldest of 12 children, Ernest Gaines lived most of his formative years in this parish, which he was later to immortalize in his fiction. His parents separated when he was very young, an event that would result in a major fictional theme for the adult writer, the search for the missing father. At age 15 Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather and continue his schooling. He never ceased thinking of his native state, however, and his feeling of displacement would result in yet another of his fictional themes. Today the novelist Ernest Gaines is known, in Valerie Melissa Babb’s words, as the “griot”—West African for oral historian or poet—of Point Coupée Parish, describing its swamps, bayous, plantations, and old slave quarters, and peopling it with such characters as Miss Jane Pittman of his novel The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (1971) or James of the short story “The Sky Is Gray” (1963) (Babb, 1). Like William FAULKNER’s Yoknapatawpha County or John STEINBECK’s Salinas Valley, Bayonne, Louisiana, has become Gaines’s fictional territory.

GAINES, ERNEST J. 475

Before Gaines graduated from high school, he completed “A Little Stream,” a story of two families, one dark-skinned and the other light-skinned, living on opposite sides of a stream. While attending junior college, Gaines was drafted into the army and, during those two years of service, from 1953 to 1955, he continued writing in his off-duty hours. He then attended San Francisco State College and began publishing stories in Transfer and Negro Digest. When he graduated with a B.A. in English in 1957, Gaines was awarded the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, allowing him to study creative writing at Stanford University. While there he found himself drawn to the alienated characters of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the conflicted sensibilities of James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and the possibilities of creating a fictional world like the Yoknapatawpha of William Faulkner’s work (Babb, 4). Gaines left California in 1962, profoundly affected by the barring of James Meredith from the University of Mississippi in that same year. The return home evoked the emotions and the creativity essential to serious writing. Now he would revise “A Little Stream” and publish it as Catherine Carmier in 1963. Set in 1960s Louisiana, the novel tells the tale of Catherine Carmier, a white Creole who falls in love with AfricanAmerican Jackson Bradley, who has been educated in California. Although Gaines refers to the coming civil rights movement and describes the freedom riders, the novel exudes a fatalistic quality; Jackson understands that prejudice exists in the North as well as the South—only the form and subtlety are different—and Catherine lacks the power to walk away from her family. Catherine Carmier was followed by Bloodline, a collection of short stories. In 1971, the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman earned Gaines a national reputation. Told in the tradition of the slave narrative, Gaines says, the novel was also influenced by Gertrude STEIN’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Carmean). Set in 1962, the novel is divided into four sections: “The War Years,” “Reconstruction,” “The Plantation,” and “The Quarters.” Gaines has been lauded for the authenticity of Jane Pittman’s voice. She is speaking into the tape

recorder of a white Louisiana historian and teacher who wants his students to hear the missing voices of African Americans who are not in the history books, like Pittman herself. His next novel, In My Father’s House (1978), reiterates the separation of fathers and sons, emanating, says Gaines, from the history of the slavery auction block. Although it departs from Gaines’s multiple narrator technique and from his customary Bayonne setting, it received favorable reviews as a psychological study (Babb, 10). A Gathering of Old Men earned Gaines enthusiastic responses from both critics and general readers alike. Although set in the 1970s, Babb points out that the contemporary era of the novel is barely recognizable because the region has been slow to change; the time frame could be 50 years earlier (10). The reviews of this novel about aging black males were nearly as favorable as those for Miss Jane Pittman. In 1987, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters voted to give its annual literary award to Gaines, who has described himself as someone deeply tied to and immersed in the past. His strongest characters perform, as do those of Hemingway (whom he greatly admires), with “grace under pressure.” His acclaimed and best-selling novel A LESSON BEFORE DYING was published in 1993.

NOVELS The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Dial, 1971. Catherine Carmier. New York: Atheneum, 1964. A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Knopf, 1983. In My Father’s House. New York: Knopf, 1978. A Lesson before Dying. New York: Knopf, 1993. Of Love and Dust. New York: Dial, 1967.

SOURCES Babb, Valerie-Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Bruck, Peter, ed. The Black American Short Story in the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Critical Essays. Amsterdam, Netherlands: B. R. Gruner, 1977. Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Greenwood Electronic Media.

476 GAITSKILL, MARY

Available online by subscription. URL: http://www.gem. greenwood.com. Accessed March 15, 2006. Estes, David C. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Gaudet, Marcia, and Carl Wooton. Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Hicks, Jack. In the Singer’s Temple: Prose Fictions of Barthelme, Gaines, Brautigan, Piercy, Kesey, and Kosinski. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Hudson, Theodore R. The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Lowe, John, ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. O’Brien, John, ed. Interview with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973.

GAITSKILL, MARY (1954– )

Mary Gaitskill has been included with Tama JANOWITZ and Catherine Texier on lists of the so-called Bad Girl postmodernist writers. The seriousness with which critics are reading Gaitskill, however, is evident in reactions to her novel Veronica (2005), a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. She has attracted attention for her complex and compelling portraits of individual men and women who people the margins of society and frequently dwell in the darker, seamier streets of New York City. Gaitskill’s explicit presentation of bodily detail and sexual encounters is balanced by her innovative, probing, sympathetic, and compassionate analyses of her sometimes heroic but more frequently depraved characters. In these fictional portraits, Gaitskill’s people are often vulnerable, emotionally immature, narcissistic, insecure: The frequent victims of sexual abuse and related traumatic childhood events, they stumble through their individual darknesses and failed relationships to emerge—occasionally but not often—as healed human beings. Gaitskill has written one other novel, the critically acclaimed Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), and two story collections, Bad Behavior (1988) and Because They Wanted To (1997), which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award. Mary Gaitskill was born on November 11, 1954, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Lawrence Russell Gaitskill, a

teacher, and Dorothy Jane Mayer Gaitskill, a social worker and homemaker. The family moved to several different suburbs in Detroit, Michigan. When she was 16 years old, after several commitments to psychiatric hospitals, Gaitskill ran away to Toronto, Canada, and supported herself in various capacities, including, at one point, nightclub stripper. She returned to Michigan and earned her bachelor of arts degree at the University of Michigan in 1981 and subsequently published her two story collections. Included in the second, Because They Wanted To, is a well-reviewed novella, The Wrong Thing, a four-part story featuring a fortyish poet named Susan who attempts to fill the gaps in her identity by taking on first, a male lover, and second, a female. Gaitskill’s first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin, traces the growing friendship between two seemingly opposite women, Justine Shade, a thin, sexually promiscuous journalist, and Dorothy Footie, an overweight and friendless law firm proofreader with a penchant for the work of writer-philosopher Ayn RAND, here called Anna Granite. The two realize that they share deep-seated memories of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of fathers and family friends. Mary Gaitskill is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University and lives in Rhinebeck in the Hudson River valley. Her novella Secretary, from the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988), was adapted for a film of the same name by Erin Cressida Wilson.

NOVELS Two Girls, Fat and Thin. New York: Poseidon Press, 1991. Veronica. New York: Pantheon, 2005.

SOURCES Hardie, Melissa Jane. “Fluff and Granite: Rereading Rand’s Camp Feminist Aesthetics.” In Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, edited by Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, 363–389. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Young, Elizabeth. “Library of the Ultravixens: Tama Janowitz; Mary Gaitskill; Catherine Texier.” In Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction, edited by Young and Graham Caveney, 165–181. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1992.

GARCIA, CRISTINA 477

OTHER Mary Gaitskill Home Page. Previewport.com. Available online. URL: http://previewport.com/Home/gaitskill2.html. Accessed December 12, 2005.

GALE, ZONA (1874–1938) Zona Gale, novelist, short fiction writer, and playwright, published 34 books and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1921 for her dramatization of MISS LULU BETT, considered to be her finest novel. Known widely as a chronicler of village life, depicted in her fictional midwestern Friendship Village stories, Gale also wrote the best-selling novel Faint Perfume in 1923. After graduating with two degrees from the University of Wisconsin in 1895, Gale worked as a reporter for several publications, including the New York Evening World and several magazines based in New York. She lived there for three years before returning permanently to Portage, Wisconsin, where she spent the rest of her life. Romance Island (1906) is an adventure fantasy set in a mist-shrouded island in a medieval kingdom. The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre (1907), on the other hand, tells the tale of an old married couple whose romance has prevailed over the hardships of their decades-long marriage. Heart’s Kindred (1915) was written largely to promote pacifistic opposition to World War I, and A Daughter of the Morning (1917) resembles Rebecca Harding DAVIS’s and Tillie OLSEN’s novels in its demonstration of the dreadful conditions in which working women labored. In her next novel, however, Gale wrote more realistically and bleakly: Birth (1918) features Marshall Pitt, whose unfulfilled, empty existence resembles that of characters in novels by the French naturalist writer Émile Zola or the American Theodore DREISER. Miss Lulu Bett, featuring a disillusioned but feisty main character, and Faint Perfume, likewise featuring the skillfully depicted and equally disillusioned Leda Perrin, are also written in this realistic vein. Preface to a Life (1926), Borgia (1929), and Papa La Fleur (1933) are all novels that grew from Gale’s increasing interest in mysticism and the occult. Her contributions to American literature, however, are most visible in her realistic novels and in her Wisconsin Friendship Village stories. Gale’s papers are collected at

the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and the Ridgely Torrence Collection at Princeton University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Birth. New York: Macmillan, 1918. Borgia. New York: Knopf, 1929. Christmas. New York: Macmillan, 1912. A Daughter of the Morning. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917. Faint Perfume. New York: Appleton, 1923. Heart’s Kindred. New York: Macmillan, 1915. The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Light Woman. New York and London: Appleton-Century, 1937. Magna. New York: Appleton-Century, 1939. Miss Lulu Bett. New York: Appleton, 1920. Mothers to Men. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Papa La Fleur. New York: Appleton, 1933. Romance Island. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1906.

SOURCES Derleth, August. Still Small Voice: A Biography of Zona Gale. New York: Appleton-Century, 1940. Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1939, 345–349, 364–365. Hoffman, Frederick J. The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade. Rev. ed., New York: Collier, 1962, 375–376, 465. Rourke, Constance. “Transitions,” New Republic, 11 August 1920, pp. 315–316. Simonson, Harold P. Zona Gale. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Sumner, Keene. “The Everlasting Persistence of This Western Girl,” American Magazine, June 1921, pp. 34–35, 137–141.

OTHER The SAC [San Antonio College] LitWeb Zona Gale Page. Available online. URL: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/ bailey/galezona.htm. Accessed July 2005. Rounds, Charles. “Zona Gale.” In Wisconsin Authors and Their Works. Madison: Parker Educational Co., 1918. Wisconsin Electronic Reader. Available online. URL: http://www.library. wisc.edu/etext/WIReader/WER0054.html. Accessed July 2005.

GARCIA, CRISTINA (1959– ) Cristina Garcia’s first novel, DREAMING IN CUBAN (1992), won praise from coast to coast and earned her a nomination for a National Book Award. The Aguero Sisters (1997), published to similar critical acclaim, was followed by

478 GARCIA, CRISTINA

Monkey Hunting in 2003. Of her mixed heritage, Garcia has commented, “The thing I hate most about the Cuban context is the attempt to limit what it means to be Cuban. Not too long ago at a reading I gave in Puerto Rico, a man stood up and said, ‘You can’t be Cuban because you write in English.’ The point for me is that there is no one Cuban exile. I am here in California and may not fit in anywhere, but I am Cuban too. I think I am trying to stake out a broader territory” (Johnson). Although Garcia examines the political and historical realities in Cuba that fractured families, the scholar Katherine B. Payant notes that Cuban leader Fidel Castro is not named in Dreaming in Cuban or The Aguero Sisters. In the first novel, Castro emerges only as El Lider and in the second as El Commandante. This gives “Castro a kind of mythic, larger-than life quality” (Payant). As a contrast Garcia creates ordinary women (most now living in Miami) who feel culturally bifurcated but want to define themselves as Cuban American. In all of her novels, however, Garcia uses poetic, lyrical language, sometimes bolstered by magical realism and often by her sense of humor. Cristina Garcia was born on July 4, 1958, in Havana, Cuba, to Frank M. Garcia and Hope Lois Garcia, and in 1961, following the rise to power of Fidel Castro, moved to the United States with her parents. After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science from Barnard College (1979) and a master’s degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University (1981), she worked for Time as a reporter, correspondent, and bureau chief in Miami until 1990, when she devoted herself to writing fiction. She married Scott Brown in 1990. Dreaming in Cuban, set both in Cuba and in New York, reflects Garcia’s own experience growing up, when she listened to stories about the Cuban Revolution and the family members who were left behind. The novel tells the story of three generations of Cuban women. Celia, the grandmother, has a love affair with a married Spaniard with whom she corresponds for 25 years; after her husband dies, she shifts her affection and political allegiance to Castro. Her daughter Lourdes is raped by a revolutionary and carries her hatred of the revolution to New York City; her daughter Pilar, raised in the United States, is eager

to know her heritage and to combine her Cuban and American legacies. Payant suggests that The Aguero Sisters, set in the 1990s when Castro is old and communism has failed, holds out more hope for the Cuban future than Dreaming in Cuban (Payant). The Aguero Sisters opens in a mysterious, magical swamp where Bianca Aguero is murdered by her husband, Ignacio, who later commits suicide. The sisters, Constancia and Reina, are depicted through the perspectives of their daughters, Dulce and Isabel, and through the eyes of Ignacio Aguero and a third-person narrator. Constancia is relatively subdued, a middle-class Cuban-American woman who has become a New York cosmetologist, and Reina is fiery and passionate, an electrician and supporter of Castro until an accident forces her relocation to Miami. Garcia is a witty as well as insightful creator of character and teller of tales. Her third novel, Monkey Hunting, is her first novel to be published in both English and Spanish. Partly inspired by her daughter’s complex heritage and partly by a childhood experience with a Chinese-Cuban restaurant, this novel focuses on the Chinese who lived in Cuba. Cristina Garcia lives and writes in California.

NOVELS The Aguero Sisters. New York: Knopf, 1997. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Knopf, 1992. Monkey Hunting. New York: Knopf, 2003.

SOURCES Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction,” World Literature Today 68, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 43. Davis, Rocío G. “Back to the Future: Mothers, Languages, and Homes in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” World Literature Today 74, no. 1 (2000): 60–68. Embry, Marcus. “Cuban Double-Cross: Father’s Lies in Obejas and Garcia.” In Double Crossings/Entrecruzamientos, edited by Mario Martin Flores and Carlos von Son, 97–107. Fair Haven, N.J.: Ediciones Nuevo Espacio, 2001. Gomez-Vega, Ibis. “The Journey Home: Defining Identity in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” VOCES 1, no. 2 (1997): 71–100. Lopez, Iraida H. “ ‘. . . And There Is Only My Imagination Where Our History Should Be’: An Interview with

GARDNER, ERLE STANLEY 479

Cristina Garcia.” In Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, edited by Ruth Behar, 102–114. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Lopez, Kimberle S. “Women on the Verge of a Revolution: Madness and Resistance in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Letras Femeninas 22, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1996): 33–49. McNamer, Deirdre. “World of Portents,” New York Times Book Review, 15 June 1997, Sec. 7, p. 38. Mitchell, David T. “National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 15, no.1 (Spring 1996): 51–60. Socolovsky, Maya. “Unnatural Violences: Counter-Memory and Preservations in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban and The Aguero Sisters,” LIT 11, no. 2 (August 2000): 143–167. Vorda, Allen. “A Fish Swims in My Lungs: An Interview with Cristina Garcia.” In Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, edited by Allen Vorda and Daniel Stern, 61–76. Houston: Rice University Press, 1993.

OTHER “Cristina Garcia’s Search for Origins” (Interview). School Library Journal (June 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3. asp?DOCID=1G1:105674643. Accessed September 4, 2005. Hernandez, Ana Maria. “Cristina Garcia: The Aguero Sisters.” World Literature Today. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.lasmujeres.com/cristinaGarcia/ aguero.shtml. Accessed September 4, 2005. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. “Cristina Garcia” (June 22, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla. umn.edu/newsite/authors/GARCIAcristina.htm. Accessed September 4, 2005. Payant, Katherine B. “From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristina Garcia,” MELUS. (September 22, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:83042397. Accessed September 4, 2005.

GARDNER, ERLE STANLEY (1889–1970) Erle Stanley Gardner, lawyer and author, combined both talents in creating Perry Mason, the most famous fictional lawyer in American detective fiction, film, and television. Mason was featured in more than 80 of Gardner’s novels and, like his creator, believed in using

the legal system to bring justice to the underdog. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Perry Mason novels have sold over 300 million copies. In addition to the Perry Mason series, Gardner wrote three other series with different heroes: Doug Selby, Terry Clane, and Grandpa Wiggins. Erle Stanley Gardner was born on July 17, 1889, in Malden, Massachusetts, to Grace Adelma Waugh and Charles Walter Gardner, a mining engineer who moved the family to Oregon, the Canadian Klondike, and California. Gardner spent only a few weeks at Valparaiso University in Indiana and was admitted to the California bar after having informally “read law” with practicing attorneys. He married Natalie Frances Talbert in 1921; they separated in 1935, and in 1968 Gardner married Agnes Jean Bethel. He wrote hardboiled fiction for pulp magazines but eventually honed his style into the one he used for the Perry Mason books. Mason, a less hard-boiled and kinder hero, champions the less fortunate and makes sure they have their day in court. Gardner was himself a founder of the Court of Last Resort, an association that worked to reopen the cases of those who might have been falsely convicted. His first Perry Mason novels, both published in 1933, were The Case of the Velvet Claws and The Case of the Sulky Girl. Here Gardner established the witty repartee between Mason and his secretary, Della Street; his character Paul Drake, a private investigator; and the continuing battles with his nemeses, Hamilton Burger, the district attorney, and Lieutenant Tragg of the Los Angeles Police Department. For roughly two decades, the Saturday Evening Post serialized nearly all the Mason novels before they were published in book form. In 1938, writing under the pseudonym A. A. Fair, Gardner began publishing novels that feature diminutive lawyer Donald Lam and his partner, the capacious and crude Bertha Cool. Gardner, who practiced law for 22 years, was also a photographer, sportsman, and inveterate traveler who spoke fluent Chinese. He died on March 11, 1970, in his home at Rancho del Paisano in Temecula, California. His posthumously published novel, another Perry Mason story, was The Case of the

480 GARDNER, JOHN, JR.

Postponed Murder (1973). Since Gardner’s death, Thomas Chastain, beginning with The Case of Too Many Murders (1989), has continued to write the Perry Mason series. The following Gardner novels were adapted by Warner Brothers into feature-length films: The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), The Case of the Curious Bride (1935), The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935), The Case of the Velvet Claws (1936), The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat (1936), and The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1937). CBS broadcast a Perry Mason radio series from 1943 to 1955, the television series Perry Mason from 1957 to 1966, and the New Adventures of Perry Mason from 1973 to 1974. Winner of the 1953 Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Court of Last Resort, Gardner was the recipient of the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1961. Many of his manuscripts are housed at the University of Texas at Austin.

SELECTED NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde. New York: Morrow, 1944. Reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1968. The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat. New York: Morrow, 1935. The Case of the Crooked Candle. New York: Morrow, 1944. Reprint, New York: Garland, 1976. The Case of the Curious Bride. New York: Morrow, 1934. The Case of the Demure Defendant. New York: Morrow, 1956. Reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1970. The Case of the Drowsy Mosquito. New York: Morrow, 1943. The Case of the Fiery Fingers. New York: Morrow, 1951. Reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1981. The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll. New York: Morrow, 1958. The Case of the Gilded Lily. New York: Morrow, 1956. Reprint, New York: Morrow, 1981. The Case of the Haunted Husband. New York: Morrow, 1941. Reprint. New York: Ballantine, 1981. The Case of the Howling Dog. New York: Morrow, 1934. The Case of the Lazy Lover. New York: Morrow, 1947. The Case of the Lucky Legs. New York: Morrow, 1934. The Case of the Lucky Loser. New York: Morrow, 1957. The Case of the Negligent Nymph. New York: Morrow, 1950. Reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1982. The Case of the Perjured Parrot. New York: Morrow, 1939. The Case of the Postponed Murder. New York: Morrow, 1973. The Case of the Rolling Bones. New York: Morrow, 1939. The Case of the Shapely Shadow. New York: Morrow, 1960. Reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1991.

The Case of the Shoplifter’s Shoe. New York: Morrow, 1938. The Case of the Spurious Spinster. New York: Morrow, 1961. The Case of the Stuttering Bishop. New York: Morrow, 1936. The Case of the Sulky Girl. New York: Morrow, 1933. The Case of the Velvet Claws. New York: Morrow, 1933.

SOURCES Bounds, J. Dennis. Perry Mason: The Authorship and Reproduction of a Popular Hero. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Fugate, Francis L., and Roberta B. Fugate. Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer: The Story-telling Techniques of Erle Stanley Gardner. New York: Morrow, 1980. Gardner, Erle Stanley. Host with the Big Hat. New York: Morrow, 1969. Hughes, Dorothy B. Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason. New York: Morrow, 1978. Johnson, Alva. The Case of Erle Stanley Gardner. New York: Morrow, 1947. Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Mundell, E. H. Erle Stanley Gardner: A Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1969. Penzler, Otto. The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crimefighters, and Other Good Guys. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977. Senate, Richard L. Erle Stanley Gardner’s Ventura: The Birthplace of Perry Mason. Ventura, Calif.: Charon Press, 1996.

OTHER “Erle Stanley Gardner (1889–1970).” Books and Writers. Author’s Calendar. Available online. URL: http://www. kirjasto.sci.fi/gardner.htm. Accessed July 2005. The Perry Mason Pages. Available online. URL: http://www. ozemail.com.au/~jsimko/. Accessed July 2005.

GARDNER, JOHN (CHAMPLIN), JR. (1933–1982) John Gardner, distinguished scholar and novelist, said, “If I was a policeman, I’d do something different. If I was an Air Force pilot, I’d do something different; if I was an undertaker, I’d do something different. But since I’m a writer . . . what I have to do is write fiction” (Stanton). That he did in 11 novels, two of which (Stillness and Shadows [1986]) were published posthumously and one of which (Jason and Medeia [1973]) is a novel in verse. Gardner also wrote two short fiction collections, two volumes of poetry, and scholarly works on two medieval English

GARDNER, JOHN, JR. 481

poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain Poet; as many critics point out, Gardner’s novels were remarkable in their appeal to both the public and the literary establishment. Of particular significance are GRENDEL (1971), a retelling of the Old English Beowulf myth from the monster’s point of view; The Sunlight Dialogues (1971), a postmodern reworking of the traditional detective novel (thought by many to be Gardner’s finest work), and October Light (1976), a story of a brother/sister relationship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gardner’s most controversial moments were associated with On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he said that writing and reading fiction should have a moral purpose and he judged many of his contemporaries according to that principle. John Gardner was born on July 21, 1933, in Batavia, New York, to John Champlin, a dairy farmer and lay preacher, and Priscilla Jones Gardner, a high school English teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1955) at Washington University in St. Louis, and both his master’s and doctoral degrees at the University of Iowa (1956, 1958). He was married twice, to Joan Louise Patterson from 1953 to 1976, and to Liz Rosenberg from 1980 to 1982. His first novel, The Resurrection (1966), depicts James Chandler, a philosophy professor diagnosed with leukemia, and his odyssey toward acceptance, courage, and compassion. These essentially optimistic, affirming concepts reappear in all Gardner’s fiction, and it is that point of view that differentiates his work from many of his contemporaries. The Wreckage of Agathon (1970), set in ancient Sparta, tells the story of the seer Agathon, who, with his friend and colleague Demodokos, is thrown in jail by a tyrannical official. Agathon and Demodokos narrate the novel while arguing the merits of the individual versus the state. With Grendel, his third novel, he retells the ancient tale from a modern perspective, using metafictional techniques and a self-reflexive monster, all the while maintaining the integrity of the original and dwelling on the dark forces of wyrd, or fate. Without succumbing to Grendel’s nihilistic despair, Gardner sends him to his death. But the monster himself is moved by the poetry of the Shaper, who implies that life continually renews itself. The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) is a novel on the grand

scale. Set in Batavia in 1966, it blends the story of Taggert Hodge, the half-mad Sunlight Man, with that of Batavia police chief Fred Clumly, who becomes consumed with capturing Hodge. The philosophical bases of the novel rest in these two characters. The Sunlight Man, part trickster, part teacher, has committed crimes because of the gruesome circumstances in his life, and, despite his obsession with reason and order, Clumly learns that the only certainty is accident; he releases the Sunlight Man when he has him in his grasp. In Nickel Mountain (1973) Henry Soames, the lonely, portly middle-aged owner of a diner who fears a second heart attack, offers to marry his pregnant teenage waitress, and she, having no options, accepts. In a novel suffused with random violence and death, the little family provides a life-affirming center that brings stability and comfort to Soames. The King’s Indian, the title novella of The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales (1974), refers not to a Native American but to a chess move, and constitutes a meditation of human nature versus free will. Jonathan Upchurch tells his story to a character named John Gardner; he relates his years on a ship called the Jerusalem evoking both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Herman MELVILLE’s MOBY-DICK. In October Light, the 83-year-old Sally Page Abbot, liberal Democrat and supporter of minority rights, women’s rights, and all government programs, is an anomaly in then conservative Vermont. Her views so outrage her 72-year-old brother James Page that he shoots her television set and locks her in her room. Stubborn and undeterred, she reads the bleak book created by Gardner as a novel within a novel. The book she is reading is a parody of the postmodern novel since it parallels the situation in October Light itself. At the denouement, James’s alcoholic son commits suicide and James decides to reconcile with Sally. Gardner’s last novels are experiments. In Freddy’s Book (1980), Gardner combines two novellas, one set in contemporary Madison, Wisconsin, the other a story slipped under the door of the contemporary narrator, in 16th-century Sweden. In Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), Gardner’s philosophy professor has committed many sins including impregnating a teenage girl and robbing an elderly man who then dies of a heart attack.

482 GARLAND, HANNIBAL HAMLIN

John Gardner was killed at age 49 in a motorcycle accident on September 14, 1982, in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His friend the writer Nicholas Delbanco edited and published Gardner’s last two unfinished novels in one volume, Stillness and Shadows (1986).

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Freddy’s Book. New York: Knopf, 1980. Grendel. New York: Knopf, 1971. Jason and Medeia. New York: Knopf, 1973. The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales. New York: Knopf, 1974. Mickelsson’s Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1982. Nickel Mountain: A Pastoral Novel. New York: Knopf, 1973. October Light. New York: Knopf, 1976. The Resurrection. New York: New American Library, 1966. Stillness and Shadows. Edited by Nicholas Delbanco. New York: Knopf, 1986. The Sunlight Dialogues. New York: Knopf, 1972. The Wreckage of Agathon. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.

SOURCES Beigiebing, Robert J. Toward a New Synthesis: John Fowles, John Gardner, Norman Mailer. Challenging the Literary Canon Series. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International Research Press, 1989. Butts, Leonard. The Novels of John Gardner: Making Life Art as a Moral Process. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Cowart, David. Arches & Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Henderson, Jeff. John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. ———. Thor’s Hammer: Essays on John Gardner. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1985. Howell, John M. John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. ———. Understanding John Gardner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. McWilliams, Dean. John Gardner. Twayne United States Author Series. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Mendez-Egle, Beatrice, ed. John Gardner: True Art, Moral Art. Living Author Series No. 5. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan-American University School of the Humanities, 1983. Morace, Robert A. John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1984. ———, and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds. John Gardner: Critical Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Nutter, Ronald Grant. A Dream of Peace: Art and Death in the Fiction of John Gardner. Modern American Literature: New Approaches, vol. 9. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Renwick, Joyce, and Howard Smith. John Gardner: An Interview. Dallas, Tex.: New London Press, 1980. Silesky, Barry. John Gardner: Literary Outlaw. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2004. Thornton, Susan. On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. Winther, Per. The Art of John Gardner: Instruction and Exploration. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

OTHER The Arch and the Abyss: A John C. Gardner Resource. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/ Oracle/2469/welcome.html. Accessed July 2005. Stanton, David. “John Gardner at Bread Loaf: His Last Interview.” (August 1982). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.sunygenesee.cc.ny.us/Gardner/ stanton.htm. Accessed September 5, 2005.

GARLAND, HANNIBAL HAMLIN (1860– 1940) Hamlin Garland, novelist, short story writer, essayist, memoirist, and literary critic, was among the first of the Western novelists to refuse to perpetuate the romantic Western myths and to insist on using realistic detail of the harsh life; these writers were sometimes called “prairie realists.” Although he wrote more than 40 books, he is best known today for his story collection, Main-Travelled Roads (1891); his autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border (1917); and family histories, including A Daughter of the Middle Border (1921), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. Through his novels and stories he drew readers’ attention to the difficult, often hardscrabble lives of rural folk in the upper Midwest. Garland was particularly active in feminist reform movements, and contemporary critics agree that his best novel is ROSE OF DUTCHER’S COOLLY (1895). He was also knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the plight of the Native American, and The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop (1902) was lauded, even by President Theodore Roosevelt, for its realistic depiction of the Indians and their mistreatment at the hands of unscrupulous whites. Hannibal Hamlin Garland was born on September 14, 1860, on a farm near New Salem, Wisconsin, to

GARLAND, HANNIBAL HAMLIN 483

Richard H. Garland and Isabelle McClintock Garland. He was reared on several farms in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, educated at Cedar Valley Seminary in Osage, Iowa, and continued his reading during the years he lived in Boston between 1884 and 1887. When he returned home, he found himself angered by the plight of the farmers and their wives, and he wrote the stories of their oppressive, narrow frontier lives collected in Main-Travelled Roads. His attempts at longer fiction, the novella Jason Edwards (1892) and A Member of the Third House (1892), were didactic and lacking in artistic technique. His first real novel, A Spoil of Office (1892), follows a young idealistic Iowan to Washington, D.C., where he is horrified by the corrupt politicians he encounters. The novella A Little Norsk; or Ol’ Pap’s Flaxen (1892), although realistic in its account of the plains and farmwork, was an uncharacteristically sentimental tale for Garland (two homesteading Dakota bachelors adopt an orphaned Norwegian girl), but its success showed him the sort of tale that would pay well. Garland settled in Chicago in 1894, his home for the next 12 years, and crusaded for a panoply of just causes, from the single tax to women’s rights to a reformed Indian policy. He wrote his well-known Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama (1894), essays that argued for decreased attention to the classics and a greater focus on Native and contemporary (particularly Western) art. Ironically, however, many critics consider Garland a writer who viewed the West through a romantic rather than a realist lens. Just before he entered the middle, or Western, phase of his career, though, Garland wrote Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, about a young Wisconsin woman who not only escapes the farm and graduates from college but also moves to Chicago and becomes a writer and new woman. After the success of Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly, Garland began writing specifically about the West. In 1899 he married Zulime Taft, sister of the well-known sculptor Lorado Taft. Most readers find that most of these novels are conventional romances for large audiences. They include The Spirit of Sweetwater (1898), Her Mountain Lover (1901), The Light of the Star (1904), Money Magic (1907), Cavanagh, Forest Ranger (1910), and The Forester’s Daughter (1914). He enjoyed some

popular success and critical approval for a few of the Western novels that have both literary and historical merit. The Eagle’s Heart (1900), known as Garland’s “Colorado novel,” depicts Garland’s first Western hero, Harold Excell, who, having been found guilty of killing a man (in self-defense), heads west, temporarily loses his young woman, Mary, to another, but reunites with her to live in the West, far from the overly civilized East. Garland believed that, more than such Western writers as Zane GREY and Owen WISTER, he had helped to invent the Western hero. Garland’s other novel frequently singled out is The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop (1902); it sold nearly 100,000 copies and enjoyed good reviews. Set at Fort Smith, Montana, the novel depicts the dilemma of Captain George Curtis, who must deal with a corrupt Indian agent, prevent the cattlemen from stealing Indian land, and find a way to help the Teton Sioux. Other successes included Hesper (1903), about an eastern woman who goes West to the Rocky Mountains, changes her name to Hesper, and marries a former herder turned wealthy mine owner; it sold over 50,000 copies and received enthusiastic reviews. Money Magic (1907) tells the story of a miner’s strike in Colorado Springs and the adventures and maturing of Bertha, a transplanted easterner who comes into her own in the West. After winning a Pulitzer Prize, Garland moved to Hollywood, California, to be close to his married daughter. Ten years later, in 1940, at the age of 79, he died in Los Angeles of a cerebral hemorrhage and was buried near West Salem, Wisconsin. His papers are housed at the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California and at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Boy Life on the Prairie. New York and London: Macmillan, 1899. The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop. New York and London: Harper, 1902. Cavanagh, Forest Ranger. New York and London: Harper, 1910. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1894. The Eagle’s Heart. New York: Appleton, 1900.

484 GASS, WILLIAM H.

The Forester’s Daughter. New York and London: Harper, 1914. Her Mountain Lover. New York: Century, 1901. Hesper. New York and London: Harper, 1903. Jason Edwards. Boston: Arena, 1892. The Light of the Star. New York: Harper, 1904. A Little Norsk; or Ol’ Pap’s Flaxen. New York: Appleton, 1892. A Member of the Third House. Chicago: Schulte, 1892. The Moccasin Ranch. New York and London: Harper, 1909. Money Magic. New York and London: Harper, 1907. The Mystery of the Buried Crosses. New York: Dutton, 1939. Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly. Chicago: Stone & Kimball, 1895. The Shadow World. New York: Harper, 1908. The Spirit of Sweetwater. Philadelphia: Curtis; New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1898. Revised and enlarged as Witch’s Gold (see below). Witch’s Gold. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906. The Trail of the Goldseekers. New York and London: Macmillan, 1899. The Tyranny of the Dark. New York and London: Harper, 1905. Victor Ollnee’s Discipline. New York and London: Harper, 1911. Wayside Courtships. New York: Appleton, 1897.

SOURCES Gish, Robert. Hamlin Garland: The Far West. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1976. Hamlin Garland’s Diaries. Edited by Donald Pizer. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1968. Holloway, Jean. Hamlin Garland, A Biography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1960. McCullough, Joseph B. Hamlin Garland. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Nagel, James, ed. Critical Essays on Hamlin Garland. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Pizer, Donald. Hamlin Garland’s Early Work and Career. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960. Silet, Charles L. P., Robert E. Welch, and Richard Bourdeau, eds. The Critical Reception of Hamlin Garland: 1891–1978. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1985.

OTHER Hamlin Garland. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu. edu/~campbell/amlit/garland.htm. Accessed September 5, 2005.

GASS, WILLIAM H(OWARD) (1924– ) Even more than the postmodernist writers with whom he is associated—John BARTH, Robert COOVER, Stanley ELKINS, Thomas PYNCHON, William GADDIS, Donald

BARTHELME, and John HAWKES—William Gass has focused on, speculated about, and experimented with the artifices and possibilities of language. He is equally well known for his visionary books, including the significantly entitled The World Within the Word (1978) and On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976). The latter is an exhaustive inquiry into, and commentary on, the uses of the word blue, from Plato to pornography, philosophy to poetry, and blue moods to blue laws. The appearance of his first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), established Gass as a presence in contemporary literature; his “essay/novella,” as Gass calls it, WILLIE MASTERS’ LONESOME WIFE (1971), demonstrated his belief in the futility and artificiality of words. The Tunnel (1995), highly controversial because Gass chose the Holocaust as the subject matter for his continuing examination of the barriers of language, received a PEN/Faulkner Award and a National Book Award. His influence on language and literature has been compared to that of William FAULKNER, the Irish James Joyce, the German Thomas Mann, and the French Marcel Proust. William Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota, to William Bernard Gass and Claire Sorensen Gass. After serving as an ensign in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College (1947) and a doctoral degree from Cornell University (1954). Omensetter’s Luck is set in the 1890s river town of Gilean, Ohio. It explores the nature of luck, life, and death through Brackett Omensetter’s relationship with two other men, Henry Pimber, his landlord, and Jethro Furber, a preacher obsessed with guilt, sex, and death. Both Pimber and Furber are repelled by and attracted to Omensetter, a sort of natural man who is indifferent to language. As with many postmodern novels, however, the novel is not about character and plot, but about language; Gass’s use of words is dazzling (perhaps the most frequently used adjective describing his work), confusing, multilayered, and filled with unusual juxtapositions, mixing urbane allusions with obscenities, for instance. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—often seen as the quintessential example of metafiction—is a self-conscious and self-reflexive inquiry into the process of storytelling and the nature of words. Gass wrote his doctoral thesis on

GASS, WILLIAM H. 485

the nature of metaphor, and in this novella, Babs Masters, Willie’s wife, becomes a metaphor for words themselves: During the lonely woman’s extramarital affair with Phil Kelvin, she seeks solace in a lover, all the while speculating on language. The actual book uses paper of various colors and textures. In the scholar Arthur M. Saltzman’s interpretation, Gass uses sex to unleash the power of words and imagination: “Let the joys of sex inspire the lexicon and rescue it from drab utility” (Saltzman, The Fiction of William Gass, 115). Gass’s major work, The Tunnel, has been described as a book for lovers of language—and also as selfindulgent, a book that some readers will find dull or unpleasant. The protagonist, William Frederick Kohler, a professor of history, has nearly completed his study of Nazi Germany and announces his intention to “put the prison of my life in language.” The resulting use of seemingly indiscriminate detail pleases some readers and repulses others. Kohler’s unfinished book parallels the unfinished tunnel that he digs throughout the novel; some critics view the tunnel as a metaphor for Kohler’s narrow vision and lack of moral commitment. Most critics believe that most of The Tunnel has yet to be fully plumbed, and that the major analyses will come from future generations of scholars. In addition to his career as writer of novels, essays, and short stories, Gass had a long career at Washington University in St. Louis, beginning in 1969. He retired as David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, and, in addition to numerous awards for his essays, won the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. He has been married twice, to Mary Patricia Kelly in 1952, and to Mary Alice Henderson in 1969, and lives in St. Louis, where, until recently, he directed the International Writers Center. The majority of his papers are housed in the Special Collections of the Washington University Libraries, in St. Louis, Missouri.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. New York: Knopf, 1998. Omensetter’s Luck. New York: New American Library, 1966. The Tunnel. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1995. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. New York: Knopf, 1971.

SOURCES Bassoff, Bruce. The Secret Sharers. New York: AMS Press, 1983. Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Bruss, Elizabeth W. Beautiful Theories: The Spectacle of Discourse in Contemporary Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Caramello, Charles. “Fleshing Out Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.” In Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self, and Postmodern American Fiction, 97–111. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1983. Gass, William H. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York: Knopf, 1970. Gilman, Richard. The Confusion of Realms. New York: Random House, 1969. Holloway, Watson L. William Gass. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Kaufmann, Michael. Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1994. ———. “The Textual Body: William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 35, no. 1 (Fall 1993): 27–42. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Klein, Marcus. “Postmodernizing the Holocaust: William Gass in The Tunnel,” New England Review 18, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 79–87. Koval, Ramona. “A Conversation with William Gass on The Tunnel,” Quadrant 40 (July–August 1996): 26–32. McCaffery, Lawrence. Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982. McCourt, James. “Fiction in Review,” Yale Review 83, no. 3 (July 1995): 159–169. Moore, Steven. “Review of The Tunnel,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 159–160. Quendler, Christian. From Romantic Irony to Postmodernist: A Contribution to the History of Literary Self-Reflexivity in Its Philosophical Context. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. Saltzman, Arthur M. “Language and Conscience: An Interview with William Gass,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11 (Fall 1991): 15–28. ———. The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

486 GEEK LOVE

Vidal, Gore. Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973–1976. New York: Random House, 1977. Ziegler, Heide, ed. Facing Texts: Encounters between Contemporary Writers and Critics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988.

OTHER Saltzman, Arthur M. “An Interview with Gass.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 3 (Fall 1991). Dalkey Archive Press. Center for Book Culture. Available online. URL: http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interviewgass.html. Accessed September 5, 2005.

GEEK LOVE KATHERINE DUNN (1989) Geek Love, a National Book Award Finalist, was Katherine Dunn’s third novel, published nearly 20 years after the release of her second novel, Truck. Geek Love combines two stories told by the same narrator, Olympia, who is—in a grotesque flourish for which Dunn has become famous—an albino hunchback. The first story is that of Olympia’s parents, Al and Lil Binewski. The Binewskis are parents who have genetically manipulated their children through feeding Lil methamphetamines, arsenic, and radioactive isotopes during her pregnancies to breed deformed children to populate and act as employees in the family business— the Binewski Fabulon—a traveling freak show. Their children include the narrator, Olympia; the beautiful Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia; and Fortunato, nicknamed Chick, the baby of the family—a boy who looks completely normal, bereft of physical deformities, yet who has been born with the most amazing “deformity” of all—he is a powerful telekinetic and psychic. Also hovering over the book’s story (both literally and figuratively—their bodies are preserved in alcohol for the sideshow patrons to see) are the ghosts of the children who were so deformed that they could not survive—Janus, with a second head growing from the bottom of her spine, and the Lizard Girl, green with a long tail. However, the first thread of the book revolves around the oldest Binewski child—Arturo (called Aqua Boy in the show). A man born with flippers in the place of limbs inspires a cult of fanatical followers who willingly undergo surgery so that they can be more like their “god,” Aqua Boy. Arturo is obsessed with power. In addition to encouraging his cult fol-

lowers to amputate themselves until they are no more than a torso and a head, he was responsible for the Lizard Girl’s death—she was killed by a jealous Arty seven months after her birth. At the same time, a second story winds its way through Geek Love. While the first part of the book delves into the history of the Binewski family, the second deals with the current circumstances of Olympia’s life. Now 40 years old, she has had a daughter (fathered by Arty), Miranda, a beautiful young woman whose only remnant of her mother’s genetic deformities is a tail, which she employs in her work as a stripper while she follows her dream of becoming an artist. Miranda, after being raised in an orphanage, is unaware that Olympia is her mother. However, Olympia keeps track of Miranda, living in the same boarding house and finding herself becoming more and more alarmed at Miranda’s association with the evil Mary Lick—a woman whose frozen food business has left her with millions to fund her mission—to disfigure beautiful women so that they can focus on what Lick sees as a higher pursuit, the development of their intellect. Lick has decided that Miranda is the next candidate for the surgery. Eventually, Olympia insinuates herself into Lick’s group and brings about its downfall (and her own death). The themes that run through Geek Love—the importance of individuality, the superiority of the outsider, and the general horror of life—are apparent to all who read the text. In the afterword to the 1989 paperback edition of Geek Love, Dunn (whose other work also dwells upon these themes) claims that the creation of her dark worldview was through seeing pictures of the World War II concentration camps and photos from the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in Guyana. Likewise, Dunn credits her sympathetic outsider view to the fact that her family worked as migrant farmers and this led her to a sense of rootlessness and identification with the outsider that has followed her for the rest of her life. Critical reception of Geek Love was mixed, although it had wide popular appeal. Matthew Giunti in the Christian Century writes, “One is forced to ask, what does it all mean anyway? Are Al’s efforts to ‘design’ his family a monstrous satire on present day obsessions

GHOST WRITER, THE 487

with programming children for the fast track? Is freakishness a metaphor for a celebrity mad culture in which it is possible to be famous just for being famous? Is the type of self-mutilation engaged by the Arturans a comment on contemporary cults like Jonestown? Does the novel mean any of these things, or anything at all?” (Giunti, 664). In the New York Times Book Review, Stephen Dobyns suggests that the book itself gets away from Dunn because of the huge scope of the two stories, even though the plot, once all the fanciful flourishes are removed, is actually pretty conventional (Dobyns, 12). It is, after all, the story of an American family, albeit one that looks a bit different, but then again William FAULKNER’s families were never known for their normalcy either.

SOURCES Dobyns, Stephen. “Hoping for Something Worse,” New York Times Book Review, 2 April 1989, pp. 11–12. Dunn, Kathryn. Geek Love. New York: Warner Books, 1989. Giunti, Matthew. “Geek Love,” Christian Century 5, no. 12 (July): 664–665. Michael Dittman

GHOST WRITER, THE PHILIP ROTH (1979) In Philip ROTH’s The Ghost Writer Nathan Zuckerman visits his role model and idol, the reclusive writer E. I. Lonoff. In the first sentence, Roth invites us to read the book as a bildungsroman about the protagonist’s development and socialization: “I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman” (3). But because Zuckerman is himself a writer, The Ghost Writer is more properly classified as a Künstlerroman, or a novel about the development of an artist. Many of Zuckerman’s preoccupations stem from the friction his writing has caused in his family and hometown; his father, especially, believes that Nathan should take more care to represent Jews in a positive light in his fiction, especially in his most recent story, “Higher Education.” Zuckerman based “Higher Education” on a family feud over money. Aunt Essie believes the money is hers to send her sons to medical school, while Uncle Sidney,

the black sheep of the family, believes that after his nephews’ undergraduate education, the money is meant for him. The disagreement leads to a lawsuit, which Sidney wins. Aunt Essie goes “to work on the road selling shingles and siding” (50) for 10 years to put her sons through medical school. Zuckerman ends the story when the hardworking Aunt Essie character takes a break in an air-conditioned movie theater, for the first time in 10 years, and the man next to her grabs her knee. Aunt Essie pulls a hammer out of her purse, and the story “conclude[s] with Essie taking aim” (51). Zuckerman’s father fears that this story will give anti-Semites ammunition against Jews, encouraging them to think that Jews are interested chiefly in money. When a local judge writes Nathan at his father’s behest, asking him to consider the possible effects of his representation of Jews, the debate between artist and family grows into a debate between artist and community. Nathan’s father and the judge see the story in terms of representation: The story exists as a quasi-factual representation of Newark’s Jews. According to those standards, the story is dangerous. Zuckerman, who sees the story in terms of art, thinks he should not need to serve as a representative for the Jews, but solely as a writer. Zuckerman negotiates this conflict in the best way he knows how: imaginatively. In Lonoff’s home, he meets Amy Bellette, whom he at first assumes is Lonoff’s daughter. Fascinated by her “severe dark beauty” (11), he imagines himself married to her, thus becoming a more literal son to Lonoff. But Amy is not his daughter—she is an ex-student of Lonoff who is now sorting his papers for an academic library (16). It becomes clear, as the story progresses, that Amy and Lonoff’s relationship goes beyond that of studentteacher. Although Amy’s story is vague, Lonoff appears to have sponsored her move to America. He also appears to be having—or ending—an affair with her. Intrigued by her European accent, her haunted beauty, and the vague details of her past, Zuckerman imagines that Amy Bellette is really Anne Frank, having lived through the concentration camps and made her way to America, where she can forge a life unhindered by others’ expectations of her. He imagines marrying her and imagines this as the ultimate trump to those who

488

GHOST WRITER, THE

would criticize him as an anti-Semite. He also realizes, in the end, that the very fact that he imagined marrying Anne Frank “would seem to them [his critics] a desecration even more vile than the one they had read [Zuckerman’s “Higher Education”] (103). His desire not to offend does not, in the end, win out over his dedication to his art. Though he wants to use Amy/Anne as a shield with his family, he also identifies with her. Although “neither she [Anne Frank] nor her parents came through in the diary as anything like representative of religious or observant Jews” (86), she is remembered chiefly as a representative of Jews, not as a writer or even a person. According to Zuckerman, the fact that she was not representative of Jewishness “was the point . . . that was what gave her diary the power to make the nightmare real” (87). Zuckerman feels that, because of the same anti-Semitic forces that led to the Holocaust, his own people and his own father are encouraging him to be less of a person. He feels that writing to represent the Jewish people would, paradoxically, make his art less real. This is a problem of ethos, in the classical sense. Ethos, or voice, is how writers or speakers use language to project their identity. In classical rhetoric, ethos served as a bridge between the identity of the speaker and the values of the audience. The speaker created a voice, or character, that would be acceptable and persuasive to the audience. But in The Ghost Writer, ethos serves as a chasm between the writer and the family or community. Zuckerman praises Anne Frank’s voice to Amy Bellette, but as Zuckerman imagines it a living Anne Frank would have to give up not only her voice, but claim to her very existence, in order to appease her books’ audience. Amy/Anne’s character would change so drastically were she to show herself that she feels she can never do so: She must stifle her voice, continue living under another identity, and never be reunited with her father. The community’s insistence that the author’s voice say what they need it to say dramatically affects Amy/Anne’s life. Zuckerman suddenly understands Lonoff’s ethos— his character as expressed through his voice—when Lonoff explains each little quirk of the record player: “And this, I realized, is the excruciating scrupulosity,

the same maddening, meticulous attention to every last detail that makes you [Lonoff] great, that keeps you going and got you through and now is dragging you down” (45). This meticulousness is Lonoff’s voice, character, and tragic flaw. Its price is a reclusive life that ill-suits his wife, Hope, and causes problems for them: another instance in which the individual’s voice and the family are at odds. Lastly, Lonoff speaks to Zuckerman’s writing when he praises its “turbulence” (20), although Zuckerman takes this praise as criticism. In clarifying, Lonoff tells Zuckerman that he has “the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years. . . . I don’t mean style . . . I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head” (44). But “an unruly personal life will probably better suit” (20) a voice like Zuckerman’s, in Lonoff’s opinion, which means that disagreements with his family and community are likely to continue. That is the price Zuckerman will pay for his voice. Hope’s pathetic attempt to leave Lonoff at the end suggests that, despite the drama and frustrations, artists and their families might always have to live together. Metaphorically, this suggests that the artist and society, though at times antagonistic, must always come to terms with each other. Beyond being about the particulars of a minority group’s struggle to be allowed the full breadth of their humanity rather than a representative caricature, beyond being about the artist’s need to balance art with life, and beyond the need of a child to break the bounds of the parents’ rules, The Ghost Writer gets at the heart of what might be the defining conundrum of modern life: how to balance the individual’s freedom with the needs and benefits of the community. The novel ends with Lonoff deliberately and resignedly following his wife, leaving Nathan alone to “make his feverish notes” about what he’s witnessed during his visit, saying “I’ll be curious to see how we all come out someday. It could be an interesting story. You’re not so nice and polite in your fiction. . . . You’re a different person.” Nathan indulges briefly in that classic downward spiral of a question, “Then does he know all I know?,” and arrives at this conclusion: “But

GIANT 489

what do I know, other than what I can imagine?” And indeed, what he has imagined—that Amy Bellette is really Anne Frank—is the most startling revelation of the story; it says more about Zuckerman, Roth, and the lineaments of their imaginations than it does about the Lonoff household. This shift in focus, from the Lonoffs and Bellette to Zuckerman himself, makes the novel a true Künstlerroman. Roth followed various stages in Zuckerman’s development in Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and “The Prague Orgy” (1985), which were published together as Zuckerman Bound (1985), “a trilogy and an epilogue” (cover); In the Counterlife (1986); and the later “AMERICAN TRILOGY”: AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). The Human Stain finds Zuckerman, at age 65, still developing as an artist, still dealing with issues of ethos, self, and community, and living in Lonoff’s town in the Berkshires, having come full circle.

SOURCES Baumgarten, Murray, and Barbara Gottfried. Understanding Philip Roth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Brent, Jonathan. “The Unspeakable Self: Philip Roth and the Imagination.” In Reading Philip Roth, edited by Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, 180–200. London: Macmillan, 1988. Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Halio, Jay. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Hendley, W. Clark. “An Old Form Revitalized: Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer and the Bildungsroman,” Studies in the Novel 16, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 87–100. Lee, Hermione. Philip Roth. New York: Methuen, 1982. Milowitz, Steven. Philip Roth Reconsidered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer. New York: Garland, 2000. Roth, Philip. The Ghost Writer. 1979. In Zuckerman Bound, 1–108. New York: Ballantine, 1986. Royal, Derek Parker. Philip Roth: A Bibliography and Research Guide. The Philip Roth Society. Available online. URL: http://orgs.tamucommerce.edu/rothsoc/resources.htm. Accessed April 1, 2006. Rubin, Derek. “Philip Roth and Nathan Zuckerman: Offenses of the Imagination,” Dutch Quarterly Review of Anglo-American Letters 13, no. 1 (1983): 42–54.

Shechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Wade, Stephen. Imagination in Transit: The Fiction of Philip Roth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Kerry Higgins Wendt

GIANT EDNA FERBER (1952)

Once you encounter Giant, Edna FERBER’s sprawling, brawling Texas novel, it is virtually impossible to think about the Lone Star State without thinking also of the novel, the film (equally sprawling, even more brawling), or both. Ferber considered alternative titles for her saga that spans 25 years in the lives of Bick and Leslie Benedict, including “Jillion,” “Big Rich,” and “No Man Is an Island.” But the single word selected best reflects the novel’s relentless, larger-than-life dimension, an underlying theme confronting readers on almost every page. Ferber’s 1952 portrayal of “modern Texas in the making” generated Texas-size verbal gushers encompassing the state and its people, novel characters and their actions, and eventually the book itself. For instance, here is Ferber describing her first impressions of Texas: “On that initial visit I had been vastly interested, astounded; confused and startled; repelled and attracted.” Subsequent visits generated similar sensations: “Shocked. Enchanted. Repelled. Delighted.” Later, she characterized Texas as “exhilarating, violent, charming, horrible, fascinating, shocking, Texas alive.” And its citizens, “[O]utrageous and delightful; and hospitable and resentful; and arrogant and insecure; and flamboyant and deprecatory; simple and complicated.” Jordan “Bick” Benedict (“pronounced ‘Jurden,’ with a ‘u,’ Texas fashion”) is the quintessential Texan. Ferber notes his “strangely contradictory face, benign and arrogant. Benevolent and ruthless. . . . His was a deceptive gentleness; soft-spoken, almost mild. His eyes were completely baffling; guileless, visionary; calculating, shrewd.” Leslie describes Bick to her father as “handsome intelligent sexy ambitious successful vital amusing tender tough. Everything.” After a pause, she adds “power-mad” and “dictator.” This same excessiveness (and lack of punctuation) Ferber applies to a cattle-branding episode. “Here were men riding running leaping; wrestling with huge ani-

490 GIANT

mals ten times their size; men slim heavy tall short young old bronze copper tan lemon black white.” Sights and sounds cascade over the entire scene: “calves bawled, cows bellowed, men yelled, hoofs pounded, gates slammed, flesh burned, irons clanged, dust swirled, sun glared.” For an instant, the novel itself is transformed into a movie. While Bick represents an entire state, Giant remains Edna Ferber’s novel, meaning a woman—in this instance, Leslie—occupies center stage. To convey both the staggering potential and the considerable pitfalls of Texas and its mind-set, Ferber employs the same device used in all her regional novels for the last three decades: uprooting her young heroine from the security of her girlhood home and moving her into a strange, unfamiliar (and often, as in this case, patriarchal) world. This takes place in Giant when Leslie Lynnton marries Bick Benedict and moves from her comfortable Virginia surroundings to Reata, her new home on the range. In the course of her marriage, Leslie comes to understand Texans, accepting that she can never truly become one of them. In the book’s later pages, the generational arc surfaces—another familiar Ferber trait— as youth mellows into middle age and the story’s focus begins shifting to the next generation. One of Ferber’s primary purposes in writing Giant was to warn complacent, arrogant, postwar Americans about the dangers of success. In their lifestyles and philosophies, Leslie and Bick personify the gulf between true and false success. Her world is graceful and sophisticated; his is utilitarian and suspicious of culture and beauty. Her outlook is democratic; his is autocratic. She respects nature; he strives to conquer it. Her interests include the larger world; he focuses exclusively on Reata. Ferber reminds readers that false success binges on wealth, position, influence, and notoriety, with the ultimate effect being excess, revulsion, even revolution. While Bick embodies some of these tendencies, he is overshadowed in these areas by his rival, Jett Rink, the original “JR,” whose monogram (brand?) is imprinted on everything he encounters. Ferber encapsulates Rink, Reata ranch-hand-turned-oil-baron, in

one word: “biggestmillionsbiggestbillionbiggesttrillionsbiggestzillions.” In contrast, Leslie is a model of true success, focused on balanced, caring values reflected in her simplicity, civility, and self-fulfillment. At one point, Leslie shares with Bick her expectations of their life together, acknowledging the many crosscurrents: “It’s going to be wonderful and terrible. I suppose we’re in for a stormy future. I’m going to try to change you and you’re going to be impatient when I don’t melt into all this.” She swept the vastness with her arms. “Whoever said love conquers all was a fool. Because almost everything conquers love—or tries to.” Her assessment is accurate, yet Ferber also notes one of the strongest positive forces underlying Giant, that “after many years of marriage and disillusionment, [Leslie] is still deeply in love with her husband.” Shaughnessy analyzes Ferber novels by zeroing in on her heroines and their approach to life, noting that Leslie is different. Whereas most Ferber women strive to transform their husbands into “go-getters,” Leslie actually tries to rein in Bick. Nor does Leslie exhibit the typical go-getting qualities herself, since these qualities are already all too available in Texas and on Reata. “They have, in fact, become vices through excess. Leslie is not trying to enter and excel in this world, but to oppose it, maintain her individuality, to keep it from destroying her. She is trying not to succeed . . . in a world where all the effects of success are negative.” Giant was serialized in Ladies Home Journal, May through November 1952, and published by Doubleday in September 1952. According to Ferber’s account, “The novel turned out to be what is known as a controversial book—to put it mildly.” Her biographer and grand-niece, Julie Goldsmith Gilbert, was not particularly mild. “To say the impact of Giant created a tumult not only in the book world but in the real world of the United States would not be an exaggeration. It was a much-talked-about book not only from the standpoint of readability but of libel-ity. The entire state of Texas felt impugned by it and it created in displaced Texans a surge of nationalistic nastiness.” Giant sold well—it was the sixth-best-selling book in 1952—due in part to reviews, which, as Gilbert noted, “were some of the best Ferber ever received, and even the ones that were

GIBBONS, KAYE 491

condemning were money reviews” (sending readers out to buy the book). Both positive and negative reviews tended to be gushers. According to the Houston Press, “Giant is the most gargantuan hunk of monsterous, ill informed, hokum-laden hocus-pocus ever turned out about Texas.” Orville Prescott in the New York Times said Giant was “entertaining as a brisk, slick, clever, constantly moving story.” The cover of the paperback Cardinal edition repeated many of Ferber’s adjectives (ones she had used to describe Texas), calling the book “a powerful American story—exhilarating, exasperating, violent, charming, horrible, delightful, alive.” Gilbert’s assessment is that in Giant, Ferber became “Texas’s first and most famous muckraker,” creating a novel that “roped up Texas like a great, thick steer.” The steer bawled and bucked, but neither the noise nor the movement altered the fact. Today, more than 50 years after Giant was published, when the subject turns to Texas and certain images flash to mind, many of the most vivid originate in Edna Ferber’s Giant.

SOURCES Ferber, Edna. Giant. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952. ———. A Kind of Magic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber, A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Women & Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon Press, 1977. Michael J. Meyer

GIBBONS, KAYE (1960– )

Kaye Gibbons has the rare ability to combine bold literary experimentation with accessibility. Her large audience appreciates both the depiction of strong and resilient female characters and Gibbons’s use of language. According to the scholar Julian Mason, her work is memorable for its “images and metaphors, its rural Southern cadences, and the matter-of-fact power in its storytelling” (Mason, 165). In most of her novels, Gibbons uses a strong first-person narrator to delineate the problems inherent in family life, particularly among women who are neither affluent nor members of elite society; she addresses, too, the conflicts between the Old South and the New. Her success at this

approach is exemplified by Ellen Foster (1987), which earned accolades from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation, and the American Library Association. Paramount optioned the movie rights. Reared in rural Nash County, North Carolina, Kaye Batts was born on May 5, 1960, to Charles Batts, a tobacco farmer, and Alice Batts (“Shine”), who committed suicide at age 47. After living with a series of relatives and in foster homes, Gibbons attended both North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she wrote Ellen Foster, the tale of an abused 11-year-old girl. Reviewers compared this character to Mark TWAIN’s Huck Finn and to J. D. SALINGER’s Holden Caulfield. In this novel Gibbons evokes Ellen’s grim childhood and much more comfortable adulthood, and eloquently describes her close relationship with her black friend Starletta. A VIRTUOUS WOMAN, her second novel, appeared two years later. It is the story of a marriage, that of Ruby and Jack Stokes, told through alternating interior monologues both by Jack and by the recently deceased Ruby. This technique suggests the work of William FAULKNER, particularly in AS I LAY DYING and The Wild Palms. However, compared to the Faulknerian couples, the Stokeses seem to have had a relatively happy marriage. In A Cure for Dreams (1991), set in rural Kentucky, Gibbons treats three generations of women in the same family: Lottie, the grandmother; Betty, her daughter; and Marjorie, her granddaughter. Although the stories are mainly Lottie’s (with anecdotes about Lottie’s own spirited Irish mother), the first-person voice belongs to Betty, who also recounts her Depression-era youth and the birth of Marjorie during World War II. Charms for the Easy Life (1993) began as a sequel to A Cure for Dreams but, in the final version, became the completely separate story of Charlie Kate, an African-American midwife and folk healer, her daughter Sophia, and her granddaughter Margaret, who narrates this fourdecade-long tale that ends with World War II. Gibbons continues to write novels about women facing adversity. Sights Unseen (1995) deals with a mentally ill mother from the point of view of the 12-year-old narrator, Hattie, while in On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998), Emma Garnet Tate Lowell remembers in

492 GILCHRIST, ELLEN

the year 1900 her father’s brutality, the vicious institution of slavery, and the saving grace of her nursemaid, Clarice. More recent novels are Divining Women (2004), in which Mary Oliver liberates her tyrannized Aunt Maureen, and The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster (2005), a sequel to Ellen Foster. Kaye Gibbons continues to be lauded by writers from the South—Elizabeth SPENCER, Lee SMITH, Josephine HUMPHREYS, and the late Walker PERCY—and appreciated by readers all over the United States. Both Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club, made Gibbons famous far beyond the South.

NOVELS Charms for the Easy Life. New York: Putnam, 1993. A Cure for Dreams. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1991. Divining Women. New York: Putnam, 2004. Ellen Foster. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987. The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon. New York: Putnam, 1998. Sights Unseen. New York: Putnam, 1995. A Virtuous Woman. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1989.

SOURCES Gibbons, Kaye. How I Became a Writer: My Mother, Literature, and a Life Split Neatly into Two Halves. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1991. Mason, Julian. “Kaye Gibbons.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 156–168. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Watkins, James, ed. Southern Selves, from Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to Maya Angelou and Kaye Gibbons: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing. New York: Vintage, 1998.

OTHER Official Website of Kaye Gibbons. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/1713/books_gibbons- k. html. Accessed July 2005.

GILCHRIST, ELLEN (LOUISE) (1935– ) Ellen Gilchrist, award-winning Southern novelist, short story writer, poet, and scriptwriter, may be seen both as a regionalist and as one whose ideas transcend the characteristics of a particular place. In her fiction she examines Southern women, as did Ellen GLASGOW, but Gilchrist has also been compared to the Southern

writers Carson McCULLERS, Flannery O’CONNOR, and Tennessee WILLIAMS. Her novels can be measured, too, against those of the contemporary Southern writers Lee SMITH and Bobbie Ann MASON, the California writer Alice ADAMS, or those of Joyce Carol OATES, a writer whose roots are in western New York State. Gilchrist never defines herself as a feminist per se. She addresses the struggle of women to achieve self-realization despite gender bias and social snobbery. Gilchrist won the American Book Award for Victory over Japan (1984), a collection of interconnected short stories, and has been widely praised for such novels as The Anna Papers (1988). Gilchrist’s characters, particularly those from the Hand, McCarney, and Manning families, reappear frequently (as do Faulkner’s) in both novels and stories. Born February 20, 1935, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to William Garth, an engineer, and Aurora Alford Gilchrist, Ellen Louise Gilchrist spent her first years in Mississippi and subsequent years in Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky. She returned frequently, however, to Hopedale Plantation, Mississippi, home of her maternal grandparents. After earning a bachelor of arts degree from Mississippi’s Millsaps College in 1967, Gilchrist worked as a reporter for the New Orleans Vieux Carré Courier before turning to poetry and fiction. Her first novel, Annunciation (1983), rewrites the New Testament annunciation, using a contemporary Southern setting, and replaces the biblical Mary figure with the adolescent Amanda McCarney. After bearing her cousin Guy’s child out of wedlock, Amanda seeks happiness with several different men but cannot shed her guilt over giving up her baby for adoption. Finally, she falls in love with Will Lyon, bears his child, finds meaning in her own artistic talents, and plans a reunion with her first child. This scene is later described in “The Song of Songs,” a story in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989). Five years later, in The Anna Papers (1988), Gilchrist once again uses Anna Hand, a character who appeared first in “Anna, Part I” in the collection Drunk with Love (1986) and explores the life of this writer-character. Now she is struggling to justify her affair with a married man as she battles breast cancer.

GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS 493

In I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas (1990), Anna Hand searches for her troubled niece in England and Turkey (in the novella Winter). In the second novella, De Havilland Hand, Gilchrist explores early generations of the Hand family as they clash with Oklahoma Indians. As the scholar Robert Bain notes, in the final novella, A Summer in Maine, Gilchrist uses a Faulknerian narrative technique: Thirteen characters present insights into both the Manning and the Hand families (Bain, 180). In Net of Jewels, Gilchrist’s third novel, one particular member of the Manning family, Rhoda Manning, attends college, meets and marries Malcolm Martin, bears his children, and finds that her marriage is in trouble. Starcarbon: A Meditation of Love includes numerous characters from earlier works, including Olivia de Havilland Hand, the half-Cherokee family member who seeks to reunite with her grandparents in Oklahoma. The novel uses a large genealogical chart to follow other Hand family members as they journey to New Orleans, Boston, and North Carolina. Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior, is Gilchrist’s first foray into the ancient past: Set in Greece, the novel features Auria, an illiterate Greek slave girl who escapes and then rebels against the rigid class system into which she was born. Gilchrist’s most recent novel is Sarah Conley (1997).

NOVELS Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. The Anna Papers. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. The Annunciation. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. The Courts of Love: A Novella and Stories. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Net of Jewels. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Sarah Conley. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997. Starcarbon: A Meditation of Love. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

SOURCES Bain, Robert M. “Ellen Gilchrist.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 169–185. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. McCay, Mary A. Ellen Gilchrist. New York: Twayne, 1997.

McDonnell, Jane Taylor. “Controlling the Past and the Future: Two-Headed Anna in Ellen Gilchrist’s The Anna Papers.” In The Anna Book, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 187–193. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Thompson, Jeanie, and Anita Miller Garner. “The Miracle of Realism: The Bid for Self-Knowledge in the Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 233–247. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Reprinted from Southern Quarterly 32 (Fall 1983): 101–114.

GILMAN, CHARLOTTE PERKINS (CHARLOTTE ANNA PERKINS STETSON GILMAN) (1860–1935) A feminist revolutionary and a prolific writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is known now primarily for her novella The YELLOW WALLPAPER (1899). That work alone has made her an iconic figure for most feminists. She began her career as a poet and wrote nearly 200 short stories and numerous essays as well as Women and Economics (1898), the book that made her internationally famous. Only late in life did Gilman turn to novel writing, and both What Diana Did (1910) and The Crux (1911) were published in her magazine, The Forerunner. Her feminist utopian novels, Moving the Mountain (1911), HERLAND (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916), followed. It is in these novels that Gilman proposed feminist solutions for a variety of society’s dilemmas. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 3, 1860, to Frederick Beecher Perkins of the New England Beechers, who included Harriet Beecher STOWE, and Mary Fitch Westcott. After her father deserted the family, Charlotte and her mother moved 19 times in 18 years, chronically in need of help and financial support. After completing a two-year course at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1880, she then supported herself by private teaching and freelance drawing until she married the Rhode Island artist Charles Walter Stetson on May 2, 1884. After the birth of their daughter in 1885, Gilman suffered the despondency and postpartum depression captured forever in The Yellow Wallpaper, a now classic study of the psychological subjugations caused by some marriages and some entries into motherhood. It raises the question, still widely discussed, of what a

494 GINGER MAN, THE

woman must do to save herself beyond the responsibilities she may have as a wife and/or mother, and the larger issue of when caretaking turns into infantilization and, finally, emotional collapse. Gilman moved to Pasadena, California, began to write, and divorced Stetson in 1894. Moving the Mountain is set in in 1940 (at that time, the future) and describes the equal roles of men and women in a socialist society. Herland describes an all-female society ruled by nurturing women who create a peaceful, rational society. It implicitly critiques chaotic and warlike masculine models. Herland was serialized in The Forerunner, as was With Her in Ourland, the sequel. In 1900, Gilman married her first cousin, George Houghton Gilman; their marriage lasted until his death in 1934. Gilman, diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932, chose to take her own life on August 17, 1935. Her influence on feminist thought and literature has been profound.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 2 vols. Edited by Denise D. Knight. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. ———. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1935. Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Feminist Press, 1992. Hill, Mary A. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical Feminist, 1860–1896. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980. Karpinski, Joanne B. Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Lane, Ann J. To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Scharnhorst, Gary. Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

Continuously in print for more than half a century, J. P. DONLEAVY’s The Ginger Man has invited controversy since its initial publication by Olympia Press in 1955, when, to Donleavy’s dismay, it was printed as part of Olympia’s pornographic series. Donleavy launched a vigorous, decades-long lawsuit against Olympia, finally buying the company himself and winning American publication rights for the unexpurgated text in 1965. By 1967 the novel was on college and university course lists and became, for some, the epitome of counterculturism and, therefore, a cult classic. For others, the book describes a comic antihero who speaks for and acts out the more universal post–World War II feelings of angst. Scholars and devotees continue to debate whether The Ginger Man typifies literature of the Angry Young Man, the Beats, nihilism, or existentialism. All, however, agree that the novel exemplifies black humor, the darkly comic mode so prevalent in post–World II fiction. In 1999, the novel caused another stir when it appeared on the Modern Library “100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century” list, with some readers arguing that it deserved a higher position on the list (it was in 99th place) and others arguing that it did not belong there at all. Sebastian Dangerfield, the rollicking, brawling, womanizing American expatriate law student at Trinity

(Under the name Charlotte Perkins Stetson) Benigna Machiavelli (originally published in Forerunner, 1914). Santa Barbara, Calif.: Bandanna Books, 1994. The Crux. New York: Charlton, 1911. Herland (originally published in Forerunner, 1915). New York: Pantheon, 1979. Moving the Mountain. New York: Charlton, 1911. What Diantha Did. New York: Charlton, 1910. With Her in Ourland. Published in Forerunner, 1916. The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Small Maynard, 1899. Published as The Yellow Wall-Paper, and Other Stories, edited and with an introduction by Robert Shulman; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Published as The Yellow Wall-Paper, afterword by Elaine R. Hedges; New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1996.

SOURCES Allen, Polly Wynn. Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Davidson, Cathy N. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989.

GINGER MAN, THE J. P. DONLEAVY (1955)

GINGER MAN, THE 495

College in Dublin, Ireland, has become a familiar name in the canon of American literary heroes. The name is likely to derive from the childhood tale of the Gingerbread Man and the lines, “Run, run, as fast as you can;/ you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.” Sebastian is the antihero, the wild Ginger Man, whom readers find hilarious, outrageous, lyrical, sympathetic, and the incarnation of 20th-century man—when they are not finding him depressed, contemptuous, and violent, a wife- and child-abuser without a shred of dependability or even accountability. Initially, at least, Donleavy presents a protagonist who is compelling in his energy and joie-de-vivre and refreshing in his antagonism toward and resistance to the middle-class work ethic and to the dictates of Catholicism. At times, his lack of self-consciousness, his honesty, and his compulsion to express the moment in effervescent, often lyrical, detail is endearing. To his friend, Kenneth O’Keefe, he remarks, “When you come back, Kenneth, I’ll walk naked wearing a green bowler to greet you at the boat. With a donkey cart and green streamers and shamrocks imported from Czechoslovakia and a band of girl pipers blowing like mad” (215). Donleavy’s manipulation of the narrative point of view has long been noted for its effectiveness, its expression of the staccato, fragmented quality of both thought and modern life, as well as its Joycean antecedents. Sebastian typically speaks in both the first and the third person, making himself at some times an observer and at others the subject, as when he describes his reunion with his friend Mac MacDoon, who offers him a kidney to eat: “Mac with smiles brought forth the rare organ and it was set upon wildly. Dangerfield withdrew from this savory with a raised eyebrow. Mac handed him the letter over the heads. What’s the news? Look at my white cuffs. Look. And this tweed is some tweed” (215). His lack of idealism can be seen as appealing in that he eschews the romantic notions about money common among students, i.e., Sebastian wants to become wealthy because he has experienced insolvency and he knows what money can buy. He is less endearing, however, in his view of the poor: “All I want out of this life,” he avows, “is my rightful place and for others to keep theirs. The common people back down where

they belong” (193). Although he wishes to become “Sebastian Bullion Dangerfield, Chairman of Quids, Inc., largest banking firm in the world” (24), Sebastian is incapable of attending his law classes, studying, or passing examinations. He is equally incapable of passing up a pub, and he is usually very drunk when he beats up his wife Marion. Donleavy has frequently noted his admiration for Kafka, and he clearly subscribes to Kafka’s vision of an absurd world. Those who view Sebastian as a bawdy but likeable rogue, a descendant of the picaresque tradition, see the novel as a comic epic. Donleavy is, moreover, compared to such contemporary writers as Saul BELLOW and Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, particularly in regard to his repeated use of the hero as stranger, as exile, as outsider, as alien. Despite his surface ebullience, many readers see the nonconformist Sebastian as a melancholy man who cannot succeed in love and who knows that he waits for death. In this regard, his creator has been likened to the misanthropic satirist Jonathan Swift or to the melancholy and pessimistic Mark TWAIN of his later work. Only in the last decade, with Donleavy’s publication of The History of the Ginger Man (1994), did he identify Gainor Stephen Crist, another American expatriate living in Ireland, as the model for Sebastian Dangerfield. In the words of scholar Ihab Hassan, “the primary value which the novel asserts is the value of courage, the ability to stare into the void” (Hassan, 200). And indeed, perhaps more than other lines in a book full of memorable statements, the final ones remain hauntingly with the reader: “On a winter night I heard horses on a country road, beating sparks out of the stones. I knew they were running away and would be crossing the fields where the pounding would come up into my ears. And I said they are running out to death which is with some soul and their eyes are mad and teeth out. God’s mercy On the wild Ginger Man” (304). The Ginger Man was produced as a play in Dublin and London in 1959 and in New York in 1963.

496 GIRL, THE

SOURCES Alsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties. London: Owen, 1958. Casey, Daniel J., and Robert E. Rhodes, eds. Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticisms. New York: AMS, 1979. Cohen, Dean. “The Evolution of Donleavy’s Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 12 (1970): 95–109. Donleavy, J. P. A Singular Country. Peterborough, England: Ryan, 1989. Reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1990. ———. J. P. Donleavy’s Ireland: In All Her Sins and in Some of Her Graces. New York: Viking, 1986. ———. The Ginger Man. Paris: Olympia Press, 1955. Published with introduction by Arland Ussher, London: Neville Spearman, 1956; New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958; complete and unexpurgated edition, New York: Delacorte, 1965. ———. The History of the Ginger Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Eckley, Grace. “Two Irish-American Novelists: J. P. Donleavy and Jimmy Breslin,” Illinois School Journal 55 (1975): 28–33. Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Johnson, John. “Tears and Laughter: The Tragic Comic Novels of J. P. Donleavy,” Michigan Academician 9 (Summer 1976): 15–24. LeClair, Thomas. “A Case of Death: The Fiction of J. P. Donleavy,” Contemporary Literature 12 (Summer 1970): 329–344. Masinton, Charles G. J. P. Donleavy: The Style of His Sadness and Humor. Bowling Green, Ohio: Popular Press, 1975. Moore, Harry T. ed. Contemporary American Novelists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Morse, Donald E. “The Skull Beneath the Skin: J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man,” Michigan Academician 6 (Winter 1974): 273–280. Podhoretz, Norman. Doings and Undoings. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Sharma, R. K. Isolation and Protests: A Case Study of J. P. Donleavy’s Fiction. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1983. Shaw, Patrick W. “The Satire of J. P. Donleavy’s Ginger Man,” Studies in Contemporary Satire 1 (1975): 9–16. Widmer, Kingsley. The Literary Rebel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965.

GIRL, THE MERIDEL Le SUEUR (1978) Meridel LE SUEUR’s The Girl is the story of many of the poor and

working poor in Minnesota during the Great Depression. The main character is unnamed, thus functioning as a symbol for all the girls who have been ignored and betrayed by a society with little compassion for the plight of the hungry and homeless. The girl is a simple country girl who travels to St. Paul to find work at the German Village, a bootleg joint run by Belle, Hoinck, and Ack. She falls in love with Butch, an unemployed former baseball player who occasionally works as a scab during strikes. She quickly becomes pregnant by him and resists the attempts of Butch and others to provide an abortion. Gantz, a gangster to whom Belle, Hoinck, and Ack pay protection for the German Village, pulls them all together for a heist on a bank. The heist goes awry when Gantz shoots Ack and Hoinck in order to escape with all the money; Butch shoots him and, while dying, Gantz shoots Butch. Although Butch makes it to the girl in the getaway car, he dies later that same day, and she is forced to abandon him near a cornfield in Iowa. The fortunes of Belle, the girl, Amelia (a Workers Alliance leader), and their friend Clara (a prostitute) take a turn for the worse after the robbery. Clara is physically ill and stressed by hardship; the relief workers take her for electric shock treatments, which eventually kill her. The girl, trying to get enough relief to nurture her pregnancy, is betrayed by relief workers who plan to sterilize her after the birth of her baby; she is briefly incarcerated in a relief maternity ward, but Amelia helps her get out. The end of the novel brings the triumphant birth of the girl’s baby, who is named Clara. The original manuscript of The Girl was produced in 1939, but it was not until the feminist movement of the 1970s that her work was rediscovered. John Crawford sought out Meridel Le Sueur and her work, editing and publishing several of her novels, including The Girl through his West End Press. Originally revolving around several women who had lost male companions in a botched bank robbery, the book was rewritten to become the story of the unnamed girl. In her afterword to the text, Le Sueur emphasizes that this story of the girl and the group of women in which she finds community is the story of many women, women who told and transcribed their stories for, or had them transcribed by, Le Sueur within the

GLANCY, DIANE 497

Workers Alliance. This emphasis upon community, women, and the underemployed poor (and the oppression they have faced and still face) is an emphasis repeated throughout her work. For Le Sueur, women represent community in part through their ability to bear life: They are the bearers of what she constantly refers to as “the seed.” Her emphasis upon the working class is a result of both her placement within it from the time she was a child and her sense that the working class is more vital and in touch with the earth; capitalism, especially industrial capitalism, is repeatedly depicted as a scourge, as a dehumanizing and violent structure responsible for the hardship of and violence done to the working poor. The emphasis on maternity is a bone of contention with Le Sueur’s critics, who claim that she is essentializing female behavior and reinscribing dominant paradigms about female experience. However, Constance Coiner records surprise at the fact that “pregnancy, labor, the moment of birth, and the nurturing of a newborn” have been represented so little in literature (Coiner, 169). The transgressive nature of the attempt by Le Sueur to chronicle a subject considered minor in dominant literature is suggested by her response (circa 1935) to an editor at Scribner who went so far as to suggest to Le Sueur that she write more like Ernest HEMINGWAY: “Fishin’, fightin’, and fuckin’,” she tersely replied, “are not the sum of my experience” (Coiner, 170). She is also countering a lack of emphasis by the Left circles in which she traveled on production and women’s labor. In addition, a “feminine consciousness,” stressing nurturance and an ethic of care, is not endemic to the biological female body but necessary to survival, as Blanche Gelfant writes (Gelfant, 207). Although Le Sueur wrote throughout her life, maintaining the same themes in her work, her best-known works are from the 1930s and 1940s. Her access to mainstream literary audiences was halted by an informal blacklist in the late 1940s under McCarthyism. It was not until the 1960s, as the women’s movement rediscovered her, that her work began to receive the critical attention it deserved. She received a Senior Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and published The Dread Road (an

underrated and incredible experimental novella) at the age of 91.

SOURCES Coiner, Constance. “Literature of Resistance: The Intersection of Feminism and the Communist Left in Meridel Le Sueur and Tillie Olsen.” In Left Politics and the Literary Profession, edited by Lennard J. Davis and M. Bella Mirabella, 162–185. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Gelfant, Blanche H. “ ‘Everybody Steals’: Language as Theft in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl.” In Tradition and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, 183–210. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Maierhofer, Roberta. “Meridel LeSueur: A Female Voice of the Thirties.” In Women in Search of Literary Space, edited by Gudrun M. Grabher and Maureen Devine, 150–162. Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 1992. Pratt, Linda Ray. “Woman Writer in the CP: The Case of Meridel LeSueur,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 3 (1988): 247–264. Schleuning, Neala. America, Song We Sang without Knowing: The Life and Ideas of Meridel Le Sueur. Granada Hills, Calif.: Little Red Hen Press, 1983. Alyson Buckman

GLANCY, DIANE (1941– )

Diane Glancy, one-eighth Cherokee, an inheritance from the grandmother who greatly influenced her during adolescence, writes about the alienated status of mixed-blood people like herself. Although she won the American Book Award for Claiming Breath (1992), an essay collection, Glancy has recently focused more specifically on the novel, and has published seven to date. Her work as a poet and playwright and the frequent mixing of one or more genres helps her underscore the complex blending that constitutes a single individual. Similarly, Glancy notes the dichotomy between Christianity and Native spirituality, both belief systems to which she herself subscribes. Not surprisingly, her most successful characters survive because they find ways to accept both the contemporary world and the one of their ancestors. Diane Glancy was born Helen Diane Hall on March 18, 1941, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Lewis Hall and Edith Wood Hall. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri in 1964 and married Dwane

498

GLANCY, DIANE

Glancy that year. After their divorce in 1983, she earned a master’s degree from Central State University in Oklahoma, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa in 1988. She began teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, that same year. Her first novel, PUSHING THE BEAR: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996), is, as reviewer Robert L. Berner points out, an “epic account” of the relocation of the Cherokee as they were forced to march from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee to Oklahoma, on the now-legendary Trail of Tears. The narrator, Maritole, expresses the Cherokee anger and pain through the metaphor of a heavy dark bear being pushed along the 900-mile trail during four months of winter; hers is one of many voices who have told this story. In the end, however, the forced march becomes a chain that links each individual to each other, to the land, and to their ancestry. In her second novel, The Only Piece of Furniture in the House: A Novel (1997), Glancy uses a firstperson narrator, Rachel Hume, to pay a moving tribute to Bethanna, her strong, generous, religious, and enduring mother. She loves her daughter to a fault. This coming-of-age novel is set in East Texas and Louisiana. FLUTIE (1998) is a 15-year-old girl of Cherokee and German descent who lives much of her life in silence, aspires to rise above the deprivation in which she has been raised and to study geology at Southwestern Oklahoma State University. She communes with her ancestors in what reviewer Donna Seaman calls, “the solace of stones” (Seaman, 787). Flutie gradually learns to use her voice to bridge the past and the present, the “white” blood and the “red.” In The Mask-Maker (2002), Edith Lewis, a divorced mixed-blood woman, explores and eventually comes to terms with her feelings by using the traditional art of the mask to hide them when she must. Experimental in form, the novel fuses much of the prose action with poetry and biblical verse. Designs of the Night Sky (2002) features a librarian, Ada Ronner, who works in the University of Oklahoma rare book room that houses the history and stories of her Cherokee ancestors. The novel contains original contributions from the Cherokee, including the Friends of Thunder. The fictional plot uses such people as Wilma Mankiller, a well-known tribal chief and spiritual

leader, and fuses the present and Ada’s Christian faith with such past events as the Trail of Tears. Glancy’s most recent novel is Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (2003), a fresh interpretation of the Shoshone woman who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their western expedition. Sacajawea, unlike her companions, views everything on both a physical and a spiritual plane, her inner vision adding depth and tension when juxtaposed against the observations of male companions. Glancy lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she continues to teach at Macalester College.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Designs of the Night Sky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Flutie. Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1998. Fuller Man. Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1999. The Mask Maker. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. The Only Piece of Furniture in the House: A Novel. Wakefield, R.I.: Moyer Bell, 1996. Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996. Stone Heart: a Novel of Sacajawea. New York: Overlook, 2003.

SOURCES Bell, Moyer. Review of Flutie, Publishers Weekly 245, no. 11 (March 16, 1998): 55. Berner, Robert L. Review of The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, World Literature Today 71, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 631–632. Bogenschutz, Debbie. Review of Designs of the Night Sky, Library Journal 127, no. 18 (November 1, 2002): 128. ———. Review of The Mask Maker, Library Journal 127, no. 4 (March 1, 2002): 138. ———. Review of Stone Heart, Library Journal 128, no. 1 (January 2003): 154. DeCandido, GraceAnne A. Review of Flutie, Booklist 94, no. 14 (March 15, 1998): 1,201. Flanagan, Margaret. Review of Stone Heart, Booklist (January 1, 2003): 847. Glancy, Diane. “Two Dresses.” In I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Grossmann, Mary Ann. “Macalester Poets, True to Form, Dedicated to Economy of Verse,” St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, 26 Febuary 1989, pp. 8D, 9D.

GLASGOW, ELLEN 499

———. “Talking Leaves Voices Popularity of Indian Literature,” St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, 22 September 1991, pp. 1D, 3D. ———. “Writer Treads Softly, a Foot in Each World,” St.Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, 4 November 1990, pp. 7D, 8D. Hughes, Kathleen. Review of Pushing the Bear, Booklist 92, no. 22 (August 1996): 1,881. Meredith, Howard. Review of Designs of the Night Sky, World Literature Today 77, no. 2 (July–September 2003): 151. Seaman, Donna. Review of Flutie, Booklist 97, no. 8 (December 15, 2000): 787. Unsigned review of Designs of the Night Sky, Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 18 (September 15, 2002): 1,348. Unsigned review of The Only Piece of Furniture in the House, World Literature Today, Publishers Weekly 243, no. 41 (October 7, 1996): 59. Unsigned review of Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, Publishers Weekly 243, no. 25 (June 17, 1996): 47.

OTHER Voices from the Gap: Women Writers of Color. “Diane Glancy.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/newsite/ authors/GLANCYdiane.htm. Accessed July 24, 2005.

GLASGOW, ELLEN (ANDERSON GHOLSON) (1873–1945) Like so many women writers in the 19th and 20th centuries, Ellen Glasgow was ignored in university classrooms for virtually the first half of the 20th century. Today, however, critics perceive her as one of the most important writers to revive Southern literature. Her novels used realism lacking in the novels of Thomas Nelson Page, among others, which set the standard for Southern literature at the turn of the century; she became a best-selling author between the turn of the century and the late 1930s. Twenty-first-century readers easily detect the ironic and subversive tone that Glasgow uses to write about the difficulties and disadvantages that white Southern women faced from the patriarchal culture of that time and see her not just as a Southern writer, but also as one who invented fictional women combating this paternalistic society. James Branch CABELL called her work a “large panorama of the customs and failings and virtues of the State of Virginia” (Thiebaux, 3). One of her best novels, VIRGINIA, published in 1913, established the use of female rather than male protagonists. Life and Gabriella: The Story of a

Woman’s Courage, appeared in 1916, followed by, among others, the critically acclaimed One Man in His Time (1922), Barren Ground (1925), The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and The Sheltered Life (1932). Glasgow published from 1898 until 1942, when she won the Pulitzer Prize for In This Our Life. Ellen Glasgow was born on April 22, 1873, in Richmond, Virginia, to Francis Thomas Glasgow, a businessman, and Anne Jane Gholson Glasgow, of an aristocratic family. Glasgow, who had watched her mother’s emotional breakdown after discovering her husband’s affair with a woman of color, suffered hearing loss and depression as she weathered four deaths in the family, two of them suicides. Glasgow was selfeducated, like Edith WHARTON and other well-broughtup women of her era, and ultimately combined frequent travel to Europe and New York with her successful writing career. She read widely in philosophy and economics, and was particularly indebted to the uncompromisingly realistic views of Charles Darwin and the naturalism of writers like Jack LONDON. Glasgow had an affair with a married man who died young, and broke her engagement to Henry Anderson, a lawyer-politician neighbor of whom she was genuinely fond. Her first two novels, The Descendant (1897) and The Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), both set in New York, focus on male characters rebelling against the status quo and women struggling to become artists. The Voice of the People (1900), however, takes place in Virginia just after Reconstruction, and is notable for its evocation of period detail and atmosphere. With The Battle-Ground (1902), Glasgow looked squarely at the Civil War, refusing to romanticize it; instead, she wrote about the way her heroes, Dan Montjoy and Betty Ambler, survive the destruction of both their families and their plantations. Although The Deliverance (1904) returns to Reconstruction days, The Wheel of Life (1906) and The Ancient Law (1908) are set in bohemian New York City. Not until after The Ancient Law does she return to Virginia, moving forward in The Romance of a Plain Man (1909) to Richmond at the turn of the century. In The Miller of Old Church (1911), she invents Molly Merryweather, an early version of the New Southern

500

GLASGOW, ELLEN

Woman, a character in all her best novels. The central character in Virginia (1913), Virginia Pendleton, raised as the ideal Southern lady who accepts her place in an unfulfilling marriage, watches as her husband and children adapt painlessly to more modern times. In contrast, Life and Gabriella depicts a woman who uses her intelligence, self-reliance, and desire to move into the modern world. In The Builders (1919), Glasgow portrays a protagonist modeled on Anderson, with whom she remained good friends, but in One Man in His Time, Glasgow features the aging beauty Corinna Page, who chooses to remain single. In Barren Ground, generally agreed to be Glasgow’s best novel, Dorinda Oakley faces her betrayal by Jason Greylock and employs her strength and business acumen to turn her parents’ hardscrabble farm into a lush productive one. She refuses to parade her triumph over Jason, who has become an alcoholic and a failure. Glasgow’s other critically acclaimed novels include The Romantic Comedians, They Stooped to Folly (both book club selections), and The Sheltered Life. As her biographer Linda Wagner-Martin points out, by the time she wrote this trilogy, “Glasgow had learned to criticize the male characters whom she had once made heroic” (Wagner-Martin, 211). When Jenny Birdsong of The Sheltered Life discovers her husband embracing another woman, she shoots him. In the later Vein of Iron (1935), Ada Fincastle, whose fiancé has been trapped into marrying another woman, bears his child and lives an independent, free life. Glasgow clearly took the novel of the South into previously uncharted waters, and recent scholarship is examining Glasgow as a rebel ahead of her time, a feminist, an artist adept at blending her views of gender and race, psychology, and philosophy, into stories of vividly realized women and men. In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1942, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the Howells Medal for Fiction. The Ellen Glasgow Collection of Manuscripts is in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia.

NOVELS The Ancient Law. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908. Barren Ground. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925. With a preface by Glasgow. New York: Sagamore Press, 1933.

The Battle-Ground. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902. Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era. Edited by Luther Y. Gore. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966. The Builders. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1919. The Deliverance: A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1904. The Descendant: A Novel. New York and London: Harper, 1897. In This Our Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman’s Courage. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1916. The Miller of Old Church. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1911. One Man in His Time. Garden City, N.Y. and Toronto: Doubleday, Page, 1922. Phases of an Inferior Planet. New York and London: Harper, 1898. The Romance of a Plain Man. New York: Macmillan, 1909. The Romantic Comedians. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926. The Sheltered Life. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. They Stooped to Folly: A Comedy of Morals. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929. Vein of Iron. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Virginia. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Page, 1913. The Voice of the People. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1900. The Wheel of Life. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906.

SOURCES Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers & Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Novelists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Ekman, Barbro. The End of a Legend: Ellen Glasgow’s History of Southern Women. Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1979. Glasgow, Ellen. A Certain Measure: An Interpretation of Prose Fiction. New York: Harcourt, 1943. ———. Letters of Ellen Glasgow. Edited by Blair Rouse. New York: Harcourt, 1958. ———, with James Branch Cabell. Of Ellen Glasgow: An Inscribed Portrait. New York: Maverick Press, 1938. ———. The Woman Within. New York: Harcourt, 1954. Goodman, Susan. Ellen Glasgow: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Inge, M. Thomas, ed. Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942.

GLASPELL, SUSAN 501

Raper, J. R. From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916–1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. ———. Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Rouse, Blair. Ellen Glasgow. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Santas, Joan Foster. Ellen Glasgow’s American Dream. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1965. Thiebaux, Marcelle. Ellen Glasgow. Boston: Ungar, 1982. Wagner, Linda W. Ellen Glasgow: Beyond Convention. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Ellen Glasgow.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 206–214. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

GLASPELL, SUSAN (1882–1948) Until recently, Susan Glaspell’s reputation as a dramatist exceeded her reputation as a novelist; for instance, her play Alison’s House (1930), based on the life of Emily Dickinson, won the Pulitzer Prize. Increased scholarly attention to Glaspell’s novels, however, has resulted in several recent studies, particularly Martha C. Carpenter’s The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell (2001). Reviewer Barbara Ozieblo says that Carpenter allows us “to understand why Glaspell always considered herself a novelist, first and foremost” (Ozieblo). Glaspell’s nine novels are set in the Midwest, and all feature women seeking self-definition. Carpenter in fact asserts that “her writing is not conservative in its content or its form, quite the opposite; her central characters are usually passionate rebels against the conservatism of society” (Carpenter, “Fidelity”). The four novels that have elicited the most favorable critical comment include Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us: A Novel (1939), Norma Ashe: A Novel (1942), and Judd Rankin’s Daughter (1945). Susan Glaspell was born on July 1, 1882, in Davenport, Iowa, to Elmer S. Glaspell and Alice Keating Glaspell. She was educated at Drake University, where she earned a doctoral degree in 1899. In 1909 she published The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love, featuring Ernestine Stanley, a young artist who gave up painting when she married scientist Karl Hubers but returns to art when he becomes blind. She gives him immortality through a portrait. In her sec-

ond, The Visioning (1911), Katie Jones, daughter of an army officer, falls in love with a socialist and begins to reject the social constructs that objectify women and render them useless. In 1913 Glaspell married George Cram Cook, a writer friend of Floyd DELL associated with Chicago’s Little Renaissance, and together in 1915 they helped found a dramatic group, the Provincetown Players, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1915 she also published Fidelity, the last and most complex novel of her early period. Clearly autobiographical in parts, it depicts Ruth Holland, of Freeport, Iowa, who elopes to Colorado with a married man. After realizing she has created a scandal back home in Iowa, and that their love affair is over, she leaves him to build a life for herself in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Until 1922, Glaspell and Cook remained with the Players. Glaspell wrote exclusively for the stage during this period, including her Trifles, later adapted as the short story “A Jury of Her Peers.” Despite Glaspell’s seven-year hiatus from novel writing, scholar Marcia Noe notes that Glaspell was a “writer of fiction” who said that she “began writing plays because my husband forced me to” (Noe, 33). Cook and Glaspell eventually immigrated to Delphi, Greece, where Cook died two years later. Glaspell returned to the United States and to novel writing. In Brook Evans (1928), Naomi Kellogg, pregnant with her daughter Brook, marries to ensure that the child has a father and a name; the rebellious daughter, however, chooses to marry for love over respectability. The novel was filmed as Right to Love in 1930. Fugitive’s Return (1929) focuses on Irma Schraeder, an abandoned wife who battles feelings of loss and insecurity by joining the community in Delphi, Greece. Glaspell adapted the last novel of this middle period, Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), from her 1922 comedy, Chains of Dew. Blossom Holt tries in vain to persuade her husband, Lincoln, a businessman who writes poetry, to treat her as an adult. When her long-lost writer father, Ambrose, suddenly reappears, he treats his daughter with respect. Blossom gains self-confidence, and even Lincoln comes to treat her with respect. Glaspell, whose second marriage (1925) to Norman Mattson had disintegrated by 1931, wrote three more

502 GLASS, JULIA

novels in what critics refer to as her late period. In The Morning Is Near Us (1940), Lydia Chippmann returns to her Iowa home and learns the truth about her parents: She is the result of her mother’s love affair. Her father kills her mother’s lover and is committed to an insane asylum. Lydia reconciles with her adopted father and hopes for a more enlightened future for her two adopted children. Norma Ashe (1942) tells the story of a once brilliant young woman who gave up her dreams of graduate study for marriage; now an impoverished widow, she returns to Pioneer University and is disillusioned with the male professor who once espoused humanitarian ideals. Like Lydia in The Morning Is Near Us, Norma places her faith in the future. Glaspell’s final novel, Judd Rankin’s Daughter (1945), takes place during World War II. As with Blossom of Ambrose Holt and Family, Frances Rankin is caught between her father the judge, a conservative midwestern newspaper editor, and her husband and son, both leftists who oppose her father. Frances eventually recognizes the merit in her father’s idealism and can assimilate both extremes as she faces the chaos of post–World War II society. Susan Glaspell died on July 27, 1948, of a pulmonary embolism, in Provincetown. Now seen as a realist rather than as a romantic, Glaspell is linked with “ ‘the revolt from the village,’ a literary phenomenon to which Sherwood Anderson, Carl Van Vechten, Willa Cather, Glenway Wescott, Edith Wharton, Zona Gale, and Sinclair Lewis would contribute during the early decades of the twentieth century” (Noe, 30). Many of Glaspell’s papers are housed in the Henry and Albert Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

NOVELS Ambrose Holt and Family. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1931. Brook Evans. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1928. Published as The Right to Love, 1930. Cherished and Shared of Old. New York: Julian Messner, 1940. Fidelity: A Novel. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1915. Fugitive’s Return. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1929. The Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1909. Judd Rankin’s Daughter. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1945. The Morning Is Near Us: A Novel. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1939.

Norma Ashe: A Novel. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1942. The Visioning: A Novel. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.

SOURCES Carpenter, Martha C. The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Makowsky, Veronica. Susan Glaspell’s Century of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Noe, Marcia. Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland. Western Illinois Monograph Series, Number 1. Macomb: Western Illinois University Press, 1983. Ozieblo, Barbara. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Waterman, Arthur E. Susan Glaspell. Boston: Twayne, 1966.

OTHER Carpenter, Martha C. “Susan Glaspell’s Fiction: Fidelity as American Romance.” Twentieth Century Literature (March 22, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 15671797. Accessed September 5, 2005. Ozieblo, Barbara. Review of The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (January 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 111270425. Accessed September 5, 2005.

GLASS, JULIA (1956– ) Winner of the 2002 National Book Award for her first novel, Three Junes, Julia Glass has written this novel and a number of short stories. Three Junes is structured as a triptych in which a large central portrait is flanked by two smaller ones; in the center is the story of Fenno McLeod, a gay expatriate Scotsman, now a New York bookseller. On either side of him subsidiary characters include family and friends who provide information about Fenno’s background. Three Junes (2002) demonstrates the strength of both family relationships and intimate friendship during the month of June in three separate years (1989, 1995, and 1999). These close relationships provide solace and strength as effective antidotes to arguments, betrayals, and loneliness. Julia Glass was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, near Boston, on March 23, 1956, to John Burgess Glass and Florence McKerrow Glass and attended Yale University, where she earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in

GODFATHER, THE 503

1978. After a year in Paris and time working in local galleries, Glass shifted her focus from composing with paint to “composing with words” (Kovach, 23). While living with her partner Dennis Cowley, a photographer, she composed her award-winning first novel at the kitchen table of a 700-square-foot Greenwich Village apartment. Having been dealt some blows she has characterized as a “triple whammy” (Kovach, 27)—a painful divorce, her sister’s suicide, and her own (successful) battle with cancer—Glass admits that the characters in Three Junes have sorrows that mirror her own but show the reader “how we make our way back from heartbreak, loss and the secret betrayals we regret for the rest of our lives” (Ryan). Through a series of flashbacks, readers learn of Fenno’s family in Scotland—his mother, who raises collies and has a love affair with a neighbor before she dies; his twin brothers, one of whom, infertile due to childhood mumps, accepts Fenno’s sperm so that he and his wife can have children; and his wealthy widower father, Paul, whose unconsummated shipboard romance with the young American woman Fern provides much of the later action in the book: Fern, having once been romantically involved with Fenno’s New York lover Tony, appears in New York after Fenno loses his dearest friend Mal to AIDS. Julia Glass lives in Greenwich Village with Cowley. She is at work on a second novel, which may feature the reappearance of one character from Three Junes (Ryan). The new novel is tentatively entitled A Piece of Cake and features a pastry chef (Kovach, 28).

NOVEL Three Junes. New York: Pantheon, 2002.

SOURCES Kovach, Ronald. “Late Bloomer,” The Writer 116, no. 11 (November 2003): 23–28. Maryles, Daisy. “Breaking the Glass Ceiling,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 18 (May 5, 2003): 17.

OTHER Hower, Edward. “Bonds of Love and Loss.” World and I (April 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 100839398. Accessed September 5, 2005. Mann, Jessica. “Triptych in Our Time.” Sunday Telegraph (May 25, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online.

URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1P1:80889709. Accessed September 5, 2005. Ryan, Laura T. “Her Pain Leads Her to Write to Soothe.” PostStandard (Syracuse, N.Y.) (March 10, 2004). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:114107325. Accessed September 5, 2005.

GODFATHER,

THE MARIO PUZO (1969)

Perhaps no other novel published in the 20th century captured the American public’s imagination quite like Mario PUZO’s 1969 novel The Godfather. Since its publication, Puzo’s third novel has reached legendary status: It has sold more than 21 million copies, was adapted into a blockbuster film that won three Academy Awards in 1972, including best picture, and launched Puzo’s career as a best-selling author (Malta). The Godfather chronicles the saga of the Corleone family, a New York Mafia empire, during the late 1940s. The novel centers on the transfer of power in the Corleone family, as Don Vito Corleone, the patriarch of Puzo’s crime syndicate, retires and hands the reigns of his criminal empire to his youngest son, Michael. Fredric Jameson has stated that The Godfather appeals to an American audience because the novel manages “anxieties about the social order” found in the late 20th-century United States, especially the rise of multinational corporations (Jameson, 30). Because the novel creates the illusion of a controlling force, the Mafia, that is responsible for the inequities created by American capitalism, The Godfather becomes a way to dispel the fears over the power of multinational capitalism. This notion that the Mafia is an unseen driving force behind American capitalism is a recurring theme in The Godfather. Don Vito Corleone does not merely circumvent the American legal system to ensure the survival of his business; rather, Corleone usurps the power of the American legal system, thereby making his own word law. Corleone’s main source of income is generated from a human vice, gambling. To keep their gambling empire profitable and unnoticed by the law, the Corleone family keeps politicians, judges, and police officers on their payroll. The money generated from gambling and the protection from prosecution

504

GODFATHER, THE

afforded by the Corleone family’s contacts makes Don Vito Corleone a man to be respected and feared in his community. His friends and allies refer to him as “Godfather,” a title of respect in the Sicilian underworld. Those denied justice by the American legal system seek the assistance of Don Corleone, hoping he will administer his own brand of justice to solve their problems. Corleone’s ability to administer justice swiftly and with impunity can be seen throughout the novel, from the fixing of an immigration issue for an old Corleone family friend to the decapitation of a prized racehorse owned by a Hollywood producer who denies a film role to Johnny Fontane, Don Corleone’s favorite godson. The ability to solve any problem makes Vito Corleone a godlike figure in the eyes of the novel’s characters. As Genco Abbandando, Corleone’s former consigliere, or adviser, dies of cancer, Abbandado begs Corleone to confront God and spare his life. Thus, Don Vito Corleone is seen as ultimate power and authority in the novel, a man whose motto of “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” applies even to God (Puzo, 30). The power wielded by Vito Corleone to ensure the operations of his criminal empire has a historical basis that echoes Jameson’s interpretation of Puzo’s novel. In 1963, a colorful mobster named Joseph Valachi testified in front of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the McClellan Committee about the Mafia’s organizational structure (Cressley, 59–60). According to Valachi, the Mafia was organized like a hierarchical corporation. This same type of organizational structure can be seen in the Corleone family. At the top of the Corleone crime family is Don Vito Corleone, followed by Tom Hagen, his new consigliere and quasi-adopted son. Under Hagen are the Corleone family’s caporegimes, or underbosses, Tessio and Clemenza. Each of the Don’s four biological children has a stake in the family business. Corleone’s eldest child, Santino, is seen as the successor to his father’s business. Frederico, or Fredo, the second-oldest child, is sent to Las Vegas to learn the casino business, the future of the Corleone family empire. Constanzia, or Connie, the Don’s only daughter, and her husband, Carlo Rizzi, run a small bookie operation in New York. At the opening of The Godfather, Corleone’s youngest

son, Michael, is left out of the family business by his own choice. Michael shuns the world of his father to construct his own version of the American dream. When the novel begins, Michael is a decorated war hero, a student at Dartmouth, and is dating Kay Adams, a fellow college student who was raised by a traditional New England family from New Hampshire. His future plans include marriage, a family, and a legitimate legal career. Michael Corleone’s development from unwilling participant in the family business to his father’s eventual successor forms the main story line of The Godfather. Puzo’s ability to develop the character of Michael Corleone becomes the novel’s greatest strength. Before the publication of The Godfather in 1969, most representations of Mafia figures were found in the film noir era of American cinema. The mobster characters portrayed by Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart were often one-dimensional psychopaths defined only by their insanity. With the character of Michael Corleone, however, Puzo created a fully developed, humanized character with whom readers could identify and empathize. Michael is thrust into his father’s world after Don Corleone is shot by the henchmen of Virgil “The Turk” Sollozzo, a drug dealer spurned by Don Corleone. Sollozzo’s actions thus make Michael a sympathetic or tragic figure to readers. To protect his father from further harm, Michael develops a plan to kill Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey, a crooked police officer on Sollozzo’s payroll. To shield both himself and his family’s business interest from the legal ramifications of his actions, Michael asks Hagen to plant information about McCluskey’s shady business deals with the family’s newspaper contacts to smear the reputation of the New York City Police Department. While these actions are extreme, readers of the novel can empathize with Michael’s actions. Michael acts as both the dutiful son protecting his father and as a shrewd, responsible businessman protecting his interests, thus acting like a red-blooded American boy. Puzo’s ability to have readers identify with the dark nature of the Mafia underworld is the reason for the continuing success of The Godfather. Readers of the novel and audiences of the film adaptation continue to

GO DOWN, MOSES 505

be drawn to the very human and realistic drama found in Puzo’s story. The primary characters of The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone and his son Michael, are seen as both light and dark, all-American and foreign Sicilian, adept businessmen and cold-hearted killers. The organization of the secret world of the Mafia is strangely similar to the organization of any American corporation, which creates a link between the fantasy world created by Puzo and the reality of late 20th-century America. Puzo’s ability to create these dichotomies, a reader’s perception of simultaneous obsession and revulsion, has been influential. Films such as Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas and HBO’s hit television series The Sopranos owe a debt to Puzo’s The Godfather.

SOURCES Albini, Joseph L. The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend. New York: Meredith, 1971. Cressley, Donald R. Theft of the Nation: The Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1990. Malta, J. Geoff. The Official Mario Puzo Library. Available online. URL: http://www.mariopuzo.com. Accessed September 6, 2005. Puzo, Mario. The Godfather. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969. Dan Jones

GO DOWN, MOSES WILLIAM FAULKNER (1942) Go Down, Moses is a collection of seven chapters or stories with recurring characters and plotlines. Although the individual sections can each stand alone, FAULKNER considered this work a novel. With each section we learn more about the history of a family line that began with Carothers McCaslin before the Civil War but developed into three distinct branches: the McCaslin line of Carothers’ direct white male descendants, the Edmonds, or female, line of the descendants of Carothers’s daughter, and the Beauchamp line of Carothers McCaslin’s black descendants. This novel features more prominent and well-rounded African-American characters than Faulkner’s earlier work, and the title, also the title of the last chapter, comes from an African-

American spiritual: “Go Down, Moses, ‘way down in Egypt land; Tell Pharaoh . . . let my people go!” One of the novel’s dominant themes is the coexisting and ongoing binding ties and unhealable breeches created between blacks and whites by slavery. The first section, simply and appropriately titled “Was,” narrates events that took place long ago. This is the only chapter set before the Civil War, and Carothers McCaslin’s sons, Buck and Buddy, are the main characters. The story is mediated for the reader by the memories of Ike, Buck’s son and the character who takes center stage in the majority of the chapters. Ike, however, was not yet born when the events took place; he only hears of them from his elder cousin McCaslin Edmonds, who lived with Buck and Buddy as a boy. The story proper begins with a comic scene of hounds chasing after a fox that has gotten loose in the house, and hunting images recur throughout the story. One of the slaves, Tomey’s Turl, has also gotten loose, and Buck and McCaslin go to Mr. Hubert Beauchamp’s plantation to hunt for him. They know where to look because Turl has a lover, Tennie, a slave on Beauchamp’s plantation. Parallel to the hunt for Turl is Beauchamp’s sister’s hunt for a husband, and she has set her sites on Buck. The whole chapter has a comic tone, as Turl eludes his white masters and Buck eludes the sister, Sophonsiba. The slapstick seems inappropriate only when the reader recalls that human beings are the prey. Eventually Buck captures Turl, and Sophonsiba captures Buck when, tired after the day’s pursuit and unfamiliar with Beauchamp’s dark house, he accidentally lies down in her bed. But young McCaslin hopes to free Uncle Buck from the marriage trap by fetching his Uncle Buddy to the scene. The men decide to settle matters with a poker game in which “the lowest hand wins Sibbey and buys the niggers” (23). In the end, Uncle Buck wins Tomey’s Turl and Tennie, and he does not have to marry Sophonsiba. By allowing three men to decide the fate of three other human beings in a game of cards, Faulkner comments on the abuses of the patriarchal South through darkly ironic humor. The irony becomes more serious when, later in the novel, the reader learns that Sophonsiba and Buck do eventually

506

GO DOWN, MOSES

marry and have Ike and that the slave, Tomey’s Turl, is Buck and Buddy’s half brother. The second chapter, “The Fire and the Hearth,” reveals that black and white lives are connected and disturbed on highly intimate levels by the plantation system. The title refers to a fire Lucas Beauchamp, a slave descendant of Carothers McCaslin, lit on his hearth on his wedding day and “which had burned ever since” (46), a symbol of Lucas’s undying bond with his wife, Molly. This bond has weathered much. Lucas remembers in a flashback when McCaslin Edmonds, Carothers McCaslin’s descendant on the female line and then-controller of the plantation, had taken Molly into the big house to care for Edmonds’s son after his wife died in childbirth. Lucas suspects that Molly stands in for Edmonds’s wife in other ways as well. He finally gets up the nerve to accuse McCaslin Edmonds of sleeping with his wife and demand her return. Edmonds denies the accusation and the two almost kill each other over the presumed insult on each side, but Molly returns to Lucas’s cabin and we never know for sure the nature of her relationship with Edmonds. Despite this reference to home, love, and family, the chapter’s main plot concerns Lucas’s attempts to find buried treasure on the McCaslin family plantation where he sharecrops. But just as slavery, an ostensibly economic institution, was destructively connected with love and family, Lucas’s pursuit of the gold disrupts his relationship with Molly and the relationship of his daughter and son-in-law. Molly wants a divorce from Lucas because she views his obsessive quest for gold as evil and she sees him corrupting her daughter’s husband. Just as the judge prepares to grant the divorce, Lucas renounces his pursuit of gold to keep his wife. Because the family survives in the end, this chapter is one of the more optimistic ones in the novel. The pessimism of “Pantaloon in Black” counterbalances the optimism of “The Fire and the Hearth.” A pantaloon is a foolish old man or the butt of a clown’s jokes. To the white sheriff, the main character, Rider, seems a mere clown, but to the reader he seems lyrically tragic. When Rider’s young wife, Mannie, dies suddenly, Rider tries to escape his grief through extreme physical exertion, through drinking, and

finally by challenging and then killing a white man who had been cheating the black sawmill workers at dice, something he knows is tantamount to suicide. The sheriff, who recounts the story to his wife as she prepares dinner, cannot fathom the depths of grief that would cause such insanity. The sheriff’s blustering lack of understanding makes him seem a buffoon; for the reader, he is the pantaloon. Furthermore, in comparison to Rider’s intense feelings for Mannie, the sheriff and his wife are an insipid pair. The great tragedy of the story is that their bond endures while the more meaningful bond between Rider and Mannie has ended prematurely. “The Old People” is set in the late 19th century when Ike McCaslin is 12. Sam Fathers, part Native American and part black, teaches Ike to hunt and instills in him a lifelong affinity for nature: “He pulled trigger and Sam Fathers marked his face with the hot blood which he had spilled and he ceased to be a child and became a hunter and a man” (171). After Ike’s first kill, Sam Fathers shows him the great deer, which Ike and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds later interpret as a mystical spirit of the forest. The chapter is a comingof-age narrative, though in the next chapter Ike will discover that he had not fully come of age until later. In this chapter Faulkner also comments on race when Sam Fathers moves permanently to the hunting camp, feeling that he does not belong to any group. “The Bear,” the longest and most important chapter in the novel, is the one around which the others build. Ike, 16, joins McCaslin Edmonds, Major DeSpain, General Compson, Sam Fathers, and Boon Hogganbeck on their annual hunting expedition. Part of their prey is Old Ben, a legendary bear. But when Ike has an opportunity to shoot the bear, he refrains. For him, the animal represents the wildness and power of nature itself. Sam Fathers, however, captures and tames a wild dog, Lion, who is brave enough to challenge Old Ben. The Bear is finally brought down when Lion attacks him and Boon Hogganbeck stabs him. Lion, however, is also mortally wounded, and Sam Fathers suffers a stroke during the battle and is later euthanized by Boon. The death of these wild creatures foreshadows the passing of the wilderness and also Ike’s loss of

GOD’S LITTLE ACRE 507

innocence. At 21, Ike discovers the shameful secret of his family’s past, that his grandfather had fathered a child, Turl, on his own slave daughter, Tomey, and caused the suicide of Tomey’s mother, Eunice. Ike’s father, Buck, and Uncle Buddy had known; they had kept the land and slaves as benevolent patriarchs, leaving each of Turl’s descendants a legacy in their wills. Ike, however, relinquishes the land as a tainted birthright and allows the Edmonds line to take over. Is he, as his cousin McCaslin Edmonds argues, abdicating responsibility? When he returns to the hunting camp with his new knowledge, logging companies already encroach on the forest and he realizes there is no return to innocence. “Delta Autumn” is set in the autumn of Ike’s life and the autumn of the Delta. Ike, now near 80, participates in one more hunting trip, though now the hunting lands are much farther away. As Ike recovers from the long journey while the younger men hunt, a woman visits the camp looking for Carothers Edmonds, McCaslin Edmonds’s grandson. Carothers had had an affair with the woman and then abandoned her and their son. Ike first assumes she is white, but he soon learns that she has mixed blood and that she is a distant cousin of Carothers. Ike has abandoned his land and position to the Edmonds family only to learn that one of their descendants has echoed the sin of the original Carothers McCaslin. In the last chapter, “Go Down, Moses,” Lucas and Molly’s grandson Henry has been charged with murder and executed in Illinois. Molly, who does not know the circumstances of her grandson’s death, asks the lawyer Gavin Stevens to arrange for the body to be returned to Jefferson for a funeral. Thinking to save Molly’s feelings, Gavin arranges with the newspaper editor to keep the story quiet, but Molly insists that it be printed in full. Faulkner’s ending emphasizes remembering the past, regardless, and forms a sharp contrast to Ike McCaslin’s attempt to flee from the sins of his fathers.

SOURCES Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Faulkner, William. Go Down Moses. New York: Random House, 1942. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Weinstein, Philip M. Faulkner’s Subject. A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Betina Entzminger

GOD’S LITTLE ACRE ERSKINE CALDWELL (1933) Published in the years of the Great Depression, God’s Little Acre was an enormous success, selling even more copies than CALDWELL’s TOBACCO ROAD, which was published the preceding year as a novel and established a record as the Broadway play with the most continuous performances. By this time, Erskine Caldwell had discovered his subject: By writing about the often ignored poor of the South, white and black, he brought them to national attention. As the scholar and critic James E. Devlin suggests, Caldwell, writing just after Theodore DREISER and simultaneously with Ernest HEMINGWAY and with John STEINBECK, his “exact contemporary,” is not known as a “philosophic” writer (Devlin, 50). In God’s Little Acre, however, he not only writes compellingly and suspensefully, bringing characters to life, but also demonstrates his concern for the poor and disadvantaged, and refers somewhat obliquely to the issue of race in the South. Indeed, in God’s Little Acre, Will Thompson’s heroic efforts to save the mill, says Devlin, bespeak a romantic naturalism reminiscent not just of Dreiser, but also of Frank NORRIS and the French writer Emile Zola. It is with the appearance of Will Thompson, a “lint head” or mill worker married to the patriarch Ty Ty Walden’s daughter, that Caldwell is able to develop one of his major themes: the deplorable conditions for unskilled Southern workers prior to World War II (Devlin, 50). The novel opens with a humorous depiction of Ty Ty Walden, the Georgia mountain patriarch who has spent 15 years digging for gold. He has found none. Although lazy and shiftless, Ty Ty works long hours at digging and has even set aside some of the land—God’s Little Acre—for the church, should he discover gold on that particular parcel. The catch in this plan is that he routinely shifts the acre so that it is never the one on which he is digging. Moreover, Ty Ty has infected two of his three sons, Buck and Shaw, with the gold fever. The third, Jim Leslie, has married a society matron and become a wealthy cotton broker. Darling

508 GODWIN, GAIL

Jill and Rosamond, Ty Ty’s two daughters, complete the immediate family. Ty Ty’s sons-in-law and daughtersin-law, however, provide most of the major tension in the novel: Buck is married to the beauteous Griselda, the object of lust for three of the male characters and Caldwell’s version of the “eternal female” (Devlin, 64): In addition to Buck himself, Griselda engenders a fatal attraction in Will Thompson, Rosamond’s husband, and in Jim Leslie. Caldwell’s version of the “eternal female” (Devlin, 64), Griselda’s status as country earth goddess may be usefully compared with that of William FAULKNER’s Eula Varner in the Snopes Trilogy. Although critics have typically seen the sexual fulfillment of Will Thompson and Griselda as an almost mythic preparation for Will’s assault on the mill, the subservient roles of Caldwell’s women are difficult to justify from a feminist perspective. Even after Will’s death at the mill, Griselda seems content to be a male sex object. Rosamond is another stereotypical wife-asdoormat, since she stoically endures Will’s sexual liaisons with both Darling Jill and Griselda. Even the promiscuous Darling Jill, once she marries Pluto Swint, the fat, timid candidate for sheriff, will be expected to remain faithful to her husband. In the end, however, the women prove more adept at surviving than the men: Will Thompson is murdered by the mill guards; Buck shoots and kills his brother, Jim Leslie, after his passion-crazed attempt to abduct Griselda; and then Buck commits suicide. The other survivors are Black Sam and Uncle Felix, the black sharecroppers whom Ty Ty hires. They are removed from the preoccupations of the white men whose frustrations regarding employment translate into passion, sex, and death. The black men exist on the periphery of the action, but they cannot be fooled. According to Devlin, the introduction of the albino brought in at gunpoint by the Walden men is likely Caldwell’s “parody of racism.” Darling Jill’s interest in the unnaturally white man foreshadows Caldwell’s interest in interracial relationships. These will emerge in future novels where Caldwell presents the black man as the “sexual victim of the white woman” (Devlin, 60). Despite its sensationalism, God’s Little Acre is a suspenseful and well-written novel that con-

veys a sense of the overlooked and unfortunate poor of the pre–World War II American South.

SOURCES Caldwell, Erskine. God’s Little Acre. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962. Devlin, James E. Erskine Caldwell. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

GODWIN, GAIL (KATHLEEN) (1937– ) Admired primarily for her achievements in the genre of the novel—she has published 10 to date—Gail Godwin writes compellingly about the complexities of women’s lives in the latter half of the 20th century; increasingly she emphasizes the significance of self-reliance and work in the lives of her heroes, most of whom live in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, and Maryland. Since Southern culture and attitudes play major roles in most of her novels and short stories, Godwin is one of those writers who has garnered critical acclaim in addition to popularity among contemporary readers; part of that popularity derives from her resistance to minimalism and postmodernist self-reflexivity and her use of traditional narrative form. She is, moreover, the subject of a growing number of scholarly books and articles, particularly with regard to A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) and A Southern Family (1987). Godwin has twice been nominated for an American Book Award, once for a National Book Award, and in 1981 received an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 18, 1937, to Mose Winston and Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin, Godwin was reared by her mother after her parents divorced when she was two years old. They settled with Godwin’s grandmother in Asheville, North Carolina, where Godwin grew up; according to the scholar Jane Hill, the prominence of Asheville in Godwin’s fiction “makes her the clear literary heir of the city’s other great chronicler, Thomas WOLFE” (Hill, 2). Godwin apparently owes her literary proclivities to her mother, who held a master of arts degree in English from the University of North Carolina, supported the family through her job as a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times, and wrote short fiction for the pulp magazines, much of it under the pseudonym of Charlotte Ashe. Similarly, after earning a bachelor of arts degree in journalism from the

GODWIN, GAIL 509

University of North Carolina, Godwin worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald, married and divorced twice, published The Perfectionists (1970), earned both a master’s and a doctoral degree from the University of Iowa (where John IRVING was a classmate and Kurt VONNEGUT one of her instructors) in 1971. She has made her living as a writer ever since (Hill, 6–8). The Perfectionists, featuring Dane and John Empson, intellectuals who have completely different views on their not surprisingly shaky marriage, earned praise from the scholar Robert Scholes and the writer Joyce Carol OATES. Like its predecessor, Glass People (1972) probes the constraints of marriage on protagonist Francesca Bolt, who for many readers is an emblem of the complex new woman of the 1970s. Despite her powerful and wealthy husband’s objectification of her, Francesca Bolt is, ultimately, too timid to leave him. With The Odd Woman (1974), Godwin examines the fulfilling life of women and professional work: Jane Clifford, a literature professor whose story unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, marks a significant shift in theme and a more sophisticated technique. Violet Clay (1978) also depicts a strong, talented woman who dedicates herself to her work. Violet Clay is an artist and, like Jane Clifford, she acknowledges the importance of her women friends—particularly Samantha “Sam” DeVere, who serves as Jane’s model in her journey toward selfconfidence and an appreciation of the ways her art defines her. Most critics seem to agree that Godwin’s fifth novel, A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), established her reputation as a writer to be reckoned with, one who could experiment successfully with multiple narrators and protagonists, in this case Nell, the mother, and Cate and Lydia, the two daughters. In this novel (which has sold more than 1.5 million copies), the South becomes a trope for connectedness and the recognition that relationships—mother to daughter, sister to sister—are important. The Finishing School (1984) reaffirms the importance of the connections between life and art. Its protagonist, Justine Stokes, also the narrator, finds a mentor at age 14 in the sophisticated but failed actress Ursula DeVane. Although Justine eventually breaks with Ursula, she

becomes a successful actress largely through the lessons she has absorbed in her relationship with Ursula. These depictions of working artists precede that of Clare Campion, Godwin’s first writer hero. She appears in A Southern Family, in which Godwin for the first time employs complex and shifting points of view. According to Wimsatt, A Southern Family is one of Godwin’s “most impressive works to date” (Wimsatt, 196). Because of a murder-suicide, the book’s narrative illuminates “the dark side of human experience” as each character approaches the denouement (Hill, 12). Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991), through protagonist Margaret Gower, explores a more illuminating or visionary experience. As the daughter of an Episcopal minister who has been abandoned by his wife, Margaret struggles to come to grips with her father’s periodic depression and her mother’s disappearance. She knows that her mother was with another woman when she left her husband. (She was killed in an auto accident shortly afterward.) Like her mother, Margaret has a close woman friend; she also falls in love with a counselor, Adrian Bonner, as she makes sense of her past and her present. The Good Husband (1994), Godwin’s updating of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, presents two tales of marriage, that of Francis and his dying wife, Magda, and the other, the disintegrating marriage between Alice and Hugo Henry. Godwin, who continues to use the South as a character, has lived for many years in Woodstock, New York. In 2003, she published Evenings at Five, a novel based on her 30-year relationship with composer Robert Starer, and in 2006 she published Queen of the Underworld, featuring Emma Grant, a journalist in Miami as refugees flee Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

NOVELS Evenings at Five. New York: Ballantine, 2003. Evensong. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Father Melancholy’s Daughter. New York: Morrow, 1991. The Finishing School. New York: Viking, 1985. Glass People. New York: Knopf, 1972. The Good Husband. New York: Ballantine, 1994. A Mother and Two Daughters. New York: Viking, 1982. The Odd Woman. New York: Knopf, 1974.

510 GOING AFTER CACCIATO

The Perfectionists. New York: Harper, 1970. Queen of the Underworld. New York: Random House, 2006. A Southern Family. New York: Morrow, 1987. Violet Clay. New York: Knopf, 1978.

SOURCES Godwin, Gail. The Writer on Her Work. Edited by Janet Sternburg. New York: Norton, 1980, 231–255. Henderson, Katherine Usher. “Gail Godwin.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson, 30–39. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Hill, Jane. Gail Godwin. New York: Twayne, 1992. Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Mickelson, Anne Z. “Gail Godwin: Order and Accommodation.” In Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Rhodes, Carolyn. “Gail Godwin and the Ideal of Southern Womanhood.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 55–66. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Rogers, Kim Lacy. “A Mother’s Story in a Daughter’s Life: Gail Godwin’s A Southern Family.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 59–66. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Wimsatt, Mary Ann. “Gail Godwin.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 193–201. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1993. Xie, Lihong. The Evolving Self in the Novels of Gail Godwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

GOING AFTER CACCIATO TIM O’BRIEN (1979) Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award in 1979. While the majority of the books listed in this reference text have received major awards, this prize was unusual. Going After Cacciato was not only chosen over John IRVING’s popular best-seller, The World According to Garp, but also the award was given to a book that unflinchingly examined the insanity of the Vietnam War—a conflict that had come to an end only three years earlier after 10 politically divisive years for the United States. In fact, the wounds of the

war were still so fresh that a vast majority of readers and critics believed that a book dealing with the war, written by a foot soldier nonetheless, would be impossible to understand or evaluate on its own merits. The publication of Going After Cacciato and the subsequent awards solidified O’BRIEN’s reputation as a major American writer. A veteran of the Vietnam War himself, Tim O’Brien is best known for his writing on the daily life of the foot soldier in Vietnam. Instead of a journalistic approach, however, one of the reasons that Going After Cacciato was and is so well regarded is its tone—a combination of reportage-like details with daydreaming. Going After Cacciato begins with an epigraph, “Soldiers are Dreamers,” from the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the group that has come to be known as the World War I poets. This short quote captures not only the spirit of the text it introduces, but also the theme of the majority of O’Brien’s work. Going After Cacciato is the story of Paul Berlin, a young grunt on guard duty in Quang Ngai Province, Vietnam, in 1968. Staring off from his tower across the shimmering South China Sea, Berlin allows his mind to wander, combining “the facts”—that his patrol recently had a member (Cacciato) go AWOL—with the fiction, Berlin’s own desire to escape the war. He begins to allow himself to think about the place with a civilization and beauty that is as far away as possible from Vietnam— Paris. Berlin begins to imagine his patrol team being sent on a mission: Chase down the AWOL Cacciato and bring him back. In his mind, the chase stretches from Vietnam to Paris—following a trail made up of M&M candies through the continents, all on foot, so that they eventually end up in France, where the peace talks to end the war are being held. And so the journey begins, as they chase Cacciato (whose name in Italian translates as “the hunted”) to the Laotian border. Here, in Berlin’s imagination, he finds a woman—a Vietnamese refugee trying to escape her own war by sneaking across the border. She and Berlin fall in love. Together the platoon heads across Iran, where they run afoul of the law and barely escape death; they hitchhike across Eastern Europe, where they meet an American hippie whose vacuous nature

GOLDBERG, MYLA 511

repels them. They desert her but keep her van to make better time in their pursuit. At the end of the book, we are reminded that this is all a dream, a sort of trance, an exercise that Berlin has created for himself to keep awake during his long watch duty. What remains true, however, is the universal longing for escape from the war, from fear, and from the insanity of killing. Catherine Calloway suggests, in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, that O’Brien’s unresolved ending to this novel is a comment against viewing reality in a fixed way. “How in life and literature can one distinguish between what is real and what is not? By raising issues and still not resolving them, O’Brien continues to resist simplistic answers while portraying the complex tangles and nuances of actual experience” (Calloway, 224). Albert Wilhelm makes the point that O’Brien has worked and reworked the writing that appears in Going After Cacciato: “Before being joined and published as a novel, several chapters . . . appeared as individual short stories. Frequently these stories were much shorter than the corresponding chapters . . . For example, in the October 1977 issue of Esquire, O’Brien published a story entitled ‘Fisherman.’ Subsequently he expanded this piece to form two separate chapters in Going After Cacciato . . . ‘Lake Country’ and ‘World’s Greatest Lake Country’ ” (Wilhelm, 219). The book also seems to be the one in which O’Brien has invested the most, verging on obsession. Just weeks before publication, O’Brien was still making adjustments to the text. Additionally, since its initial publication, O’Brien has returned to the text, with a number of versions having been published since 1979.

SOURCES Calloway, Catherine. “Pluralities of Vision: Going After Cacciato and Tim O’Brien’s Short Fiction.” In America Rediscovered; Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman Jr. and Lorrie Smith, 213–224. New York: Garland, 1990. O’Brien, Tim. Going After Cacciato. New York: Delta, 1978. Wilhelm, Albert E. “Ballad Allusions in Tim O’Brien’s ‘Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?’ ” Studies in Short Fiction (Spring 1991): 218–222. Michael Dittman

GOLDBERG, MYLA (1971– )

Myla Goldberg’s intriguing debut novel, BEE SEASON (2002), a book ostensibly about spelling bees but actually about the disintegration, transformation, and realignment of family relationships, captured the imagination of critics and reviewers and of avid readers and book club members. Goldberg does write about the distinct “subculture” of spelling bees (Giles), but she explores as well the quirky and sometimes debilitating environment inhabited by a family of intellectuals and achievers. As Susan L. Rife points out, the book ranges far afield of adolescent spelling gatherings to cover “Jewish mysticism, mental illness,” and many attempts to connect with God (Rife). Goldberg also refers to 1980s popular culture and notes that she was inspired by the techniques of novelist David Foster Wallace. Myla Goldberg reveals few details about her personal life: She was born in 1971 in Washington, D.C., to Mark and Ellen Goldberg. She was educated at Oberlin College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1993; she married Jason Little. After publishing several short stories, she wrote Bee Season. The novel, partly a coming-of-age story, focuses on Eliza Naumann, a nineyear-old who feels that she is on the fringe of her talented family. When she discovers her ability to win spelling bees, her aloof father, Saul, a Jewish cantor and mystic, begins to favor her and to ignore her brother Aaron. As Eliza rises to national prominence as a spelling prodigy, Aaron joins the Hare Krishnas and their mother, Miriam, a high-powered lawyer, becomes mentally unhinged. Her bizarre behavior leads to hospitalization. Goldberg scrupulously presents the perspectives of all four members of the family. Myla Goldberg lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York, where she has become a full-time writer. Her next book is about the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has “been totally forgotten by the world at large.” She is, says Goldberg, “fascinated by it” (Buchwald).

NOVEL Bee Season. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

SOURCES Allen, Kimberly G. Review of Bee Season, Library Journal 125, no. 7 (April 15, 2000): 122.

512 GOLDEN BOWL, THE

Anonymous. Review of Bee Season, Publishers Weekly 247, no. 16 (April 17, 2000): 50.

OTHER Buchwald, Laura. “A Conversation with Myla Goldberg” (October 1, 2002). Boldtype. RandomHouse.com. Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0500/ goldberg/interview.html. Accessed September 6, 2005. Giles, Jeff. “E Is for Eliza, a Speller at Heart.” Newsweek (May 29, 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 62286804. Accessed September 6, 2005. Rife, Susan L. “Bee Season Readers Discern a Metaphor for Society’s Ills.” Sarasota Herald Tribune (June 17, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:75597595. Accessed September 6, 2005. Maryles, Daisy. “To Bee or Not to Bee.” Publishers Weekly (July 10, 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:63541412. Accessed September 6, 2005. McNett, Gavin. Review of Bee Season. Salon.com (July 5, 2000). Available online. URL: http://dir.salon.com/story/ books/review/2000/07/05/goldberg/index. Accessed September 6, 2005.

GOLDEN BOWL, THE HENRY JAMES (1905) In this novel, James exposes and explores the relationship that exists between his two male characters, the Italian, Prince Amerigo (named after his ancestor, Amerigo Vespucci, who discovered “America”), and the American, Adam Verver, through the marriage exchange that occurs when the Prince marries Verver’s daughter, Maggie. Though the Prince had carried on an affair with the young, learned, but impoverished American, Charlotte Stant, he finds that a marriage to Maggie will not only monetarily improve his reduced state, but also will secure his own position in society through his familial relationship to the determined entrepreneur Verver. Adam Verver (named “Adam,” after the strong, biblical first man) is the object of Prince Amerigo’s fascination, as he tells his wife, “I’m eating your father alive—which is the only way to taste him. I want to continue, and as it’s when he talks American that he is most alive, so I must cultivate it, to get my pleasure” (32). Verver’s language, here, becomes deeply embedded in his national-

ity, in speaking “American,” through which act Prince Amerigo sees the older millionaire as being most “alive.” When Prince Amerigo’s former lover, also Maggie’s former schoolmate, Charlotte Stant, reenters the novel, through the machinations of the matchmaking Mrs. Assingham, Charlotte complicates the triangle that already exists among the Prince, Maggie, and her father, by marrying Verver. James carefully constructs his novel in a series of events that hinge upon one another, calling back to previous incidents and mental states. For example, in an opening scene, we see the prince and Charlotte looking for a wedding gift together in a shop in Bloomsbury, London, with Charlotte ultimately settling on a crystal bowl with gold leaf—Charlotte remains oblivious to the bowl’s flaw, a crack, unlike Prince Amerigo. The bowl, which inspires the novel’s title and acts as the central symbol within James’s perplexing psychological work, is left on hold in the shop, only to reappear much later in the novel, at that time exposing the flaw within Maggie’s own marriage to the Prince. Here, the overt flaw or secret that so many characters conspire to conceal stands as the sexual past shared between the prince and Charlotte, both of whom Maggie thinks met for the first time only shortly before her marriage to Prince Amerigo. As a whole, James makes the act of concealment and secrecy important themes within his novel, which resonate on many levels within the book. Maggie realizes how she has misjudged the prince and Charlotte through her connection with the bowl, when she comes across the antique in looking for a present for her father, who is an art collector. Upon the discovery of her husband’s past with her now motherin-law, Maggie sees the bowl as representing the lie that threatens her marriage and will disrupt her comfortable world. When Fanny smashes the bowl, which symbolically splits into three pieces, she looks to destroy the evidence of the past—to free Maggie from the crack or flaw, which has now been shattered. Maggie chooses to save her marriage, knowing that she will have to “sacrifice” her father, replacing the most important man in her life with the one who should have already held that position, her husband. In a particularly intriguing conversation with her father, Maggie

GONE WITH THE WIND 513

confesses that her “selfishness” with him has nearly cost her marriage. Verver’s proposal that he will relocate to America with his wife, the “best place” for himself and Charlotte, is an act of both “sacrificing” his own daughter and saving her. Until the departure of Adam Verver and his wife to America, Maggie sees her father as holding his wife in place, silently, but constantly—through the image of an invisible “silken noose” around his wife’s neck. The haunting end of the novel banishes Charlotte to the very country she sought to escape, leaving the princess triumphant. James masterfully intertwines several overlapping psychological events—from the almost incestuous attachment between father and daughter, to extramarital sexuality, to the numerous deceits and fabrications that keep social order in place—in his novel that explores the human mind when placed under the strains of financial desire, sexual impulse, and social ambition. James also toys with notions of taboo sexuality—the prince having had an affair with his stepmother-in-law, Maggie’s profound attachment to her father, Charlotte’s marriage to her former schoolmate’s father, considerably older than she, Verver’s own sexual replacement of his daughter with her friend—that make this book a complicated and fascinating study of human behavior. In formal terms, the novel seeks to mimic that which it explores—the psychology of the human mind. James himself discussed his structure for the book in a “Preface,” often included with the novel; in this piece, James explains that the novel’s division into two “books”—named “The Prince” and “The Princess”— reflects how each of the respective halves concerns itself with the growing “consciousness” of these characters to the situation that will challenge their marriage. In terms of James’s writing style, in this novel he demonstrates the “New York Style,” which reflected the later phase of James’s writing, where the author would stretch out sentences for numerous lines, his paragraphs for pages, to force the reader to mentally slow down and engage in the act of “thinking” through the novel, much like the characters must think through their respective problems.

SOURCES Cannon, Kelly. Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Graham, Wendy. Henry James’ Thwarted Love. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. London: Penguin, 1990. Sharon Kehl Califano

GONE

WITH THE WIND MARGARET MITCHELL (1936) Margaret MITCHELL’s only published book, Gone with the Wind, sold 1 million copies in its first six months and has subsequently become one of the best-selling novels of all time. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and was released as a motion picture in 1939. Set in Mitchell’s native Georgia just before, during, and after the Civil War, the novel features paired opposites as female protagonists: Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled Southern belle who manipulates men to achieve her goals and learns to survive in the fallen South, and Melanie Wilkes, the ideal Southern lady, whose goodness and purity make her unable to grasp the monumental changes and the rough postwar world. The novel’s great popularity is due not so much to its story of war and survival, however, as to the love stories that take place in this setting. Fittingly, two opposite male characters, Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes, engage the hearts of the two female protagonists. The two major plot lines dealing with love and war and the four major characters are introduced in an early scene, a barbecue at Twelve Oaks, the plantation home of Ashley Wilkes. Sixteen-year-old Scarlett, in love with handsome and intelligent Ashley, the ideal plantation gentleman, decides to pique his jealousy by flirting with all the young men at the barbecue. Her hopes and self-control are shaken when she learns that Ashley, who finds Scarlett attractive, vibrant, and somewhat intimidating, has already become engaged to Melanie. In a panic, she does what no proper lady should deign to; she seeks a private moment with him to declare her love. Ashley gently rebuffs Scarlett’s advances, leaving her in a childish rage. Rhett, whose unbiased observations of Southern politics and past ungentlemanly conduct have made him an outcast at

514

GONE WITH THE WIND

the party, overhears Scarlett’s tantrum and recognizes in her a kindred spirit. The barbecue ends abruptly when the guests learn that war has been declared, and Scarlett, seeking revenge against Ashley, agrees to marry Melanie’s brother, the boyish Charlie Hamilton, before he leaves for battle. Charlie Hamilton soon dies in camp of pneumonia, and the novel follows the four major characters as war transforms the South they knew. Rhett continues to pursue Scarlett, who is at once flattered and insulted by his advances. Scarlett, though she lives with Melanie, continues to long for Ashley. Pure-hearted Melanie adores her husband and admires the strength of both Scarlett and Rhett. Ashley, who fights heroically for the South though he is not ideologically committed to its values, similarly remains physically loyal to Melanie though he is infatuated with Scarlett. Scarlett begins to mature and rely on her own strength when, as the Union soldiers burn Atlanta, she serves as midwife to the birth of Melanie’s baby and conducts mother and child in a perilous journey back to Tara, her family’s plantation. Finding her mother dead and her father unstable, Scarlett refuses to play the role of the helpless lady and starve. Instead, she commands the household’s efforts at survival, proclaiming as she scrounges vegetables from the earth, “If I have to steal or kill, as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (283). As part of her plan to save her plantation and family after the war, Scarlett marries her sister’s fiancé and takes over his business, and when he is killed in a Klan raid, she marries Rhett Butler. She has grudgingly come to respect Melanie, who has worked alongside Scarlett through the war, and though she still does not love him, she has come to feel more comfortable with Rhett. The novel ends when, on Melanie’s deathbed, Scarlett realizes how weak Ashley has been all along and that her true love is Rhett Butler. Scarlett’s declaration to Rhett comes too late, however. To her confession he proclaims, “My dear, I don’t give a damn” (688). Though Scarlett is heartbroken, the novel’s final line assures readers that she will again survive: “After all, tomorrow is another day” (689). Partly because of its popularity and partly because of its uncritical portrayal of Southern race relations, the

novel has, until very recently, been dismissed by most critics. Some readers, however, have observed the similarities between Mitchell’s own life and that of Scarlett. Like Scarlett’s, Mitchell’s beloved mother died when Mitchell was young, leaving her father emotionally unstable. Mitchell had a failed early marriage to Red K. Upshaw, a violently passionate man who resembled Rhett Butler. Feminist readers have found merit in the book’s criticism of the confining ideals of ladyhood that still lingered in Mitchell’s time and in the unusual focus on war’s impact on women’s daily lives. Interpreting the work historically, Mitchell’s own Depression South parallels her fictional Reconstruction South. The poverty and social instability of both times demanded unconventional strategies for survival. Recent critics have also noted in Mitchell’s unusual color descriptions of Scarlett (red) and Rhett (black) subtle or perhaps unconscious challenges to the South’s strict racial divisions. In the novel’s two rape scenes, the failed attempt by a black and a white homeless man as Scarlett drives her buggy alone at dusk and when her “dark” husband Rhett carries her up the stairs to take possession of her body and spirit, Mitchell explores complex issues of power, gender, and race central to social turbulence in both the Reconstruction and the Great Depression. In addition, Louis D. Rubin has pointed out the similarity between Gone with the Wind and William FAULKNER’s masterpiece ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, published the same year. Both novels look back to the fall of the Old South as experienced by single-minded self-promoters, Thomas Sutpen and Scarlett O’Hara.

SOURCES Hanson, Elizabeth I. Margaret Mitchell. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: MacMillan, 1936. Pyron, Darden Asbury, ed. Recasting Gone with the Wind in American Culture. Miami: University of Florida Press, 1983. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. A Gallery of Southerners. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Taylor, Helen. Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Betina Entzminger

GOOD DAY TO DIE, A 515

GOOD DAY TO DIE, A JAMES HARRISON (1973) Jim HARRISON’s second novel, A Good Day to Die, focuses on the transgressions of society toward an ever-shrinking wilderness and sets forth a conservationist doctrine that the author would refine over the next 30 years in both his fiction and his poetry (and that he first articulated in Wolf: A False Memoir [1971], his first novel). The novel has been compared to Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), though few sources credit Harrison with preceding Abbey’s cult classic by two years. The main event around which A Good Day to Die revolves is the damming of an Idaho river by the American government and an attempt by two hapless characters bent on self-destruction to keep the country free from the onslaught of technology. Harrison’s male protagonists—the unnamed, alcoholic narrator and Tim, a disaffected Vietnam veteran who keeps his girlfriend, Sylvia, in tow on their adventure—experience the alienation inherent in the social-protest novel. Tim’s Vietnam experiences drive his willingness to reach the goal, however misguided the mission or improbable the odds for success; the narrator’s estrangement from the middle ground of “acceptable” society, for reasons that are never made clear, motivates his halting actions throughout. At the novel’s outset, the narrator has spent several weeks in the Florida Keys before heading north to his home. He struggles for balance between the reality of a society that profoundly displeases him and the release of drugs and alcohol, fishing, and women, the only signposts of a reality that threatens to slip away from him at every ill-advised decision. The origin of the narrator’s disdain for the damming of rivers, however, is apparent: Fishing dampens his otherwise free-floating anxiety, and the serenity of the stream and the one-on-one parrying with the trout erase for a time the problems common to the tormented souls of Harrison’s characters. “I was struck again as I had been for years by how my fishing so hypnotically wiped the slate clean again,” the narrator muses, “though only for as long as I was in the river” (121). As in much of Harrison’s work, the characters are drawn to water, which serves as a convenient symbol for the purification of spirit and the rebirth for

which the protagonists search in vain. The narrator’s dependence on the trout stream has defined his adult life, and he reluctantly—and without any compelling reason outside his own romantic and facile notions of the possibility of becoming a folk hero—agrees to travel west with Tim and Sylvia to make known their dissatisfaction with the dam. The title of the novel is an invocation of a Native American war cry, “Today is a good day to fight— today is a good day to die.” As with so many Native peoples, the Nez Percé, with whom the narrator associates himself and his small band, were extirpated by civilization’s steady movement westward during the 19th century. Led by Chief Joseph, the Nez Percé surrendered to the U.S. Army in Montana in 1877, the retreat punctuated by Chief Joseph’s famous speech in which the great leader intones, “Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more, forever.” That the protagonists are associated with the heroism and oppression of the Nez Percé tribe embeds the three in history and aligns them ironically with the injustice perpetrated on the tribe. As with the attitudes that have been drilled into Tim and the narrator by the heroic images (both real and imagined) that assail them daily on television and in print, however, the aimless travelers protest for the sake of hearing their own violently obscure voices against the majority, even though the narrator realizes that “I had so little of what I thought of as courage” (139). For all the braggadocio that accompanies the narrator’s incessant rationalization, he joins the journey to meet some real—if chemically induced—demons that only clearrunning trout streams can abate. While the narrator understands that he is weak-willed and often acts as a foil for Tim’s aggression, Tim agrees to the plan with only a visceral understanding of his own motives, instinctive reactions drilled into him by two tours of duty in Vietnam. The narrator is most bothered by Tim’s fixation on the dam not as an object that encroaches on good trout fishing, but rather as an object that exists simply to be destroyed. Memories of place partially explain the narrator’s motivation for following through with the project. The

516 GOOD EARTH, THE

narrator fishes a particularly dangerous part of the Yellowstone River, where his previous thoughts of suicide become intertwined with his fascination of place and his desire to conquer his anxiety. The scene echoes Ernest HEMINGWAY’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” in which Nick Adams returns to the river to reconcile himself with some unspoken tragedy in his life: The river, however, becomes the narrator’s enemy in Harrison’s narrative when the narrator’s boots fill with water, turning an idyllic test of manhood into the antithesis of Hemingway’s story. The narrator’s brush with death on the river that had always acted as his symbolic umbilical cord to reality and, until now, most often rekindled his life fires, foreshadows the tragedy and pathos of the novel’s conclusion, in which Tim, caught on the breast of the dam that they have targeted for destruction, is killed and washed downstream as the narrator and Sylvia helplessly look on. The narrator realizes only too late that “An act I had conceived of as heroic would probably go unnoticed except by a rancher who might wonder why his dam had never washed away before” (175). The importance of A Good Day to Die in Harrison’s oeuvre, which spans more than a dozen works of fiction, a memoir, and poetry produced consistently over 40 years, is as a first statement of the issues that would remain at the fore in all the author’s work, environmental concerns and America’s attitude toward stewardship of the land chief among them. The novel is an unequivocal statement of the power of place and an indictment of the mind-set that threatens to destroy the very landscapes from which Manifest Destiny, specifically, and the American mythos of expansion, in general, have drawn their power.

SOURCE Harrison, James. A Good Day to Die. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Patrick A. Smith

GOOD EARTH, THE PEARL BUCK (1932) Pearl BUCK’s The Good Earth, winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into an enormous number of languages and has remained in print continuously into the new millennium. It is the first novel in a trilogy,

House of Earth. The second, Sons (1932), follows the three sons of Wang Lung in their roles as merchant, warlord, and rich man, while the third, A House Divided (1935), depicts the eventual decline of the family as they experience war, famine, epidemic, and, finally, revolution. The Good Earth, usually considered the best of the three, is memorable both for its content, which introduced Americans to various classes of Chinese people, and for its simple, almost biblical style. As Buck noted in her 1938 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she tried, like a Chinese storyteller, to convey character and circumstances through concise detail so that the author’s voice would never impede or intrude upon the story. The Good Earth depends on universal themes—love, birth and death, and the ensuing conflicts between rich and poor and young and old, as one family, the House of Wang, prospers, and another, the House of Hwang, declines. At the opening of the novel, O-lan and her husband, Wang Lung, are poor and hardworking: Wang Lung, a farmer, has married O-lan, a slave in the House of Hwang, because she is neither too pretty nor too young. She faithfully serves Wang Lung and his father, taking little time off from her work in the rice fields to bear her first child, a son. They suffer together through drought and near starvation, culminating in O-lan’s choking of her baby daughter because there is no food. The family finally moves south where rumor suggests that more food is available, and for months on end, O-lan teaches the children to beg with her. Wang Lung becomes a rickshaw puller. When the army invades the city, Wang Lung, expecting to be conscripted, by sheer luck confronts a terrified rich man who offers him money to spare his life. Meanwhile, Olan discovers and takes a fortune in jewels from the rich man’s house. Wang Lung uses these jewels to return with his family to their property and also buys up land from the House of Hwang, builds additions to his own house, and educates his sons. In a plot-driven novel, such prosperity and happiness cannot long endure. Although Wang Lung outlasts the floods that threaten his family, his relationship with O-lan changes. He takes a more beautiful second wife, Lotus Blossom, even commandeering O-lan’s pearls to give to her. His infatuation

GORDON, CAROLINE 517

wanes, especially after his oldest son flirts with Lotus Blossom. At the same time, O-lan is dying, and Wang Lung finally feels guilty for the way he has treated her. O-lan dies shortly after the marriage of her oldest son, as does Wang Lung’s father, leaving Wang Lung with only his vulgar and dishonest uncle and his detestable cousin whom he fears too much to oust from the house; he craftily subdues them with opium. Wang Lung then faces trouble with his sons: The two eldest and their wives bicker continuously, and Wang Lung alienates his youngest son by stealing his lover, Pear Blossom. At novel’s end, only Pear Blossom and Wang Lung’s mentally retarded daughter remain to care for him. His cousin, with his own troops, arrogantly takes up residence in the family compound whenever he likes, and the sons of O-lan and Wang Lung scheme to sell the land their parents have acquired over a lifetime. Pearl Buck sparked a good deal of controversy with The Good Earth. Some Chinese scholars accused her of ignorance or distortion of both history and character; others defended her. Buck herself accused her detractors of failing to understand the diverse elements of China or the life of the peasant farmers. For most readers, however, she brings the Chinese families into focus and demonstrates the universality of corruption, evil, goodness, and compassion.

SOURCE The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

GORDON, CAROLINE (1895–1981)

Caroline Gordon, a modernist novelist and short story writer, was closely associated with the Southern Renaissance and the Fugitive/Agrarian movement. She wrote nine novels, numerous stories, and two books on literary theory—all of which affected the direction of American literature. Her fiction—including PENHALLY (1931), Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), and The Women on the Porch (1944)—demonstrates the talents that continue to attract admirers and devotees: superb stylistic achievement, development of the craft of narrative fiction, and the use of an unobtrusive narrator.

Born in Todd County, Kentucky, on October 6, 1895, to James Morris Gordon, a Virginian and operator of a classical school for boys, and Nancy Meriwether, a native Kentuckian, Gordon was reared in both rural Kentucky and in Clarksville, Tennessee, the frequent model for Gloversville in Gordon’s fiction (Stuckey, 12). After earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1916 from Bethany College, Gordon spent four years as a reporter for the Chattanooga News. During this time she wrote a commentary on I’ll Take My Stand, written by the poet and critic Allen Tate and now famous as the manifesto of the Southern Agrarian movement. Both Tate, whom Gordon married in 1924, and the British writer Ford Madox Ford became early mentors; Ford assisted her with the editing of Penhally, her first novel. Gordon used both novels and short fiction to explore her major ideas: the agrarian versus the material or urban, the heroic versus the self-centered, and, later, after her conversion to Catholicism, the mythic versus the Christian spirit. Although as many critics note, Gordon seems to celebrate male achievement, her work contains a powerful subtext that demonstrates the strength of the female. Gordon explains her literary theories in two works of nonfiction as well: the anthology The House of Fiction (1950) and How to Read a Novel (1957), a collection of lectures delivered in 1954 at the University of Kansas. Gordon’s early themes emerge first in Penhally through the Llewellyns, a Southern family divided between its traditional rural values and the present-day materialism that surrounds it. She divides the novel into three parts, traces the family from 1826 until the 1900s, and examines the conflict by contrasting Nicholas, reared in Virginia under the old laws of primogeniture with his younger brother Ralph, who advocates selling both the house, Penhally, and the land. But it is Nicholas Llewellyn a generation later who sells the land to a rich Yankee woman and is then fatally shot to death by his brother, Chance. Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Gordon’s next novel, may be usefully read against the backdrop of Penhally. Alexander Gordon Morris Maury is a Tennessee classics professor, husband, and father, but his deepest emotional involvement is with hunting and fishing. After recov-

518

GORDON, CAROLINE

ering from the deep depression engendered by the death of his wife, Molly, Maury responds fully to the call of nature. This character evokes the Thoreau of Walden, the Mark TWAIN who wrote Huckleberry Finn, and HEMINGWAY’s Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” (Stuckey, 40). In None Shall Look Back (1937), a significant Civil War novel, Gordon explores the effects of the war and the continuing influence of Southern culture. She uses General Nathan Bedford Forrest, an actual historical figure, as a character in the novel, but her main character remains Rives Allard, a soldier who represents the old Southern values and whose death leaves his widow, Lucy, contemplating a bleak future. With her next novel, The Garden of Adonis (1937), set during the Great Depression, Gordon explores the South of the 1930s. Her hero, Ben Allard, parallels the Greek god Adonis now wandering in her version of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland; he must cope with the loss of his tobacco crop. Green Centuries (1941) also contains a mythically inspired hero, Rion (an anagram of the Greek god Orion) Outlaw, but in this novel Gordon returns to Kentucky pioneering days. Featuring such historical personages as Daniel Boone, the novel details the struggle between heroic codes of honor and murdering Indians during the inexorable march to the west. In her sixth novel, The Women on the Porch, Catherine Chapman realizes that her husband, Jim, a New York history professor, is having an affair with his assistant; Chapman returns to her home and extended family in Swan River, Tennessee. The novel has been reissued recently because readers are still fascinated with the idea of three “women on the porch”—here, Catherine, her grandmother, and her aunt—and the powers they employ to ward off the psychological Wasteland issues of antiheroism, decadence, and destruction. Gordon’s next three novels—Strange Children (1951), The Malefactors (1957), and the much later Glory of Hera (1972)—were influenced by Gordon’s conversion to Catholicism in 1947. Strange Children features a long weekend party where Sarah and Stephen Lewis examine the issues of good and evil, grace and salvation, and their own spiritual deficiencies. Set in

Bucks County, Pennsylvania, The Malefactors also measures the modern-day dearth of religious values against the philosophy of Christian salvation. Here Gordon depicts her close friends and colleagues of the 1920s, including Tate, Hart Crane, and Dorothy Day. In Glory of Hera Gordon uses the Greek myth of Heracles and his labors and implies that he is a precursor of Christ. Caroline Gordon continued to teach and write and receive honorary degrees until her death in Mexico in 1981. Her papers are housed at Princeton University.

NOVELS Aleck Maury, Sportsman. New York: Scribner, 1934. The Garden of Adonis. New York: Scribner, 1937. The Glory of Hera. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Green Centuries. New York: Scribner, 1941. The Malefactors. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956. None Shall Look Back. New York: Scribner, 1937. Penhally. New York: Scribner, 1931. The Strange Children. New York: Scribner, 1951. The Women on the Porch. New York: Scribner, 1944.

SOURCES Baker, Howard. “The Stratagems of Caroline Gordon, or the Art of the Novel and the Novelty of Myth,” Southern Review 9 (Summer 1973): 523–549. Brown, Ashley. “The Achievement of Caroline Gordon,” Southern Humanities Review 2 (Summer 1968): 279–290. Dunaway, John M., and Jacques Maritain, eds. Exiles and Fugitives: The Letters of Jacques and Raeissa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. Golden, Robert E., and Mary C. Sullivan. Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Gordon, Caroline. The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. ———. The Forest of the South. New York: Scribner, 1945. ———. A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford. Davis: University of California Library. 1963. ———. How to Read a Novel. New York: Viking, 1957. ———. Old Red and Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1963. ———. Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924–1937. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. ——— and Allen Tate, eds. The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story, with Commentary. New York: Scribner, 1950.

GORDON, MARY CATHERINE 519

Hoffman, Frederick J. “Caroline Gordon: The Special Yield,” Critique 1 (Winter 1956): 299–335. Jonza, Nancylee Novell. The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Makowsky, Veronica A. Caroline Gordon: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. McDowell, Frederick. Caroline Gordon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1966. O’Connor, William Van. The Grotesque: An American Genre and Other Essays. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Rubin, Louis D., and Robert D. Jacobs, eds. South: Modern Southern Literature in Its Cultural Setting. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. Stuckey, William J. Caroline Gordon. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Tate, Allen. Memoirs and Opinions, 1926–1974. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975. Waldron, Ann. Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance. New York: Putnam’s, 1987. Walker, William Edward, and Robert L. Walker, eds. Reality and Myth: Essays in American Literature. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1964.

GORDON, MARY CATHERINE (1949– ) Known primarily as a novelist, although she has written short stories as well, collected in Temporary Shelter (1987), Mary Gordon has published five novels and three novellas to date. She writes seriously and compellingly about women’s issues and contemporary Catholicism, subjects that have caused her to be labeled both a “feminist” and a “Catholic novelist.” While she accepts the feminist label, Gordon has strenuously resisted the Catholic one, insisting that Catholicism simply provides “esthetic standards” invaluable to a novelist (Bennett, 2). Regardless of the labels, Gordon has been praised for her artistry and the philosophical curiosity with which she fashions her novels, and has been compared to Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Flannery O’CONNOR, Mary McCARTHY, and the contemporary writers Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul. Both her first and her second novels, Final Payments (1978) and The COMPANY OF WOMEN (1981), won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. She has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates for her fictional achievements.

Gordon was born on December 8, 1949, in Far Rockaway, New York, to David Gordon, a writer, and Anna Gagliano Gordon, a legal secretary; her father had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and her mother was an Irish-American Catholic. Raised in the Long Island suburb of Valley Stream, Gordon received a B.A. from Barnard College in 1971 and an M.A. from Syracuse University in 1973. Not until she divorced her first husband, Jim Brain, and married Arthur Cash, a professor of English, did Gordon publish Final Payments, a critical and popular success about Isabel Moore, a woman who devoted her life to caring for her aged father. At his death, Isabel resolves to strike out on her own to try to make up for these lost years. This surprisingly compelling heroine returns home, however, to care for Margaret, her father’s housekeeper, and consults with an alcoholic priest about the disappointments of the world outside her home. The Company of Women describes Felicitas, another young woman on the brink of entering the world. The novel, suffused with the radicalism of the 1960s, chronicles Felicitas’s affairs, childbirth, feminine communal life, and marriage; her journey, while intended as rebellious, never takes her away from the patriarchal values that influenced and in some sense paralyzed her mother: For her mother they were religious and for Felicitas they were academic. In Men and Angels (1985), Gordon’s third novel, the family life of Anne, an art historian, turns upside down when her husband accepts a fellowship in Europe. Anne researches the life of a famous artist and compares it to her own. Her religiously zealous au pair Laura upsets the religious and familial balance of the household. In The Other Side (1989), Gordon includes several generations of an Irish-American family who adapt to the United States in radically different ways. Gordon employs her most complex point of view as members of various generations reveal differing perspectives on the family story. Immaculate Man, Living at Home, and The Rest of Life, collected in The Rest of Life: Three Novellas (1993), tell the tales of three women of varying ages. The nameless worker in a battered women’s shelter of Immaculate Man has an affair with a priest and suffers fears of abandonment; the nameless narra-

520 GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

tor of Living at Home wrestles with her career (as a doctor specializing in autism) and that of her lover, whose photojournalism work necessitates long absences; the elderly woman of The Rest of Life visits, with her son, the European site of her sudden withdrawal from a suicide pact with her lover of many years ago. Gordon’s more recent work includes Spending: A Utopian Divertimento (1998) and Pearl: A Novel (2005); an essay collection, Seeing through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity (2000); and a biography, Joan of Arc (2000). She teaches at Barnard College and lives and writes in New York City.

NOVELS The Company of Women. New York: Random House, 1981. Final Payments. New York: Random House, 1978. Men and Angels. New York: Random House, 1985. The Other Side. New York: Viking, 1989. Pearl: A Novel. New York: Pantheon, 2005. The Rest of Life: Three Novellas. New York: Viking, 1993. Spending: A Utopian Divertimento. New York: Scribner, 1998.

SOURCES Bennett, Alma. Mary Gordon. New York: Twayne, 1996. Drabble, Margaret. “The Limits of Mother Love,” New York Times Book Review, 31 March 1985, pp. 1, 30–31. Iannone, Carol. “Fiction: The Secret of Mary Gordon’s Success,” Commentary (June 1985): 62–66. Lodge, David. “The Arms of the Church,” Times Literary Supplement, 1 September 1978, p. 965. Sheldon, Barbara H. Daughters and Fathers in Feminist Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Suleiman, Susan Robin. “On Maternal Splitting: Apropos of Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels,” Signs 14 (Autumn 1988): 25–41.

OTHER Gordon, Mary. “A Sense of Place: Looking Into the Life of Mary Gordon.” By Alden Mudge. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/0001bp/mary_gordon.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN JAMES BALDWIN (1953) Published in 1953, Baldwin’s autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, tells the story of John Grimes, the 14-year-old protagonist who struggles to find his own identity within his

family’s dynamics. We meet John on his birthday, a Saturday in March 1935. Through his journey to see a movie and find his brother, Roy, readers develop a sense of his character. John confronts his struggles as the plot develops—Baldwin divides the text into three sections: “The Seventh Day,” “The Prayers of the Saints,” and “The Threshing-Floor.” In addition, Baldwin further divides “The Prayers of the Saints” into three sections: “Florence’s Prayer,” “Gabriel’s Prayer,” and “Elizabeth’s Prayer.” In these three sections of “The Prayers of the Saints,” readers learn John’s family history. Each section tells the story of one member of John’s family—his aunt, Florence; his stepfather, Gabriel; and his mother, Elizabeth. Baldwin concludes the novel by giving his readers John’s religious conversion. Throughout the novel, however, the focus is on the trials John faces with his family, his sexuality, and his religion. Baldwin’s focus on John, the text’s protagonist, is expected; however, Baldwin’s method of revealing John’s character is not. We learn John’s history through the eyes of his family: his Aunt Florence, his father, and his mother. Even though John is the central character, he is the principal focus in only “The Seventh Day” and “The Threshing-Floor,” thereby reinforcing Baldwin’s focus on John’s dysfunctional family life and its influence on choices in his life. In fact, John’s family decides his future for him—in contrast to Roy, his younger half-brother, John is the sibling expected to rise above temptation: “Everyone was always praying that the Lord would change Roy’s heart, but it was John who was expected to be good, to be a good example” (7). So John’s family sets the bar for him; John’s decisions are with this expectation in mind. According to Robert Bone, readers even learn of John’s religious conversion—normally a deeply moving and private act— through the eyes of his family: “It is through the lives of the adults that we achieve perspective on the boy’s conversion” (Bone, 221). Readers experience John largely through the others’ eyes—the eyes of family members who either influence, or decide, his fate. For some readers, John’s sexuality is hidden—hidden by Baldwin’s refusal to define John as either homosexual or heterosexual. Throughout the novel, Baldwin

GRAFTON, SUE TAYLOR 521

gives glimpses of John’s sexuality, but the glimpses become part of John’s character, part of his appeal; Baldwin never defines John by his sexuality. Instead, readers see John as an adolescent who copes with his sexuality as best he can. According to Roderick Ferguson, Baldwin’s first novel arises out of sexual tension: “Go Tell It on the Mountain arose out of the sexual anxieties generated by African American migration and northern urbanization” (Ferguson, 101). For Ferguson, the novel’s main theme is the repressed sexuality experienced by its characters. And this leads readers to question John’s desires in the novel. According to Bryan Washington, John’s homosexuality is linked to his African-American heritage. “Go Tell It on the Mountain’s canonical status, on the other hand, is questionable because race, rather than sexuality, is allegedly its primary preoccupation . . . blackness and homosexuality in Baldwin are not simply coterminous; they are virtually interchangeable” (Ferguson, 78). Thus, it is possible to argue that John’s character is completely homosexual. However, some readers fail to make the connection between John and homosexuality, thereby giving way to the counterargument that John is simply a confused adolescent who—like most adolescents— exp1ores his own sexuality. For those readers, John is heterosexual, and his homoerotic urges are just that— urges. And it should be noted that John does not take part in a sexual act, other than masturbation, in the novel. Although Baldwin does not comment on John’s sexuality patently, readers must take John’s character and decide for themselves what role—if any—his sexuality plays in the development of the novel. Since the title of the text is borrowed from an old Negro spiritual, an attentive reader surmises religion will play a large role within the framework of the text. For Bone, the religious experiences in the text are intricate: “We shall confront, then, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, a certain complexity of tone. Baldwin maintains an ironic distance from his material, even as he portrays the spiritual force and emotional appeal of storefront Christianity” (Bone, 220). But this emotional appeal is not the only driving force—Baldwin bombards his readers with religious imagery. The Grimes’s family church, Temple of the Fire Baptized, serves as the set-

ting for the section “The Threshing-Floor”; John’s father, Gabriel, is a former pastor and head deacon in the church; and Elisha, the pastor’s nephew, is central to John’s emotional and spiritual development. According to Donald Hubbard, “Baldwin’s supreme achievement is his use of sermonic language to evoke certain motifs and archetypes familiar to most black Americans. His extensive use of biblical allusions and Christian ritual for symbolic expression have black religion as a point of spiritual departure to tell the tragic story of the black man’s lot in America” (Hubbard, 95). So one can argue that the text itself is a sermon. Baldwin assimilates his language use with that of a sermon—thereby combining the text with religious experience. Throughout the text, Baldwin focuses on John’s growth—through his family, his sexuality, and his religious experiences. Baldwin presents John as an African-American adolescent who approaches his religious conversion with anxiety. However, in the end, readers know that John’s religious experience must be real—if not, he would have little to go tell on the mountain.

SOURCES Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Modern Library ed. New York: Random House, 1995. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958. Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Hubbard, Donald. The Sermon and the African American Literary Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. Washington, Bryan R. “Wrestling with ‘The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’: John, Elisha, and the ‘Master.’ ” In New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain, edited by Trudier Harris, 77–95. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Christopher Lee Massey

GRAFTON, SUE TAYLOR (1940– )

Sue Grafton, one of America’s most widely read authors, said that when she “decided to do mysteries, I chose the classic private eye genre because I like playing

522

GRAFTON, SUE TAYLOR

hardball with the boys. I despise gender-segregated events of any kind” (Grafton and Taylor, 4). Along with such writers as Sara PARETSKY, Grafton created the hard-boiled female detective and remade the classic male detective novel. Grafton is connected to Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator, as is Raymond CHANDLER with Philip Marlowe or Dashiell HAMMETT with the Continental Op. Grafton’s Kinsey, says Stephanie Stassel, is “One of the first modern hard-boiled female detectives. . . . a smart-mouthed, fast-thinking ex-cop.” She is “based in Santa Teresa, a thinly veiled rendition of Santa Barbara” (Grafton and Stassel, E1). Grafton’s alphabetical series of Kinsey Millhone mysteries begins with “A” Is for Alibi; she has recently produced “P” Is for Peril and “Q” Is for Quarry. Her subjects include domestic violence, ageism, homophobia, social snobbery, and feminism. As Maureen T. Reddy points out, nearly all Grafton’s novels focus on the institutions oppressive to women (Reddy, 174). Then the murders happen! And nearly every critic mentions Grafton’s wry sense of humor, noticeable in Kinsey Millhone. Sue Grafton was born on April 24, 1940, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Cornelius Warren Grafton, a bond attorney and author of three detective novels, and Vivian Boisseau Harnsberger Grafton, a high school chemistry teacher. Graduating from the University of Louisville in 1961, Grafton married a classmate, James L. Flood, in 1959. The marriage lasted only two years, and she married Al Schmidt in 1962. By the time she published her first novel, Keziah Dane (1967), she had a desk full of unpublished manuscripts; The LollyMadonna War was published in 1969. In 1972, Grafton sold the movie rights for The Lolly-Madonna War to MGM and realized that she could leave Schmidt and make her living as a writer. She married Steven Humphrey in 1978. Grafton published A Is for Alibi in 1982, in what would become one of the longest and most popular series in the detective fiction genre. In that first novel, Kinsey is hired to help Nikki Fife, a woman unjustly accused of murder. Kinsey is a Southern Californian with a predilection for wearing pants and an enduring faith in reason over violence. But she can shoot a gun when the situation requires: “She’s like

my secret self,” Grafton has admitted (Grafton and Stassel, E1), but “more independent and more daring.” Although they share similarities such as two divorces, Kinsey Millhone is responsible to no one but herself— and her friends. Orphaned when she was five years old, Kinsey has a vulnerable side; she is sensitive to hostile family dynamics and to those who have been hurt by some family member. Like the classic male detectives, she is essentially moral. And like Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta, Kinsey has grown and matured; some readers even object to the evolution! Not strenuous objection, apparently, since the A through O novels have sold over 42 million copies in the United States (Grafton and Stassel, E1) and have been translated into 26 languages. Although most of the Kinsey Millhone books have been best-sellers, critics have chosen various novels as the most compelling or best written. “K” Is for Killer (1994) is one of the most popular contenders, comprising a world of night and darkness different from the other novels, many of which are suffused in sunlight even as Kinsey is solving crimes. In Killer, frustrated almost to the breaking point by the failure of the police to incarcerate the murderer, Kinsey contacts the Mafia, knowing that in so doing she is complicit in his murder. Another popular contender is “O” Is for Outlaw (1999), based on Kinsey’s first husband, Mickey Magruder, whom she divorced because he asked her for an alibi during a murder investigation; now, years later, she learns that he was actually innocent. She hunts down the real killer and wrestles with her longrepressed but more significant reasons for leaving Mickey. Grafton’s own favorite is “J” Is for Judgment (1993), in which Kinsey learns during the investigation of a suicide that she has a large number of relatives who have never contacted her. Sue Grafton has calculated that she will be 109 by the time she finishes the series (January Magazine). She and her husband, a philosophy of physics professor, divide their time between Montecito, California, and Louisville, Kentucky. Mindful that Kinsey Millhone (whom she has vowed never to sell to Hollywood) is the reason for her success, she drives a car with a license plate that reads “THNX KNS” (Grafton and Stassel, E1).

GRAPES OF WRATH, THE 523

NOVELS Keziah Dane. New York: Macmillan, 1967. The Lolly-Madonna War. London: Peter Owen, 1969. “A” Is for Alibi. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982. “B” Is for Burglar. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985. “C” Is for Corpse. New York: Holt, 1986. “D” Is for Deadbeat. New York: Holt, 1987. “E” Is for Evidence. New York: Holt, 1988. “F” Is for Fugitive. New York: Holt, 1989. “G” Is for Gumshoe. New York: Holt, 1990. “H” Is for Homicide. New York: Holt, 1991. “I” Is for Innocent. New York: Holt, 1992. “J” Is for Judgment. New York: Holt, 1993. Kinsey and Me. Edited by Steve Humphrey. Introductions by Sue Taylor Grafton. Santa Barbara, Calif: Bench Press, 1992. “K” Is for Killer. New York: Holt, 1994. “L” Is for Lawless. New York: Holt, 1995. “M” Is for Malice. New York: Holt, 1996. “N” Is for Noose. New York: Holt, 1998. “O” Is for Outlaw. New York: Holt, 1999. “P” Is for Peril. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 2001. “Q” Is for Quarry. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 2002. “R” Is for Ricochet. New York: Putnam’s Sons, 2004. “S” Is for Silence. New York: Putnam, 2005.

SOURCES Brandt, Kate and Paula Lichtenberg. “On the Case with V. I. and Kinsey,” Hotwire: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture 10, no. 1 (January 1984): 48–50. Grafton, Sue, and Stephanie Stassel. “Sue Grafton’s Best-Selling Mysteries—Each Titled with a Different Letter—Feature Her Smart-Alecky but Down-to-Earth Alter Ego, Kinsey Millhone,” Los Angeles Times, 3 April 2000, p. E1. Grafton, Sue, and Bruce Taylor. “G Is for (Sue) Grafton,” Armchair Detective 22, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 4–13. Johnson, Patricia E. “Sex and Betrayal in the Detective Fiction of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky,” Journal of Popular Culture 27, no. 4 (Spring 1994): 97–106. Kaufman, Natalie Hevener, and Carol McGinnis Kay. “G” Is for Grafton: The World of Kinsey Millhone. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. Revised and enlarged, 2000. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Rabinowitz, Peter J. “ ‘Reader, I Blew Him Away’: Convention and Transgression in Sue Grafton.” In Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth, 326–346. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993.

Reddy, Maureen T. “The Feminist Counter Tradition in Crime: Cross, Grafton, Paretsky, and Wilson.” In The Cunning Craft, edited by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer, 174–187. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1990. Schaffer, Rachel. “Armed with Wit and Dangerous: Sue Grafton’s Sense of Black Humor,” Armchair Detective 30, no. 3. (Summer 1997): 316–322. Shuker-Haines, Timothy, and Martha M. Umphrey. “Gender (De)Mystified: Resistance and Recuperation in Hard-Boiled Female Detective Fiction.” In The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, edited by Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy, 71–82. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Walton, Priscilla L. “ ‘E’ Is for En/Gendering Readings: Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.” In Women Times Three: Writers, Detectives, Readers, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein, 101–115. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1995.

OTHER Grafton, Sue. “ ‘G’ Is for Grafton.” By Natalie Hevener Kaufman and Carol McGinnis Kay. January Magazine (June 6, 2001). Available online. URL: http://www.januarymagazine. com/grafton.html. Accessed September 6, 2005. Sue Grafton Web site. Available online. URL: http://www. suegrafton.com. Accessed September 6, 2005.

GRAPES OF WRATH, THE JOHN STEINBECK (1939) The Grapes of Wrath was John Steinbeck’s sixth novel and is widely considered to be his masterpiece. Published in 1939 to general acclaim from critics, it received the Pulitzer Prize the following year. However, the negative portrayal of his fellow Californians cost Steinbeck dearly in terms of the support of his local community and of individuals who had praised his previous work and greeted the success of a native son with pride and admiration. After the publication of the book, the author was burned in effigy and his novel denounced as scandalous and populated with lies and distortions. Moreover, the graphic detail, the sexual innuendoes, and the scatological references that Steinbeck had included in the novel offended conservative readers, causing Viking to pressure the author to eliminate certain words or to modify his vocabulary in order to avoid censorship. Although he complied with some of the requests for change, it was not until Viking

524 GRAPES OF WRATH, THE

reissued the text in 1997 that the references offensive to 1930s middle-class sensibility were restored to their rightful place in the text. Despite such criticism, Steinbeck believed he had thoroughly researched his topic and had documented much of his material from firsthand conversations with migrant workers and oppressed minorities. He had also interviewed government officials such as Tom Collins (to whom the book was dedicated) who were trying to solve the dilemmas of poverty and homelessness that faced the nomadic workers on a daily basis. Steinbeck began his research for The Grapes of Wrath in 1937 while visiting the Arvin Sanitary Camp, a locale set up by the Roosevelt administration to alleviate the human suffering of the migrant community and to offer an alternative to the temporary shanties and lean-tos (Hoovervilles) that sprang up as the workers moved from farm to farm and crop to crop. Finding starvation and illness rampant in an area known for its fertile ground and excessive production of crops made Steinbeck fearless about espousing the cause of the underdog and exposing the crimes of the rich and powerful. The title of the book was taken from a line borrowed from Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (composed in 1861) and offered a none too subtle suggestion that the situation in California was a new “Civil” War, this time between the “haves” and the “have nots.” The story line Steinbeck followed traces a single extended family, the Joads, on their journey from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl (an actual historical occurrence in the drought years 1934–35) to the potentially Edenic state of California. There the family hopes to resettle after being dispossessed by the banks and corporations in their home state who, by trickery and deception, connived to cheat the Okies and profit from their naïveté. Since the family has no knowledge of crop rotation or other methods of preserving the land, the precious topsoil is soon blown away, and their farm is placed in foreclosure, forcing them to move. The Joads and their neighbors are helpless against the power of a faceless bureaucracy and lose the heritage of the land that has sustained them for generations. Steeling themselves to this loss, the Joads (who some critics have associated with the biblical Jews) set

out on an exodus that they believe will terminate at a promised land of milk and honey (similar to the first exodus led by Moses), where hunger will be unknown and work will be plentiful. However, they soon discover that this Canaan (California), like the Egypt (Oklahoma) they are leaving, is in reality rife with enemies rather than with solutions. After a strenuous journey over Arizona and New Mexico and the ensuing desert, the Joads, like the Israelites who wandered in a wilderness for 40 years, are weary and discouraged by the prospect of ever attaining a Promised Land. Yet the handbills that promise steady work and ample food as well as idealistic shelters/homes buoy their spirits. In yet another biblical parallel to the Jews, the Joads lose several of their number as they undertake the demanding journey. First, the older generation, Granma and Granpa Joad, are casualties of the harsh demands created by forsaking their family home. Neither makes it over the state line into the new Eden, and Steinbeck suggests that by removing them from their land, the family has effectively signed their death warrants. Similarly, the oldest son of the Joads, Noah, a misfit both physically and socially, leaves the family when they reach the Colorado River. Steinbeck uses this opportunity to show ironically that there is no place for a life-saving ark in this narrative, even though a new Noah is drawn by the promise of water’s renewal rather than being fearful of its destruction. Instead of helping to save others, this Noah sets out on his own, abandoning his family. The biblical allusions reinforce Steinbeck’s point that a chosen people (i.e., Americans) must often suffer and undergo hardships to learn and profit in the future from the mistakes they make in the present. To attain this goal, the novel espouses a moral code of brotherhood that advocates sharing and caring rather than violence and murder. Since the novel has begun with one of the Joads (Tom) being released from prison after killing Herb Turnbull, Steinbeck is clearly trying to teach the family what incarceration did not teach Tom: to love rather than hate, to practice forgiveness rather than retribution. Thus Tom arrives home just in time to accompany his parents, Ma and Pa; his brothers Winfield and Al; and his sisters Rose of Sharon (Rosasharn) and Ruthie on a learning trek that the family neither anticipates nor

GRAPES OF WRATH, THE 525

desires. Along with his grandparents, the previously mentioned Noah, Uncle John, and Rosasharn’s husband, Connie Rivers, the group comprises the symbolic number 12, disciples of a new faith who will be instructed by a former “burning bush” preacher named Jim Casy, whom Tom has encountered as he returns to search for his parents after discovering their deserted homestead. Unlike their neighbor, Muley Graves, whose stubbornness causes him to stay on the land his father bled for, the Joads have given up the struggle against progress and machines, desperately believing that their fate will improve in the richness of California. In fact, Steinbeck’s portrayal of machines as unfeeling and destructive elements rather than indicators of human progress is a central emphasis of the early chapters. Tractored out and feeling useless in a land where machines have replaced humans, the Joads have seen their little world collapse. All that remains is an escape to a “better place.” Even though there is little to reassure them, they invite the Reverend Casy to join them on the journey, unaware that en route they will discover that a new way of living will be required of them. The religious tenets that have formerly guided their lives are suddenly changed as they observe that insensitive attention to laws and rules now supersedes principles of forgiveness and charity. Friends and neighbors now betray and persecute rather than offer help and, as Casy states, it seems that everyone wants “to bust the holiness” (88). The family begins to rely on Casy, whose symbolic initials are JC, to formulate a way to cope with such drastic changes. Casy relates that he has weathered a temptation in the wilderness similar to his namesake Jesus and has discovered a new philosophy that supersedes his previous religious convictions. As he states to Tom: “All that lives is holy” (88) and “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do” (24). Impacting Tom first and later the rest of the Joads, Casy’s belief in the brotherhood of all humans causes the family to make drastic adjustments in their actions to cope with the hostile environment that encompasses them. One indication of this is their eventual acceptance of the Wilsons, Ivy and Sairy, a couple they meet along Route 66. Motivated by the couples’ willingness

to share their tent and mattress to accommodate Granpa Joad when he suffers a stroke, the Joads ignore their differences (the Wilsons are from Kansas and talk “queer kinda”) (147). Later they decide to travel together and to share Al and Tom’s mechanical expertise when the Wilsons’ car breaks down. Almost from the beginning of the text, however, it becomes evident that Steinbeck is in no hurry to move along the primary narrative. Instead, he deliberately employs intercalary or general chapters to set the fictional Joads within a historical context of a larger number of migrating individuals. Using techniques similar to those used by John DOS PASSOS in his earlier trilogy U.S.A. (1919–23), Steinbeck thus provides the readers of Grapes with a solid sense of the social and historical contexts that framed his novel’s actions, thus broadening the scope of the novel and giving it the characteristic of social realism on a larger scale. As a result, some early critics labeled the work a socialistic or communistic tract, considering it more propaganda than artistic accomplishment. Citing the fact that The Grapes of Wrath included scathing criticism of banks, agricultural monopolies, the political practices of former president Herbert Hoover, and the federal prison system, such critics saw Steinbeck as an advocate of radical reform and even as a supporter of revolutionary overthrow of democracy. The reaction to Grapes as a political tract was also strengthened by the fact that Steinbeck suggested in the text that humankind seldom learned from the past and seemed destined to repeat the mistakes made in earlier time frames. By listing the Spanish occupation of California and Mexico and the wars waged against Native Americans as just two examples of earlier oppressions practiced on those considered to be lower class, The Grapes of Wrath makes it clear that the story of the Joads is no fluke or unusual occurrence, but rather a repetitive pattern caused by Americans whose greed grew to hatred and whose hatred flourished in the persecution and manipulation of those weaker than themselves. The novel was politicized even further by its literary allusions to Homer’s Odyssey, wherein the title character’s many stops are met with a lack of hospitality and brotherhood. Rather than offer aid and sustenance, most of Homer’s characters seem instead bent on the

526 GRAPES OF WRATH, THE

destruction of the hero, Odysseus. (Consider the Sirens, the Cyclops, Polyphemus, the enchantress Circe, Scylla and Charybdis.) Eschewing the pattern used in the classic epic poem, however, Steinbeck allows the Joads to confront a variety of human intentions along their journey. Like Odysseus, the Joads discover the consequences of greed and violence as well as the value of sharing. Since the true scope of the human family includes all things living, Steinbeck illustrates his advocacy of hospitality and caring for others in the novel by such episodes as Ma Joad sharing the meager stew with the children in the Hooverville; Casy’s willingness to be imprisoned for Tom’s act of violence; the shared breakfast Tom experiences outside the Weedpatch camp; the shared work digging ditches offered to Tom by the Wilkies and by the cooperation of the Wainwrights and the Joads in the flood that concludes the novel. In these episodes, as well as their earlier experience of sharing a quilt and a Bible with the Wilsons in return for fixing their car, the Joads come to realize that only through a sense of unity with all things can humanity advance or, to paraphrase Steinbeck, “Take one step forward and perhaps stagger one half step backward.” Another element of the novel that stresses the wide sense of community that Steinbeck wished to support was the author’s use of animal imagery throughout Grapes. Employing land turtles, bees, cats, dogs, gila monsters, snakes, and chickens as symbols that represent human traits and actions, Steinbeck suggests that all individuals need to realize that a universal connection among all species is necessary before an ecological balance can occur. As the Joads discover the importance of a larger “fambly,” one that springs from more than a nuclear or genetic root, Steinbeck advocates a moral imperative that emphasizes “we” rather than “I,” that conserves natural resources and promotes brotherhood rather than a destruction of the land through selfishness and greed. Echoing the 19th-century transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson the message of Grapes not only promotes the ecological responsibility and the love for the land so evident in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, but also seeks a higher power present in all animate things. Every ani-

mal, every tree, every piece of land is seen as objectifying a deity, thus making all that lives holy. Ultimately, the Joads’ encounters on the road expand their consciousness in several ways. The discoveries of Ma, Tom, and Rosasharn particularly offer evidence of growth and understanding of a larger social picture and the importance of a unified sense of responsibility for all things if a true re-formation is to take place. As Ma expresses her faith in the people who go on, as Rosasharn offers her milk-filled breast to the dying man in the barn, and as Tom recognizes that his life purpose is to assume Casy’s mantle as an advocate for the poor and disadvantaged, the novel draws to a close. Since its ending is deliberately inconclusive, reflecting Steinbeck’s unwillingness to tie up loose ends or solve the insoluble, both Steinbeck’s agent, Elizabeth Otis, and his editors at Viking urged the writer to redraft his depiction of the mystic scene that closes the novel. Not only were they disturbed with the erotic nature of Rosasharn breast-feeding a total stranger, but they were also concerned that other central figures in the novel including Jim Casy (who disappears for almost 100 pages in the middle of the book) and Tom are no longer in focus when the novel ends. Yet Steinbeck resisted these calls for change, opting for a cyclical return to water (this time in overabundance as a flood) in direct contrast to the opening depiction of drought and dust. In the excessive downpours that threaten the Joads with extinction, Steinbeck once again reverses a symbol (water becomes destructive instead of life sustaining) and finds a salvific act in the midst of despair and pain. Just as the death of Rosasharn’s still-born baby is used by Uncle John to awaken Californians to the desperate plight of migrants and their children (he sends the shriveled body suffering from malnutrition in the womb down the swollen river as a tragic new Moses), so Steinbeck leaves his readers in Grapes with no easy solution and a family whose fate is in doubt despite their apparent strength and desire to conquer the odds. Because some of the Joads (particularly Al, Uncle John, and Ruthie) still seem to place self-indulgence and a predisposition to greed in high regard, the reader cannot assume that the harsh lessons of the Okies’ exodus have been

GRASS DANCER, THE 527

learned, or that right will defeat might. Instead, like life itself, the book closes with an indefinite and uneasy vignette, and the reader, unsettled and unsure of its meaning, must contemplate the author’s intent and realize its ambiguous nature.

SOURCES Cederstrom, Lorelei. “The ‘Great Mother’ in The Grapes of Wrath.” In Steinbeck and the Environment: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Susan F. Beegel, Susan Shillinglaw, and Wesley N. Tiffney, Jr., 76–91. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Davis, Robert Con, ed. The Grapes of Wrath: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982. Ditsky, John, ed. Critical Essays on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Owens, Louis. “The Culpable Joads: Desentimentalizing The Grapes of Wrath.” In Critical Essays on Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, edited by John Ditsky, 108–116. New York: G. K. Hall, 1989. Wyatt, David. New Essays on The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Michael J. Meyer

GRASS DANCER, THE SUSAN POWER (1994) The Grass Dancer won the 1995 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction for Susan POWER, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation. The novel traces the lives of generations of North Dakota Sioux back and forth in time from 1864 to 1982. The Grass Dancer draws upon the traditional stories of Deer Woman to accomplish what the scholar James Ruppert suggests is the goal of some Native American writers: to “shift the paradigm” (Ruppert, 150) of Native and non-Native readers so that both have an appreciation for each other’s perspectives. The Dakota versions of the Deer Woman stories were recorded by Ella Deloria, Nakota Sioux ethnologist, and published in 1932. Traditionally, Deer Woman narratives were used to help community members understand the behavior expected of them, particularly through the difficult period of courtship and marriage. Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort refer to “the traditional Deer Woman spirit” as “the spirit we are warned about as children, the spirit that bewitches those who

are susceptible to her sexual favors and who can be enticed away from family and clan into misuse of sexual energy” (Dunn and Comfort, xi). However, like other spiritual gifts, the power of Deer Woman can be used for the good of the community as well as the bad. Power’s The Grass Dancer draws upon elements of traditional Deer Woman stories in her exploration of sexual behavior on a Sioux reservation. Using the character of Red Dress (Cugignaka) from the 1860s and her descendant, Anna Thunder, Power warns her readers about the use and “misuse of sexual energy.” Although spirits abound in the novel, the Deer Woman spirit herself does not appear in Power’s novel except as a manifestation of behavior. For the contemporary residents of the Sioux reservation, the deeds of Red Dress from the 1860s serve as a model of right behavior. As a dutiful and accomplished daughter, Red Dress learns English from the local missionary priest in order to translate for her father, the chief, but she deliberately mistranslates the priest’s words, ruining his chances to convert the tribe. The story of Red Dress occurs during the time in which the U.S. government was increasingly moving to contain the Great Plains nations in reservations as white settlers and gold hunters flooded the area. Resisting this containment, many of the Great Plains nations refused to have anything to do with the treaty process, moving on and off the reservations and often drawing their reservation kin to them. Red Dress’s village is one of the bands that still lived in the old ways. Thus, when Red Dress has a dream directing her to go to Fort Laramie, “the key military outpost in the campaign to subjugate the Sioux nation” (Wright, 41), it is to be expected that carrying out her dream is part of the war against the encroaching whites. The fact that Red Dress is accompanied on her journey by numerous spirit helpers—the red stones and Spotted Dog—is an indication of her right behavior and her high standing in her community. After a journey of several weeks, Red Dress and her brother Long Chase arrive at the fort. They come upon the fort chaplain, a Reverend Pyke, and find him shooting at live bull snakes nailed to a cottonwood tree. Red Dress has serpent spirit helpers who came to her as a child, and thus the conflict between her and Pyke is set

528 GRAU, SHIRLEY ANN

up immediately. Pyke is the representation of Anglo America whose vision is that America should be a place where all the wildness is taken out of nature. The clash of these two concepts—the snake as evil and the snake as a powerful natural force—is symbolic of the clash between Western and Native American spiritual perspectives and an example of how Power’s text mediates between its Native and non-Native audiences. At the fort, Red Dress realizes that her mission is to be at war, not only with the soldiers but also with herself. She is acting like a Deer Woman, that is, using her sexual power to lure young men to their deaths. The proscription against an honorable Dakota woman acting in such a manner is so strong that Red Dress is conflicted about her behavior. With the story of Anna Thunder, Power brings the myth of Red Dress and Deer Woman onto the 20thcentury reservation. Anna, a contemporary Dakota, is a descendant of Red Dress. However, Anna is conflicted as to how to use her spiritual legacy. Did Red Dress use the Deer power selfishly or did she use it to aid the community? At first, Anna avoids using any inherited power. But when Anna’s child dies because of what she believes to be the selfishness of her cousin, Joyce, she uses the power to take revenge. She fails to see the difference between using the power Red Dress had to protect the community and using the power to destroy the community. From that time on, Anna Thunder misuses the medicine power of Red Dress, using it only for her own gain. For example, she charms young men into becoming her love slaves, even though she is old enough to be their grandmother. In The Grass Dancer, the mythic figure of the Deer Woman is an important touchstone for the continuity of traditional values in contemporary Native American life. Power illustrates how the old stories can influence identity and the individual’s place in the modern community. The myths can be used to fuel imaginative responses to the problems of the community. Her text shows that even in the face of Euro-American encroachment, the relevance of the old stories has not been muted.

SOURCES Deloria, Ella. Dakota Texts. 1932. Reprinted in “Appendix 1: Translations from the Dakota Texts.” In Deer Women and

Elk Men, the Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria, edited by Julian Rice, 161–196. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Dunn, Carolyn, and Carol Comfort, eds. Introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, An Anthology of Native American Women Writers, ix–xviii. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Marks, Paula Mitchell. In a Barren Land: American Indian Dispossession and Survival. New York: Quill, 1998. Power, Susan. The Grass Dancer. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. Rice, Julian. Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native Fiction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. St. Pierre, Mark, and Tilda Long Soldier. Walking in the Sacred Manner: Healers, Dreamers and Pipe Carriers—Medicine Women of the Plains Indians. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Dyke, Annette. “Encounters with Deer Woman: Sexual Relations in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer and Louise Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 15, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall 2003/Winter 2004): 168–188. Wright, Neil H. “Visitors from the Spirit Path: Tribal Magic in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer,” Kentucky Philological Society 10 (1995): 39–43. Annette Van Dyke

GRAU, SHIRLEY ANN (1929– ) Although Shirley Ann Grau has lived in and written about the Gulf Coast South, she refuses to identify herself as a writer in the Southern tradition, overtly distancing herself from William FAULKNER, Eudora WELTY, and Flannery O’CONNOR (Schlueter, 22), while admiring Carson McCULLERS for her power and originality, two traits that apply to Grau herself. Additionally, nearly all of Grau’s novels employ multiple perspectives, a complicated technique that she executes with great skill. Grau was born on July 8, 1929, in New Orleans, to Dr. Adolph E. Grau, a dentist, and Katherine Onions Grau. The family moved back and forth between New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama, and Grau attended schools in both places until she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Tulane University in 1950. She married the Tulane professor James Kern Feibleman in 1955, the same year she published her first book, the

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW 529

highly acclaimed The Black Prince and Other Stories, and three years before the appearance of her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky. Set on a Mississippi River island, Isle aux Chiens, the novel features strong, passionate Cajun fishermen against the backdrop of an approaching hurricane. Grau’s second novel, The House on Coliseum Street (1961), is about Joan Caillet, whose upper-middle-class background contrasts sharply with that of the Cajuns, Louisianan descendants of French Canadians. She chooses to have an abortion, which not only has a deleterious effect on her, but also serves as a metaphor for the loveless and fragmented lives of other women in her class. The Keepers of the House (1964), which won the Pulitzer Prize, introduces the issue of race as an additional corollary in this study of love and evil. The protagonist is Abigail Mason Tolliver, granddaughter of the widowed wealthy plantation owner William Howland; Howland falls in love with and marries Margaret, a black woman, but the larger issue is how race dictates action. The Condor Passes (1971) continues to examine the morally bankrupt lives of the wealthy—in this case Thomas Henry Oliver and his progeny—and the useless existence of this financially privileged family. His daughters and son-in-law epitomize the worn out, dishonest, or depraved character of the Olivers. Similarly, Evidence of Love (1977) again examines the elite, this time Edward Million Henley and his son Stephen, first introduced in “The Patriarch,” a story in The Wind Shifting West (1973). In this novel Grau uses New England rather than the South as a setting and focuses on the spiritual and religious aspects of life. Grau’s most recent novel, Roadwalkers (1994), traces the Depression-era South through the odyssey of two intriguing black women, the 16-year-old Baby and her daughter Nanda. Part of the interest in the novel derives from the difference between the orphaned but self-sufficient Baby and her privileged and spoiled daughter.

NOVELS The Condor Passes. New York: Knopf, 1971. Evidence of Love. New York: Random House, 1977. The Hard Blue Sky. New York: Knopf, 1958. The House on Coliseum Street. New York: Knopf, 1961. The Keepers of the House. New York: Knopf, 1964. Roadwalkers. New York: Knopf, 1994.

SOURCES Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965. Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Pearlman, Mickey. “Shirley Ann Grau.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katharine Usher Henderson, 132–135. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Schlueter, Paul. Shirley Ann Grau. Boston: Twayne, 1981. Shinn, Thelma J. Radiant Daughters: Fictional American Women. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

OTHER Grau, Shirley Ann. “The World According to Grau.” By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor. Metroactive. Available online. URL: http://www.metroactive.com/papers/ metro/02.26.98/ cover/lit-grau-9808.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW THOMAS PYNCHON (1973) Thomas PYNCHON’s third novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, appearing in February 1973, was immediately compared to such novels as Melville’s Moby-Dick and Joyce’s Ulysses. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the 760-page novel caused such disagreement among the judges and the trustees that for the first and only time in its history, the Pulitzer Prize in literature was not awarded. The author himself has never accepted an award, given an interview, or otherwise publicly commented on his novels. Critics, though often disturbed by the book’s vast array of flat characters, its sophomoric vulgarity, and its complexity of situations and themes, were largely impressed, hailing it as the Great American Novel. One critic called it an “encyclopedic narrative” (Mendelson, 29), an appropriate appellation for a work that successfully combines American, Western European, Russian, and African history; Western philosophy, physics, chemistry, musicology, theology, and linguistics, to name but a few of Pynchon’s fascinations. To attempt to summarize such a vast work is necessarily to omit much that is significant. The central character of Gravity’s Rainbow is the American soldier Tyrone Slothrop, who at the begin-

530

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

ning of the novel is serving in ACHTUNG (Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Germany). Slothrop keeps a map of his London sexual encounters that curiously matches the map of German rocket strikes on the city. In his infancy Slothrop was a test subject for Pavlovian conditioning by a Dr. Laszlo Jamf, later of the German firm I.G. Farben. Jamf experiments with “Infant Tyrone” and a mysterious polymer called Imipolex G that is later used in a German rocket. However, because the young Slothrop is never desensitized to the conditioning, his response becomes “transmarginal,” a term used by Pavlov to indicate an extension of the conditioning “beyond the zero,” the response preceding the stimulus. Thus there appears to be a causal relationship between Slothrop’s erections and the fall of German rockets on London. Slothrop is sent into postwar Europe, called by Pynchon “the Zone,” in a quest to locate a possibly fictional rocket with the suspicious serial number 00000. During this journey, various powers attempt to exercise control over Slothrop. Part of this control comes from PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender) in London by means of the Pavlovian behaviorist Edward Pointsman. Working for Pointsman is the statistician Roger Mexico, who studies the correspondences between rocket falls and Slothrop’s sexual encounters and who gradually develops sympathy for Slothrop during the final “Counterforce” section of the novel. As he wanders through the Zone, Slothrop gradually loses his identity, becoming for a short while English war correspondent Ian Scuffling. He encounters a Russian operative, Tchitcherine, who is on a quest to find his legendary half brother, Enzian, an African Herero who has left his homeland to come to the land of his nation’s occupiers, Germany. There Enzian leads a division of “Schwarzcommando,” an allblack force devoted to self-annihilation by means of its own rocket. The father shared by the men is the German officer Weissmann, called “Blicero,” meaning “The Bleacher,” or Death. Blicero longs for transcendence. In the words of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Blicero “want[s] the Change.” He desires to escape the limitations of gravity by using the material rocket to transcend material life. However, it is Blicero’s intention to place one of his

sexual slaves, a boy named Gottfried (God’s Peace), in the rocket. At the end of his Tenth Elegy, Rilke writes: “And we, who have always thought/of happiness climbing, would feel/the emotion that almost startles/when happiness falls” (Rilke, 10: 110–113). However, the boy, and thus what he represents, is being sent to death. The critic Joseph Slade writes, “The desire for annihilation is a desire for freedom. Sexual perversions are a reaction against the belief that life is determined, beyond human control” (Slade, 213). Blicero’s other sex slave, Katje Borgesius, is a double agent who also works for the Allies via her contact with Captain “Pirate” Prentice, whose dream opens the novel. Additionally, Blicero exerts control over a scientist named Franz Pökler whose faith in the promise of the rocket and in the absolute truth of rational thought blinds him to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi regime for which he works. He accepts the internment of his wife and child; each year he is allowed a visit with his child, Ilse, but as time passes he begins to realize that it is a different girl who comes each year, his real wife and daughter having met their deaths in a Nazi camp. By the time it is too late for him to change his or their situations, Pökler comes to a vague understanding of what the Nazis have done and what his contribution has been. A central concern of the novel is the Calvinist doctrine of Predestination, which asserts that God has chosen those who will be saved (the Elect) and those who will be passed over (the Preterite) and that people have no way of knowing into which category they fall. In Pynchon’s novel, the Elect are those who have been favored with wealth and power, while the Preterite are those like Slothrop and the “Zone-Preterite” he encounters who become the victims of the machinations of the Elect. Another central theme is paranoia, which Pynchon exploits in all of his novels. The characters who are “paranoid” are the ones who see most clearly what is going on in the world they inhabit. They recognize, as “Pirate” Prentice tells Roger Mexico, both a “They-system” and a “We-system” corresponding to election and preterition (638). As Prentice sees it, “ ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We don’t have to worry about questions of real and unreal”

GRAVITY’S RAINBOW 531

(638). Truth, then, is relative, as are the certainties of the Elect. The novel’s paranoid characters understand that “They” exercise control over the European-American world’s preterite, the “We,” by means of rational thought, science, and capitalist economics. As Peter Cooper asserts, “if [paranoia] becomes truly ‘creative’ it progresses beyond a ‘They-system’ to posit a ‘We-system’; then group political action becomes possible” (Cooper, 76). Thus a small hope for a redistribution of power becomes the hope of the “Counterforce.” Without a plan, however, the Counterforce of the novel never achieves Cooper’s true creativity. In numerous narrative digressions, Pynchon explores the influence of rational thought and its failings in his analysis of corporations imaginary and, for the most part, real. In his 1947 book, I. G. Farben, Richard Sasuly exposes the powerful I.G. Farben dye corporation, a German firm that by means of cartel arrangements managed to continue to do business with nations with which Germany was at war, including Britain and the United States. This historical episode becomes the basis for Pynchon’s scenario in which the Elect exercise control through international businesses like Standard Oil, Shell Oil, Imperial Chemicals Incorporated (ICI, or Icy Eye), General Electric (based in Slothrop’s hometown in western Massachusetts), Krupp, and Siemens with cartel arrangements that allow them, as well as Farben, to continue financial links while the nations they represent continue to engage in the slaughter of the war. The narrator shows us the dream of scientist Kekule von Stradonitz, who claimed to have seen the structure of the benzene molecule in a dream of Oruboros, a serpent consuming its own tail. From this advance in chemistry, the narrator takes us through the birth of scientific farming at the hands of Justus von Liebig and eventually to the exploitation of coal-tar dyes, the basis of the Farben corporation. But it is the link between this benzene molecule and the development of fossil fuels that leads back to the German rocket program and the novel’s present. Stylistically, Pynchon’s writing extends from the elegant to the absurd. While moments of genuine tenderness occur, Pynchon’s narrative is just as likely to break

into song-and-dance numbers from 1940s American movie musicals, vulgar “Rocket limericks,” extended scientific descriptions, lengthy historical analyses, disconnected dream sequences (one in which Tyrone Slothrop takes a trip through the sewers of Boston in search of his harmonica, meeting, among others, Malcolm X as a shoe-shine boy), drugged confessions, sexual torture, and stoned arguments about the history and future of European music between an advocate of Webern’s intellectual dodecaphonic compositions and a lover of the great, accessible melodies of Italian opera. By the final section of Gravity’s Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop has lost his identity. When Seaman “Pig” Bodine (a character from Pynchon’s first novel, V) encounters Slothrop in the final section of the novel, Slothrop’s absence is apparent: “He’s looking straight at Slothrop (being one of the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept [ . . .])” (740). A “Counterforce” consisting of Roger Mexico, “Pirate” Prentice, Katje Borgesius, and “Pig” Bodine, among others, sets out on a failed mission to find and rescue him. The novel ends with Richard M. Zhlubb, a caricature of President Richard M. Nixon, welcoming the fall of an annihilating rocket on a theater in Los Angeles. Most critics read this ending as nihilistic, believing that the failure of the novel’s Counterforce and the fall of the rocket represent hopelessness. However, the Protestant hymn appearing in the final lines of the novel offers hope of a future successful social order to make up for the failed Counterforce of the novel. The final lines read: “There is a hand to turn the time,/Though thy Glass today be run,/Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low/Find the last poor Pret’rite one . . . /Till the Riders sleep by ev’ry road,/All through our crippl’d Zone,/With a face on ev’ry mountainside,/And a Soul in ev’ry stone . . .” As long as someone continues to exist, to outlive whatever destruction the Elect can cause, there is hope for humankind. As the statistician Roger Mexico’s Poisson distributions prove, there will in all probability be someone to survive any destruction. Pynchon knows this, having lived through the age of nuclear attacks on Japan. Indeed, late in the

532 GREAT GATSBY, THE

novel Slothrop sees a mushroom cloud arise as on the days of the American attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If some people survive, they can rebuild the world, perhaps with a more inclusive distribution of truths, beliefs, and resources.

SOURCES Brownlie, Alan. Thomas Pynchon’s Narratives: Subjectivity and Problems of Knowing. New York: Lang, 2000. Cooper, Peter L. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. Pynchon, Thomas. V. 1963. Reprint, New York: Harper, 1989. ———. Gravity’s Rainbow. 1973. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1987. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. Translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. New York: W. W. Norton, 1939. Sasuly, Richard. I.G. Farben. New York: Boni, 1947. Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Lang, 1974. Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Alan W. Brownlie

GREAT GATSBY, THE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1925) Considered by many critics and readers to be F. Scott FITZGERALD’s masterpiece, The Great Gatsby analyzes and exposes the shallow foundations of the American dream, 1920s style. Peopling his novel with New York characters—all, significantly, reared in the heartland of the United States but currently living in the fictitious Long Island villages of East Egg or West Egg—Fitzgerald demonstrates that each has lost his or her innocence and perverted the original vision of an Edenic America. Brooding shadowlike over the early part of the novel, the mysterious and fabulously wealthy host of numerous West Egg parties, is Jay Gatsby—born James Gatz—who gradually comes into focus through the words of Nick Carroway, the novel’s narrator. Nick’s emphasis on Gatsby’s “innocence” derives from his love for Daisy Buchanan and corresponding optimistic belief in the possibilities of love and success. Gatsby’s death, therefore, suggests

the end of any sort of American innocence, real or imagined. The major characters in the novel—with the exception of Nick Carroway—are wealthy, privileged, selfcentered, and supremely “careless” or heedless of the rights and needs of others. Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, arrogantly embraces a double standard as he openly carries on an affair with the pathetic and vulgar Myrtle Wilson, wife of a garage mechanic: Tom insists that Nick accompany him to the New York apartment that he rents for Myrtle, then violently slaps her across the face when she taunts him about his wife. In a parallel scene, Tom sees neither double standard nor irony as he angrily orders Daisy to walk away from her love for Gatsby when they are all together at the Plaza Hotel. Just as these characters wilfully deceive their spouses, the Buchanans’ friend, the talented golf player Jordan Baker, has been caught in professional deceptions and falsehoods. Gatsby himself, although innocent in his love for Daisy, lies about his education and cannot tell the truth about the shady sources of his wealth. Among the many bits of gossip about Gatsby is the rumor that he is involved in both bootlegging and fixing the outcome of the World Series. Even Nick Carroway, frequently viewed as the voice of reason who helps connect his cousin Daisy to his landlord Gatsby, is open to charges of evasion, if not outright lies. One can credibly argue that he is one of modernism’s “unreliable narrators”: Fitzgerald learned to use the outsider observer from such predecessors as Joseph Conrad and Henry JAMES, and he also admired Edith WHARTON, who not only used the “unreliable narrator” (in ETHAN FROME, for instance) but also wrote about her technique. The setting, imagery, and symbolism of the novel have been the subject of much critical commentary, for, in a post–World War I world usually dominated by the emotionally exhausted Waste Land personae of T. S. ELIOT, Fitzgerald successfully creates the often hedonistic and careless characters who have come to typify the very different Jazz Age and who could take their places in the Eliot poem. Numerous scholarly articles address the most central symbols in the novel: the bleak and desiccated valley of ashes near which Tom’s mistress Myrtle lives, and through which all the char-

GREAT MEADOW, THE 533

acters eventually pass; the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, beguiling Gatsby while reminding the reader of the color of money (Gatsby is in love with Daisy, a woman whose voice is famously described as “full of money”). Indeed, as John Lukacs points out, it is only very recently that younger readers have come to associate The Great Gatsby with the social life of Americans (Lukacs, 235); the proliferation of “Gatsby” bars and restaurants named Gatsby’s, for instance, supports this idea. Yet the novel that so memorably describes these people at Gatsby’s extravagant parties also clearly condemns the preoccupation with money and social position, demonstrating in Gatsby’s death the essential hollowness in this perversion of America’s promise. Gatsby’s murder by George Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, provides us with another lesson in social class. Because George saw Gatsby in a car with Daisy, one of the socially elite, he assumes that he is guilty. George’s inability to distinguish between an essentially “innocent” Gatsby and the likes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan demonstrates the distance between the haves and have nots: George, who kills himself after shooting Gatsby, will never understand the vapid Daisy Buchanan, for whom Gatsby died in vain. The novel, which takes place in 1922, uses the symbol of a broken clock to demonstrate the folly of believing that one can return to the innocence of the past. Nick, thoroughly disillusioned by novel’s end—and the only guest at Gatsby’s funeral other than his father, Mr. Henry C. Gatz—returns to the Midwest. When these characters moved east, much like Henry JAMES’s characters when they traveled to Europe, their standards became warped and perverted, but at the end, only Nick Carroway returns home before, as with Gatsby, his own time runs out. For the Easterners, suggests Fitzgerald, it is too late. The end of the novel suggests that our only refuge is in hope.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1925. Reprint, New York: Scribner Classic/Collier Edition, 1986. Lukacs, John. Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other). New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

GREAT MEADOW, THE ELIZABETH MADOX ROBERTS (1992) The Great Meadow, published in 1930, is the fourth of Elizabeth Madox ROBERTS’s seven novels, and its qualities reflect the striking and often misunderstood originality of her voice. The story takes place in the late 18th century and follows the early pioneers, under the leadership of Daniel Boone and other legendary figures, across the perilous Appalachian Mountains into “the west,” or Kentucky. The author’s ancestors were among those who made this journey and settled near Fort Harrod, which would provide the setting for part of The Great Meadow. Roberts grew up in the small Kentucky town of Springfield, not far from the site of Fort Harrod. Ill health was a constant in her life, delaying college and the start of her literary career. She was 41—and just graduated from the University of Chicago—in 1922 when she published what is perhaps her best-known book, Under the Tree, a collection of poems for children. Four years later, she published her first novel, The Time of Man, generally regarded as her masterpiece. In spite of this late start, she was considered a major figure on the literary scene throughout the 1920s and 30s. When The Great Meadow came out, it was well received critically and, as one of the first books chosen for the newly established Literary Guild, achieved a certain popular success. Since then, however, this novel has sometimes fallen under the shadow of The Time of Man, and recent criticism, such as it is, has tended to emphasize its particularly, its Kentuckyness, thereby relegating it, and her other novels, to the limited and limiting category of regionalism. Moreover, the subject matter, the struggle to settle the wilderness, has reinforced the spurious idea that Roberts is a “writer of the soil,” a kind of pastoralist. In fact, the novel is a much broader portrayal of an essential aspect of the American experience: the urge to move west, toward the ever-beckoning beyond. Kentucky, here, is more than a specific place, although it is certainly that. It is also a symbol of the greater American impulse forward. The sense of excitement and possibility pervades the first part of The Great Meadow as the characters, starting out from Virginia, dream of the wonders ahead, as generations of Americans did. When the cen-

534 GREAT MEADOW, THE

tral character, Diony Hall, hears the stories about the magical place over the mountains, she is thrilled, “her eyes bright, all her inner part leaping. Oh, she muses to herself, ‘I would go, I, Diony, would go’.” On one level, the story of her going adds up to one of our best historical novels about this often neglected and/or oversimplified era. Roberts did careful research and gives the details of 18th-century customs, manners, and work with impressive immediacy and authority. She also captures the strange mixture of high destiny, sheer adventure, and raw acquisitiveness that propelled so many people into the many kinds of wilderness on the American continent. What is even more impressive—and entirely characteristic of Roberts’s work—is that all this is written from the perspective of a woman, the protagonist, Diony. This novel is a bold if perhaps unconscious attempt to fill a then-gaping hole in the depiction of American history: the role of women. With both broad and detailed strokes, Roberts portrays the essential work and place of women on the frontier, making clear as few novels do the status, authority, and autonomy they achieved, even as, and in some ways because, they faced unimaginable hardships. The Great Meadow is also notably experimental because of its reach into the interior of Diony’s heart, spirit, and, most of all, mind. Here is the real subject of the novel, and of all Roberts’s work: the workings of the female intellect to define her place in the world, to make sense of sorrow and tragedy, and to find the means of negotiating practical and psychological methods for coping with often brutal reality. Like other protagonists throughout Roberts’s novels, Diony Hall undergoes horrendous adversity, suffers a kind of “nervous breakdown” as a result, and fights her way out of these terrifying depths via her intellect, the application of hard-won thought to the problems at hand. Diony’s breakdown, following the violent death of her mother-in-law, plunges her into a sort of catatonic state, a “tight sheaf that crushed her thought.” She recovers via a “sudden knowledge.” That Roberts’s characters are typically of the yeoman class, “plain folk” without great means or education, has blinded most critics to her real achievement, conveying the presence

and active workings of the minds of even these—and these women to boot—as they struggle to make concrete their unending curiosity and intelligence. The language and sensibilities here, if not the characters, are hauntingly similar to those of Virginia Woolf, Roberts’s exact contemporary. A deeper study of this affinity will be more fruitful than comparisons with Sarah Orne JEWETT or Ellen GLASGOW, with whom Roberts is often grouped. One of Roberts’s best critics was also one of the very few to grasp her real subject. Mark Van Doren, writing in 1932, made, as we should, the connection between Roberts’s language, her very particular style, and her purpose, i.e., to show how these women translate something so amorphous as perception into something so coherent as knowledge. Diony, Van Doren writes, is “introspective; she is always learning the new world; she is forever thinking about it and watching the way it comes into her mind.” The language of the novel merges with Diony’s thoughts as they emerge slowly and painstakingly from raw sensation, “like mist taking shape,” as Van Doren puts it; such minds, he continues, may “not make swift headway in the world” but are “capable of intense experiences.” This intensity of female language and experience is at once analytical and lyrical, an unusual combination that is responsible, in part, for why Diony comes across with a dignity and autonomy rare in American letters. The poetic prose with which Roberts conveys Diony’s inner life is woven into a strong narrative framework, another unusual combination. This is a good story, well told. A stunning surprise ending compensates for a few rather overblown, almost surreal digressions. The Great Meadow is very nearly the equal of The Time of Man and is more accessible, the best introduction to Roberts’s highly idiosyncratic and strangely seductive universe.

SOURCES Gray, Richard. Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Southern Literary Studies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. The Great Meadow. New York: Viking, 1930. Reprinted with preface by M. E. Bradford.

GREENBERG, JOANNE GOLDENBERG 535

Southern Classics Series. Nashville, Tenn.: J.S. Sanders, 1992. ———. The Time of Man. New York: Viking, 1926. Reprinted with introductions by Wade Hall and Robert Penn Warren. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. ———. Under the Tree. New York: Viking, 1922. Simpson, Lewis P., and William Slavick, eds. “Writing in the South, no. 9: Recovering Elizabeth Madox Roberts.” Special issue, The Southern Review 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1984): 749–835. Stoneback, H. R. “Roberts, Still, Stuart & Warren,” Kentucky Humanities, nos. 1 and 2 (2001): 27–37. Van Doren, Mark. “Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Her Mind and Style.” In The Private Reader: Selected Articles and Reviews. New York: Holt, 1942, 97–109. Jane Eblen Keller

GREENBERG, JOANNE GOLDENBERG (HANNAH GREEN) (1932– ) Joanne Greenberg has written an impressive variety of fiction—16 books in all—set in the historical past and the contemporary era, covering rural and urban life from the world of academia to the world of the sightless, the lame, and the hearing impaired. It is, however, for her 1964 novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, that she is likely to be remembered. Written under a pseudonym because it mirrors Greenberg’s own struggle with madness, the novel is an evocative representation of the world of schizophrenia from the varying perspectives of the patient, her parents, and the medical profession. Joanne Greenberg was born on September 24, 1932, in Brooklyn, New York, to Julius Lester Goldenberg and Rosalie Bernstein Goldenberg. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the American University and then married Albert Greenberg in 1955. In 1963, she published The King’s Persons, which depicts 12th-century British Christian barons and their bigoted attitudes toward the Jews that result in a massacre. Her second, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, features Deborah Blau and her therapy with the brilliant and sympathetic Dr. Fried. In 2001 Gail A. Hornstein published a biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, the model for Dr. Fried. In 1977, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden was

filmed by New World Pictures. In 2004, 40 years after its initial publication, the novel was reissued, with an afterword by Joanne Greenberg. The Monday Voices (1965), her third novel, focuses on Department of Rehabilitation employee Ralph Oakland and his attempts to aid or cure those with handicaps. In This Sign (1968) is a sensitive depiction of a deaf couple married nearly 60 years. In her next two novels, Founder’s Praise (1976) and A Season of Delight (1981), Greenberg elucidates the force of religion, from Judaism to the “Moonies.” The Far Side of Victory (1983) is a stark, dark, fatalistic novel in which Eric Gordon kills five passengers in a car crash, falls in love with and marries Helen, the sole survivor, only to lose her in a subsequent car crash. Greenberg continues her exploration of darkness in Age of Consent (1987), in which the herosurgeon Daniel Sanbron is senselessly killed in a sniper’s attack. Of Such Small Differences (1988) considers how a deaf and blind poet, John Moon, learns to value the gift of his unique perspective. No Reck’ning Made (1993) and Greenberg’s most recent novel, Where the Road Goes (1998), are concerned with environmental issues. In No Reck’ning Made, the small-town schoolteacher takes on urban development and encroachment; and Where the Road Goes features a 62-year-old grandmother and environmentalist, Antigone (Tig) Warriner, who sets out to walk across the United States, from Fresno, California, to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Inspired by the murder of a former student, the novel uses the epistolary, or letter-writing, technique. Joanne Greenberg lives with her husband in Golden, Colorado. She still writes with a number 3 or 4 pencil on purple paper that “cuts down the glare” (Thorn). She has been an adjunct professor at the Colorado School of Mines since 1983.

NOVELS Age of Consent. New York: Holt, 1987. The Far Side of Victory. New York: Holt, 1983. Founder’s Praise. New York: Holt, 1976. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. (Under pseudonym Hannah Green) New York: Holt, 1964. In This Sign. New York: Holt, 1968. The King’s Persons. New York: Holt, 1963. The Monday Voices. New York: Holt, 1965.

536 GREEN MILE, THE

No Reck’ning Made. New York: Holt, 1993. Of Such Small Differences. Nw York: Holt, 1988. A Season of Delight. New York: Holt, 1981. Simple Gifts. New York: Holt, 1986. Where the Road Goes. New York: Holt, 1998.

SOURCES Thorn, Patti. “Joanne Greenberg Knows Her Road.” Rocky Mountain News (Denver) (March 8, 1998). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:67602380. Accessed September 12, 2005. Unsigned Review of Where the Road Goes. Publishers Weekly (December 8, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:20048131. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GREEN MILE, THE STEPHEN KING (1996) Stephen KING is a pop cultural icon, a writer of the macabre who brings to the page nightmarish studies that cut directly to the heart of societal fears. From a haunted hotel gripping the darkest aspects of our individual nature (The Shining), to the ultimate question of the fate of society as a whole (The Stand), King seeks to address questions that hold no immediate answers and spawn terror in the very nature of those silences. In The Green Mile, originally published as a serial text much in the Victorian style of writers such as Charles Dickens, King explores the themes of humanity, racism, and the death penalty in the context of a nonintrusive Christian discourse. Through the story of John Coffey, readers are led to examine their own codes of perception in balancing the role truth and faith must play in society. John Coffey, an enormous black man wandering the backwoods of the South in the 1930s is found sobbing and holding the bodies of two white children, sisters. They had been raped and then murdered. “ ‘I couldn’t help it,’ John Coffey said, holding the murdered, violated girls naked in his arms. The tears began to pour down his cheeks again. ‘I tried to take it back, but it was too late’ ” (43). Such an ambiguity of language posits Coffey at the very heart of a fluidity of meaning and the ultimate failure as to the definition of truth. Coffey’s words echo with the vile imagery of the act he supposedly commits, and seemingly admits, but it is

only in a much larger context that the significations of the words will redefine their meaning. For his actions, John Coffey is sentenced to die in the electric chair on Cold Mountain Penitentiary’s E Block, under the watchful eye of Paul Edgecomb and his band of guards, Brutal, Harry, Dean, and Percy Wetmore (the sadistic embodiment of perhaps the greatest sin of all, pride). However, John Coffey touches all their lives in different ways and forever alters their perceptions of truth and subsequently their faith. The beginning of this transformation occurs literally within Paul Edgecomb. “I had the worst urinary infection of my life—almost bad enough for me to wish I was dead every time I took a leak” (9). That is until Coffey places his hands upon the affliction. “[Coffey] exhaled a cloud of tiny black insects that looked like gnats. They swirled furiously between his knees, turned white, and disappeared” (184). Edgecomb’s urinary tract infection was gone, drawn out of the body as cleanly as one may extract a thorn. But King’s use of narrative allows for the shift in signification to work on the character at the same moment as the reader. “I helped it,” (191) Coffey says, and the connotation of the words are redefined from the first time we heard Coffey utter them. The reader is jarred with similar electricity as the relationship between Paul Coffey and the two dead girls is suddenly blurred. To “help it” becomes a literal expression, applied to both the dead girls and to Paul Edgecomb’s urinary infection. “I helped it, didn’t I? Except he hadn’t. God had. John Coffey’s use of ‘I’ could be chalked up to ignorance rather than pride, but I knew—believed, at least—what I had learned about healing: that healing is never about the healed or the healer, but about God’s will” (191). In the case of John Coffey, God’s will works through his hands and in such he becomes the Christ figure, a point illustrated through King’s choice of name and the duality of the initials J. C. But the true touch of J. C. goes beyond the act of healing Edgecomb’s urinary tract infection, to bringing life to the lifeless. Coffey restores life to Mr. Jingles, the pet of prisoner Eduard Delacroix, a mouse that is violently stomped by Percy Wetmore in an act of prideful rage. Placed into the hands of Coffey, the mouse regains life. King chooses the smallest of God’s creatures to be the recipient of the greatest mira-

GRENDEL 537

cle. But Coffey’s power is not limited to the life of the cell block. Edgecomb and his band of guards, minus the dangerous ego of Percy Wetmore (safely bound and locked away), remove Coffey from the block to perform one more miracle, this time on the brain tumor of Melinda Moores, the wife of Edgecomb’s best friend and warden of the prison. Perception for Paul Edgecomb, as well as for the reader, has shifted so drastically when the word comes of Coffey’s execution date that suspense builds from the false subjectivity of our own perception of truth and faith. Edgecomb is trapped between his lawful duty to society and the realization that he is about to put to death not only an innocent man, but also one of God’s true miracles. “ ‘I mean we’re fixing to kill a gift of God,’ he said. ’One that never did any harm to us, or to anyone else. What am I going to say if I end up standing in front of God the Father Almighty and He asks me to explain why I did it? That it was my job?’ ” (488). But King’s ultimate theme does not hinge on destructive societal laws that fail to realize the subjectivity of truth. The Green Mile raises a much more disturbing question, a question on the role of the Other and its place in our construction of societal norms. John Coffey, a black man in the South in the 1930s, does not fit. The defined role of signifier to signified places him as the objectified Other, and in such a case, Truth and Faith ultimately clash. “I am sorry for what I am” (507), Coffey says just before he is put to death. It is this question of life and death that so hauntingly resonates within the subtext of the book and comes to the forefront throughout the novel’s final sections. Is it better to live, or better to die? To believe Coffey, it is the latter. “I’m rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I’m tired of people bein’ ugly to each other” (491). But the ultimate pain is the pain of the Other, to whom the blessed gift of life becomes a curse. The ironic twist to this notion of life as curse is that Paul Edgecomb, the man whose job it was to punish the guilty by carrying out the sentence of death, is unable, himself, to die. The miracle that John Coffey bestows on Edgecomb, as well as the mouse Mr. Jingle, is that of an unnaturally long life, a life in which he must face the loss of all those he had grown to love, a life in which he is ultimately left alone. It is in the stillness of loneliness that King

emphasizes the Other and the role that religion, faith, and truth play in defining our place within the world. “I think of John saying that Wharton killed the Detterick twins with their love for each other, and that it happens every day, all over the world. If it happens, God lets it happen, and when we say ‘I don’t understand,’ God replies, ‘I don’t care’ ” (535). There is terror in this book, and this fear stems from the unanswerable questions of both truth and faith and what relationship one may have with the other.

SOURCE King, Stephen. The Green Mile. New York: Pocket Books, 1999. Paul L. Yoder

GRENDEL JOHN GARDNER (1971) In his most acclaimed and well-known literary work, John GARDNER retells the story of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster Grendel. Although written early in his literary career, Grendel was not Gardner’s first novel. It was, however, the novel that solidified his position as a major American literary figure. One could argue that it is appropriate to consider Grendel not only as a retelling of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, but also as a sort of “prequel” to it. Although Grendel’s combat with his vanquisher functions, ultimately, as the climax of Gardner’s book, Beowulf himself doesn’t show up until six-sevenths of the way through Grendel. The remainder of the narrative is devoted to the development (or arrested development) of Grendel’s mental state. Grendel finds Gardner practicing the trade of what he called a “philosophical novelist” (a term Gardner self-applied as much as it was ever applied to him). In the original text of Beowulf, Grendel is described as closer to a force of nature than a human or humanoid who has feelings and concerns. He randomly wreaks havoc and causes humiliation (Heaney, 33). In this treatment, Grendel seems closer to a lightning bolt or a tornado. Gardner, on the other hand, attempts to account more coherently for Grendel’s late-night murderous raids on Heorot Hall, the castle of King Hrothgar. As Gardner’s titular protagonist encounters the primary and secondary characters from Beowulf, he undergoes a number of transitions and transforma-

538 GREY, ZANE

tions. According to Gardner, Grendel, at least initially, is on a quest to answer the question of the meaning of his existence. Grendel’s encounters with humans, animals, and supernatural creatures present him with a colorful variety of worldviews and ideologies. It is debatable, in many cases, how closely these encounters sync up with particular real-world philosophies and their originators. In other instances, Gardner himself extrapolated upon exactly what certain characters were intended to represent. For example, Gardner was quick to note that he had gangstered the Dragon from the original Beowulf text to represent existentialist French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (for whom Gardner held an almost irrational disdain). With the Dragon’s irregular ocular organs and disapproval of Grendel’s quest for coherent meaning, there seems little reason to doubt Gardner. Grendel, then, is in many ways a creature whose search for meaning has been corrupted through his exposure to hurtful and morally bankrupt philosophies. Although it is clear from Gardner’s portrayal of Grendel’s character that violence naturally occurs to the monster (through both his physicality and his temperament), one has the sense that Grendel is also interested in applying some sort of coherent ethos to his actions. He is moved deeply by poetry and by music, although his encounters with them are never more than what he can observe while spying on humans. He wonders about religion and the meaning of his existence, yet finds priests who are easily duped and all too willing to see the hand of God at work in the party trick or simple illusion. Unfortunately for Gardner’s monster, the most persuasive advice he gets is from the Dragon, who offers: “My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it” (Gardner, 74). In the end, Grendel’s fatal flaw seems to be not that he comes into contact with Beowulf—a human too strong for him to defeat—but that he has finally accepted the Dragon’s essentially flawed philosophy. Grendel has become the senseless monster of rage and chaos as portrayed in the original Beowulf legend. However, this “position” represented by Grendel is not that of an idiot animal. In Gardner’s version, it is the ultimate result of his having reasoned himself

into a corner of doubt, cynicism, and skepticism. In Grendel, when Beowulf and Grendel begin their final physical combat, they also undergo a war of words. In this verbal exchange, Gardner solidifies the opposing combatants not only as analogous to the moral versus the immoral or good versus absence of good, but as cynicism versus hope. Grendel has bought the Dragon’s argument that the world is essentially a flawed, incoherent, and doomed place to be. Because of this (reasons the Dragon), there is no imperative to build for tomorrow, plan for the future, or be out for anybody except oneself. Beowulf, on the other hand, argues for the contrary worldview (even as he prepares to rip Grendel’s arm off). Grendel was made into an animated movie by an Australian film company, but it was never produced as a live-action movie. Though Gardner’s later novels went on to receive nominations for major literary awards, he is most widely remembered for Grendel. It is also perhaps worth noting that Gardner’s posthumous treatment by the mainstream literary community continues to be negatively influenced by his controversial 1978 book of criticism, On Moral Fiction, in which he is critical of many of the preeminent literary figures of the 20th century.

SOURCES Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Random House, 1971 Heaney, Seamus, trans. Beowulf. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000. Scott Kenemore

GREY, ZANE (PEARL ZANE GRAY) (1872–1939) Zane Grey (born Pearl Zane Gray) long ago assumed the status of legend, first for his classic novel, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), and, more important, for the way in which he helped preserve the spirit and carve the myth of the Old West. He also wrote one of the most popular and sympathetic novels about Native Americans to be penned by a white author: The Vanishing American (1925). Grey, the most popular Western novelist in American literary history, with over 63 novels to his credit, has been somewhat displaced in more contemporary times by such writers

GREY, ZANE 539

as Louis LAMOUR, but he retains iconic status to thousands of readers, even in the 21st century. Moreover, as interest in literary cultural perspectives grows, Grey’s work is receiving increasing scholarly attention from a community that would not read him in earlier times. However, the typical Grey hero is one that every American reader of Westerns recognizes: He is strong, courageous, courtly, and honest. His female characters, usually from the East, become less traditionally feminine and less naive after prolonged contact with Grey’s Western man. As numerous critics argue, Grey’s creation is more complicated and mysterious than a James Fenimore COOPER hero because Grey adds the perspectives of Darwinism and naturalism. Zane Grey was born on January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio, to Dr. Lewis M. Gray, a dentist and former preacher, and Josephine Alice Zane Gray. Grey studied dentistry at the University of Pennsylvania on a baseball scholarship, graduated in 1896, and began practicing dentistry in New York City. He published Betty Zane, his first novel, in 1903, the story of his Revolutionary War ancestor who braved British gunfire to bring gunpowder to her father, Colonel Ebeneezer Zane. With his wife Lina Elise “Dolly” Roth, whom he married in 1905, he moved to Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, and wrote the first of his Westerns, The Heritage of the Desert (1910). John Hare is a sickly Easterner who travels West to find purer air and falls in love with a half-Indian woman, Mescal, whom he marries. He also battles and triumphs over the forces of evil personified in an outlaw named Dene. Between 1907 and 1917, Zane Grey traveled west through Arizona and New Mexico gathering extensive material for Riders of the Purple Sage, which has never wavered in its place as one of the best—if not the best, as many critics argue—Western novel ever written. On these trips Grey developed a low impression of Mormons, whom he believed were both religious extremists and mistreaters of women; with this book, the scholar Carlton Jackson contends, Grey’s “anti-Mormonism was complete” (Jackson, 35). Riders of the Purple Sage features the valorous Mormon Jane Withersteen, who, with the strong and silent Jim Lassiter, defeats the Mormons who have blinded Lassiter’s horse and killed his sister.

The sequel, The Rainbow Trail, appeared in 1915. The other contender for Grey’s best novel is The Vanishing American. Into this tale Grey poured his sympathy for Native Americans and his anger at those whose racist attitudes injured them. Set during World War I, it contains a German American—with clear sympathies for the German cause—as head of the Nopah Reservation, incompetent Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, and zealous missionaries ignorant of the lives of the Indians they hope to convert. The Navajo hero, Nopahaie, educated at a white college, is in love with Marian Warner, a white woman, who travels with him on a pilgrimage to his native god. He is so weakened by influenza that he dies, becoming Grey’s “symbol of the vanishing American” (Jackson, 64). Zane Grey died on October 23, 1939, of a heart attack after exercising his fishing rod, at his home in Altadena, California. Some years after his death, numerous unpublished fishing stories were discovered. He also wrote novels of the South Sea Islands. The Last of the Plainsmen (1908), a nonfiction account of his 1907 visit to the West, has been much praised, and over 100 feature-length films have been made of his novels. Many modern readers—unlike their forbears—admire the tension between Darwinian violence and domestic romance with which Grey’s novels typically end. Zane Grey gave his readers a view of the American West as a space large enough to contain the aspirations and components of the American Dream. For this reason, Grey’s work is appearing on college and university course lists with increasing frequency. The majority of his papers remain with the Grey family and are available on a restricted basis.

SELECTED NOVELS Betty Zane. New York: C. Francis, 1903. The Call of the Canyon. New York: Harper, 1924. The Drift Fence. New York: Harper, 1933. The Heritage of the Desert. New York: Harper, 1910. Knights of the Range. New York: Harper, 1939. The Last of the Plainsmen. New York: Outing, 1908. The Lone Star Ranger. New York: Harper, 1915. The Man of the Forest. New York: Harper, 1920. The Rainbow Trail. New York: Harper 1915. The Reef Girl: A Novel of Tahiti. Edited by Loren Grey. New York: Harper, 1977.

540 GRISHAM, JOHN

Riders of the Purple Sage. New York: Harper, 1912. The Trail Driver. New York: Harper, 1936. To the Last Man. New York: Harper, 1922. The U.P. Trail. New York: Harper, 1918. Republished as The Roaring U.P. Trail. The Vanishing American. New York: Harper, 1925. Republished as The Vanishing Indian. Western Union. New York: Harper, 1939.

SOURCES Grey, Loren. Zane Grey: A Photographic Odyssey. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor, 1985. Grey, Zane. Zane Grey, Outdoorsman. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. ———, and others. Zane Grey: The Man and His Work. New York: Harper, 1928. Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. New York: World, 1970. Jackson, Carlton. Zane Grey. Revised edition, Boston: Twayne, 1989. Kant, Candace C. Zane Grey’s Arizona. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland, 1984. Kimball, Arthur G. Ace of Hearts: The Westerns of Zane Grey. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1993. Ronald, Ann. Zane Grey. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1975. Topping, Gary. “Zane Grey.” In Fifty Western Writers: A BioBibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard Etulain, 152–161. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Whipple, T. K. “American Sagas.” In Study Out the Land, edited by T. K. Whipple, 19–29. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943.

OTHER Zane Grey Museum [Ohio]. Available online. URL: http://www.ohiohistory.org/places/natlroad/index.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Zane Grey Museum. Available online. URL: http://www.nps.gov/upde/zgmuseum.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. Zane Grey West Society. Available online. URL: http://www.zanegreysws.org/zgwsmenu.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GRISHAM, JOHN (1955– )

John Grisham’s name is synonymous with the blockbuster legal thriller novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Begin-

ning with The FIRM (1991), which sold an astonishing seven million copies, the prolific Grisham has continued to mesmerize millions of readers and scores of critics with his ear for dialogue, page-turning plots, and his increasing attention to social issues like homelessness, racism, and the death penalty. In the words of the reviewer Deirdre Donahue, “John Grisham appears to be two writers inhabiting one persona. He is the creator of jet-fueled legal thrillers such as The Firm and The Pelican Brief. And, periodically, he reveals a slowerpaced, more personal side as he did in The Testament, which explored religious faith and its transformative power” (Donahue). To date, Grisham’s works have sold over 90 million copies (Osgood and Mason). John Grisham was born on February 8, 1955, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and a homemaker. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Mississippi State University in 1977 and a doctor of jurisprudence degree from the University of Mississippi in 1981. He married Renee Jones and, after working in private law practice in the 1980s and concurrently serving for six years in the Mississippi House of Representatives, published his first novel, A Time to Kill (1989), and two years later, The Firm. The success of The Firm allowed him to devote his full time to novel writing. A Time to Kill, one of his most critically successful books, tells the story of a black man who murders the two white men who raped his 10-year-old daughter. He is defended by Jake Brigance, who must confront both the Ku Klux Klan and an all-white jury. In The Firm Mitchell McDeere, a young lawyer, learns of the corruption in his firm and becomes a mole for the CIA and the FBI. Grisham followed with The Pelican Brief (1992), a second legal thriller about Darby Shaw, a young law student whose theory about the murder of two Supreme Court justices places her in extreme danger. The Client (1993) features another person with dangerous knowledge, this time 11-year-old Mark Shay, who turns to a lawyer, Reggie Love, for protection, this time from the FBI as well as from criminal elements. With his fifth novel, The Chamber (1994), Grisham eschewed the plot-driven stories in his previous four novels and instead wrote an intriguing family history. Sam Cayhall, a death-row inmate accused of murder,

GRISHAM, JOHN 541

Ku Klux Klan ties, and anti-Semitism, is visited by his grandson, Adam Hall, an attorney, who wants to prove him innocent. The Rainmaker (1995) depicts young attorney Rudy Baylor, who battles shady lawyers and sues a recalcitrant insurance company on behalf of a client terminally ill with leukemia. Nicholas Easter of The Runaway Jury (1996) fights Rankin Fitch, the unscrupulous lawyer for Big Tobacco. The Partner (1997) describes the ingenious machinations of a law partner who fakes his own death to run off with millions of dollars. In The Street Lawyer (1998), set in Washington, D.C., Georgetown lawyer Michael Brock is abducted by a homeless man; he ends up exploring and trying to alleviate the plight of the homeless. Similarly, The Testament (1999) combines Grisham’s talents for writing a legal thriller with his interest in spirituality. Here Nate O’Reily leaves behind his alcoholic haze, ferrets out the secrets of criminals, and becomes a source for good. The Brethren (2000) begins with three corrupt judges imprisoned in a penitentiary and blossoms into a political thriller that involves the secrets of gay men and the corrupt uses of power at the national level. In 2001 Grisham published a novella, Skipping Christmas, a satire on the pervasive materialism of the holiday. A Painted House (2001) is the partially autobiographical but mostly fictionalized account of young Luke Chandler, who grows up on an Arkansas farm in the 1950s, witnesses two murders, and places his own family in harm’s way. To help a small cultural magazine called The Oxford American, Grisham allowed The Painted House to be serialized there before it was published as a novel. The Summons (2002) is another legal thriller. Old Judge Reuben Atlee summons his sons but dies before their arrival. They are left with old family secrets and inexplicable sums of money. John Grisham lives with his wife Renee Jones in Charlottesville, Virginia. His novel The Last Juror (2004) returns to Ford County, Mississippi, site of A Time to Kill, and combines the Grisham talent for the legal thriller with the sensitive portrait of a young reporter, Joyner William Traynor, as he follows a sensational rape and murder case. His most recent novel is The Broker (2005). Most of Grisham’s novels have been made into feature-length films. The Firm (Para-

mount Pictures, 1993) starred Tom Cruise, Gene Hackman, and Jeanne Tripplehorn; The Pelican Brief (1994) starred Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington; The Client (1994) starred Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones; The Chamber (1996) starred Chris O’Donnell and Gene Hackman; A Time to Kill (1996) starred Matthew McConaughey and Sandra Bullock; The Rainmaker (1997) starred Matt Damon and Claire Danes; A Painted House (2003), adapted as a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, premiered on CBS television on April 27, 2003; and The Runaway Jury, starring John Cusack, Gene Hackman, and Dustin Hoffman, was released by Fox that same year.

NOVELS Bleachers. New York: Doubleday, 2003. The Brethren. New York: Doubleday, 2000. The Broker. New York: Doubleday, 2005. The Chamber. New York: Doubleday, 1994. The Client. New York: Doubleday, 1993. The Firm. New York: Doubleday, 1991. The King of Torts. New York: Doubleday, 2003. The Last Juror. New York: Doubleday, 2004. A Painted House. New York: Doubleday, 2001. The Partner. New York: Doubleday, 1997. The Pelican Brief. New York: Doubleday, 1992. The Rainmaker. New York: Doubleday, 1995. The Runaway Jury. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Skipping Christmas. New York: Doubleday, 2001. The Street Lawyer. New York: Doubleday, 1998. The Summons. New York: Doubleday, 2002. The Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1999. A Time to Kill. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wynwood, 1989.

SOURCES Black, Joel. “Grisham’s Demons,” College Literature 25, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 35–40. Grisham, John, with Michelle Bearden. “An Interview,” Publishers Weekly 240, no. 8 (February 22, 1993): 701. Nevins, Francis M. “Law School Seminar on Popular Fiction and Film,” Murder Is Academic: The Teaching and Criticism of Crime Fiction on Campus 3 (November 1995): 1–3. Panek, LeRoy Lad. Probable Cause: Crime Fiction in America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1990. Rader, Barbara A., and Howard Z. Zettler. The Sleuth and the Scholar: Origins, Evolution, and Current Trends in Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

542 GROUP, THE

Zaleski, Jeff. “The Grisham Business,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 3 (January 19, 1998): 248–251.

OTHER Donahue, Deirdre. “ ‘Last Juror’ Is a Tale of 2 Grishams.” USATODAY.com (January 27, 2004). Available online. URL: http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/200401-26-last-juror_x.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. Grisham, John. In Critical Companions to Popular Comtemporary Writers (Greenwood Press, 2002). Greenwood Electronic Media. Available online by subscription. URL: http:// www.gem.greenwood.com. Accessed September 12, 2005. John Grisham: The Official Web Site. Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/grisham. Accessed September 12, 2005. Osgood, Charles, and Anthony Mason. “A Time to Remember: John Grisham, CBS.” CBS News Sunday Morning (February 13, 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http:/www.highbeam.com/library/doc3asp?DOCID= 1p1:29463485. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GROUP, THE MARY MCCARTHY (1963)

The Group by Mary McCARTHY soared to the number-one position on the New York Times best-seller list within its first week in print (Gelderman, 250). However, the novel was not critically acclaimed. For many critics, including Norman MAILER, the book was an “embarrassing failure” (Stock, 244). McCarthy’s reputation as a New York intellectual never recovered from the publication of The Group and its critical reception as a woman’s magazine book. The book was also banned in Italy, Ireland, and Australia as an “offense to public morals” (Brightman, 486). Although every “major film studio had considered [The Group] and turned it down” before publication, in 1966 the book rights were bought by Charles Feldman, and it was made into a movie (Gelderman, 262). The Group centers on Kay—opening with her marriage as a symbol of her birth into womanhood and ending with her death, which may have been a suicide or an accident. Many of the characters in The Group are quasifictional characterizations of McCarthy and her friends. This writing practice makes the reading of the book a type of history lesson in the mores, politics, sexual practices, child rearing, housekeeping, and consumerism of the 1930s to the 1940s in which the book is set.

A week after Vassar’s commencement ceremonies Kay, the group’s leader, marries Harald. All other members of the group are present at Kay’s wedding, including Priss, Libby, Polly, Dottie, Helena, Lakey, and Pokey. The group slowly separates after Lakey goes to Europe and Kay marries. Kay, representative of the group’s progressive nature in college, marries only to become the second to her husband. The group cannot remain intact while Kay is a second-class citizen to her husband. The group can come back together only in the closing chapter for Kay’s funeral shortly after Lakey has returned from her travels in Europe. The incomplete college educations the girls in the group receive are embodied in the second chapter of the novel. Dottie’s embarrassments, uncertainties, and fears demonstrate her naïveté caused by cultural stigmas surrounding sex. For instance, women thought that douching would keep them from getting pregnant and that it was impossible to experience physical pleasure without time and experience. Although the contemporary individual is perhaps desensitized to sex, this is not the sex or sexuality The Group illustrates. When Dottie decides to have sex with someone she does not know or love and who does not know or love her, the audience is given real insight into the female’s first sexual encounter—blood and all—rather than a romanticized version. Dottie was in a great deal of pain at first and then began to enjoy the experience only to feel guilty for enjoying herself. When Dottie goes to the clinic to be fitted for a pessary, the private nature of sex meets the public clinic. Such dichotomies as public versus private and nature versus manufactured are central to the novel. McCarthy was thinking about the differences in choice due to consumerism, including different contraceptives, breast versus bottle feeding, brand named versus generic, and canned versus fresh foods (Brightman, 492). When Priss has a child, Stephen, she agrees to breast-feed her baby through the coaxing of her husband, Sloan. Something as seemingly natural as breast-feeding is portrayed, more appropriately, as difficult, painful, unnerving to the mother, and unsatisfactory to the child. The progress of the bottle, here, can be seen as both a loss of the bonding with the child along with the child’s inability to

GURGANUS, ALLAN 543

receive the immunities of the mother, but also as a positive advancement for new mothers. Priss, however, has a hard time bonding with her child even though she is breast-feeding. Again, McCarthy realistically scripts the problem women face when the bond between mother and child remains unformed. As a complete work The Group focuses on both sides of the individual—the good and the bad. The upper classes, privileged monetarily, myopically see the world through narrow and self-absorbed lenses. Lakey, although lifted above the rest of the crowd, is absent through most of the novel and therefore does not witness the changes in the group members (Brightman, 483). Among other blind spots, Kay cannot see that her husband, Harald, has committed her to a mental institution, Lakey is in love with her, Norine is sleeping with Harald, and Harald loves men. Dottie denies her sexual drive. Helena fails to have any sexual desire or to question its absence. Mary (Pokey) is voiceless because her chapters are narrated through her servant. Libby is blinded by her climb up the literary ladder and can read and interpret books but not people. Polly works for others but not for herself. Priss, corrupted by her husband’s desires, listens to her baby cry for hours a day, ignoring her motherly instinct. The group, however flawed, represents women with goals doing the best they can with their limited education. There is a peculiar absence in the novel, considering its setting in 1933. The book does not mention, through any of the eight characters, women’s newly found ability to vote. The absence of women’s rights or any mention of the feminist movement relevant to the time in which McCarthy was writing is indicative of McCarthy’s view of the movement as a bore and “[a]s she got older, she got progressively more hostile toward feminism” (Donohue, 95). Knowing McCarthy’s views on feminism makes it impractical to label the text feminist, but its effects may be feminist in exposing the problems women face. The book’s focus, rather than on women’s rights, is on the changes occurring in politics, consumerism, marriage, contraception, and other issues faced by educated women in the 1930s and 1940s, making the novel valuable as a glimpse into history.

SOURCES Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Random House: 1992. Donohue, Stacey Lee. “Reluctant Radical: The Irish-Catholic Element.” In Twenty-Four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: The Writer and Her Work, edited by Eve Stwertka and Margo Viscusi. Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 87–98. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Gelderman, Carol W. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. McCarthy, Mary. The Group. New York: Harcourt, 1963. Stock, Irvin. “Mary McCarthy.” In Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Introduction, edited by Maureen Howard, 214–264. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963. Adriane Bezusko

GURGANUS, ALLAN (1947– )

Allan Gurganus exploded onto the literary scene in 1989 with his first novel, OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL; it remained on the best-seller lists for months. He is most frequently praised for his storytelling abilities and the way in which he invents realistic voices for all his characters, male or female, black or white, old or young. In attempting to explain the source of his inspiration, he said that (like many Southerners) he grew up in a house where any one of four generations could walk through a doorway at any time. Therefore, he was accustomed to living with the past, the present, and the future; and grew up “feeling and knowing” that “history is a daily force. We knew this because we lived with the burned monuments that Sherman had left behind” (Birnbaum). Gurganus has also been widely reviewed for his novels Plays Well with Others (1997), about the way the AIDS virus interrupted the decadelong “party” for gay men in New York; his novellas The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (1993, 2001); and his collection, White People: Stories and Novellas (1991). Gurganus was born in 1947 in North Carolina. His father was a merchant-turned-preacher and his mother was a former school teacher with a master’s degree. After serving in the U.S. Navy, Gurganus attended Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied with short story writer Grace Paley; after graduating in 1972, he

544

GUTERSON, DAVID

studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with Stanley ELKIN and John CHEEVER, who helped Gurganus publish his first story, “Minor Heroism,” in The New Yorker. His talent for telling a big story with a multiplicity of voices resulted in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a series of interlocking stories that take place during the Civil War and into the 1980s. The unifying character is Lucy Marsden, the Confederate widow. Nearing her hundredth birthday, she lies on her nursing home bed and tells the story of her husband, William, and his female slave Castalia, interspersing them with observations on Elvis Presley and other modern cultural icons. Gurganus’s next book, White People, contains Blessed Assurance, the novella that the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls “brilliant” (Gates, 492). It chronicles the confessions of Jerry, an aging Southern white who looks back guiltily at his behavior toward blacks during his college days in the 1940s. Gurganus says that F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY was the inspiration for his next book, Plays Well with Others. The novel features Hartley Mims Jr., a young North Carolinian who, like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carroway, arrives in New York as an outsider after a stint in the navy during the Vietnam War. The social freedom of the 1980s, somewhat like the Gatsby experience in the 1920s, was ending, this time because of HIV and AIDS; Gurganus explains that “the funerals were the last of the parties; those too were kind of festivals and celebrations” (Salon interview). Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All was both a Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club main selection, and was made into a television movie for NBC in 1992. It was adapted for the stage as Reassurance: An Evening with Allan Gurganus, as part of the “Writers in Performance” series at the Manhattan Theatre Club. In 2000 Gurganus was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He and his partner live in a small town near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Gurganus writes every day until 3:00 P.M. His next book, he says, will be a “big, big book, like Widow” (Birnbaum).

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Blessed Assurance: A Moral Tale. Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1990.

Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. New York: Knopf, 1989. Plays Well with Others. New York: Knopf, 1997. The Practical Heart. Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1993. Published as The Practical Heart: Four Novellas. New York: Knopf, 2001. White People: Stories and Novellas. New York: Knopf, 1991.

SOURCES Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Art and Ardor,” Nation, 15 April 1991, pp. 492–495. Ketchin, Susan. “When I’m Fog on a Coffin Lid: An Interview with Allan Gurganus,” Southern Review (Autumn 1993): 645–662. Wallace, B. Austin. “Allan Gurganus.” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 178–182. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.

OTHER Gurganus, Allan. “Interview: Allan Gurganus.” By Robert Birnbaum. Identity Theory (November 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.identitytheory.com/people/ birnbaum29.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. ———. “Learning Through Laughter.” BookPage Interview by Ellen Kanner. BookPage online. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9711bp/firstperson1.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. ———. “Salon Magazine Interview: Alan Gurganus.” By Dwight Garner. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www. salonmagazine.com/books/int/1997/12/cov_si_08gurganus. html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

GUTERSON, DAVID (1956– ) David Guterson’s first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), a love story, murder mystery, and courtroom drama about a Japanese-American woman and a reporter who grow up together in the San Juan Islands until her family was interned during World War II, remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over a year, sold over 2.5 million copies in paperback, and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1995. Continuing his chronicle of what the writer and reviewer Tom Deignan calls “the struggles and victories of fundamentally decent people” (Deignan), Guterson is also the author of East of the Mountains (1999), the odyssey of a World War II veteran determined to commit suicide. Because of its ruminations on war and nature, this novel has elicited compar-

GUTERSON, DAVID 545

isons to Ernest HEMINGWAY’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Charles FRAZIER’s Cold Mountain, and Cormac MCCARTHY’s Border Trilogy. His third and most recent novel is Our Lady of the Forest (2003), about a runaway teenager lost in the Washington State woods. David Guterson was born on May 4, 1956, in Seattle, Washington, to Murray Bernard Guterson, a criminal attorney, and Shirley Zak Guterson. He earned a bachelor’s degree (1978) and master’s (1982) from the University of Washington and married Robin Ann Radwick in 1979. Snow Falling on Cedars features a reporter, the one-armed Ishmael Chambers, who loves Hatsue Shigemura, daughter of Japanese immigrants. World War II is imminent. Years later, he meets her again during the trial of her husband, Kabuo Miyamoto, accused of murdering Carl Heine, a local fisherman. Praised for his evocation of the lush damp scenery of the Pacific Northwest and his vivid characters, both Asian American and European American, Guterson also introduces questions of history and race, hypocrisy and guilt. East of the Mountains features the odyssey of the 73-year-old retired heart surgeon, Ben Givens, a widower diagnosed with colon cancer. He plans on disguising his suicide as a hunting accident, and treks into the mountains and deserts of eastern Washington. An automobile accident in an apple orchard reverses his desire to die. In a change of pace, Our Lady of the Forest, set in a fictional Olympic Peninsula logging community, tells the story of Ann Holmes, a 16-year-old with a history of drugs; after leaving home she sees—or thinks she sees—the Virgin Mary in the woods. David Guterson lives and writes at his home on Bainbridge Island. He has recently endowed a graduate creative writing fellowship at the University of Washington and founded Field’s End, a series of writing classes and visiting authors on Bainbridge Island. In

1999, Snow Falling on Cedars was made into a film released by Universal, directed by Scott Hicks and starring Ethan Hawke as Ishmael.

NOVELS East of the Mountains. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1999. Our Lady of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2003. Snow Falling on Cedars. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

SOURCES Graham, Philip. “In the Country of David Guterson,” Chicago Tribune Books, 30 June 1996. Harris, Michael. “Sometimes, Even Good People Must Coexist with Evil,” Los Angeles Times, 19 September 1994, p. E4. Iyer, Pico. “Snowbound: On a Remote Island, a Vivid Tale of Clashing Cultures,” Time, 26 September 1994. Kenney, Susan. “Their Fellow Americans,” New York Times Book Review, 16 October 1994, pp. 12–13. Mantell, Suzanne. “The Rise of ‘Snow’,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 51 (December 18, 1995): 212. Mathews, Linda. “Amid the Cedars, Serenity and Success,” New York Times, 29 February 1996, pp. C1, C4. Pate, Nancy. “Murder Unveils an Island’s Secrets,” Chicago Tribune, 12 January 1995. Robson, David. “Hysteria Down in the Woods Today,” Sunday Telegraph, 23 November 2003.

OTHER Deignan, Tom. “A Farewell.” World and I (September 1, 1999). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:55443412. Accessed September 12, 2005. Hoback, Jane. “A Stark New Landscape.” Rocky Mountain News (April 25, 1999). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3. asp?DOCID=1G1:67488655. Accessed September 12, 2005. Marshall, John. “Back on Track.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer (September 27, 2003). Available online. URL: http:// library.centralia.ctc.edu/lcr/snowfallingtoolkit.pdf. Accessed September 12, 2005.

C

HD

HA JIN (1956– ) Ha Jin, a Chinese-American novelist, won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Waiting (1999). He had already won three Pushcart Prizes, as well as a Flannery O’Connor Award, for stories collected in Under the Red Flag (1996). His first novel, In the Pond (1998), earned good reviews, but the most laudatory were reserved for WAITING, which depicts life in China under communism. Jin writes in English, as did the Polish-born British writer Joseph Conrad and the Russian-born American writer Vladimir NABOKOV, and he has noted that English has “many levels of diction and meaning.” Chinese, he says, “is a very earthy language” (Schroeder). Ha Jin (his name was Xuefei Jin) was born in 1956 in Liaoning (southern Manchuria) and immigrated to the United States in 1986. He earned a doctoral degree at Brandeis University in 1992 and, in the ensuing seven years, published two books of poetry, two story collections, and two novels. In the Pond features Shao Bin, a literary young man who must work in a fertilizer factory to help support his mother and father. The grim angle of vision reminds readers of Joseph HELLER; Ha Jin’s character Bin mocks the communist hierarchy, who do not understand his subtle humor and promote him. Waiting, based on a true story, depicts Lin, a doctor who waits two decades to marry a nurse named Manna Wu; after the marriage, they realize they are not happy together. The concept of “waiting” is also polit-

ical, because China’s Cultural Revolution makes all the citizens wait for freedom. Crazed is Ha Jin’s most recent novel: Professor Yang, a retired literature professor, has suffered a stroke. While his prospective son-in-law, Jian Wan, cares for him, they discuss Chinese history, especially the Cultural Revolution. Yang asks whether anyone raised under communism can be a true intellectual; although Yang is ostensibly the “crazed” character, the text implies that the term can be applied to those who support China’s authoritarian leadership. Ha Jin’s next book, War Trash, is set in an American prisoner-of-war camp in Korea and is narrated by a Chinese POW. Jin lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is a professor at Emory University.

NOVELS Crazed. New York: Pantheon, 2003. In the Pond. Cambridge, Mass.: Zoland Books, 1998. Waiting. New York: Pantheon, 1999. War Trash. New York: Pantheon, 2004.

SOURCES Gray, Paul. “Divorce, Chinese-Style,” Time, 8 November 1999, 144. Tharps, Lori, and Clarissa Cruz. “Between the Lines,” Entertainment Weekly, 3 December 1999, p. 93. Wanner, Irene. Review of Waiting, Seattle Times, 31 October 1999.

OTHER Schroeder, Heather Lee. “Ha Jin Captivating.” Wisconsin State Journal (January 28, 2000). HighBeam Research.

546

HAGEDORN, JESSICA T. 547

Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:84947059. Accessed September 12, 2005. Stockinger, Jacob. “Ha Jin Masters the Microcosm.” Wisconsin State Journal (January 3, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3. asp?DOCID=1P1:85131145. Accessed September 12, 2005. Thomas, John D. “Across an Ocean of Words.” Emory Magazine (74, no. 1 [Spring 1998]). Available online. URL: http:// www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/spring98/hajin/html. Accessed September 15, 2005. Weaver, Teresa K. “A Master Storyteller.” Atlanta Journal and Constitution (March 12, 2002). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3. asp?DOCID=1P1:52923960. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HAGEDORN, JESSICA T(ARAHATA) (1949–

) Jessica Hagedorn has succeeded not only

as a novelist, poet, and performance artist, but also as a playwright, screenwriter, editor, radio commentator, singer, and band lyricist. She won two American Book Awards: in 1983, for the novella and poetry in Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions, and in 1991, for her novel DOGEATERS, which was also nominated for a National Book Award. Hagedorn, a postmodernist experimenter, mixes genres (from radio transcript excerpts to historical accounts to gossip columns) and effectively blends English, Spanish, and Tagalog, all of which she spoke in her native Philippines before immigrating to the United States. Jessica Hagedorn was born on May 29, 1949, in Manila to a Scotch-Irish-French-Filipina mother and a Filipino-Spanish father whose great-grandmother was Chinese (Bonetti, 93–95). She immigrated to San Francisco, California, at age 14, was influenced by Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, and began publishing in the 1970s. She moved to New York City in 1978. The novella Pet Food (1981) features George Sand, a Filipino-American teenager living a bicoastal life and experiencing the culture of Broadway (he writes a play) and San Francisco, where he lives among street people. Dogeaters catapulted Hagedorn into the spotlight. It is an honest, graphic, disturbing satire about the U.S. presence in the Philippines in the 1950s. With a political assassination as the focal point, the novel uses characters like the unnamed but unmistakably

characterized Imelda Marcos, the wife of dictator Ferdinand Marcos; a half-American, half-Filipino prostitute Joey; and a wealthy schoolgirl Rio Gonzago, whose reality is so influenced by movies and soap operas that she cannot recognize fantasy. Critics have praised Hagedorn for her courageous decision to use the pejorative word “dogeaters” for her title and for her use of a large range of characters—from drug addicts to government officials—in her “montage of vices” that reinforces the plight of Filipinos living in the wake of colonization. Hagedorn’s next novel, Gangster of Love (1996), is about Filipina American Raquel (Rocky) Rivera. She grows from a New York adolescent to a rock star, and finally into a conscientious wife and mother. Critics have noted the numerous ways in which the novel echoes Hagedorn’s own conflicts about family obligations as she tried to succeed as an artist. Hagedorn’s most recent novel, Dream Jungle (2003), is set on the Philippine island of Mindanao in the 1970s and uses two events—the making of a movie of the Vietnam War and the discovery of a lost tribe in a rain forest—to link American journalist Paz Marlowe (born in the Philippines) with Zamora Lopez de Legazpi, a wealthy landowner. There is also Lina, the female servant who flees from the landowner’s sexually predatory nature, and Vince Moody, an American actor who falls in love with her. Jessica Hagedorn lives and writes in New York City with her husband.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon, 1990. Dream Jungle. New York: Viking, 2003. The Gangster of Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions. San Francisco: Momo’s Press, 1981.

SOURCES Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Jessica Hagedorn,” Missouri Review 18, no. 1 (1995): 90–113. Brown, Rosellen. “The Year in Fiction: 1990,” Massachusetts Review 32, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 123–146. Corrigan, Maureen. “Yo-Yo in a Rock Band,” Nation, 28 October 1996, pp. 64–66. De-Manuel, Maria Teresa. “Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters: A Feminist Reading,” Likha1 2, no. 2 (1990–1991): 10–32. Doyle, Jacqueline. “ ‘A Love Letter to My Motherland’: Maternal Discourses in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,” Hit-

548

HAMILL, PETE

ting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian-American Cultural Criticism 4, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 1–25. Gillespie, Kellie. Review of Dream Jungle, Library Journal 128, no. 14 (September 1, 2003): 206. Iannone, Carol. Review of Dogeaters, Commentary 91 (March 1991): 52. Moore, Susanna. “Danger in the Philippines,” Washington Post Book World, 8 April 1990, pp. 1, 7. Pearlman. Mickey, ed. “Interview with Jessica Hagedorn.” In American Women Writing Fiction. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989, 134–142. Rexroth, Kenneth. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1987. San Juan, E., Jr. “Transforming Identity in Postcolonial Narrative: An Approach to the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn,” Post-Identity 1, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 5–28. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Dogeaters, Publishers Weekly 237, no. 6 (February 9, 1990): 43.

OTHER Miles, Chris, Jessica Heerwald, and Tina Avent. “Jessica Hagedorn.” Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ vg/Bios/Entries/hagedorn_jessica_tarahata.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HAMILL, PETE (1935– )

In addition to his long career as an award-winning newspaper columnist, Pete Hamill has written the New York Daily News short story stories, “Tales of New York,” and 10 novels, one of which, Snow in August (1997), was selected by Ohio governor Bill Owens for the 2002 “One State, One Book” program. This much-praised coming-of-age novel is about the preadolescent Michael Devlin, his widowed mother, Father Heaney, and Rabbi Hirsch, who teaches Michael how to create a golem, a mythical Jewish creature who can—and in this novel does— rescue the neighborhood from the vicious neighborhood gang, the Falcons. Two other novels, Flesh and Blood (1977), about a boxer, and The Gift (1973), frequently compared to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, were adapted as CBS television films aired in 1979 and 1980, respectively. Hamill is also the author of a number of books of nonfiction, including his celebrated memoir, A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1994), and Why Sinatra Matters (1998).

Pete Hamill was born on June 24, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York, to William Hamill and Anne Devlin Hamill. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1952 to 1954, then attended Pratt Institute and Mexico City College (now University of the Americas) before beginning his long career with the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and the Village Voice. His marriage to Ramona Negron on February 3, 1962, ended in divorce in 1970; 17 years later, in 1987, he married Fukiko Aoki. Hamill finally conquered the drinking problem described in A Drinking Life: A Memoir in 1972. His novels have been praised especially for their realistic description of place, especially New York tenement and street life, and their re-creation of New York speech. A Killing for Christ (1968) was the first of many novels that depict New York life: Dirty Laundry (1978), The Deadly Piece (1979), The Guns of Heaven (1983), and Loving Women: A Novel of the Fifties (1990). They evoke a New York that the reviewer Sean Callery compares with the British novelist Graham Greene’s “Greeneland,” but where Greeneland is metaphysical and transportable, “ ‘Hamilland’ is a fixed location” of Brooklyn whose “armories, churches, hospitals, and other public institutions” Hamill does not bother to disguise (Callery). Flesh and Blood (1977) remains one of his best known; here Irish-American Bobby Fallon moves from a Brooklyn tenement to prison to the professional boxing arena. Diego Rivera (1999) is a lively recounting of the escapades of the renowned Mexican muralist and his equally colorful wife, Frida Kahlo. Hamill’s most recent novel, Forever (2003), uses a large historical backdrop for the activities of Cormac O’Connor, an immigrant from Belfast, Ireland, born in 1723. The immortal O’Connor lives through the ages and is involved in such historic events as the American Revolution, an African slave ship, the Civil War–era draft riots in New York, the political maneuverings of Boss Tweed, and, finally, the destruction of Manhattan’s Twin Towers. Pete Hamill lives and writes in New York.

NOVELS The Deadly Piece. New York: Bantam, 1979. Diego Rivera. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Dirty Laundry. New York: Bantam, 1978. Flesh and Blood. New York: Random House, 1977.

HAMILTON, JANE 549

Forever. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. The Gift. New York: Random House, 1973. The Guns of Heaven. New York: Bantam, 1983. A Killing for Christ. New York: New American Library, 1968, Loving Women: A Novel of the Fifties. New York: Random House, 1990. Snow in August. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

SOURCES Callery, Sean. Review of Snow in August, Commonweal 124, no. 14 (August 15, 1997): 26. Hamel-Schwulst, Mary. Review of Diego Rivera, Library Journal 124, no. 17 (October 15, 1999): 66. Henderson, David W. Review of Forever, Library Journal 128, no. 3 (February 15, 2003): 168–169. O’Hehir, Andrew. “Not a Bridge and Tunnel Guy,” New York Times Book Review, 19 January 2003, p. 6.

HAMILTON, JANE (1957– ) Jane Hamilton’s novels evoke the farming communities and “prairie wholesomeness” (Steinberg) of the American Midwest, even as her vividly realized protagonists lead lives of anguish and tragedy. Her first novel, The Book of Ruth (1989), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was an early Oprah book club selection, an event that lifted Hamilton from obscurity and made her an author “known to millions of Oprah fans” (Guinn). After its selection by Oprah, book sales increased from about 80,000 to nearly 1 million copies. Her next novel, A Map of the World (1994), was also selected for Oprah’s book club, making Hamilton, along with Toni MORRISON and Wally Lamb, the only writers twice selected for these readers. She followed with two additional novels, the critically acclaimed The Short History of a Prince: A Novel (1998) and Disobedience (2000). The book editor Marta Salij said that Hamilton “brought what I call ‘domestic fiction’ to a higher level,” not writing only for women, but for everyone, capturing “life with all its frustrations and possibilities” (Guinn). Jane Hamilton was born on July 13, 1957, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Allen B. Hamilton, a stress analyst for General Motors, and Ruth Hubert Hamilton, a freelance writer. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College in 1979, and married Bob Willard, an orchard owner, in June 1982. Begun when she was 24 and published almost eight years later, The Book of Ruth

is about a young, impecunious, and poorly educated wife who constantly fights with her abusive mother, May; when she marries the mentally disturbed Ruby, the three live together until the calamitous denouement. Her work is set in Prairie Junction, a town that Hamilton insists is not “a barely disguised Rochester [Wisconsin],” but instead “a conglomeration of many towns and a product of my imagination” (Kaufman). A Map of the World depicts Alice Goodwin, a schoolteacher responsible for the drowning death of her best friend’s daughter; she is subsequently accused of sexually molesting children. A Map of the World became a motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role as Alice. The Short History of a Prince evokes the life of Walter McCloud, a gay man who suffers more than his share while seeking his identity and his role within his family, his dance profession, and the outside world. Disobedience follows a 15-year-old boy’s initially painful discovery of his mother’s extramarital affair, one conducted in large part through e-mail; unlike Hamilton’s earlier novels, however, as the critic Tom Alesia notes, Disobedience has amusing moments: Book club members discuss real life rather than books; and Elvira, the 13-year-old Civil War reenactor, shaves her head and wears her uniforms at the family dinner table and even to a wedding. “At a certain point as you get older,” Hamilton said, “life becomes either really desperate or just funnier” (Alesia). Jane Hamilton lives with her husband, Bob Willard, on their apple farm in Rochester, Wisconsin, near Racine.

NOVELS The Book of Ruth. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988. Published in England as The Frogs Are Still Singing. London: Collins, 1989. Disobedience. New York: Doubleday, 2000. A Map of the World. New York: Doubleday, 1994. The Short History of a Prince: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1998.

OTHER Alesia, Tom. “The Books of Jane Hamilton.” Wisconsin State Journal (November 2, 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1P1:84988034. Accessed September 12, 2005.

550

HAMMETT, DASHIELL

Guinn, Jeff. “Family and Farm Is Paramount to Novelist.” Star Telegram, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service (January 31, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 69786115. Accessed September 12, 2005. Habich, John. “The Book of Jane.” Minneapolis Star Tribune (January 20, 2002). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:82057763. Accessed September 12, 2005. Kaufman, Joanne. “Talking with . . . Jane Hamilton.” People Weekly (May 30, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp? DOCID=1G1:15271037. Accessed September 12, 2005. Steinberg, Sybil. “Jane Hamilton: A Kinship with Society’s Outcasts.” Publishers Weekly Interview (February 2, 1998). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:20208993. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HAMMETT,

(SAMUEL)

DASHIELL

(1894–1961) When one thinks about hard-boiled detective novels, Dashiell Hammett’s name comes up first. For more than a decade, he set the standards to which serious writers in the genre continue to aspire. Although he began writing for the pulp magazines of the 1920s, he became increasingly respected as an insightful portrayer of character, creating the now legendary private investigators Sam Spade (The MALTESE FALCON [1930]), Ned Beaumont (The Glass Key [1931]), Nick and Nora Charles (The THIN MAN [1934]), and the Continental Op (26 stories), all of whom are both believable and romantic. His major novels—The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and The Glass Key—were adapted for films in the 1930s and 1940s. Dashiell Hammett was born on May 27, 1894, on his grandfather’s farm, named Hopewell and Aim, in St. Mary, Maryland, to Richard Thomas Hammett, a farmer and politician, and Annie Bond Hammett. He left school early and contributed to his family by taking on a string of jobs, settling in 1915 for the traveling life of a Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency operative. He served in the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps during World War I from 1918 to 1919, as a sergeant, and again, during World War II, in the Army Signal Corps, from 1942 to 1945. On July 6, 1921, he married Josephine Dolan; they divorced in 1937. Dur-

ing World War I he contracted tuberculosis and the illness forced him to give up detective work. As a result, he began writing short stories, and published over 30 stories in four years in the influential magazine Black Mask. The editor, Captain Joseph T. Shaw, encouraged Hammett to write a novel. Red Harvest (1929), published originally in four parts in Black Mask, features the Continental Op, an unnamed tough detective who succeeds in an underworld where a kinder, gentler man would have failed. Set in Personville (called Poisonville by its inhabitants because it is completely controlled by thugs, racketeers, and corrupt officials), the Op is hired to clean up the town, which he does by pitting the criminals against one another. Many critics responded to Red Harvest by comparing Hammett to Ernest HEMINGWAY, with whom he clearly shares a laconic style, unadorned dialogue, a cynical ambiance, and many ethical questions that his protagonists must answer. Hammett’s second novel, The Dain Curse, appeared in book form in 1929. It was published originally in Black Mask. It too features the Continental Op (who appears in numerous short stories as well), and traces the curse of the Dain family to Gabrielle Leggett, a morphine addict who hires the Op because she fears she has inherited the curse. The Op sees through insanity, apparent suicide, murder, incest, and a religious cult to solve the murders and the mystery at the heart of the curse. With The Maltese Falcon, Hammett created Sam Spade, the self-employed hard-boiled protagonist. The San Francisco–based novel centers on a quest for a medieval gold falcon that seems to bring death to all who seek it and is discovered at novel’s end—after numerous but subtle deceptions, murders, and sexual liaisons—to be a fraud. Partly because of its objective third-person point of view, the novel set the standard for the modern detective story; it was followed by The Glass Key (1931), Hammett’s favorite of all of his books. Its protagonist, Ned Beaumont, a gambler with exclusive connections in Baltimore’s underworld, exposes murder, political corruption, upper-class hypocrisy, and opportunism on both sides. Hammett’s fifth and last novel, The Thin Man, serialized in Redbook in 1933, appeared in 1934. A popular success, it was admired

HAMMETT, DASHIELL 551

for its humorous tone and for Nick Charles, who appears here as a retired private detective married to Nora. Both have wit and intelligence and are clearly based on Hammett and his long-term lover, the playwright Lillian Hellman. Hammett wrote no more novels, although he did write Woman in the Dark, a novella initially published in installments in Liberty Magazine, forgotten, rediscovered, and published in book form in 1951. The novella involves a frightened young woman who is taken in by a man and woman in an isolated house who are unprepared for the emotional baggage she carries with her. In 1934, along with Alex Raymond, creator of Flash Gordon, Hammett collaborated on a comic strip called Secret Agent X-9. There were also radio programs based on the Op, Nick and Nora, and Sam Spade. The Maltese Falcon was made into a featurelength film three separate times, most famously in 1940 by Warner Brothers director John Huston with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade. The success of the movie The Thin Man—starring William Powell and Myrna Loy—continued through five separate sequels. Hammett also worked on “Tulip,” an autobiographical novel that he abandoned sometime around 1953; the fragment appears in The Big Knockover (1966). In his later years, Hammett wrote less and drank more, devoted himself to left-wing politics, was briefly imprisoned, and pleaded the Fifth Amendment during the McCarthy hearings in 1953. Dashiell Hammett died of lung cancer on January 10, 1961, in New York City. Despite his decline in public favor because of his unpopular political affiliations, Hammett’s work has survived his diminished personal reputation. Today, not only is Hammett known as the father of the hard-boiled detective novel, but also at least three of his works—The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man—have become classics in the canon of American fiction. In 1973, Lillian Hellman published Pentimento, an account of her life, her work, and her years with Hammett; this memoir provided the basis for the 1976 film Julia. The papers of Dashiell Hammett are at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Dain Curse. New York: Knopf, 1929. The Glass Key. New York: Knopf, 1931. The Maltese Falcon. New York: Knopf, 1930. Red Harvest. New York: Knopf, 1929. The Thin Man. New York: Knopf, 1934. Woman in the Dark. New York: Spivak, 1951.

SOURCES Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1944, pp. 53–59. Deloux, Jean-Pierre. Dashiell Hammett. Underworld USA. Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994. Dooley, Dennis. Dashiell Hammett. New York: Ungar, 1984. Gores, Joe. Hammett. New York: Putnam, 1975. Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Hellman, Lillian. Pentimento. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. ———. Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. ———. An Unfinished Woman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House, 1983. Layman, Richard, and Julie M. Rivett, eds. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Layman, Richard. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammet, Cain, and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Mellen, Joan. Hellman and Hammett. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Metress, Christopher, ed. The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Mundell, E. H. A List of the Original Appearances of Dashiell Hammett’s Magazine Work. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1968. Nolan, William F. Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally & Loftin, 1969. ———. Dashiell Hammett: A Life at the Edge. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1983. Symons, Julian. Dashiell Hammett. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Wolfe, Peter. Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980.

OTHER The Vintage Library. Hammett, Dashiell at the Vintage Library. Available online. URL: http://www.vintagelibrary.

552

HAM ON RYE

com/books/hammett/bio.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. Dashiell Hammett, Detective, Writer. Film. Color/B&W, Approx. 56 minutes. Documentary. Released 1999.

HAM ON RYE CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1982) Narratives of cruelty and alienation are delivered in the biting tones of sarcasm and comedy in Charles BUKOWSKI’s Ham on Rye. The novel explores the childhood and adolescence of Bukowski’s alter ego, outcast Henry Chinaski, crowding the pages with poignant memories of painful relationships, disfiguring acne, and early alcoholism. Throughout the novel, these elements combine to fill Chinaski’s childhood with pain and anger. In particular, his relationship with his father, violent and traumatic, is recounted in narratives of beatings, verbal abuse, ostracism, and embarrassment: “Wherever we went, he got into arguments with people” (26). The trauma of these episodes is also echoed in Bukowski’s other work, including several poems and short stories like “Death of the Father,” reflecting a common thread between the narrative of young Chinaski’s life and the harsh reality of Bukowski’s own upbringing (Dougherty). Escaping this physically and emotionally painful family life through the usual adolescent routes of camaraderie and popularity is impossible for Chinaski, due to severely disfiguring acne, so severe, in fact, that the doctor who treats him exclaims, “Acne Vulgaris . . . The worst case I’ve seen in all my years of practice!” (131). Chinaski’s acne leaves him not only pockmarked, but emotionally scarred as well. Chinaski is vulnerable and sensitive, hypervigilant to the criticism of others, and in his youthful world where acceptance or rejection often pivots on appearance, Chinaski is again cast out and treated cruelly. These two significant conditions of Chinaski’s life, his father’s cruelty and his physical disfigurement, shape a third major element in his character—his identity as a solitary figure—an outsider who voyeuristically observes and critiques the lives and relationships of others. As Chinaski relates, “only the poor and the lost and the idiots” were willing to befriend him (155). While the young Henry has a small group of on-againoff-again friends, his vulnerability sets him apart from

them and allows him to fall victim to the pain of their pranks and dirty play, as they exploit his weaknesses. Rejecting the social goals that most young people strive for—friendship, intimacy, acceptance—the young Chinaski takes comfort in alcohol. “Getting drunk was good,” Chinaski says. “I decided I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious, and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn’t become obvious yourself” (189). And for Henry Chinaski, not being “obvious” and singled out for ridicule or scorn, is a status worth drinking toward. Henry Chinaski stands as an autobiographical character for Bukowski in several of his novels, as well as in many short stories and poems. Constructed and portrayed in a style similar to Hemingway’s “Nick Adams” personae or Kerouac’s “Jack Dulouz,” Chinaski was introduced in Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with the Beasts (1965), and his hard-boiled, cynical character was further developed and chronicled in the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), and Women (1978), all before the retrospective Ham on Rye, in which Chinaski returns to the pain and struggles of his childhood. With his literary roots in Dostoyevsky’s antihero, the “underground man,” Chinaski moves through the world alienated and alone—a tough, hard-drinking womanizer most at home with the underclass and outcasts of society. While the character of Chinaski is generally acknowledged to be the author’s self-representation in his works, Bukowski is also noted as occasionally referring to his complete identification with Chinaski as “the Bukowski Myth” (see Tales of Ordinary Madness). Bukowski, although never formally associated with writers of the “beat generation,” such as Alan Ginsberg and Jack KEROUAC, wrote in a style that refused to conform to standard formal structure, conveying a harsh immediacy that earned him a place as a “second generation beat” or “dirty realist.” Bukowski became most widely known after the release of the movie Barfly, which was based on his life around the time of another of his Henry Chinaski novels, Factotum (1975), starring Mickey Rourke as Chinaski.

SOURCES Brewer, Gay. Charles Bukowski. Hartford, Conn.: Twain, 1997. Fox, Hugh. Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Biographical Study. Somerville, Mass.: Abyss, 1969.

HANNAH, BARRY 553

Malone, Aubrey. The Hunchback of East Hollywood. Manchester, England: Critical Vision, 2003. Sherman, Jory. Bukowski: Friendship, Fame, and Bestial Myth. Oakland, Calif.: Bookpeople, 1982.

OTHER Dougherty, Jay. “An Introduction to Charles Bukowski.” Available online. URL: jaydougherty.com/bukowski/. Accessed September 12, 2005. McCullough, Michael. “Ham on Rye” Literary Kicks. Available online. URL: http://www.litkicks.com/Buk/ham.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

HANNAH, BARRY (1942– ) Barry Hannah, author of nine experimental novels and one novella, as well as three collections of short stories, is a significant voice on the contemporary literary scene. He has won awards for both novels and short fiction, including the Award for Literature from the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979. Most recently, he received the 1994 Award in Fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. Although born and raised in the South, Hannah went to Hollywood, where he wrote film scripts for the director Robert Altman, before permanently returning—via Montana and Iowa—to claim his Mississippi heritage. Identified with William FAULKNER and Flannery O’CONNOR, whose Southern Gothic work he admires, Hannah’s novels are awash in sex, brutality, and mayhem, none of which seems gratuitous. Most reviewers, in fact, have praised the style and intensity with which Hannah examines the violence that pervades contemporary American life. Barry Hannah was born on April 23, 1942, in Clinton, Mississippi, to William Hannah, an insurance agent, and Elizabeth King Hannah. Reared in several Southern states, including Alabama and Louisiana, Hannah earned a B.A. from Mississippi College in 1964, and both M.A. (1966) and M.F.A. (1967) degrees from the University of Arkansas. Hannah published Geronimo Rex (1972) to acclaim rare for a first novel. It won the William Faulkner Award and was nominated for a National Book Award. Compared by critics to J. D. SALINGER’s The CATCHER IN THE RYE, Geronimo Rex is a coming-of-age novel that opens in Dream

of Pines, Louisiana. Hannah follows eight-year-old Harriman (Harry) Monroe through high school and college, and into his first year of graduate school at the University of Arkansas. Harry, who has learned to respect and admire the mulatto Harley Butte, his father’s employee, becomes violent whenever he encounters racial prejudice. Geronimo, the historical Apache who avenges the murder of his own family, becomes a hero whom Harry tries to emulate. Nightwatchmen, published the following year, is about Thorpe Trove, described by the Hannah scholar Mark Charney as “a dissatisfied, effeminate Southern loner” who, unlike Harry of Geronimo Rex, does not grow to maturity but moves from “self-imposed exile” to involvement and back to exile again (Charney, 13). He becomes involved again because of “the Knocker,” a killer who decapitates nightwatchmen in the English Department building at Southwestern Mississippi University. Hannah’s third novel, Ray (1981), a chronological work written in Hollywood, has been praised as a brilliant portrait of Ray, a complex and immortal soldier who served in both the Civil War and the Vietnam War. In 1983, Hannah published The Tennis Handsome, an absurdist treatment of French Edward, an almost unbelievably good-looking tennis player. Edward is implicated in an attempted murder and in one of the novel’s most frequently cited scenes, in the rape of a woman by a walrus. Hey Jack! (1987), like Ray, is a story told out of sequence; the author uses vignettes and fragments to depict the Korean Homer (another Hannah antihero) and the varied individual voices of the town. The life of Jack Lipsey, the ex-sheriff, runs parallel to Homer’s, and both men struggle to make sense of their existence. Boomerang, a fictional treatment of Hannah’s own life, features a protagonist named Barry who periodically breaks into his own narrative, as he wonders about his compulsion to write about events and emotions in his life even as he feels he must fictionalize them. Charney points out that in this novel, Hannah has his characters address Barry directly, and by name (Charney, 95). Hannah’s 1991 novel, Never Die, experiments with yet another era, another locale, another subject. Set in Nitburg, Texas,

554

HANSEN, RON

in 1910, it contains both grisly Old West violence and parodies of that Old West image. Hannah’s most recent novel is Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001), a return to longer fiction after nearly a decade of writing collections of short stories (e.g., Bats Out of Hell [1993] and High Lonesome [1996]). Like Faulkner, Hannah chooses characters from previous novels and stories to appear in this novel about zany, grotesque, perhaps even insane characters encountered by the protagonist, a psychopath named Man Mortimer. Hannah insists that his characters are part and parcel of the real rural South, a view that divides him from Faulkner, whose South Hannah admires but finds an “imagination land” (Charney, 93). Hannah’s unique style of storytelling—and he continues to experiment with new ones—has brought him to the very forefront of American literature. He lives with his wife, Susan, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is the writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi, a position he has held since 1987.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Boomerang. Boston: Houghton/Seymour Lawrence, 1989. Geronimo Rex. New York: Knopf, 1972. Hey Jack! New York: Dutton, 1987. Never Die. Boston: Houghton/Seymour Lawrence, 1991. Nightwatchmen. New York: Viking, 1973. Power and Light. Winston-Salem, N.C.: Palaemon Press, 1983. Ray. New York: Knopf, 1981. The Tennis Handsome. New York: Knopf, 1983. Yonder Stands Your Orphan. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.

SOURCES Charney, Mark. Barry Hannah. New York: Twayne, 1992. Gilman, Owen W. “Barry Hannah.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographic Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 213–221. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Madden, David. “Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex in Retrospect,” Southern Review 19 (Spring 1983): 309–316. Rafferty, Terrence. “Gunsmoke and Voodoo,” Nation, 1 June 1985, pp. 677–679. Seib, Kenneth. “ ‘Sabers, gentlemen, sabers’: The J. E. B. Stuart Stories of Barry Hannah,” Mississippi Quarterly 45 (Winter 1991): 41–53.

Spikes, Michael P. “What’s in a Name? A Reading of Barry Hannah’s Ray,” Mississippi Quarterly 42 (Winter 1988–1989): 69–82. Updike, John. “From Dyna Domes to Turkey-Pressing,” New Yorker, 9 September 1972, pp. 121–124. Weston, Ruth D. Barry Hannah, Postmodern Romantic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. ———. “Debunking the Unitary Self and Story in the War Stories of Barry Hannah,” Southern Literary Review 27 (Spring 1995): 96–106. ———. “ ‘The Whole Lying Opera of It’: Dreams, Lies, and Confessions in the Fiction of Barry Hannah,” Mississippi Quarterly 44 (Fall 1991): 411–428.

HANSEN, RON (RONALD THOMAS HANSEN) (1947– ) Although Ron Hansen’s Catholic upbringing and religious concerns have earned him comparisons to the Georgia writer Flannery O’CONNOR, he examines philosophical and spiritual issues through the historical novel. He uses the genres of the Western (Desperadoes, 1979, for instance), and the murder mystery (Atticus: A Novel, 1996), sometimes combining the two in a style that has been praised for its eloquence, poetic cadences, and powerful use of imagery. He writes often about the relationship between father and son, and the intensely felt experience of religious faith (Mariette in Ecstasy, 1991). Hansen is the recipient of the 1991 Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award. Ron Hansen was born on December 8, 1947, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Frank L. Hansen, an electrical engineer, and Marvyl Moore Hansen, a stenographer. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Creighton University (1970) and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa (1974), Hansen taught at universities in Michigan, Iowa, New York, and California. From 1985 to 1993, he was married to Julie Vinsonhaler; after their 1993 divorce, he married Bo Caldwell in 1996. Desperadoes, his first novel, set in the West of the 1800s, follows the infamous Dalton brothers and their gang. Told from the viewpoint of Emmett Dalton, the surviving gang member-turned-Rotarian, it is often compared to Walter Van Tilburg CLARK’s The Ox-Bow Incident. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward

HARPER, FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS 555

Robert (1983) followed. Narrated by Bob Ford, friend and final betrayer of Jesse James, the novel portrays James as the 34-year-old Robin Hood of the West. In both novels, the narrators transcend their criminal pasts to become well-to-do citizens. In a complete change of subject and locale, Hansen wrote Mariette in Ecstasy, set in upstate New York in 1906. The novel tells the story of 17-year-old Mariette Baptiste, who enters the convent of the Sisters of the Crucifixion. Evoking the mystery and complexity of religious faith and Mariette’s passionate love of Christ, Hansen includes her Christ-like stigmata—and questions whether these wounds emanate from hysterical sexuality or spiritual transcendence. The best-selling novel went through seven printings and was filmed in 1996 by Savoy Pictures: Hansen wrote the screenplay. Hansen’s fourth novel, Atticus, also examines issues of religious faith by combining elements of the biblical parable of the prodigal son with those of a murder mystery. Sixty-seven-year-old Colorado rancher Atticus Cody (named after Atticus Finch of Harper LEE’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD) learns of his son Scott’s suicide in Mexico. Atticus, who travels to Mexico to investigate his son’s death, becomes the vessel for fatherly love and forgiveness. In his next novel, Hitler’s Niece: A Novel (1999), Hansen explores another family relationship. Based on the death—by gunshot—of 23-year-old Angelika (Geli) Raubal in September 1931, Hansen presents a scenario in which Hitler murders his sexually molested half-niece. Hansen’s novel juxtaposes the domestic horror with the escalating world horror for which Hitler was responsible. Hansen’s most recent novel, Isn’t It Romantic: An Entertainment (2003), is a complete change from his earlier works. It is a witty, romantic comedy involving Natalie and Pierre, a French couple on tour in the United States who end up in the small Nebraska town of Seldom, population 395. Ron Hansen lives with his wife in California, where he has been Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor in the arts and humanities at Santa Clara University since 1996.

NOVELS The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert. New York: Knopf, 1983.

Atticus: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Desperadoes. New York: Knopf, 1979. Hitler’s Niece: A Novel. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1999. Isn’t It Romantic: An Entertainment. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Mariette in Ecstasy. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Mexican Mystery. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

OTHER “Ron Hansen.” Nebraska Center for Writers, Creighton University. Available online. URL: http://mockingbird.creighton. edu/NCW/hansen.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HARPER, FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS (1825–1911) A novelist who published more books than any other African American of her century and a short story writer, poet, teacher, lecturer, and abolitionist, Frances E. W. Harper is best known today as the author of IOLA LEROY; OR, SHADOWS UPLIFTED (1892), a novel set just before, during, and after the Civil War. Recently, the scholar and critic Frances Smith Foster discovered three other novels by Harper, originally published serially in the Christian Recorder over a period of two decades: Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876–77), and Trial and Triumph (1888–89). They were republished in 1994. As the critic Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina points out, readers need to reconsider her themes; since Harper was previously associated only with the tragic mulatta heroine embodied in Iola Leroy. The newly discovered novels contain portraits of white and black women as well (Gerzina, 218). Frances Ellen Watkins was born in 1825 to free blacks in Baltimore, Maryland. Since both of her parents died before she was three, she was reared by her aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins, a shoemaker, minister, abolitionist, and founder of the Watkins Academy in that city, where Frances was educated. Around 1854, she moved to Pennsylvania, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Although Harper became a teacher, she wrote her first book of poetry before she was 20. She was also deeply affected by the African-American abolitionist William Grant Still, who influenced her to join the Underground Railroad. Although she continued to write, she

556

HARRIS, E. LYNN

traveled as a lecturer and became renowned for her oratorical skills. She married Fenton Harper, a widower with three children, in 1860, but he died four years later, leaving her destitute (now with four children). She continued to travel and to speak on abolitionist and feminist causes while publishing poetry, essays, and short fiction. (Her “Two Offers” was, until recently, considered the first short story by an African American.) Iola Leroy, frequently studied in American literature courses, features a sentimental and tragic hero, Iola, who survives slavery, nurses the wounded soldiers of the Civil War, and refuses a white doctor’s offer of marriage in favor of one from a black doctor. The scholar Paul Lauter believes that, in the second half of the 19th century, Frances Harper was “the most important black woman writer” (Lauter, 28). Emerging criticism and scholarship on her newly discovered novels should verify her place in American history and literature. Frances E. W. Harper died of heart failure on February 22, 1911.

NOVELS Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. Philadelphia: Garrigues Brothers, 1892. Three Undiscovered Novels: “Minnie’s Sacrifice,” “Sowing and Reaping,” & “Trial and Triumph.” Edited by Frances Smith Foster. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

SOURCES Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Carby, Hazel. “Of Lasting Service for the Race”: The Work of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. Elmsford, N.Y.: Pergamon, 1985, 167–172. ———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892–1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980, 3–5, 25–30. Elkins, Marilyn. “Reading Beyond the Conventions: A Look at Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 22 (Winter 1990): 44–54. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter . . . The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: Morrow, 1984.

Lauter, Paul. “Is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Good Enough to Teach?” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women 5 (Spring 1988): 27–32. Loewenberg, Bert James, and Ruth Bogin. Black Women in Nineteenth Century American Life, Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976, 243–251. Young, Elizabeth. “Warring Fictions: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender,” American Literature 64 (September 1992): 273–297.

HARRIS, E. LYNN (1957– )

E. Lynn Harris emerged on the literary scene in 1991 with Invisible Life, a novel, and has since published seven novels and What Becomes of the Brokenhearted: A Memoir (2003). The latter details the difficulties of being a gay man within the African-American community. With over 3 million books in print, Harris continues to mine the lives of young, black, middle-class city-dwelling professionals, both gay and straight. Harris’s first and second novels became number one on the Blackboard Bestseller List of African-American titles. Just as I Am: A Novel (1994) also received the Novel of the Year prize from Blackboard African American Bestsellers (BAAB), and his third novel, And This Too Shall Pass (1996), spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. If This World Were Mine (1997), winner of the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence, Abide With Me (1999), and Not a Day Goes By (2000) were also New York Times best-sellers, as was Any Way the Wind Blows (2001), his second BAAB Novel of the Year, and A Love of My Own (2002), his third BAAB Novel of the Year. As Harris commented in a recent interview, he is a difficult writer to pigeonhole: “I was the male Terry McMillan, and now [the gay black] Jackie Collins. I don’t mind at all, because these people have had long careers, they’ve become brand names. In 20 years, if I’m the black Sidney Sheldon, that would be great” (Millard, 62). E. Lynn Harris was born in 1957, in Flint, Michigan, to Etta Harris, an assembly worker. When he was 14, Harris met his father for the first time, but that parent was murdered a year later. After graduating with honors from the University of Arkansas in 1977, he became an IBM sales executive, later moving to Hewlett-

HARRISON, COLIN 557

Packard and AT&T. For 15 years, he says, he was “caught up in so many of the world’s dreams” that he did not immediately realize that writing “was something I was destined to do” (Interview with AALBC). He quit his job and wrote Invisible Life, publishing it with his own money until its word-of-mouth success earned him a contract with Consortium Press. The novel, featuring Raymond Tyler, is a coming-of-age book. Confused about his love for Sela, his devoted girlfriend, and his relationship with Kelvin, a fellow law student, Raymond goes to New York City until he can face the truth about his identity and his sexuality. Just As I Am, narrated by Nicole, his former girlfriend, continues Raymond’s story and, as he faces race and sexuality issues, he struggles with his need for family and faith. In Abide With Me, Raymond’s successful career as a lawyer and Nicole’s marriage are both reevaluated. And This Too Shall Pass leaves these by now familiar characters for Chicago, where Zurich, a quarterback for the Chicago Cougars, fights a sexual assault charge brought by a broadcaster, Mia. He hires first-rate attorney Tamela; Sean, a gay sportswriter, tells the story. If This World Were Mine features a strong and closely knit network—Yolanda, Leland, Riley, and Dwight— who have been friends since their years together at Hampton University. They meet to share their diaries and to add to a collective journal, “If This World Were Mine.” Not a Day Goes By introduces attractive John Basil Henderson (a.k.a. Basil), an ex-football player who appeals to both women and men. His female counterpart is rising Broadway star Yancey Harrington Braxton; the wedding between the two is interrupted in a dramatic way before the novel’s end. Any Way the Wind Blows again features John Basil Henderson, who singles out Bartholemew (Black Bart) from all his suitors, male and female. A Love of My Own features talented magazine editor Zola Denise Norwood, who keeps three men in her life while she searches for real love. She is soon joined by Raymond Tyler, who has returned to New York as CEO of Zola’s magazine while he, too, seeks love. Recently, three of Harris’s novels have been optioned; the cable television network Showtime chose Invisible Life and Just As I Am, and actor Pam Grier optioned Not a Day Goes By. Lynn Harris lives

and writes in Chicago. He says that “While I feel like my books are concerned with breaking down the barriers for homosexuality, I would like to show readers the power of one in changing the world, in ridding the world of all the isms: sexism, racism. . . .” (Interview with AALBC).

NOVELS Abide with Me. New York: Doubleday, 1999. And This Too Shall Pass. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Any Way the Wind Blows. New York: Doubleday, 2001. If This World Were Mine. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Invisible Life. Atlanta: Consortium Press, 1991. Just as I Am: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Not a Day Goes By. New York: Doubleday, 2000.

SOURCES Harris, E. Lynn. A Love of My Own. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted: A Memoir. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Millard, Elizabeth. “Writing to Find Some Kind of Peace of Mind: PW Talks with E. Lynn Harris,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 24 (June 16, 2003): 62.

OTHER Harris, E. Lynn. Interview with African American Literary Book Club Moderator. AACBC.com. Available online. URL: http://authors.aalbc.com/elynnharrischattext.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. The Official Website of E. Lynn Harris. “About E. Lynn.” Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/ elynnharris/about.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HARRISON, COLIN (1960– )

Colin Harrison writes “intelligent thrillers” (Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003). He won critical acclaim for his first novel, Break and Enter (1990), and is noted for his ability to blend significant ideas with the suspenseful plotting and the fast pace needed in this genre. He has published four additional novels—Bodies Electric (1993), Manhattan Nocturne (1996), Afterburn (2000), and Havana Room (2003)—all populated by characters who face moral dilemmas involving corporate boardrooms and domestic upheavals that tear the protagonists (they are always male) loose from their moorings.

558

HARRISON, JIM

Colin Harrison was born on November 27, 1960, in New York City, to Earl Grant Harrison Jr., the headmaster of a private school, and Jean Spencer Harrison, an actor and teacher. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College (1982) and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa (1986), Harrison married Kathryn Lang, an editor and now internationally famous author of such novels as The Seal Wife. He joined the staff of Harper’s magazine as an associate editor, leaving in 2000 to become a senior editor at Scribner. Harrison’s debut novel, Break and Enter, features Peter Scattergood, aspiring young Philadelphia district attorney. Just as his wife leaves him, Scattergood becomes embroiled with a double murder case; involved with Cassandra, a bank vice president; distraught over his best friend’s cocaine addiction; and concerned with the mayor himself, who may be implicated in the murder. Bodies Electric follows Jack Whitman, workaholic corporate executive, from his wife’s random murder, to his involvement with the homeless Dolores Salcines. The novel peaks as Salcines’s violent ex-husband Hector, learns that she is in Jack’s Park Slope, Brooklyn, house, and Jack’s board chairman learns of a multinational merger effected without the board’s approval. A successful journalist, Porter Wren, emerges in Manhattan Nocturne (1996). His life crumbles after he meets and follows a mysterious young woman who leads him into a multiple murder investigation. Both the media and the police are incensed. In Afterburn (2000), in which Harrison writes “like an angel” (Publishers Weekly review) an American pilot, Charlie Ravich, is taken prisoner by the Vietnamese, rescued, and injured by U.S. soldiers. The rest of the complex plot occurs in the present and involves Charlie, now a wealthy businessman, who suffers through his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease and his only son’s death. The work world is complicated by mob involvement, a robbery ring headed by Christina Wells and her lover Rick Bocca, who are hunted down by his employers. They have torture and murder on their minds. Most recently, in The Havana Room, Harrison detailed attorney Bill Wyeth’s family life, sparked by the accidental death of his 10-year-old son’s friend: Wyeth loses his wife and

son as the legal battle intensifies, then meets the alluring Allison Sparks, whose restaurant contains the shadowy Havana Room, site of under-the-table real estate maneuverings that lead Wyeth to Long Island intrigue, more lawsuits, and murder. Colin Harrison lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.

NOVELS Afterburn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. Bodies Electric. New York: Crown, 1993. Break and Enter. New York: Crown, 1990. Havana Room. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Manhattan Nocturne. New York: Crown, 1996.

SOURCES Gaughan, Thomas. Review of Manhattan Nocturne, Booklist 92, no. 22 (August 1996): 1,854. Review of The Havana Room, Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 19 (October 1, 2003): 1,191–1,192. Review of Afterburn, Publishers Weekly 246, no. 47 (November 22, 1999): 42. Review of Bodies Electric, Publishers Weekly 240, no. 8 (February 22, 1993): 80. Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Break and Enter, Publishers Weekly 237, no. 13 (March 30, 1990): 49–50.

OTHER “Colin Harrison: Afterburn; Manhattan Nocturne.” MostlyFiction.com. Available online. URL: http://www.mostlyfiction. com/mystery/harrison.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. Manning, Steve. “Colin Harrison ’82: The Storyteller.” Haverford Online, Alumni Profiles, Spring 1998. Available online. URL: http://www.haverford.edu/publications/spring98/ harrison.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HARRISON, JIM (JAMES THOMAS HARRISON) (1937– ) A novelist, poet, and screenwriter, Jim Harrison has become a cult figure on some college campuses; his numerous readers hail him as a contemporary Hemingway figure. His writing is powerful and universal, concerned mainly with wanderers and misfits who experience love, adultery, obsession, violence, and vengeance; some critics, however, see this definition of masculinity as outdated and not representative of contemporary culture. In his early work, particularly the best-selling novella collec-

HARRISON, JIM 559

tion, Legends of the Fall (1979), which evokes Ernest HEMINGWAY, Harrison’s world is peopled largely by male protagonists who test themselves through their relationship to the natural world, often, as with Hemingway, in Michigan. Yet in his later work, Harrison begins to focus on strong and resourceful women, as in Dalva (1988), The Woman Lit by Fireflies (1990), and Julip (1994). Because Harrison was trained as a poet, his language and use of natural imagery enhance his ability to blend humor and the stark physical world. As Harrison has remarked, when “things are terrible beyond conception,” he turns to “rivers, rain, trees, birds, lakes, animals,” finding a solace that would be impossible in an urban environment (Smith, 60). Jim Harrison was born on December 11, 1937, in Grayling, Michigan, to Winfield Sprague Harrison, an agriculturist, and Norma Olivia Wahlgren Harrison. He was educated at Michigan State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1960 and a master’s in 1964. In 1960 he married Linda King, now his wife of over 40 years. Beginning his career as a poet, he did not publish a novel until Wolf: A False Memoir (1971). The disillusioned young protagonist, Swanson, flees urban life for the Michigan woods, where he looks for a wolf and a clearer sense of his identity, only to capitulate to the lure of alcohol and a hotel bar. Harrison’s second novel, A GOOD DAY TO DIE (1973), features two men and a woman, all youthful rebels, who head west to blow up a government dam; both the tight plotting and the lyrical language impressed critics. His third novel, Farmer, depicts Joseph, a middle-aged teacher whose dull, predictable relationship with his colleague, Rosalee, pales in the face of his attraction to Catherine, one of his students. She symbolizes the beckoning world outside rural Michigan. Legends of the Fall, however, earned rave reviews and a high six-figure check for foreign and film rights (Ravo). This is a collection of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, Revenge, and The Man Who Gave Up His Name, praised almost universally, where Harrison evokes the nuances of complex personalities and issues. Legends of the Fall focuses on Tristan Ludlow, whose brother’s death in World War I, preceded by his vengeful treatment of German soldiers, leads to both tragedy and

salvation. Revenge is the tale of Cochran, a retired fighter pilot who—along with Miryea, his married mistress—is treated brutally by Tibey, Miryea’s Mexican drug lord husband; Cochran methodically plots his revenge. The Man Who Gave Up His Name focuses on the midlife crisis of Nordstrom, who abandons his wife and his oil company vice presidency, goes into the woods in hope of healing his crumbling life, and ends up as a cook in a Florida restaurant. In 1995 Legends of the Fall was released as a Tri-Star feature-length film. Harrison followed with the novel Warlock (1981), another treatment of a midlife crisis, this time of Johnny “Warlock” Lundgren. Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as Told by Jim Harrison (1984), like Warlock, presents still another middle-aged protagonist with a weakness for excess, whether in liquor, food, or women. Most critics note that with the publication of Dalva (1988), Harrison changed course. Here he focuses on Dalva Northridge, a strong, independent, 45-year-old woman looking for Nelse, the mixed-blood son she abandoned at age 15. While writing the novel, Harrison commented that Dalva represents his psyche, “probably my twin sister who was taken away at birth” (McClintock). The story includes five generations of Dalva’s Nebraska farm family, ranging from the Civil War to the Battle of Wounded Knee. It provides the basis for The Road Home (1998). The Northridge family saga continues; now Dalva goes into the woods. It is told from five different perspectives, beginning with Dalva’s grandfather John Northridge and ending with that of Nelse. Dalva was made into a television movie starring Farrah Fawcett. The Woman Lit by Fireflies opens as 50-year-old Clare leaves her husband at a highway rest stop and reunites herself with the earth, including thousands of fireflies. Julip, another trio of novellas, contains Julip, The Seven-Ounce Man, and The Beige Dolorosa. The title character in Julip is a very intelligent young woman who wants to free her brother from jail. The Seven-Ounce Man features the return of the Native American Brown Dog, a character from Legends of the Fall with whom, says Harrison, he identifies: “He’s sort of my survival mechanism. In an odd sense he’s a true Zennist while I’m only a student” (Bed-

560

HARRISON, KATHRYN

narik). In The Beige Dolorosa, a barely functioning, unnamed professor (on forced leave from the university because of his involvement with a student) moves to a cabin in the woods and heals himself through recognition of his closeness to the natural world. Harrison’s most recent book is The Beast God Forgot to Invent (2000), containing the novellas The Beast God Forgot to Invent, Westward Ho, and I Forgot to Go to Spain. It focuses on three men—Joe Lacort, a book dealer, Brown Dog, and a biographer, all aging and juxtaposed to happier men who are closer to the land. In addition to his novels and novellas, Harrison has continued to write poetry, publishing 13 collections, the most recent, with Ted Kooser, entitled Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry (2003). His most recent screenplay, Wolf, has been made into a movie directed by Mike Nichols and starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson (Ravo). Jim Harrison lives with his wife, Linda, and writes at his home on Lake Leelanau, Michigan, and his cabin on a river in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Beast God Forgot to Invent. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000. Dalva. New York: Dutton, 1988. A Good Day to Die. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Farmer. New York: Viking, 1975. Julip. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Legends of the Fall (Collection of novellas Revenge, The Man Who Gave up His Name, and Legends of the Fall). New York: Delacorte, 1979. The Road Home. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998. Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman. Robert Corvus Strang. Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike Press, 1984. Warlock. New York: Delacorte, 1981. Wolf: A False Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. The Woman Lit by Fireflies. New York: Washington Square Press, 1990.

SOURCES Gilligan, Thomas Maher. “Myth and Reality in Jim Harrison’s Warlock,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 25, no. 3 (Spring 1984): 147–153. Harrison, Jim. “A Conversation with Jim Harrison.” By Joseph Bednarik. Northwest Review 33, no. 2 (1995): 106–118. ———. “An Interview with Jim Harrison.” By Kay Bonetti. Missouri Review 8, no. 3 (1985): 65–86.

———. “PW Interviews: Jim Harrison.” By Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly (August 3, 1990): 59–60. Kauffmann, Stanley. “Stanley Kauffmann on Films: Under Western Skies,” New Republic, 2 January 1995, pp. 26–27. Locklin, Gerald. “A review of Julip,” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 126–127. McClintock, James J. “Jim Harrison, Soul-Maker,” Midwest Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 191–207. Reed, Julia. “Books” Vogue, September 1989, pp. 502, 506, 510. Reilly, Edward C. Jim Harrison. New York: Twayne, 1996.

OTHER Harrison, Jim. “The Salon Interview: Jim Harrison.” By Jonathan Miles. Salon.com (December 2, 1998). Available online. URL: http://dir.salon.com/books/int/1998/ 12/cov_02intb.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Ravo, Nick. “Will Write for Food.” The New York Times on the Web (April 17, 1994). Available online. URL: http://www. nytimes.com/books/98/11/08/specials/harrison-write.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HARRISON, KATHRYN (1961– ) “I’m interested in taboos, who breaks them and how, and what the cost is,” the novelist and essayist Kathryn Harrison told Bookreporter interviewer Janet Siciliano. Although she published three novels before her memoir, it was The Kiss (1997) that propelled Kathryn Harrison into public awareness and scrutiny. The Kiss, in part about Harrison’s affair with her father when she was in her early twenties, generated enormous publicity, along with reviews titled “Know Thy Father,” “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” “Blaming the Victim,” and “Incest Chic.” But since the furor has died down, Harrison has earned increased admiration not only for her cinematic, intense style, but also for her portrayals of different eras and cultures in her two most recent novels, The Binding Chair; or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society (2000), set in 19th-century China, and The SEAL WIFE (2002), which takes place in early 20th-century Alaska. Kathryn Harrison was born on March 20, 1961, in Los Angeles, California, to Edward M. Lang and Carole Cecile Jacobs Lang. While working as an editor at Viking Publishers in New York, she married the editor

HARTE, BRET 561

and novelist Colin HARRISON, author of the corporate thriller Afterburn (2000), and published her first novel, Thicker Than Water, in 1991. Some critics suggested that the novel was based on truth rather than fiction since it featured Isabel, a young girl abandoned by her parents, raised by her wealthy Los Angeles grandparents, and raped by her father as her mother lies dying of a terminal disease, all elements of Harrison’s life. The novel Exposure (1993) followed. Here Edgar Rogers, famous photographer, arranges his young daughter Ann in pornographic poses, then ignores her when she enters adolescence. As a young woman, she slowly creates some semblance of identity after a period of shoplifting and crystal meth addictions. Harrison’s third novel, Poison (1995), set in 17th-century Spain, has at its center two women, Maria Luisa and Francisca. Maria Luisa, queen to King Carlos II, is poisoned for her failure to produce an heir; Francisca, daughter of a farmer and a wet nurse to the queen, has a forbidden relationship with a priest, is imprisoned, and becomes the biographer of Maria Luisa. Harrison has commented: “on a personal level, the relationship between a girl and a priest was one that allowed me to explore my relationship with my father, a kind of prelude to the material I dealt with in The Kiss” (Siciliano). The Binding Chair and The Seal Wife encouraged her penchant for historical research. In the former, May Cohen, whose feet were bound and who was married off to an unbearable husband, becomes a Shanghai prostitute and marries the wealthy Westerner, Arthur Cohen; Alice, May’s half-niece by marriage, rebels against her family’s customs. The two women flee China for the French Riviera. In the latter, Bigelow, a young American meteorologist, is sent to Alaska in 1915 to set up a weather station and becomes sexually involved with a silent, mysterious, and nameless Aleut woman who is obliquely associated with the seal creatures of a Celtic legend. When she disappears without an explanation, he cannot break free of the Aleut woman’s enchantment. Harrison says she likes the historical novel because it provides her with a way of “projecting contemporary concerns” onto a different canvas (Siciliano). Kathryn Harrison and her husband live and write in Brooklyn, New York.

NOVELS The Binding Chair; or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society. New York: Random House, 2000. Exposure. New York: Random House, 1993. Poison. New York: Random House, 1995. Published in England as A Thousand Orange Trees. London: Fourth Estate, 1995. The Seal Wife. New York: Random House, 2002. Thicker Than Water. New York: Random House, 1991.

SOURCES Halpern, Sue. “The Awful Truth,” New York Review of Books, 25 September 1997, pp. 13–15. Harrison, Kathryn, with Nicci Gerrard. “Father, We Have Sinned,” Observer, 13 April 1997, p. 17. Harrison, Kathryn, with Mary Gordon. “Sex with Daddy,” Harper’s Bazaar, April 1997, pp. 136–137. Harrison, Kathryn, with Patricia A. O’Connell. “Kathryn Harrison: Her Harrowing Psychological Novels Are Fiction, but Seem Vividly Real,” Publishers Weekly, 1 March 1993, pp. 33–34. Press, Joy. “Bound, not Gagged,” Village Voice, 23 May 2000, pp. 73–74. Scurr, Ruth. “Shoeless in Shanghai,” Times Literary Review, 12 May 2000, p. 21.

OTHER Siciliano, Jana. “Kathryn Harrison” (September 29, 2000). Bookreporter.com. Available online. URL: http://www. bookreporter.com/authors/au-harrison-kathryn.asp. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HARTE, (FRANCIS) BRET (1836–1902) Although Bret Harte wrote a number of novels and essays, he is best known today for such short stories about the American West as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869). For a time, they brought him popularity, fame, and fortune. During his year with the Atlantic Monthly, he earned more money from writing than any other American author to that date. Bret Harte wrote such witty, moving tales of frontier California that critics called him the “new prophet of American letters” and “Dickens among the pines.” Eastern magazines courted him for submissions, and the San Francisco critic and writer Ambrose Bierce called his humor “incomparable.” Harte helped establish the parameters of Western

562 HARTE, BRET

American fiction. His was a world of mining camps, prospectors, gamblers, and dance hall girls. Bret Harte was born on August 25, 1836, in Albany, New York, to Henry Harte, a teacher, and Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander Harte. His parents separated soon after his birth; he grew up in Brooklyn and in Manhattan in New York City, attended school until age 13, then moved with his mother and siblings to California in 1854. After taking such odd jobs as Wells Fargo messenger and drugstore clerk, he became a newspaperman for the Northern Californian in San Francisco and a story writer for the Golden Era. Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862; they separated in 1878. By 1868, as the first editor of the Overland Monthly, he sought to define the American West by publishing “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in its August 1868 issue. It has become a classic because of his use of local color, and because Harte refigures earlier literary types like “good” and “bad” guys, the Eastern “dude,” and the image of perfect motherhood. “The Outcasts” (1869) caused a similar sensation among Eastern readers, and with his first collection of stories, in 1870, Harte was catapulted into the national consciousness as a literary genius. He accepted a contract as contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly and in 1871 moved to New York City, then later to Boston. There he wrote the novellas M’liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain (1873) and Gabriel Conroy (1876). In M’liss, an innocent girl, Melissa Smith, is orphaned and unscrupulous adults lay claim to her father’s mine. Later, in several reversals of the innocent victim formula, M’liss is revealed as a victimizer, not a victim. She is responsible for numerous fraudulent schemes, sets fire to the town, and probably murders her father. Gabriel Conroy, generally considered Harte’s best novel, and serialized in Scribner’s magazine, features the gambler Jack Hamlin, a character who reappears in A Protégée of Jack Hamlin’s and Other Stories (1894) and in Mr. Jack Hamlin’s Mediation and Other Stories (1899). He confronts both sex and innocence, violence and greed, as he faces the issues of moral complexity that compel Bret Harte. Offers of diplomatic posts as U.S. consul in Germany (1878) and Scotland (1880–85) enabled him to

continue writing. After 1885 he moved to England, where he was involved in a relationship with his wealthy married patron, Marguerite Van de Velde. A poet and dramatist as well as prose fiction writer, an author admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Dean HOWELLS, and Mark TWAIN, Harte died of throat cancer in Camberely, England, in 1902, at age 66. His large body of published work fell largely out of favor during the first half of the 20th century, but during the last few decades, scholars have been finding it more compatible with modern concerns. Dozens of films have been made from Harte’s stories and include those of Thomas Alva Edison, who filmed The Luck of Roaring Camp in 1917. Anne Baxter starred in The Outcasts of Poker Flat in 1952, and Ronald Reagan starred in Tennessee’s Partner in 1955.

SELECTED NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Argonauts of North Liberty. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. By Shore and Sedge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. Clarence. London: Chatto & Windus, 1895. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895. Colonel Starbottle’s Client and Some Other People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892. The Crusade of the Excelsior. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. Gabriel Conroy. London: Warne, 1876. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company, 1876. Jinny. London: Routledge, 1878. M’liss. An Idyl of Red Mountain. New York: DeWitt, 1873. Maruja. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. A Phyllis of the Sierras and A Drift from Redwood Camp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888.

SOURCES Barnett, Linda D. Bret Harte: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Boynton, Henry W. Bret Harte. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1903. Branham, Janet. Bret Harte: Young Storyteller. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Duckett, Margaret. Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Morrow, Patrick D. Bret Harte Literary Critic. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1979. O’Connor, Richard. Bret Harte: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.

HASSLER, JON 563

Scharnhorst, Gary. Bret Harte. New York: Twayne, 1992. Stewart, George R. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931.

HARUF, KENT (1943– )

Kent Haruf became a household name with the publication of his third novel, PLAINSONG (1999), winner of the Salon.com Award and a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award, New Yorker Fiction Award, and Los Angeles Times Fiction Award. Like William FAULKNER, Haruf creates his own postage stamp of territory in the fictional town of Holt, Colorado, a rural farming community. Haruf’s style, however, is distinctly economical, more often compared to that of Ernest HEMINGWAY. However, both modernist writers influenced Haruf to become a writer when he studied them in a college course. “I was just stunned by the quality and richness of their writing,” he recalls. “It changed my life. I fell in love with literature, and with writing, and it became like a religion to me” (Blades). Kent Haruf (pronounced to rhyme with “sheriff”) was born on February 24, 1943, in Pueblo, Colorado, to Louis A. Haruf, a Methodist minister, and Eleanor V. Shaver Haruf, a teacher. He was educated at Nebraska Wesleyan University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1965, and the University of Iowa (at the same time as John IRVING and Vance Bourjaily, among others), receiving his master of fine arts degree in 1973. He spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Turkey and married twice, first to Virginia K. Koon, then to Cathy Dempsey. His first novel, The Tie That Binds (1984), received a PEN/Hemingway Foundation special citation and a Whiting Writer’s Award; it tells the tale of Edith Goodnough, whose life is devastated by an ailing and domineering father, and is narrated by Sanders Roscoe, the son she should have had. Haruf’s second novel, Where You Once Belonged (1999), narrated by newspaper editor Pat Arbuckle, features former high school football star Jack Burdette and details his malignant influence on the characters of Holt. The title of Plainsong, Haruf’s third novel set in Holt, evokes the unaccompanied vocal melodies used in Christian churches and expresses the quality of the Colorado plains and the characters living there. The brilliance of this novel lies in the portrait of the

McPhersons; it is one of the few contemporary novels to delineate the love between brothers. In addition, Maggie Jones interacts with history teacher Tom Guthrie, who is losing his deeply depressed wife, and with his sons Ike and Bobby. The story of Victoria Robideaux, half–Native American, 17 years old, and pregnant, is interwoven throughout the novel. Kent Haruf is modest about his success. In a recent interview, he said, “I’m 56 and I’ve been around long enough to know that this is in part a matter of luck. I don’t think it’s turned my head. Fame is very seductive and can be very dangerous if you’re trying to get your work done” (Blades). Recently retired from the University of Southern Illinois, he and his wife, Cathy Haruf, live in Salida, Colorado. In 1987, Kent Haruf’s short story “Private Debts/Public Holdings” was adapted into a short film by Nancy Cooperstein for Chanticleer Films.

NOVELS Plainsong. New York: Knopf, 1999. The Tie That Binds. New York: Holt, 1984. Where You Once Belonged. New York: Summit Books, 1991.

SOURCES Blades, John. “Kent Haruf: Home on the Plains,” Publishers Weekly (November 1, 1999): 59–60. Nesbitt, Robin. Review of Plainsong, Library Journal 124, no. 14 (September 1, 1999): 232. Review of Plainsong, Publishers Weekly, November 1, 1999, p. 46.

OTHER Blades, John. “Kent Haruf: Home on the Plains.” Publishers Weekly.com. Available online. URL: http://www.publishers weekly.com/index.asp?layout=article&articleId=CA167518& text=kent+haruf. Accessed September 21, 2005. McWeeney, Catherine. “Conversation with Kent Haruf.” RandomHouse.com. Available online. URL: http://www. randomhouse.com/boldtype/1199/haruf/interview.html. Accessed September 21, 2005. Nebraska Center for Writers, “Kent Haruf.” Creighton University. Available online. URL: http://mockingbird.creighton. edu/NCW/haruf.htm. Accessed June 20, 2005.

HASSLER, JON (FRANCIS) (1933– ) Many critics believe that Jon Hassler will be remem-

564 HASSLER, JON

bered as one of the best American writers of the last century. Writing with a quiet originality, he often uses an epistolary technique combined with flashbacks about love, hate, aging, evil, and death. Hassler also explores the tense relationships of those who live in the small towns of the American Midwest. A combination of comedy and spirituality has earned him comparisons with Flannery O’Connor (Plut), and the novelist Father Andrew M. Greeley believes that Jon Hassler is “one of the very best Catholic novelists since Graham Greene” (Plut). Hassler earned his reputation as a Catholic novelist partly through his many depictions of priests and nuns. He has also invented such fictional towns as Staggerford, Minnesota, and is closely associated with the geography of his imagination, like many American writers, i.e., William FAULKNER and Yoknapatawpha County; Eudora WELTY and Morgana, Mississippi; John STEINBECK and the Salinas Valley, California; John O’HARA and Gibbsville, Pennsylvania—and, of course, Minnesota novelist Sinclair LEWIS and Gopher Prairie. Jon Hassler was born on March 30, 1933, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Leo Blaise Hassler, a grocer, and Ellen Callinan Hassler, a teacher. He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University in 1955 and a master’s degree from the University of North Dakota in 1960. He published STAGGERFORD in 1977, a novel featuring Miles Pruitt, a high school English teacher (as was Hassler). The novel was a popular success, and Miles Pruitt, who is aware of the dull, tedious nature of small-town life, earned comparisons to the character Carol Kennicott in Main Street. In Simon’s Night (1979), Hassler focused on Simon Peter Shea, who enters a home for the elderly and knows he will atrophy intellectually, spiritually, and physically in that setting. Simon enlists the aid of a young physician and moves to a cabin in the woods. The Love Hunter (1981) takes place on the campus of a small Minnesota college where a friendship between two faculty colleagues is tested. Larry Quinn is dying from multiple sclerosis and his friend Chris MacKensie plans to kill Larry for two reasons: the nobly motivated if illegal one, to end Larry’s pain, and the less admirable desire to be the second husband of Larry’s wife. Hassler’s fifth novel,

North of Hope (1990), considered by many readers and critics to be Hassler’s masterpiece, is a sequel to The Love Hunter: “I’ve always thought of them as a pair,” he says, “because they deal with the dirtier side of life— drugs and things like that” (Plut). North of Hope, a story of mystery, suspense, and romance, depicts its characters as they face the bleak, cold territory of evil (in the form of betrayal and despair), a place, as the title indicates, far removed from hope. The major characters are Father Adrian Lawrence, whose closest meeting with love is an imaginary encounter with World War II–era singer Jo Stafford; Frank Healy, a semiautobiographical character; and Libby, who shared with him an unconsummated teenage love affair. Libby betrayed Frank then and is now herself repeatedly betrayed; she tacitly evokes her feelings through unfinished paintings. In A Green Journey (1985), Miss Agatha McGee, a Catholic school teacher from Staggerford and earlier short stories, confronts morally complex issues through the pregnancy of an unmarried woman and the modernization of the church. She discusses and debates these issues via correspondence with Father James O’Hannon, an Irish priest; the pair continue their epistolary relationship that blossoms into a particular form of love in Dear James (1993). These two novels were followed by another pair, Rookery Blues (1995) and The Dean’s List (1997), featuring Leland Edwards. Both campus novels—set at Rookery State College—are hilarious parodies of the pretensions of academia, the former set in the 1960s and the latter a quarter-century later, when Edwards has become Dean Edwards. Hassler’s ability to draw believable, thoughtful characters has earned him a large following, as has his diverse stylistic abilities that portray feelings ranging from the bleak to the mystical to the downright uproarious. “I’ve been told by people,” says Hassler, “that the good thing about my novels is that the endings aren’t predictable, that I don’t take the easy way out. I think that’s what that means, too—that stories tell themselves—you have to follow them through to the end, no matter where they lead” (Plut). Since 1980, Jon Hassler has been writer-in-residence at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. In addition to his novels, Hassler has also published a poetry collection, The Red Oak and Other Poems (1968);

HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, THE 565

a short story collection, Keepsakes & Other Stories (1999); My Staggerford Journal (1999), about the writing of Staggerford; and some young adult novels.

NOVELS The Dean’s List. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Dear James. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993. Grand Opening. New York: Morrow, 1987. A Green Journey. New York: Morrow, 1985. The Love Hunter. New York: Morrow, 1981. North of Hope. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. Rookery Blues. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Simon’s Night. New York: Atheneum, 1979. Staggerford. New York: Atheneum, 1977. Underground Christmas. Afton, Minn.: Afton Historical Society, 1998.

SOURCES Hughes, Kathleen. Review of The Dean’s List, Booklist 93, no. 18 (May 15, 1997): 1,561. Interview with Jon Hassler, Dinkytown Antiquarian Bookstore (Minneapolis), 1990. Jones, Mary Paumier. Review of My Staggerford Journal, Library Journal 124, no. 20 (December 1999): 132. Plut, Joseph. “Conversation with Jon Hassler: North of Hope,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 55, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 145–163. Available online. URL: http:// www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3777/is_200301/ ai_n9167406. Accessed April 4, 2006. Review of The Staggerford Flood, Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 14 (July 15, 2002): 979.

OTHER Hassler, Jon. “Conversation With Jon Hassler: Grand Opening.” Interview by Joseph Plut. In Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature (March 22, 2005). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:133185548. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, THE SHIRLEY JACKSON (1959) Featuring Eleanor Vance, one of Shirley JACKSON’s most emotionally isolated but realistically drawn characters, The Haunting of Hill House is one of her most critically acclaimed novels, perhaps second only to We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). This novel demonstrates Jackson’s sustained interest in both the supernatural and the nature

of old houses; reviewers praised it for the realistically drawn characters, for Jackson’s ability to build suspense, and for her well-timed use of comic relief. Appearing on the best-seller lists of 1959 and subsequently published in numerous foreign editions, in 1963 The Haunting of Hill House was made into a critically acclaimed feature-length film, entitled The Haunting, starring Julie Harris as Eleanor Vance and Claire Bloom as Theodora. Jackson approved of the film, believing that it captured the original atmosphere of the novel (Friedman, 122). Eleanor Vance, a notable example of Jackson’s troubled young female characters, lost her father when she was 12 and her sister 18. Shortly after his death, showers of stones rained on their house, smashing windows as they rolled downward; although the phenomenon is never satisfactorily explained, Eleanor blames her sister, who in turn blames Eleanor. The novel opens shortly after the death of Eleanor’s mother, whom she has nursed for 12 years. At 32 years of age, Eleanor now lives alone with her sister and brother-in-law, both of whom she despises. When she receives an invitation to join a group assembled by Dr. Montague, a professor of anthropology interested in analyzing supernatural occurrences in old houses, she accepts this opportunity to leave an untenable living situation. Dr. Montague’s letter explains that the group will assemble at Hill House, an 80-year-old mansion with a history of ghostly activity, but only two others answer the 12 invitations he has issued: Theodora, a sophisticated and temperamental artist seeking temporary respite after a quarrel with her apartment mate, and Luke Sanderson, the handsome, well-educated, but roguish nephew of the owner of the house. Eleanor’s journey to the house—personified as a thoroughly evil structure—is fraught with foreboding and foreshadowing as she journeys toward “home,” a highly ambiguous word in this novel. In fact, the definition of home itself eludes the reader. Does reaching “home” refer to Eleanor’s family house? to Hill House? understanding one’s identity? comprehending the reality of evil and its consequences? committing suicide? All these definitions appear partially accurate. For Eleanor, however, the most likely meaning lies in the

566

HAWKES, JOHN CLENDENNIN BURNE, JR.

word “suicide”: By killing herself, this woman who feels so estranged from the world will finally belong to the house that lures her. Although initially attracted to both Theodora and Luke, Eleanor feels increasingly isolated from each of them as she becomes aware of their selfish natures, their attraction to each other, and their lack of interest in Eleanor herself. Indeed, Eleanor’s fear of the house is directly proportional to her increasing feelings of marginalization. Increasingly alone, she feels inexorably drawn to the terrifying ghosts and sounds of Hill House, deciding that she must never leave. Like Jackson’s earlier young women protagonists whose minds gradually become unhinged or disintegrate, Eleanor understands that she is unwanted and alone and that Hill House offers her a solace available nowhere else. When Dr. Montague, Theodora, and Luke, sensing that Eleanor has become unhinged, insist that she leave the house for her own good, Eleanor pushes her foot down on her car’s accelerator and smashes into a tree in the driveway—the same tree that had claimed a horseman’s life when he tried to leave Hill House 18 years earlier. A remarkable novel, The Haunting of Hill House may be read as a terrifying tale of the supernatural or as an equally intriguing appraisal of a world inhospitable to many of its female inhabitants.

SOURCES Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Jackson, Shirley. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959.

HAWKES, JOHN CLENDENNIN BURNE, JR. (1925–1998) John Hawkes, a man never at ease with the traditional novel or conventional realism, wrote novels and short stories for nearly 50 years. Often classed with such postmodernists as John BARTH and Thomas PYNCHON, Hawkes, too, rejected the usual truisms about character and plot. Instead, he concentrated on the desolate, chaotic, and nightmarish qualities of the contemporary psyche and to that end, incorporated scenes and details of lurid, violent, or bizarre subject matter repellent to some readers. Nearly all critics have commented too on the surreal, chimerical mood that Hawkes’s style invokes, and on the black humor woven into some of his

most horrific situations. The disconnections of the unconscious are at the base of all his work, as are the artistic connections between sex and death. Hawkes has insisted that all his work should enable the reader to experience or at least understand the darkest reaches of the human soul; although readers would never view him as a moralist, we are fortunate that, just as “we project the sources of our anxiety onto exterior pressures and forces,” we have “Hawkes to remind us that the true horror,” along with the glories, “lie within” ourselves (O’Donnell, 149). Patrick O’Donnell also points out the presence of World War II in Hawkes’s work, The Cannibal (1949), The Lime Twig (1961), and Second Skin (1964), referring directly to the “historical catastrophe,” and The Owl (1954) and The Blood Oranges (1971), referring to it obliquely (O’Donnell, 144). John Hawkes was born on August 17, 1925, in Stamford, Connecticut, to John Clendennin Burne and Helen Ziefle Hawkes. From 1944 to 1945, Hawkes drove an ambulance for the American Field Service on the battlefields of Italy and Germany. He married Sophie Goode Tazewell in 1947, and, after graduating from Harvard University in 1949, published his first novella, Charivari. Here 40-year-old Henry and Emily agonize over Emily’s unplanned pregnancy while they are at a “charivari” (a boisterous serenade sung to newlyweds). The Cannibal (1949), set in postwar Germany—and written while Hawkes was a student—features dreamlike sequences and encounters among Leevey, an American soldier, Zizendorf, a neo-Nazi, and a cannibalistic duke who literally devours a young boy. Much of the novel is based on Hawkes’s war experiences and constitutes his response to the cataclysmic effects of the war’s violence on these characters; it ends, not unexpectedly, in an insane asylum. Hawkes followed with The BeetleLeg (1951). Set in Montana, it parodies the myth of the American Western by emphasizing the accidental death of a laborer and a fetus and by denoting the sterile terrain that holds their bodies. The novellas The Goose on the Grave and The Owl (1954), set in a postwar Italy nearly destroyed by fascism and war, are considered Hawkes’s fictional farewell to the past. The Lime Twig, set in England, is ostensibly a parody of a detective novel and more accessible than those writ-

HAWKES, JOHN CLENDENNIN BURNE, JR. 567

ten previously. Here Hawkes depicts violent, orgiastic scenes in which the reader is uneasily involved; we identify with the main characters, Michael and Margaret Banks, who are victims of their desires. Second Skin alternates between Maine and a Caribbean island. Skipper, the protagonist, is finishing his own novel in which he is the main character; he writes this story to overcome his guilt and sorrow over the deaths with which he has been involved. Hawkes’s next three novels also explore guilt, eroticism, and death, and are often referred to as the Triad. The Blood Oranges, set on a Mediterranean island, features a first-person narrator, Cyril, the “sexsinger,” who denies accountability for the destruction of his marriage to Fiona and his friendships with Hugh and Catherine. He blames the social construct of monogamy for his lost Paradise. Darkness and fear pervade the next novel too: Death, Sleep, & the Traveler (1974) alternates between a Scandinavian country and a Greek island, both of which suggest the erotic subconscious of the narrator, Allert. Allert, an artist figure, alternates between his relationship with his wife, Ursula, and friend Peter in Scandinavia, and with Ariane and Olaf on an ocean cruise. Sex and death, as is usual with Hawkes, are connected. Travesty (1976) suggests Hawkes’s continued interest in fearful landscapes. It features Papa, his daughter Chantal, and Henri, lover to both Chantal and Honorine, Papa’s wife; much of the novel is written inside the speeding car that Papa intends to crash, killing himself, his daughter, and Henri. The Passion Artist (1979) contains an increasingly internalized physical and psychological terrain. Konrad Vost, another artist figure, is sexually deprived and therefore void of imagination. His exploration of his unconscious depends on erotic relations with women and, through these relationships, the release of the artistic imagination. In two of his last four novels, Hawkes experiments with a female voice, first in Virginie: Her Two Lives (1982), about an 11-year-old who travels between an 18th-century French chateau and post–World War II Paris, and in An Irish Eye (1997), in which another preadolescent girl tells her tale. His most admired novel of his later years, however, is Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (1985), narrated by Jacqueline (Sunny) Burne Deauville. Hawkes uses

some of his autobiography, such as his years in Alaska. He makes Sunny into a survivor, a woman alone on the last frontier. Michael, the narrator of Whistlejacket (1988), is a photographer who photographs fashion models and identifies with George Stubbs, the 18thcentury artist who painted Whistlejacket, the portrait of a stallion. The novel explores questions about objectivity, eroticism, and the control needed to create art. Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse (1993) is a moving narrative, told from the horse’s perspective, as he submits to the authority of human owners, and of his final peace with a kindly owner, Petrarch, before Sweet William succumbs to death. The Frog (1996) is narrated by a Frenchman, Pascal, who was a baby in Travesty and is now inhabited by a frog, giving him extrahuman powers but also making him an outsider. John Hawkes died on May 15, 1998, of a stroke during heart bypass surgery at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence. He was 72 and lived in Providence. A movie based on The Blood Oranges had been released in February 1998. In addition to many fellowships and grants, Hawkes was the recipient of the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1973, and the Prix Medicis Étranger for best foreign novel translated into French, in 1986, for Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. An Irish Eye. New York: Viking, 1997. The Blood Oranges. New York: New Directions, 1971. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. The Cannibal. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1949. Charivari (novella). New York: New Directions, 1949. Death, Sleep & the Traveler. New York: New Directions, 1974. London: Chatto & Windus, 1975. The Frog. New York: Viking, 1996. The Goose on the Grave, and The Owl. New York: New Directions, 1954. The Lime Twig. New York: New Directions, 1961. Lunar Landscapes. New York: New Directions, 1969. London: Chatto & Windus, 1970. The Passion Artist. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Second Skin. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1964. Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993.

568

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL

Travesty. New York: New Directions, 1976. London: Chatto & Windus, 1976. Virginie: Her Two Lives. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Whistlejacket. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988.

SOURCES Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Busch, Frederick. Hawkes: A Guide to His Works. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1973. Ferrari, Rita. Innocence, Power, and the Novels of John Hawkes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1996. Greiner, Donald J. Comic Terror: The Novels of John Hawkes. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1973. Hawkes, John. Humors of Blood & Skin: A John Hawkes Reader. New York: New Directions, 1984. Hryciw, Carol A. John Hawkes: An Annotated Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1977. Kuehl, John. John Hawkes and the Craft of Conflict. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1975. Laniel, Christine, ed. Facing Texts: Encounters between Contemporary Writers and Critics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988. Littlejohn, David. Interruptions. New York: Grossman, 1970. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. Marx, Lesley. Crystals out of Chaos: John Hawkes and the Shapes of Apocalypse. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Moore, Harry T., ed. Contemporary American Novelists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Santore, Anthony C., and Michael Pocalyko, eds. A John Hawkes Symposium: Design and Debris. New York: New Directions, 1977. Scholes, Robert. The Fabulators. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Whelan, Michaele. Navigating the Minefield: Hawkes’s Narratives of Perversion. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

OTHER “John Hawkes.” American Literature on the Web. Available online. URL: http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/ amlit/h/hawkes21.htm. Accessed June 20, 2005. John Hawkes Page. Available online. URL: http://www. alangulette.com/lit/hawkes/. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL (1804–1864) Nathaniel Hawthorne is recognized as one of the most significant and influential shapers of American fiction in the history of our literature and as the author of at least two classic American novels, The SCARLET LETTER and The HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. He also wrote some of the finest short stories in American literature and shared with his friend Herman MELVILLE a pessimistic view of the human condition. The two are often called nay-sayers, contrasted with such transcendentalist yea-sayers as his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Conscious of the need to fashion a national literature, Hawthorne used his New England region as background and examined such seminal influences as Puritanism and the concomitant concepts of guilt, redemption, good and evil, sexuality, morality, perfection, and pride. Hawthorne employed an intriguing system of allegory, symbols, and images that helped convey the richly ambiguous meanings of his tales and the characters who acted in them. Over all he spread the veil of romance, rather than realism; the moonlight of romance, he believed, rather than the sunlight of the realistic approach, effectively blended the imaginary and the real. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, to Nathaniel Hathorne, a ship captain who died when Hawthorne (who later added the W to the surname) was four years old. His mother, Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, remained a widow and raised her children with help from her family. Raised in Salem and Raymond, Maine, Hawthorne was educated at Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825. Rejecting the professions of the ministry, law, and medicine, Hawthorne chose to become a writer, publishing Fanshawe in 1828. Although later Hawthorne disavowed the novel, a romance in the style of the British historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, numerous critics point out that it foreshadowed the dark themes that would become so characteristic of Hawthorne’s best work. During the next decade, he published several volumes of short stories as well as children’s literature, lived for a halfyear in 1841 at the Brook Farm commune, married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, and moved into the Old Manse in Concord for nearly four years, where he wrote some of his most admired stories.

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL 569

The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s most famous novel, was composed during this time. Centering on an adulterous affair between Hester Prynne, a young woman separated from her aged husband, and Arthur Dimmesdale, a young minister, the novel examines the guilt, scorn, suffering, punishment, and penance of this couple—and their out-of-wedlock child, Pearl—as the lovers face Hester’s husband, Roger Chillingworth, the townsfolk, and themselves. Hawthorne’s next novel, The House of the Seven Gables, was written the following year in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. The plot is based on a family feud resulting from the Pyncheon family ancestor, Colonel Pyncheon, forcing the Maule family from their home. The Maule curse visits each generation until finally the cruel, greedy Judge Pyncheon dies; Holgrove Maule and Phoebe Pyncheon marry and flee the cursed house and, with the young Clifford Pyncheon and his sister Hepzibah, eradicate the curse and move to Judge Pyncheon’s rural mansion. Moving briefly to West Newton, where the family rented the home of Horace Mann, Hawthorne followed this novel with The BLITHEDALE ROMANCE (1852), based on his experiences at Brook Farm. The novel wrestles with issues of industrialization vs. nature, communal living vs. human self-interest, women’s rights, and romantic developments among two half-sisters, Zenobia and Priscilla, and two men, Hollingsworth and Coverdale, who narrates the tale. Critics have often noted the similarities between Zenobia and Margaret Fuller, one of the most influential women transcendentalists, who died in a shipwreck off Long Island. On his return to Concord, Hawthorne bought the Wayside, the house that would be his final home. First, though, with the aid of President Franklin Pierce, whose preelection biography Hawthorne had recently written, Hawthorne accepted the job of U.S. consul in Liverpool, England, and moved with his family to England for four years. He lived in Italy for one year, during which time Hawthorne conceived his last novel, The MARBLE FAUN, an allegory of the fall of man. Based on the statue of a faun sculpted by Praxiteles in Rome, the novel features the faunlike Donatello, an aristocratic Italian youth, Kenyon, a sculptor, and Hilda and Miriam Schaefer, painters. Adding mystery and complexity to this mix is an unnamed monk, an artist’s model, and an allegorical

character who figures in Miriam’s past and changes Donatello from a faun to an adult man who sins, admits guilt, grieves, and is redeemed and transformed into a man involved in the complexities of the world. After eight years abroad, Nathaniel Hawthorne returned to The Wayside in 1860. He died on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, while on a trip with President Pierce. He was buried on May 23 in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Massachusetts. Posthumously published in 1883 was the fragmentary romance Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret; in 1977, Etherege and Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret, both incomplete romances, appeared in The American Claimant Manuscripts, the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne’s works. His papers are housed at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library; the Boston Public Library; the Bowdoin College Library in Brunswick, Maine; the Essex Institute in Salem, Mass.; the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif.; the Pierpont Morgan Library; and the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia.

NOVELS The Blithedale Romance. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1852. Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret: A Romance. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883. Fanshawe. Boston: Marsh & Capen, 1828. The House of the Seven Gables, a Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1851. The Marble Faun. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860. The Scarlet Letter, a Romance. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1850.

SOURCES Abel, Darrell. The Moral Picturesque: Studies in Hawthorne’s Fiction. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1988. Arvin, Newton. Hawthorne. Boston: Little, Brown, 1929. Baym, Nina. The Scarlet Letter: A Reading. Boston: Twayne, 1986. ———. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Bloom, Harold, ed. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Boswell, Jeanetta. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Critics: A Checklist of Criticism, 1900–1978. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982.

570

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL

Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Cady, Edwin H., and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Hawthorne: The Best from American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Clark, C. E. Frazer. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978. Colacurcio, Michael J. The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Fiction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Cox, James M. “The Scarlet Letter: Through the Old Manse and the Custom House,” Virginia Quarterly Review 51 (1975): 432–447. Crews, Frederick. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, with a New Afterword. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Dauber, Kenneth. Rediscovering Hawthorne. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. DeSalvo, Louise. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987. Donohue, Agnes McNeill. Hawthorne: Calvin’s Ironic Stepchild. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. Ehrlich, Gloria. Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Tenacious Web. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. Elbert, Monica M. Encoding the Letter “A”: Gender and Authority in Hawthorne’s Early Fiction. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Haag & Herchen, 1990. Elder, Marjorie J. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Transcendental Symbolist. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969. Fogle, Richard Harter. Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Rev. ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Folsom, James K. Man’s Accidents and God’s Purposes: Multiplicity in Hawthorne’s Fiction. New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1963. Gale, Robert L. A Hawthorne Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988. Gollin, Rita K. Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. ———, and John L. Idol, Jr. Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Uses of the Visual Arts. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991. Harris, Kenneth Marc. Hypocrisy and Self-Deception in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Hawthorne, Julian. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1885.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1813–1843, edited by Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984; The Letters, 1843–1853, edited by Woodson, Smith, and Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985; The Letters, 1853–1856, edited by Woodson, James A. Rubino, and Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987; The Letters, 1857–1864, edited by Woodson, Rubino, Smith, and Pearson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987. The four collections of Hawthorne’s letters comprise volumes 15, 16, 17, and 18 of the Centenary Edition of Hawthorne’s works. Herbert, T. Walter. Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Hull, Raymona E. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The English Experience, 1853–1864. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1980. Hutner, Gordon. Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Idol, John L., Jr., and Buford Jones, eds. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. James, Henry. Hawthorne. New York: Harper, 1879. Johnson, Claudia D. The Productive Tension in Hawthorne’s Art. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Kesterson, David B., ed. Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Martin, Terence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Revised edition. Boston: Twayne, 1983. McWilliams, John Press, Jr. Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980. Miller, Edwin Haviland. Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Miller, J. Hillis. Hawthorne and History: Defacing It. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991. Millington, Richard H. Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992. Moore, Margaret B. The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Newberry, Frederick. Hawthorne’s Divided Loyalties: England and America in His Works. Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.

HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, A 571

Newman, Lea Bertine Vozar. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Pfister, Joel. The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991. Scharnhorst, Gary, ed. The Critical Response to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. ———. Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism before 1900. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Turner, Arlin. Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

OTHER Hawthorne in Salem. Available online. URL: http://www. hawthorneinsalem.org/page/11709. Accessed June 2005.

HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, A WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1890) Looking back over his long career, William Dean HOWELLS acknowledged that A Modern Instance (1882) was his favorite novel of all those he had written but A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) was his “most vital” (Cady, 101). It was surely his most ambitious and comprehensive. One seeks in vain for a plot in this all-embracing novel, a complex of personal and professional relations developed centripetally around a unifying core. The setting is New York City in the 1880s; by then New York had supplanted Boston as America’s literary and artistic center, as well as established itself as the nation’s hub of business and finance. New York was also drawing immigrants by the tens of thousands during these years from many parts of the world, especially from eastern and southern Europe, most of whom settled in overcrowded tenement districts where socialist propagandists and labor organizers increasingly strived for support among the exploited poor. In addition, New York’s rapid expansion offered promise to Americans from elsewhere in the United States, to those who saw no future for themselves remaining in the South, the West, and rural areas in the East. Howells himself, having been born and reared in Ohio, had recently moved to New York from Boston, where he had edited the Atlantic Monthly for over a decade. “There’s only one city that belongs to the whole

country,” says Fulkerson in A Hazard of New Fortunes, “and that’s New York” (Hazard, vol. 1, p. 9). Howells’s vast experience as a journalist, critic, fiction writer, and poet proved invaluable to him in the creation of this metropolitan novel. With countless thousands of other newcomers to the city, he and his wife, Elinor Mead Howells, also made “a hazard of new fortunes,” though with less risk than Basil and Isabel March, the married couple who together constitute the principal consciousness of his grand novel and who are presented, often ironically and self-deprecatingly, as partial self-portraits of Elinor and himself. Like the threatening English in Shakespeare’s King John, in which Howells found the title for Hazard, the Marches risk their future by joining in a new venture—Basil’s assuming the editor’s chair of a literary magazine still only a nameless conception in the mind of Fulkerson, the fast-talking speculator who persuades Basil to collaborate with him. Soon after acquiring the title Every Other Week, the project rapidly advances and becomes the nexus for a heterogeneous group associated with it, each of whom assumes a significant role in this sprawling novel as all their lives mesh through their relations with one another and the new magazine. Of them all, only Fulkerson and the Marches are totally engaged with and dependent on the magazine for their livelihoods, Fulkerson as publisher and Basil as editor with his wife serving as his essential confidante. Isabel is a Bostonian whose devotion to that city seems implacable before Basil’s position there in an insurance office is threatened at the very time that a new job possibility in New York appears; then she relents and rapidly transforms herself into a New Yorker. In contrast, Basil and Fulkerson are Westerners. Basil was born and raised in Indiana, where as a young man he first met Berthold Lindau, a native German who immigrated to the United States shortly before the Civil War. Fighting in that war, Lindau lost a hand and afterward became embittered over seeing his idealized American democracy increasingly under the control of a capitalistic plutocracy; hence he has become the immigrant voice of socialism, living according to his own values among the tenement poor. When Basil meets him again in New York, he hires

572 HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, A

Lindau as a translator without complaint at the time from Jacob Dryfoos, the parvenu Pennsylvania-Dutch capitalist who finances Every Other Week. Dryfoos has accumulated a fortune that originated when natural gas was discovered on his family farm in Moffit, Indiana, and steadily grew through his investments. With his overbearing personality and flashes of temper, Dryfoos appears heartless, but his ambition to join the social elite is qualified by love for his wife, son, and two daughters, whom he expects to be the chief beneficiaries of his accumulated wealth and status. Like him, however, all but his son, Conrad, are basically uncultivated country people; his wife is narrowly religious, his daughters coarse and vulgar. The exceptional Conrad, whom his father appoints to manage the magazine, is a Christ-like figure who shares with the upper-class Margaret Vance a concern for the disenfranchised poor, those who labor at the bottom of the economic ladder with no recourse or relief, those for whom he and Lindau alike ultimately and unintentionally give their lives during an historic streetcar strike. With his death, Vance becomes a Sister of Charity among the destitute and dying. The immigrant poor, whom Jacob Riis referred to as “the other half” in How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890), may be contrasted in Hazard to the slaves that Colonel Woodburn, from the postbellum South with an antebellum mentality, alleges were happy under the protective welfare of their masters. In his perverse view they were not victims like Riis’s tenement dwellers but beneficiaries under a system that should be restored nationwide to solve contemporary social and labor problems and thereby bring satisfaction to all. Fulkerson and March commission Woodburn to submit an essay on his ludicrous theory for publication in Every Other Week to stimulate sales. Woodburn’s daughter, representative of the new South, advocates the development of industry and modernity in the old Confederate states. A Southern belle with new ideas, Madison Woodburn is so appealing to Fulkerson, whose combined hucksterism and ingenuity recall Twain’s characterization of Hank Morgan, the “Connecticut Yankee,” that they are married by the end of the novel.

Also contributing to Every Other Week are two artists, Angus Beaton and Alma Leighton, who are mutually attracted, but his egocentricity and her feminist selfreliance preclude an enduring attachment. Yet both illustrate the magazine and tie the burgeoning New York art scene to its publication. The contrived relations among this variegated cast of characters through their coincidental association with the new magazine lead to a climactic conflict during a dinner hosted by Dryfoos to celebrate its successful launching. Increasing hostility in the discussion over the table erupts in a violent argument between Dryfoos the capitalist and Lindau the socialist that threatens continued publication of Every Other Week and serves as the crucial moral center of the novel. Dryfoos demands that Lindau be fired, and March, with his wife’s approval, refuses to dismiss him because he believes—wrongly, as he discovers later—that it would mean punishing the aging veteran for expressing his opinion when asked. The coincidental killing of Conrad and Lindau in the strike ends the conflict because Dryfoos then loses interest in Every Other Week and sells out to Fulkerson and March, who jointly purchase the increasingly successful biweekly. Hence the novel does not end happily for all, but it does for most, which conformed more or less with Howells’s own vision of democratic America at the time—even after the disastrous Haymarket affair of 1886–87 had outraged and disillusioned him over the unjustifiable executions to which it had led. (A bomb exploded among labor demonstrators who were seeking an eight-hour working day, in Haymarket Square, Chicago. Eleven people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Anarchists were blamed and four were hanged.) Near the conclusion of the novel, Basil and Isabel speculate fatalistically over the joint role that conditions and character had on the causes behind the deaths of Conrad and Lindau. Basil agrees with her that character was partly to blame but nevertheless concludes that “conditions make character” (Vol. 2, 253). The author himself would likely have questioned this before Haymarket, but here Basil is decidedly speaking for him. A Hazard of New Fortunes is structured organically in five unequal parts rather than according to a precon-

H. D. 573

ceived design. The lengthy house-hunting scene in New York that constitutes most of Part 1 reflects the author’s similarly frustrating experience with Elinor shortly before he wrote the novel. Although it is not integral to the fiction, the Marches’ peregrinations through the city as they track the rental ads allowed Howells to describe its various districts and cultures, including the architecture and decor of the homes and flats they inspect; thus he provides an authentic urban context in which his characters come alive. As for the role of seemingly unrealistic coincidences in a realistic novel, Howells’s held that they are often a part of life and to exclude them would itself be unrealistic. All told, over the years Howells’s own high view of A Hazard of New Fortunes has been confirmed by many of his most judicious critics, and this assessment is likely to stand.

SOURCES Bennett, George N. The Realism of William Dean Howells, 1885–1920. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973. Cady, Edwin H. The Realist at War: The Mature Years 1885–1920 of William Dean Howells. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954. Daugherty, Sarah B. “A Hazard of New Fortunes: Howells and the Trial of Pragmatism,” American Literary Realism 36 (Winter 2004): 166–179. Eble, Kenneth E. William Dean Howells, 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Howells, W. D. A Hazard of New Fortunes. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1889. Prettyman, Gib. “The Next Best Thing: Business and Commercial Inspiration in A Hazard of New Fortunes,” American Literary Realism 35 (Winter 2003): 95–119. Vanderbilt, Kermit. The Achievement of William Dean Howells. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Sanford E. Marovitz

H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1886–1961) Scholars have been studying H. D.’s entire oeuvre since the 1970s and have published numerous critical books and biographies about her life as a novelist, autobiographer, critic, and filmmaker. Her literary output was enormous and she was clearly more than an expatriate

and modernist poet. Doolittle developed mythic themes in both poetry and prose; her theories on bisexuality were controversial and avant garde. Over the course of her career, H. D. wrote seven novels, some of which have been published posthumously. After establishing a solid reputation as a poet, toward the end of World War I, H. D. began writing novels that, according to scholar M. Catherine Downs, can “best be described as biographies of the psyche of herself and her contemporaries” (Downs, 89). The best-known of these, HERMIONE (1927), is a fictional rendering of a youthful H. D. trying to carve an independent life for herself, but in love successively with both a young man and a young woman. As with all of H. D.’s novels, general readers and scholars see her life reflected in her work. H. D. was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to Charles Leander Doolittle, a Lehigh University astronomy professor, and Helen Eugenia Wolle Doolittle, a music teacher and painter, who depicted for H. D.’s entire career the struggle between science and art. From the age of nine when her father became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, she was reared in Philadelphia. In 1911, after meeting Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos WILLIAMS during her year at Bryn Mawr College (1905–1906), H. D. moved to Europe and married poet Richard Aldington in 1912. By that point, H. D.’s reputation as an imagiste poet was already well established. She lived briefly with the composer Cecil Gray and had his child, Perdita, and then moved in with her companion and friend Winifred Ellermanm (H. D. called her Bryher). Together in the 1920s and 1930s they raised Perdita in a house in Switzerland. After World War I ended H. D. began writing the novels that fictively cover various stages of her life. These lyrical and imagistic novels contain a rich subtext of myth and archetype. HERmione and Paint It Today (1992) are set during the years 1905–1911, while BID ME TO LIVE (1960) explores her separation from Aldington and her relationship with Frieda and D. H. Lawrence, who was apparently displeased with H. D.’s affair with Cecil Gray. Asphodel (1992) accounts for the birth of Perdita, Hedylus (1928) and Palimpsest (1968) focus on the events of H. D.’s life during the latter half of the 1920s,

574

HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE

a time when H. D. was writing much of her epic poetry. NIGHTS (1935), written under the pseudonym John Helforth, treats the issue of bisexuality. Sigmund Freud, with whom H. D. underwent psychoanalysis in the 1930s, was a major influence on her work. During World War II H. D. and Bryher refused to leave London and return to the United States, and together they survived Hitler’s blitzkrieg. The 1950s proved extremely productive for H. D.; she wrote two of her greatest poems, Helen in Egypt (1961) and Hermetic Definition (1971). She and Bryher continued to live together in Switzerland until H. D.’s death in 1961. The onslaught of scholarly studies of H. D. underscores her importance as an early feminist as well as one of the great talents of the 20th century. Her papers are at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

NOVELS Asphodel. Edited by Robert Spoo. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal). 1960. Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan Books, 1983. Hedylus. 1928. Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan Books, 1980. HERmione. New York: New Directions, 1981. Republished as Her, London: Virago, 1984. Nights. 1935. New York: New Directions, 1986. Paint It Today. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Palimpsest. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.

SOURCES Berkinow, Louise. Among Women. New York: Harmony Books, 1980, 155–192. Broughn, Michael. H. D.: A Bibliography, 1905–1990. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. Bryher, Winifred. The Heart to Artemis—A Writer’s Memoirs. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1962. Collecott, Diana. Introduction to The Gift, vii–xix. London: Virago, 1984. Downs, M. Catherine. “H. D. (Hilda Doolitle).” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 87–94. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. H. D.: The Struggle of That Career. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986. Edmonds, Susan. History, Psychoanalysis, Montage. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981. Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Hollenberg, Donna Krolik. H. D.: The Poetics of Childbirth and Creativity. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Gilbert, Sandra M. “H. D.? Who Was She?” Contemporary Literature 24 (Winter 1983): 496–511. Laity, Cassandra. H. D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle: Gender, Modernism. Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ostriker, Alicia. Writing Like a Woman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983, 7–41. Quinn, Vincent. Hilda Doolittle. Boston: Twayne, 1967. Wagner-Martin, Linda. H. D.’s Fiction: Convolution to Clarity. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE CARSON MCCULLERS (1940) When Carson McCULLERS’ first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, appeared in 1940, the young author caused a literary sensation. Critics, reviewers, and the reading public were surprised by the talent that this young Georgia writer of 23 showed, especially regarding her almost unnatural understanding of the human condition. McCullers was born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, a southern mill town that would serve as the perfect model for her novel’s setting, with its almost endless catalog of character types. The novel presents a fairly typical plot—that of four characters who are searching for various things in their own lives—with an unusually insightful and extremely intriguing twist: The four characters all find themselves telling their stories, relieving their frustrations, and asking deeply philosophical questions during their “conversations” with a deaf-mute named John Singer. Singer, who is able to read lips, sits silently, unable to speak in reply and sometimes even unable to read the lips of his guests when they become agitated (which is often), making for a one-sided conversation. Yet these four characters are all mysteriously drawn to the deafmute, and he becomes, as McCullers stated, a sort of hub in the middle of a wheel with the other “people in

HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, THE 575

the book . . . described as being like the spokes of a wheel” (Cook, 21). Each of these four characters is dealing with his or her own sort of loneliness or quest. The most prominent of these is Mick Kelly, a young girl of 13 faced with a sort of coming of age that is anything but typical. Most people, at one time or another, face the same sets of problems that Mick faces as an adolescent, but Mick seems to be a highly observant and intelligent 13year-old, at least by today’s standards. She faces all the awkward situations young people face when changing schools and not really knowing her classmates or being a part of any set social group. But at the same time, Mick is almost overwhelmed by an intense desire for learning music and is able to replay, in her head, symphonies that she has heard on the radio. Her longing, as would only be natural for a teen going through the uncertainties of adolescence, is to escape this world to almost any other (the novel suggests she’s partial to places with snow). Biff Brannon, the owner of the New York Cafe, is searching for love. The novel suggests that Biff is impotent, as he refuses to sleep with his wife and conveniently chooses to work the night shift in the café to avoid the issue. His marriage to Alice seems strained, yet when she dies after doctors remove a “tumor the size of a newborn child” (McCullers, 122), Biff goes into a somewhat normal state of mourning. Perhaps believing that love is a feminine quality, Biff takes on the role of a woman—putting on his wife’s perfume, sewing, wearing his mother’s wedding ring, and showing and exploring an affection for children, notably Mick and her younger siblings and his niece Baby. The novel presents two other central characters who are plagued by a stronger sense of frustration than Mick and Biff. One of these is Dr. Copeland, an African-American doctor who has spent his life caring for patients in the black sections of town and attempting to change his own race’s attitude about its condition. Focused on what McCullers calls his “strong true purpose” (139), Dr. Copeland focuses his efforts first on his own children, Portia, William, Karl Marx, and Hamilton. In spite of the doctor’s efforts, he is fighting a losing battle, evident in the difference in his own language and his daughter’s,

with Portia’s stereotypical African-American/Southern dialect (“You see—us haves our own way of living and our own plan”) serving as a stark contrast to the doctor’s more formal English (“So you and your husband and your brother have your own cooperative plan”). And as the doctor makes his daily rounds in the black section of town, he sees that his “strong true purpose” has failed. Another extremely frustrated character in the novel is the labor activist/rabble rouser Jake Blount. He comes from no place in particular but is extremely frustrated with the condition of the working class in the South. His attempts to organize mill workers to strike for better working conditions result only in laughter from the workers he’s trying to help. In one particularly important scene in the novel, Blount punches and bangs his head against a brick wall in an attempt to fight his frustration. His belief system is most like Dr. Copeland’s, based on his desire for a better social condition in the South. These characters never seem to find true relief, and their long conversations with the mysterious deaf-mute eventually do nothing to relieve their suffering. There is an important metaphor in the novel, perhaps less discussed than it should be, that draws upon the many desires and longings the characters have while reflecting the pointlessness of their attempts to make their feelings known and understood. Biff has collected newspapers every day since October 27, 1918, and has organized them chronologically in a storeroom. The newspapers, like the novel, are made up of stories, some connected, some not, and the fact that they are merely stored away and seem to serve no purpose can be compared to the frustrating nature of the stories that the four characters carry with them—they have hopes, dreams, desires, and plans, yet their attempts to express them are futile. Biff, at one point, brings out a stack of these papers and glances over the mastheads with a “practiced eye” (133). McCullers’s characters’ stories are the same—the people around the characters, including the deaf-mute John Singer, know only what’s on the surface, just as Biff is aware of the headlines in the paper. No one can relate to their inner feelings. In one poignant scene, all four find themselves in Singer’s room at the same time and all stand around awkwardly.

576 HEART OF HYACINTH, THE

Their complete stories, which go unheard and unacknowledged, are merely stored away somewhere deep inside where only the lonely hunters can find them. This is certainly the root of the sadness in the novel that most readers have commented on. The characters’ attempts to find relief and communicate desires and dreams are futile and lead only to sorrow.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Carson McCullers. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Carr, Virginia Spencer. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Cook, Richard M. Carson McCullers. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. Edmonds, Dale. Carson McCullers. Southern Writers Series No. 6. Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaugh Company, 1969. Graver, Lawrence. Carson McCullers. University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 84. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. New York: Mariner Books, 2000. McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Edited by Warren French. Boston: Twayne, 1980. James Mayo

HEART OF HYACINTH, THE ONOTO WATANNA (1903) In The Heart of Hyacinth, Onoto WATANNA (pseudonym of the writer Winnifred Eaton) examines modern issues of racial identity and feminism within the genre of Victorian romance. Originally published in 1903, the novel’s contemporary popularity was due to its sentimental love story set in an exotic en vogue Orientalist idealization of Japan replete with cherry blossoms, temple bells, and quaint mythology. The novel opens with a version of the Madame Butterfly story, already popularized by David Belasco’s play: An English sailor marries shy village maiden Aoi but dies abroad, leaving his devoted widow to raise their son, Komazawa, or Koma, in an English-speaking Christian household. Some 10 years later, the family gives refuge to a delirious, pregnant American woman who has run away from her husband, suspecting him of infidelity. Giving birth to a daughter, the dying stranger begs Aoi to care for the child as if she were

her own, enjoining her not to send the child to the father. Thus Hyacinth, the child of white parents, is raised by the Christianized Japanese Aoi as a sister to the biracial Komazawa, and the two children become inseparable companions until Koma, 16, is sent to school in England to begin to fulfill the expectations of his late father. Watanna continually sets Hyacinth and Koma apart from their contemporaries in physical space, looks, and character. Hyacinth’s restlessness and curiosity, for example, are repeatedly contrasted to a typical Japanese child’s passiveness and docility. Like other heroines in Watanna’s Japanese romances Hyacinth is a lively girl, disadvantaged by her Western features at the start but rapidly rising to the top within her social milieu, with which she is one in both training and outlook. Hyacinth perceives herself as entirely Japanese, while Koma as a child declares that all is “Engleesh” within his father’s house. As a young man Koma is comfortable with both his English and his Japanese heritages: In Japan he honors his mother’s traditions as shown by his dressing in traditional garments, while in England he successfully litigates for control of his father’s estate. Watanna uses the two characters to illustrate what would now be called fluidity in race theory: Race as a merely biological consequence gives way to race as defined by perception or social context. In a pivotal moment of self-awareness, the child Hyacinth is confronted with her own Western features for the first time in a mirror and is frightened by her similarity to the “forn debbel” missionary. With years of English training behind him, Koma urges the child “to become acquainted with herself as she is” (81), that is, to learn about her innate nature. In proof of her new frame of mind, Hyacinth speaks English for the first time in years. In a parallel scene some years later, Hyacinth as a young woman again contemplates her face in a mirror. Wearing a fashionable Japanese hairstyle and kimono, she is initially displeased to see reflected in the glass the wide blue-gray eyes that she, like her Japanese girlfriends, perceives as a deformity. But “they were one-eyed, seeing but one type of beauty” (96), while Hyacinth can speculate on the existence of

HEILBRUN, CAROLYN G. 577

a people whose looks reflect the sun rather than the moon. In a period of antimiscegenation legislation, Watanna portrays several cross-racial relationships, the first the happy and faithful marriage between Aoi and the wellto-do self-exiled Englishman Montrose, who calls Japan “the Mecca of all his hopes” (5). Both the wealthy aristocratic playboy Yamashiro and the earnest American consular attaché Saunders propose marriage to Hyacinth, the one overlooking her “white barbarian” origins, the other her alien Japanese upbringing. The American attaché, who has met Hyacinth as a result of the search instigated by her father, is fascinated with “Miss Lorrimer”: “she is not Japanese . . . I never for a moment thought of her as such” (167). Hyacinth spurns them both, the Japanese for despising her “honorable origin” (121), the American for being insensitive to her Japanese sensibility. Moreover, she returns several expensive gifts to Yamashiro, professing to despise his buying her love, yet pleased when the disgruntled young man storms off and leaves them behind. She will return them, she pragmatically tells Koma, when he provides their replacements. Thus Hyacinth is also a protofeminist within the context of the popular romance genre. Faced with the truth of her ancestry and the mandate of leaving Japan for America with her newly found father and stepmother, the shocked Hyacinth protests she is “Japanese in thought, in feeling, in heart, in soul” (172). Hyacinth is consistent in looking at situations from the point of view of a Japanese maiden, but the fact that she articulates and enacts her views and protests is a reflection of her Western character. Threatened with enforced separation from her foster mother, Hyacinth chooses instead to hide herself in the hills, where she is found by Koma. Hyacinth and Koma finally recognize their love for each other and have their marriage blessed in both Shinto and Christian ceremonies. The novel thus concludes with the union of the two most racially fluid characters, who provide a symbolic bridge between the two cultures.

SOURCES Birchall, Diana. Otono Watanna: The Story of Winnifred Eaton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Cole, Jean Lee. The Literary Voices of Winnifred Eaton: Redefining Ethnicity and Authenticity. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Ferens, Dominika. Edith and Winnifred Eaton: Chinatown Missions and Japanese Romances. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. Najmi, Samina. “White Woman in Asia: Racial Fluidity as Rebellion in Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth.” In Literary Studies East and West, edited by Cynthia Franklin et al. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press and East-West Center, 2000. Watanna, Onoto. The Heart of Hyacinth. Introduction by Samina Najmi. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000. Nona C. Flores

HEILBRUN, CAROLYN G(OLD) (PSEUDONYM: AMANDA CROSS) (1926–2003) Carolyn G. Heilbrun, an influential English professor, literary scholar, and biographer, was widely respected for her studies of British literature and of fiction by women. Using the pseudonym Amanda Cross, Heilbrun also wrote a popular series of detective novels featuring feminist sleuth Kate Fansler. Initially, the identity of Amanda Cross was kept secret because of Heilbrun’s position as a then untenured faculty member in Columbia University’s English Department. Although the satirically witty Amanda Cross/Kate Fansler novels would appear to be unrelated to Heilbrun’s academic work, a number of similarities soon become apparent. Like her creator, Kate Fansler was an English professor and a feminist engaged in serious scholarly research; she refers to, and quotes liberally from, literary works; and the 13 Amanda Cross novels trace the changing role of women and the frequent disdain of their male counterparts. Death in a Tenured Position (1981), winner of the 1981 Nero Wolfe Award for Mystery Fiction, centering on the murder of the first tenured woman in the Harvard University English Department, clearly delineates male hostility toward women in academia. This remains a constant theme throughout Heilbrun’s detective fiction. Carolyn Heilbrun was born on January 13, 1926, in East Orange, New Jersey, to Archibald Gold, an accountant, and Estelle Roemer Gold. She was edu-

578 HEILBRUN, CAROLYN G.

cated at Wellesley College, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1947, and at Columbia University, where she earned a master of arts degree in 1951 and a doctoral degree in 1959. She married James Heilbrun, a professor of economics, on February 20, 1945, and began teaching at Columbia in 1960, where she became the first tenured woman in the English Department. She published her first Amanda Cross novel, In the Last Analysis, in 1964, introducing Professor Kate Fansler, who teaches English at a large New York university. After a client is found dead in her psychiatrist friend’s office, Fansler helps solve the mystery. In The James Joyce Murder (1967), Fansler puts aside her Joyce research to come to the aid of her nephew, unjustly accused of murder. The Question of Max (1976) has at its center the murder of a female graduate student. An Imperfect Spy (1995) likewise treats the suspicious death of a woman, a law professor, at a law school where Fansler is teaching a course in women in law and literature, and in The Puzzled Heart (1998), a radical antifeminist group kidnaps Fansler’s husband, Reed Amhearst. Estelle “Woody” Woodhaven, an amateur detective, joins forces with Fansler in Honest Doubt (2000), learning from Fansler the labyrinthine—and often Byzantine—political nature of the New Jersey college where the murder of an Alfred Lord Tennyson scholar occurs. Carolyn Heilbrun remained at Columbia for more than three decades and held the endowed chair of Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities for six years. She resigned in 1992 because of the sexism she encountered. During her last years, Heilbrun surrounded herself with a “chamber of women’s voices” who were “newly-made women friends and colleagues, daughters, long-lost cousins and, most of all, the many contemporary women writers, especially American poets” (Zilversmit, 11). She continued to read and write, and The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross, all of which feature Kate Fansler at their center, was published in 1977. Her most influential nonfiction includes Toward a Recognition of Androgyny: Aspects of Male and Female in Literature (1973), Reinventing Womanhood (1979), Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (1990), Education of a Woman: The Life

of Gloria Steinem (1995), and The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (1997). When Heilbrun committed suicide on October 9, 2003, at her home in Manhattan, New York, few of her friends were surprised, because she had said earlier that she would take her own life at age 70 or when the quality of her life declined severely. She was 77 years old. Her papers are collected at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

NOVELS UNDER PSEUDONYM AMANDA CROSS Death in a Tenured Position. New York: Dutton, 1981. Published as A Death in the Faculty. New York: Gollancz, 1981. The Edge of Doom. New York: Ballantine, 2002. Honest Doubt. New York: Ballantine, 2000. An Imperfect Spy. New York: Ballantine, 1995. In the Last Analysis. New York: Macmillan, 1964. The James Joyce Murder. New York: Macmillan, 1967. No Word from Winifred. New York: Dutton, 1986. Poetic Justice. New York: Knopf, 1970. The Puzzled Heart. New York: Ballantine, 1998. The Question of Max. New York: Knopf, 1976. Sweet Death, Kind Death. New York: Dutton, 1984. The Theban Mysteries. New York: Knopf, 1971. A Trap for Fools. New York: Dutton, 1989.

SOURCES Bargannier, Earl F., ed. Ten Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Cooper-Clark, Diana. Designs of Darkness: Interviews with Detective Novelists. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Gerrard, Nicci. “Who Cares Whodunnit?” New Statesman and Society 3, no. 88 (February 16, 1990): 38. Grumman, Joan. Review of The Representation of Women in Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies 30, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 425–428. Kress, Susan. Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Manos, Nikki Lee. “Heilbrun’s Apologia,” Belles Lettres 6, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 23. McCarthy, Abigail. “Alternate Destinies and Imagined Identities,” Washington Post Book World, 6 November 1988, pp. 5–6. Mesic, Penelope. “Steinem’s Lives: Exploring the Growth of a Celebrated Feminist,” Chicago Tribune Books, 8 October 1995, pp. 3, 5.

HEINEMANN, LARRY 579

Robinson, Lillian S. “Postmurderism,” Women’s Review of Books 12, nos. 10–11 (July 1995): 32. Unsigned Review of Edge of Doom by Amanda Cross, Publishers Weekly 249, no. 39 (September 30, 2002): 53. White, Jean M. “Mysteries,” Washington Post Book World, 17 June 1984, p. 6. Zilversmit, Annette. “Free At Last,” Women’s Review of Books 15, no. 4 (January 1998): 10–11.

HEINEMANN, LARRY (CURTISS) (1944–

) Like Tim O’BRIEN, Robert STONE, and Michael HERR, Larry Heinemann’s subject is mainly the Vietnam War. He came to public attention with his first novel, Close Quarters, and followed it with the National Book Award–winning PACO’s STORY, a realistic, honest presentation of the ordinary soldier’s experience in the thick of battle. Larry Heinemann was born on January 18, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois. As he explained in an interview with Ryan Nally, “My old man was a bus driver. My mother was a farm girl from Michigan. My mother’s side of the family, oddly enough, is connected to Abraham Lincoln. I’m a sixth cousin. My father was born in Chicago and my mother came here in the 1930s and worked as a nanny for a doctor’s family up in Winnetka. She met my Dad, got married in 1939 or 1940” (Nally). Heinemann’s education was interrupted by the draft, and he went to Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, experiencing heavy combat duty; he attained the rank of sergeant and received the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. On his return, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College in 1971. Published originally as short stories in Penthouse, Close Quarters appeared as a novel in 1977. It uses a first-person narrator, soldier-protagonist Philip Dosier, who describes his yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam and his return to the United States. Paco’s Story, praised for its superb craftsmanship, follows the novel’s returning Vietnam veteran, “an inarticulate, alienated, and wandering outsider.” Heinemann writes here, according to the critic Robert M. Slabey, “a postmodern metafiction with inside narrators, stories-within-stories, implausible elements, and self-conscious strategies” (Slabey, 187). Paco not only suffers from the postwar syndromes common to Vietnam veterans, but also is

haunted by the voices of his dead comrades and by a young Viet Cong woman who was gang-raped by the members of his unit. Heinemann’s third novel, Cooler by the Lake (1992), departs from the topic of Vietnam. Set in Chicago, it follows Maximilian Nutmeg, a hustler who turns honest when he discovers a wallet containing $800. The novel describes what happens to Maximilian between finding and returning the wallet to its owner. Heinemann returned to Vietnam with a short story, “The Fragging,” in the June 1997 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and he has planned a book that combines his memories of that time, the effect of the war on him and his family, and a “reconstruction” of firefights in which he was involved. They include the battle that Oliver Stone re-created in the film, Platoon (Baker). The memoir, published in 2005, is entitled Black Virgin Mountain. Larry Heinemann, who describes himself as a “househusband,” lives and works in Chicago less than two miles from his birthplace (Nally).

NOVELS Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Close Quarters. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Cooler by the Lake. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. Paco’s Story. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986.

SOURCES Heinemann, Larry. “Larry Heinemann in Conversation With Kurt Jacobsen,” Logos 2, no. 1 (Winter 2003). Morris, Gregory L. “Telling War Stories: Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story and the Serio-comic Tradition,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 58–68. Review of Cooler by the Lake, Publishers Weekly (March 16, 1992): 63. Scott, Grant F. “Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 69–80. Slabey, Robert M. “Heinemann’s Paco’s Story,” Explicator 52, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 187–189.

OTHER Baker, John F. “[Doubledays’ Gerry] Howard Gets Novelist’s War Memoir,” PublishersWeekly.com (August 11, 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.publishersweekly.com/ article/CA316076.html?text=larry+heinemann. Accessed September 21, 2005.

580

HEINLEIN, ROBERT A.

Heinemann, Larry. “Larry Heinemann in Conversation With Kurt Jacobsen,” Logos 2, no. 1 (Winter 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://logosonline.home. igc.org/heinemann.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. Morris, Gregory L. “Telling War Stories: Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story and the Serio-comic Tradition,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (September 22, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:15987416. Accessed September 21, 2005. Nally, Ryan. “A Conversation with Larry Heinemann June 25, 1997.” HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/heinint.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. Scott, Grant F. “Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, September 22, 1994. HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http:// www.highbeamresearch.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 15987418. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HEINLEIN, ROBERT A(NSON) (1907– 1988) One of the premier writers of science fiction in the 20th century and one of the earliest (some say the first) to reach mainstream readers, Robert Heinlein ranks with Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac ASIMOV, and H. G. Wells in the influence he wielded on the genre. Many younger writers cite the impact of his works on their own development. Unlike earlier science fiction writers who used futuristic settings largely as escape environments, Heinlein created a new concept: He enabled his young readers to understand that today’s imagining is tomorrow’s fact. Critics often cite the Apollo space program, with which Heinlein was involved, as an example of this phenomenon. Author of 31 novels (15 of them for adults), more than 50 short stories published in a dozen short story collections, and several screenplays for film and television, Heinlein is best known for STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND (1961), a novel whose hero is born on Earth but raised on Mars. It gained cult status, particularly during the 1960s. Critics commonly divide his work into two periods: The early phase produced many adolescent works and the later, mature phase focused on independent heroes, political maneuverings, and Heinlein’s belief in rebelling against corrupt governments. Entwined with this attitude is a love of country and a respect for the military, along with an

endorsement of uninhibited sexual relationships. His other classic novels include The Puppet Masters (1951), The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1965), The Notebooks of Lazarus Long (1978), and The Cat Who Walks through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (1985). Two of his juvenile novels, Space Cadet (1948) and Starship Troopers (1962), were adapted for television and film, respectively. In addition to his four Hugo Awards, he was the first writer to receive the new Grand Master Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. After his death in 1988, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration awarded him the Distinguished Public Service Medal for his promotion of space exploration. Robert Heinlein (sounds like “hineline”) was born on July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, to Rex Ivar Heinlein, an accountant, and Bam Lyle Heinlein. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1929, was married in the early 1930s to Leslyn McDonald until their divorce in 1947, and married Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, a navy lieutenant proficient in seven languages in 1948 (Angelo). He served as a lieutenant, junior grade, in the navy until 1934, when he retired because of tuberculosis. Space Cadet features Oscar, a human raised on Venus, who is taught at the Space Academy that no value or assumption should remain unquestioned. There is still controversy about Heinlein’s own view of the Space Cadets and their authority over ordinary people. Starship Troopers contains much philosophic musing about the impact of violence, the value of public punishment for crimes, the effectiveness of war, and the role of men as protectors of women. Narrated by Juan Rico, much of the story is presented through dialogue between instructors—e.g., Colonel DuBois, Major Reid—and their students. Stranger in a Strange Land, frequently compared to another cult novel, Dune (1965), Frank Herbert’s first novel in the Dune Chronicles, extends Heinlein’s ideas. The protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, embodies revolutionary sexual attitudes and nontraditional behavior. This and later books are characterized by one of Heinlein’s major contributions to the genre: He incorporated “some of those sciences which until then had been practically ignored: administration, politics, economics, sociology, linguistics, mathematics, genet-

HEINLEIN, ROBERT A. 581

ics, parapsychology and others; transforming his work into a precursor of New Wave SF” (Angelo). The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, and The Cat Who Walks through Walls: A Comedy of Manners all signify Heinlein’s commitment to political and social issues, an interest that was peripheral in earlier work. In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, set on the moon (Luna), Manuel Garcia, along with a computer named Mike, wishes to free Loonies from Earth’s government. Because women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one and are valued for procreation, they can behave as freely as they wish, choosing among numerous alternatives to conventional marriage on Earth. In The Notebooks of Lazarus Long Heinlein examines many sexual combinations that contradict more traditional notions about love; for example, because Lazarus Long moves with ease over several millennia, he has sexual intercourse with his mother at one point, with his adopted daughter at another, and with clones of himself at still another. Because his works are almost exclusively male-centered, Heinlein has sometimes been accused of misogyny, despite the more complex roles he assigned to the women in his later novels. Heinlein died on May 8, 1988, in Carmel, California. After his cremation, his ashes were scattered over the ocean at a service with full military honors. Several of his novels were reissued posthumously: Stranger in a Strange Land, restored to its original version, became the best-selling science fiction novel in history. The television series Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, based on Heinlein’s novel Space Cadet, aired from 1951 to 1956. In 1994, The Puppet Masters was filmed as Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, starring Donald Sutherland; and in 1996, Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, was produced as a feature-length film.

NOVELS Beyond This Horizon. Reading, Pa.: Fantasy Press, 1948. The Cat Who Walks through Walls: A Comedy of Manners. New York: Putnam, 1985. The Door into Summer. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Double Star. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Farnham’s Freehold. New York: Putnam, 1964. Friday. New York: Holt, 1982.

Glory Road. New York: Putnam, 1963. I Will Fear No Evil. New York: Putnam, 1971. Job: A Comedy of Justice. New York: Ballantine, 1984. Methuselah’s Children. Hicksville, N.Y.: Gnome Press, 1958. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. New York: Putnam, 1966. The Notebooks of Lazarus Long. New York: Putnam, 1978. The Number of the Beast. New York: Fawcett, 1980. The Puppet Masters. New York: Doubleday, 1951. Revolt in 2100. Chicago: Shasta, 1953. Sixth Column. Hicksville, N.Y.: Gnome Press, 1949. Published as The Day After Tomorrow. New York: New American Library, 1951. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Putnam, 1961. Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long. New York: Putnam, 1973. To Sail beyond the Sunset: The Life and Loves of Maureen Johnson, Being the Memoirs of a Somewhat Irregular Lady. New York: Putnam, 1987. Universe. New York: Dell, 1951. Published as Orphans of the Sky. London: Gollancz, 1963. Waldo & Magic, Inc. New York: Doubleday, 1950. Published as Waldo: Genius in Orbit. New York: Avon, 1958.

SOURCES Aldiss, Brian W. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Atheling, William, Jr. The Issue at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1964. ———. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1970. Clareson, Thomas D., ed. Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, Volume 1. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976. Downing, Nancy Bailey. A Robert A. Heinlein Cyclopedia: A Complete Guide to the People, Places, and Things in the Fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Olander, Joseph D., and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Robert A. Heinlein. New York: Taplinger, 1978. Panshin, Alexei. Heinlein in Dimension: A Critical Analysis. Chicago: Advent, 1968. Riley, Dick, ed. Critical Encounters: Writers and Themes in Science Fiction. New York: Ungar, 1978. Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Stephens, C. Press. A Checklist of Robert A. Heinlein. Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Ultramarine, 1994. Slusser, George Edgar, and Robert Reginald, eds. Yesterday or Tomorrow?: Questions of Vision in the Fiction of Robert A.

582

HELLER, JOSEPH

Heinlein: A Festschrift in Memory of Pilgrim Award Winner, Dr. Thomas Dean Clareson (1926–1993). San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Usher, Robin. Self-Begetting, Self-Devouring: Jungian Archetypes in the Fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996.

OTHER Angelo, Carlos. “Heinlein.” Available online. URL: http://www. wegrokit.com/bio.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. Robert Heinlein Page. Available online. URL: http://www. severing.nu/rah.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. The Heinlein Webring. Available online. URL: http://www. bomis.com/rings/heinlein/. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HELLER, JOSEPH (1923–1999)

Joseph Heller will always be known as the author of a black comedy that gave the English language a new phrase, “Catch-22,” meaning a bureaucratic trap and a dead end even for the individual exerting his best effort. Heller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this 1962 novel, an experimental, fragmented, absurdist view of World War II that earned praise from nearly all quarters and, in its era, was seen as a comment on the Vietnam War as well. Heller went on to publish five more novels; at least one of them, Something Happened (1974), is receiving renewed interest from literary critics. Heller, who always pits the individual against institutions like the federal government, the military, and large corporations, creates antiheroes who are not mindless victims. He suggests instead that we are responsible for our behavior and for solutions to the declining values and increasing corruption in contemporary American society. Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian immigrants Isaac Heller, a bakery truck driver who died of complications from surgery when Heller was five years old, and Lena Heller. In 1942, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and, from the French island of Corsica, flew 60 missions while serving as a wing bombardier, earning two decorations and rising to the rank of lieutenant. Soon after World War II, Heller married Shirley Held, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from New York University and a master’s degree from Columbia University.

After a brief stint as a college professor, he worked as an advertising copy editor and published short stories until the sales of CATCH-22 enabled him to devote all his time to writing. Catch-22 was the first World War II novel to use comedy and the absurd; it parodies war novels written decades earlier like Ernest HEMINGWAY’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929), James JONES’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1951), and Norman MAILER’s THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948). The darkly comic novel features Yossarian, a malingering bombardier who avoids flying more missions, and such satirically drawn characters as Captain Milo Minderbinder, Major Major Major, Major __ de Coverly, and the figure of Snowden, whose gory death on a bombing mission becomes one of the central motifs. Although Heller wrote plays, including a dramatized version of Catch-22 and We Bombed in New Haven (1969), he turned his attention back to the novel in Something Happened. Heller tells the story of Bob Slocum, a pathetic advertising executive who has everything—a wife, children, and a house in Connecticut—yet fears everything and has confidence in nothing. The pessimism of the novel has been praised for rendering the emptiness of American life in the postwar era. Good as Gold (1979), set in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Coney Island where Heller spent his childhood, combines a satiric view of American materialism with American politics. It incorporates such public figures as Henry Kissinger but centers on Bruce Gold, a college professor who goes to Washington, experiences the power and bureaucracy that drive its institutions, and finally returns to the Jewish heritage that he almost relinquished. Heller’s interest in religion and its redemptive possibilities surfaces again in God Knows (1984), his version of the Old Testament story of the psalmist King David. In this book David sounds much like the comics Lenny Bruce, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen; King David appears foolish but finally aware of the widespread loss of faith and the absence of God. Because Heller used numerous quotations from the philosophers, the book puzzled critics, who had trouble classifying it. Picture This, Heller’s 1988 novel, unites his interests in art and philosophy. The central image is a painting by

HELPRIN, MARK 583

Rembrandt called Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer. This thoughtful and difficult novel uses the biography of Rembrandt and examines the history of the Netherlands, questioning its “golden age” and linking Holland back to Greece and forward to Nazi Germany and the era of the cold war. Heller’s final novel, Closing Time (1994), a sequel to Catch-22, focuses on memory and death. A number of characters appeared in the previous novel, and Heller draws the reader into the circle of Yossarian’s prewar friends—Lew Rabinowitz, who wanted to be the quintessential American, Sammy Singer, who links his World War I grandfather to aging World War II veterans like himself, and a minor character named Joey Heller, who figures in the memories of all these characters and introduces them to such resurrected writers as Hemingway and William SAROYAN. Heller also wrote two memoirs, No Laughing Matter (1986), coauthored with Speed Vogel, the account of Heller’s struggle with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disease that affects the nervous system; and Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998). Heller died of a heart attack on December 12, 1999, in East Hampton, New York, having influenced the views of many people who came of age in the second half of the 20th century. At his death, he left an unpublished novel titled “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.” His papers are housed mainly in the Joseph Heller Archive at the University of South Carolina, and in the Joseph Heller Collection at the Brandeis University Library.

NOVELS Catch-22: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. Closing Time: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. God Knows. New York: Knopf, 1984. Good as Gold. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Picture This. New York: Putnam, 1988. Something Happened. New York: Knopf, 1974.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. “Catch-22 Twenty-Five Years Later,” Michigan Quarterly Review 26, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 397–386. ———. “The Deceits of Black Humor,” Harper’s 258, no. 1,546 (March 1979): 115–118. Craig, David M. Tilting at Mortality: Narrative Strategies in Joseph Heller’s Fiction. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.

Frank, Mike. “Eros and Thanatos in Catch 22,” Canadian Review of American Studies (Spring 1976): 77–87. Goodwin, George. “The Pseudo-Victim,” The Poetics of Protest, 133–157. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Gross, Beverly. “ ‘Insanity Is Contagious’: The Mad World of Catch-22,” Centennial Review 26, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 86–113. Kiley, Frederick, and Walter McDonald. A ‘Catch-22’ Casebook. New York: Crowell, 1973. Meller, James M. “Heller’s Catch-22,” In The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America, 108–124. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. Merrill, Robert. Joseph Heller. Boston: Twayne, 1987. ———. “The Structure and Meaning of Catch-22,” Studies in American Fiction 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1986): 139–152. Nagel, James. Critical Essays on Joseph Heller. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Pearson, Carol. “Catch-22 and the Debasement of Language,” CEA Critic (November 1974): 305. Perry, Nick. “Class and Bureaucracy: The Meaning of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22,” Sociological Review 32, no. 4 (November 1984): 719–741. Pinsker, Sanford. Understanding Joseph Heller. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Pletcher, Robert C. “Overcoming the Catch-22 of Institutional Satire: Joseph Heller’s ‘Surrealistic’ Characters,” Studies in Contemporary Satire 15 (1988): 20–27. Potts, Stephen W. Catch-22: Antiheroic Antinovel. Boston: Twayne, 1989. ———. From Here to Absurdity: The Moral Battlefields of Joseph Heller, 2nd ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Ruderman, Judith. Joseph Heller. New York: Continuum, 1991. Scotto, Robert M. Three Contemporary Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon. New York: Garland, 1977. Seed, David. The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

HELPRIN, MARK (1947– ) Four accolades—the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Jewish Book Award, Prix de Rome from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Book Award nomination—for Ellis Island and Other Stories

584

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST

(1981), helped Mark Helprin earn serious attention from critics and readers alike. Some compared his use of magical realism to the work of Gabriel García Márquez (Schapiro). In addition to an earlier story collection, A Dove of the East and Other Stories (1975), Helprin, a former political columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has written four well-received novels—set in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Israel—all memorable for their “ambitious sweep” and “outsized characters” (Schapiro). Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling (1977) is picaresque fiction that begins with a journey that ends on an Israeli battlefield, Winter’s Tale (1983) is a Hawthornesque fantasy set in New York City, A Soldier of the Great War (1991) takes place on World War I European battlefields, and in Memoir from Antproof Case (1995) the narrator is hiding in Brazil. All Helprin’s novels are concerned with the way individuals cope with loss and tragedy as they attempt to transcend adversity with optimism, hope, and possibility. Mark Helprin was born on June 28, 1947, in New York City, to Morris Helprin, a film executive, and Eleanor Lyn Helprin. He earned both a bachelor’s degree (1969) and a master’s degree (1972) from Harvard University. After serving in the British merchant navy in 1967 and the Israeli air force from 1972 to 1973, Helprin married Lisa Kennedy, a banker and attorney, in 1980. In Refiner’s Fire, Marshall Pearl, a semi-autobiographical protagonist, is orphaned at a young age and seeks his identity from Israel to New York, Boston to Europe. Much of the novel is told in flashbacks as he lies dying of his wounds during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In Winter’s Tale, Helprin again expands the possibilities for his protagonist, Peter Lake, through magical realism: In the first portion of the novel, set during the Gilded Age (the post–Civil War era of economic expansion, marked by greed and gaudy wealth), Peter rides Athnasor, a magical white horse, through upstate New York countryside; in the second, Peter appears magically with his contemporary descendants in New York City. Helprin describes the mayoral candidate, Praeger de Pinto, who, instead of the usual political issues, campaigns on promises of cross-country skiing, love affairs, and sleigh rides. A Soldier of the Great War features

Alessandro Giuliani, a World War I soldier who deserts his unit, is captured, escapes from prison, and manages to find in his war-scarred life the means for survival and hope. He tells his story in 1964 while walking with a 17year-old factory apprentice. The 80-year-old protagonist of Memoir from Antproof Case, hiding in Brazil from assassins, keeps the notes about his life—as an American World War II pilot, wealthy stockbroker, murderer, and lover—in an indestructible box. Mark Helprin, a member of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, gained a good deal of publicity when he was revealed as the speechwriter for Senator Bob Dole during his 1996 presidential campaign. Helprin, who has also written award-winning children’s literature, lives with his wife in an upstate New York farmhouse.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Ellis Island and Other Stories. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1981. Freddy and Fredericka. New York: Penguin, 2005. Memoir from Antproof Case. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1995. Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling. New York: Knopf, 1977. A Soldier of the Great War. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1991. Winter’s Tale. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1983.

SOURCES Broyard, Anatole. Review of Winter’s Tale, New York Times, 2 September 1983, p. C20

OTHER Mark Helprin. “Rewriting Bob Dole” (interview). Interview by Mark Schapiro. Available online. URL: http://www. salonmagazine.com/weekly/interview960715.html. Accessed September 21, 2005. Mark Helprin Bibliography. Available online. URL: http://www. lib.ncsu.edu/staff/kamorgan/helprin-bib.html. Accessed September 21, 2005. Mark Helprin Website. Available online. URL: http://www. markhelprin.com. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST (1899–1961)

One of the major stylistic innovators of the 20th century, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The OLD MAN AND THE SEA (1952) and the Nobel Prize in literature, Ernest Hemingway was the author of 10 novels (six published

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 585

during his lifetime), over 100 short stories, and some 20 volumes of nonfiction. The enthusiasms of his actual life emerged in the fictional lives of his characters: bullfighting, boxing, deep-sea fishing, big-game hunting, and war; to a greater extent than other writers, he blended his adventurous and artistic life so that it is difficult to separate the two. In the now classic novels The SUN ALSO RISES (1926), A FAREWELL TO ARMS (1929), and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS (1940), Hemingway employs a terse, laconic style—an economic use of words to create his version of reality. From mentors during his expatriate days in Paris, he learned the technique of repetition for effect and for creating realistic, penetrating images. He is also associated with his iceberg theory of writing, so called because the deeper meaning in a novel, as with icebergs, is elusive at first glance: while one-eighth is immediately visible, seven-eighths remain below the surface. Well known, too, is the metaphorically (but sometimes physically) wounded Hemingway hero, emblematic of the Lost Generation that followed World War I. The Hemingway code requires grace under pressure, or good manners in the face of any calamity—from a confrontation in a bull ring or a rude remark from an acquaintance. These influences surface in the hard-boiled detective fiction writers—Dashiell HAMMETT, Raymond CHANDLER, and James M. CAIN— and in the work of a legion of writers stretching into the 21st century who name Hemingway as a mentor. Scholarly interest in Hemingway has actually increased rather than abated, with new biographies and critical books and articles discussing his use of violence, his portrayals of women, the famous Hemingway machismo, even his sexuality. One of the most significant American literary prizes, the PEN/Hemingway Award, bears his name, and the popular Hemingway parody contest is held annually. Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, to Clarence Edmunds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a music teacher. Reared and educated at public schools in Oak Park, Hemingway became a newspaper reporter in 1917, suffered wounds in both legs while driving for the Red Cross Ambulance Corps in Italy from 1918 to 1919, resumed his journalism career, and published his first

book, Three Stories & Ten Poems, in 1923, and his first story collection, In Our Time, in 1925. The Torrents of Spring, a parody of Sherwood ANDERSON’s Dark Laughter, was published in 1926. By this time his marriage to Hadley Richardson, whom he had wed in 1921, was foundering; they divorced in March 1927, and exactly two months later Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer, a writer. After their divorce in 1940, Hemingway was married to Martha Gellhorn, also a writer, from November 21, 1940, to December 21, 1945, and to Mary Welsh, a writer, from March 14, 1946, until his death in 1961. The Sun Also Rises established Hemingway as a spokesman for the Lost Generation. His rootless protagonists shuttle between France and Spain, Paris and Pamplona, engaging in casual affairs, bullfights, and fishing trips. Many empty hours are spent drinking wine and sherry at a succession of cafés and restaurants. In contrast, Jake Barnes, the wounded and emasculated American World War I veteran, is the Hemingway hero, a man who loves the vulnerable Lady Brett Ashley. Together with Jake, only Bill Gorton, a fine fisherman, and Pedro Romero, a fine matador, face the challenges with the courage demanded by the code by which the disillusioned Jake now lives. Similarly wounded lieutenant Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms finds love in the midst of war-torn Italy with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse who tends his wounds. She dies giving birth to their stillborn child. Frederic, who has also become disillusioned with the war, faces this loss and his empty future with stoic courage, later deciding to tell this tragic story. The novel was Hemingway’s first best-selling novel. TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1937) takes place during the Great Depression in Key West, Florida, where Hemingway lived with Pauline Pfeiffer, and in Havana, Cuba, where Hemingway lived with Martha Gellhorn. Here Hemingway uses Harry Morgan, an ex-policeman from Miami, who runs a charter boat in Cuba, and multiple points of view, to contrast “have” characters with “have not” characters—writers, socialites, gays, Chinese refugees—each of whom supplies a fragment of the story. For Whom the Bell Tolls, now considered a classic 20thcentury war novel, features Robert Jordan, an American professor who fights in Spain with the Loyalists during

586 HEMINGWAY, ERNEST

the Spanish civil war (1936–39) against the dictator, General Francisco Franco. Despite his love for Maria, a young Spanish woman recovering from her father’s murder and her own rape by Fascists, and the meaning that this love has provided for him, Jordan bids farewell to Maria, along with the brave fighters Pilar, Pablo, Andres, and others. He chooses to sacrifice his life for the Loyalist cause and faces his death with calm courage. As nearly every critic has noted, Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) seems to parody Hemingway’s earlier characters, styles, and themes. Set in Venice, the novel focuses on American army colonel Richard Cantwell and his love affair with the Italian countess Renata. Yet Hemingway survived the negative reactions to this novel from readers and critics and produced the universally acclaimed novella, The Old Man and the Sea, a story—often called an allegory—of one man’s ability to survive. Santiago, the old fisherman, braves age, exhaustion, hand cramps, and a three-day battle to capture the marlin of his dreams, only to lose it to a mako shark. Hemingway’s posthumously published novels have aroused controversy since publishers overrode Hemingway’s decision not to publish them, particularly since they lack Hemingway’s legendary skill at editing and revising his own work. Set in Paris, Bimini, and Cuba, Islands in the Stream features Thomas Hudson, a painter, and includes such autobiographical details as Hemingway’s antisubmarine searches on his yacht, Pilar, during World War II. The Garden of Eden (1987) depicts the sexual experimentation, androgyny, and gender crossings of David and Catherine Bourne, a couple who, like the young Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, live for a time on Paris’s rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Much less controversial was the publication of Hemingway’s A MOVEABLE FEAST (1964), a fictionalized memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s. Several of Hemingway’s works have been adapted for motion pictures, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, screenplay by Dudley Nichols, starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman for Paramount in 1943; The Sun Also Rises, screenplay by Peter Viertel, starring Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer, and Errol Flynn, for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1956; A Farewell to Arms, screenplay by Ben Hecht, starring Rock Hudson and

Jennifer Jones, for the Selznick Co. in 1957; and The Old Man and the Sea, screenplay by Peter Viertel, starring Spencer Tracy, for Warner Brothers in 1958. To Have and Have Not, screenplay by Jules Furthman, starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in her debut role in 1944. Ernest Hemingway died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scribner, 1950. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 1940. The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribner, 1986. In Our Time. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Revised edition, New York: Scribner, 1930. Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribner, 1970. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1952. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926. Published as Fiesta. London: Cape, 1927. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner, 1937.

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Jackson J. Benson, eds. Hemingway in Our Time. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1974. Baker, Carlos, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961. New York: Scribner, 1981. ———. Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story. New York: Scribner, 1969. ———. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952. Beegel, Susan F. Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1988. Bellavance-Johnson, Marsha. Ernest Hemingway in Idaho: A Guide. Ketchum, Idaho: Computer Lab., 1997. Benson, Jackson J. Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. ———, ed. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. ———, ed. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Brian, Denis. The True Gen: An Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who Knew Him. New York: Grove, 1988. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST 587

———, ed. Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. ———, ed. The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. New York: Scribner, 1996. ———. Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994. Burwell, Rose Marie. Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Comley, Nancy R. Hemingway’s Genders: Rereading the Hemingway Text. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. de Koster, Katie. Readings on Ernest Hemingway. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Donaldson, Scott. By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Viking, 1977. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Eby, Carl P. Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Fleming, Robert E. The Face in the Mirror: Hemingway’s Writers. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Fuentes, Norberto. Hemingway in Cuba. Translated by Consuelo Corwin. Secaucus, N.J.: Stuart, 1984. Griffin, Peter. Along with Youth: Hemingway, the Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Hardy, Richard E., and John G. Cull. Hemingway: A Psychological Portrait. New York: Irvington Publishers/Banner Books, 1977. Hemingway, Gregory H. Papa: A Personal Memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Hemingway, Leicester. My Brother, Ernest Hemingway. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1961. Hemingway, Mary Welsh. How It Was. New York: Knopf, 1976. Hotchner, A. E. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir. New York: Random House, 1966. ———. Hemingway and His World. New York: Vendome, 1989. Josephs, Allen. For Whom the Bell Tolls: Ernest Hemingway’s Undiscovered Country. New York: Macmillan International, 1994. Kennedy, J. Gerald, and Jackson R. Bryer. French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Kert, Bernice. The Hemingway Women. New York: Norton, 1983.

Larson, Kelli A. Ernest Hemingway: A Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990. Leff, Leonard J. Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners and the Making of American Celebrity Culture. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. Lynn, Kenneth Schuyler. Hemingway. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. ———. Hemingway. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Mandel, Miriam B. Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1995. McDaniel, Melissa. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Chelsea House, 1996. Mellow, James R. Hemingway: A Life without Consequences. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Meyers, Jeffrey. Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1985. ———, ed. Hemingway: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Miller, Madelaine Hemingway. Ernie: Hemingway’s Sister “Sunny” Remembers. New York: Crown, 1975. Monteiro, George. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. New York: Macmillan International, 1994. Montgomery, Constance Cappel. Hemingway in Michigan. New York: Fleet, 1966. Nagel, Jems, ed. Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. ———, ed. Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Oldsey, Bernard. Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. Reynolds, Michael S. Hemingway’s First War: The Making of “A Farewell to Arms.” Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976. ———. Hemingway: The Paris Years. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1989. ———. Hemingway. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. Hemingway: The 1930s. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. The Young Hemingway. New York: Norton, 1998. ———. Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Norton, 1999. ———. Hemingway: The Final Years. New York: Norton, 1999. ———. Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. ———. Hemingway: The Homecoming. New York: Norton, 1999. Rosen, Kenneth Mark, ed. Hemingway Repossessed. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994.

588 HENDERSON THE RAIN KING

Rovit, Earl, and Gerry Brenner. Ernest Hemingway. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Sanford, Marcelline Hemingway. At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait. Boston: Atlantic/Little, Brown, 1962. Tessitore, John. The Hunt and the Feast: A Life of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Franklin Watts, 1996. Von Kurowsky, Agnes. Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky. Edited by Henry Serrano Villard and James Nagel. New York: Hyperion, 1996. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. Waldhorn, Arthur. A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972. Yannuzzi, Della A. Ernest Hemingway: Writer and Adventurer. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1998.

OTHER The Hemingway Research Center. Available online. URL: http:// www.lostgeneration.com/hrc.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. Ernest Hemingway. Available online. URL: http://www.ernest. hemingway.com/. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HENDERSON THE RAIN KING SAUL BELLOW (1959) Saul BELLOW’s fifth and least-discussed novel, Henderson the Rain King (Michelson, 309) successfully combines the drama of an adventure tale, the emotional maturing and development of the protagonist typical of the bildungsroman, and the comical, often unreliable narration of a roguish trickster typical of a picaresque novel. Henderson the Rain King features 55-year-old narrator Eugene Henderson, a man of gargantuan proportions and a protagonist who, as with so many of Bellow’s fictional heroes, is ridden by self-doubt and a sense of spiritual isolation. His eccentric performances are equal to his egocentric worldview—but he is not entirely devoid of introspection. Eugene Henderson is a self-important, wealthy (“three million dollars after taxes”), violent-tempered, East Coast American, an individual who lives in constant struggle with his wives, his daughter, his neighbors, and himself—and is as lost in his own life as he is in the world. With a voice in his heart saying “I want, I want, I want!” Henderson eventually takes a trip to Africa, where a series

of surreal and vaudeville adventures with two tribes see him become (temporarily) a rain king, even as he grows spiritually and develops a better sense and perspective of his place in the world. Henderson’s comically unfocused narrative starts out with a brief overview of his life before his African journey—his two marriages, his pig farming, and his daughter’s kidnapping of a baby. The disorderliness of his narration mirrors his inability to make sense of things, to “read” his own life. What starts out as an attempt to explain his reasons for going to Africa turns into the story of his troubled life, until eventually and abruptly he concludes: “Is it any wonder I had to go to Africa?” Henderson the Rain King parodies the grand tradition of the African adventure novel. Upon arriving in Cairo, Henderson finds a loyal companion to accompany him to an undisclosed remote area of East Africa. There he encounters local tribes, the Arnewi and the Wariri, and (with some awareness of his ineptness) performs as the proverbial elephant in the porcelain shop. In one supposedly helpful gesture, he destroys the Arnewi’s water supply, before hitting the road with his faithful servant. Bellow’s Africa is a largely imaginary, even “metaphysical” Africa (Rodrigues, 242). Malindi is an existing Kenyan city, but neither the Arnewi nor the Wariri are real people, and the artificiality seems to be reinforced by the fact that the novel is set in the immediate pre-independence period of the continent and yet there is no sense of a colonial presence. In fact, King Dahfu of the Wariri greets Henderson with the unlikely words: “You’re my first civilized visitor” (156). The Africans in Henderson the Rain King are exotic beings— not unlike Rousseau’s “noble savages”—who perform strange customs but seem to possess the secret of life, which Henderson is so eager to attain. Bellow, who studied anthropology and sociology, has, despite his reliance on stereotypes, created an Africa in which the people live complex and purposeful lives far apart from Western influence. It is, after all, the bewildered Eugene Henderson who is looking for enlightenment from the Africans, not vice versa. He is a “man who goes to Africa to learn how to live in America” (Bancroft, 77), and in order to do so, Henderson immerses

HERLAND 589

himself entirely into a culture utterly foreign to him. In many ways he repeats a Conradian journey into the (mythical) interior, but where Marlow found horror, Henderson found wisdom. It has often been noted how Bellow’s novels are more interested in the journey and the transitions of their male protagonists and how small a role women play in his writings and in the lives of his heroes. In contrast to this, in Henderson, Africa itself seems to be strongly feminized: There are the female rulers of the Arnewi, Queen Willatale and her sister Mtalba, who Henderson suspects possess what he calls “the cipher” (79), a piece of invaluable knowledge about life itself. Moreover, the Watali possess Mummah, the goddess of clouds (a statue of whom Henderson needs to move in order to become the rain king), and then there is Atti, the lioness, and the animal that teaches Henderson to face his fear. Arguably, to progress, Henderson’s masculinity in crisis needs to incorporate this female knowledge he finds in Africa. His investigations reveal a new understanding of being, one as old as the human soul: He recognizes that “I want, I want, I want!” should really have been “she wants, he wants, they want” (286) all along. This element of Henderson’s development, through his contact with Africa, relies somewhat clumsily on an overworked binary opposition between men and culture on the one hand and women and nature on the other. With Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976 “for the human understanding and subtle analysis of contemporary culture that are combined in his work,” has also created an intertextual tour de force through Western bourgeois culture: There are, among others, quotations of Shelley’s poetry (77), Handel’s Messiah (84), and Whitman’s “The Mystic Trumpeter” (160), as well as constant allusions to the Old Testament: the burning bush (48) and the Prophecy of Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar (229). Henderson is a complex work that investigates the status of the conditio humana that links anthropological themes with contemporary struggles to understand a person’s individuality in the world, or “a passionately serious study of the modern identity” (Michelson, 311). But if the outcome of Henderson’s journey is

serious, the framing is playful. As Henderson explains to King Dahfu: “If I hadn’t come to Africa my only other choice would have been to stay in bed” (188).

SOURCES Andreu-Beso, Jose Vicente. “Discourse and Gender in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King,” Saul Bellow Journal 15, no. 1 (1997): 1–13. Bancroft, Michael. “Recommended: Saul Bellow,” English Journal 73, no. 4 (April 1984): 77–78. Bellow, Saul. Henderson the Rain King. New York: Viking, 1959. Bradbury, Malcolm. Saul Bellow. Contemporary Writers. London: Methuen, 1982. Byatt, A. S. “ ‘The Omnipotence of Thought’: Frazer, Freud and Post-Modernist Fiction.” In Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence, edited by Robert Frazer, 270–308. London: Macmillan, 1990. Clayton, John J. Saul Bellow: In Defense of Man. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968; 2nd ed., 1979. Hale, Thomas A. “Africa and the West: Close Encounters of a Literary Kind,” Comparative Literature Studies 20, no. 3 (1983): 261–275. Hassan, Ihab Habib. “The Spirit of Quest in Contemporary American Letters,” Michigan Quarterly Review 27 (Winter 1988): 17–37. Lamont, Daniel. “ ‘A Dark and Empty Continent’: The Representation of Africa in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King,” Saul Bellow Journal 16, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 129–149. Michelson, Bruce. “The Idea of Henderson,” Twentieth Century Literature 27, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 309–324. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. “Bellow’s Africa,” American Literature 43, no. 2 (May 1971): 242–256. Saul Bellow. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Jacobia Dahm

HERLAND CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1979) Charlotte Perkins GILMAN’s novel Herland presents a “feminist utopia,” in which Gilman counters a masculine tradition of writing that had long been defined through patriarchy and a functioning hierarchical system that maintained order. While many critics have examined Herland strictly in terms of feminist critical theory—for example, drawing upon the work of Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice as a lens through which to

590 HERLAND

see the novel—others have stressed Gilman’s destabilization of gender and rejection of exaggerated notions of learned or biological sexual difference by deconstructing the binary opposition of male/female. Gilman’s work is closely tied to her political views and ideas of social reform, beliefs she directly expresses in her nonfiction literature such as Women and Economics, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and The Home: Its Work and Influence and emphasizes what Jennifer Hudak claims is Gilman’s interest in defining women in terms of their humanness, rather than their “feminine” aspects. Yet by redefining traditional gender roles, Herland investigates problematic characteristics of American society in the early part of the 20th century by presenting her readers with an alternative vision of a perfect society. Gilman wrote Herland in 1915, the year that the text first appeared in print, serialized in the author’s magazine The Forerunner; yet the parts of the novel would not be published as a complete book until 1979 (Doskow, 52). The narrative opens with the adventure of three men who are in search of an all-female country that they refer to as “Herland,” with the narrative voice assuming the perspective of Van (short for “Vandyke”). The men—Van, a rational sociologist with democratic ideals; Jeff, a romantic botanist/physician who idealizes women with an old-fashioned sense of the feminine; and Terry, a wealthy, womanizing “man’s man” (Hudak’s term) (461) who sees women only in terms of their sexual appeal or lack thereof—fear that they will never return from Herland, as no previous explorer ever has. Carol Farley Kessler suggests that Gilman knowingly drew upon the myth of an Amazonian female society and from the belief in psychology that men fear the power of women embodied by their mothers. Gilman strikingly presents three very different types of men, whose masculinity varies in scale, and performs a social experiment by transplanting these men into an all-female society, for what the men find in fact is society strictly defined by and ordered through the vocation of motherhood. The society that Van, Jeff, and Terry discover is wholly made up of mothers, with women who appear neither feminine nor masculine and who view child

rearing as a responsibility shared by all. The land—the inhabitants’ name for which, Kessler interestingly notes, is never actually given, with the novel taking its name from one of three offered by Terry (“Feminisia,” “Ladyland,” and “Herland”)—became transformed when a volcanic eruption, two thousand years before the time of the novel, created a barrier that prevented an outlet to the sea and wiped out a large number of the male population; the rest would later perish during a slave uprising that then became resolved by angry virginal women who restored peace. With the loss of the male population, the group of remaining women would adapt to their new environment, creating a new race able to reproduce through parthenogenesis. In this new culture, women share everything and take on the responsibility of motherhood, with each woman earning the right to bear one child if found to be fit. Motherhood becomes a privilege, not a right, given to those who succeed in embodying the society’s ideals. The only roles for women that become differentiated from that of the citizen mother include Over Mothers, who are granted the reward of a second child due to great wisdom; Temple Mothers; and the figure head of the whole society, called the “Land Mother.” Beyond this, Gilman’s utopia lacks the hierarchal social structure common within the genre of utopian literature, largely dominated by men. The emphasis Gilman places on the role of motherhood, strictly an occupation contained within the domestic sphere of the home in patriarchal societies, demonstrates the writer’s political views in the vision of an ideal, matriarchal society that foregrounds motherhood as a universal occupation, which serves the collective wellness of society as a whole. By positing three nonnative men within this new culture, Gilman critiques the society that has produced individuals who cannot comprehend how a society could function without competition as a basis for existence—showing how social applications of Darwinian principles, so popular within patriarchal capitalistic societies, fail to find relevance within Herland. By the novel’s end, two of the three men marry Herlanders and the beginning of heterosexual coupling is implied, a move that Hudak suggests is directly related

HERMIONE 591

to Gilman’s overarching argument that strategies for attaining a utopian society explored in her novel can find practical applications within a society comprised of both men and women. This is the novel’s great contribution and pertinent critique of contemporary modern society, in a new landscape forever changed by the effects of World War I. Gilman reveals one way to find peace and harmony in society—through women and their roles as mothers in society: “You see, we recognize in our human motherhood, a great tender limitless uplifting force—patience and wisdom and all subtlety of delicate method.”

SOURCES De Simone, Deborah M. “Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Educational Reform.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, edited by Jill Rudd and Val Gough, 127–147. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Doskow, Minna. “Herland: Utopic in a Different Voice.” In Politics, Gender, and the Arts: Women, the Arts, and Society, edited by Ronald Dotterer and Susan Bowers, 52–63. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1992. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. New York: Pantheon, 1979. Hudak, Jennifer. “The Social Inventor: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the (Re)Production of Perfection,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 32, no. 4 (June 2003): 455–477. Kessler, Carol Farley. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995. Sharon Kehl Califano

HERMIONE H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (written 1927; published 1981) HERmione is a posthumously published autobiographical novel describing, in often rhapsodic prose, the overwrought thoughts and feelings of a young woman on the verge of discovering her vocation as a poet. A welter of heightened moments, rather than a sustained plot, concern her intimate relationships with an inspiring yet intimidating, established poet, George Lowndes (a fictive version of Ezra Pound) and a bisexual woman, Fayne Rabb (Frances Josepha Gregg), who functions as a kind of muse. As the typography signals, HERmione is a narra-

tive about identity—about splits in identity, identities contained within identities, and ultimately about a dominant, primordial self or archetype of feminine identity that eventually calls the woman to Her vocation. Hermione Gart feels herself an awkward failure in the eyes of her parents (having flunked out of college), divided between two worlds and unable to live in either in a sustained way. She is split between the world of commonplace particularities and the world of abstractions, which, during moments of exaltation, she registers “behind” or “in” everyday things and situations: “the thing back of the thing was the thing that mattered” (198). Hermione identifies the realm of abstraction, if not in strictly Platonic terms, certainly in terms of Greek antiquity, which was to play a profound role in H. D.’s subsequent poetry. She also identifies it with wakefulness. But the moments that reveal the abstract paradigm of antiquity abiding in or behind the commonplace all too quickly subside, too easily pass away, however much she tries to remain faithful to her vision: we are here, always and always, we fall, we wallow in mire and filth of war time, we are stressed in unhappy circumstance, human and dark browed, our very sweat remains witness to our fidelity . . . I have been faithful. . . . feeling the moment was about to pass into all moments, the great majority of moments that are dead moments. . . . lilac had made exact pattern, the thing inhaled into her nostrils clarified, simplified so that the triangle of heavy starched surfaces and the corresponding triangle of darkly underlined shadow in the stiff front of Amy Hamshem’s apron, meant triangle and perfect surface of some Delphic portico . . . It was important to remember the steam and hiss of the radiator that had kept on wakening Her. . . . This was the moment that should have been prolonged to eternity . . . forgotten.” (214) For the budding imagist, the incandescence of vision is exactitude of perception (“swift thought that so exactly saw things” [238]). This visionary exactitude is played off against the incarceration that is vagueness and sleep (215). Indeed, a moment perceived with exacti-

592 HERMIONE

tude might save Her from the abyss: “I will draw back tenuous antennae of delirium. . . . Her will be quite sane” (216). Yet sleep is not diametrically opposed to the idea of revelation, since vision is conceived as a dream within life’s dream. The binary opposition between visionary exactitude and somnolent vagueness is also presented in terms of two choices for Hermione: a false choice between Europe (the audacity of art) and America (conformism) and a more legitimate choice between romantic love for a dominating male who provokes Her and love for a woman, who is Her’s prophetess and suppliant. The ambiguous role that Fayne Rabb plays in Hermione’s life is, quite characteristically, alwaysalready present in her name, just as Her’s relation to Hermione is perhaps best understood in terms of the “occult” idea that “people are in names, names are in people” and that to know the occult name is to possess and be able to enlist that person in one’s struggle or quest. The name “Fayne” contains both fain, to be willing or to prefer (as in, to be willing to be different), and feign, to pretend (as in, to pretend to have strong feelings or to pretend to be unique). The nature or degree of Fayne’s feelings for Hermione aside, she most certainly encourages Hermione’s perhaps delusional intimation that she (Hermione) has a unique consciousness. The mystery of identity and the mystery of names can both be registered in the exchange or interpenetration of identity between Her and Fayne: “now I know her. I know her. Her. I am Her. She is Her. Knowing her, I know Her. She is some amplification of myself like amoeba giving birth, by breaking off, to amoeba. I am a sort of mother, a sort of sister to Her. ‘O sister my sister O fleet sweet swallow’ ” (158). This rather baffling apostrophe is one of the text’s recurring allusions to the British poet Algernon Swinburne’s Edwardian version of the Greek myth of Atalanta. There is much in the myth of Atalanta that Hermione would find relevant to her own circumstances: Atalanta’s father abandons her to the elements out of disappointment she is not a male; however, she is suckled and raised by a she-bear. She vows to remain a virgin huntress (on the model of the goddess Artemis) but loses a race, and her autonomy, to a man who, in order to win, exploits the

female’s avaricious desire for the golden apples of Aphrodite. In addition to exemplifying H.D.’s abiding love and utilization of Greek myth, the reference to the swallow-fleet Atalanta also exemplifies H.D.’s associative thinking, which is sometimes irritating, but just as often exhilarating, because it is tricky to track: “Here I found once an escaped narcissus and escaped narcissus brought back ‘Narcissa . . .’ ” (224). The fleet mental run through compressed phrasing produces a pun that conflates the very act of thinking associatively with the condition of narcissism and/or an escape from narcissism. The narcissus might also be twined with the black rose of disruptive obsession growing in the garden of Hermione Gart’s mind. At any rate, images of attempted escape abound, as do images of bounding or running through landscape, which, through association and memory, become a landscape of former experiences. Images of running after are as frequent as images of running away, and in some sense these acts are the same insofar as both constitute “reactions” to memories that persist as destinies. (Hermione’s increasingly rarefied world is kept from dissolution by memory. Swinburne’s swallow/Atalanta, with whom she identifies, is said to have forgotten she is the sister of the human race; while forgetfulness is associated with the disappearance of the world.) Hermione’s landscape is a typically modernist symbolic projection of her psyche. In one pointedly symbolic moment late in the book, Hermione comes to a standstill on the surface of a frozen brook, which begins to crack as her body moves in accord with Her desire to discover incipient growth on the other bank (“conceivably . . . just the beginning of things” [224]). She runs under a tree whose handlike branches are bound in ice (compare the recurring affirmation “I am a Tree” earlier in the book, her repeated references to herself as coldhearted, and the equally repeated claim that George could never truly love a tree). Hermione’s retreat and ambiguous safe haven is invaded by a neighbor, who also seems to save her from Her fantastical impulses, since, as a symbol of “the whole scheme of things,” he causes her to affirm, “If once you let go, give in to everybody, things come right” (227).

HERR, MICHAEL 593

Hermione rejects George, partly because he judges Fayne an insane, theatrical poseur, and partly because his American love of clowning punctures her illusion that she is an ethereal being of antiquity. She comes to repudiate the fact that she had wanted him “to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophil” (63). The book ends on a note of ambiguity that might reflect ambivalence—indicating that Hermione has yet to find, and keep, Her-self. Hermione seems acquiescent to the demands of others, yet the timeless Her that is yet to be seems determined to leave the past behind. Hermione seems determined to stop hurting her mother and others with her eccentricity and frenzied overreactions. She seems ready to embrace all practicalities—to be “at one with herself, with the world, with all outer circumstance.” However, she is informed that Fayne has arrived and is at that moment waiting in “your little workroom” (234). Her, it is implied, cannot so easily elude the destiny inherent in desires. Or in the magic of her name insofar as Hermione, the namesake of the heroine of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale remains ever fond of “leaving her wavering hieroglyph” on the “white parchment” of the snow (224) and shows no sign of having forgotten that the exact word can remove “extraneous matter . . . impassable obstruction” like a snow plow (214). Hermione derives from Hermes, the wing-footed messenger god who connects the human, divine, and nether worlds and is the protector of poets. The fact that “Her homeward feet were winged with the winged god’s sandal” (234) can be further tracked in her long poem “Helen in Egypt” (Hermione was the daughter of Helen of Troy), her memoir of Ezra Pound, End to Torment, and her very interesting account of undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis, Tribute to Freud, which explores the unconscious significance of her lifelong fascination with Greek mythology and the abstraction of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

SOURCES Friedman, Susan Stanford. Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1981.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. H. D. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1985. ———. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1974. ———. HERmione. New York: New Directions, 1981. ———. Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall/Advent. New York: New Directions, 1984. David Brottman

HERR, MICHAEL (1940– ) The journalist Michael Herr has written two novels, the first of which, Dispatches (1977), generally considered one of the best novels about the Vietnam War, assured him of a place in 20th-century American literature. It is an example of the New Journalism practiced by Tom WOLFE, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman CAPOTE, and Norman MAILER (Carpenter). Herr also wrote the screenplays for two films about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), the result of collaboration with the directors Stanley Kubrick and Gustav Hasford. His second novel, Walter Winchell: A Novel, appeared in 1990. Michael Herr was born in 1940 in Syracuse, New York; his father was a department store owner. A remarkably private man, Herr prefers not to give further details about his personal history. In 1967, as a correspondent for Esquire magazine, he went to Vietnam to observe and to write about the war and its effect on both the soldiers and the Americans at home. He used realistic dialogue and refused to soften the images of death and sometimes arbitrary violence that he believed the media usually glossed over in their dispatches. Herr’s novel drew outstanding reviews, along with inevitable comparisons to Stephen CRANE’s The RED BADGE OF COURAGE, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Joseph HELLER’s CATCH22. Adapted into a musical by Elizabeth Swados, Dispatches was performed and produced at the Martinson Hall/Public Theater in New York City on April 18, 1979. Walter Winchell: A Novel, a combination of novelistic and cinematic techniques, includes flashbacks and camera positions. Walter Winchell moves from his days in vaudeville to his life as a famous gossip columnist;

594 HERSEY, JOHN

Herr says in the preface to the novel that Americans owe their obsessions with celebrity to the likes of Walter Winchell, a man convinced of his own superiority. After more than a decade as an expatriate in London, England, Herr returned to rural upstate New York, where he lives with his wife, Valerie. His most recent book, Kubrick (2000), is a memoir about the film director Stanley Kubrick.

NOVELS Dispatches. New York: Knopf, 1977. Walter Winchell: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1990.

SOURCES Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982, 64, 141–148. Cobley, Evelyn. “Narrating the Facts of War: New Journalism in Herr’s Dispatches and Documentary Realism in First World War Novels,” Journal of Narrative Technique 16, no. 2 (1986): 97–116. Connery, Thomas B., ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992, 281–295. Gilman, Owen W., Jr. and Lorrie Smith, eds. America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. New York: Garland, 1990, 189–204. Hayles, N. Katherine, ed. Chaos and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Hellman, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, 150–160. Jones, Dale W. “The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien: Tales of Disintegration and Integration,” Canadian Review of American Studies 13, no. 3 (1982): 309–320. Limon, John. Writing after War. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994. Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1988, 146–171. Ringnalda, Donald J. Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994, 71–89. Schroeder, Eric James, ed. Vietnam, We’ve All Been There. New York: Praeger, 1992, 33–49. Van Deusen, Marshall. “The Unspeakable Language of Life and Death in Michael Herr’s Dispatches,” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (1983): 82–87.

OTHER Carpenter, Lucas. “ ‘It don’t mean nothin’: Vietnam War fiction and postmodernism.” College Literature (March 22, 2003).

HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:108786578& num=18. Accessed September 21, 2005.

HERSEY, JOHN (RICHARD) (1914–1993) John Hersey, journalist, novelist, and historian, is always associated with Hiroshima, a memorable nonfiction account of the bombing of that Japanese city during World War II; it was based on interviews with six survivors and first published in The New Yorker in 1946. As the scholar David Sanders and others point out, Hiroshima is an ancestor of what came to be known as the “new journalism,” exemplified two decades later by Truman CAPOTE’s IN COLD BLOOD (Sanders, 13). Hersey also wrote 14 novels and many short stories, and he thematically wove into his fiction the events of World War II, particularly the Holocaust, as well as social concerns like racial prejudice and inadequate education. A BELL FOR ADANO (1944), his first novel, about Americans in Italy during the war, won a Pulitzer Prize, was performed as a play on Broadway, and was adapted to the screen the following year. The Wall (1950), about the German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, was produced as a play both on Broadway and in Europe. The War Lover (1959) was made into a feature-length film, and The Child-Buyer (1960), chronicling the difficulties of a very intelligent child in a public school, was adapted for the stage in 1964. John Richard Hersey was born on June 17, 1914, in Tientsin, China, to Roscoe Hersey and Grace Baird Hersey, both American Protestant missionaries. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1936, worked as secretary to Sinclair LEWIS in 1937, and became a correspondent for both Time (1939–45) and Life (1942–45) in China, the South Pacific, the Mediterranean theater, and Moscow. A Bell for Adano, written in three weeks, was inspired by Hersey’s experiences at Licata, Italy, and his admiration for the courage of the Italian people. His main character, Major Joppolo, wants to replace the Adano bell, melted down for munitions but sorely missed by the villagers. He is based on the American ambassador, whose humanitarianism impressed Hersey. The unflattering portrait of General Marvin reflects

HERSHMAN, MARCIE 595

General George S. Patton, Jr., and the several incidents associated with Patton when he served in Italy in 1943. (He slapped a soldier and ordered the killing of a mule that blocked traffic.) Hersey’s subject matter expanded in his postwar novels. The Call (1985), for instance, set in China, details the lessons learned by David Treadup, an American engineer, as he travels up the Yangtze River in a Chinese junk and gradually abandons his ambitious plans for damming the river. The War Lover is a study of two men, one, Lieutenant Charles Boman, the copilot, loves life. His pilot, Buzz Marrow, loves war, and Sanders compares the relationship between the two men to that between Nick Carroway and Jay Gatsby of F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY (Sanders, 97). The Child Buyer follows the child prodigy Barry Rudd, who is literally bought and imprisoned by Wissey Jones and reeducated to choose the inhuman but mentally challenging process of Jones over the dull public school. White Lotus (1965), a complex treatment of racism, is told in the first person by an American girl who has been enslaved in China but who emerges into freedom. Hersey died on March 24, 1993, at Key West, Florida.

NOVELS A Bell for Adano. New York: Knopf, 1944. With a new foreword by Hersey. New York: Modern Library, 1946. The Call: An American Missionary in China. New York: Knopf, 1985. The Child Buyer. New York: Knopf, 1960. The Conspiracy. New York: Knopf, 1972. The Marmot Drive. New York: Knopf, 1953. My Petition for More Space. New York: Knopf, 1974. A Single Pebble. New York: Knopf, 1956. Too Far to Walk. New York: Knopf, 1966. Under the Eye of the Storm. New York: Knopf, 1967. The Wall. New York: Knopf, 1950. The Walnut Door. New York: Knopf, 1977. The War Lover. New York: Knopf, 1959. White Lotus. New York: Knopf, 1965.

SOURCES Huse, Nancy Lyman. John Hersey and James Agee: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Huse, Nancy Lyman. The Survival Tales of John Hersey. New York: Whitston, 1983.

Sanders, David. John Hersey. Boston: Twayne, 1967. ———. John Hersey Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

HERSHMAN, MARCIE (1951– )

Marcie Hershman wrote the award-winning Tales of the Master Race, published in 1991; she lost many family members in the Holocaust, including a great-grandmother who died in Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi extermination camp. This novel comprises interlocking short stories, but, as the title implies, Hershman uses the perspective of the “master race” rather than that of the Holocaust victims. Haunted, she says, by the voices of the past, she writes of the “Bavarian town” that, between 1939 and 1943, “had forever silenced more than half our family” (Hershman, 155). Tales of the Master Race exemplifies Hershman’s use of irony and understatement. By demonstrating the blindness and rationalization of the inhabitants of the fictional German city of Kreiswald, Hershman conveys a chilling message of deliberate failure to respond to the horrors of Hitler that so insistently provide the backdrop of the stories. In her second novel, Safe in America (1995), Hershman continues to focus on the Holocaust, this time on survivors who emigrate from Czechoslovakia to Cleveland, Ohio; as the ironic title suggests, safety is not guaranteed. Here Hershman takes a bleakly pessimistic view of the world after World War II: Although Evan and Vera Eichenbaum (and their family of three generations, from the 1930s to the 1990s) live in America, they must endure the anti-Semitic jeers of children, the deaths of European relatives in death camps because immigration bureaucracy prevented their timely escape, and homegrown tragedies such as death from AIDS. Marcie Hershman was born on May 2, 1951, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Eugene Hershman, a businessman, and Phyllis Weiss Hershman. She was educated at Boston University, earning a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in 1973, and at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, earning a master’s degree in 1978. Her most recent book is the nonfiction Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures (2001), inspired by the death of her brother Robert of AIDS. Marcie Hershman

596 HERZOG

is the companion of Rebecca Blunk, an arts administrator; she lives and writes in Brookline, Massachusetts.

NOVELS Safe in America. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Tales of the Master Race. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

SOURCES Hershman, Marcie. “Living on Top.” In A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 145–155. New York: St. Martins, 1996. Needham, George. Review of Safe in America, Booklist 91, no. 18 (May 15, 1995): 1,631. Unsigned Review of Safe in America, Publishers Weekly 242, no. 14 (April 3, 1995): 45. Unsigned Review of Tales of the Master Race, Publishers Weekly 238, no. 43 (September 27, 1991): 43.

HERZOG SAUL BELLOW (1964) In his 1976 Nobel lecture, Saul BELLOW said, “We stand open to all anxieties. The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread, we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions” (Bellow, “Nobel Lecture,” par. 16). In many ways, this statement aptly describes Moses E Herzog, the main character of Herzog, the imaginatively brilliant novel that Bellow had published 12 years earlier. Not only is Herzog’s life wrought with anxiety (real and imagined) in personal and social affairs, but the novel also portrays him agonizing over philosophical and religious issues to resolve that dread. The basic plot of the story as one critic sums it is as follows: A man, Moses Herzog, spends a week and a half in feverish thought going over the breakup of his most recent marriage (his second) and all its contingent elements: betrayals, lies, affairs, child-custody problems, alimony payments, yearnings for revenge. (Wilson, 21) The dramatic force of the narrative occurs in Herzog’s head, teeming with “memory, fantasy, reflection, philosophical speculation, and most entertainingly as a series of mental letters written to the living and the dead” (Wilson, 21). One example of the many oppressive flows stirring in Herzog’s head is the thought that “if I am right, the problem of the world’s coherence,

and all responsibility for it, becomes mine” (169). Later in the novel his serial internal dialogue leads him to believe that “subjective monstrosity must be overcome, must be corrected by community, by useful duty” (239). These internal tugs between contradictory natures reveal the essences of character and meaning in Herzog. Phillip ROTH, in his introduction to the Penguin edition, characterized Herzog as Bellow’s “grandest creation” (xvi) whose protagonist is a “labyrinth of contradiction and self-division” (xv). For example, on the same page readers find two competing self-perceptions wherein Herzog “hated the humiliating comedy of heartache,” but at the same time he wonders, “What a lot of romances! Thought Herzog. One after another. Were those my real career?” (182). Herzog later seeks to clarify the value of emotion and heart when he asks himself, “And what about all the good I have in my heart—doesn’t it mean anything?” (225). Herzog’s mind battles, in a similar duplicitous fashion, over numerous intellectual insights as well. For example, he describes himself as an “emotionally handicapped intellectual” who is “resisting the argument that scientific thought has put into disorder all considerations based on value” (116). Then later in that same passage of writing to himself he thinks: Very tired of the modern form of historicism which sees in this civilization the defeat of the best hopes of Western religion and thought, what Heidegger calls the second Fall of Man into the quotidian or ordinary. No philosopher knows what the ordinary is, has not fallen into it deeply enough. The question of ordinary human experience is the principal question of these modern centuries. (117) There is no need for a reader to be versed in the variety of philosophers that Herzog thinks of or writes to because when they appear in the text, they are framed in terms of Herzog’s own mental and intellectual dilemmas. In fact, Bellow himself stated, “I was making fun of pedantry!” (Wilson, 5). These dueling vicissitudes within Herzog create joyful and tragic consequences for the character but, at the

HERZOG 597

same time, provide the reader with great delight. From the moment of the novel’s opening the tone is set for the internal agonizing, and in his Nobel lecture, Bellow went on to say that we live in an age where we must have an “ability to live with many kinds of madness” (Bellow, “Nobel Lecture,” par. 17). Ironically, the first line of the novel is: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog” (3). Bellow further argues in his lecture that, “For every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion” (Bellow, “Nobel Lecture,” par. 27). The manner in which Herzog deals with the “madness” is perhaps to reconcile the various “existences” of his own life for he is an out-of-work professor of the history of philosophy (who specialized in the romantic period), a loving father of two children from two divorces, a lover, a son, a brother, a letter writer, a victim, and a victimizer. While Bellow’s lecture spoke to the issues of anxiety, madness, and existence in broad terms, Moses Herzog contemplates all of these and more. The novel received praise when it appeared and has since garnered a legion of scholarly criticism and interpretations. When it was published, one reviewer wrote in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week that, “this novel radiates intelligence,” and that its direction moves “towards imaginative ends by virtue of a true and sharp sense of the pain that rends the human world” (Rahv, 125). Perhaps the most succinct and accurate representation of the novel’s importance comes from Porter when he wrote: Herzog remains Bellow’s best novel. Here artistic vision finds its appropriate concretions; meaning is achieved through form. Point of view is complicated and directly reflective of the emotional and intellectual condition of the protagonist. (Porter, 145) Roth likens Bellow’s “shifting, fragmented, interior monologue” (Roth, xix) to FAULKNER’s The SOUND AND THE FURY and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, except that in Herzog, Roth finds the “disjointed perception is dictated by the mental state of the central character rather than by an author’s impatience with traditional means

of narration” (Roth, xix). Naturally enough, the multiplicitous nature of the protagonist has led to many different readings and interpretations of Herzog. It has been critiqued as a novel of ideas and truth (Wilson), as a novel reflecting the restorative power of ethnic memories (Furman), as an antinihilist critique of suffering (Mannis), as the tale of a tragicomic hero (Cohen), and in many other varied ways. Nevertheless, as Roth points out, “this book of a thousand delights offers no greater delight than those letters, and no better key with which to both unlock Herzog’s remarkable intelligence and enter into the depths of his turmoil over the wreckage of his life” (Roth, xx). Herzog’s letters and the adjoining thinking processes woven around them are a masterful presentation of a consciousness engaged, and struggling, with his heart and mind. He writes (most of which he never sends) to himself, his ex-wife Madeleine and her lover—his ex-friend—Valentine Gersbach, a department store, lawyers, a psychoanalyst, fellow scholars, his girlfriends (past and present), his children, his deceased parents, his brother, Nietzsche, President Eisenhower, Heidegger, God, and many others. In addition to the delight of these letters and ideas, the language itself at times sparkles with illumination. For example, on his way to visit a lover, Bellow writes, “There is a distant garden where curious objects grow, and there, in a lovely dusk of green, the heart of Moses E. Herzog hangs like a peach” (191). Later in the novel a sense of resolve begins to overtake Herzog, which can be seen from passages such as this: He had only gentle, dotty old neighbors, Jukes and Kallikaks, rocking themselves to death on their porches, watching television, the nineteenth century quietly dying in this remote green hole. (351) Near the end, as Herzog’s brother comes to persuade him to take a break in a psychiatric hospital, Bellow reveals his protagonist’s slim but firm hold on lucidity: “He glanced away from the piano into the clear shade of the garden, and tried to become as clear as that” (360).

598 HIAASEN, CARL

Moses Herzog believes that “the human intellect is one of the great forces of the universe. It can’t safely remain unused” (338). Despite making fun of intellectualness, Bellow’s Herzog will at least compel us to use the force of our imagination to find delight in the novel and in our minds.

SOURCES Bellow, Saul. Herzog. New York: Viking, 1964. ———. “Nobel Lecture.” In Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968–1980, edited by Tore Frängsmyr and Sture Allén. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co., 1993. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “That Suffering Joker.” In Saul Bellow’s Herzog, edited by Harold Bloom, 35–62. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Furman, Andrew. “Ethnicity in Saul Bellow’s Herzog: The Importance of the Napoleon Street, Montreal, Memories,” Saul Bellow Journal 13, no. 1 (1995): 41–51. Mannis, Andrea. “Beyond the Death of God: Saul Bellow’s Critique of Suffering in Herzog,” Saul Bellow Journal 15, no. 1 (1997): 25–54. Porter, M. Gilbert. “ ‘Weirdly Tranquil’ Vision: The Point of View of Moses Herzog,” Saul Bellow Journal 8, no. 1 (1989): 3–11. Reprinted in The Critical Response to Saul Bellow, edited by Gerhard Bach. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, 20, 125–128. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Rahv, Philip. “Bellow the Brain King.” New York Herald Tribune Book Week, 20 September 1964, pp. 1, 14, 16. Reprinted in The Critical Response to Saul Bellow. Edited by Gerhard Bach, 125–128. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Roth, Phillip. Introduction: Rereading Saul Bellow, Herzog. By Saul Bellow, xv–xx. New York: Penguin, 2000. Wilson, Johnathan. Herzog: The Limits of Ideas. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

OTHER Bellow, Saul. Nobel Lecture December 12, 1976. The Nobel Foundation. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html. Accessed January 29, 2005. Mark Fabiano

HIAASEN, CARL (1953– ) Carl Hiaasen is a Miami-based native Floridian who writes fast-paced thrillers that are simultaneously satirical, terrifying,

and hilarious. As both a journalist and a novelist, Hiaasen wants to expose the corruption and greed that are behind the damage to Florida’s wilderness areas. He loves the land and in his novels the eco-terrorists are heroes and the developers the villains. He has been compared to the realists Frank NORRIS and Upton SINCLAIR, because he too is a muckraker. His darkly humorous surrealistic scenes also invite comparisons to Nathanael WEST or Malcolm Lowry. Carl Hiaasen was born on March 12, 1953, in Plantation, Florida, to K. Odel Hiaasen, a lawyer, and Patricia Moran Hiaasen. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida in 1974; his 1970 marriage to Constance Lyford, a registered nurse and attorney, ended in 1996. In 1999 he remarried. Hiaasen’s first three novels, Powder Burn (1981), Trap Line (1982), and A Death in China (1984), were coauthored with William D. Montalbano, a former editor of the Miami Herald, and, with their emphasis on murder and smuggling, followed the conventions of crime novels and revenge stories. In 1986 Hiaasen wrote Tourist Season on his own. Here private investigator Brian Keyes is an activist who throws tourists in a pool with an alligator and kidnaps the Orange Bowl Queen in an effort to stop the development of a nearby island. In one bizarre scene, the body of a corrupt politician is found with an alligator stuffed inside his mouth. This is the first of what has become Hiaasen’s trademark. Villains are punished in weird and wonderful ways: an arm chewed off by a barracuda and an impaling on a stuffed trophy fish in Skin Tight (1989); a rape by a dolphin in Native Tongue (1991); death by vultures and manta rays in Lucky You (1997); and a goring by a rhinoceros in Sick Puppy (2000). Skin Tight, considered one of Hiaasen’s best-executed novels, involves retired investigator Mick Stranahan and a missing woman who underwent plastic surgery. Strip Tease, Hiaasen’s first novel to appear on the best-seller lists, was adapted in 1996 as a motion picture starring Demi Moore and Armand Assante. With Basket Case (2002), Hiaasen garnered exceptional reviews for his well-drawn investigator, Jack Tagger. This is the first of Hiaasen’s novels to move away from ecological concerns and in which he concentrates on

HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA 599

murder and social satire. Hiaasen lives with his wife, Fenia, in Miami. His most recent novel, Skinny Dip, was published in 2004. Director Mike Nichols has acquired the film rights to that book.

Stevenson, Diane, ed. Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. ———, ed. Paradise Screwed: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen. New York: Putnam, 2001.

NOVELS

OTHER

Basket Case. New York: Knopf, 2002. A Death in China (with William D. Montalbano). New York: Atheneum, 1984. Double Whammy. New York: Putnam, 1987. Lucky You. New York: Knopf, 1997. Naked Came the Manatee (Hiaasen and others). New York: Putnam, 1996. Native Tongue. New York: Knopf, 1991. Powder Burn (with William D. Montalbano). New York: Atheneum, 1981. Sick Puppy. New York: Knopf, 2000. Skin Tight. New York: Putnam, 1989. Skinny Dip. New York: Knopf, 2004. Stormy Weather. New York: Knopf, 1995. Strip Tease. New York: Knopf, 1993. Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. New York: Ballantine, 1998. Tourist Season. New York: Putnam, 1986. Trap Line (with William D. Montalbano). New York: Atheneum, 1982.

SOURCES Brannon, Julie Sloan. “The Rules Are Different Here: South Florida Noir and the Grotesque.” In Crime Fiction and Film in the Sunshine State, edited by Steve Glassman and Maurice O’Sullivan, 47–64. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997. Dunn, Adam. “PW Talks with Carl Hiaasen,” Publishers Weekly (November 12, 2001). Huisking, Charlie. “Following in His Footsteps,” Sarasota Herald Tribune, 2 November 1997, p. 1E. Jordan, Peter. “Carl Hiaasen’s Environmental Thrillers: Crime Fiction in Search of Green Peace,” Studies in Popular Culture 13, no. 1 (1990): 61–71. Kenen, Joanne. “Carl of the Wild,” American Journalism Review 15 (October 1993). Ott, Bill. “Hiaasen’s People,” Booklist 97 (May 1, 2001): 1,600. Phillips, Dana. “Is Nature Necessary?” Raritan 13 (Winter 1994): 78–100. Silet, Charles. “Sun, Sand, and Tirades: An Interview with Carl Hiaasen,” Armchair Detective 29 (Winter 1996): 8–18.

Hiaasen, Carl. “Carl Hiaasen,” Interview by David Bowman. Salon.com (January 31, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/people////lunch/2000/01/31/hiaasen/ print.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Carl Hiaasen Website. Available online. URL: http://www. carlhiaasen.com. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HIGHSMITH, (MARY) PATRICIA (1921– 1995) Patricia Highsmith wrote highly literate crime stories and murder mysteries and was renowned for using the murder mystery to explore human complexity, the reverberations of guilt, and the concepts of good and evil. She frequently employed doppelgängers, characters who seem similar but react in very different ways to the same ideas and events, and she injected a sense of fear into the reader and a persuasive sense of madness or abnormality into a character through her understated, clinical style. Highsmith also created homosexual characters at a time when these characters usually had to convert to heterosexuality in order to create a “happy ending.” For most of her career, the reading public was far less sophisticated and tolerant about this issue than it is today, and homosexuality was still seen as an illness that needed to be cured. Highsmith, however, refused to bow to any pressure to treat her characters otherwise. Patricia Highsmith was born on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas. Her father, Jay Barnard Plangman, and her mother, Mary Coates, separated before she was born, so she lived first with her grandparents and then, from age six until she went away to college, with her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, in Greenwich Village, New York City. After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Highsmith began the writing career that would last until her death; her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), proved an immediate success and was adapted as a feature-length film directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It features two men, Charles Bruno and Guy Haines, who meet on a train and agree to kill the most despised person in the

600 HIGHSMITH, PATRICIA

other man’s life—Charles will murder Guy’s wife and Guy will murder Bruno’s father. They plan to get away scot-free since the police will know of no connection between them. Although Bruno does commit murder, Guy suffers a crise de conscience and backs away at the last minute. The sense of guilt implicit here permeates most of Highsmith’s novels. In the Ripley novels, however, beginning with The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), a charming killer remains free. (In 1957, the novel won the Mystery Writers of America Scroll and Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.) He reappears in Ripley under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley under Water (1991). Tom Ripley is, in fact, the embodiment of the amoral murderer. Urbane and opportunistic, Ripley appeared on the screen in Purple Noon, filmed by Times Film Corporation in 1961, and in The Talented Mr. Ripley by Paramount Films in 1999; Ripley’s Game was filmed first as The American Friend in 1978 and as Ripley’s Game, directed by Liliana Cavani for Fine Line Entertainment, in 2002. The Blunderer was filmed as Le Meurtrier in 1963, and then as Enough Rope by Artixo Productions in 1966; This Sweet Sickness became the French film Dites-lui que je l’aime (Tell Her That I Love Her) in 1977. Other novels in which two male characters are contrasted include Walter Stackhouse and Melchior Kimmel in The Blunderer (1954), Rydal Kenner and Chester McFarland of The Two Faces of January (1964), Sidney Bartleby and Alex of The Story-Teller (1965), and Jack Sutherland and Ralph Linderman of Found in the Street (1986). Highsmith’s second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), tells the story of the lesbian relationship between Carol and Therese; it was originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and three decades passed before it was published in 1984 as Carol, under Highsmith’s name. Highsmith’s Small g: A Summer Idyll (1995)—the “small g” is guidebook code for gay bars—set in Zurich, revolves around the murder of Rickie, a gay man infected with AIDS. Edith’s Diary (1977) explores the demeaning roles into which American society sometimes forces women. From 1963 until her death more than three decades later, Patricia Highsmith lived abroad, making her

home in England, France, Italy, and Switzerland. The French made her an officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1990. She died of lung cancer on February 4, 1995, in Locarno, Switzerland. Highsmith’s artistic and psychological contributions to the crime novel genre have ensured her a permanent niche in American literature.

NOVELS The Blunderer. New York: Coward-McCann, 1954. Published as Lament for a Lover. New York: Popular Library, 1956. The Boy Who Followed Ripley. New York: Vintage, 1993. The Cry of the Owl. New York: Harper, 1962. Deep Water. New York: Harper, 1957. A Dog’s Ransom. New York: Knopf, 1972. Edith’s Diary. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. Found in the Street. London: Heinemann, 1986; New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. A Game for the Living. New York: Harper, 1958. The Glass Cell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. Mermaids on a Golf Course. New York: Mysterious Press, 1988. The Mysterious Mr. Ripley (contains The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley under Ground, and Ripley’s Game). New York: Penguin, 1985. People Who Knock on the Door. London: Heinemann, 1983; New York: Mysterious Press, 1985. The Price of Salt (under pseudonym Claire Morgan) New York: Coward-McCann, 1952. Reprinted as Carol under the name Patricia Highsmith. Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1984. Ripley’s Game. New York: Knopf, 1974. Ripley under Ground. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970. Ripley under Water. New York: Knopf, 1991. Small g: A Summer Idyll. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. The Story-Teller. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Strangers on a Train. New York: Harper, 1950. This Sweet Sickness. New York: Harper, 1960. The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann, 1955. Those Who Walk Away. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. The Tremor of Forgery. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. The Two Faces of January. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964.

SOURCES Brophy, Brigid. Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews. New York: Holt, 1966. Harrison, Russell. Patricia Highsmith. New York: Twayne, 1997. Highsmith, Patricia, with Diana Cooper-Clark. “An interview with Patricia Highsmith,” Armchair Detective 14, no. 4 (Spring 1981): 313–320.

HIJUELOS, OSCAR 601

Hilfer, Anthony Channell. “ ‘Not Really Such a Monster’: Highsmith’s Ripley as Thriller Protagonist and Protean Man,” Midwest Quarterly 25, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 361–374. Hubly, Erlene. “A Portrait of the Artist: The Novels of Patricia Highsmith,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 1984): 115–130. Klein, Kathleen Gregory. “Patricia Highsmith.” In And Then There Were Nine . . . More Women of Mystery, edited by Jane S. Bakerman, 170–197. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Meaker, Marijane. Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s. San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003. Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper, 1972. Wilson, Andrew. Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. London: Bloomsbury, 2003.

OTHER “Patricia Highsmith.” Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/highsm.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HIJUELOS, OSCAR (1951– )

Oscar Hijuelos’s The MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE (1989) was what publishers call a breakout book. In 1990, this novel, his second, won a National Book Award nomination, a National Book Critics Circle Prize nomination, and the Pulitzer Prize. Hijuelos, son of Cuban immigrants and the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize, features realistic Cuban-American characters as they reach for the American dream but, one by one, fail to realize their full potential or to find their elusive identities. In his more recent books, Hijuelos embraces family and immigrant issues, and has emerged as the best-known contemporary Hispanic male novelist. Oscar Hijuelos was born on August 24, 1951, in New York City, to Pascual Hijuelos, a hotel worker, and Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos, a homemaker. He was educated at the City College of the City University of New York, where he studied under Donald BARTHELME and Susan Sontag (Meet the Writers) and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1975 and a master’s degree in 1976. His first novel, Our House in the Last World (1983), has been described as an immigrant novel/memoir about the Santinio family, taking them from Cuba in 1939 to the death of the father

in Spanish Harlem in 1969. Hector, the second son of Alejo and Mercedes Sorrea Santinio, is the central consciousness, caught between the Cuba he never knew and the America that his Cuban heritage prevents him from fully participating in. Hijuelos’s second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, follows Cesar and Nestor Castillo in the late 1940s as they emigrate from Cuba to New York’s Spanish Harlem; their overnight success with a mambo band earns them a place on the I Love Lucy show, starring Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. It focuses on Cesar, the picaresque hero, who seems happier and more successful than his morose brother Nestor. By the end of the novel Cesar, who has failed to gain happiness and success, merges metaphorically with his now dead brother, and plays out his last days in a rundown hotel. The novel was adapted as the film The Mambo Kings in 1992, starring Armand Assante as Cesar and Antonio Banderas as Nestor. With The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (1993), Hijuelos gave voice to multiple female narrators. As critics have noted, the women are sisters of Emilio rather than independent women in their own right, but he earned praise, in any case, for his insightful depiction of their feelings, particularly those of Margarita, a product of 20th-century feminism. In Empress of the Splendid Season (1999), the viewpoint is that of a cleaning woman for a wealthy household. His most recent novel, A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good) (2002), offers a lyrical melody for Israel Levis, the melancholy songwriter protagonist who arrives in Cuba via Paris, the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, and Spain. The novel offers Levis’s poignant memories of the singer Rita Valladares evoked through the simple rumba melody he wrote in the 1920s. Hijuelos writes in Hempstead, New York, and is a professor of English at Hofstra University, where he has taught since 1984.

NOVELS Empress of the Splendid Season. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.

602 HILLERMAN, TONY

Mr. Ives’ Christmas. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Our House in the Last World. New York: Persia Books, 1983. A Simple Habana Melody (From When the World Was Good). New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

SOURCES Coates, Joseph. “When Cuban Musicians Dream the American Dream,” Chicago Tribune Books, 13 August 1989, pp. 6–7. Fein, Esther B. “Oscar Hijuelos’s Unease, Worldly and Other,” New York Times, 1 April 1993, p. B2. Fernández, Enrique. “Exilados on Main Street,” Village Voice, 1 May 1990, pp. 85–86. Firmat, Gustavo Pérez. “Rum, Rump, and Rumba: Cuban Contexts for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” Dispositio, no. 41 (1991): 75–86. Shirley, Paula W. “Reading Desi Arnaz in The Mambo Kings Play Songs Of Love,” MELUS 20, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 69–78. Stavans, Ilán. “Oscar Hijuelos, novelista,” Revista Iberoamericana, nos. 155–156 (April–September 1991): 673–677.

OTHER “Meet the Writers: Oscar Hijuelos.” Barnes & Noble.com. Available online. URL: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ writers/writer.asp?cid=281816. Accessed September 12, 2005. “Oscar Hijuelos.” The Connection. Available online. URL: http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2002/06/20020612_ b_main.asp. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HILLERMAN, TONY (ANTHONY G.) (1925– ) Tony Hillerman, professor emeritus of journalism and author of nearly 20 crime fiction novels, has earned his reputation largely through his depictions of Native American characters and culture in his native Southwest. His detectives, Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, right wrongs and solve murders on the “res,” the 16-million-acre Navajo reservation that extends into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. “I know what I write about seems exotic to a lot of people but not for me,” says Hillerman. “The first time I pulled up to an old trading post and saw a few elderly Navajos sitting on a bench in the shade, I felt right at home. It was like a time warp taking me back to Sacred Heart,” the small Catholic community in Oklahoma where he spent his boyhood (Zibart). One of the most successful crime fiction writers in the United States, Hillerman has been honored by the Navajo, whose Tribal Council in 1987

named him “Friend of the Navajo” for his careful research and accurate depictions. He is also praised by critics and readers alike for the way he blends the Western novel with the detective or murder mystery. He is also the recipient of numerous literary awards, among them an Edgar Allen Poe Award for Dance Hall of the Dead (1973) and the Grand Master title from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2002 and 2003, two of his novels, Skinwalkers (1986) and Coyote Waits (1990), were adapted for and aired on the Public Broadcasting Service TV series American Mystery! Tony Hillerman was born on May 27, 1925, in rural Sacred Heart, Oklahoma, to August Alfred Hillerman and Lucy Grove Hillerman, farmers who also owned a general store. After attending a boarding school for Potawatomie Indian girls, an experience that Hillerman and numerous Hillerman scholars credit with contributing to his understanding of gender, class, and cultural differences, he matriculated at Oklahoma State University until he joined the army in 1943. While serving as a mortar gunner with the 103rd Infantry Division, Hillerman was severely wounded at Alsace, France, and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart before his discharge in 1945. He completed a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1946 from the University of Oklahoma, married Marie Unzner in 1948, and worked for 20 years as a journalist before earning a master’s degree in 1965, joining the faculty at the University of New Mexico, and publishing his first Navaho Tribal Police novel, The Blessing Way, in 1970. In this novel Hillerman introduces police officer Joe Leaphorn, who gives permission to former college roommate and anthropologist Bergen McKee to investigate reports of witchcraft on the Big Reservation. While merging the two men’s experiences with witchcraft, espionage, and murder, Hillerman addresses concerns that would become hallmarks of his fiction: greed and materialism contrasted with traditional Navajo values, the significance of family and ancestry, and the inevitable loss of some of the old Navajo ways, both social and spiritual (Erisman, 6). Five years later, in PEOPLE OF DARKNESS (1980), Hillerman added his second protagonist, Jim Chee, another Tribal Police officer but one less sophisticated than Leaphorn, who has a master’s degree from Arizona State

HILLERMAN, TONY 603

University. After using Chee in two more novels, The Dark Wind (1982) and The Ghostway (1984), Hillerman decided to buy back the rights to Joe Leaphorn, which he had sold to television, and paired the two detectives in Skinwalkers. The title refers to the Navajo word for “ghosts.” The novel won a Golden Spur Award. By developing the two characters in depth, Hillerman uses them as foils, contrasting Leaphorn—rational, methodical, and cognizant of Anglo ways of thinking—against Chee, impulsive, intuitive, and more open to Navajo rites and traditions. As Hillerman scholar John Reilly notes, Hillerman “has worked diligently to exploit character differences between Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. They now represent poles of response among universityeducated Navajos to the mingling of experience from the inner world of indigenous people’s beliefs,” contrasting their own culture with the life learned in the Anglo world of white schools and “their roles as tribal police officers” (Reilly). Skinwalkers, which won an Anthony Award, was Hillerman’s first widely read novel, selling over 100,000 copies in paperback. A Thief of Time (1988) also placed him squarely on the best-seller lists. As the series continues to develop, Leaphorn must cope with his grief over the loss of his wife, Emma, who dies of complications resulting from surgery on a brain tumor, and Chee becomes romantically interested in Janet Pete, a tribal lawyer. The sense of place, of the desert Southwest, looms large in all the novels, even the ones that take Chee and Leaphorn away from the reservation. Now retired from the University of New Mexico, where he taught journalism until 1985, Hillerman writes full time at his home in Albuquerque. Since the appearance of his award-winning Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir in 2001, Hillerman, nearly 80, has published more Chee and Leaphorn novels: The Wailing Wind in 2002, The Sinister Pig in 2003, Skeleton Man in 2004, and The Shape Shifter in 2006. Despite his continuing popularity, Hillerman remains modest. “I never intended to write ‘The Great American Novel,’ ” he said in an interview with the journalist Bob Hoover. “I wanted to write books that told stories” (Hoover). In addition, he has also written numerous nonfiction books and articles on the American Southwest and on Native American history and culture.

NOVELS The Blessing Way. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. The Boy Who Made Dragonfly: A Zuni Myth: Retold by Tony Hillerman. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Coyote Waits. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. Dance Hall of the Dead. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. The Dark Wind. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. The Fallen Man. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Finding Moon. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. The First Eagle. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. The Fly on the Wall. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. The Ghostway. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. Hunting Badger. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Listening Woman. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. People of Darkness. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Sacred Clowns. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. The Shape Shifter. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. The Sinister Pig. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Skeleton Man. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Skinwalkers. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. Talking God. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. A Thief of Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. The Wailing Wind. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

SOURCES Bakerman, Jane S. “Joe Leaphorn and the Navajo Way: Tony Hillerman’s Indian Detective Fiction,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 2, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 1981): 9–16. ———. “Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.” In Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen, edited by Earl F. Bargainnier and George N. Dove, 98–112. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. Bernell, Sue, and Karni Michaela. “Tony Hillerman.” In This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, 41–51. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Breen, Jon L. “Interview with Tony Hillerman.” In The Tony Hillerman Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life and Work, edited by Martin Greenberg, 51–70. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Bulow, Ernie. Words, Weather, and Wolfman: Conversations with Tony Hillerman. Gallup, N.M.: Southwesterner Books, 1989. Republished in Talking Mysteries: A Conversation with Tony Hillerman. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991, 46–91. Erisman, Fred. Tony Hillerman. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1989.

604 HIMES, CHESTER B.

Grape, Jan. “Tony Hillerman.” In Speaking Of Murder: Interviews with the Masters of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 1998. Greenberg, Martin, ed. The Tony Hillerman Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to His Life and Work. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Hillerman, Tony. Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. ———, and Ron Hamm. “Ron Hamm Interview with Tony Hillerman for Clues,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 21, no.2 (Fall-Winter 2000): 27–35. ———, and Ernie Bulow. Talking Mysteries: A Conversation with Tony Hillerman. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. ———, and others. The Perfect Murder: Five Great Mystery Writers Create the Perfect Crime. New York: Harper Prism, 1991. Quirk, Tom. “Justice on the Reservation,” Armchair Detective 18, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 364–366, 368–370. Reilly, John M. Tony Hillerman: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Sobol, John. Tony Hillerman: A Public Life. Toronto, Canada: ECW Press, 1994.

OTHER “An Interview with Tony Hillerman.” PBS.org Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/american/ navajoland/hillerman_intv.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. The Unofficial Tony Hillerman Homepage. Available online. URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~smueller/. Accessed September 12, 2005. “Tony Hillerman: The Oklahoma Connection.” Oklahoma Authors, Oklahoma State Department of Education, Instructional Technology, Telecommunications Section. Available online. URL: http://title3.sde.state.ok.us/literatureanda/tony.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005. Zibart, Rosemary. “Sitting Down and Setting Out With Tony Hillerman.” First Person Book Page (September 1998). Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/ 9809bp/tony_hillerman.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Hoover, Bob. “No Mystery to Tony Hillerman’s Success As a Best-Selling Author.” PG Online: The Interactive Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (October 31, 1998). Available online. URL: http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/19981031hiller3.asp. Accessed September 12, 2005.

University of New Mexico Writing the Southwest. Available online. URL: http://www.unm.edu/~wrtgsw/hillerman. html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Reilly, John M. “Tony Hillerman and the Detective Fiction Genre—(continued).” Tony Hillerman. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers Online. Greenwood Electronic Media, Greenwood Press, 2002. Available online by subscription. URL: http://www.gem.greenwood.com. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HIMES, CHESTER B. (1909–1984)

Although Chester B. Himes earned an international reputation for his detective novels written primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, American readers were slower than Europeans to appreciate his work. Two of his novels, however, were made into feature-length American films. And until recently, many considered him predominantly a writer of protest fiction. Apart from the 10 detective novels he published, Himes wrote novels in the naturalistic tradition, presenting characters doomed because of poverty, race, or class. All his novels, regardless of genre, demonstrate the need for society to reexamine itself and make needed changes. The End of the Primitive (1956), considered his best naturalistic novel, focuses on attitudes toward interracial sex, and his best-known detective novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), presents an interracial love affair amid shipyard labor unrest in Los Angeles during World War II. Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909, to Estelle Bomar Himes, a teacher, and Joseph Sandy Himes, a blacksmith. Reared in Saint Louis, Missouri, and Cleveland, Ohio, Himes attended Ohio State University but was dismissed because of a prank. At age 19 he was jailed for more than seven years on a conviction of armed robbery. After writing and publishing his first stories from prison, he was released in 1936 and married Jean Johnson. He lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City until 1953, when he moved to France. There, at the advice of his French publisher, he began to write detective novels. They reflected the restlessness that characterized Himes’s own life and the violence that he believed blacks would need to embrace in their struggle for equality. His detective novels take place during the important events of the civil rights era; the detectives Coffin

HINOJOSA-SMITH, ROLANDO 605

(“Frankenstein”) Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones are the main police protagonists. All contain violence, sex, police brutality, and excruciating poverty—and some contain humor. The 10 novels, many of which are set in New York City’s crime-plagued Harlem, include For Love of Imabelle (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959), The Big Gold Dream (1960), All Shot Up (1960), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), The Heat’s On (1966), Run, Man, Run (1966), Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), and Plan B (1966). According to the scholar Gilbert H. Muller, these detective novels “present a panorama of Harlem as the center of absurdity for black Americans in the modern world” (Muller, 1). These hard-boiled detective fictions are comparable to those of other writers in the genre, e.g., Dashiell HAMMETT and Raymond CHANDLER, but Himes also uses these novels to underscore his social and political concerns. In 17 novels, more than 60 short stories, and two autobiographical works, as critic Michael Marsh points out, Himes revealed “a unique knowledge of the dark side of human nature and the corrupting influence of racism” (Marsh). Chester B. Himes died on November 12, 1984, of Parkinson’s disease, in Benissa, Spain. In 1972, Black World published a special issue containing interviews with Himes.

NOVELS All Shot Up. New York: Avon, 1960. The Big Gold Dream. New York: Avon, 1960. Blind Man with a Pistol. New York: William Morrow, 1969. A Case of Rape. New York: Targ, 1980. Cast the First Stone. New York: Coward-McCann, 1952. Cotton Comes to Harlem. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1965. The Crazy Kill. New York: Avon, 1959. The End of the Primitive. New York: New American Library, 1956. For Love of Imabelle. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1957. Revised as A Rage in Harlem. New York: Avon, 1965. The Heat’s On. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1966. If He Hollers Let Him Go. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1945. Lonely Crusade. New York: Knopf, 1947. Pink Toes. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1965. Plan B. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1966. The Real Cool Killers. New York: Avon, 1959. Run, Man, Run. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1966. The Third Generation. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1954.

SOURCES Fabre, Michel, and Robert E. Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Lundquist, James. Chester Himes. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1976. Margolies, Edward. “Chester Himes’s Black Comedy: The Genre Is the Message.” In Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross MacDonald, 53–70. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. Margolies, Edward, and Michel Fabre. The Several Lives of Chester Himes. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Millikin, Stephen F. Chester Himes: A Critical Appraisal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1976. Muller, Gilbert H. Chester Himes. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Skinner, Robert E. Two Guns from Harlem: The Detective Fiction of Chester Himes. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Wilson, M. L. Chester Himes. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

OTHER Marsh, Michael. “Chester Himes.” AALBC.com. Available online. URL: http://aalbc.com/authors/chesterhimes.htm. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HINOJOSA-SMITH, ROLANDO (ROLANDO R. HINOJOSA-S., ROLANDO HINOJOSA) (1929– ) A significant contemporary Chicano writer, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was awarded the Quinto Sol Literary Award in 1972 for his first novel, Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), which became the first of eight novels in the “Klail City Death Trip” series. They are set in Klail City, Belken County, Texas, and chronicle six decades of the history of Chicanos and Anglos in the Rio Grande valley. The series’s mythology and imagery, and its portrayal of tragedy, death, humor and hope, along with its interconnected and recurring characters, has earned him comparisons with William FAULKNER. The series gives voice to the Mexican-American community with all its contradictions and that community’s relationship with Anglo Americans. In the words of the scholar Maria Herrera-Sobek, “his (re)-creation of Texas

606 HINOJOSA-SMITH, ROLANDO

is so strong and powerful that without him it would be impossible to understand either its history or that of its people, Chicanos and Anglos, who inhabit” Texas (Herrera-Sobek). Hinojosa is also the author of two detective novels, Partners in Crime (1985) and Ask a Policeman (1998), as well as The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical (1985), including translations of the works of his friend and fellow novelist Tomas RIVERA. Hinojosa-Smith prefers to write in Spanish but has written novels in English when it best conveys the themes of a particular novel. He has translated many of his own novels into English. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith was born on January 21, 1929, in Mercedes, Texas, to Manuel Guzman Hinojosa, a Mexican-American farmer who fought in the Mexican Revolution, and Carrie Effie Smith, an Anglo American whose father had served in the Civil War on the Union side. After serving in the U.S. Army from 1946 to 1949, he earned a bachelor of science degree at the University of Texas at Austin (1953), a master of arts degree from New Mexico Highlands University (1963), and a doctoral degree from the University of Illinois in 1969. He was married to Patricia Louise Mandley from 1963 to 1989. Sketches of the Valley and Other Works is an unconventional novel consisting of numerous linked sketches and multiple narrators who present a wideranging view of the community, its inhabitants, and their historic, cultural, and linguistic traditions. This novel contained 25 characters, whereas KLAIL CITY, which followed, includes more than 100 and features such characters as historian Esteban Echevarría and writer P. Galindo, narrators who become unifying presences in the series. Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip (1980), a novel in verse, is written in English because, according to Hinojosa-Smith, he “tried to write in the wrong language and in the wrong genre” (Jason): Neither Spanish nor prose could convey the sense of the Korean War. The protagonist is Rafael (Rafa or Rafe)—who, along with his cousin Jehú Malacara, becomes one of Hinojosa-Smith’s best-known recurring characters. Thereafter, the Klail City novels trace the ongoing history of the post–World War II and Korean War Klail City. As is

the case with all the novels in the series, HinojosaSmith adopts structure and method to fit his purpose; in Dear Rafe, the epistolary technique, 22 letters from Jehú Malacara provide Klail City updates for his cousin Rafa Buenrostro as he recovers from his Korean War wounds. In Rites and Witnesses (1982), written in English, Rafe’s disturbing war experiences are juxtaposed against an increasing sense of moral and ethical malaise, particularly with regard to the Klail City Anglos, some of whom are racists. The novel also suggests that, after the war, Chicanos loosened ties to their heritage and assimilation increased in the Anglo community. Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery (1985) represents another shift in Hinojosa-Smith’s use of genres and techniques. In this hard-boiled detective novel, Rafa Buenrostro and Jehú Malacara have become, respectively, a Belken County homicide detective and a Klail City bank vice president. In an effort to fight crime, the Anglos and Mexicans unite to eliminate murder and drug trafficking. Claros varones de Belken: Fair Gentlemen of Belken County (1986) reintroduces Rafa Buenrostro, Jehú Malacara, P. Galindo, and Esteban Echevarría and moves these characters into the 1980s. Becky and Her Friends (1990), the seventh novel in the series and the third written in English, revolves around Becky, la mujer nueva (the new woman), who announces her intention to divorce her snobbish husband, Ira Escobar, and start her own business. As the critic Antonio C. Márquez notes, these “deceptively simple” responses mirror the “dilemmas and conflicts that beset Chicano communities as traditionalism meets modernity” (Márquez, 303). The Useless Servants (1993) returns to the Korean War and, in HinojosaSmith’s words, takes the form of a “personal journal.” Hinojosa-Smith has also published “The Mexican American Devil’s Dictionary” under the pseudonym P. Galindo, a character who appears as the interviewer in Claros varones de Belken. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin since 1981, where he is currently Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor. Along with Tomas Rivera and Rudolfo ANAYA, Hinojosa-Smith was important in initiating the Chicano Renaissance. His papers are in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

HINOJOSA-SMITH, ROLANDO 607

NOVELS (KLAIL CITY SERIES) Becky and Her Friends. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1990. Claros Varones de Belken. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1986. Dear Rafe. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1985. Estampas del Valle y otras obras. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol, 1973. Generaciones y Semblanzas. Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1977. Klail City. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1987. Korean Love Songs. Berkeley, Calif.: Ed. Justa, 1978. Mi querido Rafa. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1981. Partners in Crime. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1985. Rites and Witnesses. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1982. The Useless Servants. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público, 1993.

NOVELS (OR SHOULD IT BE THIS WAY SERIES) Estampas del valle y otras obras (first novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series), Quinto Sol, 1972, bilingual edition with translation by Gustavo Valadez and Jose Reyna. Published as Sketches of the Valley and Other Works. Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1980; revised English-language edition published as The Valley. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1983. Klail City y sus alrededores (second novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series), bilingual edition with translation by Rosaura Sanchez, Casa de las Americas, 1976. Published under name Rolando R. Hinojosa-S. as Generaciones y semblanzas (“Biographies and Lineages”), Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1977. Translated by Hinojosa, published as Klail City, Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1987. Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip (novel in verse form; third in “Klail City Death Trip” series), illustrations by Rene Castro. Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1978. Claros varones de Belken (fourth novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series). Berkeley, Calif.: Justa Publications, 1981. Bilingual edition with translation by Julia Cruz published as Fair Gentlemen of Belken County. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press, 1987. Mi querido Rafa (fifth novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series). Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1981. Translated by Hinojosa, published as Dear Rafe, 1985. Rites and Witnesses (sixth novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series). Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1982. Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery. Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1985. Los amigos de Becky (seventh novel in “Klail City Death Trip” series). Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1990. Translated and published as Becky and Her Friends, 1990.

El condado de Belken. (eighth novel in “Klail City Death Trap” series) Ypsilanti, Mich.: Editorial Bilingue, 1994. Estampas del valle, Ypsilanti, Mich.: Editorial Bilingue, 1994. Ask a Policeman. Houston, Tex,: Arte Publico Press, 1998.

SOURCES Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Busby, Mark. “Faulknerian Elements in Rolando Hinojosa’s The Valley,” MELUS 11, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 103–109. del Pino, Salvador Rodríguez. La novela chicana escrita en español: cinco autores comprometidos. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual/Editorial Bilingüe, 1982, 117–137. Guerrero, Yolanda. “Literatura y sociedad: Análisis de Generaciones y semblanzas,” La Palabra 1 (Fall 1979): 21–30. Lee, Joyce Glover. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. Márquez, Antonio C. Review of Becky and Her Friends, World Literature Today 65, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 303. Saldivar, José David, ed. The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1985. Stanton, Helena Villacrés. “Death in Rolando Hinojosa’s Belken County,” MELUS 13, nos. 3–4 (Fall-Winter 1986): 67–83.

OTHER Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando R. “On the 30th Anniversary of Tomas Rivera’s . . . Y no se lo trago la tierra,” World Literature Today (January 1, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3. asp?DOCID=1G1:766289838. Accessed September 12, 2005. Herrera-Sobrek, Maria. “A Spanish novelist’s perspective on Chicanola literature,” Journal of Modern Literature (September 22, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL:http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:92805771&num=3. Accessed September 12, 2005. Jason, Philip K. “A conversation with Rolando Hinojosa,” Bilingual Review (September 1, 2000). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL:http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:85472329. Accessed September 12, 2005. Rolando Hinojosa. Available online. URL: http://www.accd. edu/sac/english/portales/hinojosa.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

608 HOFFMAN, ALICE

HOFFMAN, ALICE (1952– )

Alice Hoffman uses myths, spirituality, folk tales, and magic to depict ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations. The protagonists of her 15 novels are women or girls in suburbia whose lives are complicated by urban gangs, incest, AIDS, family relationships, sexuality, marriage, and divorce. Her style is deceptively simple, whether in dialogue between characters or in her use of symbols to deepen her fictional meanings. As Hoffman said to the interviewer Ellen Kanner, “Fiction in general gives you the freedom of exploring the truth without boundaries, to get to a deeper truth, and fairy tales have always been my model” (Kanner). Her work has been published in more than 20 languages and more than 100 foreign editions (O’Hara). Alice Hoffman was born on March 16, 1952, in Brooklyn, New York; her parents divorced when she was eight years old. She was educated at Adelphi University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1973, and at Stanford University, earning a master’s degree in 1975. Her first novel, Property Of (1977), published when she was 25 years old, concerns a nameless 17-year-old narrator-protagonist and her yearlong affair with McKay, an urban gang leader whose allure quickly begins to fade. Two years later she published The Drowning Season, an exploration of the growing relationship between a Russian immigrant grandmother, Esther the White, and her Long Island, New York, granddaughter, Esther the Black. In Angel Landing (1980), a love story set against the contemporary backdrop of a nuclear power plant, Natalie becomes enamored of Finn, the saboteur who bombs the plant, while White Horses (1982), another romance, features supernatural men, or arias, who rescue women from unfulfilling relationships; in this case, the daughter, Theresa, believes her brother Silver to be an aria, leading her into an incestuous relationship. The next three novels reveal Hoffman’s increasing interest in social issues: In Fortune’s Daughter (1985) Rae Perry, a pregnant woman abandoned by Jessup, manages to gives birth to her child with the help of Lila the fortune-teller; Illumination Night (1987) depicts the complexities of knowing another person fully, and At Risk (1988) looks at the tragedy in a family when the 11-year-old daughter con-

tracts AIDS. Hoffman donated her advance from At Risk to AIDS research and to People with AIDS (O’Hara). With Seventh Heaven (1990), many critics believe Hoffman reached her full potential. Set in a Long Island suburb, the novel depicts the unsettling appearance of Nora Silk, a divorcée, in a neighborhood where a neighbor has died; the formerly closed community implodes when a wife and mother deserts her family, an adolescent girl is killed in an auto accident, and the divorcée engages in an affair with a 17year-old boy. In Turtle Moon (1993), Lucy Rosen and her 12-year-old son, Keith, move into a community of divorcées in Verity, Florida, the site of the annual sea turtle migration during a special phase of the moon. A woman is murdered, Keith rescues the victim’s daughter, and Lucy becomes romantically involved with the murder investigator, Julian Cash. Second Nature (1994) involves magic as compelling as the mystical turtle moon, this time with Stephen, a young man who had been raised by wolves, and Robin, who falls in love with him as she tries to protect him from the inquisitive community. The River King (2000), set in Haddan, Massachusetts, involves the ghost of Annie Howe, a girl who hanged herself from the rafters of the house, now a school called St. Anne in her honor. The contemporary protagonists, along with the impulsive Betsy Chase, are Carlin and Gus, teenagers who are students at St. Anne’s. In 1995 Hoffman published Practical Magic, a novel set in a small upstate New York community that again involves women with mystical gifts: The orphaned sisters Sally and Gillian live with their two aunts, makers of herbal love medicines. Ultimately the love potions entrap both sisters, one of whom murders her lover; the other marries four different times. Her recent book, The Blue Diary, features a long-married couple whose marriage is suddenly disrupted when the husband admits to a horrific rape 15 years earlier. Alice Hoffman, a survivor of breast cancer who has written about the experience, lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. She is married to Tom Martin, a writer, with whom she has written 50 screenplays over 25 years (O’Hara). In 1998, Practical Magic appeared as a feature-length Warner Brothers film directed by Griffin

HOGAN, LINDA 609

Dunne, starring Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Aidan Quinn.

NOVELS Angel Landing. New York: Putnam, 1980. At Risk. New York: Putnam, 1988. Blackbird House. New York: Doubleday, 2004. The Blue Diary. New York: Putnam, 2001. Fortune’s Daughter. New York: Putnam, 1985. Here on Earth. New York: Putnam, 1997. Illumination Night. New York: Putnam, 1987. Practical Magic. New York: Putnam, 1995. The Probable Future. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Property Of. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. Second Nature. New York: Putnam, 1994. Seventh Heaven. New York: Putnam, 1990. The Drowning Season. New York: Dutton, 1979. The River King. New York: Putnam, 2000. Turtle Moon. New York: Berkley, 1993 White Horses. New York: Putnam, 1982.

SOURCES Charyn, Jerome. “The Witches’ Tale,” New York Times Book Review, 15 July 1979, p. 13. Lingeman, Richard R. A review of Property Of, New York Times, 14 July 1977, p. 25. Mewshaw, Michael. A review of Property of, New York Times Book Review, 10 July 1977, p. 10. O’Hara, Maryanne. “About Alice Hoffman,” Ploughshares 29, no. 2/3 (October 1, 2003): 194.

OTHER Alice Hoffman Web site (November 6, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.alicehoffman.com. Accessed September 12, 2005. Kanner, Ellen. “Alice Hoffman Takes Her Practical Magic to the River.” Book Page. Available online. URL: http://www. bookpage.com/0008bp/alice_hoffman.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Hoffman, Alice. Audio Interview by Don Swaim (1988). Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/alicehoffman/. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HOGAN, LINDA (1947– ) Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw, has won awards for her poetry, short fiction, drama, and essays, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer

Prize for Mean Spirit (1990). Because of her Chickasaw heritage, which was matrilineal rather than patriarchal, Hogan celebrates women for their natural creative powers and seeks to pass on to readers traditional Native wisdom through ancient myth. She illuminates the interconnectedness of the world. As an environmentalist, she also expresses the importance of respecting and caring for all forms of nature. Nearly all critics and readers note the poetic and lyrical nature of her prose and the power of her expression through myth and allegory. Linda Hogan was born on July 16, 1947, in Denver, Colorado, to Charles Henderson, a Chickasaw enlisted in the U.S. Army, and Cleona Bower Henderson, a white descendant of Nebraska Territory pioneers. She was educated at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she received a master of arts degree in 1978. Her first novel, Mean Spirit, is set in Oklahoma during the Osage oil boom. The white characters are both racist and materialistic; because of their lust for oil, they abuse, exploit, and even murder the Native people, whom they view as subhuman. Belle Graycloud, a woman versed in the traditions of her people, reveals the arrogance and bureaucracy of the whites, whose representatives from Washington, D.C., ignore tribal customs and order Belle’s daughter Nola off to school. Through three groups of Osage—from town, from the town’s outskirts, and from the hills—Hogan conveys the history of these people and their powerlessness in the face of government rulings. Solar Storms (1995) depicts 17-year-old Angela Jensen, whose mother, Hannah Wing, abused and abandoned her. In this bildungsroman, Angela travels from Oklahoma to Minnesota to her native homeland, where she meets Bush, who cared for her as a baby, her great-grandmother Agnes Iron, and great-great-grandmother Dora-Rouge. Together the four women travel by canoe to view the latter’s birthplace and to battle the proposed hydroelectric dam that threatens to destroy it. They learn that Angela’s mother, too, was abused and abandoned. Hogan’s most recent novel, Power (1998), describes the difficult decision for 16-year-old Omishto, a member of the Taiga tribe, as she feels torn between her Westernized mother and her traditional Aunt Ama, each of whom wants Omishto to follow in her footsteps.

610 HOLLEY, MARIETTA

Hogan is also the author of screenplays, one based on her novel Mean Spirit and another entitled Aunt Moon, both completed in 1986. She also wrote the television documentary Everything Has a Spirit. Her 2001 memoir is entitled The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. She lives and writes in Idledale, Colorado, and teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she has been professor of English since 1989.

NOVELS Mean Spirit. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Power. New York: Norton, 1998. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner, 1995.

SOURCES Bell, Betty Louise, ed. Studies in American Indian Literatures, special issue on Hogan, 6 (Fall 1994). Blair, Elizabeth. “The Politics of Place in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 15–21. Bruchac, Joseph. “To Take Care of a Life.” In Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, edited by Joseph Bruchac, 119–133. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. Carew-Miller, Anna. “Caretaking and the Work of the Text in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit,” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 37–48. Coltelli, Laura. “Linda Hogan.” In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, edited by Laura Coltelli, 71–86. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Musher, Andrea. “Showdown at Sorrow Cave: Bat Medicine and the Spirit of Resistance in Mean Spirit,” Studies in American Indian Literatures: The Journal of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures 6, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 23–36. Schöler, Bo. “A Heart Made Out of Crickets: An Interview with Linda Hogan,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 16 (Spring 1988): 107–117. Smith, Patricia Clark. “Linda Hogan.” In This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by William Balassi, John F. Crawford, and Annie O. Eysturoy, 141–155. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. St. Clair, Janet. “Uneasy Ethnocentrism: Recent Works of Allen, Silko, and Hogan,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 6 (Spring 1994): 83–98.

Steinberg, Marc H. “Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit: The Wealth, Value, and Worth of the Osage Tribe,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 25, no. 2 (1979): 7–8. Taylor, Paul Beekman. “Woman as Redeemer in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit.” In Native American Women in Literature and Culture, edited by Susan Castillo and Victor M. P. Da Rosa. Porto, Portugal: Fernando Pessoa University Press, 1997. Wilson, Terry P. The Underground Reservation: Osage Oil. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

OTHER Linda Hogan. Available online. URL: http://www.hanksville. ora/storytellers/linda/. Accessed September 12, 2005. “Linda Hogan.” Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/ bios/entries/hogan_linda.html. Accessed September 12, 2005.

HOLLEY, MARIETTA (JOSIAH ALLEN’S WIFE AND SAMANTHA SMITH ALLEN) (1836–1926) In the words of the scholar Kate H. Winter, Marietta Holley, a humorist, novelist, and poet, “created the first sympathetic comic female figure in American literature” (Winter, 226). In the tradition of her contemporary Mark TWAIN, Holley used her loquacious protagonist Samantha, an uneducated upstate New York housewife living in the fictitious town of Jonesville, to present her take on such weighty issues as women’s suffrage, temperance, and children’s rights. She had her say on race relations in Samantha on the Race Problem (1892) and, through this rustic farm wife, Holley used humor to help make her criticisms palatable. Marietta Holley was born on July 16, 1836, near the village of Bear Creek, New York, to John Milton Holley, a farmer, and Mary Taber Holley. When her brothers went west during the California gold rush, Holley assumed some of the responsibility for supporting the family and, in addition to giving music lessons and making handicrafts, she began to publish poetry under the pseudonym “Jemyma.” After the publication of My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet’s (1873), a successful novel, Holley’s humorous anecdotes, laced with rustic common sense and folk wisdom, made her known across the United States as a voice for the indignities and

HOME TO HARLEM 611

injustices visited upon women. Among her most popular works were Samantha at Saratoga, exposing the silliness of women’s fashion, Samantha Among the Brethren (1890), demonstrating church politics and how it affects women, and Sweet Cicely; in the latter, Samantha meets President Chester Alan Arthur and tackles the problems of alcohol and its damaging effects on women and children. Although Holley’s character Samantha was somewhat of a traveler—she went to Coney Island, the World’s Fair, the St. Louis Exposition, and Europe— Holley herself was shy, retiring, and little inclined to travel far. She died on March 1, 1926, in Jefferson County, New York, knowing that, through her attention to women’s issues in her writings, she had helped secure the vote for women.

SELECTED NOVELS Betsey Bobbett: A Drama. Adams, N.Y.: W. J. Allen, 1880. Josiah’s Alarm, and Abel Perry’s Funeral. As Josiah Allen’s Wife. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1895. The Lament of the Mormon Wife. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1880. My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet’s. As Josiah Allen’s Wife. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1873. Samantha Among the Brethren. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1890. Samantha at Coney Island and a Thousand Other Islands. New York: Christian Herald, 1911. Samantha at Saratoga. Philadelphia: Hubbard, 1887. Samantha on Children’s Rights. New York: Dillingham, 1909. Samantha on the Race Problem. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1892. Samantha on the Woman Question. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913. Sweet Cicely, or, Josiah Allen as Politician. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1885. Republished as Samantha Among the Colored Folks. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1894.

SOURCES Armitage, Shelley. “Marietta Holley: The Humorist as Propagandist,” Rocky Mountain Review 34 (Fall 1980): 193–201. Curry, Jane A. “Samantha ‘Rastles’ the Woman Question,” Journal of Popular Culture 8 (Spring 1975): 805–824. ———, ed. Samantha Wrastles the Woman Question. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Graulich, Melody. “ ‘Wimmin is my theme, and also Josiah’: The Forgotten Humor of Marietta Holley,” American Transcendental Quarterly (Summer-Fall 1980): 187–197. Gwathney, Gwendolyn B. “ ‘Who Will Read the Book, Samantha?’ Marietta Holley and the 19th Century Reading Public,” Studies in American Humor series 3, no. 1 (1994): 28–50. Holley, Marietta. The Story of My Life. Watertown, N.Y.: Times Publishing, 1931. Winter, Kate. “Marietta Holley (Josiah Allen’s Wife).” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise D. Knight, 224–230. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. ———. Marietta Holley: Life With “Josiah Allen’s Wife.” Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984.

HOME TO HARLEM CLAUDE MCKAY (1928) Often cited as the first African-American best-seller, Home to Harlem is the first and best-known work of Jamaican-born writer Claude MCKAY’s four volumes of fiction. Perhaps most widely recognized for his sonnet “If We Must Die” (1919), which was written in response to widespread black lynchings, McKay originally wrote Home to Harlem as a short story illustrating the “socalled semi-underworld” of the urban American black in the 1920s, “leaving no subject, however degraded, untouched” (Cooper, 212). McKay’s novel, which depicts the seamier sides of life for Harlem’s workingclass blacks, was published at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, at a time when other black writers, such as Langston HUGHES, Zora Neale HURSTON, and Rudolph Fisher had begun to expand the boundaries of AfricanAmerican literature, and black music and writing were becoming exotically appealing to the literate white public in New York and beyond. While McKay’s earlier poetic works vividly portrayed blacks as an alienated, besieged, and tormented minority, Home to Harlem adds greater depth and texture to that image through both its characters’ struggles for individual and racial identity and the relationships and sense of community that arose from them and gave life to Harlem as McKay lived it from 1914 to 1919. The novel opens with a journey and a metaphor. Jake, the hero, is a veteran traveling from post–World War I Europe, headed “home to Harlem” on a freighter,

612 HOME TO HARLEM

with Harlem serving as both a geographically specific place and an embodiment of racial consciousness. Jake, who had been a longshoreman in Harlem, had enlisted in the army for a good manly fight in World War I. He was quickly disillusioned by the military’s racial policies, which didn’t allow blacks on the front lines, so he deserted and took refuge in the sociability of London’s East End. But as postwar tensions grew, the racial divide in the East End felt tangible and suffocating to Jake—his life in this predominantly white world felt like a fraud—and McKay’s readers first encounter him desperately voyaging back to ground himself in Harlem. Working the freighter with a crew of Arabs that he despises, Jake responds to their customs with disdain and more closely aligns himself with the white members of the crew, whose culture he shares. But when one of the sailors flatters Jake by saying “You’re the same like us chaps. You ain’t like them dirty jabbering coolies” (3), Jake reminds himself that the divide still exists and yearns for home and sameness. McKay uses these powerful early moments of social and cultural difference to establish a focus on racial hierarchy that will shape the characters’ lives and experiences throughout the novel. Jake arrives back in Harlem and is greeted by a vibrant sense of energy and exuberance, music, dance, laughter, including all the sounds, textures, and odors of authentic, passionate life: “The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The sugared laughter . . . Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere” (15). Jake falls in with a loosely interwoven group of friends, rivals, and lovers: Zeddy, Strawberry Lips, Gin-head Susy, and Miss Curdy—all hell-bent to enjoy the fruits of life in the face of poverty, loneliness, and misfortune. As Jake drifts through the clubs, cabarets, and house parties, his journey continues. He weaves in and out of a world of sweetmen and hussies, where layers of brown—“high yaller,” low brown, redbrown, maroon, “chocolate-to-the-bone”—are every bit as divisive as black and white. McKay’s focus stays centered on his male characters, as Jake and his compatriots explore various facets of what it means to be a black man in Harlem in the 1920s, perhaps in search of what Marcellus Blount has referred to as an “ideal racial self.”

Jake serves as a symbol of primitive African-American vitality (Blount, xxiii)—spontaneous, direct, easygoing, likable—while those around him represent McKay’s interpretation of the black male experience in other ways. While working on the Pennsylvania Railroad as a cook, Jake meets Ray, a waiter and intellectual Haitian expatriate. In contrast to Jake’s easygoing affability, Ray worries constantly and feels isolated from the AfricanAmerican community because of his European education. His sensitivity and political passion set him apart from what he perceives as Harlem’s “roughness” and abandon. Ultimately, both Ray and Jake flee the grasp of Harlem’s rough-and-tumble life. Mirroring McKay’s own experiences, Ray signs on to a freighter in hopes of working his way to Europe, while Jake finds a different kind of escape—on the train to Chicago with the woman he loves. Home to Harlem drew both praise and criticism for its frank depiction of African Americans and use of strong, vernacular dialect. Some, such as Langston Hughes, applauded McKay’s realism and integrity, while others deemed it exploitation. Black leaders W. E. B. DuBois and Dewey Jones (of the Chicago Defender) condemned McKay’s explicit portrayals as damaging to the social and political struggles of African Americans: “white people think we are buffoons, thugs, and rotters anyway. Why should we waste so much time trying to prove it? That’s what Claude McKay has done” (Cooper, 245). McKay concluded that “it will take the Negro in America another thirty or forty years to see Home to Harlem in its true light—to appreciate it in the spirit in which I wrote it” (Cooper, 247).

SOURCES Blount, Marcellus. “Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet.” In Engendering Men, edited by Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance, A Life. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Nelson, Cary. Modern American Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

OTHER Anonymous. “Claude McKay.” Drop Me Off in Harlem. Available online. URL: http://artsedge.kennedy-

HONEY IN THE HORN 613

center.org/exploring/harlem/faces/mckay_text.html. Accessed September 12, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

HONEY IN THE HORN H. L. DAVIS (1935) When H. L. DAVIS was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935), it might have made him a major voice in the emerging “new” literature of the American West. But Davis entered into a prolonged contractual dispute with his publisher, and despite the financial security provided by the commercial success of his novel, his troubled first marriage failed, throwing his personal life into turmoil. His next novel would not appear until 1947, when another group of Western American novelists—most notably Walter Van Tilburg CLARK, A. B. Guthrie Jr., and Wallace STEGNER—had come to the fore and had eclipsed Davis and several other significant figures of the 1930s. In any case, Davis’s second and third novels would treat broader historical subjects and themes, and he would not return to the topic of the settlement of the interior Northwest until his two final novels, Winds of Morning (1953) and A Distant Music (1957). In the decades preceding the publication of Honey in the Horn, Willa CATHER had demonstrated that serious literature could be produced about the American West. In the 1930s, Davis was one of several writers to write significant fiction set on the Great Plains (Herbert Krause), in the mountain region (Vardis Fisher), and in the desert Southwest (Harvey Fergusson and Conrad Richter). These writers rejected the romanticized representations of the West in the “Westerns” popularized by Owen WISTER, Zane GREY, and, later, Louis L’AMOUR. These “serious” novelists were interested instead in the truths about the settlement and continuing development of the region that the formula Westerns either misrepresented or ignored. To avoid classification as writers of Westerns, these novelists tended to focus on the backwater regions of the West and on issues much less thrilling than attacks by Indians, rustlers, and outlaws. Honey in the Horn depicts the settlement of eastern Oregon, a semi-arid region on the edge of the Great

Basin. After the fertile valleys among the coastal mountains had been settled, later arrivals and those who had failed to make a go of it in that promised land migrated into the regions that the wagon trains had passed through and found wanting. This was a hardscrabble frontier. Drought, blizzard, pestilence, and poverty ate at the souls of these later pioneers. Their violence against one another was as casual as it was brutal and typically more primitive than redemptive. In reading the novels of someone like Vardis Fisher, one has the sense that this unforgiving landscape can reverse progress and perhaps even evolution. Honey in the Horn is a picaresque and a coming-of-age story. The main character is Clay Calvert, a young man who wanders where opportunity takes him. The novel opens among the established settlements of western Oregon. Clay’s stepfather, Wade Shiveley, has been jailed for two killings and a robbery. Wade’s own father, Uncle Press Shiveley, wants him dead and sends Clay to visit him in jail and to pass him a pistol loaded only with blank cartridges, so that when he attempts to escape, he will be shot down. Somehow, however, Wade manages to make good his escape, and Clay is suddenly being hunted by the law as Wade’s accomplice. He begins traveling with a man who has identified himself as a horse trader, his wife, and their daughter, Luce, to whom Clay is immediately attracted. The horse trader, however, practices his trade only very intermittently. He is a compulsive gambler, and they support themselves primarily by laboring in the hops fields as migrant workers. Luce’s unwillingness to abandon her father to his vices threatens her relationship with Clay. But she and Clay settle on the coast, raise a stake for a wagon by selling the flour from a wrecked ship to the local Indians, and head off without her parents into the interior of eastern Oregon. They eventually join a group of settlers looking for good land, and Clay becomes friendly with the leader of the group, Clark Burdon. When Clay learns that Wade is looking for him, he confides in Burdon. Then, when Clay mistakes another settler for Wade and shoots him dead, he places the blame on Wade, who is subsequently hunted down by the settlers and lynched. Clay becomes very moody as he struggles with his guilt over having allowed his stepfather to be

614 HOPE LESLIE

killed for his crime. After Luce becomes pregnant, she worries that Clay will abandon her. When difficulties with the pregnancy force them to stop while the other settlers move on, Clay finally leaves Luce in the wagon while he goes to get medical help. The best he can do is an Indian midwife, but when he returns, Luce and their wagon have disappeared, and he angrily suspects that she has somehow rejoined her parents. Clay then joins a group of itinerant threshers. When an Indian in the group runs into Luce’s father, wins a bet with him, and is subsequently found murdered and robbed, Clay realizes that the horse trader has very likely committed not only these crimes but also one of the murders and the robbery that Wade had originally been accused of committing. He eventually meets up with Luce again when she wanders into the camp of the railroad construction crew that he has joined. When he shares his suspicions about her father, she not only tells him that her father has died but also confesses that she, and not her father, had committed the murders. She explains the murders as the only pragmatic thing to do, given her father’s unwillingness or inability to stop gambling. If she had not committed the murders and retrieved the money he had lost, they would have starved. Although he is troubled by her ability to rationalize what he still views as a coldblooded crime, he is still attracted to her, and in a territory where one’s options are always limited, even an uneasy intimacy is better than a solitary existence.

SOURCES Bain, Robert. H. L. Davis. Western Writers Series, No. 11. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1974. Brunvand, Jan H. “Honey in the Horn and ‘Acres of Clams’: The Regional Fiction of H. L. Davis,” Western American Literature 2 (1967): 135–146. Bryant, Paul T. H. L. Davis. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, no. 306. Boston: Twayne, 1978. ———. “H. L. Davis.” In A Literary History of the American West, edited by Max Westbrook, 416–423. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Cleman, John. “The Belated Frontier: H. L. Davis and the Problem of Pacific Northwest Regionalism,” Western American Literature 37 (Winter 2003): 431–451. Jones, Philip L. “The West of H. L. Davis,” South Dakota Review 6 (Winter 1968–1969): 72–84.

Kohler, Philip L. “H. L. Davis: Writer of the West,” College English 14 (December 1952): 133–140. Lauber, John. “A Western Classic: H. L. Davis’ Honey in the Horn,” Western Humanities Review 16 (Winter 1962): 85–86. Potts, James T. “H. L. Davis’ View: Reclaiming and Recovering the Land,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 82 (Summer 1981): 117–151. Rekow, Alec. “ ‘Practice in Standing Death’: Marking Time and Place in Honey in the Horn,” South Dakota Review 34 (Spring 1996): 63–77. Strelow, Michael. “H. L. Davis: A Haven for Emersonianism in the West,” Willamette Journal of the Liberal Arts: Supplemental Series 2 (1988): 43–58. Martin Kich

HOPE LESLIE CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK (1827) Written in 1827, Catharine Maria SEDGWICK’s Hope Leslie offers a fascinating exploration of the American character, specifically, that of the American female. The novel blends the conventions of romance—a tale of love among the Puritans—with historical realism, in this case the subjugation of the American Indian Pequod tribe by the early settlers. Sedgwick thus combines two remarkable achievements in her novel: She creates a romantic page-turner that ignites compassion and understanding for the Native American at a time when Indians were reviled. Like her contemporary James Fenimore COOPER, Sedgwick was conscious of creating an American past; and like the latter, she was celebrated as an author of consequence in her time. While her work was neglected by most 20th-century critics (who, with Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, relegated her to “that damned mob of scribbling women”), Sedgwick’s novel is now appreciated as an astute commentary on early American mores. Sedgwick adroitly centers the novel around two equally respectable and likable female characters: the titular Hope Leslie, descendant of Puritans, and Magawisca, the noble daughter of the Pequod chief, who, at the novel’s start, is in the service of a Puritan family. Their stories are intertwined early on: Magawisca first narrates the slaughter of the Pequod tribe by Puritan settlers; next, the same Pequods visit death upon an empathetic Puritan settler, Mother Fletcher and her children. This juxtaposition complicates the reader’s

HOPKINS, PAULINE ELIZABETH 615

response to brutality—who is guilty of what carnage?— and sets the stage for romance, since both female characters are enamored of the surviving Fletcher heir, Everell. During the same Pequod raid, both Hope’s sister Faith and young Everell Fletcher are taken captive by Magawisca’s father, Mononotto. Magawisca has an early chance to prove her mettle: As her father is about to behead Everell, Magawisca interposes, only to have her arm severed. Both leave the Pequods, but Faith remains and soon becomes inseparable from the chief’s son, Oneco. Seasons later, Hope attempts to retrieve her sister, with Magawisca’s help, but the young Faith has adopted Pequod ways and refuses to be reunited. Their individual responses to their situations prove Sedgwick’s aphorism in her preface that “the difference among the various races of the earth arises mainly from difference of condition” (6). Some years later, Everell returns to the Puritan settlement and Hope Leslie, but the young lovers are stymied by the machinations of others: Everell is betrothed to a bland young Puritan woman, Esther, while Hope is the object of an evil Dickensian-style character’s affections, Sir Philip Gardiner (who, nevertheless, manages to employ a cross-dressing servant, Rosa, to bide his time). Both romances are soon overcome by larger forces, as Magawisca is captured by the Puritans and Hope is ensnared by the Pequod tribe. Hope escapes, enduring disastrous privations, and soon finds herself masterminding the escape of Magawisca, but not before the noble Indian woman has the opportunity to level the Puritans’ gaze with a masterful speech at her trial, ending with “I deny your right to judge me” (286). Each woman demonstrates in the end a courage and independence that belie her individual circumstance and make her a heroine for all ages. Ultimately, according to the conventions of romance, Hope and Everell are united. But in the process, the reader finds not one but two heroines who display an independence of thought and word, as well as action: Each defies authority (Puritan or Pequod) to obey her own conscience. Intelligent, strong, compassionate, and independent, Hope Leslie and Magawisca define what Sedgwick believed to be the true American—male or female—character.

SOURCES Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in 19th-Century American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820–1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978. Bell, Michael Davitt. “History and Romance Convention in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 213–221. Kelly, Mary. Introduction to Hope Leslie. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Patricia Lee

HOPKINS,

PAULINE

ELIZABETH

(1859–1930) Although she wrote short stories and plays, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s reputation rests on her work as a novelist, especially on Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Her three additional novels were serialized in the magazine Colored American: Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–2), Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902), and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–3). Hopkins wrote about racial oppression—particularly as expressed by liberal whites, and about miscegenation. She understood how sexuality and slavery are interconnected, the impact of this on the mixed-race woman, and the importance then, as now, of mothers in the black family and community. Writing in the romantic sentimental tradition, Hopkins’s work includes such major historical realities as the Civil War, Reconstruction, lynching, and the Underground Railroad. Although a somewhat neglected writer, Hopkins enjoys a growing reputation as more of her works become available and scholars begin to publish criticism on her work. Born in Portland, Maine, to William Hopkins and Sarah Allen Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was reared in Boston and educated at Girls High School. She founded Boston’s Colored American League and helped to found Colored American magazine. Her first novel, Contending Forces, traces several generations of

616 HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, THE

an African-American family. They are enslaved in the Caribbean, survive the Civil War and Reconstruction in the American South, and finally move to postReconstruction Boston. Hopkins uses two women, Sappho, a feminist (and a mulatta who tries to escape her past), and Dora, Sappho’s foil. Hagar’s Daughter examines racism when a mother and daughter learn they are not white. Winona is the hero of the novel bearing her name, which takes place during slavery and the Civil War, and includes sections on the Underground Railroad and John Brown’s raiders. Of One Blood features Reuel, an American protagonist who visits Africa and learns to be proud of African culture and history. With a prolific output of novels, plays, stories, and both humorous and biographical sketches to her credit, Hopkins contributed significantly to early 20thcentury African-American literature. She died in 1930 of burns when the bandages used to relieve her neuritis pain caught fire. Hopkins’s papers are housed at the Fisk University Library.

NOVELS Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Boston: Colored Co-operative Publishing Company, 1900. Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (under pseudonym Sarah A. Allen). Serialized in Colored American magazine, 1901–1902. Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest. Serialized in Colored American magazine, 1902. Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self. Serialized in Colored American magazine, 1902–3.

SOURCES Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978. Campbell, Jane. “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.” In Afro-American Writers before the Harlem Renaissance. Vol. 50 of Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis, 182–189. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark, 1986. Carby, Hazel V. “Introduction.” In The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins, xxix–1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gabler-Hover, Janet. “Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.” In Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographi-

cal Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Gilman, Susan. “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant? The Nineteenth-Century American Race Melodrama.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 221–243. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Gruesser, John Cullen, ed. Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Otten, Thomas. “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race,” English Literary History 59 (Spring 1992): 227–256. Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Yarborough, Richard. “Introduction.” Contending Forces, xxvii–xlviii. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, THE JOHN IRVING (1981) John IRVING’s fifth novel, The Hotel New Hampshire, published in 1981, is the story of the unconventional Berry family. The novel received mixed reviews from critics upon its publication although it was certainly popular. It was a best-seller, a Book-ofthe-Month Club choice, a Time magazine cover story, and spurred a film adaptation. The novel’s narrator, John Berry, traces the history of his family, beginning in the summer of 1939 with the meeting of his parents, Win and Mary, at Arbuthnot-by-the-Sea, a resort in Maine where both young adults are working. The two fall in love, and Win meets a zany bear trainer named Freud and a man in a white dinner jacket whose image plagues Win throughout his life as a symbol of eminent change and, at times, foreboding. Freud returns to Europe, leaving his trained bear, Earl, also known as State o’ Maine, with Win. Before leaving, Freud tells the couple to marry. They obey Freud’s instructions and start a family, even though Win is often away attending university or traveling to resorts with the trained bear. After serving in World War II and teaching English at the Dairy School, where his father, Coach Bob (also known as Iowa Bob), also teaches, Win buys a former girl’s school and turns it into a hotel. So begins Win’s obsession with living in

HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, THE 617

and running hotels. The couple’s brood includes Frank (who is openly gay), Franny (who swears profusely and is gang raped at 15), John (who is the narrator of the story and is in love with his sister Franny), Lily (who is a dwarf and future novelist), and Egg (the youngest who dies in a plane crash with his mother on their way to Vienna). The novel has several interesting symbols and refrains that critics have consistently examined. Sorrow, the beloved family dog plagued with flatulence and halitosis, is put to sleep the night Franny is raped. Franny loves the dog and is wounded further by not having him for comfort. Sorrow, at this point, is transformed from family dog to a symbol for the pain, evil, and loss of life. Sorrow reappears several times because Frank stuffs him. Sorrow falls out of a closet and scares Iowa Bob to death, and when Egg and Mother die, rescuers find the crash by seeing the floating dead Labrador in the ocean. Sorrow weighs heavily upon the family. Franny warns, “We must all watch out for whatever form Sorrow would take next; we must learn to recognize the different poses” (206). Another refrain is “keep passing open windows.” Freud tells the children a story about a Viennese street clown who committed suicide by jumping out an open window. Edward Reilly asserts, “This refrain refers to life’s capriciousness and emphasizes the determination to live purposefully and energetically despite what happens” (Reilly, 91). Lily eventually is unable to heed this refrain; she jumps out an open window after not being able to grow enough as a writer in her mind. This novel is full of hotels and death. There are three Hotel New Hampshires, two in America and one in Vienna. Each hotel represents various stages in development of the Berry children. Gabriel Miller argues that the work is a psychological novel tracing the coming of age of the Berry children and is “best described as kind of fairy tale” (129). The hotels each represent a stage in the traditional structure noticed in fairy tales. The first hotel is a place where the children are initiated into life through experiencing the realities of life. Here John loses his virginity to an older hotel worker; Franny is raped by three of Coach Bob’s football play-

ers and begins to heal from the traumatic experience; and Coach Bob dies upon finding the stuffed body of Sorrow in a closet. The second hotel also comes with many losses but is, more important, the beginning of the children’s journey into the world and adulthood. Egg and Mother die in a plane crash on their way to Vienna. Motherless, the children find themselves in Freud’s hotel full of radicals and prostitutes. Here, Lily tries to grow through writing and becomes a novelist. Franny, through a homosexual relationship with Susie the Bear, comes to terms with her rape, and Susie, who was also raped and dresses as a bear because she is convinced she is unattractive, begins to deal with her insecurities through Franny’s encouragement. Freud dies and Father is blinded when they foil a plot to blow up the State Opera hatched by German terrorists living in the hotel. John realizes his father’s illusions, which formerly blinded him to reality and have now literally blinded him. Moreover, this incident gives John the opportunity to use the strength he has been obsessed with attaining after Franny’s rape to protect his family; he squeezes to death one of the terrorists who made vulgar comments about Franny. The last hotel is a place of healing for all the family. It also represents the last part of traditional-fairy tale structure; the final Hotel New Hampshire is the point of return. The family eventually buys the hotel at which their parents met. Before they buy it, the characters seek to resolve the sorrow that has plagued them while living in other hotels. Shortly after returning to America, John and Franny resolve their socially unacceptable feelings for each other that they have had since childhood. They have sex until they are in pain and are painfully aware of the impossibility of a relationship. Franny confronts her rapist, and Lily commits suicide. The last Hotel New Hampshire is a place for the remaining characters to mend the wounds accumulated while living at the other hotels. It is where Susie and John realize that they are in love, start a rape crisis center, and care for the hotelobsessed Father. Franny becomes a movie star and marries ex-football player, lawyer, and childhood friend Junior. When Franny finds out she is pregnant, she decides to give the child to Susie and John to raise.

618 HOURS, THE

Thus, the Berry family continues into the next generation, still searching for the American Dream and living in hotels and passing open windows.

SOURCES Miller, Gabriel. John Irving. New York: Frederick Unger, 1982. Reilly, Edward. Understanding John Irving. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Shostak, Debra. “The Family Romances of John Irving.” In Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom, 87–103. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2001. Jill Ann Channing

HOURS, THE MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM (1998) Michael CUNNINGHAM’s The Hours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction in 1999, is a contemporary version of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, akin to a “riff” on an older musical score, according to the author (Young, 33). The novel was made into a 2002 Miramax film directed by Stephen Daldry; it garnered a host of nominations and awards, including an Academy Award win for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman). Cunningham’s other novels include A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, which “chart the trajectory of male protagonists from unhappy nuclear families to ‘alternative’ family arrangements” (Young, 14). Though addressing many of these same themes, The Hours describes a June day in the lives of three women: Mrs. Woolf in 1923 London, as she writes her novel Mrs. Dalloway; “Mrs. Dalloway,” or Clarissa Vaughn, a New Yorker at the “end of the twentieth century” whose party preparations mimic the actions of Woolf’s protagonist (Cunningham, 9); and Mrs. Brown, a wife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles who steals time from her unfulfilling life to read Woolf’s novel in a hotel room. While Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway epitomizes writing in the modernist tradition, Cunningham adopts a postmodern awareness “that there are no new stories, just endless retellings” (Young, 34). Cunningham’s novel appropriates many of Woolf’s characters and themes in a studied way, yet his text, though it perhaps profits from a reading of the Woolf novel, stands separately as an alternate and contemporary vision of the earlier

work. Cunningham even appropriates Woolf’s working title of her novel for his own reworking of the story, but as the critic Tory Young has noted, “Cunningham has done more than simply rewrite Woolf’s novel. He has updated it (‘Mrs. Dalloway’), inserted Woolf, as author and character within it (‘Mrs. Woolf’), and in the third narrative component embodied her theories of characterization in modern fiction (‘Mrs. Brown’)” (Young, 33). In Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway prepares for a party she is giving at the evening’s end for friends and acquaintances, especially those associated with her husband, Richard, a Conservative MP in the House of Commons. In Cunningham’s version, Clarissa is giving a party for Richard, a poet and novelist who has won a prestigious poetry award, the Carrouthers Prize. Though Clarissa once had a brief affair with Richard, she has maintained an 18-year relationship with Sally, a “devoted, intelligent woman” (20). Richard, dying of AIDS with a mind “eaten into lace by the virus” (55), parallels Woolf’s war-ravaged Septimus Warren Smith, “the double of Mrs. Dalloway,” who, in committing suicide, “jumps from his window as Clarissa has plunged into the day at the beginning of her story” (Howard, xi). In The Hours, Richard too “slides gently off the sill, and falls” to his death (200), even as Clarissa is finishing her preparations for his party that evening. While the “Mrs. Dalloway” chapters of Cunningham’s novel replicate the events of Woolf’s novel, the “Mrs. Woolf” chapters take place as Woolf herself prepares to return to London after a forced physical and mental rest in the suburbs. Cunningham’s novel actually begins with a prologue, a fictionalized account of Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. The chapters in the novel, however, illustrate Woolf’s desire to escape her protected life and return to London. The chapters also describe Woolf’s choice of life, of exuberance, for her title character: “Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die. She will be too much in love with life, with London. . . . Clarissa, sane Clarissa—exultant, ordinary Clarissa—will go on, loving London, loving her life of ordinary pleasures, and someone else, a deranged poet, a visionary, will be the one to die” (211), suggesting, of course, that the “deranged poet” who

HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS, THE 619

must die is not only Septimus and Richard, but also Woolf herself. The third character, Laura Brown, exists more fully in the novels she reads than in her own life. She, too, finds relief in the thought that “it is possible to die” (151), yet she feels at least partly bound to her son, Richie, her husband, and the unborn child she carries. Only in the final chapter of the novel is Mrs. Brown revealed to have left her family as a result of her unhappiness, including her little boy, Richie, who grows into the Richard for whom Clarissa is giving the party. Unlike her children and husband, Laura, who had flirted with death, is the one still alive at the novel’s end. Thematically, Woolf’s novel explores the passing of time and the way that we attempt to understand our pasts. The tolling of the hour by Big Ben ties the characters to the city and to one another; one feels “an indescribable pause” each time “before Big Ben strikes . . . First a warning, musical; then, the hour, irrevocable” (4), a passage quoted in Cunningham’s novel (41). Woolf’s Clarissa, though “[s]he was not old yet” (36), is incapable of coming to terms with time, both her own aging and her feelings of a wasted life: She “feared time itself” (30). Like Wolfe, Cunningham instills this love of life into the three heroines of his novel, yet each of his heroines, though acknowledging the passing of time, is more reconciled to its effects. Even Cunningham’s Virginia Woolf character rejoices in the “infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead” of “waking on what feels like a good day, preparing to work” (34). Richard commits suicide, but he does so for having “failed” at what he wanted to write, “to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning” (199). In the end, Cunningham envisions a relationship with death and time that is more affirmative than Woolf is ultimately able to imagine. Richard dies, at least in part, for despair at having attempted to compete with the glory of whatever spark there is that makes us love life so. At the end of the novel, Clarissa, Sally, and Laura Brown still can have a party on the day of Richard’s death “for the not-yetdead; for the relatively undamaged; for those who for mysterious reasons have the fortune to be alive” (226).

SOURCES Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Howard, Maureen. Foreword to Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego, Calif.: Harvest-Harcourt, 1981. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway, 1925. Reprint, San Diego: Harvest-Harcourt, 1981. Young, Tory. Michael Cunningham’s “The Hours”: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2003. Mechel Camp

HOUSE BEHIND THE CEDARS, THE CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1900) Charles W. CHESNUTT’s

fiction is both interesting and unique, as he presents scenes of local color from an African-American perspective. Chesnutt is careful in all his writing not to offend the sensibilities of his reading audience, even if this means endorsing some of the predominant racial misconceptions of his day. Like many other African-American authors of this time, Chesnutt was never afforded full literary freedom, and his writing often reflects this constraint. Among his many works of fiction, The House behind the Cedars stands out as a powerful yet puzzling examination of the moral implications of passing, racial theorizing, and miscegenation in the rural South around the turn of the 20th century. The novel contains the story of the Waldens, an African- American family who live in North Carolina in the formative days of Jim Crow segregation. Because of the mother’s intimate association with her former owner, she enjoys a certain amount of freedom, and her children are both light-skinned enough to pass for white. The son, John, is pursuing just such a course of deception as a lawyer in South Carolina. As the novel opens, John returns to the town of his birth and tries to convince his sister Rena to pursue a better life for herself by joining him in the white world, even though this choice would mean deserting their mother. Rena reluctantly agrees and moves to South Carolina with her brother, assuming his fraudulent family name. Almost immediately, Rena, now calling herself Rowena Warwick, becomes the object of desire of one of her brother’s white business associates, George Tryon. Against her better judgment, Rena succumbs to Tryon’s

620 HOUSEKEEPING

advances and even agrees to marry him. At one point, her brother encourages her to overcome her reservations about marrying a white man by telling her, “My dear child, you take too tragic a view of life” (79). The wording here holds significance because of Chesnutt’s allusion to the all-too-common tale of the “tragic mulatta” character. The marriage scheme, however, is foiled when Tryon runs into Rena back in North Carolina and discovers her family background. After Tryon’s rejection, Rena claims, “I’ll stay with my own people” (181). Chesnutt’s somewhat stereotypical creation of the beautiful and tragic character of Rena is further supported by the fact that both of the African-American men interested in her—Frank Fowler and Jeff Wain— are described as extremely dark in complexion, and therefore unsuitable for her. Of course, Chesnutt’s apparent endorsement of white racial assumptions can also be understood from the perspective of audience; like his tales in The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt almost certainly would have been forced to create stories and characters his readers and publishers would have found acceptable. After all, Chesnutt was told early in his career by fellow local-color writer George Washington CABLE, “remember you are writing for white Americans” (Donaldson, 51). This concern, though, does not prevent Chesnutt from exploring some of the fallacies of the predominant racial theories of the day. When Judge Straight tells the young and ambitious John Walden, “One drop of black blood makes the whole man black” (170), the youth replies, “Why shouldn’t it be the other way, if the white blood is so much superior?” (170). The only alternative for concluding the novel seems to be the death of Rena. After leaving her home once again to become a teacher in an African-American school, Rena is confronted on a path by two suitors: one black and the other white. By now Chesnutt has made it clear that Rena belongs in neither the black nor the white world. Unable to devise any other course of action, “She turned and fled. A wiser instinct might have led her forward” (272). Chesnutt even suggests that “In the two conflicting dangers she might have found safety” (272). Alone and exposed in the woods, Rena dies and is eventually brought back home by Frank Fowler, the man who really loves her.

Despite his adherence to the conventional racial wisdom, Chesnutt refuses the didactic opportunities presented by both John’s and Rena’s stories. Chesnutt also leaves the issue of John’s passing unresolved (though Tryon knows John’s secret, he promises not to reveal it): an unsettling prospect to many white readers. Even more disturbing is Tryon’s decision to proceed with the marriage despite his knowledge of Rena’s race. Tryon rationalizes, “he was a white man, one of a race born to command. He would make her white; no one beyond the old town would ever know the difference” (208). This sort of deception would clearly strike fear in the hearts of Southern whites, and though the union between Tryon and Rena never comes about, Tryon is willing to go through with it, and he is prevented from this act of miscegenation only by Rena’s death. The House behind the Cedars is a compelling blend of racism, subversion, and ambiguity—as it bears witness to the nation’s continuing struggle with racial identity.

SOURCES Andrews, William. The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Chesnutt, Charles W. The House behind the Cedars. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Donaldson, Susan V. Competing Voices: The American Novel 1865–1914. New York: Twayne, 1998. Randy Jasmine

HOUSEKEEPING MARILYNNE ROBINSON (1980) Housekeeping, Marilynne ROBINSON’s first novel, won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award, and was nominated for others, including the Pulitzer Prize. More than 20 years passed before her second novel, Gilead, was published, in 2004, but Robinson wrote two books of nonfiction, Mother Country (1989) and The Death of Adam (2000). Housekeeping was made into a feature film in 1987 starring Christine Lahti and directed by Bill Forsyth. Reviewers, general readers, and critics have reached a near consensus that “Robinson writes powerfully, evocatively and beautifully” (Macguire, 11). In the first two decades following Housekeeping’s publication, more than 70 critical articles, book chapters, doctoral dissertations, and master’s theses have been written

HOUSEKEEPING 621

about the novel, not to mention more than 15 interviews conducted with Robinson (Macguire, 12). The novel tells the story of Ruth, the narrator, and her sister Lucille, whose mother commits suicide. The girls live with a series of relatives, finally coming under the guardianship of their eccentric 35-year-old aunt, Sylvie, a transient. Rather than adopting the conventional role of a mother figure and housekeeper, Sylvie allows the girls to come and go as they please. She collects empty cans, stacking them in high towers in corners of the house. Robinson writes: I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration. (84–85) Sylvie’s odd habits at first seem only interesting and harmless to the sisters, but as time wears on, Lucille becomes disturbed by Sylvie’s detachment from community and her isolation from other people, and she longs for a conventional life less at odds with that of her high school friends. Midway through the novel, Lucille leaves the family to live with her male home economics teacher. Ruthie, on the other hand, responds more receptively to Sylvie and her strange and poetic view of the world. Ruthie and Sylvie stay together in the house for a while, going on a long nighttime adventure exploring the local lake. On this excursion the two hop a freight train for the first time. Not long afterward, the sheriff announces to Sylvie that “a hearing” will be held regarding Ruthie’s welfare. Immediately the two set out together for a life of wandering. However, as Susan J. Rosowski states, summarizing Housekeeping this way is “akin to summarizing MOBY-DICK as a man’s hunt for a whale.” It is not events but rather reflections and extended metaphors that make up both novels (Rosowski, 189). A number of critics have pointed out Robinson’s obvious nod to MELVILLE in her opening

line: “My name is Ruth” unmistakably echoes Melville’s famous “Call me Ishmael.” Robinson’s prose is characterized by a poetic quality cited frequently by critics. The novel dwells on impermanence and loss, and the author often uses blurred boundaries between indoors and outdoors and the seeming merger of one thing into another, and of the interconnection of all things. In the first pages of the novel, she writes: Sometimes in the spring the old lake will return. One will open a cellar door to wading boots floating tallowy soles up and planks and buckets bumping at the threshold, the stairway gone from sight after the second step. The earth will brim, the soil will become mud then silty water, and the grass will stand in chill water to its tips. Our house was at the edge of town on a little hill, so we rarely had more than a black pool in our cellar, with a few skeletal insects skidding around on it. A narrow pond would form in the orchard, water clear as air covering grass and black leaves and fallen branches, all around it black leaves and drenched grass and fallen branches, and on it, slight as an image in an eye, sky, clouds, trees, our hovering faces and our cold hands. (5) Robinson’s other themes and ideas revolve around the tensions between civilization and nature, society and the individual, conformity and nonconformity, confinement and freedom, appearance and reality, stasis and change. The novel’s most important and striking feature is its feminist revision of patriarchal traditions, social and literary. Conspicuously absent from the story are any male characters of consequence, and although men and boys do appear, particularly in the memories of the characters, they play a small role in the main characters’ everyday lives. The novel opens with the telling of the story of the disappearance of Ruth’s grandfather. As he rides a train headed west, it crosses a glacier lake and nosedives over the side of the bridge, never to be seen again or salvaged. As Phyllis Lassner observes, “Housekeeping, therefore, begins by asserting the impossibility of

622 HOUSE MADE OF DAWN

searching for patriarchal origins and authority. The father is never found, the only two survivors of the train wreck see nothing, and the boy salvage diver cannot really identify what he senses in the lake.” With the disappearance of the grandfather and the train, both symbols of patriarchal power and conquest, the story is left to Ruth (Lassner, 50). Other key points of revision include Ruthie and Sylvie’s “lighting out” for a life on the road, typically an act reserved for men and boys. Dana Heller examines this aspect of the novel in a chapter in The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures. Stereotypically, when women wander, or ride the rails, they become sexually suspect in the eyes of others, or they seize the opportunity offered by the freedoms of the open road to liberate themselves sexually—think of Thelma’s new sexual playfulness with a young man after she and Louise go on the run in the film Thelma and Louise. However, neither Sylvie nor Ruthie seems to feel sexual desire or to identify themselves in relation to sexual or domestic partners, male or female. The novel makes extensive use of water imagery and symbolism through the lake, forests, and mountains (Macguire, 12). Macguire believes the novel is “a western American version of the Book of Ruth” (Macguire, 12–13). Heller states, “Housekeeping is a novel born of transformative vision of the past, and as such it is a novel deeply concerned with the dual processes of avoiding entrapment in traditional narrative structures and discovering an authentic capacity to name and validate female experience” (Heller, 94). Thomas Gardner sees the novel, however, as a reading of Emily Dickinson: “What Housekeeping does is very simple: it picks up on a set of images and situations first put into play by Emily Dickinson and unfolds them in a new situation, examining the world they make visible” (Gardner, 11). Gardner cites as an example that “Ruth’s tale of how she became a homeless, lyric-voiced drifter ‘cast out to wander’ [209], ‘the perimeters of (whose) wandering are nowhere’ [219], is simply a detailed fleshing out of one of these analogies: Poem J1382’s account of being brought to a rich, wandering alertness by the inability to hold or recover an experience of joy” (Gardner, 11–12).

SOURCES Gardner, Thomas. “Enlarging Loneliness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping as a Reading of Emily Dickinson,” Emily Dickinson Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 9–33. Heller, Dana. The Feminization of Quest-Romance: Radical Departures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Lassner, Phyllis. “Escaping the Mirror of Sameness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Macguire, James. “Reading Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Boise State University Western Writers series; no. 156. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 2003. Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. 1980. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1982. Rosowski, Susan J. “Robinson’s Politics of Meditation.” In Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Claire Pamplin

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN N. SCOTT MOMA(1969) House Made of Dawn, N. Scott MOMAPulitzer Prize–winning novel of 1969, emphasizes the importance of choosing words responsibly and appreciating the value, or necessity, of silence. The story of the protagonist, Abel, along with the story of his people and the society that keeps them suspended between a stereotyped myth and mind-numbing reality, depends in part on its own creation through what is or is not told. Creation, destruction, time, and space shift under Abel’s feet as he runs from Walatowa, New Mexico, to Los Angeles, then back again to the vast landscapes of the Cañon de San Diego. Thus the opening passage in the novel’s prologue in which Abel runs across the plains is completed in its final pages. Running, presented here as a sacred race and rite of passage, represents Abel’s grasp of his ancestral traditions, tenuous at the beginning but forcefully clear at the end. The novel contains four main sections, each representing a different place and time for Abel; these are, in turn, divided into entries defined by specific dates. At times these markers seem the only definite point of reference. Time and space appear immense, linked solely DAY

DAY’s

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN 623

by the narrative gaze: “The eagle ranges far and wide over the land, farther than any other creature, and all things are related simply by having existence in the perfect vision of a bird” (52). At first this all-embracing vision keeps the reader from picking out an absolute, ruling focus, either of characters, words, or actions. Like the eagle, we glide effortlessly over the landscape, moving from a view of old Francisco driving his cart, to his grandson Abel’s arrival, to the town’s inhabitants and visitors, and to the rites and tragedies that keep them together. In House Made of Dawn, the plains and canyons of Walatowa (sections one and four) embrace the narrow streets and back-alley rooms of Los Angeles (sections two and three). Momaday has chosen to keep the canyon land silent, creating a space where the noise of humans must not be above that of nature; in the name of harmony, a tacit balance exists between the scream of an eagle and the cry of a child. Abel’s return seems almost coincidental, as he stumbles off the bus, too drunk to find his own way, and is carried home by his grandfather. At this point, the reader cannot know much about Abel, other than that he has been away for some time. The details are slowly—almost unwillingly—revealed: Abel is a newly returned war veteran, and his experience overseas is apparently the main obstacle to his reintegration. Through flashbacks, we learn that as a child and youth he lived in harmony with the rhythm of his land, participating in community rites and festivals. Life on a battlefield has altered his sense of self and place, and Momaday’s traumatized Abel will later be echoed in Leslie Marmon SILKO’s Tayo, the Pueblo war veteran of her novel Ceremony. At one point, Abel himself concedes that “for all his looking forward, his return has been a failure” (53). Moreover, “he is unable to speak to Francisco, or return to the cycle of festivals and chores that bind the inhabitants of Walatowa. A cycle so penetrating that even Father Olguin, the foreign priest, surrendered once he had at last begun to sense the rhythm of life in the ancient town, how it was that his own pulse should eventually conform to it” (61). Disoriented, Abel becomes a loner, finding temporary comfort in drink,

distorted memories of childhood episodes, and a brief affair with Angela, another outsider to the town. Abel’s silence gradually alienates him from his family and community. His exhausting treks through the countryside, his bouts of drinking, and finally his killing of the albino following an undisclosed conversation seem unexplainable until, seven years later, Abel has moved to Los Angeles. The next two sections portray a violent transition between the soundproof vacuum of Abel’s thoughts and actions in Walatowa and a deafening journey through redemption in Los Angeles: Ironically, it is not the silence of the valley but the chaos and noise of the city that will help Abel focus on the stories and prayers of his people. During this period away from his people he begins to understand and absorb the traditions he has left behind. Once the words return, once he is able to both speak and listen, he remembers where he has come from and where he must return. These sections intersperse Abel’s passage with the sermons of J. Tosamah, Priest of the Sun. A man who scorns his brothers even while he glorifies and lives off the Native stories and traditions in his “Pan-Indian Rescue Mission,” Tosamah nevertheless is a point of reference for many of Los Angeles’s lost souls, whose only ties to the past seem to be the hilltop feasts organized by the priest. The Los Angeles hills represent a poor imitation of their ancestral lands; these displaced persons understand this but, nevertheless, dance and chant overlooking the glare of the urban skyline, at a far remove from their original traditions. Abel, too, seems trapped in this substitute world, but then again at this point his life does not belong to him. On parole after spending time in jail for murdering the albino, Abel is taken by the relocation officer to work in a factory. There, he finds a sympathetic friend in Benally and an obliging lover in Milly, a social worker. The Los Angeles period overflows with words: questionnaires, flashbacks to Abel’s trial, Tosamah’s retelling of Native and biblical creation stories, sudden bursts of confession. In the first part, the language of silence is used simultaneously to communicate and to hide; here, the countless verbal fragments of Abel’s implosion become yet another way of creating meaning. Abel

624 HOUSE OF LEAVES

appears to experiment with opposing strategies— silence and verbosity—in the process of his own recreation. Ultimately, however, Abel finds that talking will not heal him. Only his people’s prayers and stories will help him recover, and for him these cannot survive in the steam and noise of the city. He returns to drinking and sinks into yet another silent depression; he speaks to neither friends nor enemies, and his second burst of violence turns against him, his broken hands and face seeming to take away any hope of further communication. Aware of his removed, fractured condition, he returns to his grandfather’s house. By then, Francisco is dying, and Abel’s task during the last section of House Made of Dawn is to purge his own recent past so that he may inherit and carry out the rites that will see his grandfather safely through to the other side. Therefore, Abel runs in spite of his pain to complete a race that is more about conquering himself than defeating his opponents. In the end, Abel’s future is uncertain: Will he embrace a new life in Walatowa, or find himself lost once again in his memories of war and a desire for oblivion? But once again, silence restores a certain order, and Momaday seems to suggest that this is a path toward healing. Words are sacred, silence is sacred; and only a careful combination of both can result in a language meaningful enough to create entire worlds. As Tosamah states, the word is an instrument that can either preserve culture or cause it to perish.

SOURCES Momaday, N. Scott. The Names: A Memoir. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. ———. House Made of Dawn. New York: Perennial, 1999. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Woodard, Charles L. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Maria Luisa Antonaya

HOUSE OF LEAVES MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI (2000) The novel House of Leaves is multilayered and at times a perplexing enigma, but, thanks to Mark Z. Danielewski’s gifts with narrative, the mystery remains legible and compelling. Central to the book’s conceit of verisimilitude is the existence of a documentary film about one Will Navidson’s experience with a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. The house’s existence is more than a simple question of fact versus fiction, because our narrator and editor Johnny Truant is suspicious of the documentary’s existence as well. Truant is assembling the scattered notes of the recently deceased Zampanò, who has been preparing a critical exegesis of the film, but as Johnny investigates and is ultimately consumed by the book in progress, he grapples with serious doubts as to Zampanò’s existence and the significance of his own existence in relation to the work that seems (at least to the reader) mysteriously connected with the events of his own life. A third narrative voice does not appear until the appendix, suggesting one interpretation of the novel in which even Johnny is a figment of her imagination, skewing the ontology of verisimilitude even further into the realm of the imaginary. Haunting the passageways of both, the minotaur or beast haunts Johnny’s nightmares and growls through Navidson’s explorations of the mysterious dark hallways that appear in his house. This layered narration provides ample opportunities for semiotic play within encoded messages that appear to communicate between narrators across narratological boundaries, forcing the reader to reinterpret basic configurations of diegesis. Still, the central themes of the Navidson Record itself (both the documentary and Zampanò’s book of the same title) revolve around tensions of photographic representation and the anxiety of the image. This anxiety is underscored by the fact that Zampanò, who is blind, provides all the visual descriptions of the film, usually in rich and minutely precise detail. Within the film itself, then, characters are in some way gripped with anxiety about photographic representation (either of creating representation or of being represented photographically), so the thematic tension of the play is continually underscored by the irony of Zam-

HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE 625

panò’s “photo-realistic” depictions of the text. As such, it is tempting to approach the Navidson Record (film) critically as an actual work; doing so reinforces the intended irony and “plays along” with the apocryphal academic discourse continually cited by Zampanò. Adding to the novel’s preoccupation with the visual is its experimental typography. The various narrators are distinguished by employing different typefaces. Johnny Truant’s text is presented in Courier, for example, while Zampanò uses a dignified Times font. Furthermore, page layouts alternate from densely cluttered, labyrinthine footnotes to pages containing a single word or phrase. This variation in the page’s visual complexity dictates the reader’s speed through the novel and calls attention to the page as a material object. The layout of the text on the page even becomes a hieroglyph for the narrative, variously indicating a psychological and spatial bewilderment or the lonely path of a projectile. Further calling attention to the materiality of the text, some editions print the word “house” in blue, while others print references to the Minotaur or struck passages in red (among other variations between printings). This variability helps to destabilize even the “outermost” ontology in a nested series of mediated narrators. Through this performative textuality and an unreliable narrator, House of Leaves is a text firmly rooted in the logic of the digital. N. Katherine Hayles writes, “The remarkable achievement of House of Leaves is to devise a form that locates the book within the remediations of the digital era, along with the concomitant realization that reference becomes unstable or inaccessible in such an environment, and still deliver the pleasures of traditional realistic fiction” (Hayles, 128). The significance of the novel’s digital context extends from the fact that it was originally distributed over the Internet to the web forum at www. houseofleaves.com, where a diverse group of readers carry out close analysis of the text and its encoded messages and allusions. The fast-paced discussion on the forum and the hypertextual nature of its database provide the best resource for exploring the intricacies of this work, and the range of backgrounds and interests of its members mimic in some ways the range of demographics between the 20-something tattoo apprentice Johnny and

the aging, blind, pseudoacademic Zampanò. Side-byside references to Jacques Derrida, Stephen KING, and Hunter S. Thompson allow readers of disparate inclinations to access the text through its numerous inroads. For all its attempts at being a haunted house story, House of Leaves is as much a psychological and semiological experiment as it is an enjoyable piece of fiction. Its complexity, nevertheless, rewards careful readers and challenges the erudite with word puzzles and obscure allusions. Furthermore, House of Leaves situates itself as a leading example of a new way of going about fiction, infusing the material of the text with the energetic and esoteric hypermedium of the Web.

SOURCE Hayles, Katherine N. Writing Machine. Mediawork. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

OTHER Bemong, Nele. “Exploration # 6: The Uncanny in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves.” Image [&] Narrative. 5 (January 1, 2003). Available online. URL: http://www. imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/nelebemong.htm. Accessed January 31, 2005. Zach Whalen

HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE EDITH WHARTON (1905) The House of Mirth marks the beginning of the major phase of Edith WHARTON’s career as a novelist. By the time it appeared in 1905, Wharton had already published, among other works, a highly successful book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses (written with Ogden Codman, 1897); a collection of short stories, The Greater Inclination (1899); a novella, The Touchstone (1900); and a historical novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). It was The House of Mirth, however, that established the subject matter of Old New York society with which Wharton would be consistently associated and the “discipline of the daily task” that turned her from “a drifting amateur into a professional” (Wharton, 941). Like some of Wharton’s later novels, such as The AGE OF INNOCENCE (1920), The House of Mirth chronicles the ways in which a frivolous society consumes and destroys the individuals, especially women, who cannot free themselves from its constraints.

626

HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE

In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, Wharton’s heroine, is nearly at the end of her career as a single woman in New York society. At 29, with 11 social seasons behind her, Lily has been on the marriage market too long, but her status as “the beautiful Miss Bart” makes her an asset to country house weekends and other social gatherings. The opening scenes of the book succinctly present both Lily’s dilemma and a pattern of events that will be repeated throughout the novel. In Grand Central Station one hot afternoon, Lawrence Selden, a lawyer of modest means and a friend of Lily, reflects on her unerring social skills as he watches her maneuver her way through the station after she has missed her train to a weekend party at the Trenors’ country house, Bellomont. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!” she exclaims, after which he asks Lily to tea. Despite the risks to her reputation, she agrees to have tea at his apartment, but as she will do throughout the work, she must pay for her indiscretion: When leaving Selden’s apartment house, she meets the Jewish businessman Simon Rosedale, who has been trying to gain social acceptance, and lies to him about her reasons for being there, an action that will haunt her later in the work. These simple events set the thematic pattern for what is to follow: Lily repeatedly misses opportunities, as she misses trains; she gambles with cards and with her future as she refuses to acknowledge the precariousness of her social position and reputation; she allows Selden to divert her from her stated purpose of marrying well; she exists in a continual state of transition (“between trains”), having no home or secure social position of her own; and she remains an object of spectacle rather than of emotional engagement for Selden, whose belated attempts at rescue are always too little and too late. The reasons for her behavior are complex, but in part they derive from the “republic of the spirit” that she believes she shares with Selden, the quality of being in society but not wholly of it, and the ability to look objectively upon its follies without sharing its values. As Lily’s friend Carry Fisher tells Selden after one such misadventure, “That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed, but the day she ought to be reaping the har-

vest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic . . . [S]ometimes I think it’s because, at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for” (147–48). The rest of the work repeats this pattern as Lily continually begins to create a place for herself and then, confident of her success, seriously underestimates her opponents and overestimates her own ability to recover, after which her position slips. For example, shortly after her tea with Selden, Lily succeeds in attracting the wealthy but dull Percy Gryce as they both travel on the train to Bellomont. Once at Bellomont, Lily, feeling sure of Gryce’s affection and the prospect of a marriage proposal, chooses instead to spend time with Selden, thus destroying her chances with Gryce and angering Selden’s former mistress, the powerful and dangerous Bertha Dorset. Despite this setback, Lily experiences a kind of apotheosis at the Wellington Brys’ tableaux vivants when, posing as Joshua Reynolds’s painting Mrs. Lloyd, she dazzles all three of her greatest admirers: Selden, Simon Rosedale, and Gus Trenor, whom she has charmed into investing money for her while refusing to admit to herself that he expects a sexual relationship. But the chances engendered by the tableaux vivants slip away from her. Despite his admiration for her, Selden keeps his feelings for her in check; Gus Trenor attempts to rape her shortly thereafter; and although Simon Rosedale proposes to her and she makes up her mind to marry him, Lily instead leaves for Monte Carlo on George and Bertha Dorset’s yacht. The self-destructive nature of this act becomes evident when Bertha, to hide her own adulterous affairs, orders Lily off the yacht and accuses her of adultery with George. Selden witnesses both her flight from Gus Trenor’s house after the attack and the humiliating scene at the yacht, but his assistance is, as always, limited to reproving Lily for how she lives rather than making another way of life possible for her. When she inherits only a token amount instead of a large fortune from her censorious aunt, Mrs. Peniston, Lily rapidly descends the social ladder, from working as a social secretary for the nouveau riche Mrs. Norma Hatch and living in a vulgar, lavish hotel suite to trimming hats in a sweatshop and living in a cheap boardinghouse. Still clinging to her better self, Lily refuses

HOUSE OF MIRTH, THE 627

on ethical grounds either to blackmail Bertha Dorset with the love letters that Bertha has written to Selden or to ignore her own debt to Gus Trenor. During a final visit to Selden she burns the letters and returns to her room to write the check to Trenor, an act that leaves her penniless and without a future. As he has belatedly rescued her from the Dorsets’ yacht and from Mrs. Hatch’s pink parlor, Selden rushes to Lily’s side after this last visit to him, only to find that he is once again too late: She has died from an overdose of chloral hydrate. Bending over her body, Selden imagines that “in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (256). Since its publication, The House of Mirth has been critically acclaimed for its indictment of the economic realities of the marriage market for women and its unsparing look at the hypocrisy, Philistinism, and callousness of New York society. The title, as reviewers at the time noted, is from Ecclesiastes 7:4: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” Defending her seemingly frivolous subject matter, Wharton argued that “a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys” (Lewis, 150), in this case the life of a character ethically superior to those around her. A film version of the novel, directed by Terence Davies and starring Gillian Anderson and Dan Aykroyd, was released in 2000. In 2005, it was adapted as an Off-Broadway play entitled The Innocents. Scholarship on the novel has focused on a number of issues: its structure and point of view; its characterization, especially of the weak hero Selden and the roles of women; its use of gambling, speculation, and economics; its use of spectacle, theatrics, and the male gaze; its exploration of the role of the woman artist and artistry in general; its naturalistic and scientific overtones; its allusions, especially to Greek myth and drama; and, not least, its famous closing sentence and the meaning of the “word” that passes between Selden and Lily after her death.

SOURCES Benert, Annette Larson. “The Geography of Gender in The House of Mirth,” Studies in the Novel 22, no. 1 (1990): 26–42.

Benstock, Shari. The House of Mirth: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary, Critical Perspectives. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Esch, Deborah, ed. New Essays on The House of Mirth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Goldman-Price, Irene. “The Perfect Jew and The House of Mirth: A Study in Point of View,” Edith Wharton Review 16, no. 1 (2000): 1, 2–9. Hovet, Grace Ann, and Theodore R. Hovet. “Tableaux Vivants: Masculine Vision and Feminine Reflections in Novels by Warner, Alcott, Stowe, and Wharton,” American Transcendental Quarterly 7, no. 4 (1993): 335–356. Kassanoff, Jennie A. “Extinction, Taxidermy, Tableaux Vivants: Staging Race and Class in The House of Mirth,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 60–74. Kaye, Richard A. “Textual Hermeneutics and Belated Male Heroism: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and the Resistance to American Literary Naturalism,” Arizona Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1995): 87–116. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Sapora, Carol Baker. “Female Doubling: The Other Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” Papers on Language and Literature 29, no. 4 (1993): 371–394. Showalter, Elaine. “The Death of the Lady (Novelist): Wharton’s House of Mirth,” Representations 9 (1985): 133–149. Shulman, Robert. “Divided Selves and the Market Society: Politics and Psychology in The House of Mirth,” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 11 (1985): 10–19. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The House of Mirth: A Novel of Admonition. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, no. 52. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Waid, Candace. “Building The House of Mirth.” In Biographies of Books: The Compositional Histories of Notable American Writings, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk (editor and introduction), 160–186. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Wharton, Edith. “A Backward Glance.” 1934. Reprinted in Edith Wharton: Novellas and Other Writings. Edited by Cynthia G. Wolff. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1990. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Edited by Elizabeth Ammons. Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1990. Wolff, Cynthia G. “Lily Bart and the Beautiful Death,” American Literature 46 (1974): 16–40.

628 HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, THE

———. “Lily Bart and the Drama of Femininity,” American Literary History 6, no. 1 (1994): 71–87. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “The Conspicuous Wasting of Lily Bart,” Essays in Literary History 59, no. 3 (1992): 713–734. Donna Campbell

HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, THE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1851) Published one year after his widely acknowledged masterpiece, The SCARLET LETTER, The House of the Seven Gables represents HAWTHORNE’s attempt to write, in his words, a “sunnier” book. In its famous preface, Hawthorne explicitly identifies Gables as a “romance,” a term he uses to denote a quasi-fantastic blend of realism and allegorical symbolism. For Hawthorne, the “romance” provided the ideal form in which an artist might “paint” the moral nature of humankind. As in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s painting here depicts the corrupting and isolating effects of sinful pride. The specific symbolism of the text is too dense to summarize effectively, but a few remarks on the central image—the house—may prove suggestive. Hawthorne draws on two different discourses, Calvinist theology and romantic aesthetics, in developing the book’s primary setting, and both discourses prove central to his moral argument. As a physical embodiment of the pride and greed of the Pyncheon family, the sevengabled house provides Hawthorne with a vehicle for interrogating the Puritan understanding of the concept of original and inherited sin. Handed down through generations of Pyncheons, the house represents an inescapable curse driving the descendants of the original, stony-hearted patriarch to moral decay and, finally, despair. At the same time, Hawthorne renders the house in a way that suggests the romantic “picturesque”—a middle ground between the easy aesthetic pleasure of the “beautiful” and the awe-inspiring and unsettling “sublime.” Translated from purely aesthetic terms into moral ones, the house thus draws attention to Hawthorne’s use of the romance form to seek a middle ground between the naive moral optimism of Emersonian transcendentalism and its various avatars and the punitive theology and angry God of the Puritans.

The plot of the book, which is dominated by descriptive passages and narrator commentary, involves a series of dialectical encounters between individual characters and their moral opposites. Generally speaking, these encounters (many of which take place in the densely symbolic garden attached to the house) lead to the achievement of a synthetic moral middle ground. In this manner, the characters slowly grow and change as the book progresses from a gloomy opening to a happy conclusion. In the early chapters, for example, Hepzibah Pyncheon is a veritable prisoner in the sepulchral house, cut off from the world by her own misplaced aristocratic pride and a despairing sense of moral impotence. The arrival of her opposite, the young, vibrant, and beautiful country-cousin Phoebe, initiates a thawing process in Hepzibah and brings light into the house. Yet Phoebe, too, is changed following her arrival in Salem. Her time in the house and her relationships with her invalid cousin Clifford and the artist-tenant Holgrave transform her from a moral innocent into one capable of recognizing and exorcizing the family curse. This pattern manifests itself throughout the text, with a number of other interesting character pairings—Holgrave with Clifford Pyncheon, Clifford with Hepzibah, Phoebe with the hypocritical Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon, and so on. In the end, those characters who accept and engage in the process of change find some form of redemption. Humility, repentance, and forgiveness provide the cure for the curse of pride. In the final chapters, Judge Pyncheon meets his just end (repeating the grim and symbolic death of his proud ancestor), Hepzibah and Clifford escape their gloomy isolation, Phoebe throws open the doors of the house in an act of symbolic confession, and she and Holgrave (the descendant of a family grievously wronged by the first Pyncheon) agree to marry. Many critics have questioned the rapid and neat resolution of the book’s central conflicts, but it may be that Hawthorne was simply trying to explore a simple, “sunny,” moral concept—the idea that sin is inescapable only to those who fail to believe in the possibility of redemption. Much of the pleasure in reading the book comes in following the changing

HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, THE 629

perspectives of the characters (and the narrator) regarding this theological issue, with the changes reflected in the descriptive prose and shifting symbolism. The writing in Gables is rich and evocative, and Hawthorne paints his moral canvas with a sure hand. The book can thus be read simultaneously as a brilliant aesthetic production and a densely symbolic Christian parable.

SOURCES Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976. Bewley, Marius. The Eccentric Design. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The House of the Seven Gables. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Male, Roy R. Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1957. Martin, Terrence. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Twayne, 1965. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Pearce, Roy Harvey, ed. Hawthorne Centenary Essays. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964. Waggoner, Hyatt H. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. David J. Carlson

HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, THE SANDRA

CISNEROS (1989) Sandra CISNEROS’s young pro-

tagonist, Esperanza, is trapped in the concrete landscape of the Chicago barrio in The House on Mango Street. In this collection of highly autobiographical, interconnected vignettes, Cisneros claims she writes as a “reaction against those people who want to make our barrios look like Sesame Street, or some place really warm and beautiful!” (Cisneros, “Solitary,” 69). Growing up poor in Mexico and Chicago with six brothers, Cisneros, like her young narrator, learned how “poor neighborhoods lose their charm after dark.” Writing Mango Street is Cisneros’s way of documenting this reality of her upbringing. Like Cisneros, Esperanza also turns to writing to record her daily struggles and to give voice to those suffering around

her. Self-presentation through storytelling is Esperanza’s only way of gaining agency in her patriarchal, Latino community where, as both a child and a female, she is otherwise all but invisible. On Mango Street one finds children scrambling to gather their loose change so that they can buy a used bicycle to share among themselves; while jumping rope older girls make up songs about the advantages of developing hips, or they teeter down the street in castoff, high-heeled shoes, straddling the innocence of childhood and their burgeoning womanhood. It is a community in which some young women work hard to receive an education, despite having to play the role of mother to their many siblings, and where others put equal effort into finding a mate, trading the homes of their strict but often well-meaning fathers for those of their insecure, domineering, sometimes abusive husbands. Among all this activity on Mango Street is Esperanza, a young girl with the unreachable dream of living in the perfect, storybook home. Deborah L. Madsen explains that Chicano culture “promises little girls less than they are capable of achieving—a life of drudgery, servitude, and selfdenial” (Madsen, 117). This is a lesson that Esperanza learns young in life when moving from one dilapidated apartment to another with her family. When her family is finally able to move into a house of their own, it is nothing like the “real house” she is expecting, “like the houses on T.V.” (Cisneros, House, 4). In the vignette, “The House on Mango Street,” Esperanza explains that her new house has “windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath” (4). The door is swollen, there is no front yard, and even the bricks are crumbling. It is not, she says, a house “I could point to” (5) without shame. Esperanza’s desire for the perfect house becomes the controlling metaphor for the novella. Her development as a writer is tied to her desire for her own space, “a place to think her own thoughts and to write them down in an appropriate silence” (127). It is through writing that Esperanza discovers the power to make a difference in her own life and in the lives of others on Mango Street (127). Esperanza first senses possibilities for her writing when her Aunt Lupe plants the first

630 HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, THE

seeds in Esperanza’s mind that her writing may be useful to her later. Too young to leave Mango Street for the time being, Esperanza escapes into the world of her stories, continuing to chronicle the struggles and small victories of those in her community. On Mango Street, however, writing alone is not enough to save her from an oppressive future in the barrio; as evidenced in her surroundings, she will need to use her writing to escape from Mango Street. This theme is present in “Minerva Writes Poems.” In “Minerva,” a young woman a “bit” older than Esperanza who already has two kids and an on-again, off-again relationship with her husband, Esperanza finds a companion with whom to share her poetry. Like Esperanza, Minerva has the ability to escape into the world of her writing, but she remains “sad like a house on fire” (84), trapped in the cycle of her abusive marriage with no strength to seek out a future on her own. Esperanza cannot help her friend, but she knows what she needs to strive toward for herself: “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (108). Although it is clear Esperanza will need to leave Mango Street to fulfill her dream, she is warned not to abandon the other residents who have peopled her stories and fueled her imagination. In “The Three Sisters,” while Esperanza attends a funeral she is approached by three cronelike sisters who single her out of the crowd and encourage her to make a wish. “She’s special,” one woman says while reading Esperanza’s palm. “Yes, she’ll go far,” another adds (104). After Esperanza makes her wish, one of the sisters holds Esperanza’s face in her old hands. “When you leave,” she says, “you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are” (105). The old woman’s words suggest an overriding theme of the novella, Esperanza’s responsibility as a writer. With the final selection in the novella, “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” Esperanza both envisions and embraces her role as a writer. She tells us that Mango Street, the place she has always wanted to escape, is now what she remembers most, that place

“I belong but do not belong” (110). She now finds that in writing about Mango Street, she is released from its most painful memories for awhile. Finally, Esperanza recognizes that she is stronger than her upbringing in poverty and that she will eventually leave Mango Street. As the novella closes, it is clear that Esperanza is becoming the writer she has presented herself to be, and in her promise to return to Mango Street, she expresses her task as a minority writer in America to rise up as a voice for her Latino culture. Like Cisneros, Esperanza will “take upon herself the power to speak and find that she is heard” (Madsen, 134).

SOURCES Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1989. ———. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros,” edited by Pilar E. Rodriguez Aranda. The Americas Review 18, no. 1 (September 1988): 64–80. Gutierrez-Jones, Leslie S. “Different Voices: The Re-Building of the Barrio in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” In Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 95–312. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Kuribayashi, Tomoko. “The Chicana Girl Writes Her Way in and Out: Space and Bilingualism in Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” In Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women’s Writing, edited by Tomoko Kuribayashi and Julie Tharp, 165–177. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Olivares, Julian. “Entering The House on Mango Street (Sandra Cisneros).” In Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays, edited by John R. Maitino and David R. Peck, 209–235. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Valdes, Maria Elena de. “The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street.” In Gender, Self, and Society, edited by Renate von Bardeleben, 287–300. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1993. Hayley Mitchell Haugen

HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY, THE 631

HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY, THE EARL DERR BIGGERS (1925) The House Without a Key is known as the first of six Charlie Chan detective novels written by Earl Derr BIGGERS between 1925 and 1933. It was, however, conceived as the first (and last) John Quincy Winterslip detective novel. Most of the novel is narrated from the point of view of the young Bostonian who finds himself sent on a mission similar to that of another Bostonian, Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors. But instead of traveling to Old Europe, John Quincy must travel to Honolulu to recall his Brahmin aunt to her senses and escort her home. (Aunt Minerva provides the only other point of view in the narration.) It is John Quincy’s uncle Dan who is murdered, and it is John Quincy who insists on assisting the police and who, in a final struggle, apprehends the villain. Detective Sergeant Charlie Chan is merely one of the policemen whom John Quincy assists; moreover, he is subordinate to the captain of detectives, Hallet. And Chan’s ethnicity was almost an afterthought: Biggers was perhaps influenced by reports of actual Honolulu police detective Chang Apana, whom he encountered on a 1919 vacation in Hawaii, but he told the New York Times that his principal motive for making his detective sergeant Chinese was to counter the Fu Manchu stereotype of the “sinister and wicked Chinese” (Biggers, “Creating Charlie Chan,” 6). The gesture led to five more novels in which Chan is clearly the main detective, and to some 53 movies featuring Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters as a plump, Confucius-quoting Chinese detective. The House Without a Key is, however, best read as a novel with Charlie Chan in it. Its primary theme is John Quincy Winterslip’s discovery of himself in a Honolulu that was just beginning to transform itself into the magnet of mass tourism that it has since become. Dan Winterslip owns a cottage on underdeveloped Waikiki Beach, and while several characters reminisce about the romantic 1880s, “with old Kalakaua sitting on his golden throne” (9), the land that John Quincy Winterslip encounters in the 1920s is still a tropical antithesis to the buttoned-up Puritanism of the Boston with which he insistently identi-

fies himself. Almost as important as discovering who killed Dan Winterslip is discovering whom John Quincy will take as a bride: Agatha, his proper Boston fiancée; Barbara, his blonde and wealthy cousin; or Carlota, the dark-haired daughter of Jim Egan, a derelict Englishman who runs a ramshackle hostelry on Waikiki. Biggers, in 1925, had already enjoyed a career as a Broadway playwright and as the author of a half dozen novels that combined humor, romance, and mystery. The House Without a Key repeats the combination, but in adding the exotic scene and, as Biggers discovered, the exotic detective sergeant, he had produced a fiction that caught the public’s attention and that could lead to a series of encores. The mystery plot is overburdened with red herrings. Toward the end of the novel, John Quincy enumerates seven different suspects who had motives for killing Dan Winterslip and toward whom at least one clue had pointed. The list does not include the actual killer, nor a few additional minor characters who also might have done it. Classical mysteries of the “Golden Age” often suffered from a surfeit of suspects; it was regarded as a strength. It is probably a weakness in a novel as interesting as The House Without a Key. Several of the suspects are connected with Dan Winterslip’s shady past transporting involuntary laborers around the South Pacific; they happen to turn up in Honolulu at the crucial moment. Some suspects are connected with Dan’s current amours. At least one man is suspected because he has a habit of eavesdropping; it emerges that he is an agent of the Treasury Department pursuing a drugsmuggling ring—a subplot rather tenuously related to the main action. But the baroque excesses of the mystery plot should not distract from the real interest of the novel: a young urban professional’s journey from Boston to Boston’s American antipode, where he encounters new flora and fauna (lizards, the night-blooming cereus), new language (malihini, kamaaina, pau, pilikia, makai, lanai), and a new, relaxed pace of life. He discovers a slightly disreputable strain in his uncles and his aunt, and eventually in himself. In chapter 3, his Uncle Roger in San Francisco had challenged him: “Have you ever forgot to go to bed? . . . ever made love to the

632 HOWARD, MAUREEN

wrong girl? . . . ever run for your life through crooked streets in the rowdy corner of a strange town? Ever fought with a ship’s officer—the old-fashioned kind with fists flying like hams?” (26). John Quincy responds with indignant denials. But by chapter 23, he has done these things, and has discovered that he does not belong in proper Boston. The novel concludes with his decision to marry the dark-haired Carlota Maria Egan, and to take her not to Beacon Street but to San Francisco, where he will join his uncle’s firm. Charlie Chan does not appear at all in the last chapter, in which John Quincy proposes marriage to Carlota, and he does not play a large part in the penultimate chapter, in which the killer is apprehended by John Quincy (though he does perform the trick that leads to a confession). But his investigative technique, with its good-natured spirit and its attention to detail, made him a memorable figure. He does not spout psuedo-Confucian aphorisms with the prodigality of his film avatars, but he is presented as an embodiment of an alien, Eastern culture. John Quincy visits him at his home on Punchbowl Hill. He finds Chan dressed in a silk robe, amid blue and white vases, dwarf trees, and golden lanterns: “for the first time John Quincy was really conscious of the great gulf across which he and Chan shook hands” (192). Biggers did not deeply research a Chinese background, but he did effectively exploit Charlie Chan’s “Oriental” qualities of intuition and patience, and cleverly set the wisdom of China against what Chan calls “the ancient civilization of Boston” (74). Finally, Charlie Chan is not merely a Chinese detective; he is a family detective, with a wife and nine children. At a time when fictional detectives were celibate (and often misogynistically celibate), Biggers created a detective with a devotion to his own family. It is no surprise, then, that he found it possible to return repeatedly to Charlie Chan, celebrating his acuity and revealing new layers of his character.

SOURCES Biggers, Earl Derr. The House Without a Key. New York: Bantam, 1974. “Creating Charlie Chan.” New York Times, 22 March 1931, p. VIII-6.

Grigorich, Barbara. “Earl Derr Biggers: Brief Life of a Popular Author: 1884–1933,” Mystery Scene 82 (2000): 28–29. Mitchell, Charles P. A Guide to Charlie Chan Films. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. J. K. Van Dover

HOWARD, MAUREEN (1930– ) Writing of Maureen Howard’s perennial interest in family dynamics, the critic Marc Robinson observes, “Not for her the cozy domestic zones where passions are labeled and personal histories are smugly untangled into ‘relationships’ ” (Robinson, 46). Instead, Howard, author of eight novels and three novellas—in addition to short fiction, screenplays, literary criticism, and book reviews—has adamantly insisted on the individuality of each of her complex characters. These characters are usually strong enough to break free of the parameters around their preordained roles—those determined by society. Howard is, moreover, well known for vividly portrayed women who want to sever ties with their families. Nominated several times for the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Howard won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980. Maureen Howard was born on June 28, 1930, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to William Howard, an Irish immigrant who became county detective for Fairfield County, and Loretta Burns Kearns. She graduated from Smith College with a bachelor’s degree in 1952, married Daniel F. Howard in 1954, and would wed twice more, to David J. Gordon and to Mark Probst. Her first novel, Not a Word about Nightingales (1961), skillfully portrays the breaking up and coming together of the Sedgely family; a trip to Perugia, Italy, provides the catalyst for college professor Albert Sedgely to leave his wife and family, take on a mistress, and remain in Italy. As his wife begins to enjoy her new independent life and his 18-year-old daughter, Rosemary, returns to Italy, and is shocked to learn of her father’s relationship with Carlotta Manzini, Albert tires of Italy and resumes his life with his family. Bridgeport Bus (1966) features the middle-aged writer Mary Agnes Keeley, who leaves her home in Connecticut to live in New York City. She becomes disillusioned by her peculiar and depressing

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN 633

friends, and returns, pregnant and unmarried, to Stanley Sarnicki, the father, and becomes the caregiver to her aging mother. In Before My Time (1975), another Bridgeport novel, Howard presents the complex relationships among aunts, nephews, and cousins. Laura Quinn, the protagonist, aware that she cannot truly alter the course of history or family genes, becomes a better person after she intervenes in the life of her wayward nephew. Grace Abounding (1982), one of Howard’s most admired novels, depicts 43-year-old Maude Dowd and her teenage daughter Elizabeth, desolate in the wake of husband and father Frank Dowd’s death. After a tawdry affair, Maud earns a doctorate, becomes a child therapist, and marries happily; Elizabeth relinquishes her future career as a singer to marry and have children. The acclaimed novel Expensive Habits (1986) tells the tale of the writer Margaret Flood, who, after surviving heart surgery, tries to make amends for the mistakes of her earlier life; Pinkham Strong, a man of privileged background, obsessively seeks more information about his forebears. In Natural History (1992), a tale of murder and revenge with a World War II backdrop, county detective Billy Bray solves the murder of a soldier; the soldier’s angry brother, however, is dissatisfied with Bray’s handling of the matter. Billy’s wife, Nell, and their children are never sure what family ties, if any, still exist. A Lover’s Almanac (1998) has been described as a novel of its time; set just before the millennium, it juxtaposes two love stories, one between a young couple unsure about the wisdom of marriage and another about an elderly couple who begin a late-life romance. In addition to her award-winning memoir, Facts of Life, Howard has written Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (2001), a collection of novellas. Howard lives and works in New York City, where she is a professor at Columbia University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Before My Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring. New York: Viking, 2001. Bridgeport Bus. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. Expensive Habits. New York: Summit Books, 1986. Grace Abounding. Boston: Little, Brown, 1982. A Lover’s Almanac. New York: Viking, 1998.

Natural History. New York: Norton, 1992. Not a Word about Nightingales. New York: Atheneum, 1961.

SOURCES Bell, Pearl K. Review of Natural History, Partisan Review 60, no. 1 (1993): 68–70. Edwards, Thomas R. “Design for Living,” New York Review of Books, 3 December 1992, pp. 30–32. O’Brien, George. “Assimilation Blues: Maureen Howard’s Facts of Life,” MELUS 18, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 95–102. Pool, Gail. “Tales of Two Cities,” Women’s Review of Books 10, no. 3 (December 1992): 20. Robinson, Marc. Review of Natural History, New Republic, 9 November 1992, pp. 46–49.

OTHER Howard, Maureen. Audio Interview with Maureen Howard with Don Swain. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/maureenhoward/. Accessed September 13, 2005.

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN (1837–1920) Familiarly known as the “Dean of American literature,” William Dean Howells shaped American fiction for over 40 years. His contributions to American literature were extensive. In 1915, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Fiction—now known as the Howells Medal—from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. As a novelist, Howells was instrumental in defining and refining realism; most notably he demonstrated that a person’s character played a role in his or her destiny, and he emphasized the significance of the ordinary over the rare and the strange. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly and, later, Harper’s, he published established American writers and also encouraged younger ones such as Henry JAMES and Mark TWAIN. He was prolific in numerous genres. He published over 30 novels and novellas, almost 20 volumes of short fiction, over 30 plays, four books of poetry, and numerous volumes of collected essays, literary criticism, travel, biography, and autobiography. Among his best-known novels are A MODERN INSTANCE (1882), The RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM (1885), Indian Summer (1886), ANNIE KILBURN (1888), A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES (1889), The LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD (1897), and The Leatherwood God (1916), all of which illustrate Howells’s belief in an ethical basis for literature. As Kenneth E. Eble has noted,

634 HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN 634

“Howells’ own rise to affluence and social position seemed to be accompanied by a corresponding rise in his social consciousness” (Eble, William Dean Howells, 93). William Dean Howells was born on March 1, 1837, in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, to William Cooper Howells, a printer and journalist, and Mary Dean Howells. Mainly self-educated, Howells eventually received honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Columbia, and Princeton. He married Elinor Gertrude Mead on December 24, 1862. He wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and when Lincoln became president, Howells was appointed as the U.S. consul in Venice, Italy; during his four-year tenure, he practiced his craft. On his return from Europe, Howells was made editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly, which he transformed into a magazine of national distinction. In Their Wedding Journey (1872), a trip through New England by Basil and Isabel March is based on a similar journey taken by Howells and his wife. Among his early novels, A Foregone Conclusion (1874) has been singled out for praise; it is an international novel about Don Ippolito, a priest who falls in love with Florida Vervain, a young American woman who rejects his proposal of marriage. His first major novel, A Modern Instance (1882), is a study of the rise and dissolution of the marriage between Marcia Gaylord, a passionate young woman from New England, and Bartley Hubbard, a vain and self-centered young man who divorces his wife in an Indiana courtroom. She returns to her hometown of Equity, Maine; he is killed in a quarrel. In 1881, Howells left the Atlantic to spend four years in Italy. His best-known work, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), traces a Civil War veteran who leaves the Vermont family farm, moves to New York City, becomes rich and successful, then makes a decision that ruins his business but elevates him in moral stature. Indian Summer (1886), one of Howells’s own favorites, tells the story of 41-year-old newspaper editor Theodore Colville, an American in Venice, and Imogene Graham, a romantic young woman prepared to marry Colville. Colville realizes that it is her older companion who truly attracts him. That same year, 1886, Howells began writing the “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s, in which he continued his crusade against older Amer-

ican literary forms and for more truthful representations of realism. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells’s most expansive social novel, Basil March, the first-person narrator, moves from New York to Boston to begin a new magazine. In the process he encounters every psychological character type, the most memorable if least admirable being the Dryfoos family, particularly the patriarch, Jacob Dryfoos, the callous social Darwinist who clashes with the socialist Lindau. The complexly plotted novel evokes New York in all its myriad composition in the year 1890. The Landlord at Lion’s Head approaches the naturalistic end of realism, focusing, as it does, on the wealthy and sexually charged Bessie Lynde, her alcoholic brother, Alan, and the calculating Jeff Durgin, a man lacking in any moral principles. Durgin emerges victorious at novel’s end. His last novel, The Leatherwood God (1916), is a tale of religious fanaticism during pioneer times in Leatherwood Creek, Ohio. Joseph Dylks appears one summer day and persuades numerous individuals that he is God; eventually, however, he is exposed for the fraud he is. Howells died on May 11, 1920, from complications arising from a cold. The largest collection of Howells manuscripts is at Harvard University. Significant collections may also be found at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, the Library of Congress, Yale and Columbia Universities, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Library in Fremont, Ohio.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Annie Kilburn. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1888. April Hopes. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1887. A Boy’s Town. New York: Harper, 1890. A Chance Acquaintance. Boston: Osgood, 1873. The Day of Their Wedding. New York: Harper, 1896. Dr. Breen’s Practice. Boston: Osgood, 1881. A Foregone Conclusion. Boston: Osgood, 1874. A Hazard of New Fortunes, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1889; 1 volume, New York: Harper, 1890. Indian Summer. Boston: Ticknor, 1886. The Landlord at Lion’s Head. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1897. The Leatherwood God. New York: Century, 1916. Mercy. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1892. Republished as The Quality of Mercy, New York: Harper, 1892. The Minister’s Charge. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1886.

HOWELLS, WILLIAM DEAN 635

A Modern Instance, 1 vol. Boston: Osgood, 1882; 2 vols., Edinburgh: Douglas, 1882. Mrs. Farrell. New York: Harper, 1921. An Open-Eyed Conspiracy. New York: Harper, 1897. A Parting and a Meeting. New York: Harper, 1896. The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1 vol., Boston: Ticknor, 1885; 2 vols., Edinburgh: Douglas, 1894. A Sea-Change, or Love’s Stowaway: A Lyricated Farce. Boston: Ticknor, 1888. The Shadow of a Dream. Edinburgh: Douglas, 1890. The Son of Royal Langbrith. New York: Harper, 1904. Their Silver Wedding Journey, 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1899. Their Wedding Journey. Boston: Osgood, 1872. Through the Eye of the Needle. New York: Harper, 1907. A Traveler from Altruria. New York: Harper, 1894. The Vacation of the Kelwyns. New York: Harper, 1920.

SOURCES Alkana, Joseph. The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Anesko, Michael, ed. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bassett, John E. “A Heart of Ideality in My Realism” and Other Essays on Howells and Twain. West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1991. Bennett, George N. William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959. ———. The Realism of William Dean Howells, 1889–1920. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1973. Brenni, Vito Joseph. William Dean Howells: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years. New York: Dutton, 1952. ———. Howells: His Life and World. New York: Dutton, 1959. Cady, Edwin H., and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Howells. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. William Dean Howells: Dean of American Letters. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, Volume 1: The Road to Realism: The Early Years, 1837–1885, 1956; Volume 2: The Realist at War: The Mature Years, 1883–1920, 1958. Cook, Don L. William Dean Howells: The Kittery Years. Kittery Point, Me.: William Dean Howells Memorial Committee, 1991. Crowley, John W. The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Eble, Kenneth E., ed. Howells: A Century of Criticism. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962. ———. William Dean Howells, 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. ———. Old Clemens and W. D. H., the Story of a Remarkable Friendship. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Eichelberger, Clayton L. Published Comment on William Dean Howells through 1920: A Research Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. Eschholz, Paul A., ed. Critics on William Dean Howells. Miami, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1975. Fryckstedt, Olov W. In Quest of America: A Study of Howells’ Early Development as a Novelist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. Reprinted, New York: Russell, 1971. Howells, William Dean. Years of My Youth. Illustrations by Clifton Johnson. New York: Harper, 1916. ———. Life in Letters of William Dean Howells. 2 vols. Edited by Mildred Howells [daughter of William Dean Howells]. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Reprinted, New York: Russell, 1968. ———. Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays. Edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. New York: New York University Press, 1959. ———. Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, 1893–94. Edited by C. M. Kirk and R. Kirk. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1961. ———. The Altrurian Romances. Edited with an introduction by C. M. Kirk and R. Kirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———. W. D. Howells as Critic. Edited with an introduction by E. H. Cady. Boston: Routledge, 1973. Lynn, Kenneth S. William Dean Howells: An American Life. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Mielke, Robert. The Riddle of the Painful Earth: Suffering and Society in W.D. Howells’ Major Writings of the Early 1890s. Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1994. Mumford, Lewis. The Golden Day. New York: Norton, 1926. Nettels, Elsa. Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Olsen, Rodney D. Dancing in Chains: The Youth of William Dean Howells. New York: New York University Press, 1991. Pease, Donald E. New Essays on the Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

636 HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS

Reference Guide to American Literature, 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994. Spindler, Michael. American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Trilling, Lionel. The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism. New York: Viking, 1955. Tuttleton, James W. The Novel of Manners in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. Vanderbilt, Kermit. The Achievement of William Dean Howells: A Reinterpretation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Wagenknecht, Edward C. William Dean Howells: The Friendly Eye. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

OTHER The William Dean Howells Society. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/campbell/howells/index.html. Accessed September 13, 2005. American Literature on the Web. “William Dean Howells (1837–1920).” Available online. URL: http://www.nagasakigaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/amlit/h/howells19re.htm. Accessed September 13, 2005. Martin Kich

HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS JULIA ALVAREZ (1991) Winner of the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and selected as one of the Best Books of 1991 by Library Journal, this novel remains one of Julia ALVAREZ’s most popular works of fiction. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a novel composed of 15 interlinked stories that recount the process of acculturation of the García family, specifically that of the four sisters, Carla, Sandi, Yolanda, and Sofía (Fifi), after they immigrate to New York from the Dominican Republic. The novel opens with Yolanda, a teacher and writer, returning to her family in the Dominican Republic in her mid-30s and contemplating a permanent relocation. This section introduces the differences between her and her aunts and cousins, and her Americanized ways, which have made her forget the customs and class divisions of her homeland. From this point, the account of the sisters’ lives begins to move backward, engaging the themes traditional to immigrant narratives: the longing for the lost home, difficulty with language and assimi-

lation, the battle for dominance between the ways of the homeland and those of the new place, parent-child conflict in the personal and the cultural arenas. The novel’s three sections are narrated by or told from the point of view of different characters and center on diverse moments in the sisters’ lives: the first one on their adulthood (1989–72), the second on their turbulent adolescent years (1970–80), and the third on their pre-immigration childhood (1960–56). This narrative ordering and perspective effectively illustrates the girls’ ambivalent relationship to both the United States and the Dominican Republic. Forced to leave their country because their father was sought by the dictator Trujillo’s henchmen, the family cannot find complete peace in the United States. At home, the Garcías lived a life of privilege in a family compound with servants. In the United States they experienced poverty and want for the first time, making the girls aware of the status and comfort they had lost with immigration. The scene in which the family has dinner with their father’s patron, Mr. Fanning, poignantly illustrates this situation: Papi does not know whether he has to pay for the dinner and cannot even pay for small dolls the girls ask for. The humiliation is compounded when Sandi witnesses a drunk Mrs. Fanning make a pass at her father. Though immigration saves their father’s life, old fears continue to haunt the family: The parents react fearfully every time they see a black Volkswagen because it reminds them of the police in their country, and Yolanda, who had never seen snow before, thinks that the white flakes out the window are bombs. Though highly individual, the sister’s stories merge to present a multivoiced account of the process of acculturation and of the increasingly shifting cultural ground they tread. They attempt to find balance, to speak without an accent in every place and situation. Just as the girls were ridiculed as they struggled to learn English, their visits to the Dominican Republic with their increasingly Americanized Spanish lead to teasing by their cousins. The versions of Yolanda’s name symbolize her split identity: She is called Yo or Yoyo in the Dominican Republic and Joe in the United States, allowing for an Americanized spelling but gender confusion. The sis-

HUGHES, LANGSTON 637

ters are always conscious of the borders that their two languages define, personally and culturally, and have to struggle with conflicting cultural mores and expectations: The feminist ideas they acquire in the United States challenge the Dominican machismo, which the women there ostensibly accept. The sisters all have problems with self-confidence and in maintaining relationships. Carla divorces her first husband and marries her analyst; Sandi, the one who could most easily pass for American, becomes anorexic and believes she will soon cease to be human; Yolanda cannot commit to anyone and hovers between jobs. Both Sandi and Yolanda spend time in mental hospitals. Fifi, the youngest sister, has the least difficulty adapting to life in the new language, but she is also the most rebellious. The title of the novel points to its guiding metaphor: the appropriation of language. From Mami’s malapropisms (“When in Rome, do unto the Romans” or “No use trying to drink spilt milk”) to Carla’s inability to describe the sexual predator, Alvarez skillfully negotiates both the humor and the pathos of a family struggling with another language and the cultural strategies these encode. There is an inverse relationship between the title of the novel and the chronology of the narration. The book begins at the end, when the young women are adults and can speak unaccented English, and ends at a time before they were conversant in English. By using this structure, Alvarez suggests that, in the process of acculturation, more than an accent is lost. Yolanda’s return to the Dominican Republic at the beginning might be read as her attempt to recover that lost self, to explore the nuances of assimilation, and to understand precisely what she has lost. Appropriating language also suggests the possibility of manipulating it as a tool for survival. The book can therefore be read as Yolanda’s account of her family’s story, written as she struggles to unify a divided self. She tells her stories to understand what happened to her family, and thus fulfills the maid Chucha’s prediction that the sisters will have to resort to invention to survive. It also gives Yolanda a voice to speak in, to assert her presence in a place and her dominion—ownership—of a language, as well as to come to terms with her losses.

SOURCES Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1991. Barak, Julie. “ ‘Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre’: A Second Coming into Language in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” MELUS 23, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 159–176. Gomez Vega, Isis. “Hating the Self in the ‘Other?’: Or, How Yolanda Learns to See Her Own Kind in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Intertexts 3, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 85–96. Hoffman, Joan M. “ ‘She Wants to be Called Yolanda Now’: Identity, Language and the Third Sister in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingüe 23, no. 1 (January–April 1998): 21–27. Luis, William. “A Search for Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” Callaloo 23, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 839–849. Mitchell, David T. “The Accent of ‘Loss’: Cultural Crossings as Context in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” In Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, edited by Timothy B. Powell, 165–184. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Rocío G. Davis

HUGHES, (JAMES) LANGSTON (1902– 1967) Langston Hughes is regarded as one of the most significant voices to emerge from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance. He published more than 35 books and has been a staple of American literature and African-American studies programs for decades. Poet, dramatist, short fiction writer, novelist, lyricist, and journalist, Hughes was the first African American to earn his living by writing. He was untiring in his experimentalist search for new modes of expression, particularly through jazz, blues, and dialect; the result, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out, was no less than “an entire literary tradition” founded on “the actual spoken language of the black and working rural classes” (Gates and Appiah, xi). Although most readily identified with his character Jesse B. Simple, Hughes wrote two novels that used his own experiences: NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER (1930), which won the Harmon

638 HUGHES, LANGSTON

gold medal for literature, and Tambourines to Glory (1958), which Hughes adapted to the stage. He also wrote a story collection, The WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS, that some critics consider novelistic in its unity of theme. Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri, to James Nathaniel Hughes, a rancher, lawyer, and businessman, and Carrie Mercer Hughes, a teacher. Hughes earned a bachelor’s degree from Lincoln University in 1929. The following year, with the financial support of admirer and patron Charlotte Mason, Hughes published Not Without Laughter. Set in the Kansas countryside, it features a young black boy, Sandy, and his extended family of parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmother. Although the novel is not without laughter, as its title suggests, the critic Sterling A. Brown pointed out that “the dominant note of the book is a quiet pity” (Gates & Appiah, 15) for rural working-class African Americans whose hardscrabble lives are made even more difficult by their status as second-class citizens. Tambourines to Glory, written near the end of his career and set in Harlem, records and features Laura Reed and Essie Belle Johnson, who start their own street-corner gospel church. Essie genuinely wishes to help people, but Laura’s ambition is to make as much money as possible. The clash between good and evil— complete with Buddy Lomax, the devil in a Cadillac who becomes Laura’s lover—provides a dramatic opportunity for Hughes to introduce various characters in the black community. A play based on the novel was produced on Broadway in November 1963 but ran for only 48 performances. Hughes adapted his novel for the stage, writing both the dialogue and the song lyrics. Hughes published two autobiographies: The Big Sea (1940) and I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey (1956). In 1964, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After nearly a half century of writing and a lifetime dedicated to portraying African Americans in fiction, Langston Hughes died of congestive heart failure on May 22, 1967, in New York City. His papers are divided among the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library; the library of

Lincoln University in Philadelphia; and the Fisk University library in Nashville, Tennessee.

NOVELS Not Without Laughter. New York: Knopf, 1930. Tambourines to Glory. Boston: John Day, 1958.

SOURCES Berry, Faith. Langston Hughes, before and beyond Harlem. New York: Wings Books, 1995. Berry, S. L. Langston Hughes. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1994. Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Cooper, Floyd. Coming Home: From the Life of Langston Hughes. New York: Philomel Books, 1994. Dickinson, Donald C. A Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes, 1902–1967. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1967. Emanuel, James. Langston Hughes. Boston: Twayne, 1967. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Knopf, 1940. ———. I Wonder as I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1956. McLaren, Joseph. Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921–1943. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Meltzer, Milton. Langston Hughes: A Biography. New York: Crowell, 1968. Nazel, Joseph. Langston Hughes. Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1994. Neilson, Kenneth. To Langston Hughes, with Love. Hollis, N.Y.: All Seasons Art, 1996. O’Daniel, Thermon B., ed. Langston Hughes: Black Genius, a Critical Evaluation. New York: Morrow, 1971. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America, Volume I, 1902–1941. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rollins, Charlamae H. Black Troubador: Langston Hughes. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970. Shields, John P. “ ‘Never Cross the Divide’: Reconstructing Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 601–613. Trotman, C. James. Langston Hughes: The Man, His Art, and His Continuing Influence. New York: Garland, 1995. Walker, Alice. Langston Hughes, American Poet. New York: HarperCollins, 1988.

HUMAN COMEDY, THE 639

OTHER Eisenstein, Linda. Review of Tambourines to Glory, Cleveland Plain Dealer (July 1999). “Langston Hughes (1902–1967).” Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/lhughes.htm. Accessed June 30, 2005. Internet Broadway Database. “Tambourines to Glory.” Available online. URL: http://www.ibdb.com/production.asp? ID=3040. Accessed September 13, 2005.

HUMAN COMEDY, THE WILLIAM SAROYAN (1943) The Human Comedy is the kind of book that has now gone out of style for all the wrong reasons. Written in 1943, it is a soulful celebration of the humanity of small-town America and of the universal human spirit. Unabashedly uncynical, it was an inspiration to wartime America and became a best-seller upon publication. Its protagonists, the Macauley family, are simple on the surface but worldly-wise and compassionate down deep. In the novel, SAROYAN uses place and character names such as Homer and Ulysses that recall the grandeur of the Greek epics. Like his main characters, Saroyan employs simple language to talk about deeper truths. The book, short in length and understated in style and plot, follows Homer Macauley, a spirited 14-year-old telegraph messenger in Ithaca, California, deep in the San Joaquin valley. Homer, wearing a uniform that he has not even quite grown into, pedals his bicycle around the wineries and streets of the town delivering telegrams to families from the War Department (precursor of the Defense Department). Essentially serving as a messenger of death, Homer brings the outside world to Ithaca. We watch him suffer and grow into adulthood from the simple act of delivering telegraphs that tell people that their sons have died fighting in World War II. After days filled with the grim realities of the outside world, Homer retires to his family’s welcoming house, portrayed as a kind of rustic heaven where his sister Bess and neighbor Mary Arena play the harp and piano and sing. The story follows the three Macauley brothers, who lost their father a few years before the story takes place; portrayed as a simple laborer who toiled in the local wineries and packing houses, their father is nonetheless

understood by his sons to have been a “great man” who possessed the humanity and dignity that make daily life a thing of beauty. The youngest son, four-year-old Ulysses, is still imbued with the wonder and spirit of childhood. He is a ceaseless observer and already capable of deep understanding of and compassion for the neighborhood outcasts. The older brother, Marcus, is in the army headed to battle. Though he does not appear much in the book, he is a constant source of inspiration and worry for the Macauley family. But Homer, the middle boy, is the true hero of the book. Part Horatio Alger character and part Tom Sawyer, Homer is the quintessential small-town boy trying to clear the hurdles in life and on the track field. After school, he works past midnight at the telegraph office to make money for his mother, but he still wants to be a boy and win the track meet to impress the girl he admires from afar. In the series of vignettes about Homer and his neighbors, we are meant to see Ithaca as a microcosm of America. There’s Mr. Ara, the grocer from Russia, and the Mexican woman who hears her son has died in the war. There are whores and soldiers, drunks, criminals, and the rich. In one passage, the manager of the telegraph office, Mr. Spangler, comes across Sunday picnic grounds filled with the sounds of boogie-woogie and jive. “Americans! Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Russians, Mexicans, Armenians, Germans, Negroes, Swedes, Spaniards, Basques, Portuguese, Italians, Jews, French, English, Scotch, Irish. You name it. That’s who we are,” he says to his girlfriend and to no one in particular. Saroyan was himself an American-born Armenian, alive to the feelings of the immigrant. In one particularly rich scene, Mr. Ara tries to find food to suit his young son. After his son discards fruit and candies, Mr. Ara begs him to be happy because they live in the land of plenty, rather than always looking for what he can’t get. After all, Ithaca is a place where boys can steal apricots off the trees while the owner watches with delight. The book is made up of a concatenation of small acts of kindness between people of different groups that show it does matter where you come from but that in Ithaca, all are welcome. At the end of the book, sol-

640 HUMPHREYS, JOSEPHINE

diers returning from war, like Ulysses returning to Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, find that they are at last home even if they did not come from Ithaca originally. The Human Comedy is so deceptively simple that it can be read on many levels, and today it is often assigned in grade schools. The 1943 movie starring Mickey Rooney and Donna Reed won Saroyan, who was also a celebrated playwright, an Academy Award for the best original motion picture story. Saroyan wrote in his introduction to the book, dedicated to his mother, Takoohi Saroyan, “I have written it as simply as possible, with that blending of the severe and the light-hearted which is especially yours, and our family’s. The story is not enough, I know, but what of that?” It is true, as Saroyan recognized, that The Human Comedy is simple and short and veers between humor and tragedy, but it manages these elements so adeptly that it would have been false for Saroyan to have made the book longer or to have written it in a different way. While the novel makes the kinds of philosophical pronouncements that are no longer in vogue, the story still rings true. It is a tale that both children and adults can appreciate, and although simple, it touches on the very essence of the American and the universal human condition.

SOURCE Saroyan, William. The Human Comedy. New York: Dell, 1943, 1971.

OTHER The William Saroyan Literary Foundation Intl. Available online. URL: http://www.williamsaroyan.org. Accessed July 2005. Bay Area Armenian Community News. “William Saroyan’s House on the Hill of the Internet.” Available online. URL: http://armenianworld.mine.nu/saroyan/index.asp. Accessed July 2005. Blythe Grossberg

HUMPHREYS, JOSEPHINE (1945– )

Born and reared in South Carolina, where she still lives, Josephine Humphreys’s four novels reflect the changing culture of contemporary Charleston. In Dreams of Sleep (1984), Rich in Love (1987), The Fireman’s Fair (1991),

and Nowhere Else on Earth (2003), Humphreys writes about cultural upheaval and the disintegration of old values and family relationships; few readers, however, see hers as a pessimistic view. Rather, through skillful handling of plot, setting, characterization, and a highly poetic style, she usually suggests renewal and redemption for her characters, many of whom are innocent adolescents like Mark TWAIN’s Huckleberry Finn and Carson McCULLERS’s Mick Kelly or Frankie Adams. Josephine Humphreys was born on February 2, 1945, in Charleston, to William Wirt, a board director, and Martha Lynch Humphreys. She was educated at Duke University, where she studied with the author Reynolds PRICE and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1967, and Yale University, earning a master’s degree in 1968. That same year, on November 30, she married Thomas E. Hutcheson, an attorney. Her novel Dreams of Sleep, winner of the Ernest Hemingway Prize for the best American first novel, received wide acclaim. Here Humphreys depicts naive yet intelligent and self-consciously analytical characters reminiscent of those of Walker PERCY. The protagonists, Alice and Will Reese, live in a restored Charleston mansion, but their lives do not match their beautiful dwelling: Will, a successful gynecologist, is having an affair with his nurse Claire Thibault, and Alice, who relinquished her career as a mathematician to raise their two daughters, Beth and Marcy, reacts with passivity. The failure of their marriage has antecedents in the failed marriages of their parents. The marital problems of Alice and Will are further complicated when Claire embarks on an affair with Danny Cardozo, Will’s married colleague and friend. The problems of these upper-middle-class white professionals are mirrored in those of their black counterparts, the most remarkable of whom, Iris Moon, is an example of a Humphreys-created feisty adolescent whose partial role is to draw husband and wife back together. Rich in Love, a more upbeat and overtly comic novel, uses a first-person narrator, Lucille Odum, the second of Humphreys’s tough-minded teenagers. As Joseph Millichap remarks, Lucille can be traced back to J. D. SALINGER’s Holden Caulfield and even further, to Twain’s Huck Finn (Millichap, 250). Her characters

HUNGER OF MEMORY 641

again move in and out of relationships, suggesting the paucity of contemporary life, yet recombine at the end to suggest continuity and the possibility of happiness. Likewise, The Fireman’s Fair opens against the backdrop of Hurricane Hugo as the disillusioned Rob Wyatt leaves his law practice to change his life. He moves from a fashionable apartment to an old beach house where he realizes that his future depends on Billie Poe, the adolescent heroine who brings a promise of happiness into his life. In Nowhere Else on Earth, Humphreys moves away from upper-middle-class white characters and focuses on Henry and Rhoda, a young Lumbee Indian woman whose story Humphreys heard on a train when she was 17. The novel, which took her 10 years to research and write, takes place in Robeson County, North Carolina, land now controlled, for the most part, by the Lumbee tribe, who, according to legend, are descendants of the Lost Colony, and is set in the mid-19th century during the Civil War. “Perhaps,” says the scholar Joseph Millichap, Humphreys’s “most intriguing contribution is the persistent suggestion of renewal and reintegration that pervades her fictions” (Millichap, 246). Josephine Humphreys continues to stretch her talents, adding historical depth to her proven skills at realistically drawn contemporary Southern characters.

NOVELS Dreams of Sleep. New York: Viking, 1984. The Fireman’s Fair. New York: Viking, 1991. Nowhere Else on Earth. New York: Viking, 2000. Rich in Love. New York: Viking, 1987.

SOURCES Folks, Jeffrey J., and James A. Perkins, eds. Southern Writers at Century’s End. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997. Harris, Alex, ed. A World Unsuspected: Portraits of Southern Childhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Jordan, Shirley M., ed. Broken Silences: Interviews with Black and White Women Writers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. ———. “Josephine Humphreys.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by

Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Millichap, Joseph R. “Josephine Humphreys.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 244–254. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1993. Perry, Carolyn, and Mary Louise Weaks, eds. The History of Southern Women’s Literature. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 2002.

OTHER Mudge, Alden. “Michael Sims Assembles a Lively Mosaic of the Human Body.” BookPage. Available online. URL: http:// www.booksense.com/people/archive/humphreys.jsp. Accessed October 6, 2003.

HUNGER OF MEMORY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ (1982) In each of the chapters of this autobiographical novel, Richard Rodriguez keeps an analytic distance as he describes the mostly negative impact of his American education. Rodriguez depicts for us his central California immigrant parents and the ways they created a stable, though very modest, life for their three children. As a child, Rodriguez watches his parents maneuver between a public life in which their Mexican origins render them second-class citizens and a private family life in which their deeply held Mexican values allow the children to flourish. Rodriguez’s chief problem as a boy is that he is intelligent, which eventually marks him as a desirable commodity for Anglo-oriented middle-class culture. He praises the early Catholic education that taught him, like his parents, to cultivate a public self. This education did not interfere with his family life at first. Rodriguez feels that he benefited from his education because it did not attempt to tackle issues about his ethnicity or its politics; instead, the nuns taught him Latin, English, religion, and other basic studies. He had, in short, an excellent education, not one that was tailored to reflect who or what his teachers thought he was. As Rodriguez grows older, however, and his education takes him into the larger United States community, his parents are told by a school official that his Spanish speaking is “holding him back”; this official urges the parents to help him “be a success” by speaking more

642 HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, THE

English around the house. What parent could refuse such a request? With this visit, the private family sphere is punctured, and the close-knit family alters so that Rodriguez can meet public standards for his academic abilities and the goals he should pursue. Private, intimate language exchanges with his family are, with the best intentions, denied Rodriguez, but his parents maintain the Spanish language for themselves and his siblings. The boy feels increasingly isolated, and his studies draw him away from the family into books, homework, and daydreams. Rodriguez becomes alienated because America has a sense of ownership of intelligent children, and as a society it believes, especially in immigrant families, that disrupting the authority and love of the parents to train a child to be useful to the mainstream is to do the child a favor. Rodriguez details the many crossroads he encounters as he becomes more a product of his education than of his family. He shows the readers the politics at work in a working-class boy's life. He feels, in retrospect, that the goal of education for gifted children is to make them all individualistically oriented, competitive, and primed to desire and pursue middle-class ideas of success. All the “brown” people, along with those who are any “color” but white, must have their ethnicities, their class origins, and even their religion sanded away, so they will be the same as any successful white American—or at least not a threat to those who are already successful. Rodriguez finishes his coming-of-age story with a description of what it means to be a “scholarship boy” throughout college and graduate school. The illusion of the scholarship recipient as special or superior or even a welcome addition to an institution is rudely shattered as he realizes that richer students perceive him as an inferior or an exotic pet—a trophy of the liberalism of privileged students. Throughout his exploration of his higher-education experiences, Rodriguez shows that affirmative action hurts the students it serves by singling them out as being somehow inferior, by presenting them as unworthies who, because of socalled past oppression, will now be given unfair advantages among other students. Rodriguez believes that affirmative action has cost him his family, as well as the chance to be a man like his father, whom he respects

deeply. Rodriguez feels his years of education have given him selfish and self-indulgent ways that prevent him from attaining the family-oriented, self-sacrificing, and morally serious characteristics embodied in his father. In a culminating, if late, gesture of refusal of what his American culture has made him, Rodriguez refuses the academic job that both he and his jealous colleagues feel he has won because his race makes him a prize. The novel ends with an air of defeat, even as he has reclaimed himself from a process that forced him to reject his family's values. Sadly, Rodriguez’s fine education ensures that he can never return and fit naturally into the family or culture he has lost. Carolyn Whitson

HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, THE TOM CLANCY (1984) The Hunt for Red October is more than a sleek cloak-and-dagger espionage thriller or the often claustrophobic story of the cat-and-mouse games of military submariners. Tom Clancy’s novel seeks not to break these molds, but instead to bring them together in a tale that is just as much about what happens above as well as below the surface. This shifting perspective drives the action and sustains a thematic construction that will become recognizable in Clancy’s other works. The central plotline of the novel concerns Soviet submarine commander Marko Ramius and a routine “check-down” mission for the Krasny Oktyabr (Red October), the Soviets’ newest and largest Typhoon-class submarine. The Red October has been equipped with a secretly developed propulsion system that makes the submarine virtually undetectable to conventional means of tracking. Marko Ramius is well aware that the Red October is designed to carry, and launch, nuclear missiles; thus he finds himself commanding an ultimate first-strike threat capable of launching a nuclear attack against the United States. Through a postdated letter to the head of the Soviet navy, Ramius initiates his plan that sets into motion unprecedented naval operations in the North Atlantic as the hunt for the Red October begins. The United States, alerted by the sudden and immense scale of Soviet naval maneuvers, soon discov-

HURST, FANNIE 643

ers that the search is actually to track down and destroy Ramius and, if needed, the Red October itself. The understanding that the Soviet government is willing to destroy its own technically advanced submarine leads CIA analyst Jack Ryan to the conclusion that Ramius may be trying to defect with the submarine; however, the United States remains on the defensive against a rogue, perhaps unstable, submarine commander with an almost silent and armed nuclear weapon at his fingertips. Thus, a game of location and identity is played out as the Red October runs from the Soviet fleet while at the same time Ryan attempts to locate Ramius and prove that his intentions are to defect and not attack. Throughout this novel, the submarine itself serves as a symbol for the thematic structuring of the action. The Red October is at its most powerful when silently lurking beneath the water. Clancy posits this image as a reflection of cold war ideology itself; that which is most dangerous is that which we cannot see or hear, and ultimately attacks us while we remain helplessly unaware. From intelligence spy satellites to the “Star Wars” Missile Defense System, we have used technology to ease our fears and see what is beyond our ability to perceive. But Clancy carefully crafts his narrative to juxtapose technology with human nature and how one becomes a reflection of the other. Both the Soviet and the U.S. governments are entwined in a cold war game of chess, each trying to analyze the intentions of the other. Is the Soviet government acting in the interest of the world by trying to track down and kill a dangerous rogue commander with a deadly weapon, or are they merely acting in their own best interest by protecting the secrets of a new propulsion system? Likewise, Ramius and Ryan are trying to discover the intentions of the other. Is their foil friend or enemy? In both cases, surface details provide little in the way of truth, as Clancy structures the narrative to highlight these questions. Neither man can rely on fact or outward appearance to prove his case but must instead seek that which is beneath the facts, submerged in the psyche of the other. This tension naturally builds until both men are literally and figuratively brought to the surface to confront each other. The transparency of good and evil and the difficulty in determining and defining such ideological posi-

tions is of foremost importance to the thematic development of the novel, and is highlighted in its climax. The key for Ramius is not only finding a safe way to convince the United States of his intention to defect, but also to accomplish such a mission while keeping the matter a secret from his crew. While we as readers are left with no question as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong throughout this novel, the importance of just such a question is equally clear. The meaning of these words so loosely tossed about by world leaders during the cold war is as illusive as the Krasny Oktyabr itself, so the hunt for Red October becomes more than a massive naval exercise, it becomes in essence a hunt for truth.

SOURCE Clancy, Tom. The Hunt for Red October. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1984. Paul Yoder

HURST, FANNIE (1889–1968)

Fannie Hurst, novelist and short story writer, is best known for her novel Imitation of Life, although critics and readers also admire Lummox (1923) and Appassionata (1926). From the 1920s to the 1950s, Hurst was praised for her vivid characterization of eastern European Jewish immigrants and young working women—many from the Lower East Side of New York—and for her sharply perceptive use of detail when describing American life and culture. The ebullience and vitality in her work suggests a comparison with the novelist Anzia YEZIERSKA, but she was personally friendly with Ruth Bryan Owens, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan, Eleanor Roosevelt, Zora Neale HURSTON, Rebecca West, and Zona GALE. After years of critical and scholarly neglect, Hurst’s work is gaining serious attention and is now featured on numerous scholarly panels; her stories are anthologized, her novels (Imitation of Life and Lummox) reprinted, and, in the 1990s, two books devoted to Hurst appeared. Fannie Hurst was born on October 18, 1889, in Hamilton, Ohio, to Samuel Hurst, who owned a shoe factory, and Rose Koppel Hurst. She was educated at Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned

644 HURST, FANNIE

a bachelor of arts degree in 1909. Although she kept the marriage a secret for five years, she and Jacques S. Danielson married in 1915; he became her financial manager, and, despite her 16-year affair with the Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, they remained married until Danielson’s death in 1952. After graduation she moved to New York, where, determined to become a writer, she began publishing short stories in the Saturday Evening Post. As the critic and scholar Susan Koppelman points out, Hurst was once “promoted as the highest paid short story writer in the world” (Koppelman, 20). Many of her stories were later included in volumes of Best Short Stories. Of her 18 novels, Lummox, Imitation of Life, and Back Street (1931) received serious attention and have been reissued and reexamined. Lummox, Hurst’s favorite, follows a poorly educated, impoverished young woman from the slums of New York City as she moves up the social ladder; it is used in several university-level classes. Imitation of Life is a novel about a mulatta who passes for white; it was filmed twice, once starring Claudette Colbert (in 1934) and later starring Lana Turner (in 1959); it has recently been reissued. Back Street features Ray Schmidt, a woman with whose working-class world Hurst had become thoroughly familiar; it has been filmed on three separate occasions and includes Hurst’s characteristic themes: issues of race, gender, and age, as well as the role played by money and class in the lives of struggling women. Hurst’s books have been translated into 18 languages and reissued in a number of paperback editions. Thirtytwo of her short stories and novels were made into films. Her filmscript Symphony of Six Million was novelized by John Adams (a pseudonym) and published by A. L. Burt in 1932. She herself wrote 12 filmscripts that include, among others, Humoresque, Four Daughters, Back Street, Imitation of Life, and Symphony of Six Million. Her autobiography, Anatomy of Me: A Wanderer in Search of Herself, appeared in 1958. Hurst continued writing novels throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, even delivering to her publisher two novels (one entitled Lonely Is Only a Word, the other untitled) days before her death. Most of her papers are housed

at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A Fannie Hurst Professorship was endowed at Brandeis University and at Washington University as a provision of her will. Fannie Hurst died on February 23, 1968, in New York City.

NOVELS Anitra’s Dance. New York: Harper, 1934. Anywoman. New York: Harper, 1950. Appassionata. New York: Knopf, 1926. Back Street. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation, 1931. Family! Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960. Five and Ten. New York: Harper, 1929. Fool, Be Still. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964. God Must Be Sad. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Great Laughter. New York: Harper, 1936. Hallelujah. New York: Harper, 1944. The Hands of Veronica. New York: Harper, 1947. Imitation of Life. New York: Harper, 1933. Lonely Parade. New York: Harper, 1942. Lummox. New York: Harper, 1923. The Man with One Head. London: Cape, 1953. Mannequin. New York: Knopf, 1926. The Name Is Mary. New York: Dell, 1951. A President Is Born. New York: Harper, 1928. Star-dust: The Story of an American Girl. New York: Harper, 1921. Today Is Ladies’ Day. New York: Home Institute, 1939. White Christmas. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1942.

SOURCES Hurst, Fannie. Anatomy of Me: A Wanderer in Search of Herself. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Koppelman, Susan. “Review of Brooke Kroeger’s Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst,” Women’s Review of Books 17, no. 1 (October 1999): 20. Kroeger, Bonnie. Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst. New York: Times Books, 1999. Ravitz, Abe C. Imitations of Life: Fannie Hurst’s Gaslight Sonatas. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Myths about Love and Woman: The Fiction of Fannie Hurst. New York: Gordon, 1979. Willenz, Gay. “White Patron and Black Artist: The Correspondence of Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston,” Library Chronicle of the University of Texas 35 (1986): 20–43.

HURSTON, ZORA NEALE 645

HURSTON, ZORA NEALE (1891–1960) Novelist, folklorist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and autobiographer, Zora Neale Hurston, a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, is now considered to be one of the great 20th-century American writers. Her work, which has been extensively reissued and reevaluated, consists of frequently anthologized short stories and four novels: JONAH’S GOURD VINE (1934), THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD (1937), MOSES: MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN (1939), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). She coedited the literary magazine Fire!!, and her short story “Spunk” appeared in the famous collection The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke. Her pride in the richness of African-American folklore of the South shines throughout all her novels, perhaps equaled only by her strong portraits of women, black and white, and their strength and vision. Born on January 7, 1891, in Macon County, Alabama, Hurston was reared in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated and self-governing all-black community. Her biographer, Robert Hemenway, and most critics interpret this heritage as an encouragement to become a strong and assertive woman. Hurston was the daughter of Reverend John Hurston and Lucy Potts Hurston, who died young but encouraged her to “jump at de sun”. Her memory influenced Hurston and served as an impetus for her to graduate from high school and to attend both Howard University and Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under the distinguished anthropologists Franz Boas and Gladys Reichard; she received a bachelor of arts degree in 1928. After working as a secretary to the novelist Fannie HURST and collaborating with Langston HUGHES on Mule Bone (a play not published until 1991), Hurston returned to Florida and married Herbert Sheen in 1927. They divorced in 1931, largely because Hurston refused to give up her burgeoning career as a folklorist, her research supported largely by wealthy white patrons Annie Nathan Meyer and Charlotte Osgood Mason. Her career as a novelist was launched with Jonah’s Gourd Vine, a novel about an “itinerant preacher,” John Pearson, and his wife, Lucy, loosely based on Hurston’s parents. Set partly in Hurston’s hometown of Eatonville, the novel traces Pearson’s inability to con-

trol his lust and Lucy’s role as rescuer. After Lucy’s death, Pearson marries Hattie Tyson, loses everything through philandering and bad judgment, marries Sally Lovelace, and is restored to his ministry, only to be killed by a train after a return to promiscuity. The novel portrays the working-class community in a realistic fashion, as a place where people celebrate their religious and social customs, including hoodoo beliefs. The novel prepares the way for Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which the protagonist, Janie, a trouserwearing woman, seeks both romantic love and independence. She finally achieves both after marriages to Logan Killicks, who treats her like a packhorse, Joe Stark, who forces her onto a pedestal, and Verigible Woods (Tea Cake), a good man who dies from the bite of a rabid dog. Hurston’s third novel, Moses: Man of the Mountain, is a retelling of the biblical story of Moses and the exodus from Egypt. The characters speak in a black dialect, replicating an aural memory of the African-American experience. Here Hurston explores not only the experience of the powerless, but also the power wielded by men in high places. As in all her novels, Hurston remains more optimistic than many of her literary peers and emphasizes hope. In her final novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston’s protagonist is a white woman married to a likable but vain and self-assured Florida citrus grower. Like black women before her, Arvay Henson must be awakened to a sense of identity and self-appreciation. Hurston’s work had all but disappeared when she died, in poverty, in 1960; indeed, her obscurity made the novelist Alice WALKER’s search for Hurston’s unmarked grave more difficult; both she and the scholar Mary Helen Washington, along with the biographer Robert Hemenway and the scholar Lillie Pearl Howard, were among the early voices urging a Hurston revival. Today Hurston is admired not only for her original voice, but also for her deep understanding of the underpinnings of Southern black culture and for the illumination of black folkways in her nonfiction books.

NOVELS Jonah’s Gourd Vine. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1934. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

646 HURSTON, ZORA NEALE

Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Moses: Man of the Mountain. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. Seraph on the Suwanee. New York: Scribner, 1948. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Cronin, Gloria L., ed. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Davis, Rose Parkman. Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hill, Lynda Marion. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996.

Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940. Hughes, Langston, and Arna Bontemps, eds. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972. Karanja, Ayana I. Zora Neale Hurston: Dialogue in Spirit and in Truth. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Peters, Pearlie Mae Fisher. The Assertive Woman in Zora Neale Hurston’s Fiction, Folklore, and Drama. New York: Garland, 1997. Plant, Deborah G. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Witcover, Paul. Zora Neale Hurston. Los Angeles: Melrose Square, 1994. Yannuzzi, Della A. Zora Neale Hurston: Southern Storyteller. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996.

C

ID

INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL HARRIET JACOBS (1861) Harriet JACOBS

both the white and the black community, lives nearby and runs a lucrative bakery from her home. They are all slaves, including, at this time, Marthy, an important figure in the narrative. Marthy is not only the source of comfort and stability to Linda and her brother, but a prominent personage within the slaveholder sphere as well. Although Linda does no physical labor and is even taught to read and write by her beneficent mistress, she does spend the next six years officially a domestic slave. When this mistress dies and Linda is “inherited” by the relatives, the plot’s conflict is set in rapid motion. Linda’s blossoming womanhood creates an atmosphere of intense hatred and fear because of Dr. Flint’s lustful interest and his wife’s jealousy. These are the parents of Linda’s new mistress, a young child. The subsequent narrative concerns Linda’s attempts to keep Dr. Flint at bay. One ploy results in an onerous choice between two sexual liaisons, one with the white Mr. Sands, a nonabusive lover, the other with the white Dr. Flint, her proxy owner and stalker. Linda is forced to choose Mr. Sands, with whom she has two children, Benny and Ellen. Linda and her offspring remain slaves, however, and she spends the next decade protecting her children from the auction block as well as shielding herself from Flint by hiding for seven years in a dark, infested crawlspace in Marthy’s attic. The “incidents” continue to accumulate. Linda eventually escapes by boat to the North, where she works as a seamstress and nanny, reunites with her children, and

wrote this autobiographical book under the pseudonym Linda Brent. Though often classified as nonfiction, the various novelistic structures and modes of expression in the book make it rise above any single generic category. Written before the Civil War, it can be read today as a suspenseful episodic adventure novel complete with an innocent prey and her evil pursuer, disguises, counterfeits, escapes by sea, and dark hideaways with names like “Snaky Swamp.” The hounded victim, however, is a mulatta slave, Linda Brent, and the story is more than one of physical survival: It chronicles the preservation of a woman’s moral, emotional, and intellectual self. The “incidents” in the narrative parallel the life of the author, Harriet Jacobs of North Carolina. She fictionalizes her name and those of the characters in the book to protect the privacy of her family and to make more palatable to her readers the graphic realities of life under slavery. The author says as much in her “preface,” echoed in the “introduction,” written by her editor, Lydia Maria Child. Linda does not know that she is a slave until the age of six, when her mother dies, and Linda is sent to the home where her mother served. Until then, she lives a rather enriched family life with her mother, unnamed in the book, her father, a carpenter, also not named, and a younger brother, William. Her grandmother, called Aunt Marthy by 647

648 INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL

is bought and freed by one of the abolitionist women who make up her new community. The complete title of the Jean Fagan Yellin edition is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. The testimonial in the title is in keeping with slave narrative conventions used in, for example, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Jacobs and her mentor and editor, Child, were familiar with these conventions and used them self-consciously. Further defenses of the author’s veracity and strength of character appear in the appendix of every edition and are written by citizens of the time deemed “highly respected” and “highly respectable.” These testimonials are not extrinsic to the story but are part of it, almost a framing device. The sections documenting slave practices, the New Year’s slave hiring day, the atrocities of slave beatings, accounts of slave rebellions, and duplications of runaway notices and rewards appear to be digressions from the main tale. Jacobs uses slave narrative formula not to distract, but to bear further witness to the wrongs of slavery. One of the questions readers are forced to ask of Incidents is why the melodrama? Because the horrors of slavery are so convincingly portrayed by means of Linda Brent’s own story, along with all the allusions to slave incidents past and present, why does she use the overly dramatic dialogue, religious exhortations, and appeals to reader? The answer can be found in the author’s preface and in Child’s introduction: They both refer to the “women of the North” as their target audience. More specifically, the work was meant to appeal to white middle-class women of the North, and they were readers of the “sentimental” novel. Along with its other functions, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is propaganda. Jacobs tells her own true story of surmounting her circumstances, intentionally doing so within the framework of the sentimental novel in hopes of arousing the moral consciousness of those in a position to take action. The sentimental novel classically pits a young heroine, born into unfortunate circumstances, against a well-born seducer. The innocent either dies or prevails in the end, thanks to her innate virtuousness, strength, and, not the least ingredient, faith. Readers of the sentimental novel would have

been familiar with the exaggerated goodness and evil of Jacobs’s characters and with the florid tones of their speech. Linda’s plea for understanding is typical and sets the stage for her later choice of action: “O, what days and nights of fear and sorrow that man caused me! Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered” (29). While the melodrama of Incidents is obvious, at the same time Jacobs’s rendering of psychological trauma is sophisticated and very real. Emanating from a position of authority and power, Dr. Flint’s harassment of young Linda would stand today as a case study of sexual abuse and pedophilia. For her part, Linda’s inability to reveal the torment, even to her most beloved grandmother, represents the shame and guilt associated with such injuries to the spirit. Otherwise powerless, Linda uses complex sociopsychological strategies to outwit Flint. Equally subtle are the passages where Linda mentally weighs the harsh realities of having a female child under slavery as opposed to raising a male. This dilemma is the source of inspiration for such contemporary novelists as Toni MORRISON and Alice WALKER. Reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as memoir imposes a new order on its various components. Unlike autobiography per se, memoir is invented and remembered truth. Events are only loosely dependent on chronological time and seem to be filtered through imagination and memory. This would account for close attention to detail on the one hand, Linda’s momentto-moment vigil in her attic seclusion, for example, and the collapse or gaps of time on the other. Large portions of Incidents read as if told by an omniscient narrator who quotes entire conversations that, for reasons of great geographical distance, Linda Brent could never have heard. Memoir would further explain the rhetorical embellishments and other exaggerations, including stereotypical characters. Memoir is written to give voice to the disenfranchised; it is confessional like autobiography, but it is also a means of bearing witness to man’s inhumanity to man. It is more com-

IN COLD BLOOD 649

munal than autobiography that, by contrast, celebrates the single life of an esteemed person. While elements of memoir are fictive, it does document moments of history. The novel examines certain facets of institutional slavery in the United States. We discover, for instance, that being a freed slave and financially secure, as is Linda’s grandmother, does not guarantee the emancipation of her children and grandchildren. Moreover, reading the novel as memoir makes it more than the story of Harriet Jacobs or Linda Brent. The narrating voice also speaks for her silent sisters. There is not a chapter of Incidents that does not retell the story of other exploited female slaves, past or present. The novel is a chorus of voices striving to break the sound barrier and be heard.

SOURCES Benstock, Shari. “Authorizing the Autobiographical.” In Feminisms, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Herndl, 1,040–1,058. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Bercovich, Sacvan, ed. Reconstructing American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Davis, Charles, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “The Spoken and the Silenced in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Our Nig,” Callaloo 13, no. 2 (1990): 313–324. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Yellin, Jean Fagan, ed. Introduction to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. Nan Claire Tynberg

IN COLD BLOOD TRUMAN CAPOTE (1966) The first “nonfiction novel” to gain critical acclaim and widespread popularity, In Cold Blood intrigues readers for a number of reasons: It evokes such earlier works as Theodore DREISER’s An AMERICAN TRAGEDY, also based on an actual crime; it uses actual events and transforms a sensational crime into art; and it serves as an influ-

ence on later examples of the “new journalism,” like those novels of Norman MAILER or Joseph Wambaugh that are its heirs. Perhaps more fascinating is the phenomenon noticed by readers of that time as well as those of today—the way the novel purposefully elucidates the collision between two segments of American society: the God-fearing, law abiding farmer and his loving family, and the spiritless criminal men of poverty-ridden and loveless backgrounds. In November 1959, while living in New York City, CAPOTE saw a newspaper article about the mysterious murder of a farm family (mother, father, son, and daughter) in Holcomb, Kansas. He took the train, joined along the way by his good friend HARPER LEE, and arrived in Kansas in time for the funeral of Herbert and Bonnie Clutter, their son, Kenyon, and their daughter, Nancy. He decided to write about this murder and accumulated 6,000 pages of notes after interviewing family friends, law enforcement officials, and the apprehended murderers, Richard Hickock and Percy Smith. More than one critic has suggested that a large part of the novel’s fascination lies in the artistic process itself: Capote managed to reconfigure these notes into a novel of under 400 pages, divided into four sections: “The Last to See Them Alive,” “Persons Unknown,” “Answer,” and “The Corner.” Together with the subsections, the novel has 85 parts, some written as perfectly self-contained essays. Capote explained that the title is ironic, setting the In Cold Blood murder of the Clutter family against the socially sanctioned hanging of the murderers Hickock and Smith. Such irony is further echoed in the section titles. For instance, in Section I, one assumes that acquaintances of the Clutter family were the last people to see them alive. But Capote makes the reader realize that the killers, of course, were the last people to see them. This fact is emphasized by the reproduction of their eyes on the dust jacket of the first edition of the book (Nance, 189). Irony is, in fact, one of Capote’s major techniques, and he achieves it by juxtaposing the circumstances of the killers to those of the Clutter family. On the eve of the murder, Capote shows the killers drawing ever closer to the Clutter house (including one scene in a

650 IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY

gas station men’s room) and then describes Nancy’s girlish pink-and-white bedroom, the place where she will be brutally murdered. While Hickock and Percy linger in the house before murdering the family, Capote depicts the neighbor family, only a hundred yards from the Clutter home, awakened by their sick baby, but oblivious to the horror about to take place next door. In one of the most frequently noted uses of juxtaposition, Capote describes Bonnie Clutter’s empty dress hanging on a line, flapping in the breeze, and then depicts Hickock and Smith marching through the Mojave Desert, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: The contrast of the two Americas is chilling. Other contrasts propel the narrative forward. Capote introduces the idea of fate and predestination and the ways in which society produces killers and unleashes them on the innocent. According to the first theory, a mindless fate predetermined the Clutters’ murder and therefore no one could have prevented it. According to the second theory, psychological and sociological factors molded Hickock and Smith into killers who planned every step of the crime. From this perspective, the Clutter murder was not inevitable but in fact the result of cold logic. Capote withholds details of the murder until the courtroom scene in Section III. Only then is the reader made aware of the brutal ways in which the Clutters were murdered: First their throats were slashed and then there were shotgun blasts to their heads. He discloses the psychosexual elements that helped to create these killers: Percy, who exhibits moments of uncontrollable rage, was viciously beaten because of repeated bed-wettings in one of several detention homes in which he was incarcerated as a youth, and Hickock feels inferior and sexually incompetent. He is, in fact, a pederast who intends to rape Nancy Clutter before murdering her, and he is stopped from this crime— and several others—by Percy, who is the more emotional and feminine of the two, and described by Hickock as a wife who must eventually be shed. Significantly, neither one understands why he killed the Clutters, and both seem to have slipped into a trance, only to awaken and find themselves in the midst of assaulting the victims. Such dreamlike states have been

documented in such earlier novels as William FAULKNER’s LIGHT IN AUGUST. (There, Joe Christmas believes he has killed his girlfriend’s father, and, after awakening, is surprised to find himself galloping away on a horse.) One of the most intriguing revelations of this novel is that Capote developed a close friendship with both Hickock and Percy. He saw some of his own traits of alienation, homosexuality, and otherness in Percy and, despite severe vomiting in his motel room before the execution, Capote forced himself to attend the hanging. It was Capote who later purchased headstones for the graves. When the film was made by the director Richard Brooks, Capote insisted on two restrictions: It was to be shot in black and white, and the actors were to be unknowns so that the public would have no prior associations with them (Reed, 117). Robert Blake played Percy Smith and Scott Wilson played Richard Hickock. Both Capote and Brooks also felt strongly about filming on location, and they used the Cutter house and hotel rooms, gas stations, jails, and courthouses in Kansas. Nearly 40 years after it was written, In Cold Blood remains the godfather of the nonfiction novel, the new genre that it created. It is Capote’s most significant achievement, and not only remains widely available but has also been translated into at least 25 different languages.

SOURCES Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Signet, 1965. Nance, William L. The Worlds of Truman Capote. New York: Stein and Day, 1970. Reed, Kenneth T. Truman Capote. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY KATHY ACKER (1990) The novel In Memoriam to Identity (1990) is essentially a series of largely disconnected epitaphs to a discarded concept of identity—that is, to “identity” conceived as transcendental and subjective that would endure unchanged through time and exist independently of all relations to the other. What ACKER’s book suggests, in a manner that seems disjointed and even at times haphazard, is that personal identity is based on the exposure to the other person that is revealed by sexuality (the final and perhaps most significant word of the book).

IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY 651

The three cycles of narrative in the novel intersect with one another. The first narrative strand is a willfully anachronistic and reconstructive transcription of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s biography (broken off arbitrarily when Acker grew disgusted with the poet’s imperialist conversion) interspersed with references to AIDS and the postmodernist theorist Jean Baudrillard, deliberate mistranslations of Arthur Rimbaud’s verse, and intentionally unacknowledged citations from Georg Büchner, the comte de Lautréamont, and Antonin Artaud—members of the countertradition of subversive literature within which Acker would like to insert herself. Of foremost importance is Rimbaud’s impassioned relationship to Verlaine, who is compelled to choose between a socially unacceptable liaison with the boy and his responsibilities as a father, husband, and member of the bourgeoisie. The narrative is set against the background of the FrancoPrussian War of 1870. According to the logic of Acker’s repoliticization, the Germans appear as yuppies who wage a ceaseless battle against the unemployed and arrogate to themselves services that only they can afford. The second narrative strand is oriented around Airplane, a young girl who exists in a relationship of absolute dependency to her rapist (later nominated as her “boyfriend”)—a relationship that mirrors, despite Acker’s own self-interpretive claims, Rimbaud’s relationship to Verlaine. She is inexorably driven to dance at a strip club. The third narrative strand is a transformative replication of William FAULKER’s The SOUND AND THE FURY that concerns the sexually voracious Capitol, who is erotically obsessed with her brother Quentin. Her goal, to couple with every man in the world, is the indirect endeavor to achieve sexual congress with her brother, the only man who matters to her. Capitol is the pure desire to consume men, the will to conquer through copulation; she generalizes her male sexual partners to the point that they are reduced to nothing. Because Capitol can never remember any of the men with whom she couples (and does not exercise any discrimination in her choices), she not only erases these men as individual human beings; by eliding all memory, she also effectively destroys herself as

an identity that would persist through time. She “herself,” a female Don Giovanni (and this is the point that links her narrative to the Rimbaud section), is “No One”: Nonidentical with herself, “she” is a multiple series of drives to overcome men through sexuality. The final narrative strand, “The Wild Palms,” alternates successively between the narrative of Airplane and that of Capitol; both narratives are mingled together in counterpoint (a Faulknerian practice). To love, in each context, is to demolish and shape one’s personal history. The work is an extended, productive commentary on Rimbaud’s dictum “Je suis un autre” (I am another). The most productive point of departure for an analysis of this work would be the first narrative, which concerns this dictum most directly. Rimbaud longs to free himself not merely from the self that he is and has been, but from the stability of identity in general: “I want to die” (21). He desires “to wake inside someone else’s skin” (23) (a direct translation from Rimbaud’s correspondence), and this self-transformation is possible only by way of a relation to the other human being: “Human flesh needs human flesh. Because only flesh is value” (27). And later: “I’m waiting! I’m waiting for what I want! A certain type of life which I call life. So far I haven’t been able to get there because I need another person, V, and what’s happened and is still happening between me and V is nothing, shit . . . I want blood” (28). Rimbaud prefers “the vulnerability of real identity” to the bourgeois self (a preexisting self that would be identical with itself). R’s identity is, strictly speaking, a nonidentity: He is a multiple series of selves rather than the self-sameness of the unique self that would come before all others. His desire to become other-than-himself, to be exteriorized as his own double, is inextricably bound to his relation to V. Identity is both constituted and destroyed by the sexual relation. That relation gives rise to the most intense experience of pain. Sexuality is not absolute communion, the fusion of the self and the Other, but rather absolute loneliness. What is most distinctive about the sexual relation is the absence of all bonds between the persons involved. Whereas R’s relationship to V is one of submission, fragility, and addiction, the latter’s relationship to the former is something that could be

652 IN MEMORIAM TO IDENTITY

reduced to a moral decision (Verlaine is able to choose between Rimbaud and his responsibilities as a husband, father, and member of civil society). One witnesses a certain dissymmetry in the relation between Rimbaud and Verlaine in scene after scene of this work. What marks their rapport is the fact that it is unequal and without a future. The hopelessness of their relationship belongs to it essentially and defines both its members. Love becomes, as well, synonymous with coercion, the penetration of rape and the agony of torture: “R’s consciousness of his love for V was a torture rack” (62). R hates to desire V. He desires V because he hates V, because he is killing him. Because V is selfdestructive, he must enter into a relation with him. As Rimbaud says to his mentor African Pain: “I need what you’re doing to me because it’s only pain and being controlled which’re going to cut through my autism. Because it’s pain you give me I love you” (5). Acker’s “Rimbaud” is inescapably drawn to Verlaine because of the pain that the latter inflicts upon him. He discovers love through pain and this is the only experience that would allow him to “demolish” “identity” (18) altogether: “There’s no way out but death or consciousness . . . Break the heart’s dead ice. He knew that the habitual self had to be broken” (16). When V withdraws from R’s life altogether in order not to be named a “homosexual,” R accedes to another relation (“Fuck Verlaine,” he declares [94]). At this point Rimbaud renounces poetry and pronounces poetry’s end—although one cannot assign a precise date, August 1873, for instance, to this renunciation and pronouncement—and is transformed utterly: “Each person has the possibility of being simultaneously several beings, having several lives” (92). It is not as if Rimbaud discarded his past self as if it were an old shell and entered into a new one (that of an arms dealer and ivory trader). What is affirmed is the essential instability and uncertainty of all identity: that the “I” is already the “Non-I.” The renunciation of poetry corresponds precisely to the renunciation of Verlaine and what he represents: the self-sameness of subjectivity conceived as substance. Such is Acker’s implicit explanation of Rimbaud’s alleged “silence”—which was not a form of silence at all, but the accession to another

order of writing. It is not merely the case that R has broken with his past self and is transmuted into an imperialist (such is a conclusion that Acker has rejected). He enters into an experience in which the self is continually annihilated and reformed, an experience in which the self proliferates into a series of duplicable selves or nonselves. Rimbaud’s narrative ends with the affirmation of an other consciousness: not a new consciousness that would supersede one that would come before it, but a consciousness that is always entirely other-than-itself. R’s apparent renunciation of poetry, mistyped as his “silence,” was in fact a phenomenological turn toward the experience of the self as an other. All of Acker’s work is severely flawed, and In Memoriam to Identity is no exception. But these flaws are tied to the success of her densely individuated style. Acker’s “bad writing” (and carelessness is everywhere in evidence here—there are many typographical and syntactical errors) may be read, charitably, as a mark of her iconoclasm, her refusal to fashion a well-crafted masterpiece that would be accepted within the canon of traditional literary history. Unfortunately, the stylization of the narrative is not immune to this practice. The description of the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine is only intermittently compelling and tends to veer toward mere compilation and summary of biographical data. The deadpan repetition of “facts” from Rimbaud’s life denies any pathetic identification on the part of the reader. This, in itself, would not be disturbing if pathos were not what In Memoriam to Identity was all about. The work is most impressive when Acker gives herself over to the desire, however juvenile, to shock her audience and approximates the punk sensibility of her early novel, Blood and Guts in High School (1980), while bringing to the work a far greater intelligence. And yet the work lacks that critical naïveté that made Acker’s earlier writing powerful. Most troubling in this regard are the frequent intrusions of Acker the professor and literary theorist into the space of the narrative. Everything proceeds as if the author had surfeited herself with postmodern theory to the point at which she could write only narratives fraught with savvy, self-interpretive statements. She anticipates the

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 653

interpretation of her work in the hands of her informed readership. In Memoriam to Identity thus takes on the strange appearance of a book that reads itself.

SOURCES Acker, Kathy. In Memoriam to Identity. New York: Grove Press, 1990. Chelius, Suzanne. “Kathy Acker, Materialist Feminism and Postmodernism: An Analysis of Blood and Guts in High School and In memoriam to Identity.” Master’s thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1995. Friedman, Ellen G. “In memoriam to Identity,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11 (Spring 1991): 311–312. Joseph Suglia

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE ANNE RICE (1976) Anne RICE began her popular series of vampire novels with a bildungsroman that follows the physical, moral, and psychological development of its main character, Louis. Unlike his literary predecessors Dracula and Carmilla, the vampire Louis controls the narrative by telling his own story. Anne Rice’s use of first-person narrative, American settings, and nonsolitary vampires established a new standard for vampire characters in the horror genre. Louis and his progenitor Lestat resemble traditional literary vampires in that they are “citizens of the world” (Gelder, 111). The setting shifts from a contemporary room overlooking Divisadero Street in San Francisco, to old New Orleans, to eastern Europe and Paris. Louis’s New Orleans of 1791 provides Rice with a setting that is mysterious as well as multicultural; in fact, this mixture of races and cultures proves to be volatile and dangerous. When Louis’s race changes to vampire, he abandons the exploitive lifestyle of plantation owner for the predatory nocturnal activities of a vampire. What he does not abandon with these shifts in identity is his aristocratic, aesthetic, and highly educated point of view. Louis’s aesthetic sensibility continues to influence the creation of vampire images in film and literature. In the earliest image of the vampire in Western literature, suffering determines his life before and after transformation. In Louis’s case, suffering over his brother’s death and obsession with salvation versus

damnation lead him ultimately to Lestat’s parasitic clutches. Whereas Louis preys on others for understanding, intimacy, and knowledge, Lestat’s predation tends to the mundane. Louis preys on the boy, a mirror character for the doubting viewer, for his sympathy. When he preys on human victims, he delights in the feeling of intimacy the blood drinking gives. It is he who initially attacks Claudia, a child who is made child-vampire by Lestat. Whereas Louis’s identity as vampire reveals a regression to childhood and uncontrolled impulses, Lestat creates Louis for economic support. Just as Lestat’s father depended upon him for physical comforts, so does Lestat depend upon Louis as a providing son. When Louis becomes a vampire, in fact, he loses his place as head of his own family and becomes dependent upon a faulty parent, Lestat, for guidance. The vampires prey on one another more than on humans; Armand influences Louis as a substitute father and Claudia desires Madeleine as a perversion of the role of mother. Mysterious, cerebral, androgynous, the vampires fulfill numerous roles but never well. The death process does not make them any wiser than living parents. They possess no secret knowledge except that of suffering. Upon publication the novel received mixed reviews. Some critics applauded the self-reflective quality of the vampire characters; however, other critics found this same quality tiresome, lacking in plot-driven action, and disturbing with subversive eroticism (Roberts, 26). This division of critical response never hurt the series; the controversy surrounding casting for the movie Interview with the Vampire (1994) only fueled interest in the genre and author. Many critics try to account for the longevity of the image of the vampire as representative of the reader’s “feelings of helplessness in the midst of an awareness of atrocity and a sense of insignificance and alienation in an overwhelming atmosphere of decline” (Roberts, 31).

SOURCES Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. New York: Routledge, 1994.

654 IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES

Gordon, Joan, and Veronica Hollinger, eds. Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1996. Keller, James R. Anne Rice and Sexual Politics: The Early Novels. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. Ramsland, Katherine. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Plume, 1992. ———. The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles.” New York: Ballantine, 1993. Roberts, Bette B. Anne Rice. Twayne’s United States Authors, Ser. 644. New York: Twayne, 1994. Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993. Smith, Jennifer. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Kerri A. Horrine

IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES JULIA ALVAREZ (1994) In keeping with the reference to butterflies in its title, Julia ALVAREZ’s novel is about transformation—in particular, the transformation of women from domestic, law-abiding wives and mothers into courageous, rebellious martyrs. Loosely based on the 1960 murder of three young Dominican women known as “Las Mariposas” (the butterflies), this book recounts their call to action and growing involvement with a revolutionary group fighting against the despotic Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Over the course of the novel, we see the young Mirabal sisters grow in courage and strength as they defy traditional feminine conventions and aid revolutionaries in a plot to overthrow Trujillo. Not only do they dedicate their lives to speaking out against the horrific crimes against humanity conducted by Trujillo and the SIM, his secret police, they also defy traditional patriarchy, including the wishes of their father and their husbands. Minerva Mirabal, the leader of the sisters officially known as Las Mariposas, exemplifies female strength and determination. Of all the sisters, she is the most outspoken and defiant and has the most contact with Trujillo, to whose demands she continually refuses to

acquiesce. In a telling confrontation with Trujillo, she and the dictator take turns literally rolling dice to see if he will allow her to enter law school. It is a draw, and as she looks at Trujillo’s lopsided scale (due to the weighted dice he uses), she envisions herself as powerful as the dictator whom she despises: “I look down at the lopsided scale as he puts his dice back. For a moment, I imagine them evenly balanced, his will on one side, mine on the other” (115). Trujillo then permits Minerva to attend law school, where she meets Manolo, her future husband, and joins him as a member of the revolutionary underground. Significantly, it is Minerva who eventually convinces her sisters, Mate and Patria, to join in her cause. Patria, the eldest, is initially reluctant to join the movement but, upon witnessing the slaughter of some revolutionaries while on retreat, she is “a changed woman.” Her house then becomes the center of the revolutionary activity in her small village. Consistent with her emphasis on the transformation of the sisters, Alvarez centers her book on these sisters’ lives and the trials that they endured not only as Dominicans but also, more significantly, as women. She includes their ordeals with their husbands, many of whom cheat on their wives, and the struggle of women to gain independence in a country and culture deeply steeped in patriarchy. Alvarez does a particularly good job of revealing the intricacies of women’s existences—concentrating on the important work that mothers and wives perform in their domestic lives. Although on the surface such actions may seem less significant than those that men perform, Alvarez insists that women are the backbone of the country and the culture. Patria acknowledges this in her reflection upon the solidity of the house that her husband’s family built, noting that, although men may have physically constructed the house, “Patria Mercedes was in those timbers, in the nimble workings of the transoms, she was in those wide boards on the floor and in that creaky door opening on its old hinges” (148). Patria’s words can be viewed as a metaphor for the centrality of the sisters’ involvement in the revolution. Although it is their husbands who are initially arrested, the secret police quickly recognize the sisters’ significance as political agitators and round them up as well.

INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, THE 655

Woven throughout the novel are the real-life horrors of Trujillo’s cruel and oppressive dictatorship and the importance of making such brutality known. In doing so, Alvarez reveals the inhumane conditions under which many inhabitants of the developing world, including Cubans and Haitians, live. Alvarez also implicates the United States in aiding various dictatorships for the sake of economic imperialism. The purpose of her text, thus, can be read as breaking the code of silence surrounding such tyranny by relating the story of the Mirabal sisters. In her postscript to the novel, Alvarez contends that her motivation was to “bring acquaintance of these famous sisters to Englishspeaking readers . . . I hope this book deepens North Americans’ understanding of the nightmare you [Dominicans] endured and the heavy losses you suffered—of which this story tells only a few” (324). In keeping with Alvarez’s desire to end the silence surrounding oppression, Dedé Mirabal, the sole sister who refuses to participate in the revolutionary activities of Las Mariposas, is the one left behind to bear witness continually to her sisters’ story. Unlike her sisters, Dedé was never able to overcome her fear and defy her husband’s command not to participate in her sisters’ revolutionary organization. Instead, she cares for her sisters during their final months and raises their children. The book is, ultimately, her story, centered on her account of her sisters’ lives and deaths as told through alternating flashbacks written from each sister’s point of view. Dedé is haunted by survivor’s guilt throughout the novel as she continually wonders why her life was spared. She struggles to find meaning in her life as others are constantly forcing her to relive her sisters’ last days. Her husband astutely acknowledges this in his contention that “This is your martyrdom, Dedé, to be alive without them” (308). Over the course of the novel, we see Dedé grapple with her position as the mouthpiece for her martyred sisters. However, by the novel’s end, she can identify and articulate her position: “it’s me, Dedé, it’s me, the one who survived to tell the story” (321). At last, she has come to accept her position as the keeper of her sisters’ history as one of profound importance, since it is through her voice that her sisters’ live on in the country’s memory. It is also signif-

icant that through her depiction of Dedé, Alvarez establishes the importance of women as it is a woman who literally becomes the voice of historical memory. In the end, all the sisters, including Dedé, are transformed over the course of the novel through their connection, both directly and indirectly, to the revolutionary underground. They grow in courage and in strength. They become the backbone of their families and of the revolution. The three “mariposas” experience the ultimate conversion as they are transformed from ordinary women into martyrs through their deaths. Not coincidentally, their martyrdom secures their positions at the center of their country as they become icons of female resistance. A statue is erected in their memory, an annual reception is held honoring their sacrifice, and hundreds of people visit the little museum run by Dedé to hear the story of Las Mariposas. Consequently, Alvarez has recuperated their story to make known the sufferings of Third World peoples to those in Englishspeaking communities in the hope that such knowledge can possibly bring about the transformation of human rights injustices on a global scale.

SOURCES Alvarez, Julia. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Plume, 1994. Brown, Isabel Zakrzewski. “Historiographic Metafiction in In the Time of Butterflies,” South Atlantic Review 64, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 98–112. McCallum, Shara. “Reclaiming Julia Alvarez: In the Time of the Butterflies,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29, no. 1 (2000): 93–117. Sirias, Silvio. Julia Alvarez: a Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Fiona Mills

INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, THE PAUL AUSTER (1982) In his novelistic memoir, The Invention of Solitude, Paul AUSTER writes that a story’s function is “to make a man see the thing before his eyes by holding up another thing to view and in so doing delight him away from the fact” (151). In The Invention of Solitude, Auster invents his own mythology. His work contains aspects of his own life, acknowledgments to other literature, and detailed descriptions of

656

INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, THE

actual historic figures and events. Therefore, autobiographical details from Auster’s own life can, in some novels, become a detail in a character’s life: a self that can radiate toward infinite possible relations. While Auster’s work examines subjectivity and representation, his postmodern theme of self-willed solitude does not end in purposelessness, but in an attempt to understand what motivates the self and others, selfwilled solitude, and coincidence. The first half of the memoir, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” begins with Auster’s desire to save his father’s life from vanishing along with his father. Auster enters his deceased father’s solitude and tries to make it his own. This leads initially to an evocation of his father’s conduct and oddities, a reconstruction made of remembered scraps and impressions. The memoir starts with an event at once ordinary and unique, commonplace and incommunicable. His father, after a divorce and 15 years of living alone in a big house in New Jersey, in good health and with no history of illness, suddenly died. Although Auster did not feel that his world had collapsed, and that in some strange way, he accepted his father’s death in spite of its suddenness, what did disturb him was that his father left no traces. Auster defines his father’s solitary as “Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; ‘[but] Solitary in the sense’ of not having to see himself, or not having to see himself being seen by anyone else” (16–17). Their relationship had been composed in great part of remoteness and absence: His father’s inability to notice him was the principal element of their knowing each other. This made Auster crave for something so rarely and arbitrarily given. Auster realized his father did not dislike him, but that he kept himself distant from life: selfwilled solitude. His father’s death, therefore, created an urgency for him to understand his father’s solitude. Auster tries to re-create his father’s past, but when the invisible man eludes him, he turns to an examination of writing. His writing takes the form of a series of relatively brief fragments and essays that examine his father’s behavior toward his family and business acquaintances, as well as his social life after his divorce. Auster’s story is somehow incompatible with

language, and he gropes for the “tiniest of images: a fleeting resurrection, a moment otherwise lost” (28). But this account arrives inevitably at a consideration of his father’s own parents’ mysterious past, and Auster’s epigram from Heraclitus’s writings sets the tone for what follows: “In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult and puzzling when you find it.” There is a dramatic consistency in the fact that Auster, rummaging through his father’s effects, should coincidentally discover one family portrait from his father’s childhood, and that it was torn down the middle. This photograph of his father (his mother, sister, and brothers) taken more than 60 years earlier in Kenosha was distorted. His grandfather, once sitting in a chair beside his grandmother, was no longer there, but his fingertips remained. Auster learned, by an extraordinary coincidence, several years before his father’s death, that his grandmother had shot and killed her husband in 1919 and had been acquitted. But when he finds this photograph, he is severely shaken because he now understands that his father’s self-willed solitude resulted from what he experienced as a child. Although Auster saw his father as a cold, detached man, others who knew him thought he was the warmest, kindest, most wonderful man. If Sam Auster is the epitome of the decentered postmodern man, Paul Auster does not present him as the norm but rather as a defective character. Auster’s admission that he, in fact, fits Marcel Proust’s definition of a bad son allows him to radiate toward infinite possible relations. Auster re-creates his father mythology as he imagines him sitting in the public library and reading his poetry. For Auster, each fact is canceled by the next fact, and he feels that he is writing about three or perhaps four different men of whom each one is a contradiction of all the others. His father has vanished forever, but Auster takes comfort in Soren Kierkegaard’s quote: “he who is willing to work gives birth to his own father” (68). Auster’s identity as son now shifts as he turns to the image of his own son, Daniel, asleep in his crib, and he wonders what Daniel will think of these pages when he will be old enough to read them.

INVISIBLE MAN 657

In the second part of The Invention of Solitude, called “The Book of Memory,” Auster extends his examination of analogous situations bearing on his relationship with his father to the themes of isolation and speech, memory and the present. Here Auster refers to himself in the third person as he theorizes when he writes “It was. It will never be again” (75). The value of this section is Auster’s critical assertion that through reading, infinite possible relations unfold, and we find our common humanity. We engage our history, our soul, and our memories into what is on the page. “The Book of Memory” is a moving and delicately perceived portrait of lives and relations that reflects on Auster’s own story and commentaries on Jonah and on Vermeer, but, in particular, on Collodi and Pinocchio. Auster writes, “Pinocchio’s being precedes his body: his task throughout the book is to find it, in other words to find himself” (132). Like Pinocchio snatching Geppetto from the belly of a whale, “a darkness as black as ink,” Auster saves his father from vanishing, and by giving him new life, justifies his own existence. Auster suggests that when Collodi plunges Pinocchio into darkness, he is dipping his pen into his inkwell, and Pinocchio writes himself: the essential creative act. Auster, who found both his father and his father’s father to be invisible in “The Invisible Man,” now writes of his maternal grandfather’s life and death: a clear and touching evocation of a likable man who loved stories. The Invention of Solitude is a tribute to Auster’s father, who left him a small inheritance that enabled him to write without worrying about money. “The Book of Memory” celebrates the image of a man sitting alone in a room. The room is the site of spiritual life: The subject gives birth to itself. As Auster sits alone in his room, and as he speaks of that solitude, he understands that he has become more than just himself. “Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history” (139). Here Auster celebrates all the European thinkers and poets who influenced him and whom he chose as fathers to compensate for his own. Auster explains that we all experience everything that goes on in the universe,

and events that have happened before will happen again. “Playing with words,” Auster believes, “is merely to examine the way the mind functions to mirror a particle of the world as the mind perceives it” (161). For Auster, language functions as a bridge, “a network of rhymes, assonances, and overlapping meanings, that joins opposite and contrasting aspects of the world with each other” (160), creating infinite possible relations.

SOURCE Baronne, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Harriet Gold

INVISIBLE

MAN RALPH ELLISON (1952)

Now considered a classic of the American canon, Invisible Man (1952) was the only novel Ralph ELLISON published during his lifetime. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1953. Critics have discerned in this novel the influence of the writers Herman MELVILLE, Mark TWAIN, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, William FAULKNER, Langston HUGHES, and Richard WRIGHT, and the influence of the jazz musicians Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong. Autobiographical elements also appear in the work. From 1933 to 1936, Ellison studied music at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a school similar to the college that the narrator attends in the early chapters of Invisible Man. Like the narrator, Ellison left college to make his way in New York, and Ellison was interested in the Communist Party in the 1930s but later repudiated it, just as the narrator became a member of the Brotherhood and was later disillusioned with their methods and values. Concerned with the collective black experience in America as well as an individual’s quest for identity, the novel employs a narrative frame in which the prologue and epilogue depict the unnamed protagonist in the narrative present, and chapters one through 25 trace how the narrator’s life develops to that point, from his high school graduation to the events that recently precede the prologue. The novel’s structure also sometimes resembles a jazz performance, in which Ellison

658 INVISIBLE MAN

introduces key themes early on and then elaborates and varies them throughout the rest of the work. Speaking from his underground dwelling, the narrator explains his invisibility in the prologue: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3). Rather than see the narrator for the individual he is, most people see only the stereotypes they have come to identify with African Americans. The prologue also introduces many of the themes and motifs to be explored throughout the novel: the tension between vision and blindness, the subversion of authority, dreaming or altered states of consciousness, the power of music and oratory, and color symbolism. Several times throughout the prologue, the narrator says that he is hibernating, but he also reminds us, “A hibernation is a covert preparation for more overt action” (13). Though the narrator speaks to the reader directly throughout the novel, the reader never learns his name, emphasizing his struggle to find his identity and making him a universal stand-in for us all. Chapter one goes back 20 years in the narrator’s life to the high school graduation speech that he is to give for local white community leaders. Before he can give his speech, he suffers abuse and humiliation when he and several other young black men are made to participate in a battle royal for the amusement of the white men. When the narrator finally gives his speech, which echoes Booker T. Washington’s advocacy of trust, responsibility, and humility for the black race, the reader cannot help but see the irony. After his speech, the narrator is awarded a leather briefcase and a scholarship to a black college. In chapter 2, we find the narrator at the college. As a model student, he has been chosen to drive the visiting white patron, Mr. Norton, around the campus. They end up at the shack of Trueblood, a poor black sharecropper who has scandalized the community by committing incest and impregnating his daughter. The community’s differing responses, charity from whites and ostracism from blacks, and Trueblood’s name signify what whites think of him and what blacks fear whites will think of the entire race, that Trueblood’s animalistic act typifies the habits of all African Americans. Ironically, Norton’s voyeuristic fascination sug-

gests that he vicariously fulfills his own desires through Trueblood, to whom he gives money for telling his story. Then, after a disastrous visit to a saloon called the Golden Day, in which the narrator and Mr. Norton speak to an insane black war veteran and doctor, the narrator returns Mr. Norton to the college. Dr. Bledsoe, the school president, reproaches the narrator for driving the patron to these unsavory places, and he sends him to evening services while he makes apologies to Mr. Norton. At the services, the narrator listens to a speech by the Reverend Homer Barbee, who describes with reverence the college founder, a man much like Booker T. Washington. Near the end of the speech, the narrator discovers that Homer Barbee is blind, which suggests that his reverence for the founder is based on flawed vision. Afterward, the narrator learns that his punishment is to be suspended from school. In his anger, Dr. Bledsoe tells him that the only way to please a white man is to lie, echoing the dying words of the narrator’s grandfather, which we had heard in chapter 1. Speaking of whites, the grandfather had told the narrator, “I a want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction” (16). The narrator travels to New York with sealed letters of recommendation from Bledsoe and attempts to find employment. On his bus ride to New York, the narrator meets the black doctor who spoke to Mr. Norton at the Golden Day. The doctor tells the narrator to “learn to look beneath the surface. . . . Play the game, but don’t believe in it” (153), again echoing the dying words of the narrator’s grandfather. Understanding and deciding whether to act on this repeated advice becomes an important part of the narrator’s experiences throughout the rest of the novel. In New York, the narrator optimistically pursues employment, using Dr. Bledsoe’s sealed letters. After several disappointing attempts, the narrator presents his letter at the office of Mr. Emerson. Due to a feeling of kinship with the narrator and alienation from his father, Mr. Emerson’s son reveals that Bledsoe’s letters are in fact instructions to thwart the narrator’s efforts to find employment. This is one of the narrator’s many

INVISIBLE MAN 659

disillusioning experiences, from which he learns that there may be wisdom in his grandfather’s words. Following a tip from young Mr. Emerson, the narrator applies for employment at the Liberty Paint Company, an establishment known for its brilliant white paint that is used for national monuments. The narrator’s first job is to mix the white paint by adding 10 drops of a black liquid to the base. Once stirred, the black liquid disappears, making the white base even whiter. Ellison suggests here the appropriation of black labor and energy by white society and the invisibility of blacks in America. The name of the factory and the use of this paint on national monuments implicate the whole country in this exploitation. Unsatisfied with his work mixing the paint, the narrator’s boss sends him to the factory basement, where he assists the black janitor, Mr. Brockway. Brockway essentially runs the whole factory, but his power comes at the price of reinforcing the white establishment. When Brockway begins a fight with the narrator over the narrator’s supposed involvement with the union, a neglected steam valve (the white one) explodes, causing the narrator serious injury. Chapter 11 picks up on the motif of altered states of consciousness as the narrator lies in the factory hospital undergoing an experimental treatment that involves electric shock. As he regains consciousness, his inability to remember his name or the details of his life reifies the internal quest that drives the whole novel. His emergence from the glass box in which his treatment took place is a figurative rebirth. White doctors and nurses wearing white jackets deliver him and cut the electrical wire that attached him to the machinery like an umbilical cord. Disoriented and homeless after being released from the hospital, the narrator meets Mary Rambo, a matronly black woman who takes the narrator in because of her kindness and because she is sure the narrator will one day be a “a credit to the race” (255). The narrator’s experiences have changed his personality to some extent. He is no longer as naive and eager to please as he had previously been. For example, seeing an old black couple being evicted from their apartment, he gives an impassioned speech that rallies the crowd of bystanders into controlled action. Afterward,

the narrator meets Brother Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood. Having heard the narrator’s speech, Jack convinces him to become part of the Brotherhood by telling him he can have a political impact that transcends race. But at his first Brotherhood party, a woman wonders if he “should be a little blacker” (303), and a drunk man asks him to sing spirituals, indicating that he is still being stereotyped by race. This theme of being unable to escape stereotypes continues when, on his last morning at Mary’s house, the narrator discovers a racially offensive bank figurine in his room: “the cast-iron figure of a very black, redlipped and wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin” (319). He accidentally breaks this bank and decides to throw it away without mentioning it to Mary. However, getting rid of the figurine proves harder than he imagined. Each time he tries to throw it away, someone yells at him to take his garbage elsewhere or returns it to him. The offensive figurine follows him just as racial stereotypes follow him. After training, the narrator becomes the Brotherhood representative in the Harlem district. There he meets another young black Brotherhood member, Tod Clifton, as well as a black man who violently opposes the Brotherhood’s efforts, Ras the Exhorter. Ras resembles such black nationalists as Marcus Garvey, and he believes the narrator and Tod are race traitors because they are working alongside whites. While the narrator rejects Ras’s views, Tod seems intrigued by them. At first, the narrator’s work with the Brotherhood seems to be going well, then doubts about his integrity surface within the party. He receives an anonymous letter telling him to go slowly, and Brother Wrestrum, another black member, challenges the narrator’s commitment, calling him a “petty individualist” (401). After these accusations, the Brotherhood reassigns the narrator to lecture on the “woman question,” which the narrator considers an insulting demotion. Soon, however, the Brotherhood returns the narrator to Harlem because of the mysterious disappearance of Tod Clifton. But his return to Harlem does not signal a complete reinstatement of the Brotherhood’s trust. Making his way to a Brotherhood meeting from which he had been

660 IOLA LEROY, OR SHADOWS UPLIFTED

excluded, the narrator encounters Tod Clifton selling paper “Sambo Dolls” on a street corner. A policeman harasses Clifton for selling the figures without a license, and when Clifton resists, he is shot. After witnessing Clifton’s death, the narrator wonders, “Why should a man deliberately plunge outside of history and peddle an obscenity” (438). The narrator believes that the Brotherhood is the only channel through which African Americans can have a voice in America. But Clifton’s dancing figures, controlled by invisible strings, suggest that African Americans have been controlled without their knowledge by the Brotherhood. The narrator gives an impassioned speech at Clifton’s funeral that addresses the community’s sense of racial outrage and quells the building riot, but the Brotherhood is angry that he disregarded their orders to downplay the race issue. As Brother Jack rages at the narrator, telling him he was “not hired to think” (469), his glass eye pops out, startling the narrator. Here, Ellison suggests the narrator’s invisibility to the Brotherhood and his blindness to his own exploitation by the group. While fleeing another confrontation with Ras the Exhorter after this meeting with Jack, the narrator dons a hat and sunglasses, and several passersby mistake him for a man named Rinehart. Rinehart is a trickster figure, a pimp, a gambler, and a crooked reverend; he is whatever his observer wants to see and that is the source of his power. The name Rinehart suggests both rind and heart, the outer shell and the inner substance, which do not necessarily correspond to each other. Through Rinehart’s example, the narrator learns the power of invisibility. He combines this knowledge with his grandfather’s earlier advice and decides to agree with whatever the Brotherhood tells him while secretly trying to uncover their vulnerabilities. When riots break out in Harlem, the narrator realizes that the Brotherhood had planned this violence all along, hoping to use the crises to support their claims about the effects of poverty. And by acquiescing to the Brotherhood’s desires, even though he did not believe in them, the narrator unwittingly aided their plan. He learns that either his grandfather’s advice was flawed or he does not yet fully understand it. The black on black violence of the riots, staged for the benefit of whites,

parallels the battle royal from chapter 1. Fleeing attackers, the narrator falls into an open manhole, which is sealed behind him. To see his way through the underground darkness, he burns one by one the contents of his briefcase, beginning with his high school diploma. In this way, he symbolically destroys the identity that has been given to him throughout his life by others. The epilogue brings the narrative full circle when, as in the prologue, he again speaks from his underground dwelling that he had discovered just after the events of chapter 25. Again, he tells us that he plans to return to the surface to play a “socially responsible role” (581). The final line of the novel reinforces the quest for identity, suggesting to the reader that his story is ours, regardless of our racial background: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581).

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Notes: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1996. ———, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Invisible Man. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Vintage, 1995. Morel, Lucas E., ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Trimmer, Joseph F., ed. A Casebook on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1972. Betina Entzminger

IOLA LEROY, OR SHADOWS UPLIFTED FRANCES HARPER (1892) Critics of Frances Ellen Watkins HARPER’s final novel, Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted, have condemned its idealism, sentimentality, use of stock characters, and imitation of William Wells BROWN’s Clotel. Yet Vashti Lewis has noted that Harper broke “new ground in the development of the tragic mulatto character” (Foster, “Introduction” to Iola LeRoy, Or Shadows Uplifted, xxxvii). Contemporary critics have also emphasized that Harper quite consciously experimented with literary genre, technique, and theme. The main character, Iola, enters the novel as a tragic mulatta who thinks herself a white woman until, upon her father’s death, she learns of her mother’s black lin-

IRONWEED 661

eage, the cause of her own enslavement. In accordance with the stereotypical convention, Iola turns “deathly pale,” bursts into a “paroxysm of tears succeeded by peals of hysterical laughter,” and wishes she “could die” (106–107). Iola’s weeping does not last long, however. She eventually shows resistance by choosing to leave her master to work as a nurse in the Union Army camp. Here, Iola makes true strides toward finding and expressing her own identity. After only a few years as a slave and then as a freed woman, she deliberately, joyfully decides to live as a black woman. Iola’s choice emphasizes her determination to resist a false definition of herself because she views linking herself to the white world as a completely unacceptable option (Carby, 76). Iola, however, cannot satisfy the requirements of identity creation unless she does so within a community, and her family becomes the primary community she seeks. In the process of reuniting with and actually forming her family, Iola gradually becomes a reformer and redefines the white concept of true womanhood, especially through her work and marriage-partner choice. Iola sees that domestic work for black women remains a final carryover from slavery, and she prefers to assert herself as something other than mere servant. She represents what Claudia Tate refers to as the model of ideal black womanhood, the very definition of an exemplary citizen (Tate, 47, 97). Perhaps nowhere does Iola’s new identity as the reconfigured true black American woman stand out more than in her choice of marriage partner. By refusing to marry the white Doctor Gresham, fair-minded and kind though he is, she rejects moving away from her black world. When Iola chooses instead to marry Frank Latimer, she moves beyond mere romantic attachment to a kind of deep compassion, spiritual unity, and reverent admiration. That goal of racial uplift leads Iola (and Frank) back to the South “to transform their identification with the lower caste into positive political, social, and economic action directed at raising the status of the entire black group” (Berzon, 214). In this movement, Iola embraces the final stage of her transformation, for she becomes wife, teacher, and leader. Iola becomes that fully real-

ized American self-made person who has achieved every one of her self-determined goals. She stands as the fully formed American, black, but American nonetheless.

SOURCES Berzon, Judith R. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: Gotham Library of New York University Press, 1978. Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Boyd, Melba Joyce. “Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted: A Novel by a Black Nazarene.” In Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 1825–1911. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994, 169–196. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Davis, Angela Y. “Standards for a New Womanhood.” In Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 1983, 3–23. Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Delany, Douglass, and Harper. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African-American Novel. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Foreman, P. Gabrielle. “ ‘Reading Aright’: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of Histitextuality in Iola Leroy,” Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 10, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 327–354. Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. Iola Leroy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Pfeiffer, Kathleen. Race Passing and American Individualism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Yellin, Jean Fagan. The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863. New York: New York University Press, 1972. Patricia J. Sehulster

IRONWEED WILLIAM KENNEDY (1983)

William KENNEDY’s novel Ironweed was published in 1983 to immediate success and won both the Pulitzer Prize and

662 IRONWEED

the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1984. Its popularity brought renewed attention to the first novels—Legs and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game—of Kennedy’s growing Albany cycle of novels. Ironweed’s status was ensured when in 1986 it was made into a feature-length film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, directed by Hector Babenco, with a screenplay by Kennedy himself. Ironweed opens in 1938 to introduce us to roustabout Francis Phelan, an Irish-American ex-baseball player who for 20 years has been living a hardscrabble drinking life on the road with his companion Helen. In fact, most of his adult life has been spent running from the unintended consequences of his actions. As a young man he killed a scab during a trolley strike; later he accidentally dropped his baby son Gerald on the floor, killing him instantly. While Gerald’s gravestone reads “an unlucky child who was much loved,” his life was not the only unlucky one, for Francis’s adulthood has been made up of leaving and running. Michael Patrick Gillespie, in “Ironweed and the Consequences of Resurrection,” writes that while many critics have focused on the classical allusions of the novel, its “broad appeal comes more directly from its evocation of the pathos in ordinary life. . . . Ironweed legitimizes the cycle of novels that have grown out of the complex familial and ethnic connections centered in a small upstate New York city” (Gillespie, 84). Such realistic elements drawn from ordinary life conjoin with the world of the past and the dead and intersect to form a complex and challenging novel. Elsewhere this combination of elements has brought Kennedy the title “postmodern romantic” as well as “magic realist” (Alsen). The term magic realism refers to a fictional mode that mixes elements of the supernatural or fantastic into a realistic foundation made up of the details of an ordinary life. In Ironweed, the dead, with their murmurings about history and their deaths, intrude as reminders of Francis Phelan’s spiritual deficiencies. The novel begins in a graveyard, a likely place for Francis’s many deceased family members to see how he looks after years of wandering. His mother “twitch[es] nervously” while his father strains to see the son he’s

missed for so long and “signal[s] to his neighbors that an act of regeneration seem[s] to be in process” (16). Francis’s son Gerald, who in death is a glowing presence possessing “the gift of tongues in death” (17), tells Francis that he must expiate his guilt through acts the purpose of which he will not understand. Then, Gerald silently tells Francis, “you will stop trying to die because of me” (19). The expiation does not compensate for the boy’s death, an obvious accident, but instead for the abandonment of Francis’s family because of it. At this point, Francis’s life becomes one long dance with the ghosts of his decisions. In this first graveyard scene, his buddy Rudy responds to Francis’s story about the death of his son from a fall with the comment, “Hell, I fall down all the time and I ain’t dead.” Francis responds, “That’s what you think” (20). Close to moral death, Francis recognizes that he is caught in a state halfway between living and death. His next job, riding through Albany in the cart of old Rosskam, underscores this line. As they move along Albany streets, Francis is constantly distracted by talk from the dead, while his boss, a priapic 71-year-old, tells sex stories that insist on his living presence. As Francis travels through Albany, he continues to speak with these ghosts as they confront him with his guilt in their deaths, all while they offer him reminders of his mortality and continued life, along with a little forgiveness. While these apparitions could seem to be the delusional visions of a drunk, there are scenes where clearly Francis is not aware of their presence, even though we are. Francis is wounded not just by his years of alcoholism, but also by a past that he has to acknowledge. Much like Toni MORRISON’s novel BELOVED, the history of a blighted past stays alive precisely because it has not been confronted. Both novels ask us to take seriously the weight of memory and history and their constant presence in the lives of survivors. Redemption in the novel comes from the eventual recognition of the debt of memory owed to the dead, and the debt of compassion owed to the living. We see the marks of this in the contrasts in Francis’s behaviors. Although he often harangues his companion Helen, Francis cares humanely for Sandra, who lies dead

IRVING, JOHN WINSLOW 663

drunk (and later dead) outside the mission that will not let her in. While the violence that has characterized his earlier life returns to Francis when he kills a vigilante at the hobo “jungle,” he also carries Rudy himself to the emergency room for care, only to find that for Rudy, like Sandra, help is too late. The healing process that his father foresaw really begins when Francis returns to the home of his wife, reminding himself as he goes that his wife has never told anyone what happened to the baby. Here, drawn with understanding back into the family home, Francis begins to make slow progress reconnecting with his family, even his prickly, unforgiving grown daughter, Peg. This homecoming, and the conclusion of the novel, hold out some hope that Francis begins to understand what courage might mean for him. In the graveyard, speaking to the ghost of the scab he killed during the strike, Francis insists that, “Francis is no coward. He had his reasons and they were goddamn good ones” (26). At the novel’s end, he gives himself reassurance, saying, “A man ain’t afraid of going back. Goddamn spooks, they follow you everywhere but they don’t matter. You stand up to ’em is all” (196). Ironically, Francis may be liberated from his wanderings by more deaths. In the jungle, “an ashpit, a graveyard, and a fugitive city” (208), where he talks with the other homeless, Francis finally admits to why he left his home and family. “I couldn’t handle it,” he confides, “That’s why I run off and left the family” (214). Courage reveals itself in small efforts—the present of a turkey, the admission of a weakness. Courage may not be enough. Whether Francis will be caught in the weight of his 20 years on the run is, finally, ambiguous. When the night raiders set the jungle afire and attack Rudy and Francis, Francis fights back. We never know if he killed a raider or not. His street companion Helen is dead, finally succumbing to the tumor in her belly that a doctor had told her was benign, releasing him from the need to care for her that had lasted long after their sexual connection had faded. Yet Francis recognizes that he needs to retrieve something from his 20 years; as he says in the jungle, “[m]y guilt is all that I have left. If I lose it, I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing” (216).

SOURCES Alsen, Eberhard. “Sin and the Supernatural in William Kennedy’s Ironweed.” In Romantic Postmodernism in American Fiction. Postmodern Studies, 19, edited by Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens, 223–239. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. Clarke, Peter. “Classical Myth in William Kennedy’s Ironweed,” Critique 27 (Spring 1986). Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading William Kennedy. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2002. Kennedy, William. Ironweed. New York: Penguin: 1983. Reilley, Edward C. William Kennedy. New York: Twayne, 1991. Steward, Melissa. “Roads of ‘Exquisite Mysterious Muck’: The Magical Journey through the City in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, John Cheever’s ‘The Enormous Radio,’ and Donald Barthelme’s ‘City Life’.” In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, 487–582. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Lisette Gibson Diaz

IRVING, JOHN WINSLOW (1942– ) Like the 19th-century English novelist Charles Dickens, John Irving is an immensely popular novelist who has received praise from contemporary book reviewers and literary scholars. His fourth novel, The WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1978), sold over 120,000 hardcover copies and more than 3 million paperbacks, won an American Book Award, and fueled a 1980s pop culture phenomenon known as Garpomania. Of his 10 novels, The HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE (1981) also combined critical success and Book-of-the-Month Club best-selling status, while The CIDER HOUSE RULES (1985), A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY (1989), and A Son of the Circus (1994) proved similarly successful with the reading public and the critics. Perhaps it is Irving’s combination of black humor, disaster, violence, and death—a world in which his often eccentric characters explore family relationships, gender and sexual issues, and the balance between art and life—that appeals to his readers. Unlike some of his postmodernist contemporaries, Irving eschews the “elitism” of novels that seem written only for other novelists and critics (Harter and Thompson, 8). At the same time Irving is derided for his lack of intellectuality.

664

IRVING, JOHN WINSLOW

John Irving was born on March 2, 1942, in Exeter, New Hampshire, to John Wallace Blunt, a pilot who was shot down during World War II over Burma, and Frances Winslow Irving. He was named after his father, but when his mother married Colin F. N. Irving, he was adopted and his name was changed. He was educated at Philips Exeter Academy, where his stepfather was a teacher, the University of New Hampshire, where he graduated in 1965, and the University of Iowa, where he studied with Vance Bourjaily and Kurt VONNEGUT and earned a master of fine arts degree in 1967. He married Shyla Learny, a photographer, in 1964. They divorced in 1981 and Irving married Janet Turnbull, an editor, in 1987. Irving’s first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1969), is a comic and picaresque novel featuring Hannes Graff and Siegfried (Siggy) Javotnick as they travel by motorcycle through Austria; it culminates in a scene in which Graff, after Siggy’s death, enacts Siggy’s plan to free the animals in a zoo in Vienna. Critics generally agree on the excellence of his second novel, The Water-Method Man (1972), in which Fred “Bogus” Trumper, the main character, suffers from a blocked urinary tract whose cure—drinking huge amounts of water before and after having sex— becomes a metaphor for his guilt and emotional pain, especially since Trumper is engaged in an adulterous affair. He loses his wife to his best friend and eventually copes with his immaturity. The 158-Pound Marriage (1974) features an unnamed New England university history professor and his Austrian wife, Utch, who agree to sexual swapping with Severin Winter, a German professor and wrestling coach, and his wife, Edith, a wealthy writer. This idea backfires when the professor’s wife leaves and takes their children home to Austria. The World According to Garp changed the course of Irving’s career. Purposefully Dickensian, the novel employs a wide variety of characters, detailed atmosphere, complex plot lines, and digressions, all blended with Irving’s ever-present awareness of the relationship between sex and violence. Garp is conceived during World War II when his feminist mother, Jennie Fields, decides to become impregnated by Sergeant Garp, a fatally wounded ball turret gunner, so that she can raise her child without a father’s interference. Garp’s

story—and he becomes a best-selling writer himself— involves his attempts to comprehend the violence and sex and death that pervade his own story and those of his contemporaries. The Hotel New Hampshire is a conscious revisioning of F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The GREAT GATSBY (1925). Using a Dickensian-like panorama so successfully employed in The World According to Garp, Irving creates the Berrys, whose lives include rape, incest, and suicide. They act out their stories in successive (and successively bleak, perverted, and valueless) Hotel New Hampshires in New Hampshire, Austria, and Maine. The novel focuses on the narrator, John Berry, one of five children, and his sister Franny, a gang-rape victim. They survive the deaths of all the members of their family and their incestuous attraction to each other. The novel ends with a parodic echo of The Great Gatsby’s final words. Irving followed this successful novel with The Cider House Rules, which focuses on the ethical issues surrounding abortion and incest. Homer Wells, himself an orphan and now a midwife, comes to believe in the legitimacy of abortions but also in the need to deliver healthy babies. Some critics believe that A Prayer for Owen Meany, a bildungsroman that explores the underpinnings of religious faith, is Irving’s most popular work. The narrator, Johnny Wheelwright, explains that he believes in God because of his friendship with the dwarflike and endearing Owen Meany during the Vietnam War. The novel culminates when Owen sacrifices himself to save a group of Vietnamese children. In 2003, nearly a decade after publication, the British public—as part of the BBC’s The Big Read—voted Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany as one of the nation’s 100 best-loved novels. A Son of the Circus (1994) features Dr. Farrokh Daruwalla, a Toronto-based Indian orthopedic surgeon who returns to India to resume his part in a 20-year-old murder mystery. A Widow for One Year (1998) features Ruth Cole as a four-year-old child, a 36-year-old writer, and a 41-year-old widow. Because she witnesses a murder, she is eventually reunited with her estranged family. Irving’s most recent novel, The Fourth Hand (2001), is an unlikely love story between Patrick Wallingford, a journalist with one hand, and Doris Clausen, a widowed ticket seller for the Green Bay Packers.

IRVING, JOHN WINSLOW 665

The World According to Garp was filmed in 1982 by Warner Bros./Pan Arts with Robin Williams, Glenn Close, and Mary Beth Hurt in the lead roles; The Hotel New Hampshire in 1984 by Orion Pictures with Rob Lowe, Jodie Foster, and Beau Bridges; The Cider House Rules, adapted by Irving from his novel, became a motion picture issued by Miramax in 1999; Simon Birch, based on Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, was released in 1998; The Fourth Hand was optioned for film by Miramax in 2001; part of A Widow for One Year was adapted for a film, A Door in the Floor, written and directed by Tod Williams. Irving’s comic and tragic explorations of the philosophical as well as the cultural and psychological underpinnings of American life make him one of the most significant contemporary writers. He has also written two memoirs, The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (1996) and My Movie Business: A Memoir (1999). John Irving’s papers are deposited in the library at Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire.

NOVELS The Cider House Rules. New York: Morrow, 1985. The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay. New York: Hyperion, 1999. The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House, 2001. The Hotel New Hampshire. New York: Dutton, 1981. A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Morrow, 1989. A Son of the Circus. New York: Random House, 1994. Until I Find You. New York: Random House, 2005. A Widow for One Year. New York: Random House, 1998. The World According to Garp. New York: Dutton, 1978.

SOURCES Bawer, Bruce. “The World According to Garp: Novel to Film.” In Take Two: Adapting the Contemporary American Novel to Film, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, 77–90. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Bloom, Harold, ed. John Irving: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2001. Campbell, Josie P. John Irving: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. de Coppet, Laura. “An Interview with John Irving,” Interview 11 (October 1981): 42–44.

Freeland, Alison. “A Conversation with John Irving,” New England Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 135–142. Hansen, Ron. “The Art of Fiction XCIII: John Irving,” Paris Review 28 (1986): 74–103. Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. John Irving. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Herel, Suzanne. “John Irving,” Mother Jones (May 1, 1997): 64. McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with John Irving,” Contemporary Literature 23 (Winter 1982): 1–18. Nelson, William. “Unlikely Heroes: The Central Figures in The World According to Garp, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and A Confederacy of Dunces.” In The Hero in Transition, edited by Ray B. Brown, 163–170. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Neubauer, Alexander. “John Irving.” In his Conversations on Writing Fiction: Interviews with Thirteen Distinguished Teachers of Fiction Writing in America. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994, 141–152. Page, Philip. “Hero Worship and Hermeneutic Dialectics: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany,” Mosaic (September 28, 1995): 137–156. Reilly, Edward C. Understanding John Irving. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Rickard, John. “Wrestling with the Text: The World According to John Irving,” Meanjin 56 (1997): 714–722. Runyon, Randolph. Fowles/Irving/Barthes: Canonical Variations on an Apocryphal Theme. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981. Shostak, Debra. “The Family Romances of John Irving,” Essays in Literature 21 (1994): 129–145. Sykes, John. “Christian Apologetic Uses of the Grotesque in John Irving and Flannery O’Connor,” Literature and Theology 10 (1996): 58–67. Wilson, Raymond J., III. “The Postmodern Novel: The Example of John Irving’s The World According to Garp,” Critique 34 (Fall 1992): 49–62. Wolfe, Gregory. “A Conversation with John Irving,” Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion 2 (Summer 1992): 45–57.

OTHER Irving, John. Audio Interview with Don Swaim. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ johnirving/. Accessed September 14, 2005. “John Irving.” LEVITY. Available online. URL: http://www. levity.com/corduroy/irving.htm. Accessed September 14, 2005.

666 ISAACS, SUSAN

ISAACS, SUSAN (1943– )

A writer praised for her talent in evoking the extraordinary from the seemingly ordinary woman, Susan Isaacs is a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, and political speechwriter. She is ultimately an optimist despite the murder, wartime horrors, and political dangers that her characters experience, and is a winner of the 1999 John Steinbeck Award. Her books earn critical approbation for their wit, satire, and swiftly paced plots, and most have been either Book-of-the-Month Club or Literary Guild selections. Her mystery novels, in particular, have been praised for their literary quality. Susan Isaacs was born on December 7, 1943, in Brooklyn, New York, to Morton Isaacs, an electrical engineer, and Helen Asher Isaacs. In 1968, she married Elkan Abramowitz, a trial lawyer and, 10 years later, published her first novel, Compromising Positions, a murder mystery set on Long Island. It features Judith Singer, a suburban housewife-turned-detective, whom she resurrects two decades later in her most recent novel, Long Time No See (2001). In Compromising Positions, the death of a periodontist takes Singer on a trail of seduction and pornography that leads to her ultimate identification of the killer. In Long Time No See, Singer, whose 55-year-old husband has died after winning the New York City Marathon, is a history professor; once again she finds herself solving a homicide, this time involving a Long Island mobster and his murdered Princeton-educated banker daughter-in-law. In Isaacs’s second novel, Close Relations (1980), the divorced political operative Marcia Green becomes sexually involved with two men, one Jewish and one Catholic. Almost Paradise (1984), too, involves a romance, this time between the wealthy actor Nick Cobleigh and the agoraphobic Jane Heissenhuber against a backdrop of child abuse and class differences. A clear change of venue marks Shining Through (1988), a World War II novel in which legal secretary Linda Voss, a Jew as well as a spy, endangers her life by playing the role of a cook in Nazi Germany. Isaacs followed with Magic Hour (1991), distinguished from her other mystery novels because she creates Steve Brady, an alcoholic Vietnam veteran now a detective

who falls in love with the ex-wife of the movie producer whose murder he is investigating. With After All These Years (1993), Isaacs returns to a woman protagonist: Rose is deserted by her millionaire husband, Richie, and Isaacs complicates the age-old love triangle with Richie’s murder shortly afterward. In Lily White (1996), Isaacs blends the peculiar family history of attorney Lily White with her attempts to prove that her client, Norman, is innocent of murder. Isaacs leaves the murder mystery genre in Red, White, and Blue (1998) for the family antagonisms encountered when special FBI agent Charlie Blair, who has discovered his Jewish ancestry, infiltrates Wrath, an antiSemitic group whose virulence is part of the mystery that Blair, together with his counterpart Lauren Miller, eventually solves. Two of Isaacs’s novels have been filmed, with Isaacs herself writing the screenplay for Compromising Positions, starring Susan Sarandon; Shining Through was adapted to the screen for Twentieth Century Fox in 1992 and starred Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffiths. Isaacs lives with her husband on Long Island and continues to write both fiction and nonfiction. She was president of the Mystery Writers of America in 2002.

NOVELS After All These Years. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. Almost Paradise. New York: Harper, 1984. Any Place I Hang My Hat. New York: Scribner, 2004. Close Relations. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1980. Compromising Positions. New York: Times Books, 1978. Lily White. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Long Time No See. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Magic Hour. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Red, White, and Blue. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. Shining Through. New York: Harper, 1988.

SOURCES Aborn, Shana. “A Woman of Mystery,” Ladies’ Home Journal, September 2001, p. 38. Frumkes, Lewis Burke. “A Conversation with Susan Isaacs,” Writer (February 1997): 25–27. Isaacs, Susan. Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Are Really Doing on Page and Screen. New York: Ballantine, 1999.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE 667

OTHER Susan Isaacs. Available online. URL: http://www.susanisaacs. com. Accessed June 25, 2002. Wired for Books. Audio Interview with Susan Isaacs. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/susanisaacs/. Accessed July 2005.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE SINCLAIR LEWIS (1935) LEWIS wrote this 458-page novel in only four months (June–September 1935). He was immersed enough in his sources that he had no need to conduct his usual extensive preliminary research. Moreover, he wanted to seize the opportunity to give a fictional warning against the threat of fascism in America, which appeared to be increasingly possible by spring 1935. This threat was in response to the Great Depression (since 1929) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal (since 1933) and came from various American fascist leaders and their organizations, influenced by Italian Fascism and German Nazism. The greatest threat to FDR, however, came from American demagogues, whose oratorical skills challenged those of the president himself, namely, Senator Huey P. Long (Louisiana) and Father Charles E. Coughlin (Detroit). Both had supported FDR in 1932 but increasingly opposed him for failing to overcome the effects of the Depression and redistribute the wealth of America. By 1934 both had founded organizations ostensibly to deal with contemporary economic and social problems. But it was widely suspected that Long’s Share Our Wealth program and Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice, which had rapidly gained mass followings, were also designed to challenge FDR in the 1936 election. In spring 1935, books appeared warning against these and other American Messiahs (John Franklin Carter) or Forerunners of American Fascism (Raymond Gram Swing). Reference to such “Messiahs” as Coughlin in It Can’t Happen Here (chapter 5) suggests Lewis’s familiarity with Carter’s book. Swing, who had served as a foreign correspondent with Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, in Berlin in the late 1920s, considered “the Louisiana dictator” Long to be “fully as

fascist in his type and in the nature of his appeal as Hitler” (Nation, March 1935). Indeed, Long served as the major American model for Lewis’s dictator-president Buzz Windrip. Long was assassinated while Lewis was still writing his novel, and therefore he was able to change a reference to Long in the manuscript to “the late Huey Long” (chapter 4). Long’s untimely death (September 10, 1935) had otherwise no adverse effect on It Can’t Happen Here, for Lewis used or alluded to various historical or contemporary European (especially German) and American figures as models for his fictional counterparts to illustrate his argument that under similar economic, social, and political conditions, a fascist dictatorship, with similar ideologies, programs, organizations, and practices, could be established in America as well as in Europe. Lewis’s primary source for information on Hitler and Nazism and for his own portrayal of mass rallies, storm trooper actions, terror, prosecution, and concentration camp life was no doubt Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler (I Saw Hitler!, 1932) and written extensively on Nazi Germany. Contemporary reviewers of It Can’t Happen Here, which appeared in October 1935 and sold over 300,000 copies that fall, readily identified various German Nazi models for Lewis’s characters. While some reviewers found such comparisons unconvincing, “part of the plausibility” of the novel lay precisely “in the ease with which Lewis produced American counterparts of the leading Nazis” (Schlesinger, 89). Like Swing, Lewis questioned whether Americans had the passion for freedom to resist fascism. The “patriotic addresses” at the Rotary Club dinner (chapter 1) would suggest otherwise, for both retired general Herbert Y. Edgeways (compare with retired general Smedley D. Butler or Hugh S. Johnson) and Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitsch (compare with Mrs. Albert W. [Elizabeth] Dilling, author of The Red Network, 1934) speak admiringly of the model “discipline” of Germany and Italy and denounce laziness, selfishness, pacifism, labor unionism, socialism, and communism. When several influential men in town talk politics after dinner (chapter 2), Frank Tas-

668

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE

brough, the community’s leading industrialist, smugly dismisses the warning that if Senator Windrip were elected president, “a real Fascist dictatorship” would follow, saying, “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.” Doremus Jessup, liberal editor of the local newspaper and Lewis’s mouthpiece, replies: “the hell it can’t! . . . look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana and how . . . Windrip owns his state. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions.” Jessup considers the country “ripe for dictatorship,” and as the novel unfolds, his prognosis is inexorably borne out. Senator Windrip wins the Democratic Party nomination over FDR in July 1936 (chapter 7) and campaigns on his “Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Man” (chapters 8–11), a composite of Long’s and Coughlin’s programs. After his inauguration in January 1937, Windrip announces the “real New Deal” (chapter 15), with measures reminiscent of Hitler’s consolidation of power in 1933–34. The new Corpo State bans all political parties, imprisons opposition politicians and journalists, suppresses Jews and blacks, eliminates crime through mass arrests and unemployment with labor camps, publicly burns books by undesirable authors, and establishes Corpo Universities (chapters 16–22). For producing and distributing illegal pamphlets for the New Underground opposition based in Canada (chapters 26–30), Jessup is arrested in July 1938 and sentenced to a concentration camp (chapters 30–32). A short time later, however, Windrip is deposed and exiled by Secretary of State Lee Sarason, who, in turn, is assassinated in January 1939 by Secretary of War General Dewey Haik, who assumes power; “then America really did begin to suffer” under “the new reign of righteousness and the blackjack” (chapter 35). Jessup escapes and joins the New Underground in Canada (chapter 36), but the popular rebellion falters (chapter 37), and the novel ends with the country still a Corpo State, but with Jessup now fully committed to active opposition (chapter 38). Historical events did not, of course, confirm Lewis’s literary projection of an American dictator-

ship. Threats from the Left or the Right did not materialize; the third-party challenge in 1936 was doomed after Long’s assassination. FDR won reelection in a landslide over Republican governor Alf Landon (Kansas), but in his second term FDR was widely criticized for appearing to want to concentrate in the presidency increasing powers over the legislative and judicial branches. Particularly controversial were his Supreme Court “packing” plan (1937) and Government Reorganization Bill (1938). Equally disturbing was FDR’s attempt to “purge” conservative Democrats in the midterm elections of 1938. Such actions caused FDR’s harshest critics to compare him to Hitler, but FDR was democratically reelected in 1940 and 1944. Nevertheless, It Can’t Happen Here remains a relevant and readable cautionary tale, for as Lou Levov says to his daughter-in-law during the Watergate hearings in Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997): “These so-called patriots would take this country and make Nazi Germany out of it. You know the book It Can’t Happen Here? There’s a wonderful book. I forget the author, but the idea couldn’t be more up-to-the-moment” (287). It Can’t Happen Here appears to have inspired Roth’s latest novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA (2004), which imagines Charles A. Lindbergh defeating FDR in 1940 and suggests to reviewers similarities between Lindbergh and the current president of the United States, George W. Bush.

SOURCES Berman, Paul. “ ‘The Plot against America’: What If It Happened Here?” New York Times Book Review, 4 October 2004, p. 1. Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest. Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. New York: Knopf, 1982. Coetzee, J. M. Review of The Plot against America, New York Review of Books, 18 November 2004, p. 1. Fried, Albert. FDR and His Enemies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Kurth, Peter. American Cassandra. The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE 669

Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. ———. The Plot against America. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Politics of Upheaval. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Yardley, Jonathan. Review of The Plot against America, Washington Post, 3 October 2004. Frederick Betz

C

JD and stories and, with Stanley Edgar Hyman, her future husband, she began an alternative literary magazine. After their marriage in 1940 and a brief residence in New York City—she as a writer and he as an editor for the New Republic and the New Yorker—the couple moved to Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman became a professor at Bennington College. Although Jackson consistently refused offers of full-time teaching positions, she took on various lecturing and advising responsibilities at Bennington off and on until her death. Jackson’s greatest literary output occurred in the 1950s while her four children were growing up; already famous as the author of “The Lottery,” she published Hangsaman, her first psychological thriller, in 1951, a novel that focuses on the schizophrenia of first-year college student Natalie Waite, a brilliant but reclusive 17-year-old daughter of a writer and critic. Disillusioned by her experiences with men, she invents an imaginary friend named Tony, although Jackson, with her propensity for shocking denouements, withholds this information about Tony until the end of the novel. She followed Hangsaman three years later with The Bird’s Nest, another psychological novel in which the protagonist, Elizabeth, suffers from both schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder. Like its predecessor, The Bird’s Nest drew praise from critics who applauded her first-rate storytelling abilities and vivid depiction of the conflict between good and evil. The Bird’s Nest appeared as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film entitled Lizzie in 1955.

JACKSON, SHIRLEY (1919–1965) In 1948, when Shirley Jackson published a short story called “The Lottery” in The New Yorker, she won a permanent place in American literature. This now classic tale, included in innumerable anthologies and taught in high schools and colleges across the United States, contains all the ideas that compelled Jackson in her short life: isolated and marginalized protagonists, often insecure young women, relegated to the fringes of society; the existence of evil in the human character, often marked through ritualized savagery; and bigotry, especially against African Americans and Jews. She had little tolerance for hypocrisy of any sort. For a time after her death, her reputation dwindled, but recently she has been the subject of feminist literary criticism, and many of her seven novels have been reissued. During her lifetime, two of her novels, The Bird’s Nest and THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, were made into feature-length films, and WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE was nominated for a National Book award. Many of her stories appeared in American Mercury, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Woman’s Home Companion, and Yale Review. Born in 1919 to Clifford and Geraldine Jackson of San Francisco and Burlingame, California, Jackson moved with her family in 1933 to Rochester, New York. She would remain in the Northeast for the rest of her life, using a California setting only once, in her first novel, The Road Through the Wall (1948). At Syracuse University, from which Jackson graduated in 1940 with a B.A. degree in English, she wrote numerous poems 670

JACOBS, HARRIET 671

In 1959 Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House, a horrifying ghost novel featuring Eleanor Vance, an isolated young woman who answers an invitation to join a group studying the apparently haunted old house. Another study of personality disintegration, The Haunting of Hill House, was adapted for the screen as The Haunting, starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom. In 1962, Jackson published We Have Always Lived in the Castle, considered by many critics to be her best work. Its protagonist, Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood, lives with her sister in a state of siege in the Blackwood house, the isolated family home in which four persons died six years earlier of arsenic poisoning, and is now inhabited only by Uncle Julian, Merricat, and her sister Constance. For obvious reasons, this novel invites comparisons with Edgar Allan POE’s The Fall of the House of Usher, William FAULKNER’s ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Shirley Jackson, who battled her own mental illness for years, produced a rich array of novels that have been consistently described as comical, charming, and psychologically terrifying. After her death, her husband donated her papers to the Library of Congress, and in 1997, two of her children edited Just an Ordinary Day, a collection of Jackson’s previously unpublished short fiction.

NOVELS The Bird’s Nest. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954. London: Joseph, 1955. Hangsaman. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951. London: Gollancz, 1951. The Haunting of Hill House. New York: Viking, 1959. London: Joseph, 1960. The Road Through the Wall. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1948. The Sundial. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1958. London: Joseph, 1958. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. New York: Viking, 1962.

SOURCES Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Friedman, Lenemaja. Shirley Jackson. Boston: Twayne, 1975.

Hyman, Laurence J., and S. H. Stewart, eds. Just an Ordinary Day. New York: Bantam Books, 1997. Hyman, Stanley Edgar, ed. Come Along With Me. New York: Viking, 1968. ———. The Promised End. New York: World, 1963, pp. 264, 349, 365. Lyons, John O. The College Novel in America. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962, pp. 62–67, 100, 158, 186. Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988. Phillips, Robert S. “Shirley Jackson: A Checklist,” Bibliographical Society of America Papers, 56 (January 1962): 110–113. ———. “Shirley Jackson: A Chronology and a Supplementary Checklist,” Bibliographical Society of America Papers, 60 (April 1966): 203–213.

JACOBS, HARRIET (ca. 1813–1897)

Author of INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL, WRITTEN BY HERSELF (1861), the most famous of the personal slave narratives, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery and suffered the concomitant sexual abuse that so many African-American women endured. She had two children with a white man and was pursued by her owner and threatened with the loss of those children, whose freedom she finally secured. Although Jacobs’s account of her experiences uses many of the novelistic techniques of 19th-century sentimental fiction, it significantly changed the slave narrative genre from the linear male narrative that recounted the move from slavery to freedom. Instead Jacobs pointed to more complicated issues: race, women’s rights, and the degradation emanating from the ownership of one human being by another. Additionally, Jacobs—who wrote under the pseudonym Linda Brent—suggested that the African-American woman is in thrall to individuals in a complicated social web: the lustful white master, the angry white wife, the cuckolded black husband or lover, and her children, often both mulatto and black. Jacobs was born around 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, to Delilah and Daniel Jacobs. Although Jacobs was born into slavery, and, at the age of six, after her mother’s death, put to work by her mother’s mistress, Jacobs’s grandmother, Molly Horniblow, was a free black who instilled in her an unusual sense of

672 JAMES, HENRY

rootedness and community. Her first white mistress, Margaret Horniblow, taught her to read and to sew, but after her death in 1825, Jacobs was given to Horniblow’s three-year-old niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcomb, tried repeatedly to force Jacobs into a sexual relationship. Her only recourse was to enter a relationship with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a white attorney with whom she had two children, a son and a daughter. Eventually, after hiding for seven years in her grandmother’s attic crawl space, Jacobs escaped to the North, where she worked as a maid at the Massachusetts home of Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Willis. Although Cornelia Grinnell Willis was an abolitionist who purchased Jacobs’s freedom in 1852, Jacobs never lost her bitterness over the monetary exchange that the law required. In 1842, Jacobs began writing Incidents. Lydia Maria CHILD, an author and abolitionist, edited the manuscript, and the revolutionary work was published in 1861, revealing Jacobs’s lucid comprehension of Southern class and racial exploitation as well as her skillful storytelling abilities. Harriet Jacobs returned to the South during Reconstruction and worked with the Society of Quakers to help freed slaves. She died on March 7, 1897.

NOVELS Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (as Linda Brent). Edited by Lydia Maria Child. Boston: Published for the author, 1861. Republished as The Deeper Wrong; or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. London: Tweedie, 1862. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Edited by Jean Fagan Yellin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

SOURCES Doherty, T. “Harriet Jacobs’ Narrative Strategies: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Southern Literary Journal 19 (Fall 1986): 79–91. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Catherine T. Davis, eds. The Slave’s Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Sekora, J., and Darwin T. Turner, eds. The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Macomb: Western Illinois Press, 1982.

JAMES, HENRY (1843–1916)

Henry James, novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, literary critic, and theorist, was one of the most influential American writers of the 19th century, and today he is considered one of the greatest of authors to have written in English. His innovations and contributions to the novel (he wrote 22) helped pave the way for 20thcentury modernism and contemporary literature in general. Many scholars view James as the creator of the modern psychological novel, which forms a bridge to the stream-of-consciousness novels of the early 20th century. He was adamant in his belief that a given piece of fiction should contain no information not realistically available to those characters within the work. To this end, he concentrated on narrative perspective and employed a technique called the central consciousness, usually but not always assigned to the main character. This illustrated his belief in the limitation of one person’s perception. James lived most of his life in Europe and England, within cultures that provided him with the thematic fodder that would make him famous, if not popular, in his own time. He repeatedly explored the difference between the innocent American in relation to the sophisticated (but often morally corrupt) European. James is also known for his depictions of artists and writers as they negotiate the demands of both the real and the artistic worlds. His sensitivity to women’s perspectives produced such classic characters as Daisy Miller, the title character of the eponomous novella, and Maggie Verver of The GOLDEN BOWL. His interest in ghost stories produced The TURN OF THE SCREW, a tale that still intrigues readers and incites controversy. Henry James was born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, to the Reverend Henry James, a wealthy intellectual and follower of the philosophy of the Swedish mystic philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg, and Mary Robertson Walsh James. He was educated at times in school, and sometimes by private tutors in European and American cities; he was exposed both at home and through books to some of the most significant writers and thinkers of the era. Of his four siblings, James was particularly attached to William, a noted philosopher, and his sister, the intellectual and

JAMES, HENRY 673

witty Alice. One of his longest-lasting friendships was with the writer William Dean HOWELLS. Although he would continue to travel a great deal, visiting and entertaining his enormous number of friends, in 1896 James moved permanently to England and bought Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, an 18th-century country house, where he lived for the remainder of his days. James’s first published novel was Roderick Hudson (1875); here the talented, vain, and unscrupulous sculptor Roderick Hudson takes advantage of his patron, Rowland Mallet, who has financed Roderick’s career in Europe. The AMERICAN (1877), however, is considered James’s first major novel and initiates his so-called early period. The novel features the metaphorically named Christopher Newman, the wealthy, naive American who travels to Europe to find a wife; he is eventually shut out by the family of Claire de Cintré, the woman he had hoped to marry. The Europeans (1878), a comedy of manners, portrays the encounter of the expatriate Felix Young, an extrovert and artist, and his scheming but likable sister, Baroness Eugenia Munster, as they return to New England to visit their conservative Uncle Wentworth and his family. DAISY MILLER: A STUDY (1879) was James’s most popular tale. Although it is set in Rome, its major characters are American: Daisy is from upstate New York. The expatriate Frederick Winterbourne is a member of the American colony in Rome, all of whom share with her Italian friend Giovanni some responsibility for her death. In WASHINGTON SQUARE (1880), the strict and controlling widower Austin Sloper, M.D., forces his daughter, Catherine, into a tragic rebellion when he prevents her from marrying Morris Townsend, who only wants her money. The PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1882), generally considered James’s first masterpiece, is a multilayered study of Isabel Archer, an Albany, New York, heiress, who travels to Europe and is courted by three suitors: Caspar Goodwood, a well-to-do American businessman; Lord Warburton, a British aristocrat; and the smoothly sophisticated and villainous expatriate American Gilbert Osmond, who wins her hand and victimizes her. James’s experimental middle period began with The Bostonians: A Novel (1886), which explores the subservient position of women. The central character, Ver-

ena Tarrant, is the object of a tug-of-war between Basil Ransom, a Confederate Civil War veteran, and wealthy Boston suffragette Olive Chancellor. The Princess Casamassima: A Novel (1886) likewise takes up political themes; this time it is international anarchism in London. The protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, sees himself as an anarchist until he tastes a portion of the aristocratic life; after his betrayal by both Princess Casamassima and the shopgirl Millicent Henning, he commits suicide. The ASPERN PAPERS is a novella based on the true story of one man’s pursuit of his niece. She has run away to Florence with the valuable correspondence between British poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. The Spoils of Poynton (1897) is based on a British law that a widow—here the widow Poynton—must relinquish her husband’s property to his oldest son, in this case Owen Gereth. The tale is told largely through the consciousness of the impoverished and principled Fleda Vetch, who loses Owen to an avaricious rival. In WHAT MAISIE KNEW (1897), James creates Maisie Farange, a deliberately ambiguous character; the reader is never entirely sure of her comprehension of the extremely fluid adult relationships. Nonetheless, after her parents’ divorce and their subsequent affairs—her father’s second wife’s lover becomes Maisie’s mother’s second husband—most readers see that Maisie has developed a sense of goodness and decency. The Turn of the Screw involves the orphaned Miles and Flora, a young brother and sister whose innocence is questionable, and the ghosts of their former governess, Miss Jessel, and their father’s valet, Peter Quint, who almost certainly had a love affair. The story raises numerous unanswered questions on the nature of good and evil, and reality and imagination. In The Awkward Age (1899), told almost entirely through dialogue, James continues his exploration of the familial and social roles of young children: Here the young girls Aggie and Nanda are the pawns of scheming adults who parade them before potential suitors. In 1901 he wrote The Sacred Fount, a controversial tale of a relationship in which one partner thrives at the inevitable expense of the other’s loss of vitality. James emerged into his final phase to produce three great novels: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The

674

JAMES, HENRY

AMBASSADORS (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). The Wings of the Dove has at its center Kate Croy. She suggests that her fiancé, British journalist Merton Densher, marry the kind, cultured, intelligent Milly Theale, who is dying of an incurable disease. In the ambiguous ending, just before her death Lord Mark, who is in love with her, tells Milly of Densher’s relationship with Kate. Densher, however, has developed a conscience while living with Milly, and so will accept Kate only without the money he has inherited from Milly, and Kate will proceed only if he brings the money to the relationship. James believed that his finest novel was The Ambassadors. Here the aging Lambert Strether travels to Paris to save his widowed fiancée’s son, Chad Newsome, from the clutches of the married Frenchwoman Marie de Vionnet. In the course of events, each character changes, Strether for the better. As he realizes his own attraction to Marie, he must decide whether to remain in Paris, or whether to encourage Chad to continue with Marie while he himself returns to the now bleak prospect of New England. James’s final novel, The Golden Bowl, although long and complex, is one of his most critically admired. It follows the fabulously wealthy Adam Verver and his daughter, Maggie, as they travel to Europe to find a titled spouse for Maggie. Both father and daughter marry, only to learn that their spouses, Charlotte Stant and Prince Amerigo, were lovers before their marriages, and continue their relationship afterward. The tale is told through conversations, and through the perspectives of an old family friend, Fanny Assingham, and, later, Maggie herself, who sacrifices her selfhood for the sake of both marriages. Henry James supervised the massive 24-volume publication of the New York Edition of all his work. His influence, whether in his controversial definitions of art or in the towering psychological studies of his most famous fictional characters, is clear in the work of both European and American writers who followed him. After suffering several strokes, he died on February 28, 1916, in London, a year after becoming a British subject. His ashes were returned to the James family plot in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His greatness

is marked by a stone in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey in London. He left two unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past, and a number of unpublished essays and stories, all of which were published posthumously. The bulk of his papers are housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Ambassadors. New York: Harper, 1903. The American. Boston: Osgood, 1877. The Aspern Papers, Lousia Pallant, The Modern Warning. New York: Macmillan, 1888. The Awkward Age. New York: Harper, 1899. The Bostonians: A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1886. Confidence. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880. Daisy Miller: A Study. New York: Harper, 1879. The Europeans. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879. The Golden Bowl, 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1904. An International Episode. New York: Harper, 1879. The Ivory Tower (unfinished). Edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner, 1917. The Other House. New York: Macmillan, 1896. The Outcry. New York: Scribner, 1911. The Portrait of a Lady. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882. The Princess Casamassima: A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1886. The Reverberator. New York: Macmillan, 1888. Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood, 1876. The Sacred Fount. New York: Scribner, 1901. The Sense of the Past (unfinished, with author’s notes). Edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner, 1917. The Spoils of Poynton (first printed as The Old Things in Atlantic magazine, 1896). Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897. The Spoils of Poynton; A London Life; The Chaperon. London: Macmillan, 1922. The Turn of the Screw. New York: Macmillan, 1898. Washington Square. New York: Harper, 1881. Watch and Ward (serialized in Atlantic magazine, 1871). Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878. What Maisie Knew. Chicago: Stone, 1897. New York: Macmillan, 1922. The Wings of the Dove. New York: Scribner, 1902.

SOURCES Albers, Christina A. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Henry James. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Anderson, Charles R. Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977.

JAMES, HENRY 675

Anesko, Michael. “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Armstrong, Paul B. The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad and Ford. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. ———. The Phenomenology of Henry James. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Ben-Joseph, Eli. Aesthetic Persuasion: Henry James, the Jews and Race. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995. Bentley, Nancy. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bradbury, Nicola. An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Henry James. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Bradley, John R., ed. Henry James and Homo-erotic Desire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Buelens, Gert, ed. Enacting History in Henry James: Narrative, Power, and Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cannon, Kelly. Henry James and Masculinity: The Man at the Margins. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Caramello, Charles. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Cargill, Oscar. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Conrad, Joseph. Notes on Life and Letters. London: J.M. Dent, 1905. Daugherty, Sarah B. The Literary Criticism of Henry James. Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1981. Dupee, F. W. Henry James. New York: Morrow, 1974. Edel, Leon. Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916. New York: Lippincott, 1972. ———. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper, 1985. ———, Dan H. Laurence, and James Rambeau. A Bibliography of Henry James. 3rd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. ———, and G. N. Ray, eds. Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel. London: Hart-Davis, 1958. ———, and Mark Wilson, eds. Henry James, Literary Criticism, 2 vols. Lanham, Md.: Library of America, 1984. Fowler, Virginia C. Henry James’s American Girl. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Gale, Robert L. Plots and Characters in the Fiction of Henry James. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1965. Gard, Roger, ed. Henry James: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. Reprinted, 1986. Graham, Kenneth. Henry James, A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Greene, Graham. Collected Essays. New York: Viking, 1969. Hagberg, Garry. Meaning & Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Hardy, Barbara. Henry James: The Later Writing. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1996. Haviland, Beverly. Henry James’ Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hayes, Kevin J. Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Jones, Vivien. James the Critic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Joseph, Mary J. Suicide in Henry James’s Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1994. Kirschke, James J. Henry James and Impressionism. New York: Whitston, 1981. Kraft, James. The Early Tales of Henry James. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Krook, Dorothea. Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”: A Critical Study. New York: AMS Press, 1995. Landau, John. A Thing Divided: Representation in the Late Novels of Henry James. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Llewellyn Smith, Virginia. Henry James and the Real Thing: A Modern Reader’s Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Lustig, T. J. Henry James and the Ghostly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. McWhirter, David Bruce. Henry James New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995. Moore, Harry T. Henry James. New York: Viking, 1974. Mordell, Albert, ed. Literary Reviews and Essays. West Yorkshire, England: Vista House, 1957. Novick, Sheldon M. Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House, 1996. Nowell-Smith, Simon. The Legend of the Master: Henry James, revised. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Page, Norman, ed. Henry James: Interviews and Recollections. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Pound, Ezra. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited by T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1918.

676

JANCE, JUDITH ANN

Reeve, N. H., ed. Henry James: The Shorter Fiction, A Reassessment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Rivkin, Julie. False Positions: The Representational Logics of Henry James’s Fiction. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Rowe, John Carlos. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Stein, Gertrude. Four in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1947. Stevens, Hugh. Henry James and Sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Tanner, Tony. Henry James and the Art of Nonfiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. ———. Henry James: The Writer and His Work. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. ———. Henry James, Volume 1: 1843–1881; Volume 2: 1882–1898. New York: Longmans, Green, 1979. Teahan, Sheila. The Rhetorical Logic of Henry James. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Tintner, Adeline R. Henry James’s Legacy: The Afterlife of His Figure and Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Wagenknecht, Edward. The Novels of Henry James. New York: Ungar, 1983. ———. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Ungar, 1987. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1994.

OTHER The Online Book Page. “Henry James.” Available online. URL: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search? author=Henry+James&amode=words&title=&tmode= words. Accessed July 2005. The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites. Available online. URL: http://www.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/. Accessed July 2005.

JANCE, JUDITH ANN (1944– ) Winner of the American Mystery Award for her best-selling J. P. Beaumont series, set in Seattle, Washington. Jance is also the author of the popular Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady mysteries, set in Arizona, and a third series set on the Tohono O’othham reservation in Arizona. Although her settings are diverse, her protagonists are sympathetic and realistic; and Jance herself points out that she writes “with the understanding that my characters are people first and police officers second.”

J. A. Jance was born on October 27, 1944, to Norman Busk, an insurance salesman, and Evelyn Anderson Busk. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s degree in 1966 and a master’s in 1970. Her first husband, Jerry Joseph Teale Jance, who “imitated FAULKNER and HEMINGWAY primarily by drinking too much and writing too little” (Jance) died of chronic alcoholism at age 42. Jance has been outspoken about his refusal to allow her to write, an enforced repression that later motivated her writing of nearly 30 books in fewer than 20 years. Jance’s J. P. Beaumont novels feature a Seattle detective, a recovering alcoholic who, thanks to the bequest of Anne Corley, with whom he had a relationship, successfully copes with crimes and his own issues. The first of these Beaumont novels, Until Proven Guilty, was published in 1985. The first Brady novel, Desert Heat (1993), sets up the rest of the series with the murder of Joanna’s husband during his campaign for sheriff of Cochise County, Arizona. She decides to run for sheriff herself. Brady wins and, throughout the series, demonstrates the “complicated act of juggling” both her personal life as mother of two children with her difficult professional life as the first female to become a sheriff in Arizona. One of Jance’s most popular books is Kiss of the Bees (1999), a stand-alone work, but when her third novel, Day of the Dead (2004), was published, set 20 years after The Hour of the Hunter on a reservation in Arizona, critics and readers realized that that the three, taken together, had become a third series. Kiss of the Bees (1999) uses characters from Hour of the Hunter, but this time Jance creates an adopted teenage daughter and incorporates Native American folklore into the novel. Jance’s most recent novel, Exit Wounds, contains references to the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Taliban, Mexican immigrants, and pedophile priests. J. A. Jance lives with her husband and their two dogs, Daphne and Aggi, named after Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie.

“J. P. BEAUMONT” MYSTERY NOVELS Birds of Prey. New York: Morrow, 2001. Breach of Duty. New York: Avon, 1999. Dismissed with Prejudice. New York: Avon, 1989. Failure to Appear. New York: Morrow, 1993. Improbable Cause. New York: Avon, 1987.

JANE FIELD 677

Injustice for All. New York: Avon, 1986. Lying in Wait. New York: Morrow, 1994. Minor in Possession. New York: Avon, 1990. A More Perfect Union. New York: Avon, 1988. Name Withheld. New York: Morrow, 1995. Payment in Kind. New York: Avon, 1991. Trial by Fury. New York: Avon, 1987. Until Proven Guilty. New York: Avon, 1985. Without Due Process. New York: Morrow, 1992.

“JOANNA BRADY” MYSTERY NOVELS Dead to Rights. New York: Avon, 1997. Desert Heat. New York: Avon, 1993. Devil’s Claw. New York: Morrow, 2000. Outlaw Mountain. New York: Avon, 1999. Paradise Lost. New York: Morrow, 2001. Rattlesnake Crossing. New York: Avon, 1998. Skeleton Canyon. New York: Avon, 1997. Shoot/Don’t Shoot. New York: Avon, 1995. Tombstone Courage. New York: Morrow, 1994.

NON-MYSTERY NOVELS Hour of the Hunter. New York: Morrow, 1991. Kiss of the Bees. New York: Avon, 2000.

OTHER Official J. A. Jance Website. Available online. URL: http://www. j.a.jance.com. Accessed July 2005.

JANE FIELD MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1893) Mary E. Wilkins FREEMAN was already a respected short story writer when her first novel, Jane Field, was published, first as a serial in Harper’s Magazine (Hutton, 28) and then in book form. A reviewer for The Nation noted at the time that the novel is “strange to say, of the same quality” as her short stories (Marchalonis, 29). The reviewer is not referring to the relative success of the novel compared to that of the short stories but rather is pointing out that Jane Field is similar in tone and subject matter to Freeman’s well-known shorter works. The title character is an older woman in a difficult situation, a staple of Freeman’s stories. Shirley Marchalonis notes that the novel has a single focused plot and revolves around a single, well-developed character, just as in Freeman’s stories (Marchalonis, 4). The New England setting, with its strong characters and glimpse of hardship, also echoes Freeman’s other works. Though her novels, particularly Pembroke, have received some scholarly attention, Free-

man is still known and studied today more for her short stories than for her longer works (Marchalonis, 10). The plot of Jane Field unfolds as the title character decides to impersonate her deceased sister, Esther, to claim an inheritance. Jane is repeatedly described as “hard” in her manner but is quietly worried about her frail daughter, Lois, who is chronically ill and unable to recover because she is worn out by her work as a local school teacher. Jane finds out that Esther’s father-inlaw, Mr. Maxwell, has died, leaving his fortune to her, or to his niece if Esther died before him. Desperate to help her daughter, and rationalizing her actions by remembering that Esther’s husband died owing her family $1,500, and that Esther’s father-in-law refused to honor the debt despite his wealth, Jane leaves her small country town of Green River and travels to more metropolitan Elliot, near Boston, to claim the money by impersonating her sister. Though Jane successfully fools the residents of Elliot, her deception and her feelings of guilt take a toll. When Lois follows her mother to Elliot and discovers Jane’s secret, she is horrified but goes along so that Jane will not be caught. Lois takes in sewing to earn money, and neither woman spends any of the inheritance, even though they often do not have enough to eat. Because Jane and Lois remain somewhat remote from the social scene (in part because they are unable to entertain without money), and because it looks as if Lois is sewing because her aunt refuses to support her, most of the residents see “Esther” as cold and unfeeling. Despite appearances, Jane is internally eaten away by guilt over her deception. When three of her friends from Green River come to visit her, Jane worries she will be caught. But when it becomes clear her secret is safe, the night before the women are to return to Green River, Jane sits up until dawn, and the next morning confesses her true identity. She walks all over the town declaring to anyone she meets “I ain’t Esther Maxwell!” (259), even knocking on doors to make the declaration. After confessing, she has something of a mental breakdown. Some contemporary reviewers have compared Freeman’s treatment of the effects of conscience and guilt on the human psyche in Jane Field to Hawthorne’s work (Hutton, 28). Jane’s confession comes as a great release after a novel-long struggle

678

JANOWITZ, TAMA

within her—between her conscience and her need for money to take care of Lois. The specter of poverty is in fact one of the other major issues in the novel, as it is in many of Freeman’s works. Jane and Lois are renting half a house as the novel opens, their clothing is simple, and the dilemma of Lois’s illness and her teaching job demonstrate how close they are to financial ruin. Several of the characters, including Jane’s friend from Green River, Mrs. Green, and Mrs. Maxwell, mother of Flora, the rightful heiress to the Maxwell fortune, show a preoccupation with class markers such as clothing styles. In fact, Flora feels compelled to run away to be married after her mother comes to disapprove of her fiancé because of his limited financial prospects. To cover her embarrassment, Mrs. Maxwell borrows money to buy Flora a silk dress. Mary R. Reichardt notes that Freeman’s own experience with poverty—her father failed both as a carpenter and as a store manager, and the family had to live with a charitable wealthy family for a time—had a profound effect on her imagination. The author’s preoccupation with issues of poverty and economic class pervade her work (Reichardt, ix) and Jane Field is no exception. With Jane’s confession, however, the novel is allowed to come to a primarily happy ending. Unburdened by her mother’s revelation, Lois is able to marry Francis Arms, who is wealthy enough to support them comfortably. Jane is forgiven, and though for the rest of her life she continues to declare “I ain’t Esther Maxwell” whenever she meets a stranger, she mostly recovers mentally and is able to spend her last years unburdened by guilt and assured of her daughter’s health and well-being. The final passage is somewhat unsettling, however. Jane, seeing Lois on her wedding day in a white dress and wearing an expression of unusual joy, mistakes her daughter for a stranger and declares “I ain’t Esther Maxwell” (267). This is the final line of the novel. Despite the joyful circumstances as the novel comes to a close, this discordant moment reminds the reader of the damaging effects of desperation, deception, and guilt.

SOURCES Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. Jane Field. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House/Gregg Press, 1970.

Hutton, Laurence. Review of Jane Field. In Critical Essays on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 28–29. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Marchalonis, Shirley. Introduction to Critical Essays on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 1–15. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Reichardt, Mary. Introduction to Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader. By Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Mary Reichardt, vii–xxi. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Review of Jane Field. From the Nation. Reported in Critical Essays on Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, edited by Shirley Marchalonis, 29. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Jessica Hausmann

JANOWITZ, TAMA (1957– )

Although known in the 1980s as an enfant terrible and member of the literary “brat pack” that included the writers Jay McInerny and Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz garnered media applause with the publication of American Dad (1981), her first novel, an indictment of a professionally successful but philandering father. During the subsequent two decades, she has published eight novels, shedding along the way any doubts about her serious intentions or her writing talent. In fact, Janowitz’s satiric, witty rendition of wealthy upper-crust New Yorkers has earned her a good deal of praise. Janowitz herself points to Edith WHARTON, among others, as a strong influence, and the Whartonesque flavor to Janowitz’s writing has become more pronounced, particularly in A Certain Age (1999). Many readers see it as a contemporary rewrite of WHARTON’s The HOUSE OF MIRTH. Janowitz also admires Henry JAMES and Vladimir NABOKOV. Tama Janowitz was born on April 12, 1957, in San Francisco, California, to Julian Frederick Janowitz, a psychiatrist, and Phyllis Winer Janowitz, a poet and professor. She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Barnard College in 1977, a master of arts from Hollins College in 1979, and a master of fine arts from Columbia University in 1985. In 1992 she married Tim Hunt, the curator of the Andy Warhol estate. American Dad features 11-year-old Earl Przepasniak, whose mother, Mavis, is killed during a fight with her husband, Robert. He is convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to a hefty jail term. A

JASMINE 679

Cannibal in Manhattan (1988), viewed by many as a contemporary rewriting of Daniel Defoe’s 18th-century British novel Robinson Crusoe, introduces into New York City a South Sea island native, Mgungu Yabba Mgungu. Mgungu becomes engaged to and eventually marries the wealthy ex-Peace Corps volunteer Maria Fishburn. It is New York life, rather than that of New Burnt Norton in the South Seas, that is barbaric. Here the very dead Maria is, literally, served to her husband on a platter. In 1992, Janowitz published The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, another tongue-in-cheek depiction of “trustifarians,” wealthy elites who live off enormous trust funds. In the midst of all this wealth are the nine-year-old urchin Abdhul and his new friend, Pamela Trowel, a woman who works for a living. Although she must dress like a man to protect herself and her charge, she manages to maintain her values and integrity. By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (1998), an obvious parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, Evangeline, is set in upstate New York and tells the tale of a trailer park family of five children, the offspring of Evangeline Slivenowicz’s affairs with five different men. Janowitz uses a New York City setting again in A Certain Age (1999). Thirty-two-year-old Florence Collins, a modern-day Lily Bart of The House of Mirth, travels to wealthy homes on Long Island in the hope of finding a rich husband. In 2003, Janowitz published Peyton Amberg, a modern version of Gustave Flaubert’s classic Madame Bovary. Here, Emma Bovary is represented by a contemporary travel agent who cannot commit herself to a single man and instead has numerous random affairs. Tama Janowitz is most famous for Slaves of New York, a critically acclaimed collection of interconnected short stories. She and Tim Hunt live in Brooklyn, New York.

NOVELS American Dad. New York: Putnam, 1981. London: Picador, 1988. Area Code 212: New York Days, New York Nights. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee. New York: Crown, 1996. London: Picador, 1998. A Cannibal in Manhattan. New York: Crown, 1987. London: Pan, 1988.

A Certain Age. New York: Doubleday, 1999. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group. New York: Crown, 1992. London: Picador, 1992. Peyton Amberg: A Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Slaves of New York. New York: Crown, 1986. London: Picador, 1987.

SOURCES Bellante, John, and Carl Bellante. “A Chic, Cheeky Chat with Tama Janowitz,” Bloomsbury Review (May/June 1993): 13–14, 20. Bolotin, Susan. “Hiawatha Goes Hollywood,” New York Times Book Review, 20 October 1996, p. 13. Driscoll, E. Paul. “Going to the Opera with Tama Janowitz,” Opera News 61 (November 1996): 26–30. Reed, Julia. “Publishing’s New Starlets,” U.S. News & World Report, 1 December 1986, p. 61. Sheppard, R. Z. “Yuppie Lit: Publish or Perish,” Time, 19 October 1987, p. 77ff. Stubblefield, Patricia. “New York’s ‘Brat Pack’ and the Postmodern Novel of Manners.” Ph.d. diss., University of South Carolina, 2001. Todd, Tamsin. “This Is the Forest Primeval,” Washington Post Book World, 20 October 1996, p. 6. Young, Elizabeth. “Library of the Ultravixens.” In Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction, edited by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, 142–194. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992.

OTHER bayareaurbanbaby.com. “Tama Janowitz.” MomsTown (February 2000). Available online. URL: http://bayarea.urbanbaby. com/community/momsabouttown/momstown02200_cont. html. Accessed September 14, 2005. Buchwald, Laura L. “My Lunch with Tama,” Bold Type (August 1999). Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse. com/boldtype/0899/janowitz/interview.html. Accessed September 14, 2005.

JASMINE BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1989)

Bharati MUKHERJEE’s Jasmine brought widespread popular and scholarly attention to south Asian literature written in the United States, and placed South Asian American experiences on the map of American literature. Since its publication in 1989, the novel has been popular among female readers interested in ethnicity and

680

JASMINE

immigration; it was highly acclaimed as a new minority voice by mainstream reviewers, scholars, and critics; and it is taught in Asian-American studies courses. Jasmine is a first-person narrative about a young Punjabi peasant woman, Jyoti Vijh, who moves from Hasnapur village in Punjab to the United States as an illegal immigrant, to fulfill the dream of her husband, Prakash, who is killed in a Sikh terrorist attack. To avenge being raped on her first night in America, Jyoti transforms herself into the goddess Kali and murders her rapist Half-Face, a smuggler and Vietnam veteran. The novel follows the protagonist’s self-transformations and reincarnations as Jasmine, Kali, Jazzy, Jase, and Jane, as she moves between various geographic locations and the men in her life—her progressive engineer husband, Prakash, in Jullunder; the rapist Half-Face in Florida; her husband’s mentor Professor Vadhera, who sells Indian women’s hair in Flushing, New York; her suave, liberal lover, the Columbia physics professor Taylor in Manhattan; the wheelchairbound banker Bud, the father of her unborn child, in Iowa; and her fantasy-lover, her Vietnamese adopted son, Du, and finally her ex-lover Taylor, who is moving to Berkeley, California. The novel ends as a subversive rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The protagonist Jasmine (now renamed Jane) suddenly abandons the disabled Bud—whom she even refers to as “Rochester”—to follow the dream of the illimitable American frontier and escape with her first American lover, Taylor, to California. The novel grew out of the short story “Jasmine” in the collection Middleman and Other Stories (1988), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The author has described her own journey toward acquiring an American identity in terms that echo the sentiments of the novel’s protagonist. Like the author, who identifies herself as an American (Shankar, 1998), the novel’s eponymous protagonist “claims America” in the tradition of earlier Asian-American writers such as Carlos BULOSAN in America Is in the Heart and, more recently, Gish JEN in Typical American. Major themes include immigration and assimilation; hyphenated American identities and the joys and sorrows of becoming American; the American Dream; the

promise of the frontier and the open geography of the American landscape; multiple migrations and the diasporic worlds of refugees and illegal migrant workers; reincarnation and self-naming and renaming; violence and nurturance; the conflict between Old World duties and New World wants and desires; the impact of Sikh terrorism in India in the 1980s; and ethnic ghettoization of Indian immigrants who live in the ossified, recreated Indias in Queens, New York. Mukherjee’s novel lends itself to positive feminist readings as she attributes to the female protagonist the power of the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali, and male gods from the Hindu Trinity such as Shiva the Destroyer with the “third eye” and Vishnu, the Preserver, with the universe in his belly. Although some critics have spoken out against Mukherjee for her failure to be critical of the United States, Mukherjee does use an ironic narrative voice that comments on the subtle racism, ethnocentrism, and exoticizing to which her protagonist is subjected, whether by the liberal intellectuals at Columbia University; the farmers and bankers in Baden, Iowa; or a Vietnam veteran who proudly claims “I been to Asia and it’s the armpit of the universe” (100). She also depicts her view of America’s nuclear plants and “Eden’s waste” (95–96). As in her earlier short stories, Mukherjee also gives fleeting insight into other underprivileged ethnic minorities, including the Vietnamese “boat people” like Jasmine and Bud’s adopted son, Du, the Chicano and South American illegal migrant farm workers and laborers in Florida, whom the Quaker activist Lillian Gordon protects, and the “day mummys,” or Caribbean nannies and housekeepers, on whose labors the research of Columbia professors is built. Mukherjee comments not only on how the post1965 immigrants (most of whom are not European) are transformed in the United States, but also on how the post-Vietnam “puritan country” of Iowa (204), the heartland of America, is changing.

SOURCES Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne, 1996. Bahri, Deepika. “Always Becoming: Narratives of Nation and Self in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.” In Women, America

JAZZ 681

and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, edited by Susan L. Robertson. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Brewster, Anne. “A Critique of Bharati Mukherjee’s NeoNationalism,” SPAN: Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 34–35 (1993). Carabas, Thomas J. “Tristes Tropisms: Bharati Mukherjee’s Sidelong Glances at America,” Literary Half-Yearly 35, no. 1 (January 1994): 51–63. Carter-Sanborn, Kristin. “ ‘We Murder Who We Were’: Jasmine and the Violence of Identity,” American Literature 66 (1994): 573–593. Chua, C. L. “Passages from India: Migrating to America in the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee.” In Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 51–62. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing, 1992. Connell, Michael, Jessie Grearson, and Tom Grimes. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” Iowa Review 20, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 7–32. Grewal, Inderpal. “Reading and Writing the South Asian Diaspora: Feminism and Nationalism in North America.” Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, Women of South Asian Descent Collective, 1993. Hancock, Geoff. “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” Canadian Fiction Magazine 59 (1987): 30–44. Hoppe, John K. “The Technological Hybrid as Post-American: Cross-Cultural Genetics in Jasmine,” MELUS 24, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 137–157. Koshy, Susan. “Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida, 121–129. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993. Shankar, Lavina Dhingra. “The Limits of (South Asian) Names and Labels: Postcolonial or Asian American?” In A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America, edited by Lavina D. Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, 49–66. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998. ———. “Activism, ‘Feminisms,’ and Americanization in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 61–84. Tapping, Craig. “South Asia Writes North America: Prose Fictions and Autobiographies from the Indian Diaspora.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by

Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 285–301. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

OTHER Chen, Tina, and S. X. Goudie. “Holders of the World: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Jouvert. Available online. URL: http://social.class.ncsu.edu/jouvert/vlil/bharat. html. Accessed September 14, 2005. Lavina Dhingra Shankar

JAZZ TONI MORRISON (1992)

In Jazz, Toni Morrison elaborates on the themes that shaped her previous five novels while introducing an entirely different kind of narrator and structuring the novel to “play” as a jazz composition. The main plot, inspired by a photograph in James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead, is summarized in the first few sentences. The disillusioned middle-aged couple Joe and Violet Trace find themselves in crisis when Joe has an affair with an 18-year-old neighbor, Dorcas, whom he loved “with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going” (3). Dorcas, like the woman in Van Der Zee’s photograph, refuses to tell anyone who shot her or to seek help as she quietly dies. Violet then earns the nickname “Violent” when she appears at Dorcas’s funeral and tries to cut the dead girl’s face. Having described what happens, the book then turns to the questions of how and why the characters created this series of events. Several subplots develop, each of which requires a return to Southern origins from the present in New York City, and each of which reveals the main characters as orphans. As a child, Joe takes his name from his parents’ absence: Hearing that they have left “without a trace,” he assumes that he is the trace that they forgot. Dorcas has lost both of her parents in the East St. Louis race riots of 1917, while Violet is abandoned early when her mother commits suicide by throwing herself down the family well. Violet’s grandmother comes to raise her and regales her with stories of the beautiful child of her employer, Golden Grey, who also enters the story in his own search for ancestral roots. Grey’s furious pursuit of his father, whom he has just learned is alive and African American, puts him in the path of the untamed woman, legendary in the

682

JEN, GISH

area, known only as “Wild.” Wild is rumored to be Joe’s mother, but he is unable to get close to her; she is also a direct link to Beloved, the living ghost of Morrison’s fifth novel, who disappeared into the woods, pregnant with Paul D.’s child, in 1873—the same year that Joe Trace was born. The story of love, passion, and murder, then, is shot through with the painful legacies of slavery that have also structured Morrison’s earlier novels, especially the lifelong search for parentage, ancestry, name, and home. The narrator of Jazz, however, is completely unlike any other in Morrison’s body of work. Committing herself to neither first person nor third person, the narrator is simultaneously anonymous, personal, and omniscient. This voice, which claims to be both embodied and disembodied, is often understood to be the voice of the actual book upon whose pages the story appears. Interrupting her accounts of each character’s actions with small complaints about the loneliness of the bedside table or the frustration of having an inattentive “partner,” the book itself suggests to the reader how it should be handled and read. At the same time, by actively desiring the reader relationship and entreating the reader to “make me, remake me” (229), the narrator/book becomes, like Wild and Beloved, a hungry, desiring, needy, not quite human presence. Because she has a tendency toward the unreliable (made explicit by her various asides), we understand that to enter into the narrative is something we must do carefully, thoughtfully, and with a sense of personal responsibility for the story that we help “re-make.” Our “personal” relationship with the narrator of Jazz fits the overall structure of the novel as a jazz composition, in this case, creating an effect of call and response, or audience participation. Most critics agree that Morrison’s use of such conventions as repetition, improvisation, riffing, and nonclosure successfully imitates the experience of a jazz performance. In doing so, the novel conveys the rhythm of the music that is central to its characters’ lives, and at the same time, Morrison “reclaims” the Jazz Age as a movement and moment that was rooted in the African-American community. By focusing on jazz, Morrison invokes the particular position of African-American artistry and creative work in a

white-dominated society. Like jazz, her prose style borrows from and collaborates with European-American traditions but always finds its roots and focus in her African ancestors.

SOURCES Hardack, Richard. “ ‘A Music Seeking Its Words’: DoubleTiming and Double Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Callaloo 18, no. 2 (1995): 451–471. Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Plume Books, 1992. Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Peterson, Nancy, ed. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Rody, Caroline. “Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Ark of the Rain Forest,” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 4 (2000): 618–641. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Singing the Blues/Reclaiming Jazz: Toni Morrison and Cultural Mourning,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 31, no. 2 (1998): 147–163. Monika Hogan

JEN, GISH (1956– )

Acclaim and enthusiasm greeted Gish Jen’s first novel, TYPICAL AMERICAN (1991), and her second, MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND (1996), received similar praise. Typical American, a New York Times notable book of the year and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, uses a character from an earlier short story (Ralph Chang from “In the American Society”) and follows him as he emigrates from China through his marriage to Helen, and his reunion with his long-lost sister, Theresa. After Ralph receives a doctoral degree, however, he and Helen, in pursuit of the American Dream, eschew the academic life and join the capitalist society so that they too can make money. The sequel, Mona in the Promised Land, continues the Chang family story, focusing on Ralph’s daughters: Mona, the high-school-age narrator, and Callie, her older sister, a student at Harvard University. In both novels, Jen’s work is distinguished by the humorous way in which her characters challenge the ethnic and racial status quos. Gish Jen was born and reared in Scarsdale, New York, in 1956, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English

JEWETT, SARAH ORNE 683

from Harvard University, but Gish Jen is not her real name. Her real name is Lillian Jen, but as she tells the now well-known story, she took the name Gish as a pen name after enough people remarked, “Oh, like Lillian Gish?” the famed star of the silent screen. In her work, Jen says she tries to “capture some of the complexity” of the American Dream, a far more complex metaphor than most people realize (Canion et al.). Gish Jen is smart and funny and not interested in writing at length about the “usual” Asian-American experience. Although her characters search for an understanding of their cultural heritage, they are individuals, part of the mix of contemporary America. Gish Jen’s The Love Wife, a story of interracial marriage in an American family, was published in 2004.

NOVELS The Love Wife. New York: Knopf, 2004. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1996. Typical American. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

SOURCES Matsukawa, Y. “MELUS Interview: Gish Jen,” MELUS 13, no. 4 (1993): 111–120. Pearlman, Mickey. “Gish Jen.” In Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 36–46. New York: Norton, 1993.

OTHER Canion, Erika, Stephanie Johnson, Kristyna Nazar, and Keisha Ritchie. “Gish Jen.” VG: Voices from the Gaps: Women Artists and Writers of Color, An International Website. Available online (May 25, 2000). URL: http:www.voices@ tc.umn.edu. Accessed July 2005.

JEWETT, (THEODORA) SARAH ORNE (1849–1909) Sarah Orne Jewett wrote novels and short stories that have endured for well over a century, and she is admired now not only for her depictions of the harmonious qualities of nature but also for her penetrating psychological and deeply felt spiritual insights. More than a local colorist, Jewett propounds ideas that link her to Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Her portraits of women are eloquent, whether she is writing about marriage, friendships, mother-daughter relationships, or professional or artistic women. Famous for a number of finely

wrought short stories, Jewett wrote five novels: Deephaven (1877), A Country Doctor (1884), A Marsh Island (1885), her masterpiece, The COUNTRY OF THE POINTED FIRS (1896), and A Tory Lover (1901). Jewett was born on September 3, 1849, in South Berwick, Maine, to Caroline Frances (Perry) Jewett, of Exeter, New Hampshire, and Theodore Herman Jewett, a doctor, both socially elite New England Brahmins. Jewett graduated from the Berwick Academy in 1865. After publishing several poems and stories in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, then edited by William Dean HOWELLS and published by James T. Fields, a philanthropist, Jewett produced DEEPHAVEN, a series of linked stories about Kate and the narrator, Helen, two young Boston women who spend the summer at Deephaven. They find themselves drawn, unexpectedly, into the small-town life of Deephaven and gain an empathy with and an appreciation for rural folk. Jewett’s own life mimicked the life of her character since she and Annie Fields lived for more than 30 years in a “Boston marriage,” after the death of James Fields in 1881. They spent long periods of time at one or another of Fields’s residences. Jewett’s second novel, A Country Doctor, drawn partly from Jewett’s conversations and outings with her own father, tackles the issue of women and the professions. The hero, Nan Prince, is an orphan who lives in the home of a country doctor, Dr. Leslie, whom she accompanies on his rounds. Nan rebels against the dictates of her disapproving aunt, rejects an offer of marriage from an attractive attorney, and chooses instead the “thousand times better” decision to become a doctor. A Marsh Island, Jewett’s third novel, set in southwestern Maine on an island in the center of one of the salt marshes, contains eloquent descriptions of nature. The conflict occurs between two young men, Dick Dale, from the city, and Dan Lester, from the country, who fall in love with the young woman Doris Owen. At the novel’s end, Dick returns to Boston, where he feels comfortable, and the country couple marry, secure in their rural environment. Continuing with her Maine subject matter, Jewett situates The Country of the Pointed Firs in Dunnet’s Landing, a fictional coastal fishing village. Like Deephaven, Pointed Firs comprises loosely linked stories narrated by an unnamed author who has come to peaceful Dunnet’s

684

JHABVALA, RUTH PRAWER

Landing to write. She becomes close to her landlady, Almira Todd, an herbalist who ministers to the townspeople and introduces the narrator acquaintance to the talented, wise, and often eccentric women in the neighborhood. Her fifth novel, A Tory Lover, is set during the American Revolution. The most widely quoted appraisal of Pointed Firs is that of Willa CATHER, who noted, “If I were asked to name the three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs” (Cather, x). While at her family home in South Berwick, Sarah Orne Jewett suffered a stroke and died three months later of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 24, 1909. The largest collection of her papers is held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

Mobley, Marilyn E. Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Nagel, Gwen L., ed. Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Nagel, Gwen L., and James Nagel, eds. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Roman, Margaret. Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1992. Sherman, Sarah Way. Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1989. Silverthorne, Elizabeth. Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1993. Zimmerman, Bonnie, and Judith Fetterley. Sexual Theory, Textual Practice: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1993.

NOVELS

Although she was well known when she lived in India and England, it is in the last quarter-century, since her move to New York City, that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has become famous as a novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Her many awards include England’s 1975 Booker Prize for Fiction for Heat and Dust. Her earlier novels, set in India, depict middle-class life among Indians (To Whom She Will [1955], The Householder [1960]) or feature British civil servants, expatriates, and travelers in India (Esmond in India [1957], A Backward Place [1965], Heat and Dust). Numerous critics have noted her gradual withdrawal from India in her fiction. Her first novel to be set in the United States is In Search of Love and Beauty (1983), followed by Three Continents (1987) and Poet and Dancer (1993), all of which contain characters from both East and West and explore such issues as immigration, ancestry, alienation, and identity. Always present, as well, are romantic and family relationships and good and evil. Jhabvala has gained fame for her screenplays, the best known of which include Jefferson in Paris (1995), Howard’s End (1992), Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), A Room with a View (1986), The Bostonians (1984), The Europeans (1979), Heat and Dust (1983), and The Remains of the Day. In addition to numerous Academy Awards for her adaptations of British novels, in 1990 she won the Best Screenplay Award from the New York

A Country Doctor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. The Country of the Pointed Firs. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Deephaven. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1877. A Marsh Island. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. A Tory Lover. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901.

SOURCES Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Blanchard, Paula. Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. Cary, Richard. Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Cary, Richard, ed. Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett: Twentynine Interpretive Essays. Waterville, Me.: Colby College Press, 1973. Cather, Willa. Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett. 2 vols., edited by Willa Cather, vol. 1, ix–xix. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. Church, Joseph. Transcendent Daughters in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994. Donovan, Josephine. Sarah Orne Jewett. New York: Ungar, 1980. Fields, Annie, ed. The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925. Howard, June. New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

JHABVALA, RUTH PRAWER (1927– )

JHABVALA, RUTH PRAWER 685

Film Critics Circle for Mr. & Mrs. Bridge (1990), based on the novels by Evan S. CONNELL and starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, to Marcus Prawer, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, and Eleonara Cohn, a Russian-German daughter of the cantor in Cologne’s largest synagogue (Crane, 2). The family fled Germany in 1939 and Jhabvala was reared in England, became a British citizen in 1948, and studied at St Mary’s College, University of London, where she received a master’s degree in 1951. That same year she married Cyrus S. H. Jhabvala, a Parsi architect, and moved with him to New Delhi, India, where she lived for the next 24 years. Four years later Jhabvala published Whom She Will, as it is known in England, and in the United States as Amrita, a novel portraying the inner workings of New Delhi’s middle class, both Parsi and Punjabi. The Nature of Passion (1956) also elicited praise from reviewers, with many critics applauding her ability to write so realistically of Indian life. Esmond in India was praised for its womanizing civil servant whom upscale Indian women—one of whom is his mistress—find attractive. (His Indian wife deserts him.) The Householder features the recently married Prem, temporarily infatuated with the life of a swami and with Hans, his idle German bachelor friend, until he realizes his love for and responsibilities to his wife, Indu. Critics generally see a more critical treatment of India beginning with A Backward Place, in which Judy, an Englishwoman happily married to a Hindu, is contrasted with Etta, a Hungarian who attempts suicide after the dissolution of her marriage to an Indian and her betrayal by her Indian lover. Heat and Dust tells two stories, in two different eras, of Olivia, a young Englishwoman married to Douglas Rivers, an officer in India in the 1920s, and her granddaughter, who returns to trace Olivia in the 1960s. Both Olivia and her granddaughter fall in love with, and are seduced and disgraced by, Indian men and become pregnant; the difference is that while Olivia aborts her child, the granddaughter keeps hers. As the critic and scholar Judie Newman notes, Jhabvala’s early, “India-centered works” depicted such Jane Austen–like situations as marriage schemes, romance, the clash between young and old, modern and traditional, whereas her later

novels move toward an ironic depiction of the colonial presence and a more immediate cultural confrontation. While writing Heat and Dust in India, Jhabvala became ill with jaundice. On her recovery, she moved permanently to New York City. In Search of Love and Beauty, although set in New York and featuring a group of German-Jewish refugees, depicts the appearance of Leo Kellerman, a bogus Indian guru who ironically exposes American fads, silliness, and materialism and suggests that, beneath the surface, lies a darker truth. According to the scholar and critic Ralph J. Crane, Three Continents, “the most socially complex, sophisticated, and revealing of all Jhabvala’s novels” (Crane, 110), focuses on Americans, Indians, and Europeans in an attempt to depict the nature of alienation and the immigrant experience. Three Continents, like In Search of Love and Beauty, features an unprincipled guru, here the Rawul; his “wife” Renee and his “son” Crishi (Crishi is revealed as Renee’s lover, not her son); and a young American, Michael Wishwell, from a wealthy but corrupt and decaying family in the Hudson River valley. The novel follows the entry of the Rawul and his “family” into the household and the marriage of Crishi to Michael’s twin sister, Harriet. The novel is, in Crane’s words, a reversal of the colonializing depicted in Esmond in India. Jhabvala’s next novel, Poet and Dancer, set in New York, has at its center the clash between good and evil, paralleled by the obsessive love of the poet Angel for her intriguing dancer cousin Lara. Her most recent novel, Shards of Memory (1998), reintroduces a guru, this time called the Master, who affects the lives of a family over several generations. Her recent work includes a fictionalized autobiography entitled My Nine Lives (2004). Jhabvala now maintains dual citizenship in England and the United States. She lives in New York.

NOVELS A Backward Place. New York: Norton, 1965. Esmond in India. London: Allen & Unwin, 1957. Get Ready for Battle. London: J. Murray, 1962. Heat and Dust. London: J. Murray, 1975. The Householder. New York: Norton, 1960. In Search of Love and Beauty. New York: Morrow, 1983. My Nine Lives. London: J. Murray, 2004. The Nature of Passion. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. A New Dominion. London: J. Murray, 1972. Published as Travelers. New York: Harper, 1973.

686

JOHNSON, CHARLES R.

Poet and Dancer. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1993. Shards of Memory. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1995. Three Continents. New York: Morrow, 1987. To Whom She Will. London: Allen & Unwin, 1955. Published as Amrita. New York: Norton, 1956.

SOURCES Agarwal, Ramlal G. “An Interview with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala,” Quest 91 (September/October 1994): 33–36. ———. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study of Her New Fiction. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers, 1990. Belliappa, Meena. “A Study of Jhabvala’s Fiction,” The Miscellany, no. 43 (January–February 1971): 24–40. Chakravarti, Aruna. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: A Study in Empathy and Exile. New Delhi, India: BR Publishing Corporation, 1998. Crane, Ralph J. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: Twayne, 1992. Curtis, Sarah. “Antique Furnishings.” Times Literary Supplement, 2 October 1998, p. 26. Glazebrook, Philip. “Intruders in the Dusk and Elsewhere,” Spectator 281, no. 8,879 (October 10, 1998): 43. Gooneratne, Yasmine. Silence, Exile, and Cunning: The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New Delhi, India: Orient Longman, 1983. Kitley, Philip T. “Time and Scriptable Lives in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust,” World Literature Written in English (Spring 1992): 55–65. Pritchett, V. S. The Tale Bearers: Literary Essays. New York: Random House, 1980. Pym, John. The Wandering Company: Twenty-One Years of Merchant Ivory Films. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1983. Shepherd, Ronald. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in India: The Jewish Connection. New Delhi, India: Chanakya, 1994. Sucher, Laurie. The Fiction of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Usha, V. T. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s ‘The Widow’: Reading the Subtext,” Literary Criterion 27, nos. 1 and 2 (June 1992): 133–137.

JOHNSON, CHARLES R. (1948– ) Recipient of the National Book Award for his novel Middle Passage (1990), Charles Johnson has earned a wide readership and an enviable reputation. He is the author of four novels—Faith and the Good Thing (1974), Oxherding Tale (1982), Middle Passage, and Dreamer: A Novel (1998)—and a short story collection. He is also a critic, screenwriter, editor, and professor of

creative writing, as well as a former cartoonist and journalist. Essential to all his work are issues concerning race, social class, and gender, especially as they relate to the legacy of slavery. As a postmodernist, he experiments with literary styles and methods. Although his novels can be difficult to comprehend, Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage are frequently taught in literature classes. Charles Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, to Benny Lee Johnson and Ruby Elizabeth Jackson Johnson. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism (1971) and a master’s degree in philosophy (1973) from Southern Illinois University. He wrote his first novel, Faith and the Good Thing, while studying with the late John GARDNER, who emphasized the necessity of morals, ethics, and philosophical belief in fiction. The novel’s title refers to Faith Cross, a young black woman from rural Hatten County, Georgia, whose journey in search of the “good thing” takes her to Chicago, where she falls into prostitution. Johnson creates a realistic world— Faith’s husband, lover, and clients—and a magical one, complete with a mad professor, Swamp Woman, and a werewolf. Before Faith dies (in the guise of Swamp Woman), she returns to her home in Georgia. The journey as metaphor appears again in Oxherding Tale, a deliberately nondidactic “neo slave narrative.” Faith reminds some readers of Theodore DREISER’s SISTER CARRIE and Richard WRIGHT’s The Outsider because of its classic quest motif; Oxherding Tale, on the other hand, uses the picaresque tradition of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Johnson also uses 19th-century American autobiographies like that of Frederick DOUGLASS. In Middle Passage, Johnson’s protagonist, Rutherford Calhoon, is a deliberate echo of Herman MELVILLE’s Ishmael, the narrator of MOBY-DICK. Anxious to escape Isadora, the Boston schoolteacher who wants to marry him, and any number of New Orleans bill collectors, Calhoon stows away on The Republic, a ship that turns out to be a slave clipper en route to Africa. In this parable of AfricanAmerican history, Calhoun sees those horrors and comes to terms with some truths about himself. Johnson’s most recent novel is Dreamer, a fictional treatment of the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. This imaginary account of King’s last days garnered praise for Johnson, who in the same year wrote,

JOHNSON, DIANE 687

with others, a companion to the Public Broadcasting System’s series Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. Johnson teaches creative writing at the University of Washington in Seattle.

NOVELS Dreamer: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 1998. Faith and the Good Thing. New York: Viking, 1974. Middle Passage. New York: Atheneum, 1990. Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

SOURCES Crouch, Stanley. “Charles Johnson, Free at Last,” Village Voice, 19 July 1983, pp. 30–31. Davis, Arthur. “Novels of the New Black Renaissance (1960–1977): A Thematic Survey,” CLA Journal 21 (June 1978): 457–490. Little, Jonathan. “An Interview with Charles Johnson,” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 159–181. McCullough, Ken. “Reflections on Fiction, Philosophy, and Film: An Interview with Charles Johnson,” Callaloo 4 (October 1978): 118–128. ———. “Writers Should Be Able to Write Everything: Ken McCullough talks to Charles Johnson,” Coda: Poets and Writers Newsletter 6 (September/October 1978): 22–25. Nielson, Alden L. Writing Between the Lines: Races and Intertextuality. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 157–171. Shultz, Elizabeth. “The Heirs of Ralph Ellison,” CLA Journal 22 (December 1978): 101–122.

JOHNSON, DIANE (1934– )

Diane Johnson is particularly admired for her comic and satiric characters, usually women, who face chaos, disorder, and, frequently, violence. She has been nominated twice for the National Book Award, in 1973 for the nonfiction Lesser Lives, and in 1979 for Lying Low (1978). She received a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1983 for the nonfiction Terrorists and Novelists, a collection of book reviews and essays; a 1984 Los Angeles Times prize nomination in biography for Dashiell Hammett: A Life, and a 1987 Pulitzer Prize nomination for Persian Nights. Her 1997 novel, LE DIVORCE, was released as a featurelength film by Merchant-Ivory Productions in 2003. Diane Johnson was born on April 28, 1934, in Moline, Illinois, to Dolph Lain, a high school principal, and Frances Elder Lain. She was educated at the University of Utah, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1957;

she earned a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctoral degree in 1968 from the University of California. She married B. Lamar Johnson Jr., then a medical student, in 1953; by the time she married her second husband, John Frederic Murray, a professor of medicine, in 1968, she had already published Fair Game (1965). Loving Hands at Home, about an unhappy Mormon wife, appeared that same year. Burning (1971) focuses on a conservative Bel Air, California, couple who are thrown in with hippies, drug addicts, and firemen. With The Shadow Knows (1974), Johnson attracted major critical attention with her carefully knit prose, finely timed use of suspense, and depiction of an ordinary person dealing with extraordinary occurrences. Lying Low (1978) earned even higher praise for its controlled atmosphere of eerie anticipation and evil. The protagonist is a former terrorist living secretly under a false identity near Sacramento, California. Persian Nights, with its parallels to E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, focuses on Chloe Fowler, a physician’s wife, who travels to Iran just before the collapse of the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Health and Happiness (1990) reflects Johnson’s familiarity with doctors and medical facilities; it features the relations among medical employees at a San Francisco hospital where Ivy Tarro, a young mother, has been admitted with an unidentifiable disease. Le Divorce, a national best-seller, features the pregnant American Roxanne (Roxy) de Persand, whose French husband deserts her. Roxy’s younger sister, Isabel Walker, moves to Paris to help with the birth of the baby and becomes seduced by French ways; Johnson has received critical acclaim for her realistic depiction of the differences between French and Americans. For example, says Johnson in an interview, “No one likes to be a cheated-on spouse . . . but where the American wife gets a divorce, a French wife gets a trip to the Seychelles or pearls” (Mudge). Le Mariage (2000), the companion novel to Le Divorce, features two marriages: one, a longtime marriage between French film director Serge Cray and American actress Clara Holly, is in the process of dissolving, while the impending marriage between youthful Parisian Anne-Sophie d’Arget and American journalist Tim Nolinger is in doubt. Johnson’s most recent novel, L’Affaire (2003), features Stanford-edu-

688

JOHNSON, DOROTHY

cated Amy Hawkins and introduces a British character, Adrian Venn, and his young American wife, Kerry, and offers a complex evocation of British, American, and French stereotypes and character traits. After a teaching career as professor of English at the University of California at Davis, Diane Johnson lives in San Francisco, California, and Paris, France.

NOVELS Burning. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Fair Game. New York: Harcourt, 1965. Health and Happiness. New York: Knopf, 1990. L’Affaire. New York: Dutton, 2003. Le Divorce. New York: Dutton, 1997. Le Mariage. New York: Dutton, 2000. Loving Hands at Home. New York: Harcourt, 1968. Lying Low. New York: Knopf, 1978. Persian Nights. New York: Knopf, 1987. The Shadow Knows. New York: Knopf, 1974.

SOURCES Hilyard, Nann Blaine. Review of L’Affaire, Library Journal 129, no. 5 (March 15, 2004): 124. Johnson, Diane. Terrorists and Novelists. New York: Knopf, 1982. ———. Natural Opium: Some Travelers’ Tales. New York: Knopf, 1993. ———. Lesser Lives. London: Heinemann, 1973. Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson, eds. Inter/View: Talks With America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 49–57. Steinberg, Sybil. “L’amour, Expat Style,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 33 (August 18, 2003): 58. Unsigned review of Health and Happiness, Publishers Weekly 237, no. 28 (July 13, 1990): 41. Unsigned review of Le Mariage, Publishers Weekly 247, no. 5 (January 31, 2000): 78. Wickenden, Dorothy. Review of Persian Nights, New Republic, 20 April 1987, pp. 45–47. Williams, Wilda. Review of L’Affaire, Library Journal 128, no. 15 (September 15, 2003): 92–93. Yalom, Marilyn, ed. Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1983.

OTHER Mudge, Alden. “An American in Paris Looks at Life, Love, and Manners.” BookPage (April 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/0004bp/diane_johnson. html. Accessed July 25, 2005.

Reading Group Guides.com. “Le Divorce, by Diane Johnson.” Available online. URL: http://www.readinggroupguides.com/ guides/le_divorce.asp. Accessed July 25, 2005.

JOHNSON,

DOROTHY

(MARIE)

(1905–1984) Dorothy M. Johnson is one of the most highly acclaimed 20th-century writers of Western literature. As scholars have noted, she brings a woman’s perspective to the predominantly male-dominated genre. Hers was a no-frills approach; she wrote with a stark simplicity that evoked the reality of ordinary pioneer folk who took with them to the West nothing but courage, loyalty, honesty, and strength. She also produced numerous stories and novels about the Native Americans of Montana, depicting their struggles along with those of the pioneers. The Montana Blackfeet made her an honorary member and gave her the name Princess Kills-Both-Places, a tribute to her ability to see both the Indian and the white sides of the story. Her work often blurs the lines between novel and story, ranging in length from novel (Buffalo Woman [1977], All the Buffalo Returning [1979]) to novella (The Hanging Tree [1959]), to story (“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” [1949]). She achieved popular success, garnering a large reading audience, and the three films made directly from her work brought her an even larger movie audience. Her awards include a Spur Award from Western Writers of America in 1957; a Levi Strauss Golden Saddleman Award in 1976; and a Western Heritage Wrangler Award in 1978. Dorothy Marie Johnson was born on December 19, 1905, in McGregor, Iowa, to Lester Eugene Johnson and Louisa Barlow Johnson. The family moved to Montana when Johnson was six, and she was educated at Montana State University (now the University of Montana), graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1928. Johnson’s secret marriage to George William Peterkin on April 5, 1927, ended in divorce soon after her graduation. She worked in New York City from 1935 to 1950, publishing many of the “Beulah Bunny” stories in the Saturday Evening Post and the entire collection, Beulah Bunny Tells All, in 1942. She found her real vocation, however, when she returned to live in Whitefish, Montana. The short story collection Indian Country appeared in 1953, followed by the collection The Hanging Tree in 1957. Indian Country includes the

JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON 689

novella A MAN CALLED HORSE (first published in Collier’s in 1950), now considered a classic. The film of this story, made in 1972 and starring Richard Harris as John Morgan and Judith Anderson as Buffalo Cow Head, was voted by the Western Writers Association in 1984 as “the best Western story of all time.” The novella The MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (first published in Cosmopolitan in 1949) also reached classic status with John Ford’s 1962 film of the same name, starring John Wayne as Tom Doniphon, James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard the attorney, Vera Miles as Hallie Stoddard, and Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance. The Hanging Tree and the novella of the same name that appeared in the collection is considered Johnson’s finest achievement. It was revised from a 65,000-word novel to a 39,000-word novella, and its central image of the isolated cottonwood tree becomes the backdrop for the three troubled characters who arrive in town: Dr. Joseph Alberts, secretly guilty of murdering a man in a card game, has adopted the alias Doc Frail; Rune, a young thief who really has no talent for his trade; and Elizabeth Mahler, the “Lost Lady,” wandering in the desert after her father is killed in a stagecoach robbery. In the 1959 film, now another classic, Gary Cooper starred as Doc Joe Frail, Maria Schell as Elizabeth Mahler, Karl Malden as Rune (here called French Plante), and George C. Scott as Dr. George Grubb. Johnson’s novel Buffalo Woman (1977) traces the life of Buffalo Woman from birth to death, implicitly contrasting her life of selflessness to the lives of the white settlers. All the Buffalo Returning (1979) continues the story with Buffalo Woman’s grandson Stormy; as the title indicates, despite the white appropriation of Indian land, Native Americans will return through spiritual rebirth. Both novels are powerful evocations of hardships endured by Native Americans in their losing battle with the advancing white civilization of the 19th century. Dorothy Johnson deserves more scholarly attention than she has yet received. She follows in the tradition of sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans first begun by Lydia Maria CHILD; her books have never gone out of print. Dorothy Marie Johnson died as a result of Parkinson’s disease and other ailments on November 11, 1984, in Missoula, Montana. Her papers are held at Princeton University; the University

of Iowa, Iowa City; the University of Wyoming, Laramie; and the University of Montana, Missoula.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS All the Buffalo Returning. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1979. Buffalo Woman. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Indian Country. New York: Ballantine, 1953. Republished as A Man Called Horse. New York: Ballantine, 1970. The Hanging Tree. New York: Ballantine, 1957. Warrior for a Lost Nation: A Biography of Sitting Bull. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969. Witch Princess. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

SOURCES Alter, Judy. Dorothy Johnson. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1980. Hart, Sue. “Dorothy M. Johnson: A Woman’s Voice on the Western Frontier,” English Journal 74 (March 1985): 60–61. Kich, Martin. “Dorothy Johnson.” In Western American Novelists, vol. 1, edited by Martin Kich, 809–876. New York: Garland, 1995. Mathews, Sue. “Pioneer Women in the Works of Two Montana Authors: Interviews with Dorothy M. Johnson and A. B. Guthrie Jr.” In Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan J. Rosowski, 124–131. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1982. ———, and James W. Healy. “The Winning of the Western Fiction Market,” Prairie Schooner 53 (Summer 1979): 158–167. Smith, Steve. The Years and The Wind and The Rain: A Biography of Dorothy M. Johnson. Missoula, Mont.: Pictorial Histories, 1984.

JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON (1871–1938) Poet, novelist, diplomat, songwriter, editor, critic, professor, and civil rights leader, James Weldon Johnson left a sizable impact on African-American literature and culture. His only novel, The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EXCOLORED MAN (1912), published anonymously, was reviewed largely as an expression of black sensibilities. It was reissued during the Harlem Renaissance, however, and since then has undergone positive reappraisals largely for its use of the unreliable narrator, irony, and the complex psychology Johnson employs to present the story of an individual and a society. James Weldon Johnson was born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, to James Johnson, a headwaiter, and Helen Louise Dillet Johnson, a woman of African, French, and English heritage. (She became the

690

JOHNSON, JAMES WELDON

first black woman public school teacher in Florida.) Johnson, who changed his middle name from William to Weldon in 1913, graduated with a bachelor of arts degree from Atlanta University in 1894. He became a schoolteacher, principal, journalist, and the first black lawyer to pass the Florida bar exam since Reconstruction, but he left Florida for New York City in 1899 with his brother John Rosamond Johnson, a composer. After composing hundreds of songs and a number of hits for Broadway musicals, Johnson and his brother teamed up with another songwriter, Bob Cole; the trio’s success culminated in a trip to Europe and a booking at London’s Palace Theater (Fleming, 14). Two years later, Johnson was appointed U.S. consul in Venezuela. There he had time for writing poetry and his novel, which he completed while on his next assignment as U.S. consul to Nicaragua. After his marriage in 1910 to Grace Nail, the daughter of a New York tavern owner and real estate dealer, the novel was published. The protagonist, the product of a relationship between a wealthy Georgia white man and the protagonist’s black mother, grows up in Connecticut, not learning that he is black until a schoolteacher humilitates him by making him stay seated while the white students stand. After his mother dies, he drifts from Georgia to Florida to New York and Europe and back again, the “tragic mulatto” who never comes to terms with his identity. On one level, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man relates the story of a confused mixed-race man who can pass for white; on another, as critics frequently note, it metamorphosizes—through its biracial narrator’s movement among several levels of African-American society—into a metaphor for American black life of the period. James Weldon Johnson died when a train hit the car in which he was riding on June 26, 1938, in Wiscasset, Maine. After a Harlem funeral attended by several thousand people, he was buried in the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to his many literary accomplishments, Johnson and his brother composed “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Negro National Anthem. Johnson’s papers are housed in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

NOVEL The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Boston: Sherman, French, 1912. Darby, Pa.: Arden Library, 1978. Reprinted, New York: Dover Publications, 1995.

SOURCES Baker, Houston A. “A Forgotten Prototype: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Invisible Man,” Virginia Quarterly Review 49 (Summer 1973): 433–449. Brooks, Neil. “On Becoming an Ex-Man: Postmodern Irony and the Extinguishing Certainties in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” College Literature (October 1995): 17–29. Egypt, Ophelia Settle. James Weldon Johnson. New York: Crowell, 1974. Fleming, Robert E. “Contemporary Themes in Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” Negro American Literature Forum 4 (Winter 1970): 120–124, 141. ———. James Weldon Johnson. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975, 109–116. Levy, Eugene. James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Mencken, H. L. “Si Mutare Potest Aethiops Pellum Suam. . . .” Smart Set 53, no. 1 (September 1917): 138–144. O’sullivan, Maurice J., Jr. “Of Souls and Pottage: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” CLA Journal 23 (September 1979): 60–70. Payne, Ladell. “Themes and Cadences: James Weldon Johnson’s Novel,” Southern Literary Journal 11 (Spring 1979): 43–55. Price, Kenneth M., and Lawrence J. Oliver. Critical Essays on James Weldon Johnson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Rosenblatt, Roger. “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.” In his Black Fiction, 173–184. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974. Ross, Stephen M. “Audience and Irony in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” CLA Journal 18 (December 1974): 198–210. Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. “Irony and Symbolic Action in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man,” American Quarterly 32 (Winter 1980): 540–558. Tolbert-Rouchaleau, Jane. James Weldon Johnson. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Vauthier, Simone. “The Interplay of Narrative Modes in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien 18 (1973): 173–181.

JONAH’S GOURD VINE 691

OTHER James Weldon Johnson. “The Making of Harlem.” Survey Graphic 6, no. 6 (March 1925). Available online. URL: http:// etext.lib.virginia.edu/harlem/JohMakiF.html. Accessed September 14, 2005. Jill Diesman’s HomePage. “James Weldon Johnson.” Available online. URL: http://www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/johnson.html. Accessed September 14, 2005. Poets.org: From the Academy of American Poets. “James Weldon Johnson.” Available online. URL: http://www.poets. org/poet/php/prmPID/72. Accessed September 14, 2005.

JONAH’S GOURD VINE ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1934) Written in only a few months, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, Zora Neale HURSTON’s first novel, combines autobiographical elements, Hurston’s extensive field research on African-American folk culture, and her own storytelling skill. Sharon L. Jones describes it as a celebration of African-American culture at all socioeconomic levels (Jones, 67), but the novel is usually dealt with as “the fictionalization of her parents’ marriage” (Wall, 189). Originally titled Big Nigger, her family’s nickname for her father, the novel features main characters John and Lucy Pearson, clearly drawn on Hurston’s parents. It is set initially in Alabama, where Hurston was born, and then in Eatonville, an all-black town outside Orlando, Florida, where Hurston “got born” culturally (Dust Tracks, 577). While depicting John’s coming-of-age as a preacher and poet, the novel examines the lingering effects of slavery and the significance of the preacher in the African-American community. It also likely critiques domestic violence (Miles, 2), exploring the dynamics of Hurston’s parents’ troubled relationship and her own strained link to her father, who, like John Pearson, had been killed in a train accident by the time Hurston completed the novel. Fleeing the abuse of his embittered step-father, Ned, John “crosses de creek” to seek employment on Alf Pearson’s plantation, where his mother, Amy, had been a slave. Alf is presumably John’s father; in keeping with Southern refusal to acknowledge paternity in master-slave relationships, Alf says only that John’s face “looks familiar,” even though he “can’t place” him. Frightened yet awed by a train—the first he has seen and a recurring image throughout the novel— John seeks a better life and soon learns to read and

write. He guards Alf’s livestock tenaciously but remains constricted by stereotypes of black men as promiscuous, violent, financially dependent, and needing guidance (Miles, 26–30). This is evident as Alf admonishes him to “mind” and, thus, “make something” out of himself. On his first day “across the creek,” John encounters little Lucy Potts, whose pertness intrigues him and whose family is “big niggers.” The young women in the quarters pursue the handsome John, but his sights are set on Lucy. Instinctively aware she will not accept an “over-de-creek-nigger,” John determines to shed that image and takes a job at a railroad camp. Emboldened by winning his first fight, John returns to claim Lucy. He faces strong opposition from Lucy’s mother, who calls him “uh yaller bastard” and who has promised Lucy to the landowning Artie Mimms. Lucy’s will prevails, despite her mother’s threats of violence. Despite his marriage-day promise to “prop [Lucy] up on ev’y leanin’ side,” John succumbs to the “brute-beast” inside him. After each affair, he vows to mend his ways; initial regret and a subsequent promise of repentance set a pattern for their marriage. Arrested for almost killing Lucy’s brother Bud, John skips town, riding a train to central Florida and winding up near Eatonville, a town running itself “ ’thout de white folks.” Almost a year later, Lucy arrives and immediately assumes control of their lives. She urges John so effectively to become a carpenter, buy land, and preach that he is named moderator of the church conference. John’s initial success in Eatonville suggests that economic progress for blacks lies in a black world unhampered by Jim Crow laws. Eatonville frees blacks from the subservient image prescribed by a dominant white society (Wall, 142). Unfortunately, John’s philandering continues, and Lucy’s health declines as she gives birth to several other children in addition to the four born in Alabama. John seems unable to see himself as more than a mixture of “spirit and flesh” (Boyd, 255). Although he always repents, he simply cannot resist women. John’s affair with Hattie introduces African folk elements to the novel. Determined to win John and rid him of Lucy, Hattie consults a hoodoo doctor, a character drawn from Hurston’s own studies of hoodoo in

692

JONAH’S GOURD VINE

New Orleans and the Caribbean. John slaps the terminally ill Lucy and hastens her death. In Lucy’s deathbed scene, Hurston fictionalizes her own feeling of impotence at her mother’s death. In the novel Isis is as powerless as Zora to halt the usual death rituals of turning the bed, covering the mirror, and removing pillows. Hurston’s inability to carry out her mother’s final wishes haunted her most of her life. Only a few months after Lucy’s death, John Pearson marries Hattie, much to the chagrin of his congregation. Their tumultuous marriage eventually ends when John, discovering Hattie has hexed him, beats her. A poignant court scene follows, seemingly designed to elicit sympathy for John, who maintains Hattie has made him “jes’ es happy by quittin’ es Lucy did when she married” him. Stung by the turncoat individuals in his congregation, hampered by the absence of the dead Lucy, and unwilling to give whites more information about the inner lives of blacks, John refuses to refute Hattie’s accusations in court, even though he realizes that official proof of his adultery will mean losing his church. Dispirited and beaten, John preaches a final sermon, one Hurston had collected in the church of Reverend C. C. Lovelace in Eau Gallie, Florida, in 1929, and subsequently published in Nancy Cunard’s Negro: An Anthology. Although the sermon moves the congregation to choose John over the Reverend Cozy, John announces that he will carpenter rather than preach. His rejection of the pulpit signals weakness, and the townspeople turn against him. After a dream that replays his first act of protecting Lucy—killing a snake in the creek—John goes to Plant City. There he is befriended by the widow Sally Lovelace, who, recognizing him as Reverend Pearson, arranges for him to assume the pastorate at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. John marries Sally and rises to prominence again, recovering his voice in the pulpit and emphasizing what Eric J. Sundquist calls “the performative aspect of the sermon” (Sundquist, 60). When Sally urges him to visit Eatonville, he resolves to remain true to her, believing that their marriage offers him a chance to redeem himself after his mistreatment of Lucy. In Eatonville, however, John is again tempted and, although he resists, eventually succumbs to the

charms of a young woman named Ora. Despising himself for betraying Sally, John hurries to Sally’s shelter but dies when struck by a train. Ironically, Sally exults, maintaining he was “true tuh me.” In testimony to John’s magnetism, a vast crowd of mourners attends his memorial service, where the preacher pronounces him as a man whom “nobody knowed . . . but God.” Much like Hurston’s father, John Pearson was “a paradox—saint and sinner” (Holloway, 38). In creating John, however, Hurston had gone beyond one individual to depict “a Negro, a preacher who is neither funny nor an imitation Puritan ram-rod in pants. Just the human being and poet that he must be to succeed in a Negro pulpit” (Kaplan, 298). She had tried to deal with life as actually lived, “not as the Sociologists see it” (Kaplan, 286).

SOURCES Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Brown, Alan. “ ‘De Beast’ Within: The Role of Nature in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” In Zora in Florida, edited by Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel, 76–85. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Holloway, Karla F. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Hurston, Zora Neale. “Dust Tracks on a Road.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings, edited by Cheryl Wall, 558–808. New York: Library of America, 1995. ———. Jonah’s Gourd Vine. In Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, edited by Cheryl Wall, 1–171. New York: Library of America, 1995. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002. Kaplan, Carla, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Miles, Diana. Women, Violence, & Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Plant, Deborah G. Every Tum Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Speisman, Barbara. “Voodoo as Symbol in Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” In Zora in Florida, edited by Steve Glassman and

JONES, JAMES 693

Kathryn Lee Seidel, 86–93. Orlando: University of Central Florida Press, 1991. Sundquist, Eric J. “ ‘The Drum with the Man Skin’: Jonah’s Gourd Vine.” In Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 39–66. New York: Amistad, 1993. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Gloria Shearing

JONES, GAYL (1949– ) Gayl Jones, an AfricanAmerican writer admired for her complex and emotional use of blues music in fiction and her inclusion of first-person slave narratives, is also known for her nightmarish accounts of violence and abuse that are often painful to read. She remains, in the words of the scholar Kimberly N. Brown, “a literary enigma” who persists in plumbing “the fantastical and sometimes psychotic nether regions of her characters’ minds” (Brown, 127). Jones, an essayist, poet, and short story writer, is best known for CORREGIDORA (1975), a grim novel about three generations of African-American women, and Eva’s Man (1976), an account of one woman’s institutionalization for the murder of her lover. Gayl Jones was born on November 23, 1949, in Lexington, Kentucky, to Franklin Jones, a cook, and Lucille Wilson Jones, a fiction writer and daughter of Amanda Wilson, a playwright. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Connecticut College in 1971 and a master’s (1973) and doctorate (1975) in creative writing from Brown University. She then accepted a position at the University of Michigan, where she became a tenured professor. She published numerous stories, a play, and two novels during this period. Corregidora, set in the 1940s, features Ursa Corregidora, a blues singer who carries the surname of her Portuguese great-grandfather, a slave owner, who used her great-grandmother and grandmother as prostitutes, and fathered both her grandmother and her mother. Ursa’s singing transmits the history of slavery, in particular its violence and abuse of women by predatory men who rape and commit incest at will. The legacy of sexual abuse continues in Eva’s Man, narrated by Eva Medina Canada, a woman so damaged that her narration, from a psychiatric ward, is fragmented and incomprehensible even to Eva herself. After a lifetime

of being raped and abused, Eva mutilates a man by biting off his penis; the novel is disturbing and brutally truthful. After a long break from novel writing, Jones published The Healing (1998), the story of Harlan Jane Eagleton. Both in Saratoga, New York, and in Africa, Harlan’s female ancestors fail to meet the usual standards of beauty. Mosquito (1999) is about Sojourner Jane Nadine Johnson, a liberated woman who moves through time and is involved both with the present and with the 19th-century Underground Railroad. Gayl Jones lived with her partner, Bob Higgins Jones (he eventually adopted her surname), in Michigan, and then for 15 years in Europe, after he left without standing trial on a weapons charge. They returned to Kentucky and, in February 1998, during a confrontation with police, Bob Jones committed suicide and Gayl Jones was briefly institutionalized. She now lives a secluded existence in Lexington, Kentucky, where she continues to write.

NOVELS Corregidora. New York: Random House, 1975. Eva’s Man. New York: Random House, 1976. The Healing. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Mosquito. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

SOURCES Brown, Kimberly N. “Gayl Jones.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 227–232. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor Books, 1984. Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo 5 (October 1982): 32–53. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1986. Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “Escape from Trublum: The Fiction of Gayl Jones.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 249–258. New York: Anchor, 1984.

JONES, JAMES (1921–1977) According to many readers and critics, James Jones wrote the finest American novel to emerge from World War II. FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1951) also sold more than 4 million

694

JONES, JAMES

copies and won the National Book Award in 1952. The novel became the first of a World War II trilogy that included The Thin Red Line (1962) and Whistle, published posthumously in 1978. Like many best-selling writers, Jones has been neglected by the academy; however, as literary criticism concentrates more on history and culture, he is being reconsidered in terms of his subject matter—because World War II directly influenced the generation of Americans who lived through it and indirectly influenced the generations that followed. James Jones was born on November 6, 1921, in Robinson, Illinois, to Ramon Jones, a dentist, and Ada Blessing Jones. Unable to attend college because of his family’s financial reverses during the Great Depression, Jones served in the army from 1939 to 1945, receiving the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. From Here to Eternity, his first novel, is set at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where Jones was stationed during the war. The novel is a portrait of the common soldier, especially Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt, an outstanding bugler and idealist who refuses to compromise, although Sergeant Milton Warden is ordered to punish Prewitt for his refusal to enter the boxing ring. The friendship between the two men is at the core of the book, but it ends in violence, murder, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Some Came Running (1958), Jones’s second novel, focuses on two brothers, Dave and Frank Hirsch. Dave, a war hero and former novelist, is repelled by Frank’s materialistic values and by the availability of cheap and perverted sex. The Pistol (1958), a novella, followed. The pistol is an obvious psychosexual symbol and also an actual gun carried by Pfc. Richard Mast, a soldier stationed at Pearl Harbor. The Thin Red Line depicts the inhumane and grislier aspects of combat; here Charlie Company attempts to survive the battle for Guadalcanal in particular and the Pacific war in general. The protagonists are four infantrymen, but the real focus of the novel is Private Don Doll, who empathizes with the rationalizations men use to stay alive. Jones also wrote Go the Widow-Maker (1967), a Hemingwayesque fishing and diving novel set in the Caribbean, and The Merry Month of May (1971), a Parisbased novel set during the student upheavals of 1968. In 1957 he married Gloria Mosolino and together they lived

in Paris for almost two decades. Jones and his family returned to the United States in 1974 and he accepted a teaching position at Florida International University. Two years later, the family moved to Southampton, Long Island, where Jones died on May 9, 1977. His legacy includes the James Jones Literary Society, which awards an annual First Novel Fellowship and a Creative Writing Award. Three of his novels have also been adapted for the screen. Filmed by Columbia in 1953, with Montgomery Clift as Prewitt, From Here to Eternity won three Academy Awards. In 1979, National Public Television broadcast a remake of the original movie. Some Came Running was filmed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1958, and The Thin Red Line by Allied Artists in 1964.

NOVELS From Here to Eternity. New York: Scribner, 1951. Go to the Widow-Maker. New York: Delacorte, 1967. The Merry Month of May. New York: Delacorte, 1971. The Pistol. New York: Scribner, 1959. Some Came Running. New York: Scribner, 1957. The Thin Red Line. New York: Scribner, 1962. A Touch of Danger. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Whistle. Edited by Willie Morris. New York: Delacorte, 1978.

SOURCES Garrett, George P. James Jones. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1984. Giles, James R. James Jones. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Hendrick, George. To Reach Eternity: The Letters of James Jones. New York: Random House, 1989. Lennon, J. Michael, and James R. Giles, eds. The James Jones Reader: Outstanding Selections from His War Writings. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1991. MacShane, Frank. Into Eternity: The Life of James Jones, American Writer. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Morris, Willie. James Jones: A Friendship. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978.

OTHER James Jones Literary Society. Available online. URL: http:// rking.vinu.edu/j.htm. Accessed September 14, 2005. “James Jones (1921–1977).” Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jjones.htm. Accessed September 14, 2005. Audio Interview with James Jones by Don Swaim. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ jamesjones/. Accessed September 14, 2005.

JONG, ERICA 695

JONG, ERICA (1942– )

Exploding into the world of readers with her then shocking novel, FEAR OF FLYING (1973), Erica Jong made publishing and literary history. On its publication in paperback in 1974, the novel sold 3 million copies in the first year (Templin, 29). Using the voice she had discovered in two volumes of published poetry, Jong portrayed her now famous Isadora Wing, a woman who is gleefully discovering and exploring her sexuality. In the decades since the 1970s, readers and critics alike have read Flying for its literary qualities, its affirmative feminist message, and its sexual frankness. Jong has continued to write in both genres, having published nine novels and 10 volumes of poetry, as well as the nonfiction works Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994) and What Do Women Want?: Bread, Roses, Sex, Power (1998). Erica Jong was born on March 26, 1942, in New York City, to Seymour Mann, an importer, and Eda Mirsky Mann, a painter and designer. She was educated at Barnard College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1963, and a master’s at Columbia University in 1965. She was married briefly to Michael Werthman; to Allan Jong, a child psychiatrist, from 1966 to 1975; to Jonathan Fast, a writer, from 1977 to 1983; and has been married to Ken Burrows, an attorney, since 1989. Critical readers of Fear of Flying were captivated by the story of Isadora Wing as she flies to Vienna, Austria, where her psychiatrist husband, Bennett, is attending a conference. Isadora believes her ideal is the “Zipless Fuck,” and at the Congress, she meets Adrian Goodlove, the English Langian analyst with whom she embarks on a monthlong affair; at the end of the novel, thanks in part to sex with Goodlove, she has full confidence in herself as both woman and writer. In Jong’s next novel, How to Save Your Own Life (1977), Isadora is betrayed by her husband, leaves him, continues her sexual experimentation, and falls in love with screenwriter Josh Ace and discusses Hollywood deals for her novel, “Candida Confesses.” Isadora returns in Parachutes and Kisses (1984), now abandoned by Josh. Mother to their three children, she embarks on another odyssey toward self-discovery, punctuated by sexual encounters, this time in the Soviet Union, and ending happily enough with an

actor named Bean. Any Woman’s Blues is a post-Isadora novel (1990) since Isadora has disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific, leaving behind a manuscript. The novel features artist Leila Sand, who attempts to rid herself of her obsession with a young cad; to do so she must hit the bottom in the sex, drugs, and alcohol trap before emerging as a reconstructed and independent woman. In 1980, Jong wrote FANNY, a non-Isadora novel inspired by her graduate studies in 18th-century literature and considered by many critics to be her best work. The 18th-century protagonist Fanny ostensibly writes her life story to bequeath to her daughter Belinda; it recounts all manner of male mistreatment of women, from condescension to rape, but ultimately affirms the woman as an artist who is no longer content to play muse to the male artist. Serenissima: A Novel of Venice (1995) is a fantasy in which the several times divorced Jessica Pruitt not only reinvents herself by traveling to Venice as a film critic, but also finds herself in 16th-century Venice providing Shakespeare with the inspiration for the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Jong’s most recent novel is Sappho’s Leap (2003), an imaginative re-creation of the erotic poet that Jong hopes will “give people the courage to take risks with their lives” (Pearlman). She lives and writes in Manhattan and Connecticut.

NOVELS Any Woman’s Blues. New York: Harper, 1990. Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones. New York: New American Library, 1980. Fear of Flying. New York: Holt, 1973. How to Save Your Own Life. New York: Holt, 1977. Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Parachutes and Kisses. New York: New American Library, 1984. Sappho’s Leap. New York: Norton, 2003. Serenissima: A Novel of Venice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Published as Shylock’s Daughter. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.

SOURCES Jong, Erica. The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller. New York: Turtle Bay, 1993 ———. Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

696

JOY LUCK CLUB, THE

Templin, Charlotte. Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

OTHER AnnOnline. Interview with Erica Jong. Conducted by Ann Devlin. Available online. URL: http://www.annonline.com/ interviews/970815/index.html. Accessed July 2005. Erica Jong Website. Available online. URL: http://www. ericajong.com/. Accessed September 14, 2005. Jong, Erica. Audio Interview with Don Swaim. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ ericajong/. Accessed September 14, 2005. Pearlman, Mickey. “Sappho’s Secrets,” The Forward, June 13, 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.forward.com/ issues/2003/03.03.13/arts3.html. Accessed September 14, 2005.

JOY LUCK CLUB, THE AMY TAN (1989) Amy TAN follows in the tradition of Asian-American literature that began with the EATON sisters, who published under the pseudonyms Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna, and more contemporary writers such as Maxine Hong KINGSTON. Tan’s success, however, which was established with the publication of The Joy Luck Club, exceeds that of her Asian-American predecessors. Tan, a second-generation Chinese American and freelance business writer, published The Joy Luck Club in 1989, and the novel became a best seller on both hardcover and paperback lists. It also became a great success among critics and literature teachers, as evidenced by a 2002 edition in the Modern Critical Interpretations series edited by Harold Bloom and a 1994 edition of Cliffs Notes. The film version, with Tan as one of the screenwriters, was released in 1993. The Joy Luck Club explores the lives of four Chinese women who live in San Francisco’s Chinatown and gather to play weekly mah-jongg games. Because one of the four has died, her daughter June Jing-Mei Woo takes her place at the weekly table. The stories, then, are also about the four daughters. The structure of the book is that of four sections further divided into four chapters each, with each chapter focusing on a story of one of the mothers or daughters. In at least one interview, Tan claims to have written the book more as a collection, or cycle, of short stories than a novel and,

therefore, relieved herself of the burden of traditional sequencing of events. Accordingly, she was able to concentrate on letting the characters tell their versions of the various intermingled stories. Tan describes her writing process for The Joy Luck Club and other creative work as follows: First, there’s a question, and often it takes a long time for the question to surface out of false starts. The question is always related to my life, so that’s autobiographical in a sense. Then there’s an image, which is often something from my life or something that my mother talked about in a story to me. And the image leads into a scene. The scene turns out to be more fictionalized, but I would say the question and the image to me are the most important things—and the language that surrounds them—and that’s all from my life. (Somogyi and Stanton, 28) In addition, Tan values revision, working on some of the earlier stories for several years and through more than a dozen versions of each page. The four mothers of The Joy Luck Club have had few true choices in their lives, yet they grow into extraordinarily strong women. Early chapters such as “Scar,” “The Red Candle,” and “The Moon Lady” tell of the young women in China, long before the daughters have been born. In “Scar,” An-Mei Hsu’s own mother returns home; An-Mei realizes her mother is neither ghost nor widow but a concubine. Lindo Jong, in “The Red Candle,” concocts a plan for her in-laws to release her from her marriage bond. These early chapters introduce the intergenerational themes by retracing the mothers’ early lives, establish the beautiful language and images of the book, and provide the background for and rising tensions of the mother-daughter relationships that build in later chapters. The four daughters face, perhaps, too many choices in their modern American lives. This intergenerational, bicultural tension holds the entire book together, as mothers try to preserve their Chinese selves while daughters slip into perfect English phrasing, psychotherapy, and relationships with white, freckle-faced, live-in boyfriends who want to add soy

JR 697

sauce to home-cooked Chinese dinners. Still, the daughters learn deeply valuable lessons from their mothers, as their mothers pass on “talk story” from their own lives along with discipline, advice, and words full of hidden meanings. Waverly Jong, for instance, learns from her mother that the strongest wind is the one that can’t be seen. Waverly is only six years old when she receives her first lesson in “invisible strength”; she cries loudly for candies one week, is told to bite her tongue, and receives candies the next week when she passes the store quietly. Much later in the book, Waverly recognizes the complexity of her mother and their relationship: “Oh, her strength! her weakness!—both pulling me apart. My mind was flying one way, my heart another. I sat down on the sofa next to her, the two of us stricken by the other.” Each mother and each daughter comes to a similar realization of each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and value. The final chapter draws from the story of June’s mother, Suyuan Woo, of which we first hear a version in the initial chapter. The story of the sisters unfolds throughout The Joy Luck Club as June becomes old enough to hear or understand the next version of the story. Here at the end of the book, June returns to China to reunite with the sisters her mother was forced to leave behind in 1944. As soon as she enters China, June realizes that her mother was right: June can’t help being Chinese, as much as she wanted to be utterly American. Tan’s work, including The Joy Luck Club, has been criticized because it marginalizes men, though the themes validate the focus on the female characters and add to American literature both the stories of women in our culture and the intricacies of mother-daughter relationships, topics that were long left out of the literary canon. Tan also has been criticized, in part by male Asian-American authors, for changing traditional Chinese myths to suit the purposes of her fiction. Tan continues to publish novels, including The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001). She has also written a children’s book, The Moon Lady (1992), which is an adaptation of a story from The Joy Luck Club.

SOURCES Reid, E. Shelley. “ ‘Our Two Faces’: Balancing Mothers and Daughters in The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Paintbrush 22 (Autumn 1995): 20–38. Shear, Walter. “Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club,” Critique 34, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 193–199. Shen, Gloria. “Born of a Stranger: Mother-Daughter Relationships and Storytelling in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.” In International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, edited by Anne E. Brown et al. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Somogyi, Barbara, and David Stanton. “Amy Tan: An Interview,” Poets & Writers 19, no. 5 (September/October 1991): 24–32. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam, 1989. Young, Mary E. “Sui Sin Far to Amy Tan.” In Mules and Dragons: Popular Culture Images in the Selected Writings of African-American and Chinese-American Women Writers, 109–131. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Anna Leahy

JR WILLIAM GADDIS (1975) GADDIS’s satire on capitalist expansiveness and unabated appetite gets its name from the central character, an 11-year-old boy who, in his nihilistic single-minded wheeling and dealing, personifies the immature amorality of the economic drive, but who, in his irrepressible obliviousness, bodies forth the uncontainable anarchic energies of the cosmos itself. Sweater bursting at the elbow, shoelaces always untied, JR has a whirlwind presence that generates countless collisions, spills, and misunderstandings. He is a prodigy of nature whose identifying expletive “holy shit” encapsulates the comic mode’s ambiguous beatification of waste and prodigality. Fittingly, the book’s voluminous pages are filled with visual and audio evocations of the chaos inherent in clutter and glut. Gaddis uses postmodernist strategies to exploit for his own purposes farce’s conventional flurry of accident, cross-purposes, and disconnections. The book’s vision of commodity proliferation gone amok conjures an idios kosmos, an anarchic, fragmented irrational world that, at the level of language, is conveyed by intentionally banal snippets of overlapping, interrupted, and truncated dialogue in which inattentive or

698 JR

distracted characters talk at cross-purposes in the disjunctive rhythms of halting speech and lame excuse. Run-on sentences, slipping signifiers, and tangential frames of reference combine to articulate the extravagance inherent in the preposition across, which, whether explicit or implicit, is JR’s operative preposition insofar as it conveys the transgression of boundaries, the violation of the integrity of things (note the multitude of stains and footprints deposited by graceless bodies). Gaddis excels in colliding trains of thought. But the wayward straying, disjunction, and farcical confusion of all attempts to make conversational contact seem to have a metaphysical rather than a merely social source. The motto of the public school, we are told, is a “fragment” (in this book it could be little else) from Empedocles’ description of the stages of cosmic generation, “[w]hen limbs and parts of bodies were wandering around everywhere separately heads without necks, arms without shoulders, unattached eyes for foreheads.” This cosmogonic description conceives a grotesque offspring upon being overlapped by a televised lecture on incorporation: In the second generation these parts are joining up by chance, form creatures with countless hands, faces looking in different directions . . .— and that’s what owning a share in a corporation means too . . . like being an Am . . . (46) “[L]ike being an Am”—this thoughtless cogito of the truncated American belongs, of course, to the little man, JR, the very embodiment of this prodigious and deforming universe. The body itself is almost always pictured as a deformed site of strife and source of inadvertent aggression. Arms are prone to explode from the trunk of the body at any moment as a sudden manifestation of crypto-hostility: “The carriage bolts shot unaimed from the acrylic barrels of his sleeves and, poised for the moment, he seemed to seek something vulnerable, as abruptly recovering a swift turn in stabs at the telephone” (255). Elbows are always elsewherebent as obstructions of the will of others, and are usually instruments of assault (485, 546, 671, 673). Images of dismemberment abound, as do references to

lopping, severing, and other castration verbs. A wreath remembers “OUR DEAR DEPARTED MEMBER” (18). The haunches of a sexy female are “sawing” (68), and she bears a scar on her neck in accord with the folklore that witches “screw [their] head off at night” (671). A book reports that witches are believed to steal penises, but “the devil cannot impose this illusion to those in a state of grace.” This idea must be linked to another regarding “fragmentation in [the] mind’s eye” (21)— impaired and impairing vision later literalized when a pencil thrown by an impotent writer rebounds and pokes out his eye (objects typically display a malicious promiscuity in the grotesque mode). Whatever the source, what seems true of the human body seems true of the world’s body, where all things seem mutilated, amputated, crucified; where light stabs and blinds are “punctured” and sounds are “shredd[ed]” (373), “Piston’s Harmony torn through the spine” (137). Paintings, books, manuscripts, records, tapes, musical instruments, photographs, strips of film, clothing, used condoms, even business cards are inadvertently stepped on, kicked, or dragged, less by the wayward feet of inattentive, self-preoccupied people than by the cosmic principle of promiscuity that uses them. Imbalance and asymmetrical deformation constitute another attribute of both bodies. While groping for a missing shoe, a character muses on the possibilities “of a basic lack of symmetry in our part of the univ” (486). Gaddis mobilizes etymological wordplay that elaborates intricate conceptual relationships between the splitting of pairs (whether shoes or couples) and the condition of impairment, notably in regard to mobility, and between pedagogy and impediment (both deriving from the Greek word for foot), which brings the reader back to Empedocles’ primordial chaos of dismembered, asymmetrical body parts and its unabated recurrence in the contemporary subway, where “elbows found ribs and shoulders backs . . . faces looking in different directions” (161). An African sculpture’s distended phallus, a representation of an expansive cosmos straining to go beyond its confines, is criticized by an impotent male on the grounds that “they couldn’t walk around” if they were built like that (55). These and other conceptual puns generate a proliferation of images of constrained

JUBILEE 699

or wayward feet, mismatched shoes, detaching soles, limping and tripping (indexes of impaired grace), which the reader must connect in a perhaps futile attempt to repair the broken universe. Closely linked to these motifs and themes is the quintessential principle governing the world of JR: “accidental spillage” (542), a physical correlate of the slip and spill of disjointed dialogue. In a burgeoning trash culture, clutter produces glut and glut inevitably produces spillage. Things get quite literally out of hand. Spilling armfuls of paper is a recurring image, just as stray paper underfoot is the most persistent and ubiquitous evidence of the accumulation, overconcentration, imbalance, and spill of commodity/waste. JR’s empire is a paper empire; but then so is Gaddis’s massive, intricately patterned novel. When a shoe drops, sending coins spilling (193), there can be little doubt that, “Waiting for God [or the author] to drop the other shoe [is] all you got” (687). The proliferating piles of JR’s boxes of commodities—a mass of impedimenta, the “fill” deposited at the back entrance of a decimated garden, the writer’s words, are all indexes of glut and clutter. The malcontented would-be writer Gibbs puts it this way: “[I]t all comes back to this question of energy doesn’t it . . . senseless God damned energy” (585). It is Gibbs who recognizes that the profligate spilling of energy produces entropy (which a child rightly misspells “e-n . . . d?”). And it is Gibbs who christens his verbiage “Niagara,” though “a God damned period [might] give an intelligent reader the essence of the whole God damned thing” (581). An abrupt interruption of further commentary on “the rule of love and the rule of strife in the cosmic cycle of Emp” in turn produces a mishearing (another Gaddis motif and strategy) that spells out a perhaps rueful, self-parodic implication: “They didn’t come here to talk about comic cycles” (48).

SOURCES Gaddis, William. JR. New York: Knopf, 1975. Kuehl, John, and Steven Moore, eds. In Recognition of William Gaddis. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984. LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

OTHER O’Donnell, Patrick J. “His Master’s Voice: On William Gaddis’s JR,” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 2 (January 1991). The Gaddis Annotations. JR. Available online. URL: http://jefferson. village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.191/odonne-1.191. Accessed July 2005. David Brottman

JUBILEE MARGARET WALKER (1966) Jubilee, a slave narrative, centers on the character Elvira Dutton Ware Brown—“Vyry,” WALKER’s great-grandmother. Vyry differs from other characters in the book because she actually lived; she is not a character that Walker invented. Walker’s grandmother told her the story of Vyry when Walker was a child, and from that moment Walker knew that it was a story that needed to be spread widely. She began researching the era in which her great-grandmother had lived and discovered that many of the texts from the era were inconsistent. Of course, texts from the perspectives of the white Southerners and the slaves differed in opinion, but the slave versions also differed with those expressing Northern convictions about why Northerners were fighting the Civil War. Walker felt that it was important to represent all sides, so she spent years researching the period leading up to the Civil War before finishing the novel of her ancestor’s life (Walker, 1990, 55). It is in this way that Walker’s Jubilee differs from other slave narratives: The author reveals myriad points of view. She uses the slaveholders’ perspective by revealing their misinterpretation of the Bible, which, they believed, contained proof that slavery was an extension of God’s will. Walker also gives the perspective of the overseer, Ed Grimes, who later becomes a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The reader also sees the perspective of a black man who was born free and his struggle with hatred toward white people. The most important perspective that ties all the elements together is that of Vyry. Vyry, a woman who is the daughter of a slave mother and her “marster,” is raised to live in the “big house” and serve her father’s white family. She is treated poorly by “Big Missy,” her father’s wife, because Vyry is white in appearance and looks so much like

700 JUBILEE

Lillian, Big Missy’s daughter. Her father could easily have raised her as a free white woman, but he does not. He never acknowledges her as his daughter, never stands up for her when she is abused or beaten, and never shows her love. Her father’s coldness does not, however, mean that Vyry is completely deprived of love. She feels the love of “Aunt Sally” the cook until Aunt Sally is sold and Vyry is left alone. Aunt Sally’s fate makes Vyry realize the need to listen, rather than talk. She does her work as the house cook and tries to stay out of the way, for she knows the wrath of her marster’s wife. Vyry is keenly intelligent, and realizing she cannot change her situation at this time, she accepts her horrible fate and continues on with life. Vyry is, moreover, a woman of faith who tries to do good and to speak poorly of no one. She witnesses atrocities and tries her best not to dwell on them. She strengthens herself through prayer. Because she believes that God lives, and that he loves both black and white equally, Vyry finds inconceivable the inhumane treatment of black people by whites; even without being able to read and write, she knows that this is not God’s way. Vyry never considers freedom until she meets Randall Ware, a black man who was born free, has an education, and practices his own trade. Vyry meets him when he comes to the Dutton plantation to shoe some horses. Ware, instantly enamored of Vyry, offers her freedom in return for marriage. Although they marry and have two children, and although Ware helps many slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad, he is, ironically, unable to free his own wife because she is so closely watched by her owners. With the Civil War about to begin and an increasing number of runaway slaves, few can afford replacement costs and redouble their watchfulness over the slaves who remain. Ware is forced to leave Vyry when, on his way to visit her, he is nearly shot and killed. He learns that all people of color, even free blacks, will be forced into slavery if they remain in the South. He leaves her with the message to wait there until he returns. Vyry continues living in the house that supports slavery and the war. After the death of the marster, her husband, Big

Missy sends her son off to fight for slavery in clothing made by slaves. Despite the hopelessness of Vyry’s situation, Walker points out that not all Southerners supported the war and not all had been slave owners. Miss Lillian Dutton and her husband are educated and realize that war is not the best way to eradicate slavery. After pressure from his mother-in-law, however, Miss Lillian’s husband relents and leaves for war, in which he is killed. In fact, all the Dutton family dies or goes crazy during the war. Only Miss Lillian lives to see slaves set free. Shortly thereafter, she is injured and loses her mind; this illustrates that even the sane and the educated cannot escape the consequences of the wrong that permeated the entire region. True to her word, Vyry stays and waits for Ware at the Dutton plantation, working hard and providing for the family that remains. When he fails to appear, however, she consents to marry Innis Brown, a former slave freed by war and, together with her two children, Vyry and Innis set out in search of a life without slavery and a home of their own. Neither can read or write and neither has ever been outside of Georgia; yet even they have heard about free land and education that exists in some promised land farther north. Vyry’s greatest wish is that her children will learn to read and write. With her white background and experience as a house rather than a field slave, she does not realize for some years that Innis, a former field slave, harbors resentment against her unwitting condescension toward him. While on their search for a new home, they brave floods, fires, and sharecroppers. They learn a valuable and terrible lesson when their first home, a farm, is burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan. Innis wants to rebuild their home in the same place, but Vyry knows that the fire is just a warning and that they must leave immediately. They leave with government escorts and clothing donated by the church. Vyry also leaves with heavy feelings of resentment and anger, feelings of which she did not realize she was capable. Vyry had always taken everything in and she had never let anything out. She was harboring hurt and anger from years past and now she had the spirit of fear to go along with it. She would carry it for at least

JUNETEENTH 701

another year. She could not let it go until she realized that she must give it to God. After Vyry returned everything to God, her family immediately sensed a change in her. She was now a new and free woman surrounded by white neighbors who protected her.

NOVEL Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.

SOURCE Walker, Margaret. How I Wrote Jubilee. New York: Feminist Press, 1990. Kendra Haggard

JUNETEENTH RALPH ELLISON (1999) This controversial unfinished second novel was assembled by the scholar John F. Callahan from fragments written over 50 years and published posthumously. The novel consists of a dialogue between Adam Sunraider and Reverend Hickman, interwoven with their memories and dreams. Sunraider, otherwise known as Bliss, is a racist senator raised as a light-skinned African-American foundling by a black church community and his adopted father, the Reverend Hickman. Bliss chooses to pass as white, reject Hickman and the others, and build a political career on race-baiting. Fatally wounded by an assassin’s gun on the Senate floor at the novel’s opening, Adam Sunraider lies dying in a hospital and calls for Hickman, the great figure of his childhood. Though the senator seems initially to be the Invisible Man of the novel, the protagonist-hero narrating from a liminal space, reconstructing the past from a place outside of society, and though he becomes a more sympathetic character than Hickman as we uncover the details of his childhood, in fact it is the Reverend Hickman who harrows Invisible Man’s hole. The novel riffs on several themes in ELLISON’s celebrated first novel, and Hickman eventually finds a harmony of frequencies high and low, in the spirit of the famous last line of Invisible Man. He emerges as the hero of Ellison’s long cold war quest for democratic conversation and persistent dialogue. Hickman is the great overlooked character of cold war fiction and the fulfillment of Invisible Man’s emergent but not yet emerged state: his older, wiser, and visible self.

Ellison believed that democracy needs an “it-takestwo-to-tango binary response,” “an attitude of antagonistic cooperation” and would move forward in a “constant state of debate and contention,” as he put it in various essays. The dialogue that runs through Juneteenth, between Hickman and Bliss the senator, offers an example of this process. It picks up where the dialogue between the present and the past selves of IM in Invisible Man left off. But Bliss is a failed Huck Finn, a boy who in his moment of crisis chose differently and betrayed Jim: “Hickman is ‘Jim’ and Bliss is ‘Huck’ who cut out for the Territory,” says Ellison in a manuscript fragment. He notes in an essay that after dreaming of Lincoln, he returned to his “novel—which by the way has as its central incident the assassination of a Senator,” but Bliss the wounded senator is no slain Lincoln or Caesar, as Hickman acknowledges, remembering wistfully that in Bliss “we had hoped to raise ourselves that kind of man.” Too much a shape-shifter, Bliss is rather like Rinehart, from Invisible Man. In a pivotal scene at the end of the novel he looks at a car owned by three black men and thinks “it was an arbitrary assemblage of chassis, wheels, engine, hood, horns, none of which had ever been part of a single car.” He does not see the beauty and unity of the bricolage nation, America’s improvisation, what Ellison calls in essays “oneness-inmanyness,” or “unity-within-diversity.” For him it is just “a bastard creation of black bastards.” When the car door opens, the senator is hit by a blast of heat: It is the heat of the coal cellar in which IM lives, or that which hits Ellison in his famous essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” when he realizes that the little man behind the stove exists and “concrete evidence of his actual existence arose and blasted me like the heat from an internally combusted ton of coal.” A “dark hand reached down,” and he doesn’t know whether it is friend or enemy, for he will not see the invisible man, or the little man behind the stove. Unable to reach out and grasp the hand that reaches down perhaps to lift him up, the senator rejects dialogue and so civic friendship. He can’t complete the connection. But Hickman can. Both men preach for a living, one in church and the other in the Senate, but only Hick-

702

JUNGLE, THE

man is a dialogic citizen. When a storm blows in the roof of his church toward the end of the novel, so that the choir falters in its unified though harmoniously diversified singing, he stamps three times. Amid the “noisy confusion and whirling,” when his church is “plunged into darkness,” he offers a “foot-pounded rhythm . . . accompanied by . . . a snatch of a spiritual”: He provides the high frequencies of “melody” above the low frequencies of his “rhythm on the floor” in an echo of the last line of Invisible Man. At this moment he is like the old man who famously begins the singing at Tod Clifton’s funeral, “his voice rising above all the others” but in harmony with them. He sings above the bass of the storm and stamping, and out of the screaming and terror the “blended voices rise up in firm array against the thunder,” and “the pitch-black interior of the church had seemed to brighten and come aglow.” Hickman is Ellison’s unexpected hero, John the Baptist leading where the Jesus-child Bliss fails as hero and leader. Bliss hears still, in the very last line of Juneteenth, “the sound of Hickman’s consoling voice, calling from somewhere above.” Hickman has not given up on the senator and calls him still to dialogue. Initially felled by the bullet, the senator began: “Lord . . . why hast thou . . .” and across the Senate floor Hickman completed his call: “forsaken me.” He then initiated a calland-response during their first encounter in the hospital, when they perform an impromptu sermon together. He provides the “melodic line of [a] reminiscing voice” for the senator’s mind, itself the lower frequencies. And now he calls again, looking for the “you,” desiring what Ellison called the “give and take . . . of group improvisation.” He looks for dialogue and harmony. IM asks at the end of Ellison’s novel: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Ellison’s first novel begins with “I” and ends with “you,” ending even on a question: extending an invitation to dialogue. But speaking for and speaking with are different—only the latter is dialogic. After the manhole of Invisible Man, there would instead be Hickman’s “voice quietly calling,” though Bliss is a mind’s reach away, “fighting to live” and “too weary to respond”—as far as IM is from the world beyond his hole. Ellison could never finish

Juneteenth—and so, “I’m still with you. I’ll never leave now,” Hickman says, not closing the conversation.

SOURCES Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987. Callahan, John F., ed. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1952. ———. Juneteenth. New York: Vintage, 1999 (written 1954–94 and published unfinished posthumously). ———. Flying Home and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1996. Graham, Maryemma, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Watts, Jerry Gafio. Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Zoe Trodd

JUNGLE, THE UPTON SINCLAIR (1906) If all attempts at self-publishing were as successful as Upton SINCLAIR’s with The Jungle, that industry would be on fire. The novel was originally commissioned by Fred Warren, the editor of an American socialist journal, Appeal to Reason, who funded Sinclair’s research in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. When completed, it was not appealing to publishers of the day because of its gloom and radical content, so Sinclair advertised in Appeal to Reason and received nearly 1,000 orders. Telling Doubleday of the demand, the publisher decided that it did not want to miss the opportunity and published The Jungle in 1906. It became a bestseller internationally, and although Sinclair wrote 92 books and 29 pamphlets until his death in 1968, he never surpassed the fame and success he achieved with The Jungle. Perhaps even more important than its sales, the book had an impact on social and political policy. Despite President Theodore Roosevelt’s admonishments to Sinclair about the book’s socialism, Roosevelt ordered an investigation of the meatpacking industry, which led to the passing of the Pure Food

JUNGLE, THE 703

and Drugs Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906, which set in motion the development of the Food and Drug Administration. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is the centerpiece of a movement of investigative journalism, sometimes translated into sentimental fictional tales that hoped to right social wrongs. Disparagers of the movement, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt, called it muckraking (although it has been rumored that upon reading The Jungle, Roosevelt immediately threw his breakfast sausages out the window in disgust). Seen within an historical lens, The Jungle becomes more than the tale of Lithuanian immigrants living in appalling poverty during the 19th century and working in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, and even more than a well-researched critique of the disgusting conditions in that industry. It is an attempt at social revolution, at redirecting American political thinking toward a socialism that never really took hold. Sinclair, although grateful for the reforms that the book inspired, was disappointed that the socialist message of the novel was largely ignored, and he has been quoted as saying about the book, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident hit it in the stomach.” The novel begins with a wedding, that of the sturdy and optimistic main character, Jurgis, to Ona, the delicate wife he has brought, along with her entire family, to America from Lithuania in the hope of getting a fresh start. Lured by reports of high wages but not calculating a higher cost of living, the family makes its way to Chicago through many hardships and swindles, only to find a life of more struggle than they originally had. The reader experiences the endless hopelessness and gloom as the optimism of Jurgis is stripped away through horrifying events and observations such as the death of his wife in childbirth. Eventually, however, Jurgis experiences something of a redemption when he is indoctrinated into socialism through a series of meetings. He becomes convinced that labor unions are the answer to the problems he and his family have faced. The novel ends with the speech of a socialist orator claiming “We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!”

Criticism of the novel often includes the argument against its meltdown from narrative to socialist diatribe by the end of the book. Nevertheless, this blend of realism, fiction, investigative journalism, and political tract has made The Jungle frequently required reading in both literature and history classrooms. Seen strictly as a work of fiction, even the armchair critic can easily identify its faults: its ruthlessness in both content and structure, its preachy narrative interruptions, and an overhanded hopelessness. Yet it is also a snapshot of a tumultuous time in American history, and its intersection with the public policy of the time makes its value as a literary artifact inarguable. Serious students of the period may find useful uncensored editions of the book published after 1988, when the serialization that appeared in Appeal to Reason was discovered in the cellar of a farmhouse in Kansas, along with many of Sinclair’s letters and papers. The serialization of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and The Jungle, the uncensored original edition, are considerably longer than the second edition published by Doubleday. They contain more of the ethnic flavor and even more brutal descriptions of the meatpacking industry. These depictions were deleted from the Doubleday edition because they were thought to be too graphic for the reading public. Muckraking or not, good fiction or not, The Jungle is an important part of American literary history and should be read within historical context.

SOURCES Herms, Dieter, ed. Upton Sinclair: Literature and Social Reform. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1990. Kantor, Arlene Finger. “Upton Sinclair and the Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906,” American Journal of Public Health 66, no. 12 (1976): 1,202–1,205. Mookerjee, R. N. Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Pickavance, Jason. “Gastronomic Realism: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the Fight for Pure Food and the Magic of Mastication,” Food and Foodways: History & Culture of Human Nourishment 11, no. 2 (2003): 87–113. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001. ———. The Jungle: The Uncensored Edition. New York: Sharp Press, 2003.

704 JUNKY

———. The Lost First Edition of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” Edited by Gene Degruson. Paducah, Ky.: Saint Luke’s Press, 1988. Lynda Hinkle

JUNKY WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1953– ) William S. BURROUGHS authored his first novel, Junkie: The Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict, under the pseudonym William Lee. Published by Ace Books in 1953, the novel reappeared in 1977, published by Penguin Books, under the author’s given name and with the title Junky. The novel chronicles Lee’s career as a heroin addict who attempts to prolong and defeat his addiction. Lee’s simultaneously destructive and preservative habits are among the novel’s contradictory thematic and structural features. Junky consists of vignettes that gel into a coherent narrative. The reader should note, though, the unclear sense of time, which approximates a drug addict’s altered perception of reality: “As a habit takes hold, other interests lose importance to the user. Life telescopes down to junk, one fix and looking forward to the next . . . [t]he addict himself often feels that he is leading a normal life and that junk is incidental. He does not realize that he is just going through the motions in his non-junk activities” (22–23). Lee’s experiences with narcotics dovetail with Burroughs’s own addiction to heroin; in his works Burroughs fictionalized many of his life experiences. But the reader does not have to interpret the novel autobiographically. Jennie Skerl describes Junky as “fact . . . transmuted into fiction through selection, arrangement, tone, and point of view” (Skerl, 21). The novel’s tone is by turns detached and surreal; its point of view belongs to one familiar with drug culture. Lee asks, “Why does a man become a drug addict?” and answers, “he does not usually intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all” (xv). Here and elsewhere, Burroughs adopts a cautionary yet instructive tone, which should cause the reader to question Lee’s (and Burroughs’s) intentions. Lee’s prologue, separate from the main narrative, recounts his upper-middle-class origins, deflating the

stereotype that drug addicts belong to the lower classes. Later in the novel, Lee comments on class: “The American upper-middle-class citizen is a composite of negatives. He is largely delineated by what he is not” (41). Junky proper begins in New York City with Lee’s introduction to heroin and his association with various criminals, dealers, and addicts. Lee lyrically describes heroin’s effects: “Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm saltwater” (7). Lee forms a habit and begins dealing. He runs into trouble with local and federal law enforcement agencies, which forces Lee (and his wife, who appears rarely in the novel) from New York City to Kentucky for rehab, to Texas, to New Orleans (where he is arrested and imprisoned), back to Texas, and finally to Mexico City, where heroin and alcohol nearly kill him. A key motif in Junky is bodily discorporation. In his description of junk sickness Lee says, “kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk” (23). Interestingly, Burroughs’s motif often manifests itself in facial details. Lee provides scant physical descriptions of himself, save how he feels when he is on or off junk, but he almost always describes the faces of other characters, many of them junkies. Subway Mike, one of Lee’s criminal acquaintances, “had a large, pale face and long teeth” (11). Several junkies are described in terms of their faces: one is “thin . . . with a long, sharp, twitchy nose and a down-curving, toothless mouth”; another has “the skin drawn tight . . . and a spot of color on each cheekbone”; yet another is “blurred, unrecognizable, at the same time shrunken and tumescent” (30, 45, 58). Face imagery occurs often in the novel, usually in the context of junk but sometimes in the contexts of race, ethnicity, and gender. Why and how Lee describes faces could be attributed to his need for “factual classification of types” (Skerl, 24), but the matter remains open to interpretation. Burroughs shared a pen name with Junky’s protagonist, another way in which the novel skews the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Burroughs even

JUST, WARD 705

included, as a sort of appendix, a glossary of “junk talk” (153–58). Lee claims to “have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life” (xvi). By the novel’s end, Lee has temporarily conquered his habit but travels to Colombia in search of yage, a drug that supposedly grants telepathic abilities. Lee muses, “Maybe I will find in yage what I was looking for in junk and weed and coke. Yage may be the final fix” (152). Is Burroughs condemning drug use, glorifying a bohemian life, or merely describing heroin’s effects on one’s mind, body, and social relations? The answer may be all, some, or none of these. Timothy S. Murphy advises to “be leery of the idea . . . that the junky represents a kind of revolutionary figure simply because of the enormous apparatus of institutional power that is mobilized to constrain him,” suggesting instead that Lee is “not so much subversive as antiproductive” (Murphy, 55). In any case, Junky serves as a blueprint for Burroughs’s later fictional works, including Naked Lunch (1962) and Queer (1985). The latter novel chronicles Lee’s search for yage and his homosexual exploits in South America. Burroughs wrote Queer immediately after Junky, but it remained unpublished for more than 30 years. In Naked Lunch, the last book deemed obscene and banned in the United States, Burroughs explodes the confines of traditional narrative and brings to fruition the social, cultural, and literary concerns he first explored in Junky.

SOURCES Burroughs, William S. Junky. Introduction by Allen Ginsberg. New York: Penguin, 1977. Harris, Oliver. William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Johnston, Allan. “The Burroughs Biopathy: William S. Burroughs’s Junky and Naked Lunch and Reichian Theory,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 4, no. 1 (1984): 107–120. Murphy, Timothy S. Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Russell, Jamie. Queer Burroughs. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Skerl, Jennie. William S. Burroughs. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 438. Edited by Warren French. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Corey M. Taylor

JUST, WARD (1935– ) Ward Just, famed as a journalist and the author of 15 novels, was named a finalist for the National Book Award for Echo House, published in 1997. In 2001, Just won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for A Dangerous Friend, cited as the best historical novel on an American theme. He shared this award with Peter MATTHIESSEN for Bone by Bone. Just’s political novels, usually set in Europe, are praised for their comprehensive coverage of government, diplomacy, the military services, and the intelligence agencies, as well as their realistic detail and credibility. His midwestern novels, on the other hand, evoke a sense of what he calls “this flat, endless, rather sullen part of the world” where “people’s eyes are always swiveling between the east and the west coasts, wondering what’s going to befall them next, what’s the latest outrage coming their way” (Steinberg, 32). Ward Just was born on September 5, 1935, in Michigan City, Indiana, to Franklin Ward Just, a newspaper publisher, and Elizabeth Swift Just. He began his career as a reporter in 1957 and spent more than three decades working for several news publications, including Newsweek and the Washington Post. Eventually he moved from news coverage to writing novels about the news events he had covered. His solid reputation as someone who understands the labyrinthine routes to power in Washington, D.C., surfaces in the five novels he published in the 1970s: A Soldier of the Revolution (1970); Stringer (1974); Nicholson at Large (1975); A Family Trust (1978); and Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women (1979). His sixth novel, In the City of Fear (1983), opens with a 1971 dinner party in Washington, D.C., where the power structure—politicians, diplomats, military officers, and spies—has gathered. As the critic William J. Searle notes, Just’s conscious use of language “to capture the behind-the-scenes war—one of duplicity, subterfuge, and deception—results in a linguistic feast” (Searle, 40). Just continued to write novels that combine his considerable imaginative skills with his knowledge of political intrigue and keen insights into the American psyche: The American Blues (1984), The American Ambassador (1987), and Jack Gance (1989) are set in both Washington and the Midwest. In contrast to these novels The Translator (1991) is a “commanding psychological and political novel” (PW,

706

JUST, WARD

88); here Sydney Van Damm, a German expatriate and translator and his New England–born wife Angela, live in Paris. Ambition and Love (1994), again set in Paris, eschews political intrigue for romance and focuses on expatriate painter Georgia Whyte and expatriate novelist Harry Forrest. With Echo House (1997), a “political novel par excellence” (PW, 1997, 209), Just returned to Washington to depict the generations-long political involvement of the Behl family: Adolph, a senator, his son Axel, wounded during a World War II Office of Strategic Services mission; and grandson Alex, an attorney. At Echo House, the family mansion, the rooms become smaller from front to back, symbolizing “the shrinking expectations and moral fortitude of its inhabitants” (Seaman, 1997). Moving back to 1965 Vietnam, A Dangerous Friend (2001) depicts a naive protagonist, Sydney Parade. He leaves behind in Connecticut a wife and daughter and unwittingly causes tragic loss of life on a massive scale. The novel has been compared to those of Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and Joan DIDION. In The Weather in Berlin (2002) 64-year-old filmmaker Dixon Greenwood, a complex individual with a past that embodies the German national psyche, is on a fellowship in 1999 to Berlin. Ward Just’s most recent novel, An Unfinished Season (2004), set in the mid–20th century is, according to Just, “the third of what I think of as my Midwestern books” (Steinberg, 32). In its Chicago setting, it offers a sharply detailed evocation of McCarthyism and American class divisions during the Korean War period. Ward Just was married twice (to Jean Ramsay and Anne Burling) before marrying Sara Catchpole. They divide their time between Martha’s Vineyard and Europe.

NOVELS Ambition and Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. The American Ambassador. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. The American Blues. New York: Viking, 1984. An Unfinished Season. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. A Dangerous Friend. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

Echo House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. A Family Trust. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women. New York: Dutton, 1979. In the City of Fear. New York: Viking, 1983. Jack Gance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. A Soldier of the Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1970. Stringer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Nicholson at Large. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975. The Translator. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. The Weather in Berlin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

SOURCES Hooper, Brad. “Noteworthy Prizes,” Booklist, 1 June 2001, p. 1,804. Seaman, Donna. Review of Ambition and Love, Booklist, 15 May 1994, p. 1,665. ———. Review of A Dangerous Friend, Booklist, 15 March 1999, p. 1,260. ———. Review of Echo House, Booklist, 15 April 1997, p. 1,386. ———. Review of An Unfinished Season, Booklist, 15 May 2004, p. 1,612. Searle, William J. “Behind the Scenes: Ward Just’s Washington,” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 23, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 37–42. Steinberg, Sybil. “The Midwest as a State of Mind,” Publishers Weekly, 17 May 2004, p. 32. Unsigned review of Ambition and Love, Publishers Weekly, 4 April 1994, p. 56. Unsigned review of A Dangerous Friend, Publishers Weekly, 15 February 1999, p. 83. Unsigned review of Echo House, Publishers Weekly, 17 February 1997, p. 209. Unsigned review of The Translator, Publishers Weekly, 28 June 1991, p. 88. Unsigned review of An Unfinished Season, Kirkus Reviews 72, no. 9 (May 1, 2004): 415. Unsigned review of An Unfinished Season, Publishers Weekly, 17 May 2004, p. 31. Unsigned review of The Weather in Berlin, Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 7 (April 1, 2002): 444. Unsigned review of The Weather in Berlin, Publishers Weekly, 18 March 2002, p. 72.

C

KD novel, however, Francie, in love with Mark, a fellow college student, finds strength and hope through ancestral heritage and love. Kadohata’s children’s book KiraKira won the Newberry Medal in 2004. Kadohata, a third-generation Japanese American like her protagonists, was born in Chicago in 1956 and earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California. Her real-life travels with her family across the United States provided the basis for her first novel, while her injury in a car accident at age 21 appears in Francie’s experience. As Kadohata comments in an interview, “I think this book ends on a hopeful note. Yes, this can happen and everything will be okay. Writing the book may have purged my fears” (See, 49). Although she does not claim to write for all Japanese Americans, much less for all Asian Americans, Kadohata, writing “from the heart,” evokes memorably believable, strong Japanese-American characters.

KADOHATA, CYNTHIA (1956– ) Cynthia Kadohata, who has been compared to Mark TWAIN, Jack KEROUAC, Raymond Carver, and William FAULKNER, has received positive reviews from both readers and critics for her two novels, The Floating World (1989) and In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1997). Set in the 1950s, when fresh memories of the Japanese internment and anti-Japanese sentiments still predominated in much of the United States, The FLOATING WORLD is narrated by Olivia, its 12-year-old Japanese-American protagonist, who has already lived in California, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, and who travels with her family across America in search of jobs and a stable community. The journey portrays Olivia’s relationship to her issei grandmother, who wishes the resistant Olivia to absorb the Japanese cultural heritage, and her nisei parents, who, in contrast, “desperately” try to “assimilate themselves into American culture” (Yu, 122). By the end of this female bildungsroman, Kadohata has constructed for Olivia “a floating existence” where she can “both maintain her Japanese heritage” and “enjoy her freedom,” American style (Yu, 123). In the Heart of the Valley of Love, set in Los Angeles in the year 2052, features Francie, an Olivia-like protagonist whose story begins where Olivia’s ended. Nineteenyear-old Francie has been injured in a car accident, but she perseveres and decides to enter college. There she learns about class differences—and that she, whose parents were Chinese, Japanese, and black, belongs on the lower end of the spectrum. By the conclusion of the

NOVELS The Floating World. New York: Ballantine Books, 1989. In the Heart of the Valley of Love. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Kira-Kira. New York: Atheneum, 2004.

SOURCES Pearlman, Mickey. “Cynthia Kadohata.” In Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write, 112–120. New York: Norton, 1993. Roth, John K., ed. “Cytnhia Kadohata.” In American Diversity, American Identity, 603–606. New York: Holt, 1995.

707

708 KANG, YOUNGHILL

See, Lisa. “PW Interview: Cynthia Kadohata,” Publishers Weekly, August 3, 1992, pp. 48–49. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “The Politics of Mobility.” In Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, 118–165. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Yogi, Stan. “Japanese American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by KingKok Cheung, 125–155. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Yu, Su-lin. “Cynthia Kadohata.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 120–126. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000.

traveling through the United States in the 1920s; it depicts both his quest for higher education and the often painful and humiliating process of assimilation. The Chinese-American critic Frank Chin compares Kang’s work to that of Jade Snow WONG, a pioneering writer who predates Maxine Hong KINGSTON and Amy TAN (Chung). Before his death in 1972 from postoperative complications of a massive stroke, Kang had been professor of comparative literature at New York University.

KANG, YOUNGHILL (1903–1972)

SOURCES

Younghill Kang, “the father of Korean American literature” (Henry Kim), wrote The Grass Roof (1931), a story of a young man’s life in Korea before he immigrated to the United States. He later published East Goes West, a more mature novel that he preferred. Both stories describe the protagonist’s disillusionment as he encounters racism and prejudice in America, themes that, according to the scholar Charse Yun, are recurrent in KoreanAmerican literature: “the trauma, loss, displacement and [the] haunting persistence of Korea’s historical legacy, which even impinges upon the lives of those Korean Americans born and raised in the United States and who are divorced from Korean culture” (Yun). Younghill Kang was born in 1903 in Hamkyong Province in northern Korea to a farmer and his wife, whose names are unknown. After immigrating to the United States in 1921, he studied at Boston University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1925 and a master’s degree from Harvard University in 1927. He married Frances Keeley, who was educated at Wellesley College. The author Thomas WOLFE encouraged Kang, and after reading parts of the manuscript of The Grass Roof, recommended it to his editor at Scribner. As the scholar Elaine Kim notes, the publication of The Grass Roof coincided with Pearl BUCK’s The GOOD EARTH (1931), and this meant that The Grass Roof was overlooked in the avalanche of attention focused on Buck’s Pulitzer Prize winner. East Goes West, Kang’s next novel, is a bildungsroman about Chungpa Han, a man

NOVELS East Goes West. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937. The Grass Roof. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931.

Fenkl, Heinz Insu, and Walter K. Lew, eds. Kori: The Beacon Anthology of Korean American Fiction. Boston: Beacon, 2001. Kim, Elaine H. “Younghill Kang: Searching for a Door to America.” In Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, 32–43. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Lee, Kyhan. “Younghill Kang and the Genesis of KoreanAmerican Literature,” Korea Journal 31, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 63–78. Strange, David. “Thomas Wolfe’s Korean Connection,” Thomas Wolfe Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 36–41. Wade, James. “Younghill Kang’s Unwritten Third Act,” Korea Journal 13, no. 4 (April 1973): 57–61. Yun, Chung-Hei. “Beyond Clay Walls: Korean American Literature.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 79–95. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

OTHER Kim, Elaine H. “Younghill Kang.” In the Heath Anthology of American Literature, 4th ed., edited by Paul Lauter. Available online. URL: http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/ heath/4e/students/author_pages/modern/kang_yo.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KATE VAIDEN REYNOLDS PRICE (1986) Begun in 1984, Kate Vaiden was about one-third completed when a tumor was discovered braided in the core of Reynolds Price’s spinal cord (Schiff, 8). Surgery, radiation treatment, and paraplegia followed. Two years later, in 1986, the novel was published and won the National

KATE VAIDEN 709

Book Critics Circle Award. This was in the dead center of a period (1984–88) that Price refers to in his 1994 memoir A Whole New Life and elsewhere as “the eye of the storm.” Kate Vaiden is in all ways a watershed text. In a review of Kate Vaiden for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the novel “tender and frightening, lyrical and dramatic” and observed that it was “the product of a storyteller working at the full height of his artistic powers.” Acclaimed by critics, it was also one of his most commercially successful books, and its publication marks the beginning of Price’s most prolific period (he would publish 14 books in the years between 1986 and 1995). But the novel is stylistically significant within Price’s body of work as well. Written in the first person, Kate Vaiden introduces a shift in language and tone, as well as of focus, to the personal voice. These factors mark the novel as distinct from the writing of his earlier periods but of a piece with the work that will follow it. In his introduction to Understanding Reynolds Price, James Schiff writes, “The Price of recent years . . . is drawn to . . . a storytelling ‘I,’ who is most often a late middle-aged Southerner with a strong need to reflect on the distant past. This ‘I’ . . . has also plunged more openly into those questions concerning religion, sexuality, gender and race which have long been crucial to the author” (Schiff, 10). Price’s concern with these questions is evident in Kate Vaiden. The story, told by a middle-aged Kate recovering from cervical cancer and contemplating getting in touch with her son, Lee, whom she abandoned 40 years earlier, is set primarily in Macon, North Carolina, and Norfolk, Virginia, largely between 1938 and 1945, so against the backdrop of World War II, which is seemingly removed from but actually integral to the context and metaphorical meanings of the text. The novel is focused mainly on Kate’s life between the ages of 11, when her parents’ dangerous passions erupt, ending both their lives and leaving young Kate in the care of Caroline and Holt Porter (who raised Kate’s mother, Frances, after the death of her mother and who will be left to raise Kate’s son), and 18, when she abruptly leaves home and family. The reviewer Rosellen Brown observes that the book “teems with

orphans and murderous and suicidal generations,” and indeed Kate’s life is marked by significant figures who fall into one or more of these categories. Her mother, Frances, who is an orphan, is shot by Kate’s father, Dan, who then kills himself (though their story contains a great deal of ambiguity, something Price plays with throughout the text). Kate’s lovers are also suicides. Gaston Stegall inexplicably kills himself immediately before their planned elopement, and later, Douglas Lee, an orphan with a violent streak and the father of Kate’s son, shoots himself in a bathtub where Kate finds him later. Joseph Dewey argues persuasively that “Kate Vaiden’s life is shaped by the dark logic of suicide” (Dewey, 206) and that the novel gives us to see that “Kate fails not as a woman, or a lover, or even a mother; she is ultimately a bad student” (Dewey, 216) who does not learn the important lessons these suicides should have taught her about the importance of transcending the self, entering into communion with others, and thus expanding to meet her full potential as a human being. These concerns are central to Price’s corpus of work, and Kate is another of his “outlaw” characters, “marvelous to listen to but quite often difficult to live with” (Schiff, 17). What Kate learns from these suicides and abandonments is the primacy and isolation of the self, and as she puts it, to “leave others before they can plan to leave you.” With careless disregard, Kate walks out on every person who offers her love, friendship, or even simple human kindness. Critical debate about the text centers on three related issues: Is the voice of Kate Vaiden authentic, is her narration reliable, and what are we to make of Kate Vaiden, a woman who without regret abandons everyone who loves her, including an infant son? In answer to the first question, the arguments of Dewey and Schiff—picking up from Price’s own belief expressed in a 1986 review essay titled “Men Creating Women” that a writer can enter “our mutual room” of shared rather than tensive gender— reflect the experience of most readers with the voice of Kate Vaiden, which is both compelling and genuine. The answers to the other questions are harder to come by, given the ambiguity and uncertainty Price

710

KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, THE

aims to generate in this complex and engrossing story, and the ways in which Kate is at once an extremely sympathetic storyteller and in many ways an extremely unsympathetic character. Regardless of how we read Kate, though, her voice is impossible to dismiss, and her story is unforgettable.

SOURCES Brown, Rosellen. “Travels with a Dangerous Woman.” In Critical Essays on Reynolds Price, edited by James A. Schiff, 96–100. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Dewey, Joseph. “A Time to Bolt: Suicide, Androgyny, and the Dislocation of the Self in Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden.” In Critical Essays on Reynolds Price, edited by James A. Schiff, 206–222. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Kakutani, Michiko. “Book of the Times,” New York Times, 24 June 1986, p. C17. Schiff, James, ed. Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. ———. Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

OTHER Price, Reynolds. “Men Creating Women.” New York Times (9 November 1986). Available online. URL: http://partners. nytimes.com/books/98/07/12/specials/price-men.html. Accessed November 11, 2004. Aimee Berger

KEEPERS OF THE HOUSE, THE SHIRLEY ANN GRAU (1964) Shirley Ann GRAU’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Keepers of the House, offers its readers a glimpse into the history of the Howland family—pillars of their rural Southern community—from the early 1800s through the middle of the 20th century. Telling her story in the form of a flashback, Grau opens her narrative with Abigail Howland Mason Tolliver, the protagonist’s granddaughter, who informs the reader of the racial strife of the fictional town, Madison City, in which the Howlands have prospered for over a century. Having lost his first wife years earlier, William Howland secretly marries his African-American housekeeper, Margaret Carmichael, and has three children with her. Yet the marriage suggests no love story. The African-American woman in the novel is generally assigned to the role of servant; Margaret Carmichael

not only keeps the Howland household, she meets William Howland’s sexual needs as well. In fact, Abigail can recall only one time that she witnessed a gesture of affection between the couple (Kissell, 47). Yet William Howland opposes the social mores of the segregated South in that he marries Margaret—albeit in secret—therefore legalizing the births of their offspring (Kissell, 214). Although the community of Madison City learns of the clandestine marriage long after both William and Margaret are dead, Grau demonstrates the unfortunate truth that people can sustain racist beliefs and assert bigoted attitudes for generations. Because the Howland family owns most of the land in town, and the Howland farm supplies many of the small businesses in Madison City with food and other commodities, the townspeople rely heavily on the Howlands for their livelihood. But a conflict arises between Abigail—the heir of the Howland fortune— and the segregationist townspeople after the local newspaper confirms that William Howland and Margaret Carmichael had officially married in 1928. In a violent display of their opposition to miscegenation, the townspeople vandalize the Howland homestead, setting the barn ablaze and disrupting the nearby stable and smokehouses. Infuriated by the damage to her property and the degradation to the memory of her maternal grandfather, Abigail vows to dismantle the town economically by closing all her family’s businesses and cutting off supplies to those who rely on the Howland empire for trade. Thus, Abigail is last in the long line of vigilant keepers of the Howland house. Grau’s text does more than offer an engaging story of the Howland family dynasty, however. Grau illuminates the tremendous discrimination that African Americans confront in the United States and presents an overview of the complicated history of the South. Furthermore, Grau comments on the status of white women in the South and advances one of the arguments established by her literary foremothers Eudora WELTY, Carson MCCULLERS, and Flannery O’CONNOR, that women are confined to the home by a rigid Southern system that undermines and undervalues them; that is, the Southern patriarchy benefits from keeping women out of the marketplace, suggesting, as Anne

KELLER, NORA OKJA 711

Jones notes, the ornamental function of women in the South. “Constantly chaperoned, economically dependent, denied development, the actual lives of women became part of the ‘vast unsaid’ left out of the plantation literature—a literature that extolled Southern womanhood in its defense of the Southern way of life” (Jones, 22). Moreover, Jones describes the prominent symbol of the Southern lady—a symbol that threads throughout Grau’s text: “[T]he southern lady is at the core of a region’s self-definition; the identity of the South is contingent in part upon the persistence of its tradition of the lady” (Jones, 4). Only at the end of the novel, when Abigail is abandoned by her Ku Klux Klansman husband and her estate has been ravaged by the townsmen, does she vow to avenge what has been done to her. She vehemently rejects the script of the “Southern lady” that has been imposed on her—and that of the dutiful daughter, wife, and mother that she has played out. At the novel’s end, Abigail asserts herself outside the home, claiming access to traditionally male arenas—and claiming it fiercely. While Grau considers race and gender as important categories of analysis in her work, she considers also the category of the body—and the manner in which the treatment of black and white bodies intersects with attitudes about race and gender in the South. Patricia Yaeger argues that “the uncanny presence of disposable bodies” is a category worth investigation in Southern women’s writing (Yaeger, 67). Yaeger asserts: “We must pay attention to the difficult figure of the throwaway body—to women and men whose bodily harm does not matter enough to be registered or repressed—who are not symbolically central, who are looked over, looked through, who become a matter of public and private indifference—neither important enough to be disavowed nor part of white southern culture’s dominant emotional economy” (Yaeger, 68, original emphasis). The townspeople’s reference to William and Margaret’s children as “wood colts” (Grau, 242) and the comfort the town takes in knowing that all three children were sent away from Madison City suggests that Robert’s, Nina’s, and Crissy’s bodies are disposable, and as such, completely insignificant to the community in which they were born. Abigail confesses that

she, in fact, dismisses the African Americans with whom she lives in Madison City. “I had done what most white people around here did—knew a Negro and dealt with him for years, and never found out his name. Never got curious about who he was, and what he was called. As if Negroes didn’t need identities” (Grau, 233). While the system of slavery most clearly exemplifies the black body as disposable, Yaeger’s assertion can be extended to the injustice that African Americans endure on a daily basis in this racially divided small town.

SOURCES Grau, Shirley Ann. The Keepers of the House. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Kissel, Susan S. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Ann Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Carla Lee Verderame

KELLER, NORA OKJA (1965– ) Nora Keller, a journalist, wrote COMFORT WOMAN (1997), the first novel in the United States to disclose the victimization of Korean women as sex slaves by the Japanese during World War II. Told from the perspective of a Korean-American daughter who cannot comprehend her mother’s eccentric behavior, Comfort Woman won the American Book Award and was praised for the skillful treatment of a subject that the Japanese government had tried to keep secret. As the Los Angeles Times Book Review critic Merle Rubin said, “The ugly story of the women and girls forced to serve as ‘comfort women’ in the ‘recreation camps’ designed to accommodate the sexual needs of Japanese soldiers during World War II took a long time to come to light” (Rubin, 9). Comfort Woman tells the story of Akiko, the Korean mother who was one of nearly 200,000 Korean women who were beaten, tortured, and forced to have sex with scores of Japanese soldiers each night. It is

712 KENNEDY, WILLIAM

also the story of the relationship between Akiko (Soon Hyo) Bradley and her daughter Beccah, who, since the death of Akiko’s husband, an American missionary, live a penurious existence in Hawaii. Only after Akiko’s death, when Beccah is 30, does she learn of her mother’s painful past. Nora Keller was born on December 22, 1965, in Seoul, Korea, to Robert Cobb and Tae Im Ku. She earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Hawaii and a master’s at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She lives with her husband in Waipahu, Hawaii, and has also written a novel titled Fox Girl (2002).

NOVELS Comfort Woman. New York: Viking, 1997. Fox Girl. New York: Viking, 2002.

SOURCES Unsigned Review of Comfort Woman, Publishers Weekly 6 January 1997, p. 61. Farley, Christopher John. “No Man’s Land,” Time, 5 May 1997, pp. 101–102. Funderburg, Lise. Review of Comfort Woman, New York Times Book Review, 31 August 1997, p. 14. Rubin, Merle. “The Haunting,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 23 March 1997, p. 9. Wilkinson, Joanne. Review of Comfort Woman, Booklist, 15 March 1997, p. 1,226.

KENNEDY, WILLIAM (1928– ) William Kennedy will forever be associated with his Albany novels, principally IRONWEED (1983), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984. Ironweed was preceded by novels that progressed from a superficial to an almost mythic concern with Albany: The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978). Like James Joyce’s Dublin or William FAULKNER’s Yoknapatawpha County, Kennedy’s Albany—interconnected through novels he calls his Albany cycle— chronicles the history of a specific place, yet through symbols and myth addresses universal concerns. William Kennedy was born January 16, 1928, in Albany, New York, to William J. Kennedy, a deputy sheriff, and Mary Elizabeth MacDonald Kennedy, a secretary. As he has told interviewers, Kennedy was reared

among upstate Irish Americans involved in local politics. He graduated from Siena College with a bachelor’s degree in 1949, served in the U.S. Army from 1950 to 1952, and married Ana Daisy (Dana) Sosa, a former actress and dancer, in 1957. After a career as an awardwinning journalist, Kennedy wrote his first novel, The Ink Truck, a book less mature than his later fiction but that contains early versions of later Kennedy characters. During a 1964 strike at the Albany Times-Union, Bailey, a prototype of Kennedy’s Irish Americans, transcends his ordinary, often violence-filled life and acts with moral purpose. Legs (1975) refers to John T. Diamond, alias Legs Diamond, the 1920s gangster who was one of Albany’s sources of bootleg whiskey and a murderer; Kennedy mixes historical fact and fiction in his portrayal of Legs’s wife, Alice, and girlfriend Marion, and presents Legs as both humane and murderous. That complexity contributed to his mythic status after his death in a rooming house. (Kennedy later purchased this building.) Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978) introduces this family, along with the McCalls, based on the historical O’Connells, “one of the nation’s longest-running political machines” (Reilly, 3), for and with whom a number of Kennedy’s ancestors worked. The novel evolved from a series of articles on Albany that Kennedy wrote for the Times-Union, and the title refers to a series of psychological, political, and sexual games that the characters play with each other. Ironweed depicts three days in the life of Francis Phelan, a loner who returns to his hometown of Albany after two decades of wandering. The novel chronicles Francis’s flight as a young man from family and responsibility through the Depression-era world of bums and hoboes, through a mythic Dante-esque world of hell and damnation, through interaction with the strong personalities of Annie Phelan, his wife, and Helen Archer, his friend, to a world where he consciously intends to fight wrongdoing and injustice. Quinn’s Book (1988) is set in the 19th century, just after Daniel Quinn has left Ireland for America; it provides the family histories for characters in the early novels and for the next, Very Old Bones (1992). This novel, set in the late 1950s but containing frequent flashbacks, provides more information about the Phe-

KEROUAC, JACK 713

lan family. It features Peter Phelan’s bastard son, Orson Purcell, who, like many Kennedy characters, falls from grace only to be redeemed. The Flaming Corsage, focusing on the dramatic romance between Katrina Taylor and Edward Daugherty, appeared in 1996, and Roscoe, the most recent installment in the Albany cycle, appeared in 2003. William Kennedy is a professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Albany. For his Albany cycle, he has earned comparisons with Theodore DREISER, Sherwood ANDERSON, and James T. FARRELL as well as with Faulkner and Joyce. Ironweed was a feature film released by Orion in 1988. His most recent novel, Roscoe, was nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award.

NOVELS Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game. New York: Viking, 1978. The Flaming Corsage. New York: Viking, 1996. The Ink Truck. New York: Dial, 1969. Ironweed. New York: Viking, 1983. Legs. New York: Coward, 1975. Quinn’s Book. New York: Viking, 1988. Roscoe. New York: Viking, 2002. Very Old Bones. New York: Viking, 1992.

SOURCES Baruth, Philip. “William Kennedy on the Surreal and the Unconscious, the Religious, the Sublime, and the Gonzo,” New England Review 19, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 116–126. Bauer, Douglas. “Talking With William Kennedy,” Washington Post Book World, 16 January 1993, p. 6. Croyden, Margaret. “The Sudden Fame of William Kennedy,” New York Times Magazine, 26 August 1984, pp. 33f. Flanagan, Thomas. “O Albany!” New York Review of Books, 25 April 2002, p. 1. Giamo, Benedict F. The Homeless of Ironweed: Blossoms on the Crag. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Reading William Kennedy. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001. Heron, Kim. “The Responsibility of Carrying the Dead,” New York Times Book Review, 22 May 1988, Sec. 7, p. 4. Lynch, Vivian Valvano. Portraits of Artists: Warriors in the Novels of William Kennedy. Bethesda, Md.: International Scholars Publications, 1999. McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Michener, Christian. From Then Into Now: William Kennedy’s Albany Novels. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1998. Reilly, Edward C. William Kennedy. New York: Twayne, 1991. Seshachari, Neila C., ed. Conversations with William Kennedy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. ———. “Courtesans, Stars, Wives & Vixens: The Many Faces of Female Power in Kennedy’s Novels,” AWP Conference, Albany, N.Y., April 17, 1999. Sheppard, R. Z. “Stealing From Himself,” Time, 13 May 1996, p. 92. Stokvis, Irene. “First Novelists: Twenty-Five New Writers— Fall 1969—Discuss Their First Published Novels,” Library Journal 94 (October 1, 1969): 34–75. Van Dover, J. K. Understanding William Kennedy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991.

OTHER Mallon, Thomas. “William Kennedy’s Greatest Game.” Atlantic Monthly (February 2002). Available online. URL: http:// www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200202/mallon. Accessed September 19, 2005. William Kennedy. Available online. URL: http://www.albany. edu/writers-inst/ironweed.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Wired for Books. Audio Interviews with William Kennedy. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ williamkennedy/. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KEROUAC,

JACK

(JEAN-LOUIS)

(1922–1969) Jack Kerouac became an American legend with the publication of his now classic, but once notorious, novel ON THE ROAD (1957). During the cold war era of the late 1950s, Kerouac and the Beat generation captured the imagination of the American public. As the novelist William S. BURROUGHS said, On the Road “sold a trillion Levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road” (Charters, 1991, xxviii). This chronicle of Kerouac’s American journeys, written in an exuberant, spontaneous style, remains the best known of Kerouac’s 19 books, although he personally preferred Visions of Cody (published posthumously in 1972), and actually envisioned all his work as one big book: Taken together in all its parts, he called it the Legend of Duluoz. Jack Duluoz is in fact Kerouac himself and a conscious

714 KEROUAC, JACK

salute to Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In Kerouac’s legend, he participates, on the one hand, and observes and records, on the other. He and his cohort flee tradition and conformity in search of an alternative, admittedly romantic and idealistic self-fulfillment. In the almost four decades since Kerouac’s death at age 47, readers and critics have begun to understand the imaginative and lyric genius of his vision. Critics, particularly, see that he is part of an American literary tradition that includes Mark TWAIN’s ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Leaves of Grass. Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Leo Alcide Kerouac, a printer, and Gabrielle-Ange Levesque Kerouac, a shoe factory employee. Kerouac spent the first part of World War II in the merchant marine (1942), then the navy (1943), from which he was discharged on psychiatric grounds, and returned to the merchant marine for the remainder of the war. In 1944 he married Frankie Parker but they soon separated; the marriage was annulled in 1945. He attended Columbia University from 1940 to 1942 and the New School for Social Research from 1948 to 1949, but he did not graduate. It was in New York that he met the men who would become his friends, serve as models for the characters in On the Road, and establish the Beat movement, the revolutionary experimental literary movement of the mid-20th century: the poet Allen Ginsberg, the novelist William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. His first novel, The Town and the City (1950), is a semiautobiographical story of a New England family scattered by World War II. On the Road, reportedly written in its initial version on one continuous roll of paper and comprising four major parts, depicts Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Dean Moriarty (Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (Burroughs), and other Beat characters as they travel the United States. The novel, narrated by Sal, spotlights Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” style and shows Sal torn between the counterculture lifestyle of his friends and the stable lifestyle that is its opposite. In The DHARMA BUMS (1959), protagonist Japhy Ryder is inspired by the poet Gary Snyder, who teaches the West Coast adventurers about Buddhism. The Subterraneans (1958) tells the

tale of Kerouac’s 1953 love affair with an AfricanAmerican woman. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (1959) is a surreal rendition of Kerouac’s boyhood; Maggie Cassidy (1959), an account of Kerouac’s first love, and Tristessa (1960), set during the 1950s, as is The Dharma Bums, depicts Kerouac’s love affair in Mexico City. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education 1935–46 (1968) recounts Kerouac’s high school experiences playing football at the Horace Mann School, and later at Columbia University. Big Sur (1962), set in the early 1960s, reflects Kerouac’s increasing bitterness and alcoholism, while Visions of Gerard (1963) explains Kerouac’s boyhood shadowed by the death of his beloved brother at age nine. Desolation Angels (1965) covers the years just before Kerouac published On the Road. The main character Cody in Visions of Cody (1972), like Dean Moriarty of On The Road, is a version of Neal Cassady, the Beat version of Huck Finn or an older Holden Caulfield. Jack Kerouac died on October 21, 1969, in St. Petersburg, Florida, of alcoholism. He had married twice more, to Joan Haverty in 1950, and to Stella Stampas in 1966. He is firmly ensconced in American literature, although scholars continue to debate whether he is in the idealistic tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, MELVILLE, and Whitman or shares the bleaker vision of Edgar Allan POE and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE. The Subterraneans was adapted as a film by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1960, starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron. Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake, a screenplay written by Kerouac based on his novel Doctor Sax, was discovered and published by his nephew, Jim Sampas. Kerouac also wrote the unpublished novels “The Sea Is My Brother,” “Buddha Tells Us,” and “Secret Mullings about Bill,” and, with William S. Burroughs, in the 1940s, the unpublished novel “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.” Allen Ginsberg and other poets created the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. In January 2004, the original manuscript of On the Road spurred a fouryear, 13-city tour organized by Jim Irsay, who had recently acquired the manuscript.

NOVELS Big Sur. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962.

KESEY, KEN 715

Desolation Angels. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965. The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking, 1958. Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three. New York: Grove, 1959. Maggie Cassidy: A Love Story. New York: Avon, 1959. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1957. The Subterraneans. New York: Grove, 1958. The Town and the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. Tristessa. New York: Avon, 1960. Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935–46. New York: Coward-McCann, 1968. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Visions of Gerard. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963.

SOURCES Amburn, Ellis. The Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Anstee, Rod, ed. Jack Kerouac: The Bootleg Era: A Bibliography of Pirated Editions. Sudbury, Mass.: Water Row Press, 1994. Cassady, Carolyn. Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Co., 1977. ———. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: Morrow, 1990. Challis, Chris. Quest for Kerouac. Winchester, Mass.: Faber, 1984. Charters, Ann. “Introduction.” In Jack Kerouac, On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1991, xxvii. ———. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow, 1973. ———, ed. Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940–1956. New York: Viking, 1995. Clark, Tom. Jack Kerouac: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanavich, 1984. Cook, Bruce. The Beat Generation. New York: Scribner, 1971. French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978. Holton, Robert. On the Road: Kerouac’s Ragged American Journey. New York: Twayne, 1999. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981. Jarvis, Charles E. Visions of Kerouac. Lowell, Mass.: Ithaca Press, 1973, 3rd edition, 1994. McClure, Michael. Scratching the Beat Surface: Essays on New Vision from Blake to Kerouac. New York: Penguin, 1994. McDarragh, Fred W., and Gloria S. McDarragh. Beat Generation: Glory Days in Greenwich Village. New York: Schirmer, 1996.

McNally, Dennis. Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. New York: Grove Press, 1983. Turner, Steve. Angelheaded Hipster: A Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: Viking, 1997. Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.

OTHER Dorfner, John J. “Jack Kerouac.” Available online. URL: http:// empirezine.com/spotlight/jack/jack1.htm. Accessed September 19, 2005. Jack Kerouac. Available online. URL: http://www.levity.com/ corduroy/kerouac.htm. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KESEY, KEN (ELTON) (1935–2001)

Beatnik, pioneer hippie, public personality, counterculture and psychedelic drug guru, Ken Kesey was portrayed in Tom WOLFE’s now classic account of the Merry Pranksters in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Influenced not only by the Beat writers, but also by the New England Transcendentalists, Kesey studied the modernists Ernest HEMINGWAY and William FAULKNER, along with such Western writers as Zane GREY and John STEINBECK; Kesey shared their affinity with the Eastern mystics and other spiritual prophets and philosophers. Kesey epitomized the iconoclastic spirit of the 1960s; he despised bureaucracies and defended the poor and those living on the margins of society. Of his four published novels, his most popular and the biggest critical success is ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (1962). Ken Kesey was born on September 17, 1935, in La Junta, Colorado, to Fred A. Kesey, who ran a creamery business, and Geneva Smith Kesey. Kesey was educated at the University of Oregon, earned a bachelor’s degree (1957), and married Norma Faye Haxby during his senior year, in 1956. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set in a psychiatric hospital, has been recognized as a contemporary American literary classic. It pits the “inmates,” led by the Native American Chief Bromden, a large schizophrenic mixed-blood Indian, and ex-Marine Randle Patrick McMurphy, who teaches everyone the value of laughter, against “Big Nurse” Ratched, who epitomizes

716

KESEY, KEN

authority, efficiency, and repression. Despite the reception received by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey considered Sometimes A Great Notion (1964) his best novel, declaring, “I’ll never come up with a better book” (Fenex and Rick). Many readers and critics see more complexity in his second novel, set in the logging town of Waconda in Oregon, during a strike. The novel features the Stamper family, particularly the halfbrothers Hank and Lee. Using multiple perspectives, epistolary techniques, and distinctive idiomatic language, Kesey demonstrates the rebellious, self-centered, and sexually motivated love-hate relationship between the brothers. Sailor Song (1992), Kesey’s first novel in 20 years, was written after the death of his son in an accident. It is set in Kuinak, an Alaskan fishing village whose moral decline is signified when it welcomes a Hollywood film crew; much of this novel is indebted to Herman MELVILLE’s MOBY-DICK, but, as several critics have pointed out, Kesey relieves the despair at the end by invoking the Old Testament Noah and the possibility of salvation and survival through unselfish communal behavior. Kesey’s last novel, Last Go Round (1994), written with his friend Ken Babbs, is a lighthearted Western. A broncobuster contest is held among George Fletcher, a black rodeo clown, now retired; Jackson Sundown, a Nez Percé Native American; and Johnathan E. Lee Spain, a young white man from Tennessee. The three share diverse adventures, dime-Western style, as they compete for the silver saddle and the title of World Champion All Round Cowboy of the West. Ken Kesey died of complications after liver cancer surgery on November 10, 2001, in Eugene, Oregon. He had just written a new introduction to the 40thanniversary edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The book was adapted for film by United Artists in 1975. Kirk Douglas, who purchased the rights to the novel, played the role of McMurphy on Broadway in an adaptation by Dale Wasserman. The film was a huge success and gained five Academy Awards. In 1972, Sometimes a Great Notion was adapted for film by Universal, directed by Paul Newman, and starring Newman, Henry Fonda, and Lee Remick. Kesey’s papers, including the final manu-

script of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, are housed at the University of Oregon.

NOVELS Last Go Round, with Ken Babbs. New York: Viking, 1994. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Viking, 1962. Sailor Song. New York: Viking, 1992. Sometimes a Great Notion. New York: Viking, 1964.

SOURCES Barsness, John A. “Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 23 (March 1969): 27–33. Blessing, Richard. “The Moving Target: Ken Kesey’s Evolving Hero,” Journal of Popular Culture 4 (Winter 1971): 615–627. Carnes, Bruce. Ken Kesey. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1974. Foster, John Wilson. “Hustling to Some Purpose: Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Western American Literature 9 (August 1974): 115–129. Forrey, Robert. “Ken Kesey’s Psychopathic Savior: A Rejoinder,” Modern Fiction Studies 21 (Summer 1975): 222–230. Hoge, James O. “Psychedelic Stimulation and the Creative Imagination: The Case of Ken Kesey,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (Fall 1972): 381–391. Huffman, James R. “The Cuckoo Clock in Kesey’s Nest,” Modern Language Studies 7 (Spring 1977): 52–72. Leeds, Barry H. “Theme and Technique in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Connecticut Review 7 (April 1974): 35–50. Martin, Terence. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the High Cost of Living,” Modern Fiction Studies 19 (Spring 1973): 43–55. Mills, Nicolaus. “Ken Kesey and the Politics of Laughter,” Centennial Review 16 (Winter 1972): 82–90. Olderman, Raymond Michael. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Pearson, Carol. “The Cowboy Saint and the Indian Poet: The Comic Hero in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Studies in American Humor 1 (October 1974): 91–98. Perry, Paul. On the Bus: The Complete Guide to the Legendary Trip of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and the Birth of the Counterculture. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1990. Pratt, John Clark, ed. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and Criticism. New York: Viking, 1973. Sherman, W. D. “The Novels of Ken Kesey,” Journal of American Studies 5 (August 1971): 185–196.

KILLING MISTER WATSON 717

Sherwood, Terry G. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the Comic Strip,” Critique 13, no. 1 (1970): 96–109. Tanner, Stephen L. “Salvation through Laughter: Ken Kesey and the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Southwest Review 58 (Spring 1973): 125–137. Tanner, Tony. Ken Kesey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. ———. City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970. New York: Harper, 1971, 372–392. Waldmeir, Joseph J. “Two Novelists of the Absurd: Heller and Kesey,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 5 (Autumn 1964): 192–204. Wallis, Bruce E. “Christ in the Cuckoo’s Nest: or, the Gospel According to Ken Kesey,” Cithara 12 (November 1972): 52–58. Weixlman, Joseph. “Ken Kesey: A Bibliography,” Western American Literature 10 (November 1975): 219–231. Wolfe, Thomas. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968. Zashin, Eliot M. “Political Theorist and Demiurge: The Rise and Fall of Ken Kesey,” Centennial Review 17 (Spring 1973): 199–213.

OTHER Fenex, Mary Jane, and Matthew Rick. “Ken Kesey Interview.” Available online. URL: http://www.ulster.net/~shady/ keezintv.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Ken Kesey. Available online. URL: http://www.litkicks.com/ People/KenKesey.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KIDD, SUE MONK (1948– ) Sue Monk Kidd had published three nonfiction books and lectured widely on spirituality, theological concerns, and women’s issues when her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees (2001), appeared on the best-seller lists. Since then it has sold nearly 2 million copies, was named by the state of Rhode Island as its choice for all residents to read in 2004, and is read by book clubs across the nation. The novel celebrates the mother-daughter bond and chronicles a young white Southern girl’s journey to maturity during 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed. Sue Monk Kidd was born in rural southwest Georgia in a rambling farmhouse. She earned a nursing degree in 1970 from Texas Christian University. After a career as both a practical nurse and a nursing instructor, she turned to writing, publishing books on her religious epiphanies and feminist theology, before writing The Secret Life of Bees, the story of Lily Owens, a girl

from a small South Carolina town who apparently kills her mother by accident and is subsequently raised by Rosaleen, a black woman. They run away from Lily’s oppressive father, T. Ray. On their journey to freedom, they encounter three African-American beekeepers who worship the strong, independent Black Madonna figure prefiguring the more modern and more submissive white Mary (Schlumpf). They also finally learn the true fate of Lily’s mother. Kidd lives with her husband in a salt marsh of South Carolina. Her latest novel is entitled The Mermaid Chair, a South Carolina–based story of a magical chair and a love affair between a monk and a married woman.

NOVELS The Mermaid Chair. New York: Viking, 2005. The Secret Life of Bees. New York: Viking, 2001.

SOURCES Berona, David A. Review of The Secret Life of Bees, Los Angeles Times, 24 March 2002, p. 173. Huntley, Kristine. Review of The Secret Life of Bees, Booklist (December 1, 2001): 628. Reynolds, Susan Salter. Review of The Secret Life of Bees, New York Times Book Review, 31 March 2002, p. R15. Schlumpf, Heidi. “All Abuzz About the Black Madonna,” U.S. Catholic 68, no. 11 (November 2003): 26–30. Unsigned review of The Secret Life of Bees, Kirkus Reviews (October 15, 2001): 1447.

OTHER Katherine H. Wyrick. “The Buzz on Sue Monk Kidd’s Dazzling Fictional Debut.” BookPage. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/202bp/sue_monk_kidd.html. Accessed April 5, 2006. Sue Monk Kidd Home Page. Available online. URL: http:// www.suemonkkidd.com/. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KILLING MISTER WATSON PETER MAT(1990) Killing Mister Watson, the first installment of Peter Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy, tells an emblematic frontier story set in the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands region of southwest Florida. One of the best-written novels in the tradition of multiple first-person narratives since William FAULKNER, Killing Mister Watson revolves around the enigmatic story of the life and death of E. J. Watson, who was shot down by THIESSEN

718

KILLING MISTER WATSON

fishermen and farmers of his neighborhood on a remote island of the Everglades frontier on October 24, 1910. The novel reads almost like a classic Western tale as neighbors remember Watson as the cold-blooded killer of the outlaw queen Belle Starr, who escaped from an Arkansas prison and drifted into south Florida, “the last place left where a man could farm in peace and quiet, and no questions asked” (142). However, instead of just being a simple tale of “justice being served,” the novel gradually develops into an emblem in which the Turnerian frontier myth that has historically served as a rationale for the necessity of violence against both humans and nature is captured and enacted. The thesis of the American frontier posited by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner has been widely criticized over the years, but it still remains central to many Americans’ imagination: For Turner, the frontier was the place where immigrant Europeans were reborn into real Americans in the process of taming the vast, empty space, fighting the savage Indians, and finally bringing civilization into the wilderness. In the Everglades frontier, Watson takes his share of land, starts a sugarcane plantation, and runs a thriving syrup business. He even builds a big white house in the middle of the wilderness, the only house in the Everglades, and because of this, he is called Emperor Watson and remembered as someone who brought “progress” into the Everglades. As a successful Turnerian frontiersman, he wields his power to justify his violence against the Indians and controls bankers and investors in Fort Myers who want to protect their investment on his plantation. Through the story of Watson, Matthiessen examines the complex reality of the American frontier. In reality, the American frontier, unlike Turner’s argument, was not the empty wilderness neglected by the “savage” Indians. It has long been the home of the Calusas and, later, the Seminole Indians, who adapted to the hostile environment of the region. These Indians were not recognized as human beings by the settlers, and their way of respecting nature was not registered as “civilization.” Thus, as Richard Hamilton narrates, their home continued to be intruded upon: first by the Spaniards, then by “them Indian-fighters” (33), and finally by the white American settlers. Eventually, as

Matthiessen suggests in the novel, the conquistador mentality of the white intruders who first attacked the Everglades is handed down to the land developers who drain the swamps of south Florida, unheedful of destroying the habitat for a diverse array of wildlife and ending the traditional Indian way of life. As the novel unfolds, the frontier violence that Turner once depicted so heroically and justifiably in his thesis emerges as no longer necessary for bringing progress and civilization into the wilderness. As various narrators of the novel recollect their own versions of Watson’s life and death—the early encounter between the Calusas Indians and the Spaniards, the three Seminole wars with the U.S. Army, white settlers’ relentless clearing of the land, and the eventual arrival of a robber baron like Watson—readers are induced to rethink the heroic frontier history as the bloody history of greed and violence inhabited by men like Ed Brewer, a frontier trader, whose rotgut “killed more Injuns than the soldiery ever done” (82) and pioneers who massacred the wildlife of the Everglades for money. Bill House narrates a dreadful account of the pioneers’ slaughtering alligators for money during a dry season in 1898 and the shooting out of egret rookeries all over southern Florida for plumes whose worth was twice their weight in gold. Sometimes, they even killed each other to get more plumes. Matthiessen successfully weaves many strands of narrative, ranging from the accounts of the Indians’ way of life to the encroaching forces of “progress,” represented by the merciless abuse of nature by Watson and other settlers, into a complex vision of America. Although Matthiessen clearly shows deep sympathy toward the early pioneers’ grit and honesty as their harsh frontier lives are told from the settlers’ point of view, the critic James G. Watson states that he views the Watson story in terms of “the origins of an American myth” (249). With his careful, unsentimental scrutiny of every detail of the Watson story, the legend of a frontiersman becomes at once a fictional search for the truth about a main character and a communal reexamination of the reality of the American frontier. As a result, readers are encouraged to understand the seriousness of the violence that early pioneers inflicted upon the ecological system of the Everglades and the intensity of greed

KINCAID, JAMAICA 719

with which modern land developers drove the Seminole Indians out of their traditional home.

SOURCES Cooley, John. “Matthiessen’s Voyages on the River Styx: Deathly Waters, Endangered Peoples.” In Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, 167–192. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Dowie, William. Peter Matthiessen. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Gabriel, Trip. “The Nature of Peter Matthiessen,” New York Times Magazine, 10 June 1990, pp. 30–31, 42, 94, 96, 98. Watson, James G. “Man Writing: The Watson Trilogy: Peter Matthiessen in Archive,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 46 (Summer 2004): 245–270. Jihee Han

KIM RONYOUNG (GLORIA HAHN) (1926–1987) Kim Ronyoung, artist and writer, is the author of CLAY WALLS (1987), the first published novel written by a Korean American and presented largely through the perspectives of three family members. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it depicts the lives of first- and second-generation immigrants from Korea, and gives a voice to those immigrants whose voices had not been heard in the United States. Set in Los Angeles between 1920 and 1946, the novel is divided into three sections. The mother, Haesu, narrates section one; her husband, Chun, gives his views in section two; and their teenage daughter Faye presents her very different perspective in section three. The novel conveys to readers the strong sense of spirit, pride, and nationalism that Korean immigrants bring with them and that has helped them to survive. Also known as Gloria Hahn, Kim was born on March 28, 1926, in Los Angeles, California, to Chong-Hak Kim, a laborer, and Haeran (Helen) Kim, who had come to the United States as a picture bride. (A marriage system whereby the prospective Asian-American male selected his wife by viewing a series of photos.) When Kim’s father died—she was 12 years old—her mother raised all six of her children through a home sewing business. Kim attended Los Angeles City College, helped her mother make neckties to sell to local stores, and, during World War II, worked in an assem-

bly plant. At age 19, she married Richard Hahn, a Korean-American medical student from Chicago who became the first Korean-American thoracic and cardiac surgeon in the United States. After her children finished high school, Kim returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State College in 1975. Kim was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly before she wrote Clay Walls, an illness that gave her a sense of urgency about the book; she died on February 3, 1987. Her husband established the Gloria Hahn Memorial Scholarship at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea.

NOVEL Clay Walls. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990.

SOURCES Oh, Sae-o. “ ‘Precious Possessions Hidden’: A Cultural Background to Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls,” MELUS 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 31–49. Yun, Cung-Hei. “Beyond ‘Clay Walls’: Korean American Literature,” Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Amy Ling and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, 79–96. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

KINCAID, JAMAICA (1949– )

Novelist, story writer, essayist, and memoirist, Jamaica Kincaid writes of paradox and duality: Antigua and New York, mothers and daughters, men and women, imperialism and individualism, homelessness and belonging. In ANNIE JOHN, her best-known work, Kincaid focuses on the title character’s painful adolescence and maturation. Those subjects resonate in her other novels: Lucy (1990), Autobiography of My Mother (1994), and Mr. Potter: A Novel (2003); and in At the Bottom of the River (1983), an acclaimed collection of short fiction; and Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip, an illustrated conversation among women. A Small Place (1988) is a long essay on the damages inflicted by colonialism; My Brother (1997) marks the life of Devon Drew, who died from AIDS in 1996. Jamaica Kincaid is the pen name adopted by Kincaid after her first article appeared in Ingenue magazine in 1973; she was born Elaine Potter Richardson in 1949, in St. John’s, on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Her mother, Annie Richardson Potter, from Dominica, was African and Caribbean Indian. Her biological father, Roderick Potter, was from Antigua. Because Potter

720 KINDRED

rarely appeared in her life, Kincaid thinks of David Drew, her stepfather, as her real father. She left Antigua in 1965 to become an au pair in New York City, and in 1978 she published her first story, “Girl,” in The New Yorker. She became a staff writer and worked there for two decades. She married Allen Shawn, the son of William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker, in 1979, and continued publishing fiction. Annie John, a finalist for the Ritz Paris Hemingway award, details a painful and wrenching adolescence, the story of Annie’s rebellion against her mother and British colonialism. In both Annie John and Lucy, notes the critic Allison Donnell, the young women’s rebellions against their mothers parallel their rejections of their British-dominated homelands. Lucy is in fact identified by her anger. Having exiled herself to New York, she observes traces of British condescension in the attitudes of her white liberal acquaintances. Autobiography of My Mother— which Kincaid says is fiction—was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and a PEN/Faulkner Award. It is narrated in the first person by Xuela, the motherless daughter who is at the mercy of her corrupt father and her abusive stepmother. Kincaid’s most recent book, Mr. Potter: A Novel, is also fiction based on autobiography. This novel tells the story of the Antiguan father she never knew, depicting him as an abandoned child who became a chauffeur for wealthy immigrants and then a taxi driver in the United States. Continually lauded for her imagistic, poetic style and ability to tell a captivating story, Jamaica Kincaid lives with her husband in Bennington, Vermont.

NOVELS Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip. (With Eric Fischl) Lithographs by Fischl. New York: Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985. Autobiography of My Mother. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990. Mr. Potter: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Chelsea House, 1998. Covi, Giovanna. “Jamaica Kincaid’s Prismatic Self and the Decolonialisation of Language and Thought.” In Framing

the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women’s Writing, edited by Joan Anim Addo, 37–67. London: Whiting and Birch, 1996. Cudjoe, Selwyn R., ed. Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference. Wellesley, Mass.: Callaloo, 1990. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview.” In Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, 215–232. Wellesley, Mass.: Callaloo, 1990. Dance, D. Cumber, ed. Fifty Caribbean Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986. Donnell, Allison. “Writing for Resistance: Nationalism and Narratives of Liberation.” In Framing the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women’s Writing, edited by Joan Anim Addo, 28–36. London: Whiting and Birch, 1996. Ferguson, Moira. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Mistron, Deborah E. Understanding Jamaica Kincaid’s “Annie John”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Nagel, James. “Desperate Lives: Depression and Self-Realization in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Lucy.” In Traditions, Voices and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960’s, edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel, 237–253. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Perry, Donna. “Jamaica Kincaid.” In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, edited by Donna Perry, 127–141. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Simmons, Diane. Jamaica Kincaid. New York: Twayne, 1994.

KINDRED OCTAVIA BUTLER (1979)

Octavia BUTLER is one of a handful of African-American science fiction writers; there were even fewer in 1979, when Kindred was published. In February 2004, the 25thanniversary edition of the text was released in the United Kingdom and the United States. Butler’s fourth novel, Kindred is generally shelved in the science fiction section, although Butler argues against such definition because the text, which utilizes the trope of time travel in order to place its heroine in antebellum Maryland, does not describe the science of this trope. Her readers would likely argue against such external limitations on the scope of Butler’s text as well, because she appeals to those in ethnic and women’s studies as well. The heroine of the text is a black woman (Dana), as are the pro-

KINDRED 721

tagonists of many of Butler’s novels and short stories; like them, Dana must come to grips with racism and assert ownership over herself. She begins the text with her arm fused to a wall of her home; how she got there is the concern of the rest of the text and a mystery with which the reader is instantly engaged. The science fictional premise of the text soon merges with a thoroughly researched neoslave narrative. Dana and her husband, Kevin, who is white, have moved into a new home in 1976 Los Angeles and are unpacking. It is her 26th birthday, and she is suddenly transported to 1815 Maryland to save a small red-headed boy from drowning. The boy, she learns, is Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner and her own great-great-grandfather. After rescuing Rufus from drowning, Dana is repeatedly drawn back to save his life; the only way she is able to return to her own time and place is for her own life to be threatened. She ultimately becomes Rufus’s protector and house slave, and each visit to the past grows longer. Dana attempts to instill values in Rufus but with little ultimate effect; the system of slavery is just too strong. Although Rufus is a sympathetic character at first, the institution of slavery and his own horrible father make him into a cruel and hot-tempered slave owner. None of Butler’s heroines is a saint, and this is true of Dana as well; she must not only protect Rufus, but she also must convince Alice, her slave ancestor, to bed down with Rufus to ensure her own birth. However, she attempts to care for Alice as she is propelled back and forth in time to save Rufus’s life. She is not a mere race nor gender traitor nor mere victim, as Lisa Yaszek has noted (Yaszek, 1,062). A contemporary, self-confident writer, Dana must struggle with her 20th-century upbringing and sense of self—if she does not learn how slavery operates, both physically and psychologically, she will be killed. Dana learns how slaves become such psychologically, as she is whipped, beaten, and twice nearly raped. The abuse is not only physical but also psychological. She must witness the horrors of slavery, including whippings and their impact on family units and on women. She sees families ripped apart or made to suffer for the transgressions of others to keep them in line, such as when Dana’s sudden (temporal) disappearance results in the punishment of other slaves. Dana is surprised to find how easily she adapts to the plantation,

burying herself in work to avoid other aspects of slave life, including punishment of herself and others. Caught between an inability to return to the 20th century and an inability to tolerate slavery, she escapes at one point in the novel but is caught within a few hours—even as Alice, her ancestor, eludes capture for several days. Although Alice is illiterate and unfamiliar with territory beyond her birthplace, she has skills Dana does not. Kevin unwittingly travels back in time with Dana after one respite; since he was touching her when she was called back in time, he is brought back also. Although they arrive at the plantation together, they become separated when Dana’s life is threatened while she is away from Kevin and she returns to Los Angeles. Back home, Dana reads Holocaust survivor accounts, seeing herself in them and understanding the abuse of power and survivor’s guilt, as well as forging a link to shared histories of oppression. Although mere days pass in Los Angeles, five years pass for Kevin, during which time he works for the abolitionist movement and acquires a mysterious scar. We are thus able to see how Dana and Kevin, representing different genders and races, deal on their own with the antebellum environment. Readers are thus shown differences in treatment of individuals and in their survival abilities; they can also see the ways people fit within the slave system according to their race and gender. Due to his advantaged position as a white male, for instance, Kevin takes longer to see the horrors of slavery. Yet he, too, is ultimately marked by his antebellum experiences. Although Kevin fights against slavery, his personality becomes more withdrawn and quiet. Dana’s last visit to the past brings us full circle; when she must murder Rufus to fend off his attempt to rape her, he grasps her arm as she is sent forward in time, anchoring her arm in the past. Symbolically, Dana’s loss may mark the continued scars of slavery on America, as Yaszek notes; more personally, Dana has suffered many losses throughout the text, of which the arm is a symbol. For all her literacy, self-confidence, and 20thcentury knowledge, she is willing to lose an arm to escape from the past. Significantly, her final trip occurs on July 4, 1976. Yaszek argues that Kindred functions in contradistinction to other slave narratives, such as Roots, the

722

KINDRED

novel of which was published in 1976 and the TV production of which was televised in 1977. Positing Roots as a production concerned with the isolate hero overcoming obstacles and forming connections only when it serves himself, Yaszek argues that Dana is instead “enmeshed in networks of communal ties” (Yaszek, 1,056); as Kunte Kinte—and the isolate heroes of other slave narratives, such as that of Frederick Douglass— are concerned with public identity and gaining literacy, Dana—and the women of other slave narratives—are concerned with “family and personal self-worth” (Yaszek, 1,056). Dana must come to understand the raced and gendered nature of slavery and reject the myth of hearty individualism as a female slave and turn, instead, to kin networks and communal ties to survive (Yaszek, 1,060–1,061). Butler often cites a conversation with a then fellow student as the impetus to writing Kindred; this student was criticizing blacks for holding the race back, for having a slave mentality. While this student was familiar with African-American history, he did not understand what it was like to be a slave; Butler puts readers in that position through Dana. Butler is the author of 11 novels and numerous short stories. She is the winner of three Hugo Awards and two Nebula Awards, some of science fiction’s highest awards, and was the first science fiction author recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. She is also a winner of the PEN Center West Lifetime Achievement Award.

SOURCES Allison, Dorothy. “The Future of Female: Octavia Butler’s Mother Lode.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 471–478. New York: Meridian, 1990. Bedore, Pamela. “Slavery and Symbiosis in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 31, no. 84 (Spring 2002): 73–81. Brooks-De Vita, Novella. “Beloved and Betrayed: Survival and Authority in Kindred,” Griot: Official Journal of the Southern Conference on Afro-American Studies 22, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 16–20. Foster, Frances S. “Octavia Butler’s Black Female Future Vision,” Extrapolation 23 (1982): 37–49. Friend, Beverly. “Time Travel as a Feminist Didactic in Works by Phyllis Eisenstein, Marlys Millhiser, and Octavia Butler,” Extrapolation 23, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 50–55.

Govan, Sandra Y. “Homage to Tradition: Octavia Butler Renovates the Historical Novel,” MELUS 13, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1986): 79–96. Jesser, Nancy. “Blood, Genes and Gender in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Dawn,” Extrapolation 43, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 36–61. Johnson, Rebecca O. “African American Feminist Science Fiction,” Sojourner 19, no. 6 (February 1994): 12–14. Levecq, Christine. “Power and Repetition: Philosophies of (Literary) History in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred,” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 525–553. Long, Lisa A. “A Relative Pain: The Rape of History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata,” College English 64, no. 4 (March 2002): 459–483. Maida, Patricia. “Kindred and Dessa Rose: Two Novels That Reinvent Slavery,” CEA Magazine 4, no. 1 (Fall 1991): 43–52. McKible, Adam. “ ‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 223–235. Mitchell, Angelyn. “Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred,” MELUS 26, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 51–75. Paulin, Diana R. “De-Essentializing Interracial Representations: Black and White Border-Crossings in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever and Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Cultural Critique 36 (Spring 1997): 165–193. Raffel, Burton. “Genre to the Rear, Race and Gender to the Fore: The Novels of Octavia E. Butler,” Literary Review 38 (April 1, 1995): 454. Reed, Brian K. “Behold the Woman: The Imaginary Wife in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” CLA Journal 47, no. 1 (September 2003): 66–74. Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” College English 55, no. 2 (1993): 135–157. Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine,” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 2 (1984): 78–81. Yaszek, Lisa. “ ‘A Grim Fantasy’: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred,” Signs 28, no. 4 (2003): 1,053–1,066. Zaki, Hoda. “Utopia, Dystopia, and Ideology in the Science Fiction of Octavia Butler,” Science Fiction Studies 17, no. 2 (1990): 239–251. Alyson Buckman

KING, STEPHEN 723

KING, STEPHEN (EDWIN) (1947– ) The most successful and famous writer in the genre of horror fiction, Stephen King drew international attention with his first novel, CARRIE: A NOVEL OF A GIRL WITH A FRIGHTENING POWER (1974), and has been writing award-winning novels and short stories ever since. With more than 300 million books in print (Official King website), King is frequently compared to Edgar Allan POE and has been praised, not only for his characterization, his New England settings, and his experiments with plot and genre, but also for his modern renditions of the fears lurking beneath even the sunniest of dispositions. He combines science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction to elicit those fears from his readers and uses several recurring themes. One of the most frequent is that of the angry, marginalized adolescent or preadolescent, of whom Carrie was only the first example. King has commented repeatedly that he believes in the cathartic nature of horror fiction, and his recordbreaking sales and established popularity validate that view. Among his many awards are a 1980 World Fantasy Award for contributions to the field; a National Book Medal in 2003; a special British Fantasy Award for outstanding contributions to the genre, as illustrated in Cujo (1981); a Hugo Award for Stephen King’s Danse Macabre; Bram Stoker Awards for Best Novel for MISERY (1987), THE GREEN MILE (1997), and Bag of Bones (1998), as well as a Bram Stoker Award for Best Novelette for Lunch at the Gotham Cafe (1995). The British public voted The Stand (1978) one of the nation’s 100 best-loved novels. King is, moreover, the accomplished author of nearly a score of screenplays and teleplays. Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine, to Donald King, a merchant sailor, and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. He earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Maine in 1970, married Tabitha Jane Spruce, a novelist, on January 2, 1971, and, after two years of high school teaching, decided to write Carrie. The title character, an unpopular, repressed high school girl, exacts her revenge at the senior prom. ’Salem’s Lot (1975) followed; it is a popular tale about vampires living in the Maine countryside, and it is repeatedly filmed. The Shining (1977) fits the

requirements of the classic horror story. Novelist and recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance takes his wife and son Danny to the Overlook, a mountain hotel where he will be caretaker while finishing his novel. The spirit of his predecessor, however—an insane murderer who killed his own family—haunts the hotel; gradually Jack Torrance follows the spirit into madness. The source of fear in The Stand (1978) is the “superflu,” accidentally released by the government. The following year The Dead Zone was published. Here schoolteacher Johnny Smith awakens from a coma to find he has the power to read the future—and the future is a nuclear holocaust caused by a fascist candidate running for president of the United States; Johnny’s mission is to kill him before he has a chance to be elected. Although many critics think the 1970s were King’s golden age, he has produced a number of critically successful novels since then, including Different Seasons (1982), a powerful collection of four novellas; Cujo (1982), the harrowing tale of a woman locked in a car while Cujo, a rabid dog, lurks without; PET SEMATARY (1983), an extremely successful horror tale; and Misery (1987), about a writer held hostage by one of his fans. The Green Mile (1997), set in the 1930s, features John Coffey, a man imprisoned for the murder of twin girls. As the novel unfolds, it becomes apparent that Coffey has supernatural powers that he can use for good. Bag of Bones (1998) is another spellbinding evocation of a writer grieving for his dead wife and suffering writer’s block while living in a haunted cabin. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) features a lost nineyear-old girl who keeps herself safe and sane by imagining a baseball game with her favorite player, Tom Gordon. He continues, as well, to add to the Dark Tower series, a fantasy Western about Roland, a gunslinger, and his cohort as they travel through a mysterious universe that contains the Dark Tower. He has also written several novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Stephen King and Tabitha live in Maine. Among the many films of King’s novels are Carrie (1976), featuring Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie; Salem’s Lot (1979), starring David Soul and James Mason; The Shining (1980), starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall;

724

KING, STEPHEN

Cujo (1983), starring Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro; The Dead Zone (1983), starring Christopher Walken; Christine (1983), starring David Keith and Drew Barrymore; Stand By Me (based on the novella The Body) (1986); The Running Man (1987), starring Arnold Shwarzenegger; Misery (1990), starring James Caan and Kathy Bates; Graveyard Shift (1990); The Dark Half (1993), starring Timothy Hutton and Amy Madigan; Needful Things (1993), starring Max Von Sydow, Ed Harris, Bonnie Bedelia, and Amanda Plummer; The Shawshank Redemption (1994), starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman; Dolores Claiborne (1995), starring Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh; Night Flier (1997), starring Miguel Ferrer, Julie Entwisle, Dan Monahan, and Michael H. Moss; Apt Pupil (1998), starring David Schwimmer, Ian McKellen, and Brad Renfro; The Green Mile (1999), starring Tom Hanks; Hearts in Atlantis (2001), starring Anthony Hopkins; and Dreamcatcher (2003), starring Morgan Freeman. A number of King’s novels have been filmed for television as well. King and the writer Stewart O’Nan recently coauthored a book about the Boston Red Sox and their first championship in 86 years. A recent novel, Colorado Kid (2005), was published as the lead title in the second year of the Hard Case Crime series. It features two newspapermen who investigate a murder on an island off the coast of Maine. The same year, The Dark Tower, volume seven of the Dark Tower series, appeared. His most recent novel is Cell (2006). Two new films have been released: The first, Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, written by King, directed by Craig R. Baxley, and based on Lars von Trier’s movie The Kingdom, premiered on ABC in March 2004. In June of the same year, a new version of Salem’s Lot, written by Peter Filardi and directed by Mikael Salomon, aired on TNT. Most of King’s papers are housed at the Folger Library of the University of Maine at Orono.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Bag of Bones. New York: Viking, 1998. Black House (with Peter Straub). New York: Random House, 2001. Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Cell. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Christine. New York: Viking, 1983. Colorado Kid. New York: Dorchester, 2005. Cujo. New York: Viking, 1981. Cycle of the Werewolf. Illustrated by Berni Wrightson, limited portfolio edition published with “Berni Wrightson: An Appreciation.” Westland, Mich.: Land of Enchantment, 1983. Enlarged edition including King’s screenplay adaptation published as Stephen King’s Silver Bullet. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1985. The Dark Half. New York: Viking, 1989. The Dark Tower. New York: Scribner, 2004. The Dead Zone. New York: Viking, 1979. Desperation. New York: Viking, 1996. The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life As Rose Red. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Different Seasons (novellas; contains Rita Hayworth; The Shawshank Redemption; Hope Springs Eternal; Apt Pupil; Summer of Corruption; The Body: Fall from Innocence; and The Breathing Method: A Winter’s Tale.) New York: Viking, 1982. Dolores Claiborne. New York: Viking, 1993. Dreamcatcher. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. The Eyes of the Dragon. New York: Philtrum Press, 1984. Firestarter. New York: Viking, 1980, with afterword by King, 1981. From a Buick 8. New York: Scribner, 2002. Gerald’s Game. New York: Viking, 1992. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Scribner, 1999. The Green Mile: A Novel in Six Parts. New York: Plume, 1997. Hearts in Atlantis. Thorndike, Me.: G. K. Hall, 1999. Insomnia. New York: Viking, 1994. It. New York: Viking, 1986. Lunch at the Gotham Cafe. Published in Dark Love: Twentytwo All Original Tales of Lust and Obsession. Edited by Nancy Collins, Edward E. Kramer, and Martin Harry Greenberg. New York: ROC, 1995. Misery. New York: Viking, 1987. Needful Things. New York: Viking, 1991. Pet Sematary. New York: Doubleday, 1983. The Plant (e-book). www.stephenking.com, March 2000. Rose Madder. New York: Viking, 1995. ’Salem’s Lot. New York: Doubleday, 1975. The Shining. New York: Doubleday, 1977 The Stand. New York: Doubleday, 1978. Enlarged and expanded edition published as The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1990. The Talisman (with Peter Straub). New York: Viking Press/ Putnam, 1984.

KING, STEPHEN 725

The Tommyknockers. New York: Putnam, 1987. The Two Dead Girls. New York: Signet, 1996.

“THE DARK TOWER” SERIES The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger. New York: Amereon Ltd., 1976. Published as The Gunslinger. New York: New American Library, 1988. The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three. New York: New American Library, 1989. The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands. Hampton Falls, N.H.: Donald M. Grant, 1991. The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass. New York: Plume, 1997. The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla. New York: Plume, 2003. The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah. Hampton Falls, N.H.: Donald M. Grant, 2004. The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower. New York: Scribner, 2005.

NOVELS UNDER PSEUDONYM RICHARD BACHMAN The Long Walk. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1979. Rage. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1977. The Regulators. New York: Dutton, 1996. Roadwork: A Novel of the First Energy Crisis. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1981. The Running Man. New York: New American Library/Signet, 1982. Thinner. New York: New American Library, 1984.

SOURCES Badley, Linda. Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Anne Rice. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Beahm, George W. The Stephen King Story, revised and updated edition. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews & McMeel, 1992. ———, ed. The Stephen King Companion. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews & McMeel, 1989. Blue, Tyson. Observations from the Terminator: Thoughts on Stephen King and Other Modern Masters of Horror Fiction. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Collings, Michael R. Stephen King as Richard Bachman. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1985. ———. The Works of Stephen King: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide. Edited by Boden Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1993.

———. Scaring Us to Death: The Impact of Stephen King on Popular Culture. 2nd ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen King’s America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994. Docherty, Brian, ed. American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Keyishian, Amy, and Marjorie Keyishian. Stephen King. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1995. Magistrale, Tony, ed. A Casebook on “The Stand”. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1992. ———, ed. The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King’s Horrorscape. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. ———, ed. Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. ———. Stephen King: The Second Decade—“Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half.” New York: Twayne, 1992. Russell, Sharon A. Stephen King: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Saidman, Anne. Stephen King, Master of Horror. Minneapolis, Minn.: Lerner, 1992. Schweitzer, Darrell, ed. Discovering Stephen King. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1985. Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King. Grass Valley, Calif.: Underwood-Miller, 1982. ———, eds. Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. Grass Valley, Calif.: Underwood-Miller, 1986. ———, eds. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988. ———, eds. Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992. ———, eds. Fear Itself: The Early Works of Stephen King. Foreword by Stephen King, introduction by Peter Straub, afterword by George A. Romero. Grass Valley, Calif.: Underwood-Miller, 1993. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: New American Library, 1984.

OTHER The Official Stephen King Web Presence. Available online. URL: http://www.stephenking.com/. Accessed September 19, 2005.

726 KINGSOLVER, BARBARA

Stephen King on the Net. Available online. URL: http://www. geocities.com/Hollywood/Hills/5620/. Accessed September 19, 2005. Links to Stephen King. Available online. URL: http://www. malakoff.com/skc.htm. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KINGSOLVER, BARBARA (1955– )

Barbara Kingsolver is unique in her ability to write critically well-received best-selling novels that contain overtly political messages. She has said that when she was in her twenties she discovered the British writer Doris Lessing, “read the Children of Violence novels and began to understand how a person could write about the problems of the world in a compelling and beautiful way. And it seemed to me that was the most important thing I could ever do, if I could ever do that” (Kingsolver). Her second novel, Animal Dreams (1990), won the 1991 PEN fiction prize and the Edward Abbey Ecofiction Award, and in 2000 Kingsolver was presented with the National Humanities Medal. Her novels about the West are markedly different from those made popular by Zane GREY or Louis L’AMOUR; Kingsolver’s characters, usually strong, independent women, are ordinary middle-class Americans who struggle with family and identity issues but fight for the principles in which they believe, especially those concerned with the environment. Kingsolver brings to these stories an oft-noted lyricism and sense of humor. Barbara Kingsolver was born on April 8, 1955, in Annapolis, Maryland, to Wendell R. Kingsolver, a physician, and Virginia Henry Kingsolver. Reared in rural Kentucky, she attended DePauw University, graduating with a B.A. in 1977, and the University of Arizona, earning a master of science degree in 1981. In 1985, she married Joseph Hoffman, a chemist. After their divorce, she married Steven Hopp. She worked in scientific research, then moved into journalism, and published her first novel, The BEAN TREES, in 1988. Narrated by Taylor Greer, who is traveling across the United States westward from Kentucky, the novel focuses on Taylor’s acquisition of a nontraditional family: She takes care of a two-year-old abandoned Cherokee toddler named Turtle and teams up with Lou Ann, another single mother, and the widow

Mattie, who employs Taylor in her automotive garage. Together the women shelter Central American refugees. Her second novel, Animal Dreams, features Codi Noline, who, after a 14-year absence, returns to Grace, Arizona, to care for her aging father. Influenced by her sister, an agronomist working with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Codi fights industrial pollution and forms personal alliances with both her father and the townspeople. In Pigs in Heaven (1993), Taylor, three years after adopting Turtle, finds out that permission from the Cherokee Nation has not been obtained and that the adoption is illegal; she flees instead of returning the child and supports Turtle with marginal, low-paying jobs. The novel resolves happily as Turtle’s birth mother emerges and, together with the Cherokee lawyer, the women reach an amicable solution. The POISONWOOD BIBLE (1998) is, in the opinion of many readers, Kingsolver’s masterpiece. Set in the Belgian Congo, where Kingsolver herself lived for a time, the Hawthornesque tale features Nathan Price, a fanatical evangelical missionary who treats his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters brutally. The novel is an allegory of American involvement in the Congo as well as the stories of five women and of Nathan’s increasing insanity. Kingsolver’s most recent novel, Prodigal Summer (2000), features wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe, who falls in love with the poacher who is killing the local coyotes. In 1997 Kingsolver established the Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which awards $25,000 to a novel promoting social change by a first-time novelist or one not widely recognized. Barbara Kingsolver was a member of a musical group called Rock Bottom Remainders that included Kingsolver as the keyboardist, Amy Tan as vocalist, Dave Barry as lead guitarist, and Stephen King as rhythm guitarist.

NOVELS Animal Dreams. New York: Harper, 1990. The Bean Trees. New York: Harper, 1988. Pigs in Heaven. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998. Prodigal Summer. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG 727

SOURCES Beattie, L. Elisabeth. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Conversations with Kentucky Writers, 151–171. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996. Berry, Donna. “An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver.” In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, 143–169. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Bowdan, Janet. “Re-placing Ceremony: The Poetics of Barbara Kingsolver,” Southwestern American Literature 20 (Spring 1995): 13–19. Butler, Jack. “She Hung the Moon and Plugged in All the Stars,” New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1988, p. 15. Dunaway, David King. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Writing the Southwest, edited by David Dunaway and Sara L. Spurgeon, 93–107. New York: Penguin, 1995. Epstein, Robin. “An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver,” Progressive 12, no. 9 (February 1996): 337. ———. “Barbara Kingsolver,” Progressive 60, no. 2 (February 1996): 33–38. Fleming, Bruce. “Woolf Cubs: Current Fiction,” Antioch Review 52 (Fall 1994): 548–565. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Books of the Times; Community vs. Family and Writer vs. Subject,” New York Times, 12 July 1993. Lyall, Sarah. “Termites Are Interesting but Books Sell Better,” New York Times, 1 September 1993, pp. C1, C8. Pence, Amy. “An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver,” Poets and Writers 21 (July 1993): 14–21. Perry, Donna. “Barbara Kingsolver.” In Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out, edited by Donna Perry, 145–168. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Randall, Margaret. “Human Comedy,” Women’s Review of Books 5, no. 8 (May 1988): 1, 3. Ryan, Maureen. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” Journal of America Culture 18, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 77–82. ———. “Barbara Kingsolver’s Lowfat Fiction,” Journal of American Culture 19 (Winter 1995): 77–82. See, Lisa. “An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 35 (August 31, 1990): 467. Smith, Wendy. “The Mother and the Tribe,” Washington Post Book World, 13 June 1993, p. 3.

OTHER Brosi, George. “Barbara Kingsolver.” Available online. URL: http://www.english.eku.edu/services/kylit/KINGSLVR.htm. Accessed September 19, 2005. Gergen, David. Interview with Kingsolver. NewsHour Online. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ gergen/kingsolver.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

Kanner, Ellen. “Barbara Kingsolver Turns to Her Past to Understand the Present.” Book Page. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9811bp/barbara_kingsolver.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Kingsolver, Barbara. Home Page. Available online. URL: http:// www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp. Accessed September 19, 2005. Salon.com. “Lit Chat with Barbara Kingsolver.” Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/16dec1995/departments/ litchat.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG (1940– ) The “godmother” of Asian-American fiction in the United States, Maxine Hong Kingston has written three books that have made her one of the most influential and widely read novelists in contemporary American literature. Her first book, The WOMAN WARRIOR: MEMOIRS OF A GIRLHOOD AMONG GHOSTS (1976), has been translated into some three dozen languages and has been republished in numerous editions. The Woman Warrior, winner of the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award, and China Men (1980), winner of the National Book Award, are represented in most mainstream American literature classes, in AsianAmerican fiction courses, and in women’s studies courses. Although both The Woman Warrior and China Men won awards for nonfiction, most readers view them as fiction created through Kingston’s imaginative blending of Chinese tradition and American culture and her use of such novelistic techniques as magical realism, flashback, metaphor, and the incorporation of myth, legend, and fairytale. As the novelist Anne Tyler points out, both books demonstrate “fiction at its best” (Tyler, 44). Indeed, one of the prominent metaphors of the book is “talk-story,” and one of the first-person narrator’s main lessons is to analyze the stories and, when necessary, recast them in ways more favorable to women, particularly Chinese-American women. Kingston’s third book, TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK (1989), seems a novel in the more conventional sense, yet in its very title it questions the definition of the word book. Although Kingston is well known for her resistance to labels and genres—autobiography, fiction, memoir, novel, nonfiction—most

728

KINGSTON, MAXINE HONG

readers view Tripmaster Monkey as an example of postmodern fiction. Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 17, 1940, in Stockton, California, to Tom Hong, a scholar and teacher in China and a laundryman and gambling house manager in the United States, and Ying Lan Chew, a doctor and midwife in China and a laundress and field worker in the United States. Kingston was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1962. In that same year she married Earll Kingston, an actor and former classmate. They moved to Hawaii in 1967 and remained for nearly two decades, during which time Kingston taught school and wrote The Woman Warrior and China Men. In The Woman Warrior the young narrator-protagonist, oppressed by the contradictions between two cultures and shy to the point of speechlessness, learns to read family history from a woman-centered perspective and to fashion her own legends and stories in accordance with her own needs. As she regains her voice and seizes control of her destiny, she consciously adapts Chinese and American versions of folklore, customs, and attitudes toward women until they support her own progress to American womanhood. This same narrator reappears in China Men, but while in the previous novel she had told the stories of her mother, Brave Orchid, and her two aunts, Moon Orchid and No-Name Woman, here she concentrates on actual and spiritual grandfathers who faced—and mostly endured—the exclusionary and racist policies toward Chinese immigrants in the United States. The narrator demonstrates not only their resistance to authority, often through Chinese “trickster” methods, but also their contributions to America, particularly the transcontinental railroad. Tripmaster Monkey, narrated by Kuan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy, is a witty, picaresque, postmodernist blending of the legendary Chinese Monkey King figure and the hip, artistic, draft-dodging persona of the protagonist, Whitman Ah Sing, who obviously shares ironic parallels with the American poet Walt Whitman. Both wrote sprawling and inclusive celebrations of American diversity. Set in California during the Vietnam War era, Whitman Ah Sing is a war protester, an adolescent, a

rebellious trickster figure (on the drug trips of the 1960s) whose odyssey deliberately evokes those of Mark TWAIN’s Huck Finn and J. D. SALINGER’s Holden Caulfield. Most reviewers, however, had little difficulty equating his pranksterish, condescending, and self-centered side with the Chinese-American novelist Frank CHIN, with whose literary philosophies Kingston has long and famously differed. A senior lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, Kingston published another novel, The Fifth Book of Peace, in 2003, that features Whitman Ah Sing. Although many of her papers were burned in the devastating Oakland fire of October 20, 1991, a collection has been deposited at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

NOVELS China Men. New York: Knopf, 1980. The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Knopf, 2003. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Knopf, 1989. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976.

SOURCES Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. ———. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian-American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999. Huang, Guiyou. “Maxine Hong Kingston.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 120–126. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Juhasz, Suzanne. “Maxine Hong Kingston: Narrative Technique and Female Identity.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick, 173–189. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” New York: MLA, 1991. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990. ———. “Chinese American Women Writers: The Tradition behind Maxine Hong Kingston.” In Redefining American

KIRKLAND, CAROLINE 729

Literary History, edited by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Wand, Jr., 219–236. New York: MLA, 1990. Seshachari, Neila C. “An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” Weber Studies 12 (Winter 1995): 7–26. Skandera-Trombley, Laura E., ed. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998. Skenzany, Paul, and Tera Martin, eds. Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Simmons, Diane. Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Twayne, 1999. Smith, Sidonie. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘Woman Warrior.’ ” In A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation, 150–173. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Tyler, Anne. “Manic Monologue,” New Republic, 17 April 1989, pp. 44–46. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

OTHER Soderstrom, Christina K. “Maxine Hong Kingston.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/bios/ entries/kingston_maxine_hong.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KIRKLAND, CAROLINE (MATILDA STANSBURY) (1801–1864) Caroline Kirkland, a significant forerunner of the realist writers in the United States, is best known for A New Home— Who’ll Follow? (1838), a satire that details her move with her husband, William Kirkland, to Pinckney, Michigan, where they lived a rough frontier existence. She used the pseudonym Mrs. Mary Clavers and was a spirited and perceptive critic of the Middle West. According to the scholar William Osborn, “Mrs. Clavers played a distinctive role in American social history and in the development of American regional writing” (Osborne, 135). A New Home was a comedy of manners and the first treatment of a frontier settlement written by a woman. It continues to elicit responses into the 21st century because it defies labeling: It has variously been called a novel, an autobiography, domestic fiction, travel literature, and local color realism.

Caroline Kirkland was born on January 11, 1801, in New York City, to Samuel Stansbury and Eliza Alexander Stansbury, a writer. Kirkland studied at excellent schools directed by her aunt and then became a teacher herself; in 1828, she married William Kirkland, a classics tutor at Hamilton College. After their move to Michigan, William Kirkland hoped to found a city on 800 acres of land. Although A New Home was lauded by Edgar Allan POE, it was criticized by some for its sometimes humorous yet critical depiction of Kirkland’s frontier neighbors. It looked honestly, however, at the women who often paid the price for their husbands’ obsessions with money and new land. In fact she paved the way for Mark TWAIN by rebutting the romantic view of the westward movement and depicting instead the often painfully debilitating hardships. In 1842 Kirkland published Forest Life, the more restrained sequel to A New Home. In 1846, just after the family had returned to New York City, her husband drowned, and Kirkland supported herself and her children through teaching, writing, and—by 1847—the editorship of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. She became an astute critic of the literature by the women of her time. Caroline Kirkland died of a stroke on April 6, 1864. In the 1960s, the short-lived Kirkland College, the women’s counterpart to the then all-male Hamilton College, was named after her. Her papers and manuscripts are scattered among the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, the John M. Olin Library of Cornell University, the Bentley Historical Library of the University of Michigan, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. A few manuscripts are at the Cincinnati Historical Society; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin; and the Newberry Library in Chicago.

NOVELS (As Mrs. Mary Clavers) Forest Life. 2 vols. New York: C. S. Francis. Boston: J. H. Francis, 1842. London: Longman, 1842. (As Mrs. Mary Clavers) A New Home—Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life. New York: C. S. Francis, 1839.

730

KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE, THE

Republished as Montacute: Or, a New Home—Who’ll Follow? London: Churton, 1840. (As Mrs. Mary Clavers) Western Clearings. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1845. London: Wiley & Putnam, 1846.

SOURCES Fetterley, Judith, ed. Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Osborne, William S. Caroline M. Kirkland. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Spencer, Stacy L. “Legacy Profile: Caroline Kirkland (1801–1864),” Legacy 8 (Fall 1992): 133–140. Zagarell, Sandra A. Introduction. In Kirkland’s A New Home—Who’ll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life. Edited by Sandra Zagarell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE, THE AMY TAN (1989) Amy TAN ranks as a major Chinese-American author on the strength of THE JOY LUCK CLUB (1989), a novel portraying the complex mother-daughter relationship as well as Asian-American women’s voices and identities. In her second best-seller, The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), which continues to explore the mother’s life stories, Tan constructs a daughter narrative to recapitulate her mother’s story in China, thereby delving into a broader China narrative. The trope of journey, the return to the mother(land) as discovery and reconciliation, plays a central role in Tan’s stories. As the Asian-American critic Sau-ling Cynthia Wong observes, the major reason for the sensational success of The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife is the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship, which places mothers and daughters “in a tradition of matrilineal discourse that has, as a part of the feminist movement in post-war America, been gathering momentum in the United States” (Wong, 176). The Kitchen God’s Wife is a story about a young Chinese-American woman, Pearl Louie Brandt, who searches for greater understanding of her Chinese mother’s background. The entire story of Jiang Weili (aka Winnie Louie in the narrative) is framed by her daughter Pearl’s inquiries at cousin Bao Bao’s wedding and Grand Aunt Du’s funeral. Weili’s personal experiences are told in a domestic setting to her American-

born and -bred daughter. After Pearl confides to her mother that she is afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Weili, in turn, reveals her traumatic story that gives the daughter hope to survive. Back in Tsungming Island, China, Weili, abandoned at a young age by her mother and sent to grow up in the house of her relatives, accepts the arranged marriage and endures the excruciating abuse from her sadist husband, Wen Fu. Weili’s individual stories lead to a particular period of Chinese history during Japan’s invasion of China in the 1930s and the atrocious Rape of Nanjing in 1937. As the title of the book suggests, Weili tells the story from the perspective of the abused Kitchen God’s Wife. In drawing attention to the parallel mythological, national, and personal stories, Weili articulates her marital abuse in conjunction with the legendary Kitchen God’s misconduct and the Japanese invasion; Wen Fu epitomizes the ungrateful Kitchen God mistreating his wife and the brutal Japanese raping China. Weili survives both a disastrous marriage and the invasion of her country by the Japanese: After falling in love with Jimmy Louie, a Chinese-American soldier in China, she is jailed after her failed attempt to elope with him, and escapes to America only days before the Communist takeover of China. The mother’s stories also enable the daughter narrator(s) to redefine their mother-daughter relationship and to obtain a new insight into the elusive, conflicting layers of reality. At first glance, the reader might find Tan’s contrivance nothing original: recycling “a modern pseudofeminist retelling of the folklore story of the abused wife (patient Griselda in the West, the kitchen god’s wife in the East) who wins her husband’s love by passing all his tests or his remorse by her generosity of spirit” (Caesar, 164). Most critics posit the novel’s mother-daughter narrative within transnational, transcultural, transhistorical, and transgressive contexts, and such readings along the matrilineal trajectory indeed generate productive critical interpretations. First, the maternal narrative in Tan’s novel functions as the ultimate interpretive frame of the daughter’s reconceptualization of the remote motherland, China. In spite of the all too often universalized mother-daughter conflicts, the American-born daughter in Tan’s fic-

KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE, THE 731

tions inherits the split between cultures, and from that displaced context and removed memory, “she invents China in a fantasy space, reconfiguring the ghost of China to inscribe her present subject position” (Yuan, 158). Weili’s recollection reveals a process of negotiation with the past and her mother’s stories, translated and mediated by Pearl into a narrative that grants reality to present situations. However, the reconstruction of Weili’s past/history here is rendered problematic, unstable, and porous, as Pearl complains that she is “confused, caught in endless circles of lies.” History in the novel thus fails to bridge the gap between its accurate representation and past experience to make reliable understanding on the parts of both Weili and Pearl. The cultural clash also forges the second generation’s subjectivity that emerges from various discursive sites. The Kitchen God’s Wife, despite the domestic mother-daughter stories, opens up transcultural politics and draws attention to the specific ways such politics inscribes multicultural and multigenerational texts, fusing them within a particular formation of cultural and historical subjectivity. As Wong argues, “After listening with appropriate awe, empathy, and ‘culture envy’ to her mother, the daughter returns to yuppiedom (to which Chinese Americans have been allowed qualified access) and continues to enjoy the fruits of assimilation” (Wong, 200). It is also noteworthy that Tan inscribes her transgressive gender politics into the daughter’s narrative. Weili’s stories capitalize on the patriarchal institutions of marriage, and in this regard, the novel acknowledges the historical role played by patriarchal ideology in its molding of Chinese women. As Weili puts it, “Why did stories always describe women that way, making us believe that we had to be that way too?” (120). The heroines in the novel all attempt to improve intolerable conditions by transgressing traditional (gendered) mores. Weili’s mother courageously chooses an alternative life by eloping with another man; Weili, like her mother, flees her marital prison; and Pearl, escaping Confucian values, opts for a Caucasian husband. Tan sees transgression as a necessary act to reinvent the oppositional wheel anew. The narrative in The Kitchen God’s Wife itself is contained by a patriarchal spectral

frame that reveals itself at critical junctures in the text. These disruptions within the narrative gesture toward a disturbing subtext of marital and familial discontent. The individual voices that mediate on the mothers’ and the daughters’ multilayered selves are inseparable from one another, coalescing to enact a maternal genealogy. The process of unearthing maternal stories also achieves a narrative completion. The journey to the maternal connection performs a pivotal function in bringing to closure the broader pattern of women’s marginalized positioning in patriarchal societies. Tan writes about the struggle of women situated in constantly negotiated domestic and familial spaces deeply affiliated to the oppressing paternal legislation, and the author empowers the daughter narrator to be the subaltern’s mouthpiece and storyteller. The centrality of recovering the traumatic stories of the women leads to important interrogations about the epistemology of the forgotten women within the context of maternal rewriting. In the process of exposing the hidden transcultural trajectory, Amy Tan weaves these critical issues into Asian-American women’s imagination, thereby pointing the way to new modes of existence and new ways of understanding (m)other’s stories.

NOVEL The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Ivy Books, 1991.

SOURCES Adams, Bella. “Representing History in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife,” MELUS 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 9–30. Bloom, Harold, ed. Asian American Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997. Cesar, Judith. “Patriarchy, Imperialism, and Knowledge in The Kitchen God’s Wife,” North Dakota Quarterly 62, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 164–174. Foster, Marie Booth. “Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” In Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown Guillory, 208–227. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1999.

732

KLAIL CITY

Kafka, Phillipa. (Un)doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990. Smorada, Claudia Kovach. “Side-Stepping Death: Ethnic Identity, Contradiction, and the Mother(land) in Amy Tan’s Novels,” Fu Jen Studies: Literature and Linguistics 24 (1991): 31–45. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating Amy Tan Phenomenon.” In The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, 174–210. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Yuan, Yuan. “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan.” In Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan, edited by Harold Bloom, 151–162. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bennett Fu

KLAIL CITY ROLANDO HINOJOSA-SMITH (1987) The second novel of the Klail City Death Trip Series, this novel, for which Hinojosa was awarded the Casa de las Americas prize in Cuba in 1976, shows a clear similarity to Tomas Rivera’s style, particularly his penchant for the sketch form. The characters in Klail City, however, hope for a more optimistic future than the ones in Y no se lo Tragó la tierra. The series opened with Estampas del Valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works), which was awarded the Quinto Sol prize in 1973. First published in Spanish as Klail City y sus alrededores in 1976 and divided in two parts—“Generaciones y Semblanzas” (Generations and semblances) and “Notas de Klail City y sus alrededores” (Notes on Klail City and its environs)—Klail City is the definitive English translation provided by Hinojosa himself. The volumes that follow expand further the stories initiated in this novel, introduce more characters, and feature protagonists, now young adults, who grow to become responsible and productive members of the community. This Belken County chronicle can be considered as several separate volumes, each novel an episode in the history of the county, or as a whole historical account of a crucial era for Klail City and its denizens in Texas. Hinojosa—the most prolific of all contemporary Chi-

cano writers—has published eight Klail City novels to date. In the series, he experiments with several genres, including the detective novel and the epistolary novel. In Klail City, the orphan Jehú Malacara narrates his life story in Klail City and the neighboring towns while his cousin Rafe Buenrostro serves drinks at the “Aquí me quedo” (I’ll stay here), a local bar, during his school holidays. From his position as bartender, he enjoys the opportunity to listen to multiple narrators telling stories about the events that have taken place in the Valley during the last decades. One of these storytellers is Esteban Echevarría, a Korean War veteran whose monologues involve the lives of every town inhabitant. Echevarría’s stories acquires relevance when he reveals the murder of Rafe’s father, Jesús “El Quieto” (the Quiet), by the Leguizamón family in a fight for the land. This re-creation of events helps rewrite the history of the city in the minds of the expectant audience while new heroes and bandits appear. Rafe as a narrator himself follows-up in a very journalistic style with the stories that years before provided grist for the city’s gossip mill. Flashbacks resemble film shots and certainly the influence of the visual arts is highly evident as Rafe reveals the history of the city. He records the voice of the Valley people and even letters addressed to combatants in the Mexican War of Independence. Rafe’s and Jehú’s lives are constantly intertwined as are the lives of the rest of the town’s inhabitants. They all somehow end up together in one event or another, giving the sense of a community where the individual does not stand on his own but depends entirely on the rest. Humor dominates most scenes, while deep irony and satire fill the pages of the narrative. The names of the protagonists, Malacara and Buenrostro (Mug and Goodface), anticipate the hilarious events that will follow. Apparent opposites, the lives of Jehú and Rafe will run parallel from their childhood onward without their noticing. The world Jehú seems to know best revolves around partying: Descriptions of whorehouses in Flora town and of nights drinking with friends fill up several pages of the account of Jehú’s adolescence. The encounter between Jehú and Brother Tomás Imás, the fuereño (foreigner) Lutheran priest and for-

KNOWLES, JOHN 733

mer Bible seller, is amusingly narrated, as are the following chapters in which the protagonist reminds the reader of a picaresque hero. In those pages, Hinojosa plays with the concept of religion, parodying both Catholics and Protestants by highlighting their commonalities and using the character of Jehú to illustrate the way followers can move from one church to another without radical changes in their lives. All narrators in the novel talk about Texan Mexicans; la raza, literally meaning “race” in English, has further implications when used by Chicanos: It names a whole nation and underlines the sense of community and union in the struggle for a common goal. The chapter about the protagonists’ time in Korea is based on the author’s own knowledge of war and the army, for Hinojosa joined the army at age 17. Although he was placed in the postwar reserves soon after, he was called in 1949 to serve in Japan and Korea. Hinojosa plays with time and setting, moving backward and forward with dexterity. Through his narrators, characters travel along the different towns of the Valley, serve in Vietnam and Korea, turn young or old, and are even brought back to life at the speaker’s convenience. He demonstrates his control over the characters’ words and appears in the narrative, calling himself “the writer,” challenging readers on the issue of authenticity—does the narrative recount history or fiction?—but assuring readers that, in any case, it is the author who controls the narrative decisions. Truly postmodern in his treatment of humor and the collage technique through the use of sketches, Hinojosa introduces and manipulates multiple perspectives, a polyphony of voices who tell and write the history of the imaginary Belken County in a way that is similar to William FAULKNER’s Yoknapatawpha County or Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo in a Texan valley.

SOURCES Lee, Joyce Glover. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. Saldivar, J. David, ed. The Rolando Hinojosa Reader: Essays Historical and Critical. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985. West-Durán, Alan, ed., and María Herrera-Sobek and Cesar A. Salgado, associate eds. Latino & Latina Writers. Volume 1. New York: Scribner, 2004.

Zilles, Klaus. Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader’s Guide. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Imelda Martín-Junquera

KNOWLES, JOHN (1926–2001)

John Knowles, the author of nine novels, is known primarily for A Separate Peace (1960), winner of the William Faulkner Award for Outstanding First Novel. For more than four decades, the novel, made into a feature-length film in 1972, has appeared on many syllabi of high school classes. Its focus on the competition between boys at an Eastern private school and the moral that resolution of conflict should occur not through violence but through acceptance of difference is characteristic of most of Knowles’s subsequent novels. A Separate Peace focuses on the friendship between Phineas, an athletic and popular boy, and Gene, his more intellectual and introverted friend. With World War II in the background, hostility and jealousy drive Gene to strike out against Phineas, injuring his friend and, finally, learning a good deal about himself. John Knowles was born on September 16, 1926, in Fairmont, West Virginia, to James Myron Knowles and Mary Beatrice Shea Knowles, both New Englanders who believed in the excellence of a New England education. Knowles was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy during World War II and, after graduation, enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and became a pilot before returning in 1946; he earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale University in 1949. In 1962 Knowles published Morning in Antibes, a story that evokes F. Scott FITZGERALD or Edith WHARTON because it depicts wealthy Americans abroad. Set on the French Riviera and in southern France with the 1950s French-Algerian crisis in the background, it juxtaposes the emotional and sexual adventures of both French and American characters against those of ordinary working folk. Indian Summer (1966), which, like A Stolen Past (1984) and The Paragon (1971), is set at Yale, continues to examine the conflicts caused by personal differences. Its protagonist is the part–Native American midwesterner Cleet Kinsolving, who clashes with his

734

KOSINSKI, JERZY

acquisitive and vapid friend Neil Reardon. The Paragon (1971) explores both the power of sexuality and the ambivalent nature of both gender and sexuality and the need of Louis Colfax, attending Yale after his discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps, to understand and embrace both the masculine and the feminine sides of himself. Spreading Fires (1974), a short novel dedicated to his friend Truman CAPOTE, is set on the French Riviera and addresses romantic and sexual issues and, as in the novels of Wharton and Henry JAMES, contrasts American and European values and culture. The protagonist, Brendan Lucas, his sister Miriam, and Neville, the cook, take part in an unusual tale of sexuality and terror. A Vein of Riches (1978), set between 1918 and 1921, features the clash between West Virginia miners on strike and the wealthy mine-owning Catherwoods. In a departure from Knowles’s characteristically balanced view of opposing parties, the miners are sympathetically portrayed while the Catherwoods become symbols of the dark side of capitalism. Peace Breaks Out (1981), published more than two decades after A Separate Peace, focuses on Pete Hallam, a World War II veteran who has returned to the Devon School to teach history and physical education. Hallam’s traumatic experiences have disillusioned him and, despite his efforts to recapture his prewar innocence, he must learn to accept the flaws in human nature. In A Stolen Past (1984), writer Allan Prieston, educated at Devon and Yale, looks back at his past in an attempt to understand the formative influence of his teacher Reeves Lockhart while simultaneously accepting the flaws inherent in both his teacher and himself. The novel is often viewed as a companion piece to The Paragon. Knowles’s last novel was The Private Life of Axie Reed (1986). John Knowles died on November 29, 2001, in Florida. A number of his manuscripts are held at the Beinecke Library of Yale University.

NOVELS Indian Summer. New York: Random House, 1966. London: Secker & Warburg, 1966. Morning in Antibes. New York: Macmillan, 1962. London: Secker & Warburg, 1962. The Paragon. New York: Random House, 1971. Peace Breaks Out. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981.

The Private Life of Axie Reed. New York: Dutton, 1986. A Separate Peace. New York: Macmillan, 1960. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. Spreading Fires. New York: Random House, 1974. A Stolen Past. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983. London: Constable, 1984. A Vein of Riches. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978.

SOURCES Bryant, Hallman Bell. “A Separate Peace”: The War Within. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Carragher, Bernard. “There Really Was a Super Suicide Society,” New York Times, 8 October 1972, section 2, p. 2. Ellis, James. “ ‘A Separate Peace’: The Fall from Innocence,” English Journal 53 (May 1964): 313–318. Gardner, John. “More Smog from the Dark, Satanic Mills,” Southern Review 5 (Winter 1969): 224–244. Greiling, Franziska Lynne. “The Theme of Freedom in ‘A Separate Peace,’ ” English Journal 56 (December 1967): 1,269–1,272. Halio, Jay L. “John Knowles’s Short Novels,” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (Winter 1964): 107–112. Henkel, Wayne J. “Pas de Feux,” Washington Post Book World, 23 June 1974, p. 2. MacDonald, James L. “The Novels of John Knowles,” Arizona Quarterly 23 (Winter 1967): 335–342. Slethang, Gordon E. “The Play of the Double in A Separate Peace,” Canadian Review of American Studies 15 (1984): 259–270. Veitch, Colin R. “The Devon School Fiction of John Knowles,” Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature 3 (Spring 1986): 101–113. Weber, Ronald. “Narrative Method in ‘A Separate Peace,’ ” Studies in Short Fiction 3 (Fall 1965): 63–72.

OTHER John Knowles. Available online. URL:http://library.exeter.edu/ dept/Special/separate_peace/index.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. John Knowles Author Sheet. Available online. URL: http://216. 183.184.20/locations/references/authorsheets/knowles.html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

KOSINSKI, JERZY (NIKODEM) (1933– 1991) Jerzy Kosinski, writer, photographer, and teacher, is best known as the author of three highly disturbing novels: The PAINTED BIRD (1965), the horrific account of a young boy’s experiences in Europe during

KOSINSKI, JERZY 735

World War II; STEPS (1968), sequel to The Painted Bird; and BEING THERE (1971), a satiric portrayal of American pop culture. Steps won the 1969 National Book Award, while all three novels were made into feature-length films; particularly noteworthy is the award-winning Being There, for which Kosinski won the Best Screenplay of the Year award from both the Writers Guild of America (1979) and the British Academy of film and Television Arts (1981). Jerzy Kosinski was born on June 14, 1933, in Lodz, Poland, to Moses Lewinkopf, a classicist, and Elzbieta Lewinkopf, a concert pianist. They evaded the Nazis during Kosinski’s youth after his father invented Christian identities for the entire family and adopted this non-Jewish Polish name. Kosinski was educated at the University of Lodz, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950 and two master’s degrees (1953, 1955). He did further graduate work at the Polish Academy of Sciences and, after immigrating to the United States, at Columbia University. His first novel, The Painted Bird, focuses on a young boy whose life is radically changed because of the evil he experiences while wandering through eastern Europe during the war; he resolves that evil in others can be fought only with evil. Kosinski’s next novel, Steps, features that same nameless boy, now an adult, as he grapples with the world and finds himself unable to escape the scars of his boyhood experiences. In Being There, Kosinski’s only novel that does not focus on sex, violence, and brutality, the character Chance, a gardener employed by a millionaire, must enter the nonbeautiful world after his benefactor dies. When the populace treat him as a wise man, interpreting his gardening theories as solutions to contemporary ills, Chance becomes a candidate for president. Other works, less well received, include The Devil Tree (1973); Cockpit (1975); Blind Date (1977); Passion Play (1979); Pinball (1982); and The Hermit of 69th Street: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky (1988). With the publication of articles in the Village Voice in 1982 that cited the doctoral dissertation of Barbara Tepa, many passages in Kosinski’s work were found to have been directly translated from original Polish sources into English. Kosinski’s honesty and writing abilities were seriously questioned. As the critic Julia

Bloch Frey points out, the “rumors about his plagiarisms and ghostwriters were rampant for at least 10 years” before the Village Voice article accused him of not writing English well enough to put words down on paper, let alone write award-winning novels (Frey). These questions about the reality of his fiction and the fictional aspects of his own life continued after Kosinski committed suicide on May 3, 1991, in New York City; the questions are most explicitly explored in James Park Sloan’s 1996 biography of Kosinski.

NOVELS Being There. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Blind Date. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Cockpit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. The Devil Tree. New York: Harcourt, 1973. Revised and expanded edition, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. The Hermit of 69th Street: The Working Papers of Norbert Kosky. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. The Painted Bird. Abridged edition, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Complete edition, New York: Modern Library, 1970. Complete and revised 10th-anniversary edition, with an introduction by the author, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Passion Play. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979. Pinball. New York: Bantam, 1982. Steps. New York: Random House, 1968.

SOURCES Batchelor, John Calvin. “The Annotated ‘Roman à Tease,’” New York Times Book Review, 3 July 1988, p. 11. Boyers, Robert. “Language and Reality in Kosinski’s Steps,” Centennial Review 16 (Winter 1972): 41–61. Cahill, Daniel J. “Jerzy Kosinski: Retreat from Violence,” Twentieth Century Literature 18 (April 1972): 121–136. ———. “The Devil Tree: An Interview with Jerzy Kosinski,” North American Review 258 (Spring 1973): 56–66. Coale, Samuel. “The Quest for the Elusive Self: The Fiction of Jerzy Kosinski,” Critique 14 (1973): 25–37. Corry, John. “The Most Considerate of Men,” American Spectator 24, no. 7 (July 1991): 17–18. Cronin, Gloria L., and Blaine H. Hall. Jerzy Kosinski: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1991. Fetherling, Doug. “Sex and Dreams and Rock ’n’ Roll,” Maclean’s Magazine, 8 March 1982, p. 645. Frey, Julia Bloch. “Jerzy Kosinski,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 12 May 1996, p. 3.

736

KRANTZ, JUDITH

Gladsky, Thomas S. “Jerzy Kosinski’s East European Self,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 29, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 121–132. Griffin, Patricia. “A Conversation with Kosinski,” Texas Arts Journal 1 (1978): 27–35. Howe, Irving. “The Other Side of the Moon,” Harper’s, March 1969, pp. 102–105. Kane, John. “Jerzy Kosinski: Interview,” Yale Literature Review 141 (August 1972): 12–16. Kennedy, William. “Who Here Doesn’t Know How Good Kosinski Is?” Look 24 (April 20, 1971): 12. Lavers, Norman. Jerzy Kosinski. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Lilly, Paul R. Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988. ———. “Vision and Violence in the Fiction of Jerzy Kosinski,” The Literary Review 25, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 389–400. Mount, Douglas N. “Jerzy Kosinski,” Publishers Weekly 199 (April 26, 1969): 13–16. Nathan, Paul S. “Multiple Kosinskis,” Publishers Weekly 203 (April 30, 1973): 48. Plimpton, George. “Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 14 (Summer 1972): 183–207. Sheehy, Gail. “The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man,” Psychology Today 11 (December 1977): 54–56, 126, 128, 130. Sloan, James Park. Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography. New York: Dutton, 1996. Stone, Elizabeth. “Horatio Algers of the Nightmare,” Psychology Today 11 (December 1977): 59–60, 63–64. Teicholz, Tom, ed. Conversations with Jerzy Kosinski. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Walsh, Thomas, and Cameron Northouse. John Barth, Jerzy Kosinski and Thomas Pynchon: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Weales, Gerald. “The Painted Bird and Other Disguises,” Hollins Critic 9 (October 1972): 1–12. Ziegler, Robert E. “Identity and Anonymity in the Novels of Jerzy Kosinski,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 35, no. 2 (1981): 99–109.

KRANTZ, JUDITH (TARCHER) (1927– ) With more than 75 million copies of her novels in print, Judith Krantz is “one of the most published women in history” (Higgins). She did not begin writing until she was 48, and her first novel, Scruples (1978), appeared after her 50th birthday. Two years later, Krantz received $3.2 million for Princess Daisy, her second novel. Her

first six novels were made into television miniseries produced by her husband, Steve Krantz, while I’ll Take Manhattan, Till We Meet Again, Spring Collection, Dazzle, and The Jewels of Tessa Kent were made into television movies. In a 2002 interview, Krantz emphasized the long years of preparation for becoming a novelist. Although she has said she wishes she could have begun writing about 10 years earlier, “My work [as a magazine editor] caused me to interview hundreds of women about their lives and their problems. I think that getting to know so much about women was crucial before I started to write fiction to be read mainly by women” (Huseby). Known today as the inventor of the “sex and shopping” genre of women’s fiction, Krantz, unoffended by the moniker, entitled her 2002 memoir Sex and Shopping: The Confessions of a Nice Jewish Girl. As Huseby points out, although Krantz is often categorized with such writers as Danielle Steel and Jackie Collins “as an author of ‘commercial women’s fiction,’ Judith Krantz alone among them is a natural storyteller.” Judith Krantz was born on January 9, 1927, in New York City, to Jack D. Tarcher, an advertising executive, and Mary Braeger Tarcher, a teacher and legal aid lawyer. She was educated at Wellesley College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1948. Scruples refers to the exclusive Beverly Hills boutique owned by the widowed Billy Ikehorn, remarried at the end of the novel to the wealthy Oscar-winning producer Vito Orsini. The book was the first of 10 bestsellers, and Krantz explained why: “I love to write sex scenes, and . . . women love to read them” (Huseby). But, she points out, her books have no more sex in them than do those by John UPDIKE and Philip ROTH, who write “excruciatingly detailed” sex scenes (Higgins). Beneath the glamor and sex, says Krantz, “The subtext of all my books, every single one of them, is women’s opportunities” (Huseby). Princess Daisy is about a real Russian princess. Mistral’s Daughter (1982), Krantz’s own favorite, explores the mother-daughter relationship through Maggy Lunel, a 1920s French fashion model and mistress to modeling agency owner Julien Mistral, and also through Fauve, her granddaughter and Mistral’s daughter. I’ll Take Manhattan (1986) focuses on a hero who starts her own newspaper, the protagonist of Till We Meet Again (1988) flies

KRANTZ, JUDITH 737

her own plane (as did Krantz), and Dazzle (1990) features an internationally famous photographer. As many critics have pointed out, Krantz rewards her struggling women heroes with success, wealth, and happiness. In Scruples Two (1992), Billy Orsini discovers that her husband, Vito, has a 16-year-old daughter, Gigi. Billy forms close ties with Gigi, suffers a miscarriage, gets divorced, has a devastating love affair, and finds happiness with a third husband. Lovers (1994) is a novel about Gigi. Spring Collection (1996) features the vice president of a modeling agency who is “smart enough to live in a rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn” (Higgins). The Jewels of Tessa Kent (1998), Krantz’s most recent novel, again focuses on the mother-daughter relationship, this time through the title character’s attempts to overcome her long-ago folly. Kent, a wealthy, talented Hollywood star, would forfeit all her assets, including her happy marriage (whose reception was hosted by Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco) to live a normal life with the daughter she had at age 14 and who has been raised as her sister.

NOVELS Dazzle. New York: Crown, 1990. I’ll Take Manhattan. New York: Crown, 1986. The Jewels of Tessa Kent. New York: Crown, 1998. Lovers. New York: Crown, 1994. Mistral’s Daughter. New York: Crown, 1982. Princess Daisy. New York: Crown, 1980. Scruples. New York: Crown, 1978. Scruples Two. New York: Crown, 1992. Spring Collection. New York: Crown, 1996. Till We Meet Again. New York: Crown, 1988.

SOURCES “The Booklist Interview,” Booklist 89, no. 3 (October 1, 1992): 240–241. Glueck, Grace. “Absolutely the Most,” New York Times Book Review, 2 January 1983, pp. 10, 12. Stein, Jeannine. “Pleasures That Should Be Guiltier,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 June 1992, p. 15.

OTHER Berman, Sara. “The Sexual Education of the Steamy Novelist Judith Krantz.” Forward. Available online. URL: http://www. forward.com/issues/2000/00.05.05/fastforward.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Costin, Glynis. “Grande Dame of Romantic Sagas Judith Krantz Specializes in the Art of Titillating.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (May 18, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/ library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:6605432. Accessed September 19, 2005. Hewitt, Jennifer Love. “Judith Krantz: A Passion for Words.” Lifetime Online. Available online. URL: http:// www.lifetimetv.com/lp/portraits/0021/0021_index.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Higgins, Bill. “Success Stories: Wealth, Power, Beauty, Brains—Judith Krantz’s Heroines Have It All: Interview” Town & Country (November 1, 1998). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/ library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:21281931. Accessed September 19, 2005. Wikoff, Katherine Hennessey. “Dose of Reality Infused in Books, Krantz Says.” Journal Sentinel (December 3, 1998). Available online. URL: http://www.jsonline.com/enter/ daily/1203krantz.asp. Accessed September 19, 2005.

C

LD alcoholic mother, Elizabeth Ferguson, the characters Lamott calls “the ones closest to my heart. They are,” she says, “facets of myself” (Jones). When her husband is killed in an auto accident, Elizabeth becomes increasingly dependent on alcohol until she realizes it has impaired her ability to stop a sexual assault on Rosie. Joe Jones (1985), recently republished, was written the year before Lamott herself stopped drinking. With Jessie’s Café at the center, the novel relates the stories of Jessie, the owner; Joe Jones, the bartender; and Louise, the cook. All New People (1989), which Lamott has called “my first sober book” (Jones), is narrated by Nanny Goodman, who plumbs her past for the causes of her depression and general unhappiness; the memories she evokes reveal a 1960s counterculture California family, replete with marijuana and extramarital sex. Crooked Little Heart (1997) is a coming-of-age story featuring the now 13-year-old talented tennis star Rosie, of the 1983 novel, and her mother, Elizabeth, who has married her writer friend James but has yet to confront the nature and cause of her alcoholism. The Blue Shoe (2002) is the story of the recently divorced Mattie Ryder, who moves with her two children into her mother’s rat-infested house. As she copes with single parenting, she continues to sleep with her ex-husband (remarried and expecting a baby) and cares for her mother, recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Anne Lamott lives and writes in Marin County, California.

LAMOTT, ANNE (1954– ) Anne Lamott, novelist, columnist, and political activist, first came to public attention with Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), an account of the first year of motherhood. She was not afraid to say to new mothers “that it’s OK to have really awful thoughts” about their children (Hansen). Operating Instructions, which sold over 100,000 copies and is listed on the Modern Library’s list of the best fiction of the 1900s, was followed by Bird by Bird, much more than a manual for aspiring writers; the latter sold over 200,000 copies. With a spot on National Public Radio and regular columns for Salon magazine, Lamott developed a readership for her six novels. Drawing on her own life, she writes about marriage and divorce, motherhood, alcoholism, and her own unconventional Christian religious convictions. Her novels are acclaimed for their witty asides; still, in Redbook writer Molly McDermot’s words, they have “an undercurrent of darkness.” Anne Lamott was born on April 10, 1954, in San Francisco, California, to Kenneth Lamott, a writer, and Dorothy Lamott, an attorney. After attending Goucher College from 1974, she returned home to attend to her father, who was dying of brain cancer. This experience surfaces in the novel Hard Laughter (1980), where a California family with three adult children (including the narrator, Jennifer) copes with the traumatic effects of the father’s battle with a brain tumor. Rosie (1983) is the tale of a little girl and her 738

L’AMOUR, LOUIS 739

She is also the author of Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (2000).

NOVELS All New People. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1989. The Blue Shoe. New York: Riverhead, 2002. Crooked Little Heart. New York: Pantheon, 1997. Hard Laughter. New York: Viking, 1980. Joe Jones. San Francisco, Calif.: North Point Press, 1985. Rosie. New York: Viking, 1983.

OTHER Charles, Ron. “Everybody Loves Anne Lamott.” Christian Science Monitor (September 26, 2002). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:92080308. Accessed September 19, 2005. Hansen, Liane. “Interview With Ann Lamott.” HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:28265657. Accessed September 19, 2005. Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “Lowercase, High class: Profile: Anne Lamott.” Newsweek (April 28, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:19336486. Accessed September 19, 2005. MacDermot, Molly. “The Writer Women Love: Interview with Anne Lamott.” Redbook (December 1, 1997). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:19997826. Accessed September 19, 2005. Welch, Dave. “Word by Word with Anne Lamott.” Powells.com. Interview (September 26, 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/lamott. html. Accessed September 19, 2005.

L’AMOUR, LOUIS (DEARBORN) (1908– 1988) The premier writer of Western novels in the 20th century, Louis L’Amour won the National Book Award in 1980 for his novel Bendigo Shafter. As America’s best-selling author of Westerns, at the time of his death L’Amour had nearly 200 million copies of his books in print. L’Amour wrote nearly 100 novels, more than 400 short stories for such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, collected in 20 volumes, and more than 65 television scripts. More than 45 of his novels and stories have been adapted for film and television.

His novels made him popular with millions of readers because of their historically and geographically accurate details. They educated while they entertained, and his knowledge of both Indian and Western white ways, reflected in his characters, added to the discussion of long-standing cultural conflicts. During his 80 years L’Amour received numerous honors, including the Western Writers of America Award-Novel in 1969, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. Louis L’Amour was born on March 28, 1908, in Jamestown, North Dakota, to Louis Charles LaMoore, a veterinarian and farm-machinery salesman, and Emily Dearborn LaMoore. A self-educated man, he wandered the West for over 10 years, earning a living as a boxer, cattle skinner, and longshoreman, before joining the ranks of such writers as Raymond CHANDLER and Edgar Rice BURROUGHS and selling short stories to the pulp magazines. He served in the army from 1942 to 1946, becoming a first lieutenant, and married the actress Katherine Elizabeth Adams in 1956. After establishing some of the continuing plots for his Western protagonists (the hero often marries the wife of the man he kills and becomes stepfather to her son) and stock ingredients (gunfights, fistfights, historical detail, and actual historical figures), L’Amour moved from short fiction to novels. His first novel, Westward the Tide, appeared in 1950. L’Amour’s heroes always behave with honor and courage, ready to die if necessary (although they never do). L’Amour was also hired under the pseudonym Tex Burns to write novels about Hopalong Cassidy, a hero of the pulps first created by the author Clarence Mulford. By 1953 L’Amour’s own Western voice had evolved, and he considered his fifth novel, Hondo (1953), the real beginning of his career as a professional writer of Western novels. Evolving from the short story “The Gift of Cochise,” it features Hondo Lane, the first of L’Amour’s loner Western gunmen. Along with Flint (1960), it appeared on the Western Writers of America list of the top 25 Western novels of all time. John Wayne starred in the film released that same year. For the next four decades L’Amour wrote between three and four books a year. Notable for their original-

740 L’AMOUR, LOUIS

ity are Heller with a Gun (1955) and Sitka (1957). In the 1960s, L’Amour began writing the Sackett series (later made into a 1987 TV miniseries), beginning with The Daybreakers (1960), about Tyrel and Orrin Sackett, two brothers, ex–Civil War soldiers, who head west from Tennessee to the New Mexico territory. These novels were written until the 1970s and 1980s, and there were finally 17 Sackett family stories. The 1970s also saw The Rider of Lost Creek (1976), the first of three Lance Kilkenny novels, and Bendigo Shafter, a detailed account of the young easterner Shafter’s trip. In the 1980s, L’Amour published 14 novels, including The Walking Drum (1984), a historical novel set in 12thcentury Europe, and Last of the Breed (1986), a cold war espionage novel with Western characters. His last novel, The Haunted Mesa (1987), combined the Western with science fiction. Louis L’Amour, a nonsmoker, died on June 10, 1988, of lung cancer, in Los Angeles. Several million copies of his novels remain in print, and his novels about the Old West, its heroes, its family values, and its violence continue to attract readers.

Shalako. New York: Bantam, 1962. Reprint, 1985. Sitka. New York: Appleton, 1957. Reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1986. Taggart. New York: Bantam, 1959. Reprint, New York: Arbor House, 1982. The Walking Drum. New York: Bantam, 1984. Westward the Tide. Surrey, England: World’s Work, 1950. Reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1984.

SELECTED NOVELS

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED UNDER PSEUDONYM JIM MAYO; REPRINTED UNDER AUTHOR’S REAL NAME; NOVELS

Bendigo Shafter. New York: Dutton, 1978. The Burning Hills. New York: Jason, 1956. Reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1985. Comstock Lode. New York: Bantam, 1981. Crossfire Trail. New York: Ace Books, 1954. Reprinted with introduction by Keith Jarrod, Boston: Gregg, 1980. Original reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1985. Flint. New York: Bantam, 1960. Reprinted, 1985. The Haunted Mesa. New York: Bantam, 1987. Heller with a Gun. New York: Gold Medal, 1954. Reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1985. Hondo. New York: Gold Medal, 1953. Reprinted with introduction by Michael T. Marsden, Boston: Gregg, 1978. Original reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1985. How the West Was Won. (Based on the screenplay by James R. Webb) New York: Bantam, 1963. Reprinted, Thorndike, Me.: Thorndike Press, 1988. Kilkenny. New York: Ace Books, 1954. Reprinted with introduction by Wesley Laing, Boston: Gregg, 1980. Original reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1984. Last of the Breed. New York: Bantam, 1986. The Quick and the Dead. New York: Bantam, 1973. Revised edition, 1979.

“SACKETT FAMILY” SERIES; NOVELS The Daybreakers. New York: Bantam, 1960. Reprint, 1984. Lando. New York: Bantam, 1962. Reprint, 1985. Sackett. New York: Bantam, 1961. Reprint, 1984. Sackett’s Land. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974. The Warrior’s Path. New York: Bantam, 1980.

“THE CHANTRYS” SERIES; NOVELS North to the Rails. New York: Bantam, 1971. Over on the Dry Side. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.

“THE TALONS” SERIES; NOVELS The Man from the Broken Hills. New York: Bantam, 1975. Milo Talon. New York: Bantam, 1981. Rivers West. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1974. Reprinted, New York: Dutton, 1989.

Showdown at Yellow Butte. New York: Ace Books, 1954. Reprinted with introduction by Scott R. McMillan, Boston: Gregg, 1980. Original reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1983. Utah Blaine. New York: Ace Books, 1954. Reprinted with introduction by Wayne C. Lee, Boston: Gregg, 1980. Original reprinted, New York: Bantam, 1984.

SOURCES Bannon, Barbara A. “Louis L’Amour,” Publishers Weekly, (October 8, 1973): 56–57. Gale, Robert L. Louis L’Amour. Revised ed. New York: Twayne, 1992. Gonzalez, Arturo F. “Louis L’Amour: Writing High in the Bestseller Saddle,” Writer’s Digest 60 (December 1980): 22–29. Jackson, Donald Dale. “World’s Fastest Literary Gun: Louis L’Amour,” Smithsonian 18 (May 1987): 154–170. Marsden, Michael T. “A Conversation with Louis L’Amour,” Journal of American Culture 2 (Winter 1980): 646–658. Nesbitt, John. “Louis L’Amour-Paper Mache Homer?” South Dakota Review 19 (Autumn 1981): 37–48.

LANCELOT 741

Terrie, Philip G. “Last of the Breed: Louis L’Amour’s Survivalist Fantasy,” Journal of Popular Culture 25 (Spring 1992): 23–33. Weinberg, Robert, ed. The Louis L’Amour Companion. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews & McNeel, 1992.

OTHER Veinotte.com. “Louis L’Amour.” Available online. URL: http:// www.veinotte.com/lamour/bio.htm. Accessed September 19, 2005. Random House, Inc. “Louis L’Amour.” Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl? authorid=16445. Accessed September 19, 2005. Wired for Books. Audio Interview with Louis L’Amour. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/louislamour/. Accessed September 19, 2005.

LANCELOT WALKER PERCY (1976)

“Come into my cell. Make yourself at home” (Lancelot, 1). Walker PERCY directs these opening lines of monologue toward readers as much as Lancelot extends them toward Father John. With this polite invitation into the mind of a sane, clear-thinking madman, the reader begins a journey on a quest to discern illusion from reality, with the only guide being the madman himself. Percy fuses vivid description and multiple historical and literary references to an exaggerated mix of sanity and madness, allowing readers to journey with Lance in his quest for a New World. Lancelot can be read and interpreted successfully in several different ways: as an apocalyptical tale or as a fictional work of one man’s journey through self-induced insanity. Lance Lamar’s story begins simply, and sanely, enough. He is a father; he smokes, watches the news, and loves his wife, Margot. However, with the discovery that his daughter, Siobhan, is the product of Margot’s infidelity and not the result of their love, he takes his reality and twists it in a way that most readers find disturbing. According to Gary Ciuba, “the catastrophe of coming into consciousness makes the father and husband see the end of the world in the end of his world” (Ciuba, 172). Rather than immediately confront Margot or file for divorce, as one might consider a “normal” reaction to such news, Lance only verbally identifies the expected “appropriate” response, and discusses it with Father John. “First, you must under-

stand that the usual emotions which one might consider appropriate—shock, anger, shame—do not apply” (34). He then goes on to compare this discovery of treachery to a situation that occurred with his own father during his childhood. Lance, in fact, never directly addresses Margot on the issues of her infidelity or Siobhan’s paternity. He takes Margot’s actions and forces a blunt change in his life, so much so that he identifies a split in time: “that my life is divided into two parts, Before and After, before and after the moment I discovered that my wife had been rendered ecstatic, beside herself, by a man on top of her” (15). Margot, in stark contrast to Lance’s concrete, scientific world, lives her life in a virtual Hollywood. She is an actress, and the events of the novel to which Lance refers in his recounting to Father John take place during the filming of a movie at the fictitious Belle Isle. An exciting opportunity for most, having a movie filmed on one’s own property, Lance is so disrupted by the comings and goings of the actors that he secludes himself in the pigeon coop. By living here, separated from the rest of Belle Isle, he becomes an observer—able essentially to spy on Margot unnoticed. The others involved with the film—Merlin, Jacoby, Raine, and Dana—seem nonoffensive at first. As Lance pushes his investigation into the paternity of his daughter, however, he begins to suspect Merlin or Jacoby of impregnating his wife, or at the very least, possibly both of them having an affair with her. This progression of events takes the focus for Lance from his daughter’s real father to the behavior of his wife. He enlists the help of his African-American housemaid, Elgin, in collecting solid proof of his wife’s infidelity by way of videotape. For Lance, who begins to exhibit many characteristics of obsessive-compulsive disorder, this plan provides an outlet for his emotions. He designs an elaborate arrangement of video cameras, placed by Elgin, that show all the rooms at the Holiday Inn where the film crew and actors have moved. Through these videos, Lance gathers the evidence he needs. His final step of the plan is to eliminate Margot and her lover(s?) by causing an “accident” during a violent storm at Belle Isle. Since Lancelot is written as a monologue with one apparently passive listener, readers have little choice

742

LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD, THE

but to accept Lance’s version of events. “Lance has the lectern for most of the book, a monopoly which lends his words persuasive power” (Hobson, 95). Yet the reader must keep in mind that Lance is telling this tale from the Center for Aberrant Behavior. Thus, everything he says must be taken within the context of insanity. This is most significant in terms of the apocalyptical aspects of the novel. Lancelot believes strongly that it is his role to become a 20th-century Adam, that he has a firm grasp on all that needs to be amended and changed to create a New World. The novel, therefore, switches back and forth from Lance detailing the events that unfolded at Belle Isle, from his initial discovery of Margot’s infidelity to the final tragic explosion that destroys the property, to his running commentary on the state of society, the ideas of good versus evil, and determining the exact definition of sin. “But suppose you could show me one ‘sin,’ one pure act of malevolence. . . . My quest was for a true sin— was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought. . . . Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin” (124, 126). Percy pulls Lance away from the plot of the novel several times to allow him to pontificate on the tragic state of the world—a world that accepts wives who cheat on their husbands, that allows women to be gang-raped and beaten, as in the case of Anna, the woman in the cell next to his—and establish that he is above it all. It is his role in life to establish a New World, a new way of life not only for the rest of society but for himself and Anna, the new “Eve,” as well. “The New Woman is the survivor of the catastrophe and the death of old worlds. . . . The worst thing that can happen to her has happened. The worst thing that can happen to me has happened. We are both survivors” (33). Father John listens to Lance throughout the novel, offering no words in affirmation or opposition, until the very end, where he suggests to Lance that there is something more, something Lance has forgotten. This is left as an open, yet fundamental, question that the novel does not answer. Lance Lamar’s journey backward and forward from sanity to insanity serves as a complete plotline in itself.

Percy’s vivid description carries the reader deeply into his divided world. “Lance’s memories of his life at Belle Isle are so concrete and detailed that the reader often feels he is back at the plantation with Lance as he recounts his dissolution” (Hobson, 100). His wife’s infidelity and his eventual decision to destroy Belle Isle, his wife, and his life as he had known it, or arguably not known it, to that point, weave together to create a splendid tale of the “soap opera” that can develop from seemingly ordinary circumstances. Walker Percy has created in Lancelot a novel enjoyable both to leisure readers and to analysts alike. He uses a narrator who is almost stereotypically “normal” and shows his descent into madness as a result of circumstances that occur in society on a daily basis, circumstances that could happen to anyone. Lancelot is an excellent example of apocalyptical literature in terms of Lance’s quest for the renewal of a destroyed world.

SOURCES Ciuba, Gary. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Hobson, Linda Whitney. Understanding Walker Percy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Percy, Walker. Lancelot. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. Kelly Flanagan

LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD, THE WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1896) “Overlooked” and “underappreciated” are two adjectives commonly used by critics to describe The Landlord at Lion’s Head. It is something of a mystery why this unusual and compelling work by HOWELLS remains relatively unknown. Robert Mielke notes that it is one of “only a handful of Howells’ works that read like modern writing,” meaning that Landlord contains more action and description and less extended discussion than many of the author’s other novels (Mielke, 96). The novel’s more “modern” style, however, in no way affects the characteristic depth and precision with which Howells constructs the story of a New England rustic who attempts to make his fortune in the elite circles of Bostonian society. Through the country-city paradigm, Howells manages to portray class hierarchy in an often devastating

LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD, THE 743

light while investigating the larger question of whether character and personal destiny are predetermined by inherited temperament. Howells confesses in his foreword to the 1909 edition, “I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men.” The “hero” is amoral country-bred Thomas Jefferson Durgin, in whom Howells believed he had created “the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always vexing the heart of Puritanism” in New England. Jeff Durgin does not believe in personal moral introspection of the variety so deeply ingrained in the descendants of New England Puritans; when he commits an act many would perceive as despicable, he argues that most actions in the world are not intentional or purposeful (and, by implication, not blameworthy). He looks at his destructive action, he explains, “as if someone else had done it” (278, 281). Through the contrast between self-interested Durgin and highly moral artist Jere Westover, Howells reveals his lifelong interest in the question of personal responsibility for suffering. As the author himself acknowledges, his “liking” for Jeff Durgin is literary admiration rather than moral approval, for in many of his other writings Howells emphasizes the responsibility of every human being for the suffering of others (see The Minister’s Charge, chapter 35, for Sewell’s sermon on “complicity”). Although Howells would not agree with a purely self-interested philosophy, the author brings his trademark objectivity and balance to the portrait of Durgin. The character is no demon or monster; he is a fully drawn human being whose unfortunate temperamental tendencies are exacerbated by an indulgent mother and the humiliating treatment he receives from members of Bostonian high society. Jeff Durgin becomes the catalyst for the novel’s central questions: Can a person of bad temperament, a “vindictive” and/or amoral person, ever truly change? If the answer is no, can such an unregenerate person prosper in this world, against all reasonable expectations of what is fair or just? In Jeff’s boyhood, he reveals his vindictive nature by tormenting younger children and physically attacking artist Jere Westover despite his general admiration and liking for the man. From that point forward, Jeff oscillates between the

honorable and decent behavior urged on him by his mother, his fiancée, and Westover, and the amoral and destructive behavior apparently prompted by his own inclinations. He betrays his engagement to intelligent, beautiful, and good Cynthia Whitwell, a country girl and his childhood companion. He dallies with emotionally damaged, devastatingly witty Bessie Lynde, whose chief attraction is her unparalleled chic, acquired through birth and exposure to only the best of Boston society. He has no compunction about contributing to the alcoholic downfall of Bessie’s brother Alan as he attempts to ingratiate himself by offering champagne to the struggling man. Even at the climactic moment when Jeff refrains from murdering an enemy, he himself does not know whether his behavior springs from mercy or from fear of being witnessed. Howells uses the 19th-century craze for occult activities like the planchette (also known as the ouija board) to deepen the mystery about Jeff and his destiny. Jeff’s brother Jackson, an avid spiritualist, reads the planchette while Jeff is on a voyage only to receive the following message: “broken shaft . . . Thomas Jefferson Durgin.” Though Jackson initially fears that the message originates from Jeff Durgin in the spirit world and therefore means that he is dead, Jeff’s safe return eliminates that worry. Mr. Whitwell, another amateur spiritualist, proposes that the message refers to the nature of human life in the sense that the mystery and imperfection of the “bottom” of the shaft, that is, life in the material world, will be explained only by the unseen “top” of the shaft, or life after death. Whitwell’s interpretation is echoed by the critic Robert Mielke, who attempts to equate the “broken shaft” device with the interest of Howells and his contemporaries in socialism. Mielke argues that the religious belief in a perfect afterworld that will remedy the brokenness and sorrow of human life mutates, through socialism, into the desire to make “heaven on earth” through a perfection of the social order (Mielke, 53). Though Mielke’s reading correctly analyzes Howells’s real interest in Christian socialist ideas, it does not account for the intense fascination with the afterlife that Howells shows here and in his other novels. In Landlord, he uses the debate over an afterlife between quasi-Christ-

744

LANNY BUDD SERIES

ian Whitwell and agnostic Westover to add resonance to the broken-shaft trope. Whether an afterlife exists affects the question of Jeff Durgin’s destiny; in the first half of the novel Howells leaves the reader to wonder whether Jeff will receive material consequences for his amoral actions, or if justice exists only after death, at the “other end” of the broken shaft. By the end of the novel, the meaning of the brokenshaft trope has shifted considerably, because Jeff Durgin has apparently changed his amoral ways. Though Jeff’s life as a young Harvard man was marked by superficiality, violence, crudeness, and callousness toward women, his adult life as a hotel proprietor is apparently the soul of upper-middle-class respectability. Whitwell takes this change to mean that the “broken shaft” is “the old Jeff that he’s left off bein’,” because it could not be possible for a “devil” to prosper so greatly in this world. Westover counters that the nature of Jeff Durgin may not have changed at all; perhaps the “broken shaft” is simply his interrupted destiny that will be fulfilled in another world. The often skeptical artist is moved to remark that perhaps in another life “there is room enough and time enough for all the beginnings of this to complete themselves” (450–53). It is an appropriate ending for a novel too finely written and well observed to provide pat answers to the questions it raises.

SOURCES Cady, Edwin. “The Howells Nobody Knows,” Mad River Review 1 (1965): 3–25. Howells, William Dean. The Landlord at Lion’s Head. 1896. New York: AMS Press, 1976. ———. The Minister’s Charge. 1886. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1914. Mielke, Robert. The Riddle of the Painful Earth: Suffering and Society in W. D. Howells’ Major Writings of the Early 1890s. Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1994. Rosslynn F. Elliott

LANNY BUDD SERIES UPTON SINCLAIR (1940–1953) The Lanny Budd series, also known as the World’s End series after the first novel in the series, by Upton SINCLAIR, focuses on a young American abroad in the tumultuous years between the begin-

ning of World War I and the beginning of the cold war. Lanny functions both as an everyman, caught in the rising tide of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and as a spokesperson for the ideas of the political theorist Upton Sinclair, who felt that fiction ought to help educate readers about economic and social injustice. Many of the novels in the series were immensely popular, and one, Dragon’s Teeth, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943. Lanny ages as the century does, starting as a teenager, serving as a translator for one of President Wilson’s staff during the writing of the Versailles Treaty in Paris. As he matures he develops a political consciousness, formed from the ideas of his family and associates: his father, a pragmatic munitions dealer; his mother, an apolitical and pleasure-seeking beauty; his uncle, Jesse Blackless, a French communist; Rick Pomeroy-Nielson, a former RAF flyer who becomes a left-wing journalist; Kurt Messner, a German composer who supports National Socialism; and various others who range from members of the German underground, a Jewish businessman, and an antifascist Italian labor organizer to the Nazi leaders Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, and Adolf Hitler. There are 11 novels in the series, starting with World’s End (1940), which covers the years 1913 to 1919, concluding with the Paris Peace Conference. Lanny becomes an adult in Between Two Worlds (1941) and travels between his mother’s family in Europe and his father’s family in the United States during the 1920s. In Dragon’s Teeth (1942), which takes place between 1929 and 1934, he becomes aware of the growing danger of fascism and becomes an art dealer, and in Wide Is the Gate (1943) he is caught up in the Spanish civil war. In Presidential Agent (1944) Lanny becomes a secret agent for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, all the while pretending to be sympathetic to National Socialism so that he can move about Europe and obtain information. While these earlier novels also show how fascism spread throughout Europe and the complicity of multinational corporations throughout the world in aiding those who support war because it is profitable, the next several works in the series—Dragon Harvest (1945), A World to Win (1946), and Presidential Mission (1947)— function more as Allied propaganda. One Clear Call

LANNY BUDD SERIES 745

(1948) involves Lanny in many of the events at the end of the war, including becoming involved with German officers who plot to kill Hitler. In O Shepherd, Speak! (1949), set in the postwar world, Lanny functions once again as a translator and an expert in art stolen by the Nazis. With the last of the series, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953), Lanny becomes a cold warrior in the late 1940s, abandoning his ideals of peace in order to defeat the Soviets. He even turns his sister in to the FBI because she has become a spy for the communists. As William Bloodworth has noted, Sinclair’s “strongly expressed sensitivity to inequities in the political and social life of modern capitalistic society” (Bloodworth, 150) is a major theme in all his writings. What makes the Lanny Budd series noteworthy is the way that Sinclair combined this political ideal with a compelling narration of the history of the first half of the 20th century. George Bernard Shaw once wrote to Sinclair, “When people ask me what has happened in my long lifetime, I do not refer them to newspaper files and to the authorities, but to your novels” (Sinclair, My Lifetime, 66). Sinclair paid great attention to getting details right, from the characteristics of the real people with whom Lanny interacts, such as Roosevelt and Hitler, to the places Lanny travels—the French Riviera, the White House, even Hitler’s Alpine retreat, Kehlsteinhaus. He wrote to correspondents all over the world for information and to check facts. As Jon Yoder notes, “It is clearly to Sinclair’s advantage as a propagandist to make his novels as ‘true’ as possible, for if the reader is persuaded that the events and persons and places described correspond with the ‘facts’ of history, he may believe that the interpretation is equally accurate” (Yoder, Upton Sinclair, 11). Lanny is in many ways a prototype for James Bond, traveling on secret missions, attracting a variety of women, and having access to enough money that he can do what he wants. The books at the beginning of the series are most interesting when Lanny is still making up his mind as to what he believes. As Sinclair wrote to Charles Seymour, the president of Yale University, in 1939, “The method I am following throughout the novel is to have no opinions of my own, but to let a varied cast of characters express all points of view and argue with

one another.” Robbie Budd, Lanny’s father, takes great pride in his munitions dealings and early on instructs Lanny: “Remember, there never was a war in which the right was all on one side. And remember that in every war both sides lie like hell” (World’s End, 216). This cynicism is what Lanny takes as his starting philosophy. However, Lanny is eventually forced from his role as philosophical spectator by the Italian fascists who beat a labor-organizer friend of his to death. The deaths of a number of his friends at the hands of the Nazis provoke Lanny into action. His cover, an art connoisseur who buys art from impoverished Europeans, gives him entrée into many homes. He moves from gentleman adventurer to double agent, giving Roosevelt advance warning of Hitler’s plans. But in the end, what he wants most is peace. At the end of Presidential Mission, Lanny articulates Sinclair’s greatest hope: “Why can it not be brought about that men will live in peace and safety, with dignity and mutual consideration, instead of turning each new discovery to the act of destruction, and raising one generation after another to commit mass suicide?” (442).

SOURCES Bloodworth, William, Jr. Upton Sinclair. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Mookerjee, R. N. “Contemporary History as Novel: The Lanny Budd Series.” In Art for Social Justice: The Major Novels of Upton Sinclair, 116–122. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Parry, Sally E. “Learning to Fight the Nazis: The Education of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd.” In Visions of War: World War II in Popular Literature and Culture, edited by M. Paul Holsinger and Mary Anne Schofield, 47–55. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992. Sinclair, Upton. Letter to Charles Seymour. July 26, 1939. Upton Sinclair Collection. Lilly Library, Indiana University. ———. My Lifetime in Letters. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960. ———. Presidential Mission. New York: Viking, 1947. ———. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1940. Yoder, Jon A. Upton Sinclair. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975. ———. “Upton Sinclair, Lanny, and the Liberals,” Modern Fiction Studies 20 (1974–1975): 483–504. Sally E. Parry

746

LANSDALE, JOSEPH RICHARD HAROLD

LANSDALE, JOSEPH RICHARD HAROLD (1951– ) Critically acclaimed “Mojo storyteller” and writer of “barbecue noir,” Joe Lansdale has written numerous novels, novellas, and short stories set in the darker corners of life in rural Texas. Cited by the New York Times Book Review as possessing “a folklorist’s eye for telling detail, and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace,” Lansdale’s uncompromising, over-the-top approach to storytelling weaves elements of his own east Texas upbringing with settings and story lines that range from the down-home to the fantastic. His stories illuminate the taken-for-granted areas of everyday life, often constructing “lesser of evils” situations that ask readers to rethink their assumptions and desires. Lansdale’s literary world is animated by characters who are often at the margins: confused, flawed, angry, violent, and barely getting by; yet it is exactly those traits he uses to underscore their undeniable humanity and spirit. Lansdale’s writing has been critically acclaimed across genres, garnering an Edgar Award for The Bottoms (2001), a Mid-South Booksellers Award for a book that best represents the region, for Fine Dark Line (2003), an award from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Bibliophiles for his contribution to Burroughs’s legacy, a British Fantasy Award, an American Mystery Award, six Bram Stoker horror awards, an Inkpot Award for his contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, a Heroditus Award for Best Historical Fiction, and two New York Times Notable Books. Joe Lansdale was born on October 28, 1951, in Gladewater, Texas, to Alcebee (A.B.) Lansdale, a mechanic, and O’Reta Wood. A high school graduate with 60 hours of college credits, Lansdale lays claim to such former occupations as rose field worker, mobile home carpenter, ditchdigger, and mule-team plow driver on his way to becoming a full-time writer. These early experiences resurface in many of his novels, with sites such as rose fields and aluminum chair factories creating such vivid backdrops that they become supporting characters in his stories. Lansdale’s first published writing appeared in Farm Journal in 1973, under his mother’s name. Several years later, he continued his writing career under his own name, producing detective stories for Mike Shayne

Mystery Magazine. Elements of these early writings are particularly evident in the novels of his Hap Collins series: Bad Chili (1997), Mucho Mojo (1994), Rumble Tumble (1998), Savage Season (1990), Captains Outrageous (2001), and Two-Bear Mambo (1995). Hap’s world-weary character is firmly rooted in the pulp detective tradition—rumpled, sardonic, powerful, and alienated, with too much beer and too little food in the refrigerator. Hap and his best friend, Leonard Pine—a gay, African-American Vietnam veteran with a short fuse and fierce, commanding presence—search for murderers, vanished lovers, and daughters-turnedharlots in the seamy underside of rural Texas, where nothing is quite as it seems. As a reviewer from the Boston Globe noted: “Add a few Pentecostal preachers turned hit-men, a sprinkle of armadillos, a biker army or two, lots and lots of firearms, maybe a rabid squirrel or skunk, then litter the stage with bodies, and you’ve got it” (Sallis, 2004). This bizarre and often humorous blending of elements, both vernacular and fantastic, gives Lansdale his distinctive voice across genres. While the Hap Collins series is rooted in present-day Texas, The Magic Wagon (1986) draws on Texas-past, featuring gunslingers, a traveling medicine show, a wrestling chimpanzee, and the long-dead body of Wild Bill Hickok. Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-Tep (2003), recently released as a motion picture, spins the tale of an aging Elvis, wasting away in an east Texas rest home, until he and a fellow resident, who believes himself to be JFK disguised as an African American, discover the home is being preyed on by a soul-sucking mummy. Lansdale’s wild abandon and grisly humor are most apparent, however, in his Drive-In novels: the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award nominee, Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988), and Drive-In 2: Not Just Another One of Them Sequels (1989). The two novels begin when a group of teenagers’ Friday night of “junk food, beer, and sex education” is interrupted by a comet hurtling toward the drive-in that then veers off at the last minute, smiling a wide, toothy grin, and leaving the world outside the gates in toxic blackness. All are trapped within the drive-in, forced to exist on junk food and measure

LARSEN, NELLA 747

their days by replays of the endless loop of horror films, as the drive-in becomes a deadly shrine to popular culture and its icons. Lansdale has been a martial artist all his life and is a two-time inductee into the International Martial Arts Hall of Fame. He owns and teaches at Lansdale’s SelfDefense Systems, in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he lives with his wife of 31 years, writer and editor Karen, and their two children, Kasey and Keith.

NOVELS Act of Love. New York: Kensington Press, 1980. Bad Chili. New York: Mysterious Press, 1997. Batman: Captured by the Engines. New York: Warner Books, 1991. The Boar. Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 1998. The Bottoms. New York: Mysterious Press, 2001. Bubba Ho-tep. LaPlume, Pa.: Night Shade Books, 2003. Captains Outrageous. New York: Mysterious Press, 2001. Cold in July. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Dead in the West. (With Neil Barrett Jr.) New York: Space and Time, 1986. The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. The Drive-In 2: Not Just Another One of Them Sequels. New York: Bantam Books, 1989. Fine Dark Line. New York: Mysterious Press, 2003. Freezer Burn. New York: Mysterious Press, 1999. Magic Wagon. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Mucho Mojo. New York: Mysterious Press, 1994. The Nightrunners. Arlington Heights, Ill.: Dark Harvest Books, 1987. Rumble Tumble. New York: Mysterious Press, 1998. Savage Season. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. Sunset and Sawdust. New York: Knopf, 2004. Texas Night Riders. New York: Leisure Books, 1983. Two-Bear Mambo. New York: Mysterious Press, 1995. Waltz of Shadows. Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 1999. Zeppelins West. Burton, Mich.: Subterranean Press, 2001.

SOURCES Kehr, Dave. “New DVDs,” New York Times, 25 May 2004. McCammon, Robert. Lights out: The Robert R. McCammon Newsletter 1, no. 3 (January 1990). Miller, Cynthia J. Email interviews with Joe R. Lansdale, August 18–22, 2004. Sallis, James. “The Reading Life,” Boston Globe, 21 March 2004.

OTHER “Joe R. Lansdale, Papers 1985–Ongoing.” Available online. URL: http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/archives/writers/ lansdale.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Lalumiere, Claude. “The Fantastic, the Imaginative, and the Weird.” January Magazine. Available online. URL: http:// www.janmag.com/SFF/highcotton.html. Accessed September 19, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

LARSEN, NELLA (1891–1964) Now recognized as one of the most important novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen focused both her novels, QUICKSAND (1928) and PASSING (1929), on young women struggling with the conflicts resulting from mixed ancestry. Like her contemporary Zora Neale HURSTON, Larsen resisted the polemics used by numerous Harlem Renaissance writers; she depended instead on her prose to demonstrate the effects of racial, class, and gender bias. Among her literary heirs are Maya Angelou and Alice WALKER. Until the recent discovery of her birth certificate, Larsen was known by the name given her by the critic Mary Helen Washington: “Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance.” She was born on April 13, 1891, in Chicago to Mary Hanson Walker, a Dane, and Peter Walker, a “colored” cook (McDonald, 182). She trained as a nurse at Fisk University’s Normal School, graduating in 1915, then accepted a nursing position in New York City. She married Elmer Imes, a white physician, in 1919 and divorced him in 1933. In 1928 she published her first novel, Quicksand, winner of the Harmon Foundation’s Bronze Award for Literature. The novel explores racism within both the black and the white worlds through the character of Helga Crane, daughter of a white mother and black father. Even when Helga chooses the black world by marrying the Reverend Pleasant Green, this educated young woman is trapped as the mother of five children in Alabama. She is always lonely, always seeking resolution. Larsen’s other novel, Passing, centers on two childhood friends, a mulatto, Clare Kendry, who passes for white and marries a white bigot, and a black woman, Irene Redfield, who fears that Clare will steal

748

LAST GENTLEMAN, THE

her husband, a doctor. The novel ends tragically when Irene pushes Clare from a window to her death. Like so many other talented Harlem Renaissance writers, particularly women, Nella Larsen has been rescued from obscurity. Her complex fictional depictions of troubled characters, particularly middle-class African-American women, provide insights into the difficulties that women—black and white—had, and still have, in achieving success and independence.

NOVELS Passing. New York: Knopf, 1929. Quicksand. New York: Knopf, 1928.

SOURCES Bontemps, Arna, ed. The Harlem Renaissance Remembered. New York: Dodd, 1972. Brown, Sterling. The Negro in American Fiction. New York: Atheneum, 1965. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larson, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. New York: Anchor Press, 1975. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981. McDonald, C. Ann. “Nella Larsen.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 182–191. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

LAST GENTLEMAN, THE WALKER PERCY (1966) The Last Gentleman is Walker PERCY’s second novel, preceded by The Moviegoer, which won the National Book Award for fiction in 1962. A southerner and Roman Catholic, Percy has confirmed the influence of William FAULKNER and Flannery O’CONNOR, but his writing is unquestionably unique, particularly in his ability to infuse philosophical musings with wry wit. The Last Gentleman is a philosophical novel writ-

ten in a comic picaresque mode. It begins with the quest of 25-year-old Will Barret for his romantic love, Kitty. But the adventures of this southern gentleman quickly become less a quest for Kitty than an urgent chase to find her brother, Jamie, before he dies of leukemia. That, in turn, changes into another urgent pursuit, this time adding Kitty’s elder brother, Sutter, who plans to commit suicide. Beneath this plot lies a Kierkegaardian search for home, identity, and perhaps, ultimately, life in the Spirit. Will Barret works as a janitor in the third basement below Macy’s department store, monitoring the steam heat; although he is a janitor, he prefers to think of himself as a “humidification engineer.” Besides suffering from melancholy, he sometimes finds himself wandering Civil War battlefields after a period of amnesia. He puzzles over feeling happy when everyone is sad and sad when everyone is happy. He has long periods of déjà vu, his knee jerks whenever he discerns a cloud of “ravening particles,” and he feels that he must know everything scientifically before he can act. This leaves him frozen and helpless in a malaise of “everydayness,” unable to make decisions. He does, however, have radar that allows him to detect everydayness in conversation and to intuit peoples’ physical problems. Percy has a great deal of fun with the three years of Freudian psychoanalysis that have failed to diminish any of Will’s strange symptoms. One day Will visits Central Park to photograph a peregrine falcon. Looking through his telescope, he immediately falls in love with a beautiful young woman sitting on a park bench. Will’s telescope and camera are tools with which he distances himself from others. What follows begins as a search for his ideal love. Kitty Vaught belongs to an old southern family gathered in New York to obtain special treatment for her brother, Jamie, who suffers from leukemia. During a visit to the hospital, Will discovers that Rita, Kitty’s sister-in-law, is a malign influence on Kitty, who rapidly loses her ideal status. Will develops an immediate rapport with, and affection for, Jamie, another “gentleman” by background and nature. Finding that the Vaughts and the Barrets had once been acquainted in

LAST OF THE MOHICANS: A NARRATIVE OF 1757, THE 749

Mississippi, Jamie’s father offers Will a job as a companion to his 16-year-old son. Will accepts but the group leaves without him. The next segment of this picaresque journey begins as a pursuit of Kitty and the Vaught family, who are traveling home to Mississippi, also Will’s home. On the way, several comic incidents occur, most of which deal with the changing status of Southern blacks. Will hitches a ride with a white man who, having dyed his skin, has become a “pseudo-negro” on his way to sell insurance to blacks. Later, Will visits his Uncle Fannin and Fannin’s black butler. These lifelong friends watch TV together, yet publicly play the old-fashioned role of master and servant. Finally, Will returns to his home to face his father’s suicide, the source of his symptoms. He sleeps among the bloodstains in the attic room where his father pulled the trigger. Traveling from cellar to attic, he acquires strength to endure a new stage of growth beginning with the introduction of Sutter. Sutter is Jamie’s missing elder brother, a failed doctor on the verge of suicide. Now more in pursuit of Jamie and Sutter than Kitty, Will turns toward the fresh, spiritually inspiring air of New Mexico, armed with the notebooks and map “accidentally” forgotten by Sutter. On the way, Will reads the notebooks, Percy’s technique of avoiding lengthy, boring conversations. In long, faulty philosophical arguments, Sutter explains that the only release from malaise is sex or death. Will next visits the Vaughts’ sister, Val, a povertystricken nun who teaches traumatized black children to speak. Val charges Will with responsibility for Jamie’s baptism. When Will finally reaches his companion, Jamie is on the point of death, and Will faithfully finds a priest who performs the sacrament. As Sutter had come to visit Jamie, the story ends with Will on foot chasing Sutter’s car to prevent him from committing suicide. Will yells, “Wait!” and Sutter stops. The novel’s major theme is the Kirkegaardian search for self and home. Will is so lost that he must look in his wallet to recall his name. Symbolically he is homeless living in the YMCA before he starts his journey home. But home can be defined in many ways, and Percy seems to suggest that “home” may be the capacity to live comfortably with oneself. Earning a self

requires synthesizing Kirkegaard’s “angelic” and “bestial” natures. These are symbolized by the baptism scene, during which a clouded plastic glass holds spiritual water while the odor of death fills the room. The conclusion is indeterminate. Will possibly, but not probably, will marry Kitty. His name suggests, however, that he will not only live life incarnate but also “will-bear-it.” He has lived a philosophically Stoic life almost completely of the mind, but at the end he demonstrates that he has learned to act. He calls “Wait!”—telling Sutter he needs him. But clearly Sutter needs Will, so Will’s act also becomes a demonstration of kindness and compassion.

SOURCES Broughton, Panthea Reid. “Gentlemen and Fornicators: The Last Gentleman and a Bisected Reality.” In The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being, edited by Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Hobson, Linda Whitney. Understanding Walker Percy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Percy, Walker. The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966. Pindell, Richard. “Toward Home: Place, Language and Death in The Last Gentleman.” In The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being, edited by Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Tolson, Jay, ed. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy. New York: Norton, 1997. Vauthier, Simone. “Narrative Triangulation in The Last Gentleman.” In The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being, edited by Panthea Reid Broughton. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Helen Killoran

LAST OF THE MOHICANS: A NARRATIVE OF 1757, THE JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1826) The Last of the Mohicans is the second of the five books making up COOPER’s LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, and its action is second in terms of the adventures of Cooper’s hero Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend

750 LAST OF THE MOHICANS: A NARRATIVE OF 1757, THE

Chingachgook. The first novel of the series, The Pioneers (1823), portrays Natty, bitter and at the end of his life, leading a group of pioneers westward, and fighting to protect the wilderness against the ever encroaching civilization. The Last of the Mohicans takes the reader back to Natty’s youth, when he, Chingachgook, and Chingachgook’s son Uncas are given the task, during the French and Indian War, of escorting Alice and Cora Munro from Fort Edward through the wilderness to Fort William Henry to be reunited with their father, British lieutenant colonel Munro. Natty, at home neither with his own people nor with the Indians from whom his race necessarily excludes him, remains a man surviving solely on his intuitive understanding of the wilderness, his Christian moral values, and the companionship of Chingachgook. Natty (also referred to as Hawkeye in this novel) is “a man without a cross,” meaning that he is purely white, with no trace of Indian blood. Magua, the Munro sisters’ hired Huron Indian guide, along with psalmist David Gamut (the novel’s comic relief) and Major Duncan Hayward, constitute the rest of the party. Magua, however, whose tribe is at war with the Mohicans, is leading the group into an ambush, propelling the action of the first half of the novel. As was common in the 19th century, The Last of the Mohicans was published in two volumes, each of which ends with a massacre and a narrow escape for our protagonists. At the end of the first half of the novel, Magua agrees to release his captives Alice, David, and Duncan if Cora will promise to be his wife. Cora refuses, and only the timely intervention of Hawkeye prevents the death of the party. The second half of the novel finds the group at Fort William Henry, which the defeated British are in the process of evacuating. Again, the group finds itself caught between warring factions of whites and Indians. The second half of the novel contains elements of the near magical, as people take on disguises (both human and animal) to carry out subterfuges to save their own lives and the lives of their friends. The wilderness in this part of the novel is a place of transformations and regeneration, somewhat akin to William Shakespeare’s restorative Green World. As is usual in Cooper, only the harmless (David

Gamut) or those safely within their own race (Duncan and Alice) are allowed to survive. Hawkeye’s killing of Magua restores the implied Christian order (the noble and honest Natty kills the Miltonic evil embodied by Magua). Uncas is mourned as the true “last” of the Mohican tribe, Duncan Hayward and Alice are left to marry, and Hawkeye and Chingachgook return to the wilderness. Much has been made of Cooper’s liberties with verisimilitude in his Leatherstocking Tales (most notably, perhaps, by Mark TWAIN’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”), but Cooper (once referred to as the “American Walter Scott”) is a romancer in the way that term applies to American novelists; he is not a realist or a naturalist, and follows in the tradition of European writers (like Scott) more concerned with heroic chivalry and the mystical qualities of nature. He also, however, creates a uniquely American mythology. Cooper, himself raised at the near edge of civilization in upstate New York, valued survival in the wilderness as an expression of the American ideal of self-reliance. But he was also aware of the questionable means (though Cooper himself did not make this judgment) by which the young country gained its territories and settled its affairs with the natives of the region. There are two massacres represented in The Last of the Mohicans, and in neither are Indians killed at the hands of whites. By utilizing historical accounts to align Indian tribes with warring factions of the French and Indian War, Cooper uses warring parties of Indians to assuage white guilt at the violence depicted in the novel. This is not to say, though, that Cooper is merrily celebrating “Manifest Destiny.” In perhaps the novel’s greatest emotional moment, Cora pleads with the Indian seer Tamenund, leader of the Huron tribe, for her and her sister’s release from Magua (though Magua is aligned with a separate tribe, the Hurons take great pride in respecting the honest claims of other Indians). When Cora appeals to Tamenund’s emotions by invoking her and Alice’s grieving father, she addresses Tamenund: “Tell me, is Tamenund a father?” The old man looked down upon her from his elevated stand, with a benign smile on his wasted

LAST TIME THEY MET, THE 751

countenance, and then casting his eyes slowly over the whole assemblage, he answered,-

Peck, H. Daniel, ed. New Essays on “The Last of the Mohicans.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

“Of a nation.”

Bill Scalia

Cooper here elevates the tribal affairs to the level of nobility, and allows the reader to absorb the dignity, and the inevitable pain, of the tribes’ dissolution. Cooper dispenses with the usually languid pace of the Leatherstocking novels and delivers an all-out thrill ride in The Last of the Mohicans. Tensions are ratcheted upward at every opportunity, and Cooper knows well how to maximize the melodrama of hairbreadth escapes and last-minute rescues. Yet the reader must not be quick to read past the nuances and complexities of Cooper’s characters and the political and moral implications of his tale. Cooper works his tensions in careful pairs: the frail and virginal Alice and the dusky, passionate Cora; noble, honest Chingachgook and the satanic, though wronged, Magua; the civilized Major Hayward and the outcast naturalist Hawkeye. However, Cooper is not a novelist to push the boundaries of his own time: Major Hayward and Alice are free to marry and reproduce, while Cora’s death is a consequence of Colonel Munro’s earlier taboo-violating coupling with a dark native, Cora’s mother. The Last of the Mohicans was, and most likely will remain, Cooper’s most popular book. James Fenimore Cooper was the first American to make his living as a writer, and he creates for us the prototypical American hero in Natty Bumppo. More than a dozen films have been drawn from this novel, with greater or lesser success; perhaps the most faithful to the novel is Maurice Tourneur’s 1920 version. Most recent is Michael Mann’s 1992 version, which so alters the circumstances of the novel and its characters that readers of Cooper might scarcely recognize the source material.

SOURCES Barker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. Reissue, New York: Bantam, 1982. Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967.

LAST TIME THEY MET, THE ANITA SHREVE (2001) Anita Shreve has worked as both a novelist and a journalist in her professional life. Her talent as a journalist shows in her literature most specifically in her attention to detail and her ability to captivate a reader in the first few paragraphs of her novels. The Last Time They Met, her eighth novel, combines journalistic details with a creative plot to place the reader “in the middle of the action.” Original structure and poetic imagery make The Last Time They Met an unforgettable read. Thomas Janes and Linda Fallon, the novel’s central characters, meet and fall in love when they are 17. Linda is sent away after they are involved in a car accident, and they lose touch. They meet, by chance, in Africa nine years later. Linda is with the Peace Corps and Thomas is a poet. They are both in Africa with their spouses but begin an affair with each other. When the spouses discover the affair, Thomas and Linda part ways only to meet 26 years later as published poets at a literary festival. They resume their affair and, even when the festival concludes, promise to meet again in the near future. Shreve’s decision to structure the novel in reverse order ensured that the story would avoid being labeled a “common” love story. The novel’s conclusion structurally occurs at the end of part one. All three parts move forward within themselves, with parts two and three occurring in the past. This unique structure presents challenges to the reader. There are a number of questions raised by both Linda and Thomas throughout the novel; often the answer has already been given in a previous conversation. To avoid a sense of disjuncture, Shreve works subtle parallels throughout for continuity. Specific words and phrases are repeated at various points in each part. Linda says, in part one, “I’ve loved you all my life” (90). In part 3, 35 years earlier, she says, “She knows she will love him all her life” (312). Parallels in language, phrasing, and word choice ring true for readers and keep the flow of the novel

752

LAST TYCOON, THE

consistent as it covers more than three decades through an intricate reversing of chronology. Shreve herself indicated that the structure “presented a whole set of challenges” but felt it was necessary to protect the true ending of the novel (Laird, 26). The final scene of the novel, occurring when Thomas and Linda are 17, changes the reader’s perspective on not only the characters themselves but also their relationship and the plot as a whole. Strong imagery is trademark Shreve. Her descriptions of both the beautiful and the tragic Nairobi are taken largely from her own memory during her travels there as a journalist (Papinchak). In fact, Shreve admits that the only time in her life she has ever kept a journal was when she lived in Africa; she found these journals invaluable in constructing the realistic images of the African cities in part two. “Once, he’d seen, through the bedroom window, a tree come shockingly into bloom. Its leaves had been bluish-gray, and on that day it had given birth to an explosion of small yellow puffy balls as big as marbles, thousands upon thousands of them all at once, so that almost instantly a lemon-colored haze had filled the room” (106). Beyond the lyrical description of nature, Shreve captures a scene in a public market in Kenya with clarity. “Although just then, a cocoa-skinned girl with a gazelle neck and a shaved head passed them. . . . She looked an exotic slave, though she couldn’t have been more than 14 years old. The Asian man she was with was short and plump, his suit expertly tailored. Child prostitution in Kenya was epidemic” (194). Shreve balances delicate description with an exposé of the desperate poverty of the Kenyan people. Her clear description of the images allows readers to move slowly through the streets and countryside of Africa while still being engaged in the plot. To suggest that The Last Time They Met is a love story and nothing more ignores the rich layering and depth Anita Shreve orchestrates through original structure and detailed imagery. When asked “what is your constant goal as a writer?” Shreve responded, “To be inventive with the language and structure of a novel; to write arrestingly” (Papinchak). The Last Time They Met meets this goal.

SOURCE Shreve, Anita. The Last Time They Met. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001.

OTHER Laird, Margaret. Interview. Bookends: The Bookplace Magazine. Available online. URL: http://www.thebookplace.com/ bookends/chat/shreve.asp?TAG=&CID. Accessed September 21, 2005. Papinchak, Robert Allen. “Testing the Water.” The Writer Magazine (November 2001). Available online. URL: http:// www.writmag.com/wrt/default.aspx?c=hp&id=31. Accessed August 8, 2005. Kelly Flanagan

LAST TYCOON, THE F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1941) Readers coming to FITZGERALD’s Hollywood novel, The Last Tycoon, from The GREAT GATSBY or Tender Is the Night may be disappointed, due to its incompleteness at the time of the author’s premature death. It stands much like the scaffolding of the roofless, yet already partly furnished, house that is one of its major symbols. Not surprisingly, the qualities of its parts exceed that of its sketchy whole. It provides enough social and psychological insight, memorable descriptions, and quotable lines to encourage the reader to wonder how it might have been revised and expanded. The novel’s focus is Monroe Stahr, a Jewish man in his mid-thirties who rose from the ghetto of an East Coast city to become a “wonder boy” executive in Hollywood by his early twenties, but whose workaholism has led him to the brink of a premature death. This and his modus operandi at work are by all accounts modeled on the legendary, much lamented head of production at MGM, Irving Thalberg, a commanding, charismatic figure of great dynamism who stamped his values and aesthetic sensibility on every aspect of the studio’s film projects. But the weariness concealed by Stahr’s bright light and his pervading feeling of private loss may well be that of Fitzgerald himself, whose struggle to revive his writing career and to pay his estranged wife’s sanatorium bills are themselves the stuff of legend. But Stahr’s feeling that his “heart’s in the grave” (94) is due to the death of his wife, whom he has been

LAST TYCOON, THE 753

mourning for three years when he chances to meet an English expatriate, Kathleen Moore, whose facial features and seemingly elegant simplicity are strikingly reminiscent of her. Their relationship produces affecting examples of one of Fitzgerald’s stocks in trade, the tender evocation of the infatuation and yearning of one lonely person for another. This relationship is also one of the bases for the not entirely convincing argument advanced by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the editor of the revised version of the novel, that Fitzgerald intended the book to be entitled The Love of the Last Tycoon. Be that as it may, the abiding interest for many readers is likely to be Fitzgerald’s backstage report of Hollywood in the mid-1930s, when the studio system was operating with the efficiency of not so much a dream factory as “a little feudal system” (99). Stahr is often described as kingly—demanding and tolerating no impediment to what he wants done. Although the opening chapter introduces a character who commits suicide apparently because he has been threatened with exile, Stahr is generally admired by his grateful minions, not only for keeping them at work during economic hard times, but also for his commitment to the quality of their productions and his paternalistic attention, when he has time, to their personal well-being. In addition to many shrewd, yet tolerant, thumbnail portraits of Hollywood types (from financiers to receptionists), the novel provides historically valuable descriptions of working practices at the time. It affords, for example, glimpses of the highly specialized division of labor in the writing process (one staff writer has worked for decades only on improving the plot construction of other writers’ scripts; another’s metier is “the ‘delivery’ of situations through mimetic business” [49]). Much is said about writers, but not much that is to their credit. Stahr/Thalberg’s competitive system of having teams of writers working at the same time on the same film script, without each other’s knowledge, is said to demoralize them and turn them into drunks almost as quickly as California’s insidiously clement climate (it “wears you down”). Whatever the cause, writers are consistently held to be undisciplined—and this seems to be

Fitzgerald’s remorseful contention as much as that of his fictive producer’s. One of the book’s most interesting sequences entails Stahr’s canny, Socratic instruction on how to build dramatic interest purely through camera placement and editing. Through this and other inspired improvisations, Stahr eventually succeeds in getting an overly literary English playwright (imported to add artistic polish and prestige) to accept that there are limiting “conditions” in any artistic project. But the fact that movies “have to take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them” does not mean that they have to be sensationalistic (“you try to pin the murders on us” [106–7]). Nor must they be gimmicky just because they do not rely on theatrical dialogue. Stahr acknowledges matter-of-factly that he does not read and the implicit contrast between literature and “just making pictures” (32) can be located in at least two aspects of the book. One aspect is Stahr’s insistent disquisition that a film has failed because the script has not made the emotions of the two lovers sufficiently simple—that it has made the heroine especially ambiguous by infecting her with “doubt and hesitation,” which will in turn make the audience doubtful and alienate them from their readiness to identify and sympathize (39–42). This contrasts curiously with Fitzgerald’s characterization of Stahr and Kathleen, although this contrast is probably not intended as critique, notwithstanding the narrator’s assertion that, socially, “one doesn’t mix motives in Hollywood” (102). Attracted initially by Kathleen’s seeming simplicity, Stahr gradually becomes erotically intrigued by her hesitation. He becomes somewhat dubious regarding her mysterious complexity the more she tells him about her checkered past. Stahr also becomes increasingly complicated and ambiguous as the reader learns, for example, that he finally fell in love with his wife only when, perhaps because, she was dying (97) or that, according to his doctor, “he would much rather die [insofar as] fatigue was a drug as well as a poison and [he] apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he had seen before” (110). Another aspect

754

LAST TYCOON, THE

of the implicit contrast between literature and a picture-based form of storytelling can be registered as Stahr manifests his intuitive, visual imagination while in the screening room commenting on the day’s rushes from various film projects. The long series of episodes describing Stahr’s typical working day might challenge credulity by striving too hard to idealize him as a “virtuoso” master of everything (126). Some of these episodes are amusing, such as Stahr’s fatherly counsel to a popular romantic lead distraught about his impotence: “go along and do the role the way I said” (37). But each reader will have to decide for himor herself whether it is credible that a studio head would have a better sense of camera placement than a director or director of photography, or a better sense of decor and props than a trained scene designer. That said, Fitzgerald has the authority of having been there, however briefly and unsuccessfully. And his take does serve to redress the present-day, overestimating assumption that the director is a film’s auteur, when it was more often the case, and often still remains so, that the producer determines the picture (“I am the unity” [58]). The strength and some of the weaknesses of the book could both be said to derive from the fact that Fitzgerald had one mental foot out of Hollywood and the other still in it. This situation allowed him the distance needed to satirize its workings and conventions while at the same time making it all the easier for him to, perhaps unconsciously, rely on them in his own working practices. The conception of certain scenes succumbs to the movies’ conventionalized sense of what people do. For example, some of the dialogue, like the fast and frothy banter between Cecilia Brady, the daughter of a studio head, and Wylie White, an about to be has-been writer, reads like a film script from a Tracy/Hepburn screwball comedy (69ff). However witty such scenes are, they also subvert the intended theme insofar as they are there to demonstrate how Cecilia, and anyone else, derives from the movies a distorted sense of the possibilities afforded by the world. Additionally, readers are willing and able to process this insight as it is played out precisely because they have been prepared to accept it by movies already seen. Another scene that seems derived and contrived

from the movies has Stahr demonstrating his sense of loss at Kathleen’s abrupt marriage to somebody else by getting drunk and trying unsuccessfully to beat somebody up. In the extant version, Fitzgerald’s novel eschews the petty and sordid ambition described in Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run? Except for rare vignettes, such as the description of a star’s eczema-studded décolletage (50), it also registers little of the appalled demeanor of Nathanael WEST’s apocalyptic The DAY OF THE LOCUST. The earthquake and flood that bring Stahr and Kathleen together might have been, but never is, developed as an objective correlative of the enormous changes affecting the movie industry in the 1930s: the arrival of talkies, censorship under the Hays office, the Great Depression, and the emergence of the union movement (the Hollywood Writer’s Guild figures in the story). On occasion Fitzgerald pays appreciative tribute to the iconographic power of film, as when a foreigner suddenly recognizes what Lincoln really means when he sees a suitably costumed actor munching his lunch in the commissary (48–49). But if the book is a “Western,” as Fitzgerald’s tentative subtitle claims, it is probably not because it characterizes the Hollywood movie industry as the last American frontier, as some critics have speculated. It is more probably a Western in the light of Stahr’s doctor’s diagnostic reading that strenuous endeavor and the desire for control constitute a “perversion of the life force,” which is an idea developed in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, a tome that is pressed upon Kathleen by her first lover, although she declines to read it.

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew J. The Last of the Novelists: F. Scott Fitzgerald and “The Last Tycoon.” Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Love of the Last Tycoon. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner, 1993. Latham, John Aaron. Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood. New York: Viking, 1971. Sklar, Robert. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Tycoon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. David Brottman

LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, THE 755

LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, THE JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Hawkeye, the Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, the Long Rifle, the frontier scout, and the trapper—by any of these names we may know about Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo, one of early American literature’s most enduring characters, created by James Fenimore COOPER in 1823. A memorable hero in U.S. culture, Natty Bumppo is an Englishman raised by missionaries among Indians whose proprietorship of the wilderness is evidenced by his familiarity with hidden places and pathways, his feelings for his environment, and his skill as a guide. Although Natty is “a man without a cross” who has no Indian blood, he understands Indian ways as much as any white man could and often criticizes the white civilization from which he is alienated. Cooper’s five novels known collectively as the “Leatherstocking Tales” include The Pioneers: or the Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale (1823), The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), The Prairie: A Tale (1827), The Pathfinder: or The Inland Sea (1840), and The Deerslayer; or The First War-Path (1841). Among Cooper’s 32 novels, as well as travel writings and works of social and political criticism, the Leatherstocking Tales are recognized as his most influential works. The proper sequence for reading Cooper’s saga has been an ongoing question for readers and critics of Cooper. Should the books be read in the chronological sequence of Natty Bumppo’s age or in the order of their publication? The argument for following the order of Natty’s life is presented with compelling evidence by Allen Axelrod, who believes Cooper “selfconsciously alphabetized the titles to coincide with the life cycle of their hero, from budding manhood to superannuation and death” (Axelrod, 193). In support of this view is the fact that Cooper’s preface to a reissued edition of the Leatherstocking Tales in 1850 states the order using the life of Natty as a guide (Axelrod, 192). This alphabetized list of the titles also states Natty’s approximate age in each novel: Deerslayer (21 to 25), Mohicans (38), Pathfinder (42), Pioneers (70), and Prairie (82). However, scholars of American literature prefer analyzing the series in its order of publication to grasp

the author’s developing values and social critique. Geoffrey Rans believes it is valuable for the reader’s memory not to align with Natty’s, for a reader remembering what Natty cannot yet know gains added meaning from the novels (Rans, 104). Cooper did change over the course of writing these novels, and his books accordingly developed. There is a shift in Cooper’s writing when he returns to America in 1833 after a seven-year stay in Europe. An adherent of Thomas Jeffersonian democracy, Cooper was not fully at home in Andrew Jackson’s America. After the gap in writing about Natty, the author reacted against what he saw as a debased U.S. mass culture and “converted Leatherstocking into a mythic figure of honesty and calm virtue” (Reynolds, 187). But even as early as Pioneers, Cooper had showed “a dark underside of democracy emerging” (Peck, 244). Cooper’s consistent preoccupations include the idea of dispossession, the contrast between the forces of nature and civilization, and the forcible disappearance of the Natives of America. Cooper was in part compelled to write about the loss of territory due to land disputes affecting his own family, and financial insecurity is now recognized as one reason for Cooper’s pursuit of a writing career. But in the Leatherstocking Tales, the topics of dispossession and conflicts over contested boundaries are portrayed principally in regard to the relentless elimination of the Native Americans. Mourning the passing of “the last” of many tribes is a fundamental theme in the series. The “Vanishing American” in Pioneers is Old John Mohegan, whose debasement and death are symbolic events showing the doom to befall the Native populations and the wilderness. Both through narration and events of Pioneers, “the complaints against and uneasiness attending the dispossession of the Indian peoples are frequent” (Rans, 110). Chingachgook in Mohicans is nature’s even more famous nobleman. It seems to signal the death knell for not only the Mohicans but also all the Indian tribes when Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, is killed, and this book has been perceived as a requiem for the disappearance of Native Americans due to white encroachment. Furthermore, each of the tales shows different

756

LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, THE

ways that Natty, and by extension the reader, identifies and sympathizes with Indian characters. Judgments of Cooper’s accuracy regarding Native American life vary. While Cooper made a careful effort to be as accurate as possible, some of his sources were unreliable. Right or wrong, the global image of the Native American populations has been based on the Leatherstocking Tales. Cooper also deliberately changed tribal identifications and battles to suit his narrative purposes; the Leatherstocking Tales cannot be taken as historically accurate. A related complexity is that the books are both condemnatory of racism but also racist, in assigning traits based on race and never depicting intermarriages between whites and Native Americans. Yet it would be an oversimplification to label Cooper a racist. The subtexts of the novels reveal that much of the violence by Indian tribes is their response to displacement by white civilization, which initiated the savagery. In Cooper’s 1831 introduction to an edition of Mohicans, “the inroads of civilization” are seen as “a nipping frost” to the Indian (7). Rans interprets such imagery as Cooper’s deliberate linkage of man’s “destruction of nature with the elimination of the Indian” (Rans, 11). Cooper’s environmental imagination is a significant aspect of his literary legacy. Pioneers and Prairie particularly emphasize environmental concerns, demonstrating the beauty of nature and the wilderness and arguing for the conservation of natural resources for humanity. Setting is character for Cooper, as the natural world has a major role throughout the series. Meticulous descriptions of wilderness unique to North America combine with Cooper’s foreboding of ecological devastation due to the settlers’ “wasty ways,” in Natty’s phrase from Pioneers, a novel considered “one of the earliest statements of the modern ecological conscience” (Peck, 244). Cooper warns against destroying the resources on which human life depends, such as the sugar maple trees, schools of fish, and migrating passenger pigeons. While the felling of trees may indicate progress, it also dramatizes white civilization’s wastefulness and destructiveness. In Prairie, set on Nebraska’s barren plains instead of New York’s forests, Natty “sees this

environment as silent, visual prophecy of what the Eastern forests will become if ecological destruction proceeds without restraint” (Peck, 257). Cooper uses the idea of the treeless expanses to forecast the nation’s future as unfit for human inhabitants. Although Natty disapproves of colonial excesses and is unsuited to life in close quarters with other white men, he still ultimately aligns himself with and assists his fellow white men. He may seem to have cast his lot in life with the Indians, but he never becomes completely “Indianized.” Before his death, Natty ultimately realizes that “every step he takes westward opens a path for the exploiters who follow him” (Ringe, 48). Nevertheless, in his rejection of white society and discomfort in settled towns, the adventurous Natty reminds readers of the part of us that, like Mark TWAIN’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN, does not want to be civilized all the time and wants to be liberated temporarily from social consequences. Perhaps the very fact that Natty was not a dominating or conventionally heroic character in the first three books helped readers to project their own conflicted desires onto him. Natty Bumppo became a cipher onto which readers could inscribe themselves, even selecting a preferred nickname. Some readers prefer the perfect shot of “the longue carabine,” while others identify with the Leatherstocking’s role as a pathfinder. Though Natty’s death at the end of Prairie could have provided closure to the series, Cooper returned to his most revered character in 1840. In Pathfinder, Natty believes for a time that his love for Mabel Dunham overpowers his love of nature and adventure, but Mabel fortunately rejects Natty, leaving our scout to return to his better-suited companions, the forest and Chingachgook. Family life in a settlement would be captivity for Natty, who is barred from marriage due to his “prior commitment to a lonely life in a state of nature” (Fiedler, 207). As Natty tells Judith Hutter, the woman who pursues him in Deerslayer, his true bride is the Spirit animating the forest. The question of whether Natty might be incomplete from lacking romance and a family is left for readers to determine, but most critics seem to prefer the bachelor Natty. Among the five novels of the Leatherstocking saga, the court of popular opinion suggests that The Last of

LEATHERSTOCKING TALES, THE 757

the Mohicans may have the greatest resonance, for it has been the most reprinted, adapted, and “transformed for general social consumption” (Barker and Sabin, 6). Even people who have never read the book know the significance of its title. Around the historical event of a 1757 “massacre” of British troops and civilians by Indian allies of the French, Cooper creates a fiction of lost trails, questionable allegiance, and captivity involving two young women, Alice and Cora—one pale, one dark, in Cooper’s usual formulation—traveling with an itinerant music teacher and British officer through the woods to join their father, Colonel Munro. Uncas is killed while trying to save Cora, leaving his father, Chingachgook, to be the last of the line. If taken alone, Mohicans might seem like “just” an adventure tale, but reading it in light of Pioneers shows that the pattern of chase, escape, and battle “suggests the fundamental insecurity of the whites” when they enter the wilderness for the first time and become dependent on the Indians and their guide “Hawkeye” for their very survival (Ringe, 43). Two of the most famous among the numerous film versions of Mohicans are the 1936 production, with Randolph Scott as Natty, which gutted Cooper’s emphasis on the wilderness and the fates of Indians (Barker and Sabin, 83), and Michael Mann’s 1992 production. Mann’s beautiful cinematography and Oscarwinning sound design capture the atmosphere of Cooper’s Mohicans while revising the text substantially, making it even more critical of racism and creating a romantic linkage between Natty, played by Daniel DayLewis, and Cora, played by Madeleine Stowe. While watching segments from any adaptation of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales can be useful for generating discussion about the mythic characters and concepts, viewers must be aware that no version is entirely faithful to the original text. Teachers and students of Cooper’s novels could benefit from viewing the paintings of America’s Hudson River School of painters, for Cooper is believed to have affected and been influenced by these painters. Thomas Cole’s canvases help us visualize some of Cooper’s settings and themes: “The Voyage of Life” series, the “Course of Empire” series, “The Ox-Bow,” “The Falls of

Kaaterskill,” or “The Notch of the White Mountains” could be of particular interest. Mark Twain’s 1895 essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” reveals the influence of Cooper on the popular imagination about frontier life and analyzes Cooper’s language choices. It is also worth excerpting the section on Cooper from James Russell Lowell’s 1848 poem “A Fable for Critics,” a mock epic about contemporary American writers. Cooper’s novels have been fruitfully compared with the fiction of authors such as Catharine SEDGWICK, Maria CHILD, William Gilmore Simms, and Sir Walter Scott. Cooper’s storytelling abilities and the myths he created in the Leatherstocking Tales will preserve the character of Natty Bumppo, the original “Hawkeye,” in our cultural memories for many more years to come.

SOURCES Axelrod, Allen. “The Order of the Leatherstocking Tales: D. H. Lawrence, David Noble, and the Iron Trap of History,” American Literature 54, no. 2 (May 1982): 189–211. Barker, Martin, and Roger Sabin. The Lasting of the Mohicans: History of an American Myth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer; or The First WarPath. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. ———. The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757. Albany: SUNY Press, 1983. ———. The Pathfinder: or The Inland Sea. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981. ———. The Pioneers: or the Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale. Albany: SUNY Press, 1980. ———. The Prairie: A Tale. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960. Peck, Daniel. “James Fenimore Cooper and the Writers of the Frontier.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, 240–261. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Rans, Geoffrey. Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Novels: A Secular Reading. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Reynolds, David. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Ringe, Donald. James Fenimore Cooper. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Amy E. Cummins

758

LEAVITT, CAROLINE

LEAVITT, CAROLINE (1952– )

The prizewinning short story writer Caroline Leavitt is also the author of eight critically acclaimed novels, including the semiautobiographical Coming Back to Me (2001), based on Leavitt’s own trouble-fraught childbirth experience. Girls in Trouble (2004), her latest work, stems from Leavitt’s encounters with adoption agencies. “All my novels are character-driven,” Leavitt told the interviewer Tonya Ramagos (Ramagos), and her character portrayals have been praised by critics. Leavitt also favors multiple narratives, and most of her stories are told from the perspectives of at least two of the protagonists. Caroline Leavitt was born on January 9, 1952, in Quincy, Massachusetts, to Henry Leavitt, an accountant, and Helen Seindlovitz Leavitt, a teacher. She graduated with honors from the University of Michigan in 1974, and published four novels in the 1980s: Meeting Rozzy Halfway (1981); Lifelines (1982); Jealousies (1983); and Family (1987). Her fifth, Into Thin Air (1992), was her breakthrough novel. Here 17-year old Lee, whose father remarries after her mother dies of cancer, elopes with Jim Archer. They have a predictably dull marriage. To escape her unhappy life, Lee abandons her daughter in a Baltimore hospital; she later regrets her rash act and tries to find her. Living Other Lives (1995) traces the effects of the death of Matt on three women: his mother, Dell; his fiancée Lilly; and his 15-year-old daughter, Dinah. Leavitt says that this novel grew from the loss of her fiancée two weeks before their wedding. Coming Back to Me (2001) features third-grade teacher Molly Breyer, a young woman who nearly dies in childbirth from a potentially fatal blood disease. Her recovery is aided by her artist husband, Gary Breyer, their neighbors in Hoboken, and her estranged older sister, Suzanne. Girls in Trouble follows the downward-spiraling life of Sara Rothman, a 16-year-old high school honor student who becomes pregnant, is deserted by the father, Danny Slade, opts for the adoption of her baby Anne, then becomes enamored of the adoptive couple, George and Eva Rivers. On December 5, 1993, Leavitt married the magazine editor and writer Jeff Tamarkin. She lives with him and

their son, Max, in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she is at work on another novel about the death of a woman in an automobile accident (Leavitt). Leavitt teaches an online novel writing course for the University of California at Los Angeles, and she writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe Sunday book section.

NOVELS Coming Back to Me. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Family. New York: Arbor House, 1987. Girls in Trouble. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004. Into Thin Air. New York: Warner Books, 1993. Jealousies. New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1983. Lifelines. El Cerrito, Calif.: Seaview Books, 1982. Living Other Lives. New York: Warner Books, 1995. Meeting Rozzy Halfway. El Cerrito, Calif.: Seaview Books, 1981.

SOURCES Hill, Nancy Milone. Review of Girls in Trouble, Library Journal 128, no. 19 (November 15, 2003): 97–98. Pearl, Nancy. Review of Coming Back to Me, Library Journal 126, no. 1 (January 1, 2001): 155. Unsigned review of Coming Back to Me, Publishers Weekly 248, no. 11 (March 12, 2001): 60. Unsigned review of Girls in Trouble. Publishers Weekly 250, no. 39 (September 29, 2003): 40. Unsigned review of Into Thin Air, Publishers Weekly 239, no. 52 (November 30, 1992): 34. Unsigned review of Living Other Lives, Publishers Weekly 242, no. 17 (April 24, 1995): 61.

OTHER Caroline Leavitt Home Page. Available online. URL: http:// www.carolineleavitt.com/entry.htm. Accessed September 21, 2005. Ramagos, Tonya. “A Conversation with Novelist Caroline Leavitt about Girls in Trouble.” BookBrowser. Available online. URL: http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/ full/index.cfm?author_number=602. Accessed September 21, 2005. Scribner, Susan. Review of Coming Back to Me. Romance Reader. Available online. URL: http://www.theromancereader.com/. Accessed September 21, 2005.

LEAVITT, DAVID (1961– ) David Leavitt is a novelist who first came to public attention when one of his short stories was published in The New Yorker in

LE DIVORCE 759

1983, while he was still a student at Yale University. The following year his story collection Family Dancing won nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Since then he has built a reputation as one of the most eloquent writers about the difficulties of being gay in a straight world. David Leavitt was born on June 23, 1961, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Harold Jack Leavitt, a Stanford University professor, and Gloria Rosenthal Leavitt, a housewife and political activist. He was reared in Palo Alto, California, and educated at Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. His first novel, The Lost Language of Cranes, about a family in which both father and son acknowledge their homosexuality, appeared in 1986; this novel about Rose and Owen Benjamin and their son Philip, remains Leavitt’s most acclaimed work. He followed it with Equal Affections (1989), in which a brother and sister are both gay; their father engages in infidelities that he excuses because his wife is dying of cancer. While England Sleeps (1993), set in England during the Spanish civil war, depicts the relationship of Brian Botsford and Edward Phelan; Brian tries to deny his sexual orientation by ending the affair and marrying a woman. Part of the novel was based on the poet Stephen Spender’s autobiography and Spender brought a lawsuit against Leavitt, forcing him to rewrite part of the text. Arkansas: Three Novellas (1997) experiments with using autobiography in fiction, especially about gay relationships. The Page Turner (1998) presents the complications of a love affair between a young concert pianist, Paul Porterfield, and a famous concert pianist, Richard Kennington. In Leavitt’s novel, Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (2000), the protagonist bears a striking similarity to Leavitt himself; he publishes a short story about gay issues while he is still in college and reacts with repulsion to the obsession with money in the publishing world. His most recent novel is The Body of Jonah Boyd (2004). The New York Public Library recently named David Leavitt a Literary Lion. He teaches at the University of Florida, dividing his time between Gainesville, Florida, and Tuscany, Italy.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Arkansas: Three Novellas. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. The Body of Jonah Boyd. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004. Equal Affections. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. The Lost Language of Cranes. New York: Knopf, 1986. Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. The Page Turner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. While England Sleeps. New York: Viking, 1993. Reprinted with a new preface by the author, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

SOURCES Alexander, Jonathan. “One Gay Author, One Straight Author, and a Handful of Queer Books: Recent Fiction of David Leavitt and Nick Hornby,” Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly 4, no. 1 (2002): 111–120. Bleeth, Kenneth. “The ‘Imitation David’: Plagiarism, Collaboration, and the Making of a Gay Literary Tradition in David Leavitt’s ‘The Term Paper Artist,’” PMLA 116, no. 5 (October 2001): 1,349–1,363. Hamilton, Ian. “Spender’s Lives,” New Yorker, February 1994, pp. 72–85. Harned, Joe. “Psychoanalysis, Queer Theory, and David Leavitt’s The Lost Language of Cranes,” South Central Review 11, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 40–53. Iannone, Carol. “Post-Counterculture Tristesse,” Commentary 83, no. 2 (February 1987): 57–61. Lo, Mun-hou. “David Leavitt and the Etiological Maternal Body,” Modern Fiction Studies 41, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1995): 439–465. Schwartz, Michael. “David Leavitt’s Inner Child,” Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 2, no. 1 (Winter 1995): 1, 40–44. Sinfield, Alan. “Stephen Spender’s Bit of Rough: Some Arguments about Art, AIDS, and Subculture,” European Journal of English Studies 1, no. 1 (April 1997): 56–72. Wilner, Arlene. “Confronting Resistance: Sonny’s Blues— and Mine,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 173–196.

OTHER New York Times on the Web Featured Author: David Leavitt. Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/ 98/04/26/specials/leavitt.html. Accessed September 21, 2005.

LE DIVORCE DIANE JOHNSON (1997) National Book Award finalist Diane JOHNSON’s eighth novel, Le Divorce, belongs to the genre of the international or

760 LEE, CHANG-RAE

transatlantic novel refined by Henry JAMES and Edith WHARTON at the turn of the 20th century and proves that the theme of the American expatriate in Paris is still intriguing. The action of the novel covers a period of six months during its first-person narrator Isabel Walker’s stay in Paris, where she goes from Santa Barbara to baby-sit for her pregnant stepsister, Roxanne de Persand, and to take off some of her “rough California edges” (5). Isabel arrives in Paris on the day after her sister was abandoned by her French husband, CharlesHenri de Persand, for a Czechoslovak sociology teacher, Magda Tellman, married to an American lawyer working for EuroDisney. Innocent but not ignorant, Isabel takes her place in no time in both the American expatriate community and the Persand family, working at a number of jobs provided by her wealthy compatriots and beginning an affair with Charles-Henri’s married uncle, Edgar Cosset. Headed by Charles-Henri’s mother, Suzanne, the Persand family adheres to its traditional French mores and counsels Roxanne with patience. Despite being baffled by her sister’s submission to the advice of her husband’s family to maintain her married social status, regardless of her husband’s infidelity, and resenting the gender bias in legal systems and sexual relationships in France, Isabel continues to enjoy the elegant family lunches on Sundays at the Persands’ château near Chartres and the company of her elderly lover at chic Paris restaurants, cafés, and theaters. During her sojourn in Paris, Isabel finds her feeling of responsibility to her family enforced by taking care of her three-year-old niece, Geneviève, during a trying time for her sister, her sense of self intensified by her love affair with the suave French ex-politician, and her perception of the world enhanced by her foreign experiences. She comes under the influence of her worldly lover’s altruistic political views on the Bosnian crisis. It is her natural American sang-froid, however, rather than her newly acquired French savoir-faire that guides her in her rescue of her sister from the suicide she attempts during her divorce procedure. The parents of Roxanne and Isabel, Chester and Margeeve Walker, and their son Roger and his wife,

Jane, arrive in Paris as a family painting, Saint Ursula, which Roxanne brought to Paris with her from Santa Barbara and gave her husband, proves to be an original Georges de la Tour and complicates the divorce proceedings. The American and the French families join together at an exquisite Sunday lunch at the Persands’ château, where Isabel’s love affair, now known to the Persands, is revealed to her mother by Madame de Persand. The two mothers, accompanied by Isabel, get together for the second time to take their grandchildren to EuroDisney, where they are taken hostage by Magda Tellman’s husband, who committed a crime of passion the night before by murdering CharlesHenri. Roxanne, now a widow instead of a divorcée, retains her place in the Persand family and Isabel plans on remaining in Paris, meeting people, and learning French. The novel is a comedy of manners about the differences between the old and the new world traditions. It juxtaposes innocence with experience in the vein of Henry James’s The American and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and illustrates that, even at the end of the 20th century, despite the globalization, transnationalism, and multiculturalism, the divide between the two worlds results in the clash of characteristics of the new world such as “bluntness, freshness, and naïveté” (124) with those of the old such as circuitousness, intricacy, and complexity. Le Divorce is also the story of the moral and social growing up of its narrator, Isabel Walker, as she tells of her progress from an observer to a participant in the culture she has just entered and grows from an aimless film school dropout, a go-between for her sister’s American and French families, a half-time girlfriend, and a part-time employee of the American expatriate community, into a woman with a deeper awareness of her responsibilities, desires, and aspirations.

SOURCE Johnson, Diane. Le Divorce. New York: Plume, 1998. Ferdâ Asya

LEE, CHANG-RAE (1965– )

Many critics have pointed out that Chang-rae Lee is the first KoreanAmerican author to have been published by a main-

LEE, (NELLE) HARPER 761

stream press, and an even greater number have hailed him as the first major Korean-American novelist. Lee was catapulted into the spotlight with his first novel, NATIVE SPEAKER (1995), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction and the 1995 Discover Award, as well as numerous other prizes. The novel has received widespread praise for its treatment of bicultural conflicts, immigrant issues, and family relationships. In 1999 Lee published his second novel, A Gesture Life, which grew out of his research on the “comfort women” of World War II, Koreans who were abducted and forced into prostitution by the Japanese army for the benefit of their soldiers. The novel earned high praise from nearly every reviewer and literary critic, and, along with Nora KELLER’s earlier novel, Comfort Woman (1997), made countless readers aware of an atrocity of World War II of which they had no previous knowledge. Aloft (2004), Chang-rae Lee’s most recent novel, focuses on the identity crisis of an aging suburban white male. Lee was born in Korea on July 29, 1965, to Young Yong, a practicing psychiatrist, and Inja (Hong) Lee, a homemaker. When he was three years old, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in New York City, moving later to New Rochelle, New York. After receiving a B.A. from Yale University in 1987, Lee moved to Oregon and earned an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon in 1993. He moved back to New York and currently teaches at Princeton University. Lee continues to write about Korean-American protagonists in lean and unadorned language. Its haunting lyrical quality is perfectly suited to the major idea in both novels: that the past unmistakably shadows both our present and our future.

NOVELS Aloft. New York: Riverhead, 2004. A Gesture Life. New York: Riverhead, 1999. Native Speaker. New York: Putnam/Riverhead, 1995.

LEE, (NELLE) HARPER (1926– ) Harper Lee’s one and only novel has sustained her reputation since its publication in 1960. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD has been a huge critical as well as popular success. It received the Pulitzer Prize, was a Literary Guild selection and a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate, and was

made into an Academy Award–winning film. It has become required reading in almost all American high schools. The book received largely positive reviews, and the most discerning readers and critics also noted the artistry of the narrative device, in which a mature woman recalls deeply ingrained childhood memories of herself and her brother in the South during the trial of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama, to Amasa Coleman, a lawyer, and Frances Finch Lee. She was educated at Huntington College (1944–45), the University of Alabama, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1949, and Oxford University. After one year of study, she changed her mind about completing her law degree. While working for several airlines in the 1950s, she wrote and revised her manuscript. To Kill a Mockingbird is narrated by Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, a mature woman who is reflecting on her coming-of-age in the South during segregation. Scout, her brother, Jem; their father, Atticus, the lawyer; and their friend Dill are based on Lee’s memories of her own childhood with her brother, father, and future author Truman CAPOTE. The children are fortunate in having a father who courageously refuses to cower before the prejudice of the townspeople, instead defending the man he knows is innocent. The novel seems to have enduring appeal primarily because of its handling of racial prejudice (it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, the children are told, and the mockingbird is strongly equated with Tom Robinson, the falsely accused black man). Lee’s skill in evoking Scout’s journey to maturity, the romantic and Gothic elements of the tale, and Lee’s deceptively simple style help her tell a thematically complex story. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed by Universal in 1962, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, and won two Academy Awards. Its appeal is not limited to American readers. In 1987, Christopher Sergel adapted it as a London stage play; and on May 17, 2003, during the BBC’s “The Big Read,” the British public voted To Kill a Mockingbird as one of the nation’s 21 best-loved novels. Harper Lee continues to live in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, and to travel extensively.

NOVEL To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960.

762

LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE

SOURCES Erisman, Fred. “The Romantic Regionalism of Harper Lee,” Alabama Review 26 no. 2 (April 1973): 122–136. Johnson, Claudia Durst. “The Secret Courts of Men’s Hearts: Code and Law in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,” Studies in American Fiction 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1991): 129–139. ———. Understanding “To Kill a Mockingbird”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. ———. To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries. New York: Twayne, 1994. Schuster, Edgar J. “Discovering Theme and Structure in the Novel,” English Journal (October 1963): 506–511. Shackelford, Dean. “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel,” Mississippi Quarterly 50, no. 1 (Winter 1996–1997): 101–113.

LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE URSULA K. LE GUIN (1969) In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, the author Ursula K. LE GUIN argues that science fiction does not foretell what will become of humanity, but rather takes advantage of modern metaphors to portray our actual character and behavior: “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” (Introduction). Therefore, she argues, even the use of a future era becomes a metaphor. Le Guin’s account of envoy Genly Ai’s mission to Gethen/Winter to draw the reclusive planet into joining a larger federation—the aptly named Ekumen—draws upon and comments on the modern world’s attempt at both uniting nations into peaceful alliances while retaining each people’s individual sense of nation and culture. Therefore, the main themes in this book arise from a tension between opposites that seem to ask one single question: Are choices A and B mutually exclusive? Unity or dispersion? Knowledge or ignorance? Progress or tradition? Ultimately, Le Guin seems to point out that both extremes are needed; after all, a line needs two opposite points to exist. Through Ai’s observations on Gethen’s government structures, unique gender characteristics, and drive to maintain certain traditions, The Left Hand of Darkness is a journey through a world’s questioning of its own individuality in a time of larger alliances. This tension between the group and the individual works on various levels to become the novel’s central

theme. The planet where Ai seeks to fulfill his mission itself has two names: To its inhabitants, it is known as Gethen; outsiders call it Winter because of its harsh climate. It has three main regions, but only two— Karhide and Orgoreyn—hold real power, the third being a sort of wasteland. And these two “countries” present vastly different forms of government, one being a monarchy, the other a highly bureaucratic mechanism. Thus, Ai soon finds himself caught in the middle of a dispute between Karhide and Orgoreyn: One wishes to expel him, and the other will support his mission to bring Gethen into the fold of the Ekumen’s federation of planets. Nevertheless, the dualities present on Gethen do not seem to be reflected in the planet’s inhabitants, as Genly Ai learns when challenged by their unique biology and traditions. Most of the time, Gethenians are neither male nor female, but in a “potential” state. When an individual enters the period of fertility, he/she will begin displaying traits of what would be considered a “man” or a “woman”; at the same time, her/his partner, or in fact any Gethenian who is around during this process, will mutate into the opposite sex. Thus both individuals come together in the bond of kemmer and create offspring. As Genly Ai notes, disconcerted, a Gethenian may be the mother of one child and father to another, depending on where the cycle has led him/her on that occasion. In fact, it is Ai’s stability in his own maleness that disgusts the Gethenians, who refer to those individuals that do not shift their gender regularly as “Perverts.” To Ai, at least initially, this very fluctuation seems unnatural, until he comes to appreciate the Gethenians’ lack of gender hierarchy; in Genly’s own society, females might have been given less power because they were bound by childbearing; this is not true in Winter, where there are no such distinctions because everybody, at one time or another, will become a mother and bear offspring. Again, if we hold our interpretation of the novel against Le Guin’s claim that science fiction merely describes what already exists, the narrator’s observation seems obvious: In life, one is sometimes called upon to take a “dominant” role and sometimes asked to remain in a more “passive” position. The roles of nurturer and provider are in all of us, and our psyche often knows better and looks beyond our social

LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, THE 763

conditioning to adapt to the circumstances at hand. As one of Genly’s predecessors on Winter remarks in a scientific diary, “[o]ne is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience” (95). Another gray area for Gethenians is the issue of violence. While wars have not taken place in so long that weapons are considered museum relics, there are frequent forays, assassinations, and exiles where an individual is forced into such extremely hostile isolation that s/he either perishes in the planet’s wastelands or is eventually murdered by enemies or mercenaries. It is difficult to understand how war is openly rejected, while more sinister acts of violence are carried out without thought or, often, punishment. When Genly witnesses the exile of Estraven, he senses that Gethen does not, in fact, need wars to keep people under control. Cast out from society, the undesirable subject will eventually die, a victim of retribution or his/her own doing. As contradictory as this sounds, it again mirrors human experience: Covert violence is probably more widespread than declared wars; all countries claim to work for peace, yet live out their turmoil and act against one another. Finally, there is an important question that deeply affects the envoy’s mission to bring Gethen into the fold of the Ekumen, surrounding the pull between tradition and progress. Although we are normally used to science fiction’s presenting societies far more advanced than our own, Gethen is actually a quite primitive world. While it is true that Genly has arrived via starship and uses sophisticated communications devices, the planet Winter itself possesses no such technology. Its information is distributed by radio, and the vehicles that cross the barren landscape are slow and cumbersome. On the other hand, Gethen is a world populated by seemingly magical beings. In addition to their astounding biological characteristics, Genly Ai encounters a species of would-be prophets, the Foretellers, who claim ignorance as their highest virtue and yet predict events—supposing one has asked the right question—with devastating accuracy and effects. In general, Gethenians trust innovation less than they do their own customs; it is telling that the book is structured so that the Envoy’s account and scientific journal entries from previous Investigators to the planet are interspersed with Gethenian legends and

lore. What does this tell us about ourselves? Does the scientific method eventually win over what are perceived to be superstitions? Perhaps, but in time societies learn to exist straddling both worlds: grateful for technological advances but maintaining a strong sense of culture and even mystery—as we see in our own mix of information technology, which keeps us informed of the present, and telephone psychics on whom many depend for information on the future. In the end, we sense that both magic and reality are needed in healthy doses to keep a culture moving safely forward without compromising its identity. Ultimately, what is the outcome, both for Gethen and for our own world? Does the Ekumenical alliance want to present an interplanetary United Nations? If Le Guin is, as she says, merely describing us through another world and time, we may have caught a glimpse of ourselves as a contradictory, complicated mass of power struggles, beliefs, superstitions, and—beneath all this—a thirst for peace and knowledge. The success of Genly Ai’s mission then becomes important for us as well; for although we cannot depend on the Foretellers for answers, we sense that we, too, are crossing a fragile time, when we will decide whether to join others in goodwill or clutch desperately at our individual beliefs and comfortable social structures. Do we dare become as fluid as the Gethenians in our roles, or will we condemn ourselves to exile in a frozen, immobile landscape?

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, and William Golding. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Penguin, 1976. ———. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 1997. ———. The Language of Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Harperperennial Library, 1993. Rass, Rebecca. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: A Critical Commentary. St. Paul, Minn.: Hungry Minds, 1990. Rochelle, Warren G. Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2000. Maria Luisa Antonaya

764

LE GUIN, URSULA K.

LE GUIN, URSULA K(ROEBER) (1929– ) The preeminent early feminist voice in the writing of science fiction, Ursula Le Guin not only crossed over from science fiction and fantasy into mainstream literature but also, through her feminist and ecological stance, contributed significantly to the development of the genre. Typically, her characters embark on quests that should (but do not always) redress the imbalance that they seek to correct. In the last 40 years Ursula Le Guin won the Nebula and Hugo Awards from the International Science Fiction Association for The LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS (1969), one of the most admired science fiction novels of the 20th century, and the Nebula, Hugo, Jupiter, and Jules Verne Awards, all for The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). It too is now considered a classic in the genre. She has also continued to receive awards for novellas, short stories, and children’s and young adult literature, and in 2002 she received the Nebula Award Grand Master and the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction, and, in 2004, the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in young adult fiction. Le Guin has also written volumes of poetry, essays, literary criticism, and a translation of the Chinese Taoist text I Ching (1997). Ursula Le Guin was born on October 21, 1929, in Berkeley, California, to Alfred L. Kroeber, an anthropologist, and Theodora Covel Brown Dracaw Kroeber, a writer. Raised in Berkeley, she spent summers at Kishamish, the family’s 40-acre Napa Valley ranch, and was educated at Radcliffe College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1951, and Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in 1952. Le Guin married Charles Alfred Le Guin, a historian, in 1952, and by 1960 she had written five unpublished novels. Her first trilogy—Rocannon’s World (1966), Planet of Exile (1966), and City of Illusions (1967)—considered apprentice work, establish the Hainish world that Le Guin would continue to explore in her major fiction. She followed with the highly regarded Earthsea Trilogy, written for young adults: A Wizard of Earthsea (1968), frequently compared to J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth and C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. It features the adventurer of a sorcerer named Ged; The Tombs of Atuan (1970) introduces the priestess Tenar, Le Guin’s first significant

woman character; and The Farthest Shore (1972) centers on a more mature Ged. Le Guin added to the series in 1990 with Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea, The Other Wind, and a story collection. The Left Hand of Darkness, the first major novel in the Hainish cycle, constitutes an exploration of life on Winter, a frozen planet peopled by androgynous beings. Here LeGuin explores characters who are sexually equal and thus calls into question the socially imposed aspects of gender in the “real” world. The next Hainish novel, The Dispossessed, features Shevek (critics have suggested his similarity to the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer), who tries to ease the mistrust between a capitalistic planet and an anarchic one. He ends up with an increased comprehension of the complexity of the issues. The Word for World Is Forest (1972), a Hainish novella, sometimes seen as an anti–Vietnam War novel, equates the colonizers’ destruction of the trees of the forest with their abuse of women and other beings who are less physically strong. The most recent novel in the Hainish series, The Telling (2000), features Sutty, a lesbian who has lost her lover as a result of homophobia. Malfrena (1979), the first of the two novels and the short story collection that compose her “Orsinian Tales,” is a political bildungsroman featuring Itale Sorde, a nobly born university student whose adventures in learning are contrasted to those of his sister Laura. Her stability and inability to venture out make possible her brother’s mobility. Always Coming Home (1985), another Orsinian novel, set in a futuristic Napa Valley, is highly experimental. It includes artwork, recipes, a dictionary, poetry, and a tape with music, all coordinated by the central character, an anthropologist named Pandora. The Lathe of Heaven was televised by PBS in 1979. A new version, with screenplay by Alan Sharp and direction by Philip Haas, was produced by the A&E Television Network. The “Earthsea” books were adapted by Gavin Scott into a miniseries epic, produced by Hallmark Entertainment for the Sci Fi Channel in 2004. Le Guin, who lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon, has given her manuscripts to the University of Oregon Library in Eugene.

NOVELS Always Coming Home. New York: Harper, 1985. City of Illusions. New York: Ace Books, 1967.

LESSON BEFORE DYING, A 765

The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper, 1974. The Lathe of Heaven. New York: Scribner, 1971. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books, 1969. With new afterword and appendixes by the author, New York: Walker, 1994. Malafrena. New York: Putnam, 1979. Planet of Exile. New York: Ace Books, 1966. Rocannon’s World. New York: Ace Books, 1966. The Telling. New York: Harcourt, 2000. The Visionary. (Bound with Wonders Hidden, by Scott R. Sanders) New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

SOURCES Bittner, James. Approaches to the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1984. Bucknall, Barbara J. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Ungar, 1981. Cogell, Elizabeth Cummins. Ursula K. Le Guin: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Cummins, Elizabeth. Understanding Ursula K. Le Guin. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Jones, Libby Falk, and Sarah Webster Goodwin. Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Keulen, Margarete. Radical Imagination: Feminist Conceptions of the Future in Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy, and Sally Miller Gearhart. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Reginald, Robert, and George Edgar Slusser, eds. Zephyr and Boreas: Winds of Change in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin: A Festschrift in Memory of Pilgrim Award Winner, Marjorie Hope Nicolson. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Reid, Suzanne Elizabeth. Ursula K. Le Guin. New York: Twayne, 1997. Slusser, George Edgar. Between Two Worlds: The Literary Dilemma of Ursula K. Le Guin, 2nd ed. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo, 1995. Spivack, Charlotte. Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Twayne, 1984. St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996. Wayne, Kathryn Ross. Redefining Moral Education: Life, Le Guin, and Language. San Francisco: Austin & Winfield, 1994.

OTHER Justice, Faith L. “Ursula K. Le Guin.” Salon.com. People. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2001/ 01/23/le_guin/print.html. Accessed September 21, 2005. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Web site. Available online. URL: http:// www.ursulaleguin.com. Accessed September 21, 2005.

“Legends Author: Ursula Le Guin.” Tor. Available online. URL: http://www.tor.com/sites/legends/le_guin_bio.html. Accessed September 21, 2005.

LESSON BEFORE DYING, A ERNEST GAINES (1993) Ernest GAINES’s novel A Lesson Before Dying was published in 1993 but gained bestseller status when Oprah Winfrey named it as her Book Club selection in September 1997. Set in the 1940s in the small Southern town of Bayonne, Louisiana, the novel tells the story of a beleaguered school teacher, Grant Wiggins, who has returned from college to serve a “plantation” school in his home town. His goal as an educator is to motivate his African-American charges to become both literate and self-confident members of their community. As the novel begins, however, Wiggins is clearly despondent about his potential to attain this goal, especially given the prejudice of the local school administrators, who feel that minority schools deserve fewer supplies and less financial support than what is given to “white” schools. Gaines makes it clear that Wiggins is held in Bayonne only by a romance with a local woman and that he will soon follow the footsteps of other black teachers before him, leaving his position out of sheer despair of ever making a difference in the lives of his students. Wiggins clearly recognizes that instilling self-pride and respect in children is a cruel joke when they are continually faced with racial prejudice and discrimination. Surprisingly, however, Grant’s life undergoes a turnabout when he is requested by his Tante Lou and his godmother Miss Emma to visit Jefferson, another of Emma’s godsons who is in prison awaiting execution after being convicted as an accomplice to murder. During his trial, Jefferson has been relegated to animal status by the white judge and jury, who are clearly racially prejudiced. In a last-ditch attempt to gain sympathy and acquittal for his client, even Jefferson’s own defense lawyer refers to him as a hog, suggesting that he has so little intelligence that he cannot tell right from wrong. Convinced by the court proceedings that he is less than human, Jefferson has given up on himself, deciding merely to await his imminent death submissively. Upset by Jefferson’s acceptance of an animal rather than a

766

LESSON BEFORE DYING, A

human status, Miss Emma wants Grant to undertake the task of restoring Jefferson’s dignity, to help him to die with pride in himself rather than humbled and distraught by the unrestricted power of a white majority that degrades him verbally and considers him subhuman. Unfortunately, in the beginning of the novel, Jefferson resists Grant’s attempts, preferring to wallow in piglike squalor and silence in the white man’s jail. Not only does he accept the harsh label of hog, but he also refuses to see those who really love and care about him. Gaines makes it clear that Grant initially tries to refuse his responsibility as an educated black man, preferring to avoid this new teaching assignment. Already sensing the futility of instilling self-pride in his own students, he feels any interaction with Jefferson will also be meaningless. But as he continues his visits to the jail to meet with the condemned man, he forges a bond with Jefferson that eventually leads to wisdom and courage for both of them. Their jail conversations also reveal Jefferson’s isolation as well as the stigma and loneliness entailed in being imprisoned and sentenced to death for a crime he never committed. Much more important, however, readers see how a white world strips Jefferson of his dignity as a human being and how Grant as teacher extraordinaire helps him to regain his self-esteem just as Miss Emma desired. Moreover, Grant provides Jefferson with the means to face his unjust accusers with his head held high; primarily, this is accomplished by helping Jefferson find his voice in a world that seldom listens to black men. By providing Jefferson with a notebook in which to record his thoughts, Grant both teaches a lesson about the power of words and learns one himself as well. Clearly there is an intentional double entendre in the book’s title as readers see a number of lessons learned. Gaines suggests that when Jefferson is able to record his feelings on paper, he is not only able to plumb his deepest feelings but also he is allowed a glimpse into his soul, discovering that he still has a pride in self despite the desperate straits he find himself in. This lesson carries over to both the black and the white communities as a whole as Wiggins’s students as well as the two protagonists are enlightened by the strength of character they observe in an otherwise

“beaten” man. In fact, the novel itself has been labeled a parable like those told in the Gospels to instruct the laity in simple terms about a complex issue. If this is so, then Gaines’s parable not only reveals in a single story the entire bitter history of black people in the South but, by extension, it also exposes their sad plight in America as a whole. Yet while outwardly painting a bleak picture of the South’s past and present, Gaines is still able to suggest that both black men, the impoverished “loser” and the successful intellectual, can and will find ways to rise above the racial aspersions that threaten to destroy them and their race. Clearly Gaines goes to great trouble to draw several biblical parables in the novel. For example, Jefferson is portrayed with Christ-like innocence, moving in silence toward his execution/crucifixion, offering his life as sacrifice although he is clearly not guilty of a crime. Although he is not restrained behind bars, Wiggins is also a captive of the white society. Despite his higher social status, his blackness still means restricted liberty; for example, he must enter white houses by back doors and must suffer the constant ridicule of whites who consider themselves his superiors. Yet another biblical allusion employed is the story of Cain and Abel, with Cain/Grant suggesting that he is not his brother’s keeper and that therefore he owes nothing to the dying Jefferson/Abel. Unlike Jefferson, whose Christ-like acceptance is admirable, Grant for a time considers following Cain’s pattern, running away and escaping his persecutors as well as his responsibilities. Ultimately, however, Grant, like Jefferson, must learn that he needs to face opposition and duties headon as the biblical Jesus did. Asserting power and conviction even when it appears to be futile thus raises the Christ figure to a higher status. In addition to making biblical allusions that link his protagonists with the Messiah, Gaines’s novel also attains added depth by its subtle reference to a famous sonnet by the black poet Claude McKay and to several Negro spirituals. The McKay sonnet “If We Must Die” is a call to arms for the black race, a plea to defy being treated as subhuman and unequal. Using imagery suggesting that all black men are fighting a death sentence, McKay also employs the hog metaphor to suggest the racial oppression

LE SUEUR, MERIDEL 767

endured by blacks. Like pigs, they seem penned in, unable to escape and subject to torture by hungry dogs (the poet’s depiction of Klan-like white men). As the poem rises toward its climax, McKay urges his kinsmen to rise to meet the challenge rather than passively succumb to degradation and ensuing death. “If we must die,” he says to his black brothers, “we must face that fate with fortitude.” To do that requires courage, for although black men may concede that they are outnumbered in the struggle for justice, they still must engage every ounce of effort to resist defeat, to fight back and show the “cowardly” enemy force that its pack mentality will not overcome black individuality and independence. McKay argues that although racial conflict may bring death, it will also provide honor and pride if the minority can demonstrate its ability to confront and withstand the prejudice and hate practiced by white bigots. Still other critics have drawn attention to Gaines’s use of the Negro spiritual to shape the structure of this novel. Specifically, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” and “He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word” have been singled out as major influences that impact the thematic unity of A Lesson Before Dying. If these claims are true, the words that open the novel (“I was not there yet I was there”) have a whole new meaning when considered in tandem with their musical counterpart. The allusion to musical texts associated with the Crucifixion also clearly suggests that the novel will mirror an unfair prosecution that parallels the inequities faced by Christ before Pontius Pilate and will later combine this suffering portrait with the transformation and redemption experienced by the Messiah as well. The latter elements suggest that, like Christ, the persecuted black man will attain victory even in death and that on Judgment, or Termination, Day all wrongs will be righted. The fact that in the novel Determination Day is also called Termination Sunday is no chance occurrence or random shortening of the word. Instead the novel depicts both Jefferson and Grant Wiggins as finding determination (courage and strength) as they face a brutal termination together. The second song, “He Never Said a Mumblin’ Word,” is also referenced literally (223) and indicates Jesus’s acceptance of his

sacrificial death. Similarly, led by Grant’s encouragement, Jefferson decides not to give his white captors any indication of the physical and emotional agony he is undergoing. Rather, his silence serves as a powerful form of his resistance. The frequent allusions to Christ’s death on the cross thus deliberately make readers confront still other crosses: the cross of slavery borne by African Americans both in the past and in the present, the crosses burnt by the Ku Klux Klan and the cross of unfair “justice” meted out to innocent men. Throughout the text, Gaines also alludes to pierced and bleeding hands, to last suppers and to a transfiguration of Jefferson from animal to superior human, thus affirming still other Christological parallels. Ultimately, the Gospel according to Gaines offers many lessons individuals need to learn before dying, not the least of which is that “defeated heroes” like Jesus, like Jefferson, and like Grant Wiggins himself may die literally but their spirits will never pass away.

SOURCE Gaines, Ernest. A Lesson Before Dying. New York: Knopf, 1993. Michael J. Meyer

LE SUEUR, MERIDEL (1900–1996) Meridel Le Sueur, political writer and poet, has only recently been recognized for her achievements as a novelist. As with Tillie OLSEN, Le Sueur gained national recognition for her portraits of the poor and inarticulate, only to find during the McCarthy era that her radicalism was cause for blacklisting. Her modernist novel, The GIRL, written in 1932, was not published in book form until 1978 despite the author’s experimental use of dialogue and attempt to fuse the working class experience with poetic, affective imagery on the one hand and realistic, sometimes grotesque, description on the other hand. Belated recognition came too for her Harvest Song: Collected Stories and Essays (1991), which received an American Book Award. Meridel Winston was born on February 22, 1900, in Murray, Iowa, to William Winston and Mary Lucy Wharton Winston. When her mother later married Alfred Le Sueur, a lawyer instrumental in establishing the Industrial Workers of the World (or the Wobblies,

768

LETHEM, JONATHAN

a group dedicated to fostering solidarity among workers), he adopted her daughter; at this point Meridel took Le Sueur for her surname. Again, like Tillie Olsen, she was educated according to midwestern socialist ideas of the time, through the HaldemanJulius blue books, inexpensive paperback books, first published in the 1920s, that made literature available to students and adults alike. Through her parents, she met nationally known social reformers: Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Theodore DREISER, and Carl Sandburg, among others. Le Sueur dropped out of high school and moved to New York City, where she lived in a commune and studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Le Sueur’s life on the frontier became the setting for her first novel, The Girl; the somewhat autobiographical protagonist escapes her dreary home by running away to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she finds poverty and unwanted sexual encounters with men. An alliance of homeless women rescues her. Le Sueur’s technique is an experimental composite of real-life stories presented through a socialist-feminist perspective and drawn from members of the Worker’s Alliance in St. Paul, one of the many worker solidarity groups that sprang up in the 1930s. Le Sueur’s fictional women endure the real Depression of the 1930s and real hardship. Although Le Sueur was popular in the 1930s and was published in New Masses and the Daily Worker, she fell out of favor during the McCarthy era and was blacklisted because of her association with the U.S. Communist Party. But during the last years of her life, her work enjoyed a revival; much of it was republished in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Meridel Le Sueur died on November 14, 1996, in Hudson, Wisconsin.

NOVELS Annunciation. Los Angeles: Platen Press, 1935. The Girl. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: West End, 1979. North Star Country. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945.

SOURCES Boehnlein, James M. The Sociocognitive Rhetoric of Meridel Le Sueur. Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994.

Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Le Sueur, Meridel. Crusaders: The Radical Legacy of Marian and Arthur Le Sueur. Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society, 1984. Roberts, Nora Ruth. Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. New York: Garland, 1996. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Modern American Novel, 1914–1945: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

LETHEM, JONATHAN (ALLEN) (1964) Jonathan Lethem, called the Don DELILLO of his generation, is admired for his experimentation with and blending of many genres, including hard-boiled crime fiction, science fiction, romance, and satire. As his editor, Bill Thomas, says, Lethem “has gone from unknown to cult figure, breakout critical darling and now, if all goes according to plan, mainstream ‘great American writer’ ” (Zeitchik, 38). His novella The Happy Man was a finalist for the Nebula Award in 1991; he won a World Fantasy Award for best story collection for The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye: Stories (1996), and a National Book Critics Circle Award for MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN (1999). The Fortress of Solitude, his most recent and partially autobiographical novel, was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice for 2003. Jonathan Lethem was born on February 19, 1964, in New York City, to Richard Brown, an artist, and Judith Frank, an activist. Both before and after the two years he studied at Bennington College, Lethem earned his living as a bookseller. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music (1994), set in near-future Oakland, California, features private investigator Conrad Metcalf; he reveals a plot to create animals and infants who can speak as well as adult humans. Amnesia Moon (1995) is also a futuristic novel in which Los Angeles and San Francisco are inhabited by aliens, televangelists have become robots, and film stars hold important government posts. The real subject, however, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, is “the search for identity, the search for family” on the part of the main character, Everett, a.k.a. Chaos. As She Climbed Across

LEWIS, SINCLAIR

the Table (1997) is a science fiction tale featuring physicist Alice Coomb’s romance with Lack, who is revealed to be not human but a black hole with a charismatic personality. Girl in Landscape (1998), in the interviewer Elizabeth Gaffney’s words, is “a beautiful but grim work that exists somewhere in the previously uncharted interstices between science fiction, western and coming-of-age novels.” It is narrated by Pella Marsh, a 13-year-old adolescent girl. Lethem says she is based on characters in works by Carson MCCULLERS and Shirley JACKSON (Gaffney, 50). Motherless Brooklyn (1999)—Lethem’s fifth novel in five years—is the story of Lionel, an orphan with Tourette’s syndrome who is rescued from a boys home by Frank Minna, a small-time hustler who runs a detective agency masked as a limousine service. After Minna is murdered, Lionel seeks his killers; his Tourette’s actually works to his advantage. In The Fortress of Solitude (2003), the white Dylan Ebdus and his best friend, the black Mingus Rude, are on the Brooklyn streets of the 1970s, marked by graffiti, hiphop, and rap music. A magic ring gives them the power to fly.

NOVELS Amnesia Moon. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1995. As She Climbed Across the Table. New York: Doubleday, 1997. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Girl in Landscape. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Gun, with Occasional Music. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt, 1994. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

SOURCES Unsigned review of Amnesia Moon, Publishers Weekly 242, no. 24 (June 12, 1995): 44. Unsigned review of The Fortress of Solitude, Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 11 (June 1, 2003): 764. Unsigned review of The Fortress of Solitude, Publishers Weekly 248, no. 6 (February 5, 2001): 52. Unsigned review of Motherless Brooklyn, Publishers Weekly 246, no. 33 (August 16, 1999): 57. Bradshaw, Peter. “Flight of fancy,” New Statesman (1996) 132, no. 4,671 (January 19, 2004): 51–52. Gaffney, Elizabeth. “Jonathan Lethem: Breaking the Barriers between Genres,” Interview, Publishers Weekly 245, no. 13 (March 30, 1998): 50–51.

769

Hays, Carl. Review of Gun, with Occasional Music, Booklist 90, no. 12 (February 15, 1994): 1,064. Munson, Sam. Review of The Fortress of Solitude [and The Namesake], Commentary 116, no. 4 (November 2003): 68–71. Smith, Starr E. Review of Girl in Landscape, Library Journal, April 1998, p. 123. Ward, Nathan. Review of The Fortress of Solitude, Library Journal, July 2003, p. 123. Zeitchik, Steven. “A Brooklyn of the Soul: Jonathan Lethem,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 37 (15 September 2003): 37–38.

LEWIS, SINCLAIR (1885–1951) Sinclair Lewis, winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for ARROWSMITH and the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, in 1930, wrote about American types, their foibles, and small towns. His satiric novels still resonate with readers today. Lewis’s fictional places, Gopher Prairie, for instance, of MAIN STREET (1920), and types—George F. Babbitt of BABBITT (1922) and the protagonist of ELMER GANTRY (1927)—have not only entered the literary consciousness but have become international symbols for the back-slapping can-do American and the hypocrisy of a certain decadent mode of fundamentalist. His depiction of the American small town as hypocritical, vulgar, and gossipy rather than moral, industrious, and benevolent fueled a public and critical controversy; these novels underscored the insights of Sherwood ANDERSON and Hamlin GARLAND and set the stage for the work of Flannery O’CONNOR. This so-called revolt from the village was embedded in Lewis’s rebellious characters: Main Street’s Carol Kennicott, Babbitt, and Martin Arrowsmith and in his correspondingly satiric treatment of American business, medicine, and the ministry. Lewis’s novels seem to epitomize the ideas of H. L. Mencken, who invented the word booboisie to describe what he saw as cultureless Americans. Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, to Edwin J. Lewis, a physician, and Emma Kermott Lewis. He was educated at Yale University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1908. Before his 1914 marriage to Grace Livingston Hegger, he lived in New York City and published a

770 LEWIS, SINCLAIR

juvenile novel under the name Tom Graham; by the time of his 1928 divorce and remarriage to the noted journalist Dorothy Thompson, Lewis had written most of the novels for which he is famous. His apprentice novels include Our Mr. Wrenn (1914), The Trail of the Hawk (1915), The Job (1917), The Innocents (1917), and Free Air (1919), books in which Lewis experimented with American provincialism, ordinary, everyday speech, the flight from the Midwest, and eastern elitism. The publication of Main Street, propelling Lewis into fame and popularity, signaled the beginning of a remarkably productive decade in which he published Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and DODSWORTH (1929). In Main Street, Carol Kennicott is so bored with her marriage and small-town life that she flees to Washington, D.C., where, finding no satisfaction, she decides to return to Gopher Prairie and cave in to the shallow, vulgar life that she is ultimately powerless to change. George F. Babbitt, a shallow and materialistic businessman, was such a successful evocation of the glad-handing, vulgar American that the term babbittry was coined to describe such traits. Like Carol Kennicott, Babbitt fails in his rebellion against oppressive social forces and, somewhat pathetically, returns to conformity. Arrowsmith features another rebel, Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor who, in his quest for truth, struggles between his love of pure research and his desire for personal pleasure. He triumphs in the end, opting for the Spartan research laboratory. Lewis refused the Pulitzer Prize for this novel because he distrusted the reasons behind the awarding of it. (The Columbia University trustees had twice vetoed the Pulitzer Prize Committee’s recommendations that the prize be awarded to Lewis, first for Main Street and second for Babbitt.) Lewis’s next novel, Mantrap (1926), has been characterized by most reviewers as a potboiler; it is based on an expedition Lewis made into the Canadian wilderness. Elmer Gantry created even more of a sensation than Main Street, lambasting every aspect of Protestant fundamentalism, symbolized by the vulgar, crude, power-hungry Elmer Gantry, who rises from minister of a small rural Baptist church to head of a

large, influential Methodist church in New York City. Along the way he has a celebrated affair with Sharon Falconer, a glamorous evangelist. The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928) has for its subject another American businessman. He followed with Dodsworth, more autobiographical than some of the other novels and related to Lewis’s own failing marriage. Samuel Dodsworth, a retired, 50-year-old businessmen has some understanding of literature and art (unlike Babbitt); his burden is his superficial and snobbish wife, who has multiple affairs, including one with an Italian count. Dodsworth finally divorces her to marry a nobler and less pretentious woman, Edith Cortright. Dodsworth is, by common critical consent, the last of Lewis’s best books. He wrote another dozen novels, most notably the best-selling IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE (1935), a tale of fascist dictator Buzz Windrip; Bethel Merriday (1940), about a young woman’s attempts to succeed in the New York theater; Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives (1945), which depicts an older man’s passion for his much younger wife; and Kingsblood Royal (1947), a tale of racial prejudice and its tragic implications for America. Sinclair Lewis died of paralysis of the heart on January 10, 1951, in Rome, Italy. His ashes were returned to Sauk Centre. Since his death, the Sinclair Lewis Society and the Sinclair Lewis Newsletter have been founded. Most of Lewis’s manuscripts are housed at Yale University and the University of Texas at Austin. Samuel Goldwyn filmed Arrowsmith in 1931 and Dodsworth in 1936; in 1960, Elmer Gantry was adapted as a United Artists film starring Burt Lancaster.

NOVELS Ann Vickers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1933. Arrowsmith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925. Babbitt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922. Bethel Merriday. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1940. Cass Timberlane. New York: Random House, 1945. Dodsworth. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Elmer Gantry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Free Air. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1919. Gideon Planish. New York: Random House, 1943. The God-Seeker. New York: Random House, 1949. The Innocents. New York: Harper, 1917.

LIBRA 771

It Can’t Happen Here. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Jayhawker: A Play in Three Acts, by Lewis and Lloyd Lewis. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. The Job. New York: Harper, 1917. Kingsblood Royal. New York: Random House, 1947. Main Street. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920. The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings. Edited by Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane. New York: Random House, 1953. The Man Who Knew Coolidge. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Mantrap. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926. Our Mr. Wrenn. New York: Harper, 1914. The Prodigal Parents. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1938. Storm in the West, by Lewis and Dore Schary. New York: Stein & Day, 1963. The Trail of the Hawk. New York: Harper, 1915. Work of Art. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1934. World So Wide. New York: Random House, 1951.

SOURCES Aaron, Daniel. “Sinclair Lewis, Main Street.” In The American Novel, edited by Wallace Stegner, 166–179. New York: Basic Books, 1965. Austin, Allen. “An Interview with Sinclair Lewis,” University Review 24 (March 1958): 199–210. Batchelor, Helen. “A Sinclair Lewis Portfolio of Maps: Zenith to Winnemac,” Modern Language Quarterly 32 (December 1971): 401–408. Cantwell, Robert. “Sinclair Lewis.” In After the Genteel Tradition, edited by Malcolm Cowley, 92–102. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Douglas, George H. “Babbitt at Fifty—The Truth Still Hurts,” Nation, May 1972, pp. 661–662. ———. “Main Street After Fifty Years,” Prairie Schooner 44 (Winter 1970): 338–348. Fleming, Robert E., and Esther Fleming. Sinclair Lewis: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Griffin, Robert J., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “Arrowsmith.” Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Hilfer, Anthony C. “Caricaturist of the Village Mind” and “Elmer Gantry and That Old Time Religion.” In The Revolt from the Village, edited by Anthony C. Hilfer, 158–192. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Hoffman, Frederick J. “Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit.” In The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, rev. ed.,

edited by Frederick J. Hoffman, 408–415. New York: Free Press, 1962. Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Kazin, Alfred. “The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.” In On Native Grounds, edited by Alfred Kazin, 217–226. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. Lewis, Grace H. With Love from Gracie: Sinclair Lewis, 1912–1925. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Love, Glen A. Babbitt: An American. New York: Twayne, 1993. ———. “New Pioneering on the Prairies: Nature, Progress and the Individual in the Novels of Sinclair Lewis,” American Quarterly 25 (December 1973): 558–577. Lundquist, James. Sinclair Lewis. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973. Miller, Perry. “The Incorruptible Sinclair Lewis,” Atlantic Monthly, April 1951, pp. 30–34. Schorer, Mark. “Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt.” In Landmarks of American Writing, edited by Hennig Cohen, 315–327. New York: Basic Books, 1969. ———. Sinclair Lewis: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1962. ———. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Tuttleton, James W. “Sinclair Lewis: The Romantic Comedian as Realist Mimic.” In The Novel of Manners in America, edited by James W. Tuttleton, 141–161. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972. West, Rebecca. “Sinclair Lewis Introduces Elmer Gantry.” In The Strange Necessity, edited by Rebecca West, 295–308. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Whipple, Thomas K. “Sinclair Lewis.” In Spokesmen, edited by Thomas K. Whipple, 208–229. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Yoshida, Hiroshige. A Sinclair Lewis Lexicon: With a Critical Study of His Style and Methods. Tokyo: Hoyu, 1976.

OTHER The Sinclair Lewis Home Page. Available online. URL: http://www.ilstu.edu/~separry/lewis.html. Accessed August 2005.

LIBRA DON DELILLO (1988) Libra, Don DeLillo’s ninth novel, is about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but, as the critic Frank Lentricchia asserts, “DeLillo’s American tragedy is much more Oswald’s than it is Kennedy’s; much more America’s than it is the tragedy of an isolated psychopath” (Lentricchia, 198).

772 LIBRA

That the story is about Oswald, and even more significantly about America, is evident in the double narrative structure of the novel. The first narrative is a fictional account of Oswald’s life. The second, appearing in every other chapter, begins with the character Nicholas Branch, a retired CIA agent, sitting in a small room where he tirelessly reviews 25 years of data and evidence regarding the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo returns to this character throughout the novel, but the main focus of this second narrative concentrates on a plot devised on April 17, 1963, by Win Everett, an ex-CIA agent. Everett creates a plot to stir up the anti-Castro movement by creating a failed attempt on Kennedy’s life. He explains to his coconspirators Laurence Parmenter and T. J. Mackey, two other ex-CIA agents who were involved in the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion, “we need an electrifying event. . . . we want to set up an attempt on the life of the President. . . . but we don’t hit Kennedy. We miss him” (27–28). But the layers of secrecy soon cause Everett to lose control of his plan. As the chapters dealing with this plot progress, more characters, each with his or her personal agenda, become involved. Twenty-five years later, Branch looks at all his accumulated information and concludes, “the conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance. Deft men and fools, ambivalence and fixed will and what the weather was like” (441). Through the tangled lives of anti-Castro followers, CIA agents, and members of the Mafia, DeLillo suggests that while Oswald was not working alone, the conspiracy was more of a series of coincidences and personal objectives that led to “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century” (181). Interspersed and sometimes intersecting with the events leading to this moment is the narrative of Lee Harvey Oswald. The novel begins with Oswald living in the Bronx borough of New York City (not far from where DeLillo himself grew up), struggling to fit into society as a poor, socially withdrawn young man. As the novel enters Oswald’s psyche, the reader sees his proud, violent, and rebellious actions in the context of the America he lives in and in contrast to the America of John F. Kennedy. Despite the apparent struggles of Oswald against the system, DeLillo does not, as the

critic George Will suggests, “blame America for Oswald’s act of derangement” (Will, 56). Will denounces Libra as “an act of literary vandalism” because of DeLillo’s misrepresentation or manipulation of facts (Will, 56). However, DeLillo fictionalizes a story already steeped in inconsistencies and coincidences. In a comment on the difference between history and fiction, DeLillo has said, “the novelist can try to leap across the barrier of fact, and the reader is willing to take that leap with him as long as there’s a kind of redemptive truth waiting on the other side, a sense that we’ve arrived at a resolution” (56). DeLillo does not offer a final resolution of what happened on November 22, 1963; he offers one version of what could have happened. There is no one specific cause that leads to one specific event. Instead, the incident arises from certain causes that interplay with many coincidences and are propelled by human desires and mistakes. The novel, then, is a comment on the randomness of contemporary life, and the redemptive truth it reveals is that we must accept coincidence and chaos. Branch, sitting in a room filled with data, notes, physical evidence, and objects associated with the assassination, must ultimately accept coincidence and randomness or surrender to a life imprisoned in his room of evidence. DeLillo does not “blame America” for Oswald’s actions. Oswald’s actions remain elusive and often contradictory throughout the novel (characteristics associated with his astrological sign, Libra). One character comments on Oswald, “he may be a pure Marxist, the purest of believers. Or he may be an actor in real life. What I know with absolute certainty is that he’s poor, he’s dreadfully, grindingly poor” (56). DeLillo presents Oswald studying Marxist theory and experiencing class struggle throughout his poverty-stricken life. However, he also shows Oswald self-consciously playing the part of a socialist, envisioning himself in the media light, or in historical records, as the shooter of Senator Walker, as the American defector, as the socialist activist struggling against the system. Oswald does not simply react against the unjust circumstances of his life; he takes actions toward notoriety and infamy. The creation of Oswald’s consciousness is the novel’s greatest achievement, and it signifies the line between fact

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS 773

and fiction. This character’s struggles and his self-conscious ambition to become a part of history say more about contemporary American life, about the media’s infiltration of our consciousness, than it says about the politics involved behind the plot to assassinate Kennedy that runs parallel to the story of Oswald. Lentricchia notes that “the question, who or what is responsible for the production of Lee Harvey Oswald (or John Fitzgerald Kennedy), is inseparable from the question of where DeLillo imagines power to lie in contemporary America” (Lentricchia, 204). This power, Lentricchia suggests, is the insidious and pervasive power of the media in contemporary American society. The reader may take from this novel a vision of America subsumed by the image media. The reader may conclude, as the critic Bill Millard does, that the novel is “a nightmarish parable of the transmission of any type of consequential information through the public sphere under late capitalism” (Millard, 221). The reader may see in Libra a way to make sense of the randomness and chaos of contemporary life. The point is that DeLillo leaves the reader thinking about these issues. In Libra, as in his other novels, DeLillo creates an accurate and stirring portrait of American culture.

SOURCES DeCurtis, Anthony. “ ‘An Outsider in This Society’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” In Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia, 43–66. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. DeLillo, Don. Libra. New York: Penguin, 1988. Lentricchia, Frank. “Libra as Postmodern Critique.” In Introducing Don DeLillo, edited by Frank Lentricchia, 193–215. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Millard, Bill. “The Fable of the Ants: Myopic Interactions in DeLillo’s Libra.” In Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, edited by Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles, 213–228. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000. Will, George F. “Shallow Look at the Mind of an Assassin.” Review of Libra, by Don DeLillo. In Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, edited by Hugh Ruppersburg and Tim Engles, 56–57. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000. Elise A. Martucci

LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS REBECCA HARDING

DAVIS (1861) Originally published in the April

1861 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Rebecca Harding DAVIS’s Life in the Iron Mills had been virtually forgotten for over a century before the Feminist Press brought the story to the attention of a new generation of readers and students. The novella—one of the first portrayals of 19th-century factory life—has become canonical, included in women’s literature courses as an early feminist work and in American literature courses as an example of the transition between the sentimental novel and realism. Indeed, much criticism on the work stems from its puzzling ambiguities, especially regarding the exact nature of its sympathies and perspectives. Set in Wheeling, West Virginia (then Virginia), the work opens as the narrator urges readers to “come right down here with me” into the depths of the cotton mill to ponder “a secret down here, in this nightmare fog. . . .” “I want to make it a real thing for you,” the narrator adds (13–14). The narrator proceeds to open up the lives of her working-class characters through realistic dialogue and the settings of factory and tenement house. Although physically handicapped and intellectually deprived, the characters are presented as fully developed human beings who, like the laborer Hugh Wolfe, reveal their capacity for love, aspiration, and appreciation for beauty (Hesford 73–74). Readers should notice that the story’s narrator often looks down on the industrial scene from above, claiming that what she observes from there—the smoke, the masses, and the muddy dawn—“stifles” her. She too, it is suggested, is suffering a form of imprisonment, which leads her to identify with the lives of the mill workers. The focus on Hugh’s cousin Deborah Wolfe, the occasional “feminized” descriptions of Hugh, and the statue of the Korl Woman, which he creates from the refuse of the pig iron, all suggest that this novella is concerned not only with the plight of industrial workers but also with that of women as well. Exploited by the factory that is symbolically represented by overseer Clarke Kirby, the artistically talented and unhappy Hugh is destined for a tragic end; even the compassionate Doctor May is helpless to save him. Deborah fares slightly better because of the kindly intervention of a Quaker woman. David Shi’s comments in Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture echo several critics and

774 LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS

scholars who credit Life in the Iron Mills as “charting a new course for American literature from romanticism to realism” and Davis for the way she depicts “the conditions of working-class life with such power [and] candor” (36). William Dow, however, sees more characteristics of literary naturalism than of realism in the novella, analyzing it alongside Stephen CRANE’s MAGGIE and Frank NORRIS’s McTEAGUE. Along similar lines, Jean Pfaelzer extensively charts Davis’s political commitments against industrialism and slavery. Other critics see Davis’s intentions even more radically, placing Davis among authors and journalists associated with the beginning of “muckraking literature,” including Edward BELLAMY, Thorstein Veblen, and Lincoln Steffens. One might argue that this work also resonates with current “muckrakers” like Michael Moore, whose 1989 documentary film Roger and Me poses the same questions that lie at the heart of Davis’s novella: What, if anything, does the corporation owe to its workers and the community in which it profits? Still, there are those who are cautious about removing Life in the Iron Mills from the traditions of romanticism. Walter Hesford cautions readers against seeing the novella simply as a portent of realism, claiming that Davis’s story “shares in and extends the accomplishments of the romance,” specifically the romances of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE (70). Another branch of criticism focuses less on literary classification of Davis’s work and more on examining the novel’s religious vision, a perspective that has led to some divergent opinions. Much of the sentimental “social reform” fiction of Davis’s time was religious in nature, often thinly veiled propaganda tracts designed to turn recently arrived, working-class immigrants into clean and respectable Christians. Whether Davis is embracing or critiquing the genre and its social message has been debated. Some, like Sharon Harris, claim that Davis’s novel critiques unreceptive and insincere Christianity and calls for a more politically conscious activism from Christians. Others, however, like William H. Shurr, emphasize the story’s positive representations of religion—particularly the scenes involving the Quaker woman who takes Deb away from the prison, allowing her to be “re-born”—and read the

story as a conversion narrative. Indeed, Sheila Hassell Hughes, arguing that the story is a reworking of the gospel parable of Lazarus and the rich man, sees the novella as a “biblical cry for liberation” that allows us to view Davis’s intention as “radically political yet particularly Christian in its lineage and historical trajectory” (113). While the novella’s significance is generally agreed upon, it is not without its critics. Some, like Dawn Henwood, believe that a full understanding of the cultural scene of the era shows that the work is “embedded in the popular narrative of the proslavery novel, a genre germane to Davis’s regional literary heritage” (567). In other words, despite Davis’s abolitionist leanings, Henwood sees Davis’s relationship with the South (where she lived) as ambiguous. The novella, she argues, is grounded in the literature produced by slavery's defenders—including journalism, political tracts, and plantation novels—all used adroitly by Davis to present the “abuses of industrial labor” (568). Finally, Davis’s novella has been read as an early feminist tract as well. David S. Reynolds places Davis alongside Emily Dickinson and Kate CHOPIN as examples of inspired writers in whose work “women’s anger and women’s power were projected in compelling images” (411). He places the novel and its imagery squarely in the tradition of the “literature of women’s wrong,” dark fiction of the 19th century connected with the antiprostitution, abolitionist, and temperance movements and ultimately focused on the dreadful social and economic conditions of American women (again, often with a missionary agenda). Wolfe’s Korl Woman serves as a perfect artistic image of the “objectification of women’s wrongs and women’s potency” (Reynolds, 411). The power of Life in the Iron Mills—and its continued relevance in an age of “faith-based initiatives,” corporate downsizing, and the continuing disparagement of feminists and immigrants—suggests that this novel will not be lost to American literary history again any time soon.

SOURCES Dow, William. “Performative Passages: Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Crane’s Maggie, Norris’s McTeague.” In Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, Ten-

LIGHT IN AUGUST 775

nessee Studies in Literature, edited by Mary E. Papke, 23–44. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Harris, Sharon M. Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Henwood, Dawn. “Slaveries ‘In the Borders’: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills in Its Southern Context,” Mississippi Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999): 567–592. Hesford, Walter. “Literary Contexts of ‘Life in the IronMills.’ ” American Literature 49 (1997): 70–85. Hughes, Sheila Hassell, “Between Bodies of Knowledge There Is a Great Gulf Fixed: A Liberationist Reading of Class and Gender in Life in the Iron Mills,” American Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1997): 113–137. Norris, Frank, “Zola as a Romantic Writer.” In Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer, 1,106–1,108. New York: Library of America, 1986. Pfaelzer, Jean. Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Shi, David E. Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Shurr, William H. “Life in the Iron Mills: A Nineteenth Century Conversion Narrative,” American Transcendental Quarterly 5 (1991): 245–257. Lance Rubin

LIGHT IN AUGUST WILLIAM FAULKNER (1932) William FAULKNER published Light in August in the context of the Great Depression. Because it had never fully recovered from the Civil War and Reconstruction, the South suffered more from the depression than the rest of the country. Social tensions caused by poverty worsened racial tensions, and the Ku Klux Klan grew in strength. Always preoccupied with racial problems in the South, Faulkner deals more overtly with racial violence in this book than in most of his others. The novel follows two main characters, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, both orphans who set off on journeys alone. Beyond that, their lives differ greatly and come together only briefly near the end of the novel. When we meet Lena Grove, she is eight months pregnant walking along a dirt road in Mississippi,

having walked all the way from Alabama in search of the man who impregnated her and then left her, promising to send for her soon. Names are important symbols in this novel; as one character thinks, “a man’s name, which is supposed to be just the sound for who he is, can be somehow an augur of what he will do, if other men can only read the meaning in time” (33). Lena Grove’s name suggests her connection to nature and fertility. When Lena arrives in Jefferson, instead of her lover, Lucas Burch, she meets Byron Bunch at the sawmill, the similar names having been confused by people who directed her along the way. Byron quickly falls in love with the beautiful and candid young woman, although she’s about to give birth to another man’s child. He promises to help her find Lucas Burch but does not reveal that the man she seeks has been working at the same sawmill under the name of Brown. Also working at the mill is Joe Christmas, a man who had appeared in Jefferson without so much as a change of clothes. Soon, however, by selling bootleg whiskey and living free in the old slave cabins behind Joanna Burden’s house, he makes enough money to buy a new car and quit the sawmill. Brown, who arrives in Jefferson shortly after Christmas, serves as his self-appointed business partner and roommate. The town knows nothing of Christmas’s identity, and he himself knows little more. The reader learns much of the backstory about Joe as Byron Bunch, suffering pangs of conscience over his feelings for Lena, discusses the scandal involving Christmas and Brown with his friend, the Reverend Gail Hightower. As Hightower’s name suggests, he is isolated from and feels himself to be somewhat above the community, and it is perhaps for this reason that Bunch seeks his counsel regarding this strange predicament. Through these overheard conversations and flashbacks, Faulkner allows the reader to piece together bits of information about Joe Christmas. Joe was found as an infant abandoned at the door of an orphanage on Christmas Eve. Having no other name, he is given the name Joe Christmas by an orphanage doctor. He never fits in with the other children; he is teased, called names, and mysteriously watched by the orphanage

776 LIGHT IN AUGUST

custodian. The mysterious custodian is in fact Joe’s grandfather, Doc Hines. Joe’s mother had become pregnant by a carnival worker whom Hines suspected, without any real evidence, of being part black. Hines kills the carnival worker and then abandons the baby at the orphanage. The orphanage director discovers the rumor of Joe’s parentage when Joe is around five years old, and she quickly arranges an adoption so he will no longer be kept with the other children. Mr. McEachern, Joe’s adoptive father, shows his love for him through beatings and fanatical prayer, and Mrs. McEachern tries to win his love through food, money, and a secret alliance against her husband. Joe rejects them both, as well as the McEachern name that they had given him, and as a teenager secretly seeks that which his adoptive father most abhors—alcohol, dancing, and sex. He falls in love with Bobbie, a woman he believes to be a waitress. Later he discovers that she is a prostitute, but not before he has told her his darkest secret: “I think I got some nigger blood in me” (196). When Mr. McEachern discovers them drunk at a dance and insults Bobbie, Joe flies into a rage, striking him with a chair and killing him. In Joe’s mind, he has killed to protect Bobbie; in her mind, he has gotten her “into a jam” with the police. Her companions beat Joe, steal his money, and leave him unconscious in their abandoned house. At this point, Joe “entered the street which was to run for fifteen years” (223). He travels from town to town, compulsively sleeping with white prostitutes and then telling them he is black, reveling in their outrage. He lives for a time in a black community and eventually arrives in Jefferson at age 33. Joanna Burden, the woman behind whose house Joe lives in Jefferson, had been taught by her father that it was her duty, her “burden,” to uplift the black race to expiate the sins of the white race. Joe resents her cold kindness and rapes her, but to his dismay “she did not resist at all” (236). They become lovers and Joanna further disconcerts Joe by wanting to have his baby and trying to help him go to a black college. Joe, who has spent his whole life in defiance of those who would welcome his white body but hate his black blood, cannot accept her acceptance of him.

Her final offense is to pray over him, which reminds Joe of the abusive Mr. McEachern. He kills her, ironically at the same time that she had planned to kill them both because she could not mentally and emotionally subsume him. This murder occurs shortly after Lena Grove arrives in Jefferson, and at this point the two narratives come together. Because he is at the house when the authorities discover Joanna’s body, Lucas Burch is accused of the murder. In exchange for his freedom, and hoping to get the thousand dollars reward money, Burch tells the police that Christmas is part black and that he had murdered Joanna. Though no one had cared about Joanna Burden while she lived, the town zealously seeks retribution against this black man who dared rape and murder a white woman. For them, the news of Joe’s racial origin is tantamount to proof that he committed the crime. As the police hunt for Christmas, Byron Bunch shepherds Lena Grove into town, ostensibly to help her locate Burch but in reality trying to deflect her attention away from him. Lena finally insists on moving to the old slave cabin where Burch had lived with Christmas, and it is here that she has her baby. Byron arranges for the sheriff to bring Burch to her, but Burch escapes through the cabin’s back window and abandons her once again. Joe, however, is not so lucky. When he is finally caught, the townspeople want to lynch him, and Joe’s grandfather is one of the loudest voices in the mob. Christmas breaks free while being escorted to court and ends up in Rev. Hightower’s house. He is caught there by Percy Grimm, an overzealous captain of the state national guard, who shoots him and, before he dies, castrates him, saying “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell” (464). Joe Christmas dies at the age of 33, the same age, and with the same initials, as Jesus Christ at his death. What is Faulkner suggesting with these parallels to the life of Christ? Clearly Joe was not a good man and did not uphold Christian values. But he does, at least symbolically, bring black and white together through his supposed mixed blood, and he dies a martyr for his cause to disrupt a social system that depends on the unquestioned separation of black and white. The townspeople and Joe Christmas himself proclaim that

LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, THE 777

he has black blood, but no one, not even Joe, knows for sure. And the community has no room for such ambiguity. Perhaps Joe Christmas represents an embodiment of the South battling the black blood within itself. Just as Christ takes on the sins of humankind, Christmas internalizes the racial sins of the South. The novel comes full circle at the end as Lena again travels in pursuit of Lucas Burch, this time with her baby and with Byron Bunch, who is hopelessly in love. Though she still ostensibly seeks her baby’s father, the furniture salesman who gives them a lift believes that the journey has become an end in itself. The final paragraph echoes the first almost exactly: “Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee” (507). Faulkner mingles two metaphors of life: the road, with its beginning and end, representing life as a journey; and the repetition itself, representing, as does Lena Grove, the cycles of nature and fertility.

SOURCES Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Collins, R. G. “Light in August: Faulkner’s Stained Glass Triptych.” In The Novels of William Faulkner, edited by R. G. Collins and Kenneth McRobbie, 97–158. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 1973. Fadiman, Regina K. Faulkner’s Light in August: A Description and Interpretation of the Revisions. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975. Faulkner, William. Light in August. 1932. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Weinstein, Philip M. Faulkner’s Subject, A Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Betina Entzminger

LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, THE ELIZABETH SPENCER (1960) The Light in the Piazza is one of Elizabeth SPENCER’s several works set in Italy, where she lived for a few years after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship. The novella, which was first published in the New Yorker and later made into a film and musical, begins as Margaret Johnson and her daughter Clara visit Florence on a European tour. As Mrs. Johnson falls in love with the beautiful Florentine setting, a young, wealthy Italian, Fabrizio Naccarelli, falls in love with her

beautiful daughter. Clara is a 26-year-old woman who, because of a childhood accident, has the mind of a 10year-old. To Mrs. Johnson’s surprise, however, after several conversations neither Fabrizio nor his family notices her daughter’s disability. She attributes their obliviousness to cultural difference, believing that Clara, with her childlike simplicity, innocence, and malleability, must be the ideal Italian wife. As Mrs. Johnson writes to her husband, “nothing beyond Clara ever seems to be required of her here. I do wonder if anything beyond her would ever be required of her” (41). Inwardly the mother debates disclosing her daughter’s condition for the sake of honesty or withholding it so her daughter can have a chance at marriage and a normal life. She also guiltily acknowledges a selfish motive in wanting her daughter to marry: The girl will be off her hands. Spencer often writes of tensions in parent-child relationships, especially between mothers and daughters. Though Margaret Johnson has been a devoted mother, she sometimes feels burdened by her daughter, who will never grow up. And though Clara normally has the sunny disposition her name suggests, she grows defiant and deceitful when her mother discourages her attachment to the young Italian. Many of Spencer’s works employ female protagonists, but The Light in the Piazza was the first one to do so. Through this motherdaughter pair, Spencer explores gender roles as these two vulnerable women gain a sense of selfhood and freedom. By suggesting that the ideal wife has the mental age of a 10-year-old, the writer critiques the marriage institution and patriarchal culture. On the other hand, Mrs. Johnson has to go abroad to find even this much independence for her daughter and herself. Despite her handicap, Clara does seem to come of age and achieve an aura of completeness in Florence, even, Mrs. Johnson notes with awe and displeasure, beginning to look like a native. Mrs. Johnson also comes into her own in Italy. Though she struggles with her own conscience and the assumptions of Mr. Johnson and Signor Naccarelli, Fabrizio’s father, the mother skillfully takes on the role usually handled by a man, negotiating the dowry. Some readers detect the influence of Henry JAMES in this work, an influence Spencer denies. Like James, her protagonist is an American

778 LINDEN HILLS

abroad, unsure of customs and culture; also like James, the protagonist faces a moral dilemma related to differences in cultures and genders; finally, as does James, Spencer relays the protagonist’s inner struggle through a third-person, nearly omniscient narrator. At one point Signor Naccarelli says to Mrs. Johnson, “In Florence we have too much history. In America, you are so free, free” (18). This line is an ironic commentary on personal histories as well as national histories; the story reveals that the appearance of innocence and of freedom is often an illusion. Both because she is an American and because she is a woman, Signor Naccarelli takes Mrs. Johnson as an innocent like her daughter. He tries to manipulate her over the dowry, not dreaming that he himself is being manipulated into marrying his son to a woman deemed unfit in her own country. Despite the similarities to James, the sunny landscape, marriage plot, and humor of The Light in the Piazza give this novella the blithe quality of a Shakespearean comedy. One can also see the influence of fellow Mississippian Eudora Welty in the story’s likeness to an ancient myth. The Light in the Piazza reads like a revision of the Kore-Demeter myth. Unlike Demeter, Mrs. Johnson willingly gives her daughter to a man from the other world (in this case Europe). And unlike Kore, whose time in Hades represents a transformation from innocence to wisdom, summer to winter, Clara will remain the perpetual innocent in a land that is perpetually sunny. The story ends just after the wedding ceremony, with Mrs. Johnson hoping she has done the right thing for the right reasons and hoping her husband will understand. As is true in all her works, Spencer refuses to pass judgment on her protagonist’s actions, creating a morally ambiguous ending.

SOURCES Phillips, Robert. “Introduction.” The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Elizabeth Spencer. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Roberts, Terry. Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

Spencer, Elizabeth. The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Betina Entzminger

LINDEN HILLS GLORIA NAYLOR (1985) Gloria NAYLOR explored women’s communities in a rundown urban neighborhood in her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Her second, Linden Hills (1985), focuses on class considerations in an upscale neighborhood. In fact, as critic Robert Jones notes, for the women who reside in Brewster Place, “Linden Hills rises above their dead-end street as a dream to be achieved” (Jones, 283). Linden Hills represents the realization of the dream of Luther Needed and his descendents. Together, they create a place for African Americans and defy the white racists who surround them. Unlike the piece of heaven the Needed men envision, however, the dream is doomed: Linden Hills materializes into a partitioned hell that mirrors Dante’s Inferno. All manner of ambitious African Americans flock to the development, but they must exchange their essence as well as their connection to black culture for the privilege of living there. Their fate represents Naylor’s indictment of black middle-class life, which attempts to emulate a life based solely on commercialism. Like Dante and Virgil in The Inferno, Willie, the omniscient narrator, and Lester, both young black poets, embark on a quest—but theirs is a quest to earn money for the holidays by doing odd jobs in the prestigious community. As they move through the neighborhood, they discover the repressed the lives of the people there are. The closer they come to the bottom of Linden Hills, the more they understand the extent of individual sacrifice (and the clearer are the parallels between Linden Hills and Dante’s Inferno, with its penetration of the nine circles of hell). Even the suburban streets are circular or semicircular, and at the core of Naylor’s allegory is the contemporary answer to Satan in Luther Needed, a mortician and businessman who is conniving and heartless. Once again, as she did in The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor allows the stories of radically different individuals to unfold. Winston Alcott denies his male lover in order to satisfy the heterosexual expectations of Luther Needed. Xavier Donnel

LITTLE WOMEN 779

renounces his love, Roxanne Tilson, to maintain favor with powerful members of his firm. Others literally give up their lives under the pressure to conform. Laurel Dumont, for instance, leaps into an empty swimming pool when she realizes the utter meaningless of her life. Luther Needed’s materialistic, acquisitive dream represses not only the residents but also several generations of women who marry Needed’s heirs. The nightmare of Linden Hills is decidedly patriarchal, right down to the perpetuation of the family line through male descendents. Imprisoned in a basement as a result of Needed’s paranoia about the paternity of his son, Willa Needed discovers the experiences of prior Mrs. Neededs through cookbooks, Bibles, and photo albums. To her horror, she finds that for three generations, each Needed wife—chosen for her obsequiousness—has been erased by the ambition of the Needed men. This bond with women of the past, however, becomes ironic as the reader notes the absence of bonds among the Linden Hills women in particular and the Linden Hills community members in general. While Willa is distanced from her husband, she shares an odyssey of enlightenment with Willie as he journeys toward the unnamed woman at the bottom of the hill. The trajectories of Willie and Willa cross at the conclusion of the novel. When Willie and Lester take Luther up on his invitation to help trim his Christmas tree, the repressed maternal spirit returns in the form of Willa’s emergence from the basement with her dead child in tow. After a struggle, Willa, Luther, and the dead son are fused together in a ball of fire, and Willie and Lester look on in horror. The failure of any resident of Linden Hills to aid in extinguishing the fire demonstrates their indifference toward the community that, for them, had seemed the answer to their dreams.

SOURCES Andrews, Larry. “Black Sisterhood in Naylor’s Novels,” CLA Journal 33, no. 1 (1989): 1–25. Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York:Columbia University Press, 1991. Bouvier, Luke. “Reading in Black and White: Space and Race in Linden Hills.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives

Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 140–151. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Boyd, Nellie. “Dominion and Proprietorship in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day and Linden Hills,” MAWA Review 5, no. 2 (1990): 56–58. Collins, Grace E. “Narrative Structure in Linden Hills,” CLA Journal 34, no. 3 (1991): 290–300. Eko, Ebele. “Beyond the Myth of Confrontation: A Comparative Study of African and African American Female Protagonists,” Ariel 17, no. 4 (1986): 139–152. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Significant Others,” Contemporary Literature 29, no. 4 (1988): 606–623. Goddu, Teresa. “Reconstructing History in Linden Hills.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 215–230. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor and Randall Kenan. Athens; London: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Jones, Robert. Commonweal 112, no. 9 (May 3, 1985): 283–285. Lattin, Patricia Hopkins. “Naylor’s Engaged and Empowered Narrative,” CLA Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 452–469. Naylor, Gloria. Linden Hills. New York: Penguin, 1986. Odamtten, Vincent O. “Reviewing Gloria Naylor: Toward a Neo-African Critique.” In Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers, edited by Femi Ojo-Ade, 115–128. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1996. Sandiford, Keith. “Gothic and Intertextual Constructions in Linden Hills.” In Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, 195–214. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Saunders, James Robert. “The Ornamentation of Old Ideas: Naylor’s First Three Novels,” The Hollins Critic 27, no. 2 (1990): 1–11. Storhoff, Gary. “‘The Only Voice Is Your Own’: Gloria Naylor’s Revision of The Tempest.” African American Review 29, no. 1 (1995): 35–45. Toombs, Charles P. “The Confluence of Food and Identity in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills: ‘What We Eat Is Who We Is,’” CLA Journal 37, no. 1 (1993): 1–18. Ward, Catherine. “Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno,” Contemporary Literature 28, no. 1 (1987): 67–81. Crystal Anderson

LITTLE WOMEN LOUISA MAY ALCOTT (1868) Academic literacy is significantly influenced by remembered and cherished texts brought to the classroom.

780 LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa May ALCOTT’s Little Women, a fictionalized autobiography and classic children’s text about four girls growing up during the Civil War, is one of those texts. A vivid view of life in 19th-century New England, Little Women was written primarily as a source of income for its author but immediately drew significant response and remains a popular text for reading lists. In the early 1900s the text became the subject of two silent movies and was later adapted to include dialogue. In contrast to those of other children’s books of the period, Alcott’s protagonists are not unblemished or flat characters but young women with recognizable personality flaws. Current readers still identify with Alcott’s characters, although the Marches’ lives are sketched in broad contrasts to existing circumstances. Born in Pennsylvania in 1832, Alcott devoted attention to the details of education, homemaking, and communication that allow readers to imagine the values and events of the earlier and simpler era that inspired her stories. Alcott served as a nurse in a Washington hospital during the Civil War and was active in the women’s suffrage movement, writing and canvassing door to door to encourage women to vote. In 1879 she was the first woman voter in a Concord school committee election. These interests and her understanding of the consequences of poverty and wealth are reflected in the lifestyles of her characters. Thus she provides a realistic cultural backdrop for Little Women. With the girls’ father serving in the army during the Civil War and with little monetary support, Mrs. March is left to maintain the home, educate the girls in domestic skills, and occupy their leisure time. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy frequently entertain themselves and their mother with their imaginative discussions and performances, including John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The sisters grow into little women, meeting individual challenges that reveal character development. These challenges provide insights into Alcott’s response to 19th-century gender roles. Using such literary devices as omniscient narrator and foreshadowing, Alcott demonstrates her characters’ connections and their resistance or compliance to circumstance and inherited, elaborately constructed social roles. The March girls candidly explore the meaning and boundaries of their world. When

Beth becomes ill, the family reaffirms its loyalty and values, and while Meg makes wedding plans, Jo learns to surrender her own preferences and to live with imposed change. Eventually, Professor Friedrich Bhaer and his nephews, Franz and Emil, enter Jo’s life. This change leads Jo toward a wider world view in the sequels, Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Alcott interweaves a variety of familiar and timeless themes, including faith, love, death, jealousy, sacrifice, and recompense. These themes continue to invite identification and response from young readers, their mentors, and educators. Themes frequently connected to classroom projects and discussions of Alcott’s historical markers include art and music, war, homemaking, cultural and gender issues, and women in literature. Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870 (1993) is a major critical study examining the work of 19thcentury U.S. women writers. Critics and scholars, with renewed interest in character education as a social and curricular approach to literature, have encouraged serious academic consideration of Alcott’s work. Gender specialists note that Alcott removes the contemporary strictures from Jo’s conduct and conversation. The unconventional Jo provides a contrasting model of feminine conversation, one that resists the accepted standards of the period, and her passionate outbursts and preference for verbal directness counter the expected feminine practice. Significant to these autobiographical applications is Jo’s more masculine rhetoric and preference for composing novels, in contrast to the traditional feminine rhetoric of letter writing. The constraints of gender politics are evident in Jo’s struggles to reconcile preference and the conventions of faith and rhetoric. Also of interest is the tension between Alcott’s private maternal capacity and her experienced reality, as mirrored in the character Jo March. Alcott’s private letters and journals, regarding her “adopted” children and soldiers, offer a distinctly softer image of surrogate motherhood, in contrast to the hint of pithy, self-reliant independence in her more public texts. Perhaps this rich and subtle contrast of actual and mirrored history explains the

LOLITA 781

continuing appeal of Alcott’s texts to an increasingly diverse audience.

SOURCES Allen, Richard C. “When Narrative Fails,” Journal of Religious Ethics 21 (Spring 1993): 27–67. Baym, Nina. Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. 2nd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Myerson, Joel, and Daniel Shealy, eds. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Newton, Sarah E. Learning to Behave: A Guide to American Conduct Books Before 1900. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Saxton, Martha. Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. New York: Noonday Press, 1995. Stern, Madeleine B. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Rev. ed. New York: Random House, 1996. Vallone, Lynne. Disciplines of Virtue: Girls’ Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. Stella Thompson

LOLITA VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1955) Vladimir NABOKOV called Lolita, his third novel composed in English, a record of his “love affair” with the “English language” (Nabokov, Lolita, 316). It is generally regarded, along with PALE FIRE, as his masterpiece and as one of the major novels of the 20th century. At once a penetrating study of the psychology of sexual obsession, a poignant if bizarre love story, and a trenchant social satire, Lolita is stylistically complex and richly intertextual, drawing upon the conventions of “the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the Doppelganger tale,” and the detective story (Appel, l). The novel takes the form of the posthumously published confessions of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged European émigre living in the United States who becomes emotionally and sexually obsessed with a 12-year-old American girl named Dolores Haze. After a mock “Foreword” by moralizing psychiatrist John Ray Jr. (or J. R. Jr., one of many “double” names in the novel), the narrative proper begins with an account of an ill-fated childhood romance between Humbert and

a girl he calls by the Poesque name of Annabel Leigh. Annabel’s premature death from typhoid fever offers itself as a likely source of Humbert’s subsequent obsession with pubescent girls (he calls them nymphets), but Humbert repeatedly dismisses this explanation as facile. Nevertheless, Annabel’s sudden death (as well as that of Humbert’s mother, under freakish circumstances—“picnic, lightning”—which Humbert reports with cool, parenthetical detachment) sets the tone for a narrative that is repeatedly punctuated by casual catastrophes. After moving to the United States, Humbert becomes infatuated with 12-year-old Dolores Haze and marries her bridge-playing, book-clubbing mother, Charlotte. When Charlotte is killed, Humbert becomes Lo’s guardian and, afterward, her lover. They spend the next two years moving from place to place throughout the United States. Lo grows depressed and restless under the authority of the possessive and paranoid Humbert, who believes he is being shadowed by a mysterious double. When at last Lo contrives to escape with another man, Humbert plays detective, tracking their movements across America so that he can carry out an awful vengeance. Structurally and thematically, Lolita, a novel that is divided into two parts and begins and ends with the same word, is a literary hall of mirrors. The narrative is highly self-referential and reflexive, marked by multilingual puns, literary allusions, comic names, and other wordplay that call attention to the artifice of the text itself. (For example, Nabokov repeatedly reminds us of the fictiveness of Humbert’s absorbing narrative by inserting his own name into the text, anagrammatically, as the name of Vivian Darkbloom.) Moreover, the novel is full of images of doubleness and mirrors. Humbert’s double name evokes both Edgar Allan POE’s “William Wilson,” a tale whose narrator is haunted by an enigmatic double, and the sneering Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, who chides young Alice for not remaining frozen forever at the age of seven. (Both Poe and Carroll are in fact historical doubles for the fictional Humbert; each famously developed strong attachments to pubescent or prepubescent girls.) Most poignantly, in the hotel room in which Humbert first seduces Lolita on a double bed, mirrors mirror mirrors ad infinitum. This

782 LOLITA

motif of the mirror reflects the fundamentally narcissistic nature of Humbert’s desire for Lo, a little girl he can see only obliquely through the distorting mirror of his solipsistic fantasies. As Humbert himself remarks early in the novel, the “Lolita” he loves is not Dolores Haze, “but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita— perhaps, more real than Lolita; . . . and having no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own” (62). It is appropriate that the solipsistic universe Humbert inhabits seems to him to be crowded with copies of himself: Everywhere he travels in America, he encounters a host of doubles, from the chess-playing pederast Gaston Godin to the decadent playwright Clare Quilty to Charlotte’s first husband, Harold Haze. Though Humbert, in a moment of self-reproach, accuses himself of having polluted America, the America Humbert describes—with rapier wit—is no shining city on a hill, but rather a tawdry cultural wasteland, where everything is for sale, and where racists, antiSemites, sexual predators, and simpletons wear masks of middle-class respectability. Though Lo is utterly free from such hypocrisy, Humbert nevertheless regards her as the embodiment of American consumerism: She is the “ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster” (148). Yet, paradoxically, even as Old World Humbert sees hamburger-and-movie-loving Lo as an emblem of America’s culture of consumption, he cannot suppress his desire to possess her. Humbert turns out to be the novel’s consummate consumer, imaginatively converting the flesh-and-blood Dolores into the phantasmic “Lolita,” a commodity for his enjoyment, utterly evacuated of substance or will. When Lo dies giving birth to a stillborn daughter (an incident reported, indirectly, in the “Foreword”), the novel’s “theme of ruined life, abortive childhood . . . culminates in the dramatic image of Lolita’s stillborn baby” (Pifer, 315). After writing Lolita, Nabokov wrote that he considered it his “best thing in English,” but he feared that his “pure and austere work” would be dismissed as “a pornographic stunt” (Letters, 285, 296). Indeed, five American publishers rejected Lolita before Nabokov found a publisher willing to assume the legal and financial risks of its publication: Olympia Press in Paris,

which specialized in erotica and English editions of books censored in England and the United States. A storm of controversy followed the initial publication of Lolita in 1955, and it was not until 1958 that G. P. Putnam’s Sons produced the first American edition of the novel, making Lolita generally available to Englishspeaking readers for the first time. Reviews ranged from the effusive (“a great book,” cheered Dorothy Parker) to the punishing (“dull,” “pretentious,” “florid,” “archly fatuous,” “highbrow pornography,” sniffed Orville Prescott in the New York Times). Far from scorched by the controversy surrounding its publication, Lolita proved to be a success de scandal, selling 100,000 copies within three weeks of its first American publication—the first book to do so since Margaret MITCHELL’s GONE WITH THE WIND (Boyd, 364–365). Nabokov consistently named Lolita as his favorite among his own works, and it remains the best known of his novels. Lolita has been filmed twice: first by the director Stanley Kubrick (1962) and more recently by Adrian Lyne (1997). Nabokov was credited with writing the screenplay for the 1962 film, although only “ragged odds and ends” of his original script were used (Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay, 674–75). Nabokov’s translation of Lolita into his native Russian was published in 1967. Nabokov also supervised Alfred Appel’s The Annotated Lolita, an indispensable guide to the novel’s punning and allusive complexities, first published in 1970.

SOURCES Appel, Alfred, Jr. The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1991. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971. Edited by Simon Karlinsky. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. ———. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1997. ———. Lolita: A Screenplay. Novels 1955–1962. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage, 1990. Pifer, Ellen. “Lolita.” In The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Vladimir E. Alexandrov. New York: Garland, 1995. Brian Sweeney

LONDON, JACK 783

LONDON, JACK (JOHN GRIFFITH) (1876–1916) Jack London—an adventurer, gold prospector, seaman, rancher, Darwinian, and socialist—saw himself as an exemplar of the HORATIO ALGER myth; he enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity as a writer of novels, short stories, essays, and war correspondence, and his corresponding rags-to-riches existence was perfectly suited to the stuff of American legend. His place in American literature, however, is based on the quality of his writing rather than on his intriguing life. During the early 20th century, he became the most popular writer in the United States. His first Northland novel, The CALL OF THE WILD (1903), written when he was 27 years old, has been translated into more than 80 languages; his second, WHITE FANG (1906), a blend of naturalism and supernaturalism, determinism and survival of the fittest, assured his enormous readership. Other well-known works include The SEA-WOLF (1904) and MARTIN EDEN (1909), both demonstrating the strong influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Carl Jung. By the time of his early death at age 40, London had published more than 50 books and earned more than a million dollars. Jack London was born on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California, to Flora Wellman Chaney, a spiritualist. His father was probably William H. Chaney, a philosopher and astrologer who deserted his common-law wife and denied his paternity. Before the baby was a year old, London’s mother married John London, a carpenter. Raised in Oakland, California, London had a sporadic formal education, but he read voraciously. His adult life was lived intensely, on ships, in the Klondike, in England, in Hawaii, in Mexico, and at his ranch during the 10 years before he died. He married Bessie Maddern in 1900. A year later he fell in love with Anna Strunsky, a Stanford University student with whom he collaborated on The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903),an epistolary dialogue about romantic vs. realistic love; London and Bessie Maddern London divorced in 1904. After writing stories that appeared in the Overland Monthly and the Atlantic Monthly, London published his first novel, A Daughter of the

Snows (1902); his style was unique for its era—grim, powerful, unsentimental. The Call of the Wild, an acknowledged masterpiece, is a novella about Buck, a kidnapped dog, owned by a series of men, including John Thornton, whom he loves but who is killed by Indians; at the end of the novel Buck has returned to nature and, as he draws closer to the world of myth, becomes the Ghost Dog of the Wilderness. In 1902, London moved to London, England, where he wrote The People of the Abyss (1903), an account of the desperate poverty of London’s East End. The little-known novel is viewed today as an early example of the New Journalism, later popularized by Truman CAPOTE and Tom WOLFE. On his return to California he fell in love with Clara Charmian Kittredge, whom he married in 1905. She is the model for Maud Brewster of The Sea-Wolf, the story of Humphrey Van Weyden, who, thrown with Maud onto a primitive sealing schooner, evolves from a precious milksop into a man of substance. The novel contains Captain Wolf Larsen, London’s famous portrait of a Nietzschean superman. In White Fang, London creates a dog who is Buck’s opposite; he moves from the frozen wilds to brutal dogfights to the company of Weedon Scott, whose love for White Fang transforms the dog into a civilized pet. Other critically acclaimed works include the socialist novel The Iron Heel (1905), the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909), and the Prohibitionist John Barleycorn (1923). Dozens of London’s novels and stories have been made into films, some of them more than once. After he spent two years in Hawaii and the South Seas (during which he wrote the posthumously published stories in The Red One [1918] and On the Makaloa Mat [1919]), London bought a 125-acre ranch in Glen Ellen, California, where he built Wolf House and became widely known for his scientific farming methods. Jack London died on November 22, 1916, at Glen Ellen, possibly of uremia (kidney failure), or heart failure, or, according to some critics, suicide. Although his work—like that of Mark TWAIN, James Fenimore COOPER, and Edith WHARTON—was for some years relegated to high school and children’s literature sec-

784 LONDON, JACK

tions in libraries, the 1960s saw a revival of scholarly and popular interest in London that has increased with each passing decade. His papers are collected in several locations, the two largest being the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Merrill Library at Utah State University in Logan.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Adventure. New York: Macmillan, 1911. Before Adam. New York: Macmillan, 1907. Burning Daylight. New York: Macmillan, 1910. The Call of the Wild. New York: Macmillan, 1903. The Game. New York: Macmillan, 1905. The Iron Heel. New York: Macmillan, 1908. Jerry of the Islands. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Martin Eden. New York: Macmillan, 1913. The Sea-Wolf. New York: Macmillan, 1904. Smoke Bellew. New York: Century, 1912. The Star Rover. New York: Macmillan, 1915. The Valley of the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1913. White Fang. New York: Macmillan, 1906.

SOURCES Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Barltrop, Robert. Jack London: The Man, the Writer, the Rebel. New York: Pluto Press, 1976. Beauchamp, Gormon. America as Utopia. Edited by Kenneth Roemer. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987. ———. Jack London. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1984. Cassuto, Leonard, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Rereading Jack London. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dyer, Daniel. Jack London: A Biography. New York: Scholastic Press, 1997. ———. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild for Teachers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Etulain, Richard W. Jack London on the Road: The Tramp Diary and Other Hobo Writings. Logan: Utah State University, 1979. Foner, Philip, ed. Jack London: American Rebel. Rev. ed. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1964. Gair, Christopher. Complicity and Resistance in Jack London’s Novels: From Naturalism to Nature. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Gleiter, Jan, and Kathleen Thompson. Jack London. Austin, Tex.: Raintree, 1998.

Hamilton, David Mike. “The Tools of My Trade”: Annotated Books in Jack London’s Library. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987. Hedrick, Joan D. Solitary Comrade: Jack London and His Work. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Johnston, Carolyn. Jack London—An American Radical? Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Kershaw, Alex. Jack London: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Kingman, Russ. A Pictorial Biography of Jack London. New York: Crown, 1979. Labor, Earle. Jack London. New York: Twayne, 1974. Reprinted, 1994. ———, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard, eds. The Letters of Jack London, 3 vols. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. Loewen, Nancy. Jack London. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1995. London, Charmian Kittredge. The Book of Jack London, 2 vols. New York: Century, 1921. London, Joan. Jack London and His Times: An Unconventional Biography. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1939. ———. Jack London and His Daughters. Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1990. Lundquist, James. Jack London: Adventures, Ideas, and Fiction. New York: Ungar, 1987. McClintock, James I. White Logic: Jack London’s Short Stories. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wolf House, 1976. ———. Jack London’s Strong Truths. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997. Mencken, H. L. Prejudices: First Series. New York: Knopf, 1921. Nuernberg, Susan M. The Critical Response to Jack London. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Ownby, Ray Wilson, ed. Jack London: Essays in Criticism. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1978. Perry, John. Jack London: An American Myth. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981. Powell, John. Jack London. Vero Beach, Fla.: Rourke Book Co., 1993. Schroeder, Alan, and Vito Perrone. Jack London. New York: Chelsea House, 1992. Sherman, Joan R. Jack London: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Sinclair, Andrew. Jack: A Biography of Jack London. New York: Harper, 1977. Tavernier-Corbin, Jacqueline. The Call of the Wild: A Naturalistic Romance. New York: Twayne, 1994.

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL 785

———, ed. Critical Essays on Jack London. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Walker, Dale L., ed. The Fiction of Jack London: A Chronological Bibliography. El Paso: Texas Western University Press, 1972. Walker, Franklin. Jack London and the Klondike: The Genesis of an American Writer. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966. Watson, Charles N., Jr. The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Woodbridge, Hensley C., John London, and George H. Tweney. Jack London: A Bibliography. Georgetown, Calif.: Talisman Press, 1966. Revised and enlarged ed., Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus, 1973.

OTHER American Literature Online. “Jack London.” Available online. URL: http://faculty.millikin.edu/~moconner.hum. faculty.mu/e232/londonbio.html. Accessed September 22, 2005. Jack London Main Page. Available online. URL: http://www. jacklondon.com. Accessed September 22, 2005. Jack London: His Life and Books. Available online. URL: http:// parks.sonoma.net/JLStory.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL THOMAS WOLFE (1929) Critics typically describe Thomas WOLFE’s first and most famous novel as a bildungsroman, and this autobiographical narrative definitely abides by the strictures of that term: “a novel of education from youth to experience” (Frye 74). In the most basic sense, Look Homeward, Angel chronicles the infancy, boyhood, and young adulthood of its central character, Eugene Gant. Eugene is the youngest of nine children (of whom only six actually survive) born to W. O. Gant and his wife, Eliza. Gant, Eugene’s father, spends his life working as a stonecutter and tombstone merchant, and the book’s initial pages involve Gant’s own youthful travels from Baltimore to the southern mountain town of Altamont (Wolfe’s fictional name for his own hometown, Asheville, North Carolina). Gant moves to Altamont after the death of his first wife and, with the remainder of her estate, sets up shop in the town square. Soon thereafter Gant meets his future second wife, Eliza Pentland. Eliza’s humble means have made her mindful

of money and, in particular, of the value of property. This desire in Eliza to possess land, and to earn and grow capital, clashes with the wants of Gant, who continually expresses his disinterest with respect to property ownership. The tension that arises from these differing sets of values presides over the novel’s narrative, as the constant seesawing between stability and change in Look Homeward, Angel carries on throughout the first 20 years of Eugene’s life. But the tension between these competing interests grows more complex over time, as Eliza’s desire for what in her eyes constitutes stability (namely, property) initiates most of the changes she experiences in her life. Meanwhile Gant, for all his inconsistency and unpredictability, actually manages— despite his alcoholism—to provide a relatively stable existence for Eliza and their children. For the most part, the family resides in a single home (until Eliza buys a boardinghouse later in the novel) and Gant successfully maintains his own small business. In Eugene’s own life, stability comes by way of knowledge, creativity, and art. But of course these elements constitute that which carries Eugene away to a world of unpredictability, first to Margaret Leonard’s private school, and later to university. Likewise, Eugene’s experiences with youthful love and sex are subject to the imbalances of human life, as he initially finds stability in his affair with Laura James, but when she admits to being engaged, Eugene undergoes the painful changes that come with mending a broken heart. Thus, the persistent interplay between stability and change that characterizes the marriage of Eugene’s parents ultimately becomes a central thematic component of Eugene’s self-becoming. The novel’s treatment of Eugene’s search for himself depends on four principal symbols, all of which connect to the overriding give-and-take between the predictable and the transient elements of life that figure so importantly in the collective journey of the Gant family. Wolfe introduces his symbols—the stone, the leaf, the door, and the angel—very early on in his narrative and consistently returns to them throughout the novel. John Idol Jr. has suggested that the symbols refer to the

786 LOOKING BACKWARD

following conditions, respectively: permanence amid change, decay and the changes of life, the opening of a new life and/or a return to a previous one, and the human urge to create (Idol, 87). Taken together, these symbols reinforce Wolfe’s emphasis on change and stability regarding Eugene’s development. But while these symbols serve as touchstones for Eugene that allow him to take stock of the totality of his experiences before he moves ahead, their persistent presence throughout the course of his youth and adolescence in fact suggests their permanency. At the end of the novel, as Eugene converses with his brother’s shade on the porch of Gant’s shop, he learns that there is no end to the “hunger” he seeks: Eugene comes to understand that impermanence is the one thing in life on which one can count. One’s recognition of this fact constitutes one’s transition from childhood to adulthood. From the novel’s subtitle, “A Story of the Buried Life” (which alludes to Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life”), we can infer that the awareness Eugene gains regarding life’s transience allows him to come to the figurative surface of self-knowledge. The novel’s three phases, which Wolfe himself visualized in terms of “concentric circles” (Idol, 88), depict Eugene’s gradual journey upward. The novel’s first part shows how Eugene discovers the world, and then, in the novel’s second part, he begins to discover how to navigate it under the tutorage of his teacher, Margaret Leonard. Finally, in the novel’s third section, Eugene learns the most difficult lessons of all, those of love (through his affair with Laura James) and loss (through his brother Ben’s death). Eugene’s desire to embark on a “voyage” in search of “the happy land” (520), that is, the state of having discovered himself, resembles what Matthew Arnold describes as A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us — to know Whence our lives come and where they go. (1355)

But Eugene ultimately comes to see his “voyages” as a diversion, as they were exterior in character and took him away from his main goal, which was interior discovery. Eugene’s epiphany with regard to his voyages occurs during the aforementioned conversation with Ben’s apparition, which is to say, his final conversation with himself, in which he explains to himself that this is life. You have been nowhere . . . There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one. (521) The “one voyage” to which Ben/Eugene alludes here is that of emotional, intellectual, and sexual growth. It is the very journey that Eugene has taken, but not necessarily the one on which he has been focused.

SOURCES Arnold, Matthew. “The Buried Life.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Edited by M. H. Abrams et al. New York: Norton, 1993. Connigg, Lucy, and Richard S. Kennedy, eds. The Autobiographical Outline for Look Homeward, Angel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Frye, Northrop, Sheridan Baker, George Perkins, and Barbara M. Perkins, eds. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York: Longman, 1997. Idol, John Lane, Jr. A Thomas Wolfe Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Johnston, Carol Ingalls. Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe, His Novels, and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996. Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel. 1929. New York: Scribner, 1995. David Tomkins

LOOKING BACKWARD EDWARD BELLAMY (1888) This utopian novel launched a political mass movement and provided a program for the Populist Party. Though neglected by scholars now, BELLAMY’s novel was an instant best-seller at the time of its first publication. It sold millions, and across the United States readers established 165 “Bellamy Clubs” for the discussion and implementation of the novel’s ideas. Looking Backward influenced so many politicians, philosophers, and economists, including Thorstein Veblen, that some put it second only to Karl Marx’s

LOOKING BACKWARD 787

Capital in terms of its impact on the political thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The success of the work was in part due to the public appetite for utopian fiction in the 1880s and 1890s. At least 160 American novelists offered fictional utopias during this period, and after the crash of 1893, which was the worst U.S. financial crisis to that time, many must have felt like the 19th-century hero of Bellamy’s novel, who wakes up in 2000 to feel that “all had broken loose . . . all had dissolved and lost coherence . . . nothing was left stable.” With his vision of a freer, happier society, Bellamy tapped into public curiosity about recent explorations of Hawaii, Samoa, and Tahiti, and public interest in how Darwin’s theories might affect social evolution. He also responded to the country’s need to revisit its vision of national destiny: The novel evokes the myth of America’s founding as an 18th-century utopia and visualizes a new golden age. And in a letter of 1892 published in The New Nation, Bellamy wrote of the American experiment as the last utopia: “We are today confronted by portentous indications in the conditions of American industry, society and politics that this great experiment (America), on which the last hopes of the race depends, is to prove, like all former experiments, a disastrous failure. Let us bear in mind that, if it be a failure, it will be a final failure. There can be no new worlds to be discovered, no fresh continents to offer virgin fields for new ventures.” The man who rediscovers the “great experiment” in Looking Backward is Julian West, a representative of 19th-century Western man, who falls asleep and awakens in the America of 2000. There he spends much time in conversation with Doctor Leete, who answers his questions and allays his fears about the result of the great experiment, this future world. Their long conversations place the work in the tradition of novels of ideas: literature that often interrupts the plot with a sermon, letter, short story, or conversation. Bellamy wrote one of those novels that Northrop Frye terms anatomies: works in which characters function as mouthpieces for certain attitudes or theories, and he presumably frustrated the critic F. R. Leavis, who wrote in The Great Tradition that there was an “elementary distinction to be made between the discussion of prob-

lems and ideas, and what we find in the great novelists.” In spite of its commercial success then, Bellamy acknowledged the flaws of Looking Backward later, writing: “barely enough story was left to decently drape the skeleton of the argument and not enough, I fear, in spots, for even that purpose.” Even in his preface to the work he sought to apologize in advance: “The author has sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book,” he promises, “by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative.” Bellamy blends the didactic features of the novel with those of the sentimental romance and reform novel, attempting a voice that is both realist and idealist, sociological and fantastical. Though it meant he left unhelpfully vague the details of the transitional stages toward utopia, the unbelievable plot device by which Julian West reaches the year 2000 apparently did not deter those reading for political realism—perhaps because they understood the traditions of utopian fiction. Sometimes suspended animation or reincarnation, sometimes time travel or an undiscovered island, the dozens of devices by which 19th-century humans reached their utopic destination were usually improbable and imaginative. Since the original Utopia of Thomas More (1516), the double meaning of the word, ou topos, no place, and eu topos, good place, had meant writers tended to construct ideal societies in a timeless, nonprescriptive fashion. So while the literary flaws in the novel might be put down to Bellamy’s use of fiction for the explication of ideas and as a political platform, they might also be traced to the age-old problem of art in the utopian tradition. H. G. Wells noted in A Modern Utopia (1905) that “there must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness about Utopian speculations.” He explained, “That which is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalized people. In almost every Utopia . . . one sees handsome but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, happy, beautifully dressed, but without any personal distinction whatever . . . This burdens us with an incurable effect of unreality.”

788 LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

We might also remember Aldous Huxley’s famous dystopia, in Brave New World, where utopia means the end of great literature: “You’ve got to choose between happiness and high art,” says the Controller, and adds, “We’ve sacrificed high art.” In the utopian tradition, society has achieved a static perfection; but the novel depends on plot and character development for its interest. J. W. Roberts’s follow-up novel of 1893, Looking Within, foregrounds this problem by sending his 19th-century characters (via a sleeping potion) to visit Julian and Leete in their society of 2000, only to decide that in fact it is a dystopia, and bound to breed apathy, for “such a system excludes emulation, shuts out ambition, abolishes hope of preferment or distinction.” Conflict, chance, decision, pain, competition—all offer narrative possibilities. Absolute happiness does not. Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum, “when humanity lands there [Utopia], it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail,” explains the strange moment in American literary history when a ‘bad’ novel captured the imaginations of a country: The reading public landed on Looking Backward, looked out, saw its relevance to their particular political moment in 1888, used it as a point of departure for their political parties and utopian societies, and then set sail and let Bellamy’s utopia fade into critical oblivion.

SOURCES Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1888. ———. “How I Came to Write Looking Backward,” The Nationalist, May 1889. Berneri, Marie Louise. Journey through Utopia. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950. Morgan, Arthur E. The Philosophy of Edward Bellamy. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1945. Michaelis, R. C. Looking Further Forward. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Rhodes, H. V. Utopia: In American Political Thought. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1967. Roberts, J. W. Looking Within. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Vinton, A. D. Looking Further Backward. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Zoe Trodd

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR JUDITH ROSSNER (1975) In 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Freedom of Information Act, The Godfather, Part II won six Oscars, Rolling Stone reported on the burgeoning disco craze, the Vietnam War ended, and the author Judith Rossner published Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a book that would go on to revolutionize nonfiction (along with its predecessors The Collector and IN COLD BLOOD) and its role in covering real events. This one is about Theresa (Terry) Dunn, a young school teacher who, to keep loneliness at bay, goes to bars to meet and pick up men. This psychosexual saga leads to her brutal murder on New Year’s Eve. Theresa’s family would, by today’s standards, be kindly classified as dysfunctional. Living in a strict Roman Catholic household full of passive aggressiveness and rage, Theresa’s father is brusque and withholding while her aproned mother remains quietly on the sidelines. Katherine is the sister who, while pretty and seemingly smart, is often pregnant, gets abortions, and marries every man she meets à la Elizabeth Taylor. Theresa’s second sister, Brigid, marries and has children and is the “normal” sibling. Thomas was a brother who died “in a training gun accident when he was eighteen” (25). After being struck with polio and scoliosis as a child, Theresa is scarred for life, physically, mentally, and metaphorically. She has an inability to treat herself with dignity, lacks self-esteem, and is seemingly indifferent at times to violence and pain. She leaves home to go to college, against her parents’ wishes, and there she meets Professor Martin Engle, a married man who has little regard for her. She works in his office twice a week and falls in love with him despite his elusiveness and constant verbal abuse. He breaks off their relationship in his usual clipped manner and the break renders her helpless. The depression she fights from this experience is a pervasive theme throughout the novel. She then meets Eli (now named Ali), a divorced Jewish father who seems a more promising partner. He is so confused about his own life, however, that he cannot give Terry what she is looking for. Facing the prospect of lonely evenings in her apartment, she opts instead to go to a local bar, Corners, gets drunk, and

LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR 789

takes a man home. She wakes up at four in the morning, horrified, but this will be the only time she is stunned by her actions. This abyss of loneliness and desperation that clogs the book’s pages leads to two very important relationships: James Morrisey, a trial lawyer who is “Every Irish mother’s favourite son” (148). While he is attracted to her, his insecurities stop him from allowing the relationship to blossom. Terry cannot stand it because she thinks after he kisses her for the first time “you like me too much” (179). Her search for love leads her to a bar, the last bar she will visit, Mr. Goodbar: “It was a comfortable place with old gum-ball machines for table lamps and one wall covered entirely with a shellacked montage of candy wrappers” (186). With Mario PUZO’s THE GODFATHER and a glass of wine in hand, she takes one more chance on finding that something that will bring her happiness. While still seeing James, Theresa allows Tony Lopanto, a parking garage worker who uses heroin, described as “a punk but a cute one” (152), to take her home from the bar. They begin an affair filled with rage that is brought on by the slightest provocation and a vaporescent sexual entanglement that will later lead to her violent rape and subsequent death at the hands of Gary Cooper White. Beginning at the end of the story with the confession of the killer, Gary Cooper White, the book immediately draws in the reader. The haze of eroticism, music, drugs, and sexual liberation in some novels would have a sedative effect. However, the high-voltage brutality of violent sex and trysts that offer little else permeates the pages and compels the reader onward. The book definitely struck a nerve. Two words synonymous with the book are “complex” and “chilling.” Interestingly, this is often how Truman CAPOTE’s IN COLD BLOOD is described. It gripped the nation with themes of sexual liberation and caustic living. While it was the seventies and women had come a long way (baby), the writing was still bold in its subject matter—violence, sex (and often violent sex), abortion, drugs, homosexuality, alcohol, and promiscuity. It not only made an impact in the literary world, it made women, particularly in New York City, more wary of the singles scene.

Readers are often divided on whether to sympathize with Theresa and reviewers are usually as perplexed. Is the writing any good? Does the story have merit? Does it deserve the praise heaped upon it? Carol Eisen Rinzler wrote in the New York Times, “Judith Rossner has impeccable literary credentials. Her first three novels were beautifully reviewed and didn’t sell. Looking for Mr. Goodbar is so good a read, so stunningly commercial as a novel, that it runs the risk of being consigned to artistic oblivion.” Some reviewers, however, felt the tsunami of gloom throughout was literary flotsam. The juxtaposition of Terry’s desire for love and later moral loosening is what reviewers believed was the draw of the novel. Elaine Feinstein wrote in the New Statesman: “Perhaps we have an interesting piece of double-think which allows the righteous housewife to indulge her fantasy and satisfy her sense of ultimate retribution.” The novel is based on a real person and event— Roseann Quinn, 27, a school teacher, met John Wain Wilson in a bar in Manhattan and took him home, where he brutally raped and killed her. But at the beginning of the book it states: “Any resemblance between characters in this book and any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.” The book was originally to be an article for Esquire magazine, but luckily for Rossner, the story was not published and she was able to use the idea for the novel. The book went on to sell more than 3 million copies and was sold for $225,000 to Paramount Studios. The movie, made in 1977, starred Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, and Tuesday Weld. What is the allure of such a novel in a time when Sex and the City, the Shopaholic series, and movies like Wedding Planner and Bridget Jones’ Diary top the charts? The playful side of being a single gal is certainly not one of this novel’s themes; to the contrary, the novel emphasizes the dreary working life and the coming home to an empty apartment. The fact that Theresa stumbles from misguided attempts at happiness to rollicking, tremulous relationships captured the nation in 1975. Nowadays we have Desperate Housewives and The Sopranos for that. In Looking for Mr. Goodbar, however, Rossner wrote a cautionary tale that still speaks to the modern condition and warns the liberated woman

790 LOOS, ANITA

that, despite her perception of increased social independence, a dangerous nether world lurks just beneath the surface of a Mr. Goodbar world.

SOURCES Duffy, Martha. “The Trap,” Time, 7 July 1975. Feinstein, Elaine. “Defectors,” New Statesman, 12 September 1975, p. 313. Rinzler, Carol Eisen. “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” New York Times Book Review, 8 June 1975, p. 24, Rossner, Judith. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.

OTHER Hadad, Herbert. “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” Eve’s Magazine. Available online. URL: http://www.evesmag.com/goodbar. htm. Accessed September 22, 2005. Stephanie Dickison

LOOS, ANITA (1893–1981) Anita Loos, novelist, playwright, and prolific screenwriter, wrote more than 150 Hollywood screenplays, yet today she is best known for her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (1925). Lorelei, a pretender of innocence and the heroine of the novel, became a household name. Together with her fictional friend Dorothy, she traveled to Europe, met men of every class, and turned all their heads. The novel became a film and a Broadway play, and won accolades from critics and readers alike for its comic, satiric treatment of Lorelei and her suitors. Loos followed it up with a sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1928). The equation of blondes with sunshine, naïveté, and goodness, and brunettes with darkness, complexity, and mystery (if not evil) is not a new one, harkening back at least to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe—but it worked well for Loos, earning her accolades from such surprising sources as Edith WHARTON, who called it “the great American novel,” and William FAULKNER, who counted it as one of his favorite books. Anita Loos was born on April 26, 1893, in Sisson, now Mount Shasta, California, to R. Beers Loos, a newspaperman from Ohio, and Minnie Ellen Smith Loos, a farmer’s daughter. When Loos was 15, she wrote a script called The New York Hat and sent it to the direc-

tor D. W. Griffith, who accepted it and directed it as a film that starred Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Dorothy and Lillian Gish. While still in high school, Loos married Frank Palma Jr., in June 1915, but the marriage was annulled the next day. In 1919 she married John Emerson, the director of numerous silent movies starring the popular actor Douglas Fairbanks, and they collaborated on a number of films until the mid-1920s, when Loos wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Years later, in her memoir A Girl Like I (1967), Loos revealed that she had been in love with the critic, journalist, and editor H. L. Mencken and, when she saw him, along with other men in the cross-country train in which they were all traveling, ogling a blonde Hollywood starlet rather than paying attention to her, she conceived the germ of the story that Mencken later thought hilarious. Lorelei and Dorothy traipse through European cities seeking rich husbands; Lorelei succeeds, marries the fabulously wealthy Mr. Stoddard at the end of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and makes the comment that is the source of the song entitled “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The sequel focuses on Dorothy, who keeps falling in love with the wrong men until finally, like Lorelei, she settles happily with the nicest rich man she can find. Whatever the origins, Lorelei Lee has remained an inimitable American fiction, a descendant of such outspoken and often stunningly truthful fictional heroes as Marietta HOLLEY’s Samantha Allen; Arthur Miller’s thinly veiled portrait of Marilyn Monroe in his play After the Fall almost certainly borrows from Loos’s portrait of Lorelei, as does Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy—particularly The Town’s portrait of Eula Varner’s daughter Linda, whose friend Gavin Stevens, like Lorelei’s husband, protests that he is interested only in “forming her mind.” Loos wrote a stage version that ran on Broadway in 1926 for 201 performances, the 1928 silent film version, and the 1953 film starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Anita Loos, who counted among her friends such literary luminaries as Sherwood ANDERSON and Aldous Huxley, F. Scott FITZGERALD and Ernest HEMINGWAY, has an apparently secure legacy in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She died of a heart attack on August 18, 1981, in New York City.

LOSING BATTLES 791

NOVELS “But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.” New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. A Mouse Is Born. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. No Mother to Guide Her. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.

SOURCES Blom, T. F. “Anita Loos and Sexual Economics: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Canadian Review of American Studies (Spring 1976): 39–47. Carey, Gary. Anita Loos: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1988. Weeks, Edward. “Why Gentlemen Preferred Anita,” Atlantic 218 (October 1960): 138.

OTHER The Anita Loos Page. The San Antonio College LitWeb. Available online. URL: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/ bailey/loos.htm. Accessed August 8, 2005.

LORD, BETTE BAO (1938– )

Bette Bao Lord writes both fiction and nonfiction about modern Chinese life. However, her first novel, Eighth Moon: The True Story of a Young Girl’s Life in Communist China, grew from the experiences of Lord’s sister, Sansan, and was published in 1964. Because the Nationalist government had sent the Lord family to the United States for only two years (her father was a Nationalist Chinese official), they did not bring their infant daughter; during their diplomatic residency, however, the Communists took power and, as a result, Sansan was separated from the family for 17 years. Unable to find an author for her sister’s story, the 24-year-old Bette wrote an account of Sansan’s ordeal, which included forced hard manual labor and long food lines. Lord is best known, however, for her historical novel, Spring Moon, a tale of five generations of a prominent Chinese family from the late 19th century through 1927, with an epilogue set in the 1970s. It remained on the best-seller list for 39 weeks. She has also published a children’s book, The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson (1984), and Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic (1990), about life in the People’s Republic of China leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Lord was born in Shanghai in 1938, and was eight years old when she arrived in Brooklyn, New York. She received a B.A. from Tufts University in 1959 and an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1960. An active member of numerous AsianAmerican societies and foundations, she married Walter Lord, the U.S. ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989, the year that violence erupted in Tiananmen Square. Lord’s most recent novel, With the Middle Heart, features three friends separated by the communist revolution who meet again at Tiananmen Square after years of imprisonment in labor camps.

NOVELS Eighth Moon: The True Story of a Young Girl’s Life in Communist China. (With sister, Sansan Bao) New York: Harper and Row, 1964. The Middle Heart. New York: Knopf, 1996. Spring Moon. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. New York: Harper Collins, 1984.

SOURCES Fox, Mary Virginia. Bette Bao Lord: Novelist and Chinese Voice for Change. Chicago: Children’s Press, 1993. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990.

OTHER Lamb, Brian. “Legacies: A Chinese Mosaic by Bette Bao Lord.” Interview. Booknotes. C-SPAN (May 27, 1990). Available online. URL: http://www/booknotes.org/transcripts/50013. html. Accessed August 8, 2005.

LOSING BATTLES EUDORA WELTY (1970) In Eudora WELTY’s novel Losing Battles, the Beechams and Renfros hold a daylong family reunion and attend a funeral in the 1930s southern town of Banner, Mississippi. At more than 400 pages, this comic novel is Welty’s longest, consisting mainly of the authentic southern dialogue for which the author is famous. With the exception of a few major characters, the members of this large family are hard to distinguish, and they, like the characters in Welty’s early novel Delta Wedding (1949), function more as a family unit than as individuals. Also like Delta Wedding, this novel reflects Welty’s trademark fascination with family, place, and

792 LOSING BATTLES

the conflict between the individual and the community. In this work, however, Welty has chosen a nearly bankrupt group of hill farmers rather than the wealthy plantation-holding Fairchild family of Delta Wedding. Beulah Renfro is the hostess of the reunion, which also commemorates the 90th birthday of Beulah’s mother, Granny Vaughn. The reader learns the group’s history as Brother Bethune, a traveling Baptist preacher, traces the family tree in his sermon and other characters chime in with family legends. Uncle Noah Webster also has a new wife, Cleo, and as the other characters inform her of relationships and history, they inform the reader as well. The novel’s major characters are Beulah’s son Jack Renfro, the family favorite, and his wife, Gloria, still an outsider. Jack has just spent the last 18 months in prison for aggravated assault. While there, he missed the birth of his daughter, Lady May, and was unable to prevent the loss of the family farm. The reunion, however, is an event they all know he would not miss, and the family anxiously awaits his arrival. They are not disappointed, for Jack escapes on the prison farm overseer’s horse just one day before his scheduled release so he can attend the reunion. Jack’s exploits are larger than life, and the family views him as a hero. To give him a hero’s welcome and to signal better times ahead, Jack’s father has a new tin roof put on the family house despite their lack of income from the farm. Jack’s stint in prison is like an epic hero’s journey to the underworld, while the other family members are the chorus who celebrate his exploits. Gloria, however, views Jack’s family as a negative influence and believes that they imprison him in their own way. She spends much of their reunion trying to convince him to move away with her and Lady May. An orphan who has been trained as a schoolteacher, Gloria considers herself above Jack’s family and tries to set herself apart from them. Ironically, through stories of the past told at the reunion, she learns that her father may have been a Beecham, Jack’s Uncle Sam Dale, which would mean that she has been one of them all along and is now married to her first cousin. On the last leg of Jack’s journey home, he had clung to the back of a car traveling in the right direction, not

realizing that the car’s driver was Judge Moody, the man who had sentenced him to prison. When the car runs off the road and into a ditch, Jack, with the great strength for which he is famous, pushes it back onto the road, still without recognizing the driver. When he later realizes whom he had helped, Jack leaves the reunion planning to run Judge Moody’s car off the road once more so he can desert him in the ditch as revenge for his imprisonment. Judge Moody, however, crashes his own car trying to avoid Jack’s baby, who had run out into the road, and Gloria, who is chasing after her. The car ends up perched on a precipice above a ravine, prevented from plunging over the edge by one of Uncle Nathan’s religious signs that reads “Destruction Is At Hand.” Jack’s Uncle Nathan, also home for the reunion, compulsively travels the country planting such religious messages. During the course of the novel, the reader learns that in the past he killed a man named Dearman, a lumber speculator who had raped the land surrounding Banner, and let a black man hang for it. In penance, he had cut off his own hand and now tries to win people to God. Because Judge Moody did not run over his wife and daughter, Jack now feels that he owes him a debt of gratitude. He spends the next two days trying to get the car down and eventually succeeds. Jack invites the Judge and his wife to attend the reunion, and while the judge is there, they all discuss the life and death of Miss Julia Mortimer, the local schoolteacher. Gloria had been her protégée and Miss Julia had tried to convince her to take a career as a teacher instead of marrying Jack, perhaps because she suspected Gloria’s kinship to him. Miss Julia writes a deathbed letter to the judge, and it is from this letter that Welty’s title comes: “All my life I’ve fought a hard war with ignorance. Except in those cases that you can count off on your fingers, I lost every battle” (298). The reader learns that her last words were the despairing question, “What was the trip for?” (241). But Miss Julia’s is just one of the lost battles in the novel. Jack loses a fight with Curly, Gloria has lost her fight to separate Jack from his family, and the Renfros have lost the fight to keep the farm running. Welty said in an interview, however, that she did not want Losing Battles to be a

LOST, LADY, A 793

novel of despair; instead she wanted it to be a novel of human indomitability. She captures this theme by pairing the lost battles with several battles just begun. Julia Mortimer’s last words are echoed by Lady May’s first words: “What you huntin’, man?” The beginning and the end, the baby and the dying woman, ask essentially the same question. Welty encompasses the cycles of life at this reunion of old and young. Fittingly, the novel ends as Jack and Gloria, after attending Miss Julia’s funeral service, stroll through the cemetery and plan their future.

SOURCES Gretland, Jan Nordby, and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. The Late Novels of Eudora Welty. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. Welty, Eudora. Losing Battles. New York: Random House, 1970. Betina Entzminger

LOST LADY, A WILLA CATHER (1923)

Willa CATHER’s A Lost Lady examines changing gender roles and traditions in a modern world that is no longer an “age of innocence,” as Edith WHARTON would describe it. According to Cather, “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts,” the year that would see numerous influential works published, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, works that would redefine literature within the post–World War I era. Cather opens the novel with a retrospective look at life in the West, amid the meadows and pristine lands, with a nostalgia that appreciates many traditions of a late Victorian time. Set in Sweet Water, in the western plains, where Captain Forrester could comfortably transport “friends from Omaha or Denver over from the station in his democrat wagon” (5) to his stately home, a story unfolds that pits two worlds against each other—that of an ideal past and that of the grim present. The narrator assumes the perspective of a third person omniscient, able to provide insight into characters’ thoughts and motivations, and centers the novel on Marian Forrester and the men who surround her. Yet what seems to interest Cather greatly in this work is the conflict between

two generations of pioneer men in the West and resulting redefinition of manhood during the liminal period between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Largely, Niel Herbert’s fascination with Marian Forrester and the men whom she attracts drives the novel, for Niel observes Marian through the years—with an interest that mirrors that of Winterbourne in Henry James’s Daisy Miller. Despite their age difference (he is 12 years old when he first meets Mrs. Forrester), Niel becomes enthralled with Marian as an image of Victorian domesticity during his youth. She becomes an “angel of the house,” happily greeting visitors in a disheveled dressing gown, with her hair partially coiffed, or toting baskets of freshly baked cookies to the neighborhood boys playing near the stream on the Forrester grounds. While Niel is still a boy, the Captain assumes the role of a great protector who chooses not to drain his fields for more productive land, but rather magnanimously allows the creek to run through his pasture, because he can afford to and because he admires the beauty of the place. This landscape becomes symbolic, for when the Captain becomes ill and eventually dies, many changes take place at the homestead. For Cather, the noble pioneer embodied by the Captain, who appreciates nature and values its beauty, finds replacement in the selfish modern man of Ivy Peters, who sees nature only in terms of resources waiting to be stripped and profits to be made. When Captain Forrester’s health weakens, Ivy Peters moves onto Forrester’s land and starts to assume his role as the dominant male in the household, replacing the grand, strong figure of the older railroad man. Ivy makes the decision to drain the Forresters’ meadowlands, instead planting wheat that will then be harvested and cut down. Cather writes: “All the way from Missouri to the mountains this generation of shrewd, young men, trained to petty economies by hard times, would do exactly what Ivy Peters had done when he drained the Forrester marsh” (90). Here, Ivy acts as a symbol of a new generation of ruthless “shrewd young men” who ravage the landscape and strip the feminized earth of her resources. Yet Ivy will not only dominate the land; the beautiful woman, like the beautiful land, also becomes a target of exploitation.

794 LOVE

Marian Forrester becomes immediately likened to a bird when Niel returns after being away for two years from the Forresters and the town in which they live. When Niel first greets Marian, he does so by clasping her in his arms while she lay on a hammock, “like a bird caught in a net” (92). This image of a bird becomes instrumental in Marian’s relationship to Ivy; if Marian is the bird, then Ivy is the cruel male who will mutilate her and show her his dominance increasingly. That Cather would use this image of a bird in reference to Marian, after providing her reader with a dramatic scene of cruelty and abuse when Ivy Peters uses a tool from a taxidermy kit to slice the eyes of a female woodpecker he has captured in his hands, while calling her “Miss Female,” stands as something more than coincidence. When the reader examines Ivy’s treatment of Mrs. Forrester, one sees that she becomes more and more dependent on him and therefore must tolerate his disrespectful behavior. “Poison Ivy” will become the scourge that ravages the “forest” found in Marian Forrest(er), subtly spreading and taking over her land. A lasting image of Marian emerges from the story she tells about how she and Captain Forrester became married. When Marian describes the scene in which she, crippled with two broken legs, is carried out of the ravine by men who took alternate turns in bearing her weight, an image of Captain Forrester holding the broken body of his wife reveals the Captain’s comfort in taking care of a dependent woman. Marian’s dependence does not threaten the Captain but draws them together. Marian submits to Captain Forrester and trusts that he will take care of her, for he represents the idealized image of masculinity that countered the Victorian “angel of the house” as the strong, dominant provider. After her husband’s death, which leaves her disoriented like the blinded bird, without the Captain to carry her or give her a strong sense of noble masculinity from which to contrast herself, she must redefine her feminine female subject position against a new kind of male. Just as the new, modern male will exploit land and women, so will Marian learn to use her beauty as a commodity, in order to gain financial security within an increasingly commercialized world of men.

SOURCES Cather, Willa. A Lost Lady. 1923. New York: Vintage, 1990. O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997. Peck, Demaree C. The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather’s Fiction. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1996. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Sharon Kehl Califano

LOVE TONI MORRISON (2003)

Toni MORRISON’s Love, as the title itself suggests, is a sustained meditation on the notion of love that the author characterizes as both “the cliché of the century” and “the most powerful, probably singular, exclusive human emotion” (Gates, 51). In delineating this “singular” human experience, the novel addresses profound issues such as the nature of human relationships, the problems of forgiveness and retaliation, and, more important, the redemptive and demonic powers of love. Although an astute Morrison reader is alive to the presence of these concerns in her earlier novels too, it is with Love that the novelist touches new emotional registers. Set in a southern town along the East Coast, Love revolves around “the commanding and beautiful” (Morrison, 36) Bill Cosey, who is a proud owner of, in its heyday, “the best-known vacation spot for coloured folk[s]” (44). As the novel opens, the reader is told that the dead protagonist Cosey is survived by the feuding Christian, his granddaughter, and Heed, his second wife. In pressing their claims on Cosey’s property, the rivalry between Heed and Christian assumes horrific dimensions–it is this rivalry that compels a critic like Elaine Showalter to see them as “female versions of Cathy and Heathcliff,” from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In such a claustrophobic world arrives Junior, a young woman who readily becomes a secretary to Heed and from then on exploits every opportunity to drive a wedge between Heed and Christian to further her own designs. Paradoxically, Junior acts as an arbiter on the “solemn” “hatred” (177) that exists between Heed and Christian.

LOVE 795

Another significant textual presence is L, the former female cook at Cosey’s restaurant, whose lyrical ruminations not only frame the narration but also unravel the tangled life stories of the Coseys. For instance, L describes Cosey’s women; illuminates his relationship with Celestial, a prostitute; and comments on his father, Daniel Robert Cosey. Moreover, as a perceptive observer of the rapidly changing realities, L performs the function of a Greek chorus. In exercising the authority that goes with such a role, she comments on the present-day children, girls, tramps, and food. In short, L is at once a semiotic reality and a character in her own right, “the woman in the chef’s hat” (37) and a depersonalized rational voice. As the story refracts through the memories of Christian, Heed, L, and the Gibbons, the local worthies, we learn of the mysterious ways of Cosey that occasion the grotesque and dangerous ramifications of love. Perhaps the crucial and haunting event concerns Cosey’s marriage to the 11-year-old “pre-menstrual” Heed that destroys her friendship with Christian forever. Although the novel ends with the reconciliation of these archrivals, the change of equations in relationship (blood and power) effected by Cosey in their lives leaves readers wondering whether to consider Cosey “a good bad man, or bad good man” (200). Such moral ambiguities cannot be readily resolved as Morrison’s characters are living embodiments of the complexities attending human beings. Moreover, since Love at its core occupies “an emotional terrain where reason doesn’t operate” (Miller, 10), any concrete solution would fall short of the emotional chemistry that the novel strives to achieve. Besides offering a telling commentary on patriarchal hegemony, Love also treats the issue of generation gap by dramatizing, on the one hand, the relationship between the troubled youth, Romen, and his grandparents and by sustaining, on the other, L’s sporadic observations. In a characteristic vein, Love continues Morrison’s preoccupation with the complicated relationship between history and individuals. While her trilogy comprising BELOVED (1987), JAZZ (1993), and PARADISE (1997) invokes slavery, Harlem, and Reconstruction as its historical intertexts, respectively, in Love Morrison evokes the civil rights movement. Fur-

thermore, Love stridently critiques the idea of “paradise” and separation—a theme thoroughly explored in Paradise. Thus, though Cosey dreams of transfiguring his restaurant into a “utopia” by evading the contingent historical forces, these steadily and deliberately besiege his heavenly resort, leading to its ruination. Racism, the influence of the past on the present, the types and effects of love, and the role of parenting are other significant concerns of the novel. All of this is accomplished through a formidable control of the subtleties of language that reflects Morrison’s virtuoso linguistic inventiveness. For instance, referring to Heed and Christian fighting over Cosey’s coffin, Vida reflects thus: “Standing there, one to the right, one to the left, of Bill Cosey’s casket, their faces, as different as honey from soot, looked identical. Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy’s” (34). This admirable economy and elegant use of language not only heightens the tart observations on human experience but also creates poetic patterns that in turn deepen the reader’s experience of the novel. It is this concentrated force of the novelist’s prose that has compelled her editor, Gottlieb, to comment thus: “It[Love]’s found the language in which to tell it. Nothing is there that shouldn’t be there, and everything that should be there is there” (Langer). In the final analysis, while Love will be appreciated for its audacious depiction of verities and fallacies of humankind and for exposing the fundamental paradoxes that inhere in humanity, it lacks the poetic force and mythic heft of her earlier fiction. But clearly what salvages Love is Morrison’s redeeming prose, a revelatory faith in humanity, and her ability to transcend the ethnic boundaries to reflect on the forces that bind humanity. In view of these strengths, it is not surprising that the novel won the 35th NAACP Image Award (2004) and was also considered for the Orange Prize for Fiction (2004). If only for its delightful strokes of genius, Love, as Karen Sandstrom urges, “deserves to be read” and for “pure pleasure, it deserves to be read more than once.”

SOURCES Gates, David. “The Power of Love,” Newsweek, 8 September 2003, pp. 50–51.

796 LOVECRAFT, H. P.

Morrison, Toni. Love. New York: Knopf, 2003. Sandstrom, Karen. “Circle of doom.” Review of Love by Toni Morrison, Cleveland Plain Dealer, 26 October 2003.

OTHER Langer, Adam. “Star Power.” Review of Love by Toni Morrison. Book Magazine.com (November/December 2003). Available online. URL: http://www.bookmagazine.com/ issue31/morrison.shtml. Accessed January 22, 2005. Miller, Laura. “The Last Resort.” Review of Love by Toni Morrison. New York Times Book Review, 2 November 2003. Available online. URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/ fullpage.html?. Accessed January 20, 2005. Showalter, Elaine. “A Tangled Web.” Review of Love by Toni Morrison, Guardian, 29 November 2003. Available online. URL: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction. Accessed January 20, 2005. Sathyaraj Venkatesan

LOVECRAFT, H(OWARD) P(HILLIPS) (1890–1937) Before his death, H. P. Lovecraft’s macabre tales reached cult status among contemporary scholars, but today even mainstream readers increasingly view him as the descendant of Edgar Allan POE and the literary ancestor of the writer Stephen KING. Erudite, sickly, fascinated with the poetic power of words to conjure up the scientific possibilities of the cosmos, Lovecraft published more than 100 stories, novels, poems, and articles during his brief lifetime. Lovecraft also wrote three short novels: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943), The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1941), and At the Mountains of Madness (1936). No book-length collections appeared until 1939, two years after his death. Despite this, his work influenced the contemporary writers Clive Barker, Fred CHAPPELL, and Umberto Eco. Lovecraft’s invention of entire mythologies, replete with new vocabularies, inspired Chappell’s little-known poem, “H. P. Lovecraft.” Chappell’s novel Dagon (1968) is openly indebted to and influenced by Lovecraft’s mythology to “achieve a specific supernatural effect” (Clabaugh). Robert Bloch, who as a young writer was inspired and encouraged by Lovecraft, wrote the story Psycho that became the 1960 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. H. P. Lovecraft was born on August 20, 1890, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Winfield Scott Lovecraft,

a traveling salesman, and Sarah Phillips Lovecraft. When Lovecraft was three years old, his father was declared insane and was institutionalized; when he was eight, his father died of tertiary syphilis. Lovecraft was raised until 1904 by his grandfather, Whipple V. Phillips; his mother, who was institutionalized for bouts of hysteria and depression, died in 1921. Not surprisingly, many of Lovecraft’s tales would focus on madness and hereditary illness; after 1920, they demonstrated Lovecraft’s increasing use of his corner of New England. He created the towns of Kingsport (mimicking Marblehead, Massachusetts) and Arkham (like Salem). In 1923, his first story appeared in Weird Tales, a luridly illustrated pulp magazine; the following year he married Sonia H. Greene; the two divorced in 1929. Between 1926 and 1931, Lovecraft wrote three novels. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is the most autobiographical; Randolph Carter, who stands in here for Lovecraft, is on an odyssey in search of the gods living on the fictive Kadath that appears often in his dreams. Along the way he meets strange creatures— zoogs, gugs, and ghasts—and eventually realizes that, despite his attraction to the exotic and otherworldly Kadath, he, like Lovecraft, is part of a symbiotic relationship with Providence (Rhode Island). In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward the main character also shares traits with Lovecraft. He is initiated into the full horrors of his ancestor Joseph Curwen, a black arts practitioner from the Salem witchcraft days. Part of the novel is set in Providence on Good Friday, 1771. Although at novel’s end Curwen is killed, he first murders young Charles, who learns that it is dangerous to seek knowledge about one’s own ancestors (St. Armand, 178). Lovecraft’s third novel, At the Mountain of Madness, demonstrates Lovecraft’s fascination with Antarctica: Jason C. Eckhardt notes that, before writing the story, Lovecraft was aware of four polar expeditions, including Admiral Byrd’s of 1928–30 (Eckhardt, 31–38). The other notable influence on the novel is Poe’s The NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, a novel referred to in Lovecraft’s text. The unnamed leader of the expedition that leaves from Miskatonic University in Providence has an assistant named Danforth, a young Harvard University graduate; they head for the mountains just out of range

LOVECRAFT, H. P. 797

of the known world and come face to face with the horror that Poe and Pym viewed only indirectly and at a greater distance. Appalled by the murdered bodies of the previous tenants of the mountain, called Old Ones, they manage to escape the horrors of monsters, sirens, and madness in an airplane that takes them back to Miskatonic University. Lovecraft died of cancer and Bright’s disease on March 15, 1937, in Providence. Today he is famous for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos series of stories, a fictitious mythology that reveres a race of Old Ones waiting to return from another dimension of space and time, and a blind idiot god referred to as Cthulhu, Ashtoroth, or Azathoth. The man who “lived to write and wrote to live,” as the Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi puts it, also wrote so many letters that, if published, they would fill hundreds of volumes. The 1990s saw an explosion of interest in Lovecraft, with publication of eight collections of his work, including critical analyses, a biography, and an introduction by Joyce Carol OATES. At least nine of his novels and stories have been adapted as feature-length films, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (for a film titled The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman in 1963) and again for a film titled The Resurrected, directed by Dan O’Bannon in 1992.

NOVELS At the Mountains of Madness, and Other Novels. Collected with introduction by August Derleth. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham, 1964. Revised ed. edited by S. T. Joshi, introduction by James Turner, 1985. Beyond the Wall of Sleep (includes The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward). Collected by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham, 1943. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Complete edition. New York: Belmont Books, 1965. The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath. Introduction by George T. Wetzel. Buffalo, N.Y.: Shroud, 1955. Reprinted and edited with new introduction by Lin Carter. New York: Ballantine, 1970.

SOURCES Burleson, Donald. H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.

Carter, Lin. Lovecraft: A Look behind the “Cthulhu Mythos.” New York: Ballantine, 1972. Updated, 1996. De Camp, L. Sprague. Lovecraft: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Derleth, August. H. P. L.: A Memoir. New York: Ben Abramson, 1945. Eckhardt, Jason C. “Behind the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraft and the Antarctic in 1930,” Lovecraft Studies 6 (Spring 1987): 31–38. Faig, Kenneth W., Jr. H. P. Lovecraft: His Life, His Work. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1979. Hay, George, ed. The Necronomicon. London: Neville Spearman, 1978. Joshi, S. T. H. P. Lovecraft; A Life. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1996. ———, ed. H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. ———. H. P. Lovecraft and Lovecraft Criticism: An Annotated Bibliography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1981. ———, ed. In Defense of Dagon. West Warwick, R.I.: Necronomicon Press, 1985. ———. A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H. P. Lovecraft. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Introduction by August Derleth. New York: Ben Abramson, 1945. Price, Robert M., ed. H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos: Essays on America’s Classic Writer of Horror Fiction. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. St. Armand, Barton L. “Facts in the Case of H. P. Lovecraft.” In H. P. Lovecraft: Four Decades of Criticism, edited by S. T. Joshi. Athens: Ohio State University Press, 1980. Schweitzer, Darrell. The Dream Quest of H. P. Lovecraft. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1978. ———, ed. Discovering H. P. Lovecraft. Mercer Island, Wash.: Starmont House, 1987. Revised, San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1996. Turner, Jim, ed. Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of HPL in Popular Culture. Collinsville, Ill.: Golden Gryphon Press, 1998. Weinberg, Robert E., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Lovecraft’s Legacy. New York: Tor Books, 1996.

OTHER Clabough, Casey. “Appropriations of History, Gothicism, and Cthulhu: Fred Chappell’s Dagon.” Mosaic (September 1, 2003). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 109270179. Accessed September 22, 2005.

798 LOVE IN THE RUINS

LOVE IN THE RUINS WALKER PERCY (1971) Like Flannery O’CONNOR, Walker PERCY was a Roman Catholic Southerner who attempted to address metaphysical questions in an age that seemed to have lost faith in the efficacy of metaphysical discussions. But whereas O’Connor typically explored the grotesque possibilities in unfortunate or damaged characters awkwardly confronting troubling dilemmas, Percy focused on the malaise that passes for contentment in the midst of affluence. In the details of everyday life, Percy saw the evidence of a gnawing spiritual emptiness underlying the pursuit and even the acquisition of material comfort. Percy was 45 years old when he won a National Book Award for his first novel, The MOVIEGOER (1961). It has become a critical maxim that his first novel was the product of a mature sensibility and that in his subsequent novels he extended his exploration of the focal themes defined in The Moviegoer, rather than discovering new thematic interests. This perception is supported by even a superficial look at his subsequent works. Over the next quarter century, he would produce just five more novels, and two of those are sequels to others. His second novel, The LAST GENTLEMAN (1966), has its sequel in his fifth novel, The Second Coming (1980). Love in the Ruins (1971), his third novel, has its sequel in his last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). The main character of Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome is Dr. Thomas More. Both novels are set in a near future in which America’s current environmental, social, cultural, and political ills have become amplified to the point where they have become prevailing rather than underlying realities. Instead of directly examining our present malaise, Percy allows us to consider some of its constituent elements against the backdrop of a very different society, which may either represent our future or provide the sort of nightmare version of our future that we require in order to see the necessity of continuity, of preservation, of history. The main character is the namesake of one of his ancestors, Saint Thomas More, the highly principled lord chancellor who was beheaded by Henry VIII because he could not endorse the king’s improvisational approach to the theological chain of command. Love in

the Ruins is ostensibly the transcript of the contemporary More’s tape-recorded account of his continuing, if uncertain, survival in the midst of near-anarchic conditions. He has barricaded himself and three female companions in an abandoned building that resembles a Howard Johnson’s motor lodge. In the face of what seems to be impending apocalypse, More is faced with the distracting domestic conundrum that although the three women are attracted to him, they increasingly despise one another and not just because of their competing interest in him. In this manner, the situation within the ruined building thus becomes an ironic complement to—even a microcosm of—the deteriorating conditions outside its damaged walls. As time passes, More confronts the philosophical issue of whether he should dread or welcome the apocalypse, of whether he should be relieved or disappointed if the world does not end but somehow continues to devolve. Much of the novel consists of More’s extended jeremiad on the competing but equally self-interested forces that not only have failed to reverse, to halt, or even to slow the erosion of civil order and of the basic quality of life, but also have actually contributed to and at times accelerated the process of decline. Within the framework of a futuristic narrative, Percy has More comment at length on the potentially cataclysmic ramifications of the deep antagonisms between conservative and liberal ideologies. In the context of this extended exercise in what is essentially exposition and argument, the sense of narrative—and of narrative movement—is sustained less by plot than by the anecdotal qualities of the illustrations that More presents to clarify his observations and to support his claims. These compressed stories range in tone from the outrageously comical to the movingly pathetic, from the surprisingly ironic to the shockingly horrific. This range in tones suggests the manifold ways in which human intention and human invention have proven both constructive and destructive. Moreover, these illustrations are presented almost as case studies, and there is an extended, underlying irony in More’s continuing, implicit faith in the scientific method, even as everywhere around him and his companions, the concept of the world as a machine has been

LOVELY BONES, THE 799

unmistakably wrecked by its own products. The novel’s emblematic object is More’s own invention, the Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, a device that unfailingly diagnoses the spiritual causes of psychological disorders and physical ailments. More fantasizes about winning a Nobel Prize for this invention, at least until he realizes that the diagnoses it provides are worse than pointless if there are no corresponding remedies available. This recognition is at the crux of More’s development, of his transformation from a man equally at odds with his world and with himself to a man whose sense of spiritual equilibrium truly sustains him in the midst of deepening chaos, even though it may be anachronistic rather than radically progressive.

SOURCES Bizup, Joseph. “Hopkins’ Influence on Percy’s Love in the Ruins,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 46 (Summer 1994): 247–259. Christensen, Bryce J. “Family Themes in Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman,” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 40 (Winter 1988): 145–151. Cunningham, John. “ ‘The Thread in the Labyrinth’: Love in the Ruins and One Tradition of Comedy,” South Carolina Review 13 (Spring 1981): 28–34. Godshalk, William Leigh. “Love in the Ruins: Thomas More’s Distorted Vision.” In The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being, edited by Panthea Reid Broughton, 137–156. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Graybill, Mark S. “Walker Percy’s Postmodern Parod(ox)y: Love in the Ruins,” Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 6 (Winter 1995): 43–64. Kennedy, J. Gerald. “The Sundered Self and the Riven World: Love in the Ruins.” In The Art of Walker Percy: Stratagems for Being, edited by Panthea Reid Broughton, 115–136. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Ledbetter, T. Mark. “An Apocalyptic Cacophony: Music as Apocalyptic Symbol in Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins,” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture 1 (September 1987): 221–227. Percy, Walker. Love in the Ruins. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. Webb, Max. “Love in the Ruins: Percy’s Metaphysical Thriller,” Delta: Revue du Centre d’Études et de Recherche sur les Écrivains du Sud aux États-Unis 13 (November 1981): 55–66. Martin Kich

LOVELY BONES, THE ALICE SEBOLD (2002) Before publication, Alice SEBOLD’s first novel was in its sixth printing due to advance publicity and interest. The novel remained at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for several months. In the United Kingdom, it received the Richard and Judy television show’s first Best Read Award, in addition to its many American prizes. A film of the novel is scheduled for release in 2007. Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, who won Oscars for their Lord of the Rings trilogy, will be directing the film. In a modern reconfiguring of the omniscient narrator, the voice of dead 14-year-old Suzie Salmon narrates the novel. From a quasi-Christian, high school–like “heaven,” Suzie begins with a brutally detailed account of her rape, murder, and dismemberment before recounting her family and friends’ varying responses to the tragedy. Comparison with Russell BANK’s Sweet Hereafter (1992) and Alice MCDERMOTT’s Charming Billy (1998) reveals how Suzie’s narration facilitates a unique exploration of an American neighborhood’s experience of loss. Sebold’s forte is in offering insightful, careful observance of the smallest moments and movements between human beings. Suzie is one “of those who no longer lived on Earth . . . the watchers.” Having dreamed of becoming a wildlife photographer, she turns her eye on the now foreign species of the living. The issue of the gaze is imbedded in Sebold’s language (“I saw . . . ,” “He watched . . . ,” “I watched her see . . .”). Along with its construct, the photograph, it arguably dominates the text more than the bones metaphor of the title. Suzie and Ruth have unusual capacities of sight. Having noticed Suzie’s spirit leave Earth, Ruth grows up able to see murders that have taken place across New York. Suzie can “see all the way back through” the memories of others, including her killer. In some of the novel’s most vivid passages, Suzie observes the separate layers through which characters physically experience their present, a specific past, and some sense of Suzie’s proximity. This occurs when her sister Lindsey searches Mr. Harvey’s house. Among Suzie’s family, the distance between “watching” and truly “seeing” is revealed in all its tragedy. So, too, is the

800 LOVELY BONES, THE

inadequacy and potential destructiveness of the watching act as a desperate impulse to protect. Throughout, photographs express loss—not only of the dead but also of the mother’s former, unwillingly relinquished self. It is this personal loss that the mother’s grief for her dead child will force her finally to confront. Several clusters of motifs underpin Sebold’s plain language and unexpectedly amusing humor. These offer versions of isolation and communion. The title’s bones are “lovely” as the new connections formed between those who knew Suzie or her death, from family to the neighbors, whose dog found her elbow bone. Suzie takes comfort from these growing bonds that contrast with her dismembered, undiscovered body. At times, this linkage constitutes an actual overlapping. This is physically represented through characters repeatedly borrowing one anothers’ clothes. It finds ultimate expression in Suzie’s use of Ruth’s living body. Images of enclosure and of ice, of snow and that which is frozen abound. These often combine with the structure of the collection: Ray’s dried flowers, the father’s bottled ships, Mr. Harvey’s dollhouses. The novel, itself a collection of the murdered, contains lists of the dead in many forms: Mr. Harvey’s mementos from his victims, Ruth’s journal notes of murder scenes, or Detective Fenerman’s photographs of victims from unsolved cases. The novel proves surprisingly uplifting and redemptive. Some have attacked it as “saccharine,” popular only due to “infantilized” societal needs for unrealistic consolation following September 11 and a particularly harrowing series of abductions, rapes, and murders of young girls that coincided with the book’s release. Particular issue is taken with Suzie’s return, through Ruth’s body, to partake of a nonviolent sexual experience with Ray. Yet The Lovely Bones does ask the reader what can and cannot be believed—not only recovery, communication with the dead, and heaven, but also innocence, a father’s suspicions of a neighbor’s guilt, one’s own marriage, and death itself. Similarly, it explores what can and cannot be said: Suzie frustratedly speaks “unheard phrases” to her family, and the living feel the impulse to even mundane, everyday speech similarly muted by boundaries of what trauma has rendered too

painful to hear. These new un-sayables draw attention to the habitual un-saids of the only-just-functioning suburban family. Reception of the novel as a therapy document is arguably fueled by knowledge of Sebold’s own violent rape, recounted in her memoir, Lucky (1999). Sebold asserts, “I’m a writer first and I happen to be a rape victim.” Nonetheless, there are interesting parallels between the two works. Referring to her attacker’s previous victim, Sebold declares that she “felt [she] had more in common with the dead girl” than the living. She has Suzie endure this girl’s fate—rape, murder, and dismemberment, both similarly below ground. The two texts open with an unflinchingly detailed account of rape and end in a pseudovirginal experience in place of previous, violent defilement. Sebold’s turbulent healing process involved a geographical move to California like that of Suzie’s mother. Both texts examine an unsought, morbid celebrity. They present the experience of victimhood as an assault on an individual’s being that threatens to obliterate her identity (with Sebold, through dangerous drink and drug addiction and with Suzie, death), while simultaneously forcing the loss of their anonymity. Suzie watches her family and friends suffer this lost normalcy as well as the loss of a child, sister, and friend. Together, Lucky and The Lovely Bones ask, when rape and murder are involved “can you speak those sentences to the people you love?” while expressing the contrary instinct to tell one’s story to society? This impulse is portrayed as specifically literary, both in the fact of the memoir and in the manner in which the majority of the novel’s characters turn to forms of reading, writing, and authoring Suzie’s story for her, as an act of retrieving themselves from the tragedy. Above all, “telling” constitutes “remembering.” Lucky begins, “This is what I remember.” Suzie exists through memories of the living. She becomes increasingly concerned for her fate as this remembering appears to abate. Yet by then, through memories, her “bones” have formed anew as human connections. Resonant female narratives, both very different texts, present the writing act as an important remembering.

LOVE MEDICINE 801

SOURCES Barnes and Noble Reader’s Companion: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. New York: Spark, 2003. Ross, Peter. “ ‘Everybody said don’t look at the rapist in court. But I looked at him intensely’: An Interview with Alice Sebold.” Sunday Herald, 15 June 2003, p. 6.

OTHER Bouton, Katherine. “What Remains: Review of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.” New York Times (July 14, 2002). New York Times on the Web. Available online. URL: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpagehtml/?res= 98OCE7D71031F937A2575COA9649C8B63. Accessed September 23, 2005. Lawson, Mark. “The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold: Edited Highlights of the Panel’s Review.” Newsnight Review. BBC News World Edition Online (July 29, 2002). Panel: Mark Lawson, Natasha Walter, Paul Morley, Ian Rankin. BBC. Available online. URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk.2/hi/ programmes/newsnight/review/2/59644.stm. Accessed September 23, 2005. Mead, Rebecca. “Immortally Cute: Review of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.” London Review of Books Online 24, no. 20 (October 17, 2002). LRB Ltd., 2004. Available online. URL: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n20/mead01_.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Novel of the Year: Review of The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.” New York Review of Books Online 50, no. 1 (January 16, 2003). NYREV Inc., 2003. Available online. URL: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview? article_id=15970. Accessed September 23, 2005. Amy Evans

LOVE MEDICINE LOUISE ERDRICH (1984) Louise ERDRICH’s Love Medicine, published in 1984 with 14 chapters, was named best work of fiction by the National Book Critics Circle; the novel was republished in 1993 with 18 chapters. This first novel of a series of four multigenerational novels focuses mostly on the Native American families of the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Lazarres, and Morrisseys living out the joys and hardships of contemporary reservation life, including “alcoholism, suicide, abandoned children, disrupted relationships, yet continuity in extended families, new life, escapes and humor” (Hafen, 16). Love Medicine’s multiple narrators explore stories of

parents and children, siblings, husbands and wives, friends and enemies. All possible combinations are covered, including a myriad of step and half relations whose stories are told back and forth through time beginning in 1981 and circling backward to 1934, then moving chronologically forward to 1984. The multiple narrators, some first person, some third, make the novel at times seem less like a novel and more like a series of short stories, and in fact many of the chapters were originally published as short stories. This gives the novel a distinctively Native American storytelling feel. In Native American traditions one voice, one narrator, would not be given precedence over other voices. All voices and stories are important and produce their full impact when spoken together, as they do in the multiple narrators and plots of this work. The chapters, however, do fit together, and though many can stand alone, when combined under the umbrella of the novel they blossom in the presence of one another. As Jane Hafen has put it, “the solo voices create a chorus of tribal storytelling” (Hafen, 16). The Ojibwa, mixed-blood, and European immigrant characters in this work struggle internally and externally. Their struggles, often as painful for the reader as they are for the characters, focus around the themes found prominently in Native American literatures, such as the search for identity, successfully incorporating the past into the present, holding on to community, and refiguring family in the wake of colonization (Wong, 5). Most often these struggles are transformed into individual and cultural survival through storytelling. Thus, according to Lisa Schneider, “storytelling constitutes both theme and style” in Love Medicine (Schneider, 26). Sometimes the characters tell their own story; sometimes readers get the stories through an omniscient narrator, and at other times characters tell stories to other characters. This last category is what Schneider sees as the “real spiritual force of the novel,” the love medicine (Schneider, 26). And what Kathleen Mullen Sands sees as “community gossip,” the defining feature of the novel (Wong, 36–37). John Purdy points out that the first-person narratives in particular ask the reader to take on multiple roles,

802 LOVE MEDICINE

that of amateur ethnographer and/or familiar confidant. In addition, readers “are asked to respond, . . . to build connections and patterns for making connections between stories” (Purdy, 35). The reader has work to do and is not powerless. Readers are also participants in the love medicine. In part 4 of “Crossing the Water,” Lipsha Morrissey speaks to readers directly, punctuating their power in the storytelling process in his refusal to tell us whether his father, Gerry Nanapush, killed the trooper he was sentenced for supposedly killing: “If I tell you he said yes, and relate to you how it all happened, it might get used against him. I’m sorry but I just don’t trust to write down what he answered, yes or no. We have entered an area of too deep water” (364). This not only shows the distrust of most Native Americans for the written word, but also gives evidence of the reader’s role in the storytelling process. Every time a story is told or read, as in this case, it is storytelling in the traditional Native-American sense. Erdrich makes us feel this and the characters believe this. The first time Lipsha Morrissey encounters Gerry Nanapush, knowing that Nanapush is his father, he feels for the first time what it is like to be the son of a father, as if he were the first son ever to feel this. Lipsha Morrissey says, “So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be the son of a father was like that” (246). Reading the stories of Love Medicine is also like that; each time they are read is like the first time. There is an abundance of falsified love medicine, sex, alcohol, and organized religion, but readers come to understand the real meaning of love medicine in the story named for it. If there is one story that provides the focal point for the novel, it is the chapter “Love Medicine.” It could be argued that the other stories build up to this one or grow out of it. Ironically, in this chapter the love medicine Lyman concocts for Marie Lazarre/Kashpaw to use on her husband, Nector Kashpaw, to rekindle their love and douse his love for Lulu Lamartine kills him. Yet it never was the medicine that was the real power, but as Lipsha says, the “faith in the cure” (246), the faith that love is possible and powerful and worth surviving for. And despite the fact that the novel begins with June

Kashpaw’s death and that others like Nector don’t survive, there is always that striving for survival; the stories keep being told. Marie carries on after Nector’s death and even forms an unlikely friendship with her rival Lulu in a later chapter, “The Tomahawk Factory.” Humor and a sense of place are also important themes sprinkled throughout the work and are essential parts of storytelling and thus survival. For Erdrich, humor is “a personal way of responding to the world . . . very different from the stereotype, the stoic unflinching Indian” (Coltelli, 157). The trickster figure is one manifestation of Native-American humor, which is often used as a trope for the humor and wit. According to William Gleason, “Many characters act tricksterian; the men in particular roam, eat, and love their way through this book” (Gleason, 123). Gerry Nanapush is most tricksterian, changing shapes and laughing at everything. He takes after his trickster mother, Lulu, who sleeps with numerous men for the sheer pleasure of it. In addition to humor, staying connected to place is also a force of survival. Erdrich’s own place, North Dakota, is the place of the novel as well. According to Erdrich in her essay “Where I Ought to Be,” NativeAmerican contemporary writers often write about the land, especially the three percent they still hold, in the way traditional storytellers spoke of it, as unchanging (48). The chapter “The Island,” which moves from spring to winter, best illustrates this idea. In it Lulu Lamartine has a dreamlike encounter with Moses Pillager, a man so much a part of his environment that he can’t leave the island; “he was his island, he was me, he was his cats, he did not exist from the inside out but from the outside in” (83). Furthermore, political statements are sprinkled throughout this family drama in direct comments like those of Albertine Johnson, who says, “the policy of allotment was a joke,” and Lulu Lamartine, who says that the “authentic” Native-American souvenirs that they were making in the tomahawk factory are just “ka-ka” (12, 314). But politics is also seen in the actions of the characters, as when the Native-American workers destroy the tomahawk factory. Lyman gives readers a powerful image when he describes the destruction as “the factory running backward” (320).

LOVINGKINDNESS 803

Last, there is the beauty of the writing that is oral even when we as readers are silently reading alone. There are sharply poignant moments throughout the novel that, when combined with all the others, leave readers feeling a wide variety of emotions. Just as Marie Kashpaw says after June moves out, leaving her Cree beads: “I don’t pray, but sometimes I do touch the beads.” Readers may not pray but the very act of reading Love Medicine becomes its own sort of prayer (96).

SOURCES Coltelli, Laura. “Interviews with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.” In Love Medicine: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 155–158. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Perennial, 2001. ———. “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place.” In Love Medicine: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 43–52. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Gleason, William. “ ‘Her Laugh and Ace’: The Function of Humor in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.” In Love Medicine: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 115–135. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hafen, P. Jane. Reading Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Boise, Idaho: Western Writers Series, 2003. Purdy, John. “Critical Extracts.” In Native American Women Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 35–37. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Sands, Kathleen M. “Love Medicine: Voices and Margins.” In Love Medicine: A Casebook, edited by Hertha D. Sweet Wong, 35–42. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Schneider, Lisa. “Critical Extracts.” In Native American Women Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 25–26. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Van Dyke, Annette. “Critical Extracts.” In Native American Women Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 26–28. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1998. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, ed. “Love Medicine”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

LOVINGKINDNESS ANNE ROIPHE (1987) Dubbed a “feminist mother’s nightmare” (34) by a Ms. magazine reviewer, Anne ROIPHE’s Lovingkindness focuses on Annie Johnson, a nominally Jewish professor and scholar of women’s studies in New York City. After five months of silence, her troubled 22-year-old daughter—

who once wrote “God Sucks” on the bathroom mirror— phones her mother to tell her she is living as a dedicated follower of an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem. The story of how Annie struggles to bring her daughter back to the contemporary world and the resolution of that conflict creates an emotionally powerful narrative and a luminous parable of the mother-daughter theme within the contexts of modern feminism and ancient Judaism. Intelligent, acerbic, passionate, and reflective, Roiphe’s protagonist and narrator is winning in her eloquence, touching in her dilemma, funny in her mockery of both New World and Old World excesses, and triumphant in her final decision and plotted revenge. As a college professor and single parent, Annie has dedicated herself to her only daughter and the “tabernacle” (44). Annie has structured her life on her values of liberation, rationalism, and an enlightened view of woman’s potential. A child of secular Jews—a distant father and an eccentric mother tormented by her husband’s coolness—Annie adores her daughter despite Andrea’s rejection of all that her mother holds dear: education, reason, health, and independence. Her abortions, promiscuity, and suicide attempts drive Annie to sacrifice her summer home for the cost of Andrea’s psychoanalysis, but despite her plea to understand, Dr. Wolfert gives Annie only cold comfort and no insight into Andrea’s free fall, or this recent embrace of ultra-Orthodoxy. Annie acknowledges that our trust in therapy—one of the bulwarks of modern rescue— does not always work, and, at least for Andrea, help, if it comes, must arrive from another dimension. There are no easy answers in Lovingkindness. Through a series of letters to her mother from Israel, we hear of this new Andrea, who is now totally obedient to the rules of the Yeshiva Rachel and immersed in the communal life centered on the kitchen and domestic order. While the feminist Annie abhors this subordinate view of women, she must admit that the Rabbi Cohen and his wife have certainly made a difference in Andrea’s physical well-being. They have fixed her teeth, taught her habits of personal hygiene, and provided a healthy diet; they have also taught her how to cook and study diligently. Annie recognizes these val-

804 LOVINGKINDNESS

ues of the Orthodox lifestyle, but she resents their rationale as a preparation for a life restricted to the roles of child bearer, nurturer, and holy vessel. Andrea now calls herself “Sarai” and writes of her love of polishing floors and tables (this rhapsodic response draws a smile from Annie, who recalls the notoriously messy daughter), the lighting of candles, and the new meaning Andrea/Sarai discovers in baking bread. Annie is mobilized to cancel her summer course and visit Jerusalem when she hears of the marriage that will doom her daughter to a future of continual childbearing and the rigors of kashruth, the complex laws that govern the preparation of kosher food. In Israel she will meet the outraged parents of another new member of the yeshiva, Michael (now Micah), the husband chosen for Sarai. The father, a pediatrician, and his wife, Gloria, ask Annie to join them in their effort to extricate their son from a world that repudiates all that they stand for. In Jerusalem, Annie discovers a still estranged Andrea, physically healthier and respectful to her mother, but insisting on her happiness and commitment to the Yeshiva Rachel. Annie participates as a visitor with patience and dignity and, despite mixed feelings, gains a deeper understanding of her daughter’s desires and needs. Still, we are not sure which way Annie will choose—to go with the plan of Micah’s father and mother, or to accept Sarai’s plea for a new life. The cliff-hanger ending provides a satisfying metaphor for ambivalence: It simultaneously rejects the violent solution of the secularized Jewish parents and promises a clever revenge on Orthodoxy based on Annie’s role with the next generation. Enriching the novel’s philosophical and psychological depth is the author’s deep ambivalence about Jewish culture, especially in relation to the position of women. Annie’s reflective nature and intelligence does not allow a simplified condemnation of ultra-Orthodoxy. As Andrew Furman argues in his analysis of Roiphe and other Jewish-American feminist writers, while Roiphe recognizes the horrors of fundamentalism, she also portrays the emptiness of materialism (Furman, 121). Sarai cannot survive in a feminist (liberated) world; and although the yeshiva is patriarchal, it is also spiritual. And Annie, even as a secular Jew, demonstrates, if only

subconsciously, a spiritual hunger. Despite her antipathy to patriarchy, Annie does not totally reject Judaism (Roiphe, 138), especially in her dreams. In addition to traditional narrative, the novel utilizes flashbacks, letters, and a notable dream sequence that focuses on the character of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, the hero of Annie’s rabbinical grandfather. It was the illustrious stories of Rabbi Nachman—a unique historical figure of the early 19th century—that were tantalizingly denied to Annie as a child. Disappointed with the irreligious world in which he found himself, her grandfather refused to share these strange Hasidic tales that were, he proclaimed, “better than that of the ‘Lone Ranger,’ better than your ‘Inner Sanctum’ . . . stories that made the stars come into your mouth so you could taste them” (12). So in her dreams, the beleaguered mother, agonizing over her lost daughter in Israel, conjures Rabbi Nachman, appearing in fearsome and demanding attitudes, who tells her five remarkable tales. Queens who kill their children out of dashed expectations and disappointment; a misguided prince and a murderous falcon who ruin the future; an ungrateful king who lives on the sacrifice of art and love; and a monarch who, unable to accept the truth, destroys a kingdom. In a 1989 telephone interview, Roiphe stated that she fashioned these tales from a combination of actual Nachman fables and her own purposes: “I took that form and made up stories that are fractured. What Picasso did to the face, I do to Nachman’s tales” (137). While the stories connect to the main plot in a variety of illuminating ways, their philosophical function is to apply Hasidic mysticism to a modern world. “Why do we suffer?” was Annie’s mother’s underlying question in her fascination with gossip. The stories reply, “Everything is not deserved.” Moreover, these fractured fairy tales, over the scope of the novel, gradually “provide a tentative rapprochement with [Annie’s] Jewish background through mysterious allegory” (131). Through the course of the novel, the Nachman dream fables, a blend of existentialism and fairy tale, give us not only the landscape of Annie’s mind, but also benchmarks on the way to her assent, however quali-

LOWRY, LOIS 805

fied, to Judaism. Finally, holy yet nonsensical, they are a kind of background music that delivers us to the place of Annie’s ultimate lovingkindness. There is value and grace in the yeshiva, alongside a monstrous limitation of women’s rights. But liberation and feminism also have their drawbacks—at least for some individuals—such as Andrea. The bittersweet ending of Lovingkindness balances Annie’s acceptance of Sarai’s choice against the wonderful possibilities of the future, when, with her future granddaughter, Annie plans for the pendulum to swing back to women’s freedom.

SOURCES d’Alpuget, Blanche. “A Daughter Lost to Faith.” Review of Lovingkindness, New York Times Book Review, 30 August 1987, p. 9. Furman, Andrew. “Anne Roiphe’s Ambivalence: A Jewish Feminist Looks at Israel,” MELUS 21, no. 121 (Summer 1996): 17. Roiphe, Anne. Lovingkindness. New York: Warner Books, 1987. ———. Telephone interview conducted by Carole Weaver. February 1989. Weaver, McKewin Carole. “Tasting Stars.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 131–139. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Carole Weaver

LOWRY, LOIS (1937– ) In addition to being the creator of Anastasia Krupnik, the star of a famous series of young adult novels. Lowry is the author of The Giver, a dystopian novel in that series that has won more than 10 awards and has been adopted as the all-city read in many municipalities around the country. The Giver has been favorably compared to such classic novels as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1933), Ray BRADBURY’s FAHRENHEIT 451 (1953), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1940). Known primarily for her award-winning children’s novels, Lois Lowry’s novels often cross the line between adolescent and adult audiences. In both genres, as the critic Walter Lorraine has noted, Lowry is a writer “who really ha[s] something to say” (Lorraine, 413). Lois Lowry was born on March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Robert E. Hammersberg, a dentist

and an army officer, and Katharine Landis Hammersberg. During World War II, while her father served in the army, Lowry was reared by her maternal grandparents in Pennsylvania; after the war she lived with her parents in Tokyo, Japan, and New York City. In 1956 she married Donald Grey Lowry, a naval officer and, later, an attorney, earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Maine in 1972, divorced her husband in 1977, and won her first Children’s Literature Award in 1978. In 1979 her character, the feisty and rebellious Anastasia Krupnik, appeared in a series of popular novels. In spite of—or perhaps because of—its popular success, The Giver has also been the target of censorship and protest because it directly confronts the issues of infanticide and euthanasia. The young hero of the book, however, escapes from his narrow and intolerant community to begin a new and hopeful life made stronger by his recognition of the weaknesses and failures of the community he has left behind. Lois Lowry, whose children’s books have been adapted for film and television, has also written a memoir and a book about photography, her first love She divides her time between her house in West Cambridge, Massachussets, and her 19th-century farmhouse in New Hampshire. The film version of The Giver will be produced by Walden Media and directed by Vadim Perelman. Lowry’s recent novel The Silent Boy was published in 2003.

NOVELS All about Sam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Anastasia, Absolutely. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Anastasia Again! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Anastasia Ask Your Analyst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Anastasia at This Address. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Anastasia at Your Service. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Anastasia Has the Answers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. Anastasia Krupnik. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Anastasia on Her Own. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Anastasia’s Chosen Career. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Attaboy, Sam! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Autumn Street, 1980. Published as The Woods at the End of Autumn Street, London: Dent, 1987.

806 LURIE, ALISON

Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Gathering Blue. Boston: Houghton, 2000. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. The One Hundredth Thing About Caroline. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. Number the Stars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Rabble Starkey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Stay!: Keeper’s Story. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. See You Around, Sam! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. The Silent Boy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. A Summer to Die. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Switcharound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Taking Care of Terrific. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. Us and Uncle Fraud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Your Move, J.Press.! Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Zooman Sam. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.

SOURCES Chaston, Joel D. Lois Lowry. New York: Twayne, 1997. Lorraine, Walter. “Lois Lowry,” Horn Book Magazine 70, no. 4 (July–August 1994): 423–426. Lowry, Lois. “Make Yourself at Home.” In A Place Called Home, edited by Mickey Pearlman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Markham, Lois. Lois Lowry. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Learning Works, 1995. Smith, Amanda. “Interview: Lois Lowry.” Publishers Weekly, 21 February 1986, p. 152–153.

OTHER Internet Public Library. “Lois Lowry.” (December 11, 1995). URL: http://www.ipl.org/youth/AskAuthor/Lowry.html. Accessed February 6, 1996 [no longer available]. Learning about Lois Lowry. Available online. URL: http://www. scils.rutgers.edu/special/kay/lowry.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Write4Kids.com “Q&A: Lois Lowry.” An Exclusive excerpt from In Their Own Words: The Best of CBI’s [Children’s Book Insider’s] Interviews. Available online. URL: http://www. write4kids.com/lowry.html. Accesssed September 23, 2005.

LURIE, ALISON (1926– )

Alison Lurie, recipient of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize as well as 1984 nominations for the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, all for her novel Foreign Affairs (1984), is a professor and critic best known for

her witty, satiric novels about the extramarital affairs and identity crises of upper-middle-class intellectuals. Of particular note are The War between the Tates (1974), The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), and The Last Resort: A Novel (1998), all of which reveal the Lurie trademark unmasking of characters who would deny the pride and self-deception that constrains their potentially rich lives. Lurie has chronicled women’s lives before and after the feminist movement of the late 20th century (Mermin, 81) and has been praised for her careful prose, use of detail, and highly developed sense of irony. Alison Lurie was born on September 2, 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, to Harry Lurie, a professor of sociology, and Bernice Lurie, a former journalist. Lurie earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1947, worked as an editor for Oxford University Press, and married Jonathan Peale Bishop in 1948. A founding member of the Poet’s Theater at Harvard University, Lurie published her first novel, Love and Friendship (1962), an exploration of academia and adultery in a small New England college. The Nowhere City (1965) features a young couple who move to California to shed their East Coast inhibitions and engage in numerous sexual affairs; the wife, Katherine, becomes part of an alternative California lifestyle. Imaginary Friends (1967) involves two researchers who investigate the smalltown cult of the fictional New England town of Sophis, only to be seduced themselves by the teenaged cult leader. In Real People (1969), Lurie takes a different tack and, using the journal form, tells the tale of Janet Belle Smith, a writer who tries to improve her fiction at a satirically depicted writer’s resort, and becomes involved in a love affair. The War between the Tates (1974), Lurie’s first bestseller, transpires during the Vietnam War, student rebellions, and the emerging counterculture; meanwhile, the battle between Brian and Erica Tate, and among the Tates and their four children, escalates as the Tate marriage falls apart. Narrated by two eight-yearold girls, Only Children (1979) takes place during a 1935 Independence Day celebration at a farm where two couples, the two girls, and a girls school headmistress confront one another. Foreign Affairs focuses

LURIE, ALISON 807

on two American university English professors on leave in London: 54-year-old unmarried Anglophile Virginia Miner and 28-year-old Fred Turner, separated from his wife. In The Truth about Lorin Jones (1988), Polly Alter, a single parent and feminist biographer, becomes entranced with Lorin Jones, an artist who died 20 years previously, and in so doing faces up to her self-deceptions regarding her latent lesbianism. In The Last Resort, the title refers to the possibilities confronting the characters Wilkie Walker, a 76-year-old naturalist with suicidal tendencies, and Jenny Walker, his 46-year-old wife, who sees Key West as the place where his depression will be cured. In fact, Wilkie does not tell her he is dying of cancer and plans his suicide while Jenny embarks on a lesbian affair with Lee Weiss, a local guesthouse owner. Alison Lurie, a professor at Cornell University since 1969, separated from Bishop in 1975 and later married the novelist Edward Hower. In 1989 she was named Fredric J. Whiton Professor of American Literature at Cornell, where her manuscripts are housed. Imaginary Friends, The War between the Tates, and Foreign Affairs have been filmed for television.

NOVELS Foreign Affairs. New York: Random House, 1984. Imaginary Friends. New York: Coward, 1967. The Last Resort: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Love and Friendship. New York: Macmillan, 1962. The Nowhere City. New York: Coward 1965. Only Children. New York: Random House, 1979. Real People. New York: Random House, 1969.

The Truth about Lorin Jones. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Truth and Consequences: A Novel. New York: Viking, 2005. The War between the Tates. New York: Random House, 1974.

SOURCES Bobrick, Elizabeth. “Arrested Development,” Women’s Review of Books 20, no. 7 (April 2003): 8–11. Busch, Frederick. “What Shall We Tell the Children?” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 3 October 1993, pp. 1, 13. Costa, Richard Hauer. Alison Lurie. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Givhan, Robin. “Making a Statement,” Washington Post Book World, 16 April 2000, pp. 8–9. Gussow, Mel. “Comedies of Manners, Laced with Morals,” New York Times, 5 September 1998, p. B9. Kakutani, Michiko. “Scenes from a (Faltering) Marriage,” New York Times, 3 July 1998, p. E32. Kruse, Horst. “Museums and Manners: The Novels of Alison Lurie,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für Englische Philologie 111, nos. 3–4 (1993): 410–438. Maslin, Janet. “Once Upon a Time, Yes, But Not So Long Ago,” New York Times, 19 August 1993, p. C15. Mermin, Dorothy. “Alison Lurie.” In Women Writers Talking, edited by Janet Todd. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983. Newman, Judie. Alison Lurie: A Critical Study. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 2000. Skow, John. Review of The Truth about Lorin Jones, Time, 19 September 1988, p. 95. Yardley, Jonathan. “Wasting Away Again in Margaritaville,” Washington Post Book World, 19 July 1998, p. 3.

OTHER Wired for Books. “Audio Interview with Alison Lurie.” Available online. URL: http://www.wiredforbooks.org/alisonlurie/. Accessed September 23, 2005.

C

MD “the Bull” Gravano’s life in the Mafia; and Killer Spy (1995), a portrayal of convicted Soviet spy and CIA agent Aldrich Ames. In the latter category are Serpico, based on New York undercover policeman Frank Serpico, the cop who refused to be bought, and The Terrible Hours (1999), detailing a pre–World War II U.S. submarine rescue. It was Maas’s friend, the writer E. L. DOCTOROW, who persuaded him to try a novel, and the result was the gripping Made in America, featuring former New York Giants football player Richie Flynn, who has the chance to make a fortune on an abandoned synagogue. Flynn is forced to borrow the down payment from Albert “King Kong” Karpstein, whom the critic Evan Hunter calls “surely one of the most frightening creations in recent fiction” (Hunter, 9). The novel taps into American hopes for instant wealth and the usual corresponding deal with the devil. Peter Maas died in 2001 after undergoing surgery for an ulcer in New York City. A number of his books were made into successful films: Serpico, starring Al Pacino in the title role, earned an Academy Award nomination; The Terrible Hours was aired as an NBC TV movie entitled Submerged. Film rights have been purchased for Made in America and King of the Gypsies.

MAAS, PETER (1929–2001)

Peter Maas, writer, editor, and investigative reporter, was the author of more than 13 books, although only one of them, Made in America (1979), was a novel per se. Such nonfiction best-sellers as The Valachi Papers (1969) and Serpico (1973) were praised for their novelistic qualities and adapted into successful films and television series. As the critic and novelist Evan Hunter has noted, Maas was equally talented at evoking character and setting, whether “the barren moonscape of a South Bronx street or the languid luxury of a northern Westchester tennis court” (Hunter, 9). Peter Maas was born on June 27, 1929, in New York City. He was educated at Duke University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1949, and served in the U.S. Navy from 1952 to 1954. His marriage to Audrey Gellen, a movie and television producer in 1962, ended with her death in an automobile accident on July 2, 1975, and his marriage, in 1976, to Laura Parkins, a real estate broker, ended with their separation in 1979. After an early stint as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in Paris, Maas returned to New York City, where he wrote for Collier’s, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, before turning to realistic evocations of both criminals and the decent people who go unrecognized by the general public. The former category includes The Valachi Papers, about Cosa Nostra informant Joe Valachi; King of the Gypsies, about King Tene Bimbo and his son Steve Tene, a gypsy caught between modern America and the traditional gypsy life; Underboss (1997), about Sammy

NOVEL Made in America. New York: Viking, 1979.

SOURCES Hunter, Evan. “Faust and the Loan Shark,” in New York Times Book Review, 2 September 1979, pp. 9, 13.

808

MACDONALD, JOHN 809

Perlmutter, Emanuel. Review of Serpico. New York Review of Books, 19 April 1973.

MacDONALD, JOHN (DANN) (1916– 1986) John D. MacDonald, most famously the creator of fictional Florida private investigator Travis McGee, was also a popular writer of science fiction, suspenseful detective fiction, and issue-oriented mainstream fiction. His highly regarded science fiction stories appeared in magazines alongside those of Isaac ASIMOV; his first Travis McGee novel, The DEEP BLUE GOOD-BY, introduced a series that eventually produced more than 20 novels. (The Green Ripper won the National Book Award in 1980 and was included in critic H. R. F. Keating’s 1987 list of the 100 best crime novels.) His novel Condominium (1977), excoriating Florida land developers, was a best-seller. In total, MacDonald wrote more than 60 novels and 600 short stories, selling over 80 million copies in 19 languages. John D. MacDonald was born on July 24, 1916, in Sharon, Pennsylvania, to Eugene Andrew MacDonald, a successful businessman, and Marguerite Grace Dann MacDonald, a former YMCA secretary. After attending the University of Pennsylvania (1934–35), MacDonald graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor of science degree in 1938, and from Harvard University with a master’s in business administration in 1939. He married Dorothy Mary Prentiss, an artist, in 1938, and, from 1940 to 1946, was in the U.S. Army, eventually with the Office of Strategic Services, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. He began writing short stories in 1946, and published his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, in 1950, intended for publication in the pulp magazine Black Mask but instead expanded and published as a hard-boiled detective novel. Three science fiction novels followed: Wine of the Dreamers (1951), Ballroom of the Skies (1952), and The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything (1962). After publishing more than 40 well-reviewed novels, MacDonald was asked to initiate what became the Travis McGee novels. All Travis McGee fans know that his name was originally Dallas McGee, but, after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, MacDonald renamed the character after Travis Air Force Base (Liukkonen). Travis, a loner and Korean War veteran, lives on a houseboat called the Busted

Flush (because it was won in a poker game) and solves crimes with his brilliant neighbor, the chess-playing economist Meyer. (Meyer lives on a houseboat called John Maynard Keynes.) MacDonald also wrote the posthumously published Reading for Survival (Library of Congress, 1987), which features a long dialogue between McGee and Meyer. John D. MacDonald died on December 28, 1986, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from complications following a heart bypass operation. MacDonald’s novel The Executioners (1958) has twice been adapted to the screen as Cape Fear, in 1962 and 1991, starring Robert Mitchum and Robert DeNiro, respectively, as the psychopathic Max Cody. In all, more than 30 MacDonald works have been adapted for television. Travis McGee appeared in Darker Than Amber (1970), featuring Rod Taylor as McGee. Travis McGee: The Empty Copper Sea (1982), starring Sam Elliott, was a television film, and A Flash of Green (1984) was yet another adaptation of MacDonald’s 1962 novel. MacDonald’s awards include the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1964 and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972. MacDonald was, according to the scholar Edgar W. Hirshberg, “a writer’s writer, a true professional” (Hirshberg, 1).

SELECTED NOVELS The Damned. New York: Fawcett, 1952. A Flash of Green. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962. A Key to the Suite. New York: Fawcett, 1962.

SELECTED MYSTERY FICTION Border Town Girl. New York: Popular Library, 1956. The Brass Cupcake. New York: Fawcett, 1950. A Bullet for Cinderella. New York: Dell, 1955. Published as On the Make, 1960. Deadly Welcome. New York: Dell, 1959. The Executioners. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958. Published as Cape Fear, New York: Fawcett, 1962. The Last One Left. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Murder for the Bride. New York: Fawcett, 1951. The Only Girl in the Game. New York: Fawcett, 1960. One Monday We Killed Them All. New York: Fawcett, 1961. The Soft Touch. New York: Dell, 1958. Where Is Janice Gantry? New York: Fawcett, 1961.

810 MACDONALD, ROSS

“TRAVIS McGEE” SERIES The Deep Blue Good-By. New York: Fawcett, 1964. Dress Her in Indigo. New York: Fawcett, 1969. Free Fall in Crimson. New York: Harper, 1981. The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper. New York: Fawcett, 1968. The Green Ripper. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979.

SCIENCE FICTION Ballroom of the Skies. New York: Greenberg, 1952. The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything. New York: Fawcett, 1962. Wine of the Dreamers. New York: Greenberg, 1951. Published as Planet of the Dreamers, New York: Pocket Books, 1953.

SOURCES Breen, Jon L. Hair of the Sleuthhound. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1982. Brogan, John. The Official Travis McGee Quiz Book. New York: Gold Medal, 1984. Campbell, Frank D., Jr. John D. MacDonald and the Colorful World of Travis McGee. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1977. Geherin, David. John D. MacDonald. New York: Ungar, 1982. Hirshberg, Edgar W. John D. MacDonald. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Landrum, Larry, Pat Browne, and Ray B. Browne, eds. Dimensions of Detective Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1976, 149–161. MacDonald, John D. One More Sunday. New York: Random House, 1984. ———. Reading for Survival. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1987.

OTHER Books and Writers. “John D(ann) MacDonald (1916–1986).” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jdmacd. htm. Accessed September 23, 2005. John D. MacDonald. Available online. URL: http://www. kruse.demon.co.uk/johnd.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MACDONALD, ROSS (KENNETH MILLAR) (1915–1983) Ross Macdonald, the creator of Lew Archer, private investigator, is considered by many critics to be the equal of Dashiell HAMMETT and Raymond CHANDLER, both of whose influence Macdon-

ald acknowledged. Macdonald’s hero—named after Miles Archer, a character in Hammett’s classic novel The Maltese Falcon—evolved from a hard-boiled sleuth into a sensitive hero who plumbs the intricate depths of evil, sometimes caused by desire and deceit. As Bernard A. Schopen notes, in Macdonald’s Archer novels, themes include “exile and return, the search for the father, the quest for identity,” all of which have “at their core the desire for love” in all its manifestations (Schopen, 15). The books are known for complex plots—blending the actual murder or missing persons case, for example, with his search for clues in the past, which are clues to the behavior not only of those Archer is investigating but also of himself. Ross Macdonald was the recipient of two Edgar Allan Poe Awards, in 1962 and 1963, a Silver Dagger from the Crime Writers Association in 1965, a Gold Dagger in 1966, a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1973, and a Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1981. Ross Macdonald was born Kenneth Millar (pronounced Miller) on December 13, 1915, in Los Gatos, California, to John Macdonald Millar, a newspaper editor, and Anne Moyer Millar, a nurse. His father abandoned the family when Macdonald was six years old. After a childhood in Canada, where he and his mother lived hand to mouth, Macdonald was able to attend the University of Western Ontario because of his father’s death and an unexpected inheritance from him. There he earned a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1938. Macdonald moved to the United States and received a master’s degree (1943) and a doctorate (1951) from the University of Michigan. In 1938 he married Margaret Ellis Sturn, and from 1944 to 1946, served with the U.S. Naval Reserve in the Pacific during and after World War II. He published his first novel, The Dark Tunnel in 1944, followed by Trouble Follows Me (1946), both spy thrillers. They were followed by Blue City (1947) and The Three Roads (1948), the first Macdonald novel set in California. In 1949 he published his first Lew Archer novel, The MOVING TARGET. Most critics credit The Galton Case (1959) with presenting Macdonald’s new version of Lew Archer, a man less interested in fighting evil and more interested in the

MADAME DELPHINE 811

nuances of human character. Many readers and critics have noticed Oedipal and Freudian patterns in the later Lew Archer novels. He even resembles James Fenimore COOPER’s Natty Bumppo of the Leatherstocking Tales: He is gracious to women but, divorced, prefers to remain single; he is self-reliant, honest, and immune to bribery. A resident of Los Angeles, he despises its smog and loves nature, Japanese art, fine books, and classical music (Books and Writers). Ross Macdonald died of Alzheimer’s disease on July 11, 1983, in Santa Barbara, California. Among the numerous film and television adaptations of Macdonald’s work are The Moving Target, filmed as Harper by Warner Bros. in 1966; The Underground Man, filmed for television by Paramount in 1974; The Drowning Pool, filmed by Warner Bros. in 1975. Archer, a 1975 National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television series, was based on several of Macdonald’s short stories featuring private detective Lew Archer.

SELECTED NOVELS The Barbarous Coast. New York: Knopf, 1956. London: Cassell, 1957. Black Money. New York: Knopf, 1966. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1966. Blue City (as Kenneth Millar). New York: Knopf, 1947. London: Cassell, 1949. The Blue Hammer. New York: Knopf, 1976. The Chill. New York: Knopf, 1964. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1964. The Dark Tunnel (as Kenneth Millar). New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944. Republished as I Die Slowly, New York: Lion, 1955. The Doomsters. New York: Knopf, 1958. London: Cassell, 1958. The Far Side of the Dollar. New York: Knopf, 1965. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1965. Find a Victim. New York: Knopf, 1954. London: Cassell, 1955. The Galton Case. New York: Knopf, 1959. London: Cassell, 1960. The Goodbye Look. New York: Knopf, 1969. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1969. The Instant Enemy. New York: Knopf, 1968. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1968. Meet Me at the Morgue. New York: Knopf, 1953. Republished as Experience with Evil, London: Cassell, 1954. The Moving Target. New York: Knopf, 1949. London: Cassell, 1951.

The Name Is Archer. New York: Bantam, 1955. London: Fontana, 1976. Sleeping Beauty. New York: Knopf, 1973. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1973. The Three Roads (as Kenneth Millar). New York: Knopf, 1948. London: Cassell, 1950. The Underground Man. New York: Knopf, 1971. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1971. The Way Some People Die. New York: Knopf, 1951. London: Cassell, 1953. The Wycherly Woman. New York: Knopf, 1961. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1962. The Zebra-Striped Hearse. New York: Knopf, 1962. London: Crime Club by Collins, 1963.

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew J. Kenneth Millar/Ross Macdonald: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. ———. Ross Macdonald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Leonard, John. “Ross Macdonald, His Lew Archer, and Other Secret Selves,” New York Times Book Review, 1 June 1969, pp. 2, 19. Macdonald, Ross. Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past. Edited by Ralph Sipper. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1981. Nolan, Tom. Ross Macdonald. New York: Scribner, 1999. Schopen, Bernard A. Ross Macdonald. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Simons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History—From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper, 1972. Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Speir, Jerry. Ross Macdonald. New York: Ungar, 1978. Weinkauf, Mary S. Hard-boiled Heretic: The Lew Archer Novels of Ross Macdonald. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1994. Wolfe, Peter. Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1977.

OTHER Books and Writers. “Ross Macdonald (1915–1983).” Available online. URL: http://www.kirijasto.sci.fi/rossmach.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MADAME DELPHINE GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1881) George Washington CABLE’s Madame

812 MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS

Delphine is part of a Creole trilogy that describes the people, the streets, and the atmosphere of New Orleans. Creoles are defined as people of French ancestry born in Louisiana. The trilogy includes the short story collection Old Creole Days (1879) and the novel The Grandissimes (1880), a vivid depiction of the intrusion of American outsiders of various hues and backgrounds into the French-based, Europeanfocused, white society of old New Orleans. Madame Delphine, a novella derived from an earlier story entitled “Tite Poulette,” appeared in Scribner’s Monthly from May to July 1881, and that same year Scribner’s published the novella in book form. All three works helped establish Cable as a very early, perhaps the first, American local colorist. The trilogy established him as a celebrity, but with fame came controversy. He blended realism and romance, and looked unflinchingly at a variety of characters of varying degrees of mixed blood. He directly portrayed female quadroons and octoroons and the difficulties faced by these women of mixed blood in contrast to the already established stereotypes of the “tragic mulatto” and the glamorous quadroon. In fact, the Cable scholar Philip Butcher emphasizes that an examination of the black characters in The Grandissimes makes that novel “a trenchant indictment of slavery” (Butcher 51, 52). Not surprisingly, Madame Delphine, too, contains a sympathetic depiction of Delphine, a quadroon, and Olive, her octoroon daughter, in a society that affords them no rights at all. When Madame Delphine’s white American “protector” dies, she learns that he has left her property. His relatives insist on taking Olive, the daughter of that union, and raising her, but they allow the adult Olive to return to her mother. In this regard, the novella can be compared to William FAULKNER’s Absalom! Absalom! In that novel, Charles Bon’s octoroon mistress and son are invited to leave New Orleans and stay at Sutpen’s Hundred after Bon is killed in the Civil War. The person issuing the invitation is his white fiancée (and, as it turns out, half sister), Judith Sutpen. Clearly, in this society, Charles’s mixed-blood family is doomed, and his son marries the blackest woman he can find. In Cable’s novella, Olive falls in love with Ursin Lemaître-

Vignevielle, a famous pirate (modeled on Jean Laffite) (Butcher 57), and so impresses him that he gives up piracy and becomes an honest banker, all in hopes of finding the lost Olive again and marrying her. When they finally meet again, they realize that Olive cannot legally marry Ursin because she is part black, but Ursin determines to take her to France, where no anti-miscegenation laws exist. Ursin’s incensed relatives try to prevent the marriage, even threatening to turn him over to government authorities, but Delphine fabricates evidence and swears that she is not Olive’s blood mother. The scheme works and Ursin and Olive are married, but the marriage exacts a price: Delphine confesses her sin to Père Jerome, the priest, and dies. The sympathetic Père Jerome, fictional spokesman for Cable, understands the racial unfairness in this situation and prays that God will not punish her for her lie. The controversy that this novella caused arose partly from the fact that Olive marries a white man who is a Creole. It gave racists permission to wonder how many octoroon women had married Creole men, thereby mixing their “black blood” with that of unsuspecting Creoles. Cable’s intent is clear: He made Delphine and her daughter into aristocratic paragons of beauty, emphasizing their unjust situation and appealing to a wide audience, particularly in the Northeast. His understanding of the complexity of southern social and racial stratification is superseded only by his courage in writing about it so forthrightly.

SOURCES Butcher, Philip. George W. Cable. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Cable, George Washington. Madame Delphine. New York: Scribner, 1881.

MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS STEPHEN CRANE (1893) As a writer of naturalism, Stephen CRANE seeks to describe human beings and their interactions with the surrounding environment objectively and accurately. In Maggie: A Girl of the Streets Crane explores how human beings are significantly influenced by their surroundings. Crane’s dark description of life in 19th-century American urban tenement housing depicts the negative effects that living in a slum has on both a person’s psyche and physical well-being. The book was

MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS 813

far too shocking and brutal in its depiction of slum life for his reading public’s genteel tastes, so Crane was forced to published Maggie himself under a pseudonym. Crane opens his novel with a description of young children fighting a bloody battle for possession of a gravel heap. This violent bout of King of the Hill sets the dark tone of the work and serves as a microcosmic depiction of the violent struggle for existence that pervades life in New York City’s Bowery. Besides the constant violence, residents are also affected by filth, overcrowding, and an overwhelming sense of alienation. Though inhabitants of the tenements live packed in upon one another in extremely close quarters, absolutely no sense of community or even familial affection exists there. Each individual lives an alienated existence in the struggle for survival. Crane’s disturbing description of the physical environment of the Bowery explains why its inhabitants are unable to aspire to what were in his time considered more highly elevated human values such as community, even within the confines of their own family. He describes the Bowery as “a dark region, where from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and gutter” (7). He likewise describes the filthiness of the streets and alleys and the “withered persons” who fill them. The tenements, bulging with their teeming masses of humanity, rise up on all sides, working as a barrier between humans and the natural world, literally blocking from view the world beyond with their litter of trash and people. The confined and dirty space of the tenement has a tremendous impact on its residents’ psyches and on their chance for progress and development. The design of the tenements keeps their inhabitants relegated to the downtrodden class of which they are a part. In fact, isolated from the rest of the world, humans in the Bowery are in a state of regression, becoming more and more brutish. Getting drunk seems to be the only way that most can transcend the confinement of the slum. The filth and confinement of the streets actually provides respite for Maggie, the main character, and her brother Jimmy, whose home lives, too, are characterized as a violent and bloody battle. Utter chaos reigns

inside their home as Maggie’s parents continually smash furniture and beat each other and their children in bouts of drunken rage. Maggie’s place of employment, the collar and cuff factory, further degrades her. Like the other inhabitants of the Bowery, she is a victim of an urban and industrialized society that has alienated people from their work and pays them the meagerest wages for their endless drudgery. Furthermore, working conditions in the factory are unsafe and nearly unbearable for Maggie: “The air in the collar and cuff establishment strangled her. She knew she was gradually and surely shriveling in the hot, stuffy room” (33). Crane describes Maggie and the other “grizzled women in the room” as “mere mechanical contrivances” creating fine lace cuffs that they will never be able to afford (33). Rather than attempting to transcend the imprisonment and violence of the tenement and the drudgery of endless, meaningless toil through alcohol, Maggie finds a glimmer of hope in the tawdry world of melodrama. Though the theater offers her some aspiration in a hopeless world, its false and exaggerated representations give her a warped view of what life outside the Bowery and the collar and cuff factory is actually like. As she begins to calculate “the costs of the silks and laces” she sees on stage, Maggie erroneously conflates possession of material goods, of which she has always been deprived, with refinement and happiness. Crane’s novel argues that being bred in poverty, filth, and ignorance causes Maggie to be easily duped by the stage. Maggie, eventually thrown out of her house for a sexual indiscretion, turns to prostitution and ultimately achieves the level of material “advancement” to which she aspires. Crane reveals, though, that Maggie, rather than progressing, has actually undergone a process of de-evolution. At the end of the novel Maggie has a “handsome cloak” and “skirts” and “well-shod feet,” but she is now worse off than when she dressed in her one well-worn black dress (66). Her trek at the very end of the novel from the upscale theaters of the aristocracy, through the cheaper saloon and restaurant district, and eventually down to the “gloomy districts near the river, where the tall black factories shut in the street” and “the river appeared a deathly black hue,” visually represents Maggie’s regression (67–68). By the time she gets there,

814 MAILER, NORMAN

“afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance” (68). Despite her material possessions, Maggie is now even further away from achieving any kind of advancement other than material. After Maggie’s fall from grace, her mother asks an absurd and ironic question that encapsulates the novel’s message: “When a girl is bringed up deh way I bringed up Maggie, how kin she go teh deh devil?” (51). According to Crane, the answer is obvious. When one lives in an environment characterized by filth, poverty, isolation, and violence—where there is no chance for progress—one can only regress. Ironically, the American city of 1893, which promised wealth, advancement, and happiness to all according to Crane, really offered only sickness, poverty, estrangement, and misery to most. Maggie leaves readers to ponder whether a chance for human progress really exists at all.

SOURCE Crane, Stephen. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. In The Portable Stephen Crane. Edited by Joseph Katz. New York: Penguin, 1969. Kathleen Hicks

MAILER, NORMAN (NORMAN KINGSLEY MAILER) (1923– ) Norman Mailer has been famous since the publication of The NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948), when he was 25 years old. He began then to grapple with a theme that would intrigue him for the rest of his career: misuse of power in all its manifestations. During Mailer’s long career as a novelist, essayist, political activist, producer, director, and actor, he has been both controversial and provocative, evolving into a practitioner of “American existentialism” that, the scholar Robert Merrill explains, is rooted “in the hipster and characterized by a deep commitment to instinct as opposed to reason” (Merrill, 20). As an experimentalist, Mailer has written several amalgams of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and autobiography that place him, along with Truman CAPOTE, Joan DIDION, and Tom WOLFE, in the movement known as New Journalism. These works include The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the

Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970), The EXECUTIONER’S SONG (1979), How the Wimp Won the War (1991), and Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1979). At this writing Mailer has published 40 books. In addition, he has won a National Book Critics Circle nomination, a Pulitzer Prize, and an American Book Award nomination, all for The Executioner’s Song (1979). Norman Mailer was born on January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, to Isaac Barnett Mailer, an accountant, and Fanny Schneider Mailer, a small business owner. He was reared in Brooklyn, New York, and educated at Harvard University, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1943 and marrying Bernice Silverman the following year. After their divorce in 1952, Mailer married five more times, to Adele Morales (whom he stabbed in the aftermath of a party in 1960), Lady Jeanne Campbell, Beverly Rentz Bentley, Carol Stevens, and Norris Church, an artist 25 years his junior. Mailer served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, as an infantry rifleman in the Philippines and Japan. This experience fueled his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, the tale of an army infantry platoon that captures a small island in the Pacific during World War II. The novel depicts the use of power through two basic plotlines that juxtapose General Cummings and Sergeant Croft, developed characters who simultaneously suggest the dangers of tyranny, fascism, and totalitarianism, and their officer and enlisted counterparts, Lieutenant Hearn and Private Valen, both of liberal sympathies. Mailer’s second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), features Mikey Lovett, an amnesiac. Here Mailer introduces characters who emblematize the major social results of World War II, including hedonism, capitalism, narcissism, and the like. Mailer has described it as his most autobiographical novel. The Deer Park (1957) depicts Sergius O’Shaughnessy, a writer, an orphan, and an air force veteran of World War II, wandering in Desert D’Or, Mailer’s fictionalized Hollywood. His mentor is Eitel, a Hollywood film director and former communist who compromises on the truth because he fears being blacklisted. O’Shaughnessy is admired by readers and critics alike as the wandering postwar American.

MAILER, NORMAN 815

First serialized in Esquire in 1964, AN AMERICAN DREAM features Stephen Richards Rojack, a World War II veteran turned congressman who murders his estranged wife, Deborah Kelly, disappears with his new love, Cherry, and hopes to be reborn. A riveting book, most Mailer fans consider this to be his most autobiographical novel; it also seems antifeminist to a majority of women readers. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), although a novel, uses many of Mailer’s nonfictional opinions on national politics. To some degree, it made him a commentator on American foreign policy. The protagonist, D. J. Jethroe, a young Texan soldier about to leave for Vietnam, may be an angry young man, a black man in Harlem, or Mailer himself; he embodies the American male with more than a hint of a corrupted Huck Finn. Mailer followed this novel with The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (1968), a blend of fact and fiction about the American presence in Vietnam. It won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, but The Executioner’s Song (excerpted in Playboy in 1979), a similar amalgam of the real and the imaginary, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This “true-life novel,” as it was advertised, tells the tale of real-life convict Gary Gilmore, twice convicted of murder and apparently lacking in any morals or values, but with the ability to evoke sympathy from Mailer and many of his readers. Ancient Evenings (1983) recounts conversations between two ghosts in a tomb, Menenhetet I, who has the power of reincarnation, and his great-grandson Menenhetet II, who has recently died and seeks wisdom from his great-grandfather. Much of the novel reaches back into the Egyptian past when Menenhetet I knew Ramses IX. Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1984) is a best-selling detective novel about Tim Madden, a failed writer who has been imprisoned for drug use and whose wife is divorcing him. Many critics compare this novel, with its theme of rebirth through violence, to An American Dream. Mailer adapted Tough Guys Don’t Dance for film and directed it. Harlot’s Ghost (1991) is another thriller narrated by Henry Hubbard, a Central Intelligence Agency writer of disinformation. Hubbard, suspi-

cious that the CIA plays favorites with graduates of elite universities, pits himself against the CIA cold warrior Tremont (Harlot) Mantague. Norman Mailer lives in New York. His most recent novels are The Gospel According to the Son (1997), written from the first-person perspective of Jesus Christ, and The Time of Our Time (1998). The Naked and the Dead was made into a film by Warner Bros. in 1958; An American Dream was adapted for film as See You in Hell, Darling, produced by Warner Bros. in 1966. Mailer received an Emmy nomination for best adaptation for his screenplay of The Executioner’s Song. In 2005, the National Book Foundation awarded Mailer its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

NOVELS An American Dream. New York: Dial Press, 1965. Ancient Evenings. Boston: Little Brown, 1983. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. New York: New American Library, 1968. Barbary Shore. New York: Rinehart, 1951. The Deer Park. New York: Putnam, 1955. The Gospel According to the Son. New York: Random House, 1997. Harlot’s Ghost. New York: Random House, 1991. The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart, 1948. The Time of Our Time. New York: Random House, 1998. Tough Guys Don’t Dance. New York: Random House, 1984. A Transit to Narcissus: A Facsimile of the Original Typescript. Edited by Howard Fertig. New York: Fertig, 1978. Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: Putnam, 1967.

SOURCES Amis, Martin. The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986, 57–73. Bailey, Jennifer. Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist. New York: Harper, 1979. Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. Bloom, Harold, ed. Norman Mailer. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Dearborn, Mary V. Mailer: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Farbar, Jennifer L. “Mailer on Mailer,” Esquire, June 1986, pp. 238–240, 243–244, 246–249.

816 MAIN STREET

Glenday, Michael K. Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Gordon, Andrew. An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. Guest, David. Sentenced to Death: The American Novel and Capital Punishment. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Leeds, Barry H. A. “Conversation with Norman Mailer.” In Conversations with Norman Mailer, edited by J. Michael Lennon, 359–377. Literary Conversations Series, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Leigh, Nigel. Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. ———, ed. Conversations with Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Lounsberry, Barbara. The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990, 139–189. Mailer, Adele. The Last Party: Scenes from My Life with Norman Mailer. New York: Barricade Books, 1997. Manso, Peter. Mailer: His Life and Times. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer. Boston: Twayne, 1978. ———. Norman Mailer Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Mills, Hilary. Mailer: A Biography. New York: Empire, 1982. Rollyson, Carl. The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography. New York: Paragon House, 1991. Wenke, Joseph. Mailer’s America. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987.

OTHER Norman Mailer: His Life and Works. Available online. URL: http://www.iol.ie/~kic. Accessed September 23, 2005. Wired for Books: Audio interview with Norman Mailer. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/normanmailer. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MAIN STREET SINCLAIR LEWIS (1920) One of the best known of Sinclair LEWIS’s novels, Main Street is important as a work of social satire and as an exposé that revealed the stifling limitations of small-town life in America. The novel’s heroine, Carol Kennicott, observes that popular literature traditionally depicted the small

town in one of two ways: one insisting on its virtue— that “the American village remains the one sure abode of friendship, honesty, and clean sweet marriageable girls”—and the other celebrating its rustic humor (264). To these Lewis added a third: the small town as “dullness made God” (165). Although works such as Sherwood ANDERSON’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) had already begun to express similar murmurings of discontent, the “revolt from the village,” as the critic Carl van Doren called it, emerged fully into public consciousness with the publication of Main Street. The novel diagnosed what one of its characters, Guy Pollock, calls the “Village Virus”: “the germ [of complacency] which infects ambitious people who stay too long in the provinces” and allows them to sink comfortably into the boredom, hypocrisy, and philistinism of small-town life (156). Advertised largely by word of mouth, Main Street “sold well over 295,000 copies” in the first year of its publication and became “the number-one selling novel not only for the year 1921, but also for the entire period from 1900 to 1925” (Hutchisson, 42). Attacked in newspaper editorials for its alleged distortions of small-town life, parodied, and endlessly discussed, the novel and its title swiftly became a cultural shorthand for the kind of attitudes that Lewis described, so much so that Richmond, Virginia, and Buffalo, New York, among other cities, changed the name of their Main Street to something less evocative of Lewis’s fictional Gopher Prairie (Schorer, 464). Lewis used several techniques to convey his message, including the time-honored device of introducing a cultured outsider into the life and rituals of a village setting. Carol Milford is a sensitive, well-educated librarian with vague notions of social uplift. Bored with her work in St. Paul, she marries Dr. Will Kennicott of Gopher Prairie after he woos her by showing her photographs of a struggling family and suggests that as a doctor’s wife she could help them. After arriving in Gopher Prairie, Carol tries to still her doubts by taking a half-hour walk through the town, a justly celebrated scene that delineates the limited boundaries of her world and presents a vivid catalogue of small-town life. Such details as the “black overripe bananas and lettuce on which a cat was sleeping” in the grocery store window, the “sour smell of

MAIN STREET 817

a dairy” (35–36), the gilded, gaudy ceramic ware of Ye Art Shoppe, and the “unsparing unapologetic ugliness” of the architecture (37) combine with suffocating intensity to illustrate Carol’s entrapment. As in his other works, Lewis also uses parallel scenes to establish his main character’s point of view. Carol’s dismay during her walk, for example, contrasts sharply with the perspective of Bea Sorenson, a Swedish farm girl from Scandia Crossing (population 67) who later becomes Carol’s hired girl; seen from Bea’s perspective, the same features of Gopher Prairie that Carol deplores become objects of interest and excitement. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the model for Gopher Prairie, Lewis satirizes institutions and types alike as Carol, with Progressive Era zeal, tries to improve each feature of small-town life in turn. She is a reformer in a town that, as she gradually realizes, is already self-satisfied to the point of smugness. Her attempts at piercing Gopher Prairie’s dullness include borrowing from exotic cultures and reviving the pioneer past; for example, her first party has a Chinese theme, and she values the Swedish and German customs that do not survive the town’s efforts at Americanizing immigrant cultures. Although Lewis describes at length the dull parties, the commercial rivalries among the town’s elite, and the hypocrisies of its upstanding citizens, he aims his sharpest barbs at the town’s attempts at culture, such as the Thanatopsis Club, a women’s literary society that devotes a single afternoon to studying all the English poets, including Shakespeare, and feels itself enlightened thereby. The dramatic society that Carol organizes, Lewis’s nod to the newly formed Little Theater movement, also fails to bring culture to the town, as the actors vote down performances of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen in favor of the popular play The Girl from Kankakee. Like Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, to whom she has been compared, Lewis’s Carol Kennicott moves gradually from disillusionment to an attempt at escape. A series of quarrels leads her to realize that she and her husband are fundamentally incompatible. They are, she realizes, the eternal aesthete and the eternal Philistine, or, as she puts it, “two races of people, only

two . . . His calls mine ‘neurotic’; mine calls his ‘stupid.’ We’ll never understand each other, never” (294). Aiding her recognition are her encounters with others who want to reform the town: Miles Bjornstam, the town socialist and handyman; the repressed schoolteacher Vida Sherwin; the elderly Mrs. Westlake, who reads to escape; the frustrated businesswoman Mrs. Julius Flickerbaugh; Guy Pollock, a lawyer felled by the “Village Virus”; and even the insufferably pious Widow Bogart, whose dark imaginings about the town’s immorality and Kennicott’s affair with a friend’s wife are both closer to the truth than Carol imagines. Isolated and restless, Carol continues her quest for a meaningful existence. When Erik Valborg, a Swedish tailor and self-taught aesthete, comes to town, Carol falls in love with him and believes she has found her purpose in life, but when he leaves town, she refuses to go with him, instead fleeing to Washington, D.C., to do war work. Some years later, her discontent muted but not silenced, Carol returns to Gopher Prairie and to Kennicott, finding sympathy for the town but remaining no less critical of its flaws. Controversial in its own time for its unflattering depiction of small-town life, Main Street remains a classic, albeit one that fell into critical disfavor during the mid-20th century, when Lewis’s Dickensian realism lost ground to modernist works as a subject of study. Although less well known than it was during the 1920s and 1930s, Main Street remains a significant text for its portrait of the manners, speech, and mores of a vanished America.

SOURCES Bucco, Martin. Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies. New York: Twayne, 1993. Eby, Clare Virginia. “ ‘Extremely Married’: Marriage as Experience and Institution in The Job, Main Street, and Babbitt.” In Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, edited by James M. Hutchisson, 38–51. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1997. Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. Penn State Series in the History of the Book. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920. Lingeman, Richard R. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. New York: Random House, 2002.

818 MAKING OF AMERICANS: BEING A HISTORY OF A FAMILY’S PROGRESS, THE

Marantz Cohen, Paula. “Return to Main Street: Sinclair Lewis and the Politics of Literary Reputation.” In Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, edited by James M. Hutchisson, 5–20. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1997. Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Town, Caren J. “ ‘A Scarlet Tanager on an Ice-Floe’: Women, Men, and History on Main Street.” In Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, edited by James M. Hutchisson, 80–93. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1997. Donna Campbell

MAKING OF AMERICANS: BEING A HISTORY OF A FAMILY’S PROGRESS, THE GERTRUDE STEIN (1925) First published in 1925, Gertrude STEIN’s The Making of Americans holds a central place among both American and international modernist writing. Given its massive size (925 pages) and difficult prose style, the novel challenges a comfortable and unengaged reading experience; yet, for Stein, that is just the point. The word “progress” in the novel’s subtitle functions in contradictory, though not irresolvable, ways. From Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” to discourses lauding developments in economy, industry, and transportation, the American identity has always keyed in to the notion of progress, of continual improvement and advancement; likewise, the reader typically works her way through a novel, revealing the mechanics of the plot through a progression through the work’s pages and development. However, with The Making of Americans, Stein problematizes such notions of progress, both with respect to the interconnected family histories of the Dehnings and Herslands in particular, and the experience of reading the novel in general. Frames of reference and chronological ordering fall away from the movement of the narrative. In the words of David Lodge: “Gertrude Stein virtually eliminated events from The Making of Americans because she was more interested in capturing—what she herself called a ‘continuous present’ ” (Lodge, 147). This continuous present, marked not only by the tense of the verbs and time of narrative, but also by the time in which the reader engages the text, allows Stein to break open the restrictive form of linear narrative.

Though the novel focuses primarily on three generations of the Hersland and Dehning families, both of European descent, Stein weaves constantly between the particular and the general, as the narrator links the lives of the novel’s ostensible characters to universal aspects applicable to all individuals, to all families. Norman Weinstein has argued such a point, as he notes: “When a character has ‘spoken his part’ he returns to that swelling, amorphous mass of ‘everyone’ and ‘some ones’ and ‘all those who are living ones’ and ‘all those who are dead ones’ that comprises the backdrop for the characters of the two families and their significant actions” (Weinstein, 32). Though the novel charts only three generations of the two central families, “We need only realise our parents, remember our grandparents and know ourselves and our history is complete” (3). Nonetheless, the history of the two families follows a pattern of repetition, verbal innovation and inversion, and syntactic variation that challenges a straightforward account of progress, or even reading for that matter. As the narrator of The Making of Americans remarks: “So any one can know about any one the nature of that one from the repeating that is the whole of each one. The whole of everyone is always coming out in repeating” (186). Even at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, Stein performs such repetitions not only thematically, but also structurally and syntactically. At the heart of Stein’s narrative, Alfred Hersland’s pursuit of and subsequent marriage to Julia Dehning serves as one of the most concrete and identifiable events in the novel. However, Stein’s investigation of consciousness, most tangible when considering the narrator’s meanderings and digressions, takes center stage and vies for a level of importance equal to the happenings relegated to the level of plot. In her discussion of the novel, Lisa Ruddick writes: “The plot, which the opening sections promise, is progressively overrun by the characterology; Stein the bourgeois narrator is (almost) consumed by Stein the psychologist” (Ruddick, 68). The narrator’s digressions reveal a rather limited number of character types, into which all Americans, all characters fall. One such characterization rests along the lines of the “independent

MALAMUD, BERNARD 819

dependent” and “dependent independent” character types, Stein writes: “There are then two kinds of women, those who have dependent independence in them, those who have in them independent dependence inside them; the ones of the first of them always somehow own the ones they need to love them, the second kind of them have it in them to love only those who need them, such of them have it in them to have power in them over others only when these others have begun already a little to love them” (165). Though only one example of the different character types Stein develops through her circuitous digressions and stylistic repetitions, this passage highlights the classificatory impetus running throughout the text. Numerous critics have cited the digressions in The Making of Americans to signal the way in which Stein deconstructs the genre of the novel, especially the family saga, to make space for alternative, yet equally valid, interpretations of family life. Franziska Gygax has looked at the way in which such digressions challenge normative conceptions of gender and sexuality through their refusal to yield to conventional reading practices. Gygax remarks: “As a woman who does not fit into the traditional pattern of a woman’s role, that is, being a homosexual and a writer, Stein—could not follow the patrilinear narrative; instead she disrupted it and created portraits in order to describe persons” (Gygax, 18). Such a reading demonstrates how even in the midst of so many digressions and repetitions, each sentence, each phrase carries a specific weight and calculated function for Stein. Read along these lines, The Making of Americans simultaneously deconstructs notions of progress and normative conceptions of the family through Stein’s curiously unsettling and demanding prose. Though certain sentences seem to show only the slightest variation from those that precede them, that slight variation provides the insight necessary for the emergence of a difference central to Stein’s project. Barbara Will notes: “Repetition would function in this way as what liberates difference, as what resembles but is never ‘exactly the same’ ” (Will, 50). Take, for example, the following sentence: “I am very much interested in men and women having sense for being ones being in

being living, for men and women having sense for being ones succeeding in being living, succeeding feeling being living, succeeding in winning anything in being one being living, succeeding in living to themselves to any one, in men and women being married ones” (682). Of the 59 words the sentence comprises above, the word “being” appears nine times; the “-ing” word ending 23 times. Though arguably such repetition creates a sense of visibility, of importance placed on this one word, perhaps Stein’s calculated use of the word highlights something else, something subtler about the nature of writing itself. No matter how similar any singular clause containing the word “being” may appear to others that also feature it, the minutest variation opens the space for difference, for a slightly different perspective that does not, cannot, contain the exact same meaning or force. As a whole, The Making of Americans generates and consciously preserves this difference throughout the narrative, only superficially concerned with traditional notions of family and progress.

SOURCES Gygax, Franziska. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Lodge, David. “Gertrude Stein.” In The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 144–154. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977. Ruddick, Lisa. Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Weinstein, Norman. Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1970. Will, Barbara. Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius.” Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Zachary Weir

MALAMUD, BERNARD (1914–1986)

One of the preeminent writers of the last half of the 20th century, novelist and short story writer Bernard Malamud won both critical and popular acclaim, garnering two National Book Awards, for The Magic Barrel (1958) and The Fixer (1966); and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for

820 MALAMUD, BERNARD

The Fixer. Many readers and critics consider The Assistant (1957) to be his most accomplished novel. Malamud, along with Saul BELLOW and Philip ROTH composing the triumvirate of Jewish-American literature as they were sometimes called, was known for his characteristic blending of fantasy and reality, folktale or myth, as his characters—Jews and non-Jews metaphorically imprisoned by their individual ghettos—both seek moral guidance, survival, and even salvation. His writings contain both the joy and the pain in the lives of ordinary people who were often isolated and lonely; he was also adept at conveying the sense of Yiddish speech and in leavening the serious with humor and wit. Malamud was awarded the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in 1983. Bernard Malamud was born on April 28, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to Max Malamud, a grocery store manager, and Bertha Fidelman Malamud. Reared in New York City, he was educated at the City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1936, and Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in 1942. He married Ann de Chiara on November 6, 1945, and published The NATURAL in 1952. On one level the story of the downfall of Roy Hobbs, an American baseball player, many readers also recognize in the story the mythic elements of the quest for identity drawn from Arthurian legend, Greek myth, Judeo-Christian culture, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and the American national sport. In 1957 he published The Assistant, in which he portrayed the characters who would become typical for him here: Jewish immigrant Morris Bober, a Brooklyn grocery store owner, becomes mentor to the anti-Semitic Italian-American wanderer Frank Alpine. Alpine, who has a love affair with Morris’s daughter Helen, grows spiritually and emotionally as a result of Bober’s lessons on the goodness of the human soul; Bober has been seeking a son just as Alpine has been seeking a father, and on Bober’s death, Alpine converts to Judaism. The best-selling and picaresque A New Life (1961), a satire of academic life, depicts Seymour Levin, a professor at a Pacific Northwest College who is escaping his alcoholic past in New York City. Loosely based on Malamud’s own experiences at Oregon State University, the novel

reveals the hypocrisy of academic freedom and the romantic notions of rural life as Levin engages in an affair with Pauline Gilley, wife of his soon-to-be department head; he wins her in a Pyrrhic victory, since he also loses his future in academia. The Fixer is based loosely on the infamous 1913 blood libel trial of Mendal Beiless in Russia under the rule of Czar Nicholas II. Malamud’s protagonist, Yakov Bok (bok means “goat”), endures the pain, suffering, and humiliation of imprisonment and learns that he cannot escape his Jewish identity; for most readers, he becomes emblematic of all Russian Jews. On a personal level, he is able to acknowledge his part in the infidelity of his present wife, Raisl, while on a more general level he becomes a courageous hero who stands up to tyranny. Pictures of Fidelman (1969) is another picaresque novel, experimentally comprised of a series of stories about the struggling art student, Arthur Fidelman, who finds meaning in art during his study in Italy, and moves from second-rate painting to first-rate glassblowing. The Tenants (1971) features the Jewish novelist Harry Lesser and the black novelist Willie Spearment, the only remaining tenants in a soon-to-be-demolished apartment building. Although they cooperate initially, they begin to fight, Harry steals Willie’s white girlfriend, and the two men end up violently destroying each other. Malamud’s last novels were Dubin’s Lives (1979) and God’s Grace (1982). Dubin’s Lives depicts middleaged married biographer William Dubin and his attempt to find meaning in a frustrating affair with Fanny, who rekindles his ability to write. In God’s Grace, often referred to as a parable, paleontologist Calvin Cohn is the last human alive in the aftermath of nuclear war. Bernard Malamud died on March 18, 1986, in New York City. His manuscripts are housed at the Library of Congress, while his letters are in libraries at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts, and the New York Public Library. The numerous films made from his work include the novels The Fixer, filmed by John Frankenheimer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and released in 1969; and The Natural, starring Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, Robert Duvall as Max Mercy, Glenn Close as Iris Gaines, and Kim Basinger as Memo Paris,

MALTESE FALCON, THE 821

directed by Barry Levinson for Tri-Star Pictures and released in 1984.

———, ed. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.

NOVELS

OTHER

The Assistant. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1957. Dubin’s Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979. The Fixer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966. God’s Grace. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. The Natural. New York: Harcourt, 1952. A New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961. The Tenants. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971.

Novels by Bernard Malamud. Available online. URL: http:// www2.dokkyo.ac.jp/~esemi006/malamud/art/novels01.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005. Bernard Malamud. Available online: URL: http://www. emanuelnyc.org/bulletin/archive/35.html. Accessed September 23, 2005.

SOURCES

MALTESE FALCON, THE DASHIELL HAM-

Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. Alter, Iska. The Good Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud. New York: AMS Press, 1981. Astro, Richard, and Jackson J. Benson, eds. The Fiction of Bernard Malamud. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977. Avery, Evelyn G. Rebels and Victims: The Fiction of Richard Wright and Bernard Malamud. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1979. Bloom, Harold. Bernard Malamud. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Cohen, Sandy. Bernard Malamud and the Trial by Love. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 1974. Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field, eds. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York: New York University Press, 1970. ———, eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Hershinow, Sheldon J. Bernard Malamud. New York: Ungar, 1980. Kosofsky, Rita Nathalie. Bernard Malamud: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1969. Lasher, Lawrence M., ed. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Meeter, Glen. Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth: A Critical Essay. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1968. Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Roth, Philip. Reading Myself and Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1975. Salzburg, Joel. Bernard Malamud: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985.

METT

(1930) There is general agreement that Dashiell HAMMETT’s The Maltese Falcon is one of the most influential of all detective stories, rivaled, perhaps, only by Poe’s “Murder in the Rue Morgue,” which established the conventions of the genre, and by Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, which presented the archetypal detective, Sherlock Holmes, in his greatest full-length adventure. Sam Spade was not the first of the hard-boiled detectives; he was not even Hammett’s first hard-boiled detective. He was, however, almost immediately recognized as the paragon of the new tough type of detective: a cynical, wisecracking (e.g., Joel Cairo: “you have always, I must say, a smooth explanation ready.” Sam Spade: “What do you want me to do? Learn to stutter?” [474]), womanizing, clever, and dedicated private eye. At a time when the most celebrated detectives were cerebral masters of inference (Philo Vance, Ellery Queen, Hercule Poirot, Peter Wimsey), Spade showed that street smarts were also an effective investigative tool, and that verbal and physical conflict with witnesses and with cops could be as revealing as subtle interrogation of butlers and close examination of cigarette ashes. The key to Spade’s distinctive achievement lies in the world in which Hammett placed him, a world that Raymond Chandler famously described: “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes” (Chandler, 989). The result is that Sam Spade’s world

822 MALTESE FALCON, THE

is, to use a vexed but appropriate term, realistic. If Spade is not quite an ordinary man doing an ordinary job, he is certainly not an extraordinary man pursuing detection as an extraordinary pastime. Spade inhabits a San Francisco that can be traced street by street on a map; he knows those mean streets, and he (unlike his partner, Miles Archer) knows how to walk down them without losing his life. Archer’s murder is the crime that frames the action of the novel. He is killed while attempting to aid Spade and Archer’s newest client, the lovely Miss Wonderly, in rescuing her misguided sister from an ill-starred relationship with a cad named Floyd Thursby. The police suspect Spade himself might be the killer; Archer’s wife, with whom Spade has had an affair, shares this suspicion. Spade declines to cooperate with the police investigation: “I’ll bury my dead” (404), he says; but instead of concentrating on Archer’s murder, he becomes further involved in the affairs of Miss Wonderly, who now identifies herself as Brigid O’Shaughnessy. O’Shaughnessy confesses to having been involved in an unspecified adventure with Thursby, who has now also been murdered. Spade agrees to protect her, even as he insists that he does not trust her. His mistrust is justified. It eventually emerges that O’Shaughnessy and Thursby were part of a larger conspiracy to steal the Maltese Falcon, a priceless, jewelencrusted relic of the medieval Knights of Rhodes. The other conspirators include the effete Joel Cairo, the fat Casper Gutman, and Gutman’s gunsel, Wilmer Cook. At some point, each conspirator betrays one or more of the others: There is no honor among thieves. Nor, given Spade’s affair with Iva Archer, is there much honor among detectives. Immediately after sleeping with O’Shaughnessy, Spade rifles her apartment; and when challenged by Gutman, he is willing to make the woman he loves strip before witnesses to prove whether she has stolen a thousand-dollar bill. But Spade does, ultimately, make one claim to honor. At the end of the novel, in the single most memorable scene in detective fiction, Sam finds himself alone with Brigid. He has turned the case over to the police, giving them the evidence they need to arrest Gutman, Cairo, and Cook for the murders of Thursby and another

accomplice, Captain Jacobi. But he has not, as it appeared, forgotten about the first murder, that of his partner. The murderer is, he declares, Brigid. And although he may now be in love with her, he will turn her over to the police. He enumerates seven reasons for doing so, beginning with the idea that a man is supposed to do something when his partner is killed and ending with the idea that Brigid has played him for a sucker. It is this minimalist ethic—a detective buries his own, completes his job, refuses to be a sap—that defines the moral core of the hard-boiled detective. He cannot afford to value love, and it is this antiromanticism that made him a romantic icon in the dark world of the mean streets of urban America. The Maltese Falcon made Spade the icon. He was so popular that Hammett wrote three pot-boiling short stories featuring Spade in 1932. But it was the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, directed by Walter Huston and featuring Humphrey Bogart as the detective and Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, that assured Spade’s status. The screenplay followed the plot of the novel closely and adapted much of the dialogue directly from Hammett. It is widely acclaimed as the masterpiece in the genre of film noir, and it has installed Spade-Bogart as the archetype of the hard-boiled detective.

SOURCES Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” In Later Novels & Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. Dooley, Dennis. Dashiell Hammett. New York: Ungar, 1984. Gale, Robert L. A Dashiell Hammett Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Hammett, Jo. Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001. Johnson, Diane. Dashiell Hammett: A Life. New York: Random House, 1983. Layman, Richard. Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979. ———. Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. ———, and Julie M. Rivett, eds. Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001.

MALTZ, ALBERT 823

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. ———. Dashiell Hammett. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Mellen, Joan. Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. New York: HarperCollins, 1966. Metress, Christopher, ed. The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Nolan, William F. Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally & Loftin, 1969. ———. Hammett: A Life on the Edge. New York: Congdon and Weed, 1983. Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Symons, Julien. Dashiell Hammett. San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Wolfe, Peter. Beams Falling: The Art of Dashiell Hammett. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980. J. K. Van Dover

MALTZ, ALBERT (1904–1985) Although Albert Maltz was best known for the screenplays of This Gun for Hire (1942), Destination Tokyo (1944), Pride of the Marines (1945), The Naked City (1948), or, more recently, Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), he was also a novelist and short story writer, much of whose work exemplifies the protest literature of the 1930s. Maltz was one of the Hollywood Ten, those who refused to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee during the anti-Communist hearings of 1947. During the years he was blacklisted from the Hollywood studios, Maltz wrote offscreen fiction, including essays, novels, and screenplays for which he did not receive onscreen credit. His most popular novel was The Cross and the Arrow (1944), which was on the best-seller lists. Albert Maltz was born on October 28, 1908, in Brooklyn, New York, to Bernard Maltz, a builder, and Lena Sherry Maltz. He was educated at Columbia University, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1930. He joined the Communist Party in 1935 and married Margaret Larkin two years later; after the marriage ended in divorce in 1963, he married Rosemary

Wyld in 1964. After her death in 1968, he married Esther Engelbert in 1969. Maltz had gone to Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1941, but his refusal to testify at the McCarthy hearings in 1947 ended that career. He served a prison sentence for contempt of court from June 1950 to April 1951, after which he moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico. He returned to Los Angeles in 1962 and worked there until his death on April 26, 1985. His novels include The Underground Stream: An Historical Novel of a Moment in the American Winter (1949), about the attempt to unionize the auto industry in the face of employer opposition. The Cross and the Arrow, his best-selling novel about the German anti-Nazi resistance movement, features Willi Wegler, a decorated factory worker who turns against his superiors. The Journey of Simon McKeever (1949) is concerned with 73-year-old arthritic McKeever, who escapes from a nursing home and searches for the perfect community. A Long Day and a Short Life (1957), a fictional account of Maltz’s nine months in jail, is Maltz’s articulation of his ideal of democratic solidarity; and A Tale of One January: A Novel (1966), published in England and preferred by most critics, follows two women who escape from the Auschwitz death camp, one of whom finds true independence and self-fulfillment. The unfinished Bel Canto is a World War II novel about the French Resistance. Maltz’s fiction demonstrates, despite oft-noted images of imprisonment and confinement, his unwavering belief in the democratic ideals and traditions of the country that produced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.

NOVELS The Cross and the Arrow. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946. The Journey of Simon McKeever. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. A Long Day and a Short Life. New York: International, 1957. A Tale of One January: A Novel. London: Calder & Boyars, 1967. The Underground Stream: An Historical Novel of a Moment in the American Winter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1940.

SOURCES Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Viking, 1980. Salzman, Jack. Albert Maltz. Boston: Twayne, 1978.

824

MAMA DAY

MAMA DAY GLORIA NAYLOR (1988)

Set on the fictional Willow Springs, an island located on the eastern coast of the United States exactly between South Carolina and Georgia, Gloria NAYLOR’s third novel tells the story of an African-American community that triumphed over slavery and continues to thrive as the new millennium approaches. The novel’s main characters are Miranda, or Mama Day, the community’s midwife and healer, and her grandniece, Ophelia Day, nicknamed Cocoa, who falls in love in New York and eventually brings her city-bred husband to her remote island home. Minor characters include Dr. Buzzard, a community bootlegger and would-be witch doctor, and Bernice Duvall, a young woman whom Miranda helps to conceive a child and who then tragically loses that child in a storm. Naylor emphasizes the importance of both European and African cultures to the island’s inhabitants. For example, most of Willow Springs’s residents descend from an original couple: Bascombe Wade, a European land and slave owner, and Sapphira, a slave of “pure African stock” (2) with whom he falls in love and to whose children he eventually deeds all his land. Sapphira’s escape from her new world also has roots in African and African-American folklore and myth. Many former slaves recounted folk legends about early, enslaved Africans who flew back home. Many of the inhabitants of Willow Springs believe that Sapphira also flew back to Africa and to freedom: “and when she left, she left in a ball of fire to journey back home east over the ocean” (111). Other European cultural references include numerous allusions to the plays of Shakespeare. After her daughter, Peace, dies, the eldest Ophelia (Sapphira’s granddaughter and Miranda’s mother) drowns herself in the sound off the island’s coast. Ophelia, of course, is best known as the doomed lover of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, and she, too, commits suicide by drowning. George, the younger Ophelia’s husband, is an avid reader of Shakepeare. In addition, Miranda Day shares a name with the heroine of The Tempest, and life-changing storm wracks both Shakespeare’s island and Naylor’s.

Along with the European written tradition, the island has a rich oral tradition similar to that of precolonized Africa. Each year on December 22, the community members participate in a commemoration of the island’s first couple, Sapphira and Bascombe Wade. The meaning of this celebration, called Candle Walk, is passed on orally from generation to generation, and as Miranda notes, this meaning changes as the society changes: “In her young days Candle Walk was different still. . . . And Miranda says that her daddy, John-Paul, said that in his time Candle Walk was different still” (111). The spread of the legend of Sapphira Wade and of Candle Walk, like any shared literature, fosters unity and acceptance in the community. George, Ophelia’s city-bred husband, cannot accept all aspects of himself and his heritage, let alone the unusual customs of the island. Abandoned as an infant and raised in the Wallace P. Andrews Home for Boys, George had been taught by the matron to respect rules, facts, and the power of his own mind and hands. The matron’s mantra had been “Only the present has potential, sir.” The boys received a thorough education based on European culture and rational, scientific, masculine ideals. Other qualities, such as emotion, spirituality, or dependence, were considered dangerous luxuries for an abandoned bastard child. Though George’s education has prepared him to compete in the modern American world, it has left him incomplete, unable to access his heritage or his emotions, as evidenced by his physical disability, a weak heart. George never feels this spiritual and emotional incompleteness until he meets and falls in love with Ophelia. Ophelia and her family challenge George to access parts of himself that had long been buried. When Ruby, a jealous woman of Willow Springs, puts a curse on Ophelia that threatens her life, George refuses to accept the supernatural causes for her illness. A hurricane blown in from Africa, however, destroys the only bridge to the mainland, the only access to Western medicine. Mama Day enlists George’s help in a curing ritual, seeking to combine his love with her own to defeat the curse on Ophelia. Mama Day places in George’s hands a ledger that had

MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE, THE 825

belonged to Bascombe Wade—the ledger that records the purchase of Sapphira—and a walking cane topped with carved snakes that had belonged to Mama Day’s father. And she gives George a mission: to walk to her henhouse, reach under the nest of the biggest hen, “and come straight back here with whatever you find” (295). Though the mission seems like a foolish game to George, each of the objects involved has symbolic significance for the blending of energies. The ledger represents the European heritage of Bascombe Wade and the idealization of rational orderliness and control that system privileges. The phallic staff is the masculine power of male ancestors. The nesting hens are fertile feminine energy, and hens are also used in the divining and fertility rituals that Miranda performs; they provide access to a magic-based African belief system. George, however, is incapable of incorporating Miranda’s view of reality into his own. Finding nothing under the hen’s nest, he exclaims, “There was nothing that old woman could do with a pair of empty hands” (301). Of course, George’s offering of empty hands, representing his acceptance of and cooperation with her power, is exactly what Miranda wants. Instead, George lashes out at the hens in impotent rage, taxing his weak heart beyond its limits. George’s sacrificial death by heart attack enables Ophelia to survive, and in his death he becomes a type of Christ figure complete with stigmata. Ophelia, after recovering from her illness and her grief, stands poised to take Miranda’s place as the community medium. Naylor’s use of unexplained fantastic events in a realistic narrative has been labeled magical realism. She also uses the fantastical or magical in the communal voice that begins and ends the novel. The voice draws readers in during the novel’s opening section: “Think about it: ain’t nobody really talking to you. . . . Really listen this time: the only voice is your own” (10). By demolishing the boundaries between omniscient and limited omniscient points of view, this voice blurs the borders of individual characters’ consciousnesses, forming a collective consciousness of which all partake. This same strategy also obscures the borders between the reader and the novel. Finally, at the novel’s end, we learn that much of the narrative we have just

read is from conversations Ophelia holds with George years after his death, conversations that readers have unknowingly eavesdropped upon. Sitting above the sound in which the elder Ophelia Day had drowned, the younger Ophelia discusses the past with George’s spirit, trying to make sense of what happened to them. This narrative strategy that reveals the supernatural origins of the tale only after we have become invested in the characters and their stories challenges the reader to broaden his or her world view, to accept the possibility that the dead influence the living and that time is not necessarily linear.

SOURCES Felton, Sharon, and Michelle C. Loris, eds. The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Gates, Henry Louis, and K. A. Appiah, eds. Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Random House, 1988. Stave, Shirley A. Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Wilson, Charles E., Jr. A Critical Companion to Gloria Naylor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Betina Entzminger

MAMBO KINGS PLAY SONGS OF LOVE, THE OSCAR HIJUELOS (1989) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990, Oscar HIJUELOS’s tale of music, passion, and self-destruction, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, was also nominated for both the National Book Critics Circle and the National Book Award. Translated into more than 20 languages, the novel was adapted in 1992 for a Warner Brothers film of the same name, starring Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas as the Castillo brothers, Cesar and Nestor. As the first Latino writer to receive the Pulitzer, Hijuelos has been critically acknowledged alongside such Latin American authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende, and Gabriel García Márquez. Hijuelos, however, points out stylistic differences between Mambo Kings and other works in the Latin American “magical realism” style—a whimsical, often particularistic prose style in which a completely fluid reality is

826 MAN CALLED HORSE, A

accepted as normal. Hijuelos refers to Mambo Kings stylistically as “lyrical realism”—which “conveys an exuberant, almost musical rendition of the reality of very ordinary lives” (452). The story line narrates the remembrance and regret of Cesar Castillo’s final hours as he sits drinking in a rundown hotel room with his thoughts immersed in the past. Overwhelmed by life, loss, and the people and events that crowd his memories, he listens to recordings made by his band, the Mambo Kings. His brother is long dead, his lovers are gone, and all that remain are memories of his triumphant rise to fame and reruns of the most important moment of his life— their performance of his brother’s song, “Beautiful Maria of My Soul,” on an episode of the popular TV series I Love Lucy. The chapters chronicling Cesar’s memories are simply divided into “Side A” and “Side B,” bracketed at the beginning and end by the contextualizing narration of Eugenio Castillo, Cesar’s nephew and the late Nestor’s son. Cesar has checked into a room at the Hotel Splendor with the remaining artifacts of his diminished life: his record player, a stack of records, and several bottles of liquor. Now 62 years old, Cesar suffers from failing health, and he can no longer drink alcohol or have sex—two critical elements in his sense of masculine identity. A shadow of the vibrant man he once was, he has come to the Hotel Splendor to review his life and reassert his control over it by determining when and how it will end. He drinks himself to death and is found the next morning, smiling, with a glass still in his hand and a handwritten copy of the lyrics to “Beautiful Maria of My Soul” nearby—a final testimony to his love for his brother, his success as a performer, and his failure as a man. This bent for self-destruction is a significant factor in the lives of both brothers. Cesar’s walk toward death is deliberate and thickly overlaid with the taint of machismo, unfocused passion, and shallowness, all embodied in a character that some critics have considered stereotypical and flawed (Hornby, 33). Nestor’s death, on the other hand, is accidental but functioned only to end the charade of a life half-lived—overshadowed by the specter of deep, ravaging, unattainable

love for a former lover—the “Maria” of his song. Nestor, the more gentle and sensitive of the brothers, moves through life as though his very existence holds nothing of value for him, save obsessively writing and rewriting “Beautiful Maria” in 44 versions as penance to lost love. After Nestor’s death, Cesar turns away from all the vitality and creativity in his life and merely grows tragic as he ages. Unable to affirm his sense of self due to illness and insecurity, he rages until he finds himself alone and ready to die. For both brothers, success and failure, passion and pain, life and death, all blend together in the lyrics of a sorrowful love song.

SOURCES Hornby, Nick. “Cuban Heels,” Listener 123, no. 3,158 (March 29, 1990): 33. Kanellos, Nicholas. “Review of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” American Review 18, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 113–114. McGuigan, Kathleen. “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” Newsweek, 21 August 1989, p. 60. “Q&A with ‘Mambo Kings’ Author Hijuelos,” Arizona Daily Star, 30 July 2004, p. F47.

OTHER Reading Group Guides.com. “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” Available online. URL: http://www. readinggroupguides.com/guides/mambo_kings_play_ songs_of_love.asp. Accessed September 23, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

MAN CALLED HORSE, A DOROTHY JOHNSON (1953) Born in Iowa and raised in Whitefish, Montana, Dorothy M. JOHNSON wrote fiction reflecting the Old West values that she learned as a child. Her work, however, has failed to receive the critical success it deserves, perhaps because the film adaptations of these works have become so famous. John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which starred John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, has become a classic, and both Hanging Tree (starring Gary Cooper) and A Man Called Horse (starring Richard Harris) were successful films in their own right. All three have become standard titles in the western film genre and have worked their way into the American consciousness. But another reason that Johnson’s stories have failed to receive critical acclaim is that they revolve around the

MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE 827

romanticized plots that are a product of the western “myth,” a trait that has caused many western works to be relegated to the status of “popular” rather than “literary” fiction. A Man Called Horse gives readers another story of an easterner who goes west, but this typical plot has a unique twist. Leaving his life of privilege in the East, a nameless protagonist is captured by Crow Indians, made to live like a horse, and eventually adopted into the tribe after he kills members of an enemy tribe, and he is even allowed to marry the sister of his captor. He wants to escape and return to New England to share his story with others, but he finds himself feeling an emotional attachment to his mother-in-law, who, after the death of her son in battle and her daughter in childbirth (with the white man’s child), has nothing left. The easterner finally recognizes her as “Eegya” (mother) and is able to leave only after her death. The problems with the story are obvious today. The Crows are described in negative ways (as savages and animals), yet the adoption of the easterner is completely romanticized—a reflection of the white Europeans’ “noble savage” mythology. While the Crows in the story have little value as humans, the easterner still wants to be a part of their tribe and holds their values and bravery as sacred and honorable. While it is difficult to find literary criticism about this work, many of the commentaries on the film adaptation are well suited to exploring the story itself. One of these, written by the American Indian activist and critic Ward Churchill, calls the film “a massive misrepresentation of a whole variety of real peoples” (237). Nonetheless, Johnson’s stories have, like many others, helped promote the myth of the American West, which is a large part of the American cultural identity, and they should also be read in this light, for better or worse.

SOURCES Brown, Bill, ed. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997. Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1992.

Johnson, Dorothy M. A Man Called Horse. In Indian Country, 180–197. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. ———. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In Indian Country, 89–107. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. James Mayo

MANCHURIAN

CANDIDATE,

THE

RICHARD CONDON (1959) CONDON’s novel about a Congressional Medal of Honor winner programmed by Chinese brainwashers, during his internment as a prisoner of war in Korea, to assassinate an American politician was the basis of the 1962 film of the same name directed by John Frankenheimer, which was yanked from distribution following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A best-seller on first publication, it has enjoyed a reputation and readership that has grown with every reissue or remake of that film, while both book and film continue to grip the popular imagination due to increasing contemporary anxieties about the possibilities of mind control. Like all conspiracy narratives, Condon’s masterful example of “poplore” consolidated and further disseminated amorphous folkloric anxieties already circulating in the culture. These had lodged in the American imagination because they were symptomatic of its worldview, of what it was prone to accept as credible and within the nature of things. Post–Korean War press reports about the successful Chinese brainwashing of GIs were credible because multiple social and cultural processes had already begun to destabilize traditional American convictions about the autonomy of the individual and the feasibility of self-reliance. Similarly, admonitions by the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy about “the enemy within” had played their part in weakening American conviction regarding the durability of a political order based on rational public discourse. The ever-changing tally of Condon’s fictional senator John Iselin regarding the exact number of communists in the government satirizes not only McCarthy’s notorious quantification of communists in the State Department in 1950, but also more fundamental processes of social and psychological destabilization. But these are by no means the only psychosocial anxieties regarding

828 MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE

the loss of individuality, autonomy, order, and rationality that Condon converges and mobilizes. One of Condon’s most inspired imaginative touches is his conflating of anxieties about the threat of totalitarian communism and racist anxieties about the “Yellow Peril”—which, given the hierarchy of power satirized by the book, supersedes the threat of the “Red Menace”—into anxieties about the perceived feminization of American culture, which had been memorably formulated a few years earlier by Philip Wylie’s denunciation of “momism” in A Generation of Vipers (1942, but reissued 1955). The assassin’s cold, calculating, dominating, and manipulative mother, the emblematic mastermind of the would-be coup, exerts totalitarian surveillance of and control over the structures of her son’s unconscious mind. By means of such characterization, Condon’s paranoid plot dramatically mobilizes, indeed allegorically encodes, aspects of the American political unconscious, an ideological substructure of vague intimations, and by so doing he has contributed much to what the cultural critic Frederic Jameson has identified as the definitive product of postmodern conspiracy discourse: “disclosure of a non-individual unconsciousness made up of thoughts and myths belonging to nobody in particular” (63). In the manner of most conspiracy narratives, The Manchurian Candidate not only conveys a state of emergency, in the sense of an impression of imminent threat; it also symbolizes, in the manner of a symptom, the State in emergency. Both meanings of the word state, the condition and the complex governmental and ideological apparatus, are metaphorically encapsulated through a “negation of space and reduction of distance” that registers, in narrative and descriptive terms, the omnipresence of the conspiracy: its “ability to move across space, immediately and virtually unnoticed” (Fenster, 122). A conceptually witty example of the conflation of time and space that also symptomatically represents the uncanny conflation of aforementioned psychosocial anxieties can be observed in the scene in which the hypnotized and delusional GIs see their Chinese and Soviet captors as a group of New England matrons attending a lecture on flowers. Condon’s story also extrapolates and mobilizes an informa-

tion trope in the manner of all conspiracy narratives— be they rumors, urban legends, novels, or overarching explanatory models of history. The narrative is structured by the activity of discovering, exposing, and disseminating information about conspiratorial operations that have stolen or are about to steal history without anybody noticing. Such a narrative structure effectively interrogates the culture’s fundamental propositions and founding beliefs—which is to say, the very epistemological foundations of plausibility, evidence, credibility, credulity, and authoritativeness. The activity of exposing the conspiratorial machinations— e.g., the associative mechanism of the Queen of Diamonds—constitutes a quasi-magical attempt to dispel the spell that holds the state, a social and psychological entity, in the thrall of sleep. It also serves to indicate the fairy tale paradigm that underlies the tough contemporary tone of Condon’s storytelling. Its generic elements aside, one of the pleasures of Condon’s novel, as of the film (which retains a remarkable degree of the original dialogue), derives from the idiosyncrasies of his manner and style. The sardonic tone and lurid detail of the hard-boiled school is interlarded with recondite, sometimes arch, recherché vocabulary and arcane references, producing the impression of “Mickey Spillane with an MFA” (Menand, viii). However, the novel is notably less sentimental than the film version. The assassin, for example, does not nobly kill himself; the monster that he is must be killed by the only man he calls friend, just as he had been compelled to kill his beloved wife and her father. And Condon’s assassin is complicit in his own victimization. Vivid analytical descriptions, such as “Like an angry man with a cane who pokes a hole through the floor of heaven and is scalded by the joy that pours down upon him” (2) accrete over the course of the book to produce a useful diagnostic portrait of the paranoid personality. Raymond Shaw’s alienation and contempt, his arrogant, supercilious tone, overwrought bitterness, ambivalence toward authority, emotional isolation, extreme insistence on privacy, and perhaps most indicative, his excessive personal fastidiousness and punctiliousness—clearly expressed in his abhorrence of the very idea that his person or mind

MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, THE 829

could be (has been) penetrated—are well-known indexes of the fragile, besieged ego structure of the paranoid individual—or State. These indexes may also suggest under what conditions a culture might produce paranoid fantasies of conspiracy insofar as suspiciousness reflects an unconscious attempt to protect that fragile, besieged structure from collapse when confronted with anything sufficiently unexpected as to be capable of symbolizing lack or loss of control.

SOURCES Condon, Richard. The Manchurian Candidate. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. ———. “Manchurian Candidate in Dallas,” Nation, 28 December 1963, pp. 449–451. Fenster, Mark. Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. New York: Knopf, 1965. Jamison, Frederic. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Marks, John. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA and Mind Control. New York: Times Books, 1979. Menand, Louis. “Introduction.” In The Manchurian Candidate. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Thomas, Gordon. Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse. New York: Bantam, 1990. David Brottman

MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, THE DOROTHY JOHNSON (1949) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, first published in Cosmopolitan in 1949, is the story of Ransome Foster, a young eastern “tenderfoot, with his own reasons for being there and no aim in life at all” (Johnson, 90). The story begins with an older Foster, now a senator, returning to the town of Twotrees for the funeral of an old friend, Bert Barricune. The plot shifts its focus when the senator is asked by a reporter why he is attending the funeral instead of working in Washington. Readers are then told the story of how Foster showed up in Twotrees after being beaten by a villain named Liberty Valance,

how he won the hand of a young woman (Bert Barricune’s sweetheart), and how he became known as the “man who shot Liberty Valance.” We also learn that Barricune, not Foster, is the man who actually killed Valance, as Barricune knew that the tenderfoot would be no match for a killer like Valance. But Foster’s political success sprung in part from his reputation as Valance’s killer, and he knows Barricune’s importance in his life: “He was my enemy; he was my conscience; he made me whatever I am” (90). While this story is interesting (especially in the ironic twist concerning who killed Valance), there are elements in the story that may prevent it from being considered a “great” literary work. One of these is the romanticized nature of the plot. This is yet another story of a green easterner who comes west, totally unprepared for the harsh conditions he finds. There is also a heavy emphasis on the “hero” winning out over evil, even though Foster is actually an antihero. Comparing Johnson’s story to a western story that is considered literary may be helpful. In Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel,” an easterner who has spent his time reading dime-store novels of adventure in the west finds himself in a card game, gets drunk, picks a fight, and is stabbed to death by a professional gambler (Brown, 1). There is nothing heroic or romantic about what happens to this tenderfoot. In a more realistic portrayal of western life, Liberty Valance would have killed Ransome Foster. Nonetheless, Johnson’s story has proved to have a strong hold on the American consciousness. The myth of the American West, after all, is a large part of the American cultural identity.

SOURCES Brown, Bill, ed. Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997. Churchill, Ward. Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1992. Johnson, Dorothy M. A Man Called Horse. In Indian Country, 180–97. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. ———. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In Indian Country, 89–107. New York: Ballantine Books, 1953. James Mayo

830

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE NELSON ALGREN (1949) The Man with the Golden Arm won the first National Book Award in 1950. It was Nelson ALGREN’s fourth book, third novel, and first commercial success. In 1955, it was made into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Frank Sinatra (who scooped up the role while Marlon Brando held out for a finished script) as Frankie Machine opposite Kim Novak. Algren was initially hired to write the screenplay, but, as he summed up his Hollywood stint in a later interview, “I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday” (Anderson and Southern, 58). The novel follows Frankie “Machine” Majcinek, recently returned to Chicago from the army hooked on morphine, who works as a backroom poker dealer but dreams of being a jazz drummer. He spends nine months in jail for shoplifting, murders a drug dealer in a moment of confused passion, and, after running from the police, hangs himself in a rented room. The Man with the Golden Arm, in the publisher Daniel Simon’s view, is “an account of a junkie trying to go straight, or in more universal terms, a man pulling his life together—and failing miserably at it” (Simon, 413). James R. Giles places The Man with the Golden Arm as a late work in the tradition of American naturalism, a genre characterized by grotesque imagery, a focus on marginalized groups and individuals, plots that unfold in a mood of environmental determinism, and statements of protest against economic and social inequity. The characters in The Man with the Golden Arm are enclosed by a lack of opportunity, and their fates are slotted into a narrow range of outcomes. A tone of sardonic fatalism pervades the narration and dialogue, discernible in the jazz lingo aphorism with which Frankie Machine frequently meets the disparate examples of human behavior displayed in the novel, that “some cats just swing like that” (315). But while The Man with the Golden Arm can be fruitfully read as a work of naturalism, it also diverges significantly from its generic conventions. Stylistically, William Savage points to the novel’s “highly wrought prose, which most American naturalist writers would have thought

beside the point” as recognizably modernist (Savage, 418). It also differs from the explicitly reformist thrust of most naturalist novels, as Giles explains that “Not an exposé, nor truly social protest, The Man with the Golden Arm is a relentless probing of existential dread among Chicago’s Division Street lumpenproletariat” (Giles, 1989, 56). The existentialist worldview Giles describes suggests a relationship between Algren’s work and French literature, as well as American social conditions (Giles, 1989, 24–37). If Algren paints a bleak picture with a “panoramic view of the urban underclass,” his inner city remains a barometer, receptacle, and scapegoat for a broader economic, social, and political malaise (Horvath). Brooke Horvath emphasizes Algren’s social scheme in relation to the state of the nation, which lies mostly outside the novel’s purview, writing that “what ails Division Street is what ails midcentury America” (Horvath). On the other hand, drawing on the city’s spatial, historical, and economic dimensions, Carlo Rotella offers a tightly localized interpretation of The Man with the Golden Arm as a pivot between industrial and postindustrial Chicago, a “literary epitaph” and “requiem for Nelson Algren’s Chicago” (Rotella, 20, 69). Responding to Chicago’s economic exhaustion, the novel registers, in Rotella’s view, two related shifts in the city and urban literature. Concerning Chicago itself, The Man with the Golden Arm “captures the delicately balanced feel of a transitional postwar moment, as dramatic movements of people and capital began to shape the long urban crisis associated with postindustrial transformation” (Rotella, 22). In Algren’s writing, there was a complementary move from “social critique toward the retrospective, elegiac mood of the decline narrative” (Rotella, 20). Apart from symbolizing a general philosophical ennui of national proportions, The Man with the Golden Arm, in Rotella’s analysis, tells the story of postindustrial decline “as a neighborhood tragedy, so claustrophobically local in scope that the decline seems ungraspable, mysterious, inchoate” (Rotella, 22). The criminal justice system features prominently in The Man with the Golden Arm. During a nine-month stretch in prison, Frankie meditates on the rhythms of

MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, THE 831

prison life, with its motionless clocks, and finds in actual incarceration significant resonance with the lack of freedom felt by all the novel’s characters, for whom imprisonment provides figurative language for everyday experience, as in the landlord known as “Jailer.” From the reverse angle, administering prison experience induces a moral crisis in Sergeant “Record Head” Bednar. Record Head, who banters dryly with offenders and tallies their criminal records with baffled disdain, is unexpectedly shaken by a former preacher who responds to his charge with the declaration that “we are all members of one another” (196). Unable to shake this memory, or Solly “Sparrow” Saltskin’s explanation that “everybody’s a habitual in his heart,” Record Head’s disgust and middle-class propriety dissolve into anxiety and confusion over the habitual detachment with which he carries out his duties, which has stripped him of compassion and left him alienated from others and his own humanity (272). The Man with the Golden Arm also represents an early portrait of “the life and times of a soon-to-be canonical street type, the criminal intravenous drug user” (Rotella, 68). Although Algren initially planned to write a war novel, he later told how “the war kind of slipped away, and those people with the hypos came along” (Anderson and Southern, 39–40). In this respect, perhaps inadvertently, The Man with the Golden Arm represents an important point in the genealogy of junkie antiheroes who would later emerge in the work of such American writers as William BURROUGHS and Hubert SELBY. Forms of humor in The Man with the Golden Arm have drawn particular attention from a number of critics. Giles traces elements of the novel’s humor in relation to various European writers cited as influences by Algren, discussing the inclination toward grotesque comedy of the French author Céline and the sardonic despair of Russian writers such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Boris Akunin (from whom the novel’s opening epigraph is drawn). The novel’s humor, to which Giles applies Algren’s own phrase, “harsh compassion,” humanizes rather than mocks or uses its characters to make a political statement (Giles, 1995, 102). William J. Savage Jr. argues that considering the power of

laughter (both the characters’ and the reader’s) to create and distinguish reading communities is a significant perspective from which to view the novel. In Savage’s account, a given reader’s tendencies to laugh at or with various characters, descriptions, and situations, and whether one, in Algren’s words, “snickers” or “laughs out from the heart” reveals a reader’s own assumptions, commitments, and acts of social identification (Savage, 421). The laughter provoked by each reading experience activates and sustains the novel’s function as a tool of promoting social consciousness. Savage thus connects Algren and his work to “American literary traditions based in vernacular humor” and to “Ambrose Bierce, Finley Peter Dunne, and Mark Twain, writers who satirically exploited the dark humor latent in the direst of situations” (Savage, 418).

SOURCES Algren, Nelson. The Man with the Golden Arm. 1949. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Anderson, Alston, and Terry Southern. “Nelson Algren,” Paris Review 11 (Winter 1955): 37–58. Bruccoli, Matthew, and Judith Bauman. Nelson Algren: A Descriptive Bibliography. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1986. Donohue, H. E. F. Conversations with Nelson Algren. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Drew, Bettina. Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side. New York: Putnam, 1989. Giles, James R. Confronting the Horror: The Novels of Nelson Algren. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989. ———. The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Horvath, Brooke. Understanding Nelson Algren. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Savage, William J., Jr. “The Quality of Laughter: Algren’s Challenge to the Reader.” In The Man with the Golden Arm, 417–422. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Simon, Daniel. “Algren’s Question.” In The Man with the Golden Arm, 411–416. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999. Alex Feerst

832 MAO II

MAO II DON DELILLO (1991)

Mao II, Don DELILLO’s 10th novel, won the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1992 as the best work of fiction by an American author. Mao II is a postmodern novel focusing on the individual psyche among the crowd or society, and the roles of individuals (especially authors and terrorists) in today’s superficially modern culture. DeLillo often focuses on the artificiality or superficiality of late 20thcentury life, and how this artificiality leads to alienation and seclusion. The protagonist of this work, Bill Gray, is a PYNCHON-esque novelist/recluse who comes out of hiding to save a poet taken hostage by terrorists in Beirut, Lebanon. DeLillo romanticizes the role of novelists as intellectual terrorists whose territory is being infringed on by violent interlopers, modern political terrorists who crave nothing more than media exposure for their vile and hateful rhetoric. DeLillo’s characters are voices in the crowd who struggle against the influence of mass media, terrorists, charismatic leaders, and authors who affect the fabric of society. DeLillo places the characters as cogs in the larger social construct of the world, and shows how society can affect the individual and his or her psyche. This illustrates the postmodern fear of globalization and the loss of the individual to the ever-growing global marketplace. Bill Gray argues that we take seriously only the “lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for his faith” (157), and these types of terrorists are the only ones who are not absorbed into the mass of modern popular culture, but only because the global culture has not figured out how to assimilate them yet. Bill Gray also feels that terrorists have been steadily encroaching on the author’s territory of social activism and change. He states, “Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated” (41). He believes that society is moving away from the presentation of ideas and the sharing of knowledge to enact change and resorting more and more to violence to instill fear to bring social revolution. Gray also seems to be taking a bit of a shot at

publishers, with their emphasis on the bottom line as opposed to art. The novel places great emphasis on the importance of fiction as an art or craft and the impact of terrorism on art. This is evidenced when Gray states, “the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art” (157). Terrorists and novelists are closely linked in this novel. As Bill Gray states: what terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous . . . I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured (157). DeLillo’s argument that the roles of authors and terrorists are similar in society is convincing, and one can see the links shared between these two identities. The terrorist tries to destroy the fabric of society as opposed to the novelist, who tries to work within the fabric to construct a different type of society. In Mao II, DeLillo ultimately seeks to idealize and romanticize the place of the novelist in a culture that is growing more artificial and superficial by the day.

SOURCE DeLillo, Don. Mao II. London: Vintage, 1991. Terry Peterman

MARBLE FAUN, THE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1860) The Marble Faun, HAWTHORNE’s romance, is a combination of melodrama, travel essay, critical meditation on art and artists, and essay on comparative religion—all of which are highly inflected with moral and spiritual allegory. The plot has many elements typical of melodrama: a persecuted female innocent, her enigmatic victimizer, her would-be savior, secret crimes placed within the context of metaphysical guilt, the overwrought expression of pent-up emotions, and preoccupation with fatality. The major action is set in 19thcentury Rome. Hawthorne’s Rome is a moral sermon on “the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness” (326).

MARBLE FAUN, THE 833

Persistent references to the sedimentation of death, decay, and dust give oppressive weight to the idea that here “all the weary and dreary Past [is] piled upon the back of the Present” (302). Dreary hovels scavenged from what remain of once magnificent palaces, now decrepit, not only illustrate how “the seeds of antique grandeur” have produced a “squalid crop” (152), they also assault the typically American conviction that there is the “greatest mortal consolation” to be “derive[d] from the transitoriness of all things—from the right of saying, in every juncture, ‘This, too, will pass away’ ” (150). Hawthorne’s atmospheric evocation of picturesque monuments in ruin, catacombs where early Christians hid and were betrayed, and Capuchin cemeteries displaying an uncanny architecture of bones disinterred to make room for the newly dead does more than merely validate the claim that “there is reason to suspect that a people are waning to decay and ruin, the moment that their life becomes fascinating either in the poet’s imagination or the painter’s eye” (296). They also serve to expand the moral, existential, and spiritual implications of his characters’ situations by providing an immemorial context for them. Otherwise, “[t]he very ghosts of that massive and stately epoch have so much density, that the actual people of to-day seem the thinner of the two, and stand more ghostlike by the arches and columns, letting the rich sculpture be discerned through their illcompacted substance” (160). Hawthorne’s plot is generated out of the intense relationship among four friends: two female painters, Hilda and Miriam—the former from New England, the latter of unknown, exotic origins—a male sculptor, Kenyon, who is also from New England, and Donatello, an Italian count whose resemblance to a faun sculpted by the ancient Greek artist Praxiteles gives the book its title. (A faun is a wild forest deity combining in one form the characteristics of a human male with the horns, pointed ears, and tail of a goat.) The psychological predispositions, attributes, skills, motivations, and emotional states of these characters are rendered in detail with a view to their moral and spiritual implications. In the manner typical of alle-

gory, the relationships among the characters tend to be schematically organized—in this case, around the consequences of a murder perpetrated by Donatello in a moment of passion with the intention of saving his beloved Miriam from a mysterious stalker. Hawthorne’s schematic design can best be seen by comparing and contrasting Hilda and Donatello. Both are prodigies of innocence, although the different natures of their innocence could hardly be more pronounced. Donatello’s faunlike qualities—his “eternal youth,” his warmth and playful amiability, his excitability, his childlike capacity for pure joy and other emotions unadulterated by thought, his animal absorption in the sensations of the moment, free of the burden of the past or of apprehension for the future— together with his association with Arcadia, the (unspiritualized) bucolic paradise of antiquity, and with the Golden Age, generally, combine to type him as a creature so naturally “outside of rules” as to be outside “sin, sorrow or morality itself” (13–14). Donatello is indulged and cherished by the others, while being both gently mocked as “underwitted” and whimsically admired for a “simplicity” that, “mingled with his human intelligence, might partly restore what man has lost of the divine!” (71). However doglike he may be in his open devotion, docility, and loyalty, his fearsome protection of his chosen mistress causes him to manifest what had theretofore been merely latent brutishness. In contrast to Donatello’s lack of “moral severity,” the book’s other equally childlike and gentle innocent, Hilda, has an exacting sense of the diametrical opposition of right and wrong, despite her otherwise dovelike qualities and “natural and cheerful piety” (162). Her angelic qualities and spiritually elevated condition are symbolically correlated with her “hermitage,” a medieval tower “high above the turmoil of the world” and its “corrupted atmosphere” (54) that can be accessed only by ascending “heavenward” (53). Though seemingly fragile, Hilda is remarkably self-sufficient, because her spiritual refinement has kept her “blind” to the ugliness all around her. Her devout capacity for “unselfish” reverence and her discerning eye for spiritual excellence in art lead her to forsake nobly any ambition to create original art for the pro-

834 MARBLE FAUN, THE

duction of spiritually exquisite, not merely accurate, copies of great paintings. Hawthorne implies that such activity is akin to acts of spiritual devotion, but he leaves unstated the erotic sublimation in the virginal Hilda’s “generous self-surrender” to the old masters— “her brave, humble magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own” (60–61). Hilda’s art is meant to be contrasted with that of her other schematic opposite, the physically and psychologically darker, gloomy, haunted Miriam, a woman with a past, who does sketches of avenging biblical women (Jael, Judith, and Salome). However, she subverts the idea, if not the mood, of these pictures with pictorial hints of scorn or remorse, reflecting her awareness “that woman must strike through her own heart . . . whatever were the motive that impelled her” (44). While yearning for the absence of memory, conscience, and remorse she had witnessed in Donatello/the faun, Miriam implicitly contrasts herself with Hilda in shrewdly predicting that “She would die of her first wrong-doing;—supposing . . . that she could be capable of doing wrong. Of sorrow, slender as she seems, Hilda might bear a great burthen;—of sin, not a feather’s weight” (12). And in fact, when Hilda witnesses Donatello’s murder and Miriam’s complicity, she becomes heartsick and disconsolate because “the effect was almost the same as if she herself had participated in the guilt. Indeed, partaking the human nature of those who could perpetrate such deeds, she felt her own spotlessness impugned” (329). Her innocence lost, but retaining a severity that Kenyon judges “unworldly and impracticable,” Hilda expels Miriam from her world, thereby severing the “few remaining bonds between [Miriam] and decorous Womanhood” (287). Miriam and Kenyon accuse Hilda at different times of lacking mercy: “You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and therefore you are so terribly severe! As an angel you are not amiss; but, as a human creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you need a sin to soften you!” (209). Both Hilda and Donatello acquire a knowledge of sin and are expelled from their paradise of innocence. But their fall is providential. Donatello loses all semblance of the faun, but “[o]ut of

his bitter agony, a soul and intellect . . . have been inspired into him” (282); while the “chillness of her virgin pride” is gradually “softened out of” Hilda (370). The fact that everything that happens in the book subsequent to the murder serves to explore “the riddle of the Soul’s growth, taking its first impulse amid remorse and pain, and struggling through the incrustations of the senses” (381) serves also to justify the dominant presence in the book of discussions about art, artists, the creative process, and, most important, the reception of art and its effects. When Hawthorne refers, for example, to the immortal incorruptibility of marble yellowed by the corroding capacity of the wet earth, the allegory makes it clear that questions of artistic practice, sensibility, and taste are, ultimately, spiritual questions. Therefore, its “pure . . . undecaying substance” possesses “a sacred character” that places a “religious obligation” on the sculptor not “to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain consecration and a priesthood” (136). Some contemporary readers might feel that melodramatic tension is unduly dissipated when characters break off from their despair or ecstasy to discuss works of art or architecture—stained-glass windows, fading frescos, a portrait of Beatrice Cenci (a Renaissance woman driven by abuse to seek her father’s murder), a depiction of an archangel looking away with repulsion as he steps on the neck of the demon. But this commentary serves to deepen the resonance or expand the implications of their own actions, as well as to indicate their relative capacity to recognize spiritual truth, or its absence, in works of art. Thus, Donatello comes to reject paintings by Fra Angelico, much loved by Hilda, because the innocence of his angels and saints seems merely inexperience, while Miriam presciently critiques in caustic terms Hilda’s overestimation of the depiction of the archangel’s battle with evil: “If it cost her more trouble to be good . . . she would be a more competent critic of this picture. . . . A full third of the Archangel’s feathers should have been torn from his wings; the rest all ruffled, till they looked like Satan’s own!” (183–184). The idea that the object viewed reflects the spiritual condition of the viewer is exemplified as Miriam and Hilda each project their own preoccupations or sense of self onto the Beatrice Cenci

MARQUAND, JOHN P. 835

portrait—Miriam seeing the exceptional sorrow of a guilty conscience that cannot be appeased or expiated and Hilda a senseless sorrow and hopelessness that is so black it is close to being a sin (compare similar ideas in Hawthorne’s parables, “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Ethan Brand”). The spectator’s response to images is also implicated in Hawthorne’s interrogation of Catholic religious practices and the ambivalence they produce in those brought up in Calvinism, “our own formless mode of worship.” Hilda, in particular, is attracted to Catholicism’s provision of public iconography that consoles the despairing and the needful. Deeply appreciating the responsive convenience of its daily masses, its “sympathizing,” once-human saintly mediators, and its ubiquitous shrines to Mary (“a Woman to listen to the prayers of women; a Mother in Heaven for all the motherless girls like me!” [348]), she relieves herself of her tortuous secret knowledge in the confessional. Receiving benediction, she becomes “a figure of peaceful beatitude” (363); but her “fine sense of the fit and decorous” will not let her succumb to the “brilliant illusion” of Catholic imagery by converting, and she remains a “heretic” (366ff). Possessing a new understanding of the relation of sorrow and sin to art that has deepened the “moral virtue” of her already exquisite sensibility, Hilda is no longer as “pliable to influence” and can no longer “yield herself up to the painter so unreservedly” (375). She now recognizes that many esteemed pictures are “but a crust of paint over an emptiness” (341), and that most depictions of Mary display only a “venal beauty” originally rendered for purposes of flattery or seduction. Hilda’s partial loss of receptive “sympathy” for the work of some of the old masters is but one of many variations on a theme so dominant that the word seems to appear on every page of the book. Hawthorne’s understanding of sympathy expands the common usage also to include artistic empathy and capacity for responsive harmony. More than this, it is a moral and spiritual necessity dictated by the human need to participate in “the chain of humanity,” a phrase occurring elsewhere in Hawthorne’s writing. Alienation from our fellows “is

one of the most forlorn” consequences of crime (113), while sin forces on the sinner “the dreariness of infinite and eternal solitude” (305). The concept of sympathy pervades the whole book. Hawthorne emphasizes the artist’s need for the “sympathy” of his or her fellows and praises Rome as a place where, despite their rivalries and mutual jealousies, artists can feel a sense of community and thereby escape the feelings of isolation they have in their home countries; sewing is said to keep women—even those who are artists and thinkers—from morbidity because the activity links them “in communion with their kindred beings” (40). But this sympathetic binding is not a panacea. Donatello and Miriam’s crime unites them “closer than a marriage-bond.” Within the dialectic of sympathy and alienation, while “their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and . . . released [them] from the chain of humanity” (174), they also became one with “the blood-stained city” insofar as their guilt makes them guilty of the totality of human crimes and members of a “confraternity of guilty ones” (176–177). All in all, the art of Hawthorne’s romance is much like that of the bas-relief on a Roman sarcophagus, in which “some tragic incident” is “thrust sidelong into the spectacle, and when once it has caught your eye, you can look no more at the festal portions of the scene, except with reference to this one . . . doom and sorrow” (89).

SOURCES Bell, Millicent. Hawthorne’s View of the Artist. Albany: State University of New York, 1962. Fogle, Richard H. Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun: Or, the Romance of Monte Beni. The Centenary Edition, IV. Edited by W. Charvat et al. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. James, Henry. Hawthorne. Ithaca, N.Y.: Great Seal Books, 1956. David Brottman

MARQUAND, JOHN P(HILLIPS) (1893– 1960) John P. Marquand, like Edith WHARTON, Ellen GLASGOW, Sinclair LEWIS, and James Gould COZZENS, wrote novels of manners that both venerated and sati-

836 MARQUAND, JOHN P.

rized the upper classes. He centered on those of New England, particularly the inhabitants of Boston. He is known for the Pulitzer Prize winner The Late George Apley (1937) and for the mystery series featuring a Japanese detective, Mr. Moto, a diminutive man who speaks flawless English along with numerous Chinese dialects. Marquand made the flashback his trademark in more than 20 novels; typically, his characters are successful professionals immersed in thought and self-analysis, energized by reminiscences. Many of Marquand’s works were adapted for stage and screen. John P. Marquand was born on November 10, 1893, in Wilmington, Delaware, to Philip Marquand, an engineer, and Margaret Fuller Marquand, both descendants of old New England families that included the writer Margaret Fuller. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University in 1915, Marquand served with the U.S. Army Artillery from 1916 to 1917, becoming a first lieutenant. He then began his career as a newspaper copywriter and short story writer, publishing short stories in Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post. He married Christina Sedgwick in 1922. They divorced in 1935; he married Adelaide Hooker, a wealthy member of the Rockefeller family, in 1937. That same year, The Late George Apley was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, and the following year it was published as a book. Described by many critics as brilliant, it focuses on the editor of George Apley’s papers, Horatio Willing. Apley’s son, John, insists that Willing include the bad and the good in the book about his father. The resulting satiric portrait of Willing, who tries to excise such facts as Apley’s affair with a young Irish woman, is matched by Marquand’s exposé of the late George Apley and the society that shaped him. Other significant novels include Wickford Point (1939), a story of the vain, self-centered Bella Brill told through Jim Calder, a writer of fiction for magazines, based on Marquand himself. In H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), Boston businessman and one-time New York advertising executive Pulham, writing an autobiography for his 25th class reunion, recalls his ineffectual attempts to rebel against the culture that produced him. Point of No Return (1949), considered one of Mar-

quand’s best, tells the story of a New York City banker who, while awaiting a promotion to the bank vice presidency, looks back over the social forces that molded him. In the 1930s, Marquand’s travels in the Far East inspired him to create six novels featuring Mr. Moto, the Japanese intelligence officer who repeatedly foils evil. In Stopover: Tokyo (1957), Mr. Moto foils a Soviet plot against the United States. Marquand himself served as special consultant to the secretary of war in Washington, D.C., in 1944 and 1945, and, in 1945, as a war correspondent for Harper’s with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific. The “Mr. Moto” novels were made into motion pictures in the 1930s and 1940s featuring Peter Lorre as the Japanese secret agent. John P. Marquand died on July 16, 1960, on Kent’s Island, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Marquand’s manuscripts are housed at Yale University; most of his correspondence is located at the Harvard University Library.

“MR. MOTO” DETECTIVE NOVELS Last Laugh, Mr. Moto. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942. Mr. Moto Is So Sorry. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938. No Hero. Boston: Little, Brown 1935. Published as Your Turn, Mr. Moto. New York: Berkley, 1963. Stopover: Tokyo. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. Thank You, Mr. Moto. Boston: Little, Brown, 1936. Think Fast, Mr. Moto. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937.

OTHER NOVELS B. F.’s Daughter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946. The Black Cargo. New York: Scribner, 1925. Don’t Ask Questions. London: R. Hale, 1941. H. M. Pulham, Esquire. Boston: Little, Brown, 1941. It’s Loaded, Mr. Bauer. London: R. Hale, 1943. The Late George Apley: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. Melville Goodwin, USA. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Ming Yellow. Boston: Little, Brown, 1935. Point of No Return. Boston: Little, Brown, 1949. Repent in Haste. Boston: Little, Brown, 1945. Sincerely, Willis Wayde. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. So Little Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. The Unspeakable Generation. New York: Scribner, 1922. Warning Hill. Boston: Little, Brown, 1930. Wickford Point. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939. Women and Thomas Harrow. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958.

MARRIED OR SINGLE? 837

SOURCES Bell, Millicent. Marquand: An American Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Birmingham, Stephen. The Late John Marquand: A Biography. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972. Gross, John J. John P. Marquand. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Hamburger, Philip. J. P. Marquand, Esquire. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Holman, C. Hugh. John P. Marquand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries. Boston: Little, Brown, 1958. Marquand, John. Thirty Years. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954. Nicol, Charles. “Frank Lloyd Wright and Mr. Moto,” Paradoxa 1, no. 2 (1995): 224–230. Penzler, Otto. “Mr. Moto.” In The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters, and Other Good Guys. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1977. Rausch, George J. “John P. Marquand and Espionage Fiction,” Armchair Detective 5 (1972): 194–198. Wires, Richard. John P. Marquand and Mr. Moto: Spy Adventures and Detective Films. Muncie, Ind.: Ball State University, 1990.

OTHER The Mr. Moto Novels of John P. Marquand. Available online. URL: http://www.csupomona.edu/~jskoga/moto/. Accessed September 23, 2005. Yale University Library: John P. Marquand Collection. Available online. URL: http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/ beinecke.MARQUAND.com.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Internet Broadway Database: “John P. Marquand.” Available online. URL: http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?ID=6881. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MARRIED OR SINGLE? CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK (1857) In a letter written just after Married or Single? was published, SEDGWICK described it as “a novel without any purpose or hope to slay giants, slavery, or the like, but only to supply mediocre readers with small moral hints on various subjects that come up in daily life” (Dewey, 369). Her conventionally modest disclaimer underestimates her final novel’s scope as well as its achievement. Sedgwick’s Married or Single? can be read as a compendium of the genres that were popularized by 19th-century American women writers, including the seduction novel, the conversion

narrative, the novel of education, and social reform fiction. The novel was both criticized and praised by early reviewers for a moral point of view that was “strongly in favor of married life,” but its realistic situations, characters, and details were generally admired (Damon-Bach and Clements, 250). Modern critics continue to see the novel as a reflection of Sedgwick’s ambivalence about women’s rights (Bardes and Gossett, 36), overlooking the ways in which its careful depiction of the lives of women in New York City at mid-century also presents a decisive movement in women’s fiction toward realism. The novel begins and ends in the typical fashion of domestic fiction, tracing the journey of a beautiful young woman, Grace Herbert, from maiden to matron. Along the way, Grace encounters a variety of suitors, competitors, and comrades causing her romantic notions of marriage to be replaced with a combination of commonsense and Christian ideals. Sedgwick presents the marriage of Grace’s older sister Eleanor to a young minister, with all its struggles and successes, as the epitome of the egalitarian union the novel endorses. Grace, on the other hand, initially enjoys the attentions of Horace Copley, a dilettante and rake, who is busy seducing and abandoning his mother’s young servant girl, Jessie, and enjoying the attentions of a married woman, Mrs. Tallis. When Mrs. Tallis’s neglect of her daughter results in the child’s death and the near ruin of her marriage, the tragedy also affects Grace profoundly. She not only ends her relationship with Copley (leaving the field open for her shallow and avaricious stepsister, Anne), but experiences a religious conversion and vows to become a respectable old maid and dedicate herself to the well-being of others. She briefly enters the working world by giving music lessons, which, the narrator implies, elevates rather than degrades her character. Grace eventually falls in love with and decides to marry an honest, country-bred lawyer, Archibald Lisle. However, what distinguishes this conclusion from that of the traditional domestic novel is Sedgwick’s insistence that Grace has the choice to remain happily unmarried, as well as the fact that Grace’s salvation comes not from marriage but from

838 MARROW OF TRADITION, THE

her decision to reject the superficiality of upper-class society and the marriage market, and to reinvent herself as a worthy human being. Furthermore, Sedgwick’s depictions of other sensible and respectable working women, including Grace’s sister Eleanor, a wife who becomes a school teacher to supplement her husband’s income; her Cousin Effie, a spinster who cares for Eleanor’s children when she decides to work; Julia Travers, a single woman who devotes her life to helping the poor and homeless women; and Letty, a bright young woman from the country who finds gainful employment in the city as a governess suggest that marriage is neither the surest nor the sole source of contentment for a woman. Beyond the central story, Married or Single?’s numerous subplots offer some of the best examples of Sedgwick’s emerging realism, from detailed descriptions of urban situations (including prisons, tenements, and court rooms), to the use of dialect to delineate characters (including Irish immigrants and fugitive slaves) to the use of irony and humor. Her description of the neighborhood surrounding the Tombs (New York City’s most historic jail), where “[o]verburdened women were carrying or dragging along lagging children, and here and there a drabbish-looking outcast, a frightful vestige of womanhood, crouched against the wall” (vol. 2, 122), and her sympathetic portrait of tenement dwellers like Martha, a nearly blind seamstress who is too proud to accept charity, for example, reveal Sedgwick’s concern for the difficulties of poor women’s lives, perhaps a result of her benevolent work with the Women’s Prison Association of New York (DamonBach and Clements, 232–233). The novel’s refusal to idealize romance, its depiction of disappointed wives as well as blushing brides, and its acknowledgment of the harsh realities working women faced anticipates the unsentimental treatment of marriage in works like Edith WHARTON’s The House of Mirth and the emergence of the New Woman at century’s end.

NOVEL Married or Single? New York: Harper and Bros., 1857.

SOURCES Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth-Century

American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Damon-Bach, Lucinda L., and Victoria Clements, eds. Catharine Maria Sedgwick: Critical Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Dewey, Mary, ed. Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New York: Harper, 1871. Kelley, Mary, ed. The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Deborah Gussman

MARROW OF TRADITION, THE CHARLES CHESNUTT (1901) The Marrow of Tradition portrays the devastating consequences of the destruction of dialogue between blacks and whites by racial segregation. Though the novel is now viewed by many readers as Charles CHESNUTT’s greatest achievement, it was not as well received at the time of its publication in 1901. Chesnutt’s contemporary William Dean HOWELLS, unaccustomed to a passionate African-American perspective on racial injustice, did not appreciate the novel’s “bitter” tone (Howells, 882). Howells, a previous champion of Chesnutt’s writing, acknowledged even in his somewhat negative review that Chesnutt’s depiction of the post-Reconstruction South was accurate and just. Nonetheless, The Marrow of Tradition sold and reviewed poorly and marked the beginning of the demise of Chesnutt’s public literary career. Chesnutt bases his plot on a deadly race riot that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, only three years before the novel’s publication. Though some of his characters are loosely based on historical persons, Chesnutt renames the town “Wellington” to reinforce the fictional nature of his narrative. Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning call the novel “one of the most penetrating analyses we have of the culture of segregation” (Chesnutt, 26), because the multifaceted narrative centers on the tragedy of enforced separation of races under Jim Crow laws. One of the earliest scenes in the novel reveals Dr. William Miller, a talented African-American doctor, conversing with a white colleague as he travels by train from the North to the South. After a white passenger complains, Dr. Miller is forced to move to the “colored” car, and even

MARROW OF TRADITION, THE 839

worse, his well-intentioned white colleague is prevented by law from showing friendship or support by accompanying Miller. Chesnutt reveals through this concise scene that Jim Crow law is gradually stifling all chances for dialogue and understanding that might result from the free association of whites and African Americans. The novel relies on a third-person narrator to follow several key groups of characters as their lives converge over the course of the narrative. As Dr. Miller, his light-skinned African-American wife, Janet, and their young son attempt to start their lives in Wellington, the aristocratic white, Major Carteret, and his wife Olivia welcome their first, long-awaited child into the world. The two families share a bond of blood since “black” Janet Miller is the half sister of “white” Olivia Carteret. Their mutual father secretly married Janet’s mother, a slave, after the death of his first wife, Olivia’s mother. Both women know of their kinship, but Olivia refuses to acknowledge it or indeed even to speak to Janet. Olivia’s refusal of the dialogue that Janet would welcome parallels the white supremacist rejection of all contact with African Americans through enforced racial segregation. Major Carteret, Olivia’s husband, personifies the contradiction of the hate-filled white supremacist who still claims to love his black family servants. He and two other leading citizens deliberately foment the animosity that will lead to a race riot by inflaming passions about an African-American newspaper editorial that they claim insults the honor of white women. Tellingly, before the three white supremacists decide to use the article, they must first retrieve the newspaper from the garbage can into which it had been tossed unread (96). The whites have no interest in actually reading the newspaper with an objective mind and thereby allowing the African-American voice a place in cultural dialogue; they seek only to use disembodied African-American words as a tool for destructive purposes. Another major plotline revolves around Sandy, the faithful black servant and former slave of old Mr. Delamere, an honorable white Southern gentleman. Delamere’s depraved grandson Tom frames Sandy for a crime by dressing in blackface to impersonate him. Tom gets away with his crime because he is seen as

“Sandy” only from a distance and thus carries off a strictly visual deception. This scene suggests a theme common in Chesnutt’s work, in which appearance can be deceptive but the voice reveals true identity. Chesnutt sets in motion a huge cast of white and African-American characters of all varieties: white supremacists, black and white doctors, submissive black servants still bound by the plantation mentality, angry revolutionary black men set on vengeance, and women and children tied by blood across racial lines. In the end, it is the children who enable the tragedy and the hope that turn The Marrow of Tradition from protest novel to masterpiece. Dr. Miller’s son is killed by a stray bullet during the riot that Major Carteret has incited; but the major’s son also lies dying from croup. The little white boy can be saved by an operation that only Dr. Miller can perform. At first, bereaved Miller and his wife refuse Carteret’s pleas for mercy, but as Carteret in his agony begs God to change their hearts, they agree at the last moment that Miller will try to save the major’s son. As Miller stands in front of his white relatives’ house, to which he and his family have always been refused entry because of their race, we read the novel’s closing words: “Come on up, Dr. Miller . . . There’s time enough, but not a moment to spare.” In this climactic scene, Chesnutt shows the best hope for racial reconciliation in America: no-holdsbarred open dialogue between whites and African Americans. Even should such dialogue occur, Chesnutt implies that in the end human forgiveness might be possible only through divine intervention. In this novel as in his other writings, Chesnutt reveals the unique insight he gains from his liminal position as a “black” man who is light-skinned and easily capable of passing for white should he choose to do so (Render, 3). The phenomenon that W. E. B. DuBois calls “double-consciousness,” or the almost mystical doubling of self-perception in the African American (DuBois, 100–102), is intensified by Chesnutt’s borderline status as both white and African American. Throughout The Marrow of Tradition, Chesnutt can depict dialogue between blacks and whites with the expertise of one who can assume many voices.

840 MARSHALL, PAULE

SOURCES Chesnutt, Charles. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. Edited by Nancy Bentley and Sandra Gunning. Boston: Bedford/ St.Martin’s, 2002. DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. In The Oxford W. E. B. DuBois Reader. Edited by Eric J. Sundquist, 97–240. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Duncan, Charles. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Howells, William Dean. “A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction,” North American Review 173 (1901): 872–888. McElrath, Joseph, ed. Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt. Critical Essays on American Literature. James Nagel, series ed. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. McWilliams, Dean. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: University Press of Georgia, 2002. Render, Sylvia Lyons. “Introduction.” The Short Fiction of Charles Chesnutt, edited by Sylvia Lyons Render. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Rosslyn Elliott

MARSHALL, PAULE (1929– ) Paule Marshall, winner of a 1992 MacArthur Prize for lifetime achievement, is the author of five novels and two collections of short fiction. Her most widely read novel, BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES (1959), is now considered a classic American coming-of-age novel. Marshall has also written The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Daughters (1991), and The Fisher King (2000), as well as the story collection Reena and Other Stories (1983) and the novella collection Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1988). She writes about African-American identity and its relationship to the African diaspora, the significance of ancestry, and a sense of bicultural existence in a materialistic America. Marshall often uses flashbacks and dreams, letters, and characters with immigrant speech patterns. She is admired for her penetrating insights into character. Marshall was born on April 9, 1929, in Stuyvesant Heights, New York, to Samuel and Ada Clement Burke, who had emigrated from Barbados before World War II. In 1953 she graduated from Brooklyn College and, in 1957, married Kenneth Marshall. In 1959 Marshall

published her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, the psychologically compelling portrait of Selina Boyce as she journeys toward self-understanding. After Selina’s parents disagree about whether to return home to Barbados and her father, Deighton, commits suicide, Selina relies on other women and her first love, Clive Springer. Ultimately she comprehends that her journey is solitary and she travels to the West Indies. There she learns from the emotional strength and work ethic of her mother, Silla. Soul Clap Hands and Sing consists of four novellas entitled Barbados, British Guiana, Brooklyn, and Brazil. Each novella examines an elderly man’s philosophy after a lifetime of pursuing money: Mr. Watford returns to Barbados and believes himself superior to his countrymen; the mulatto Gerald Motley faces the issues created by his mixed ancestry and by the return of Sybil, an old flame of Chinese and black ancestry; Max Berman, a French teacher, becomes besotted with one of his African-American students; and Caliban, a nightclub entertainer, realizes that he no longer can find his real identity under his performer’s mask. Similar in format to Soul Clap Hands and Sing, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People is divided into four sections and features women and men coping with the predicaments of mixed ancestry and colonialism. Merle Kinbona, suffering a nervous breakdown, returns to Bourne Island from London. Harriet Amron, alienated from her mother, fails to reconcile with her and commits suicide, but Saul Amron, although a workaholic, succeeds where Harriet has failed and refashions his life. Lyle Hutson, a native of Bourne Island, attends Oxford University and the London School of Economics, but he loses sight of his heritage and, therefore, his identity. Avarara “Avey” Johnson, the wealthy widow on a Caribbean cruise in Praisesong for the Widow, fares much better: She recognizes the materialism of her husband, Jay Johnson, but chooses instead to find her ancestral roots on the Caribbean island of Carriacou. She moves to South Carolina from White Plains, New York, hoping to imbue in younger generations a sense of the rites and rituals of their ancestors. Daughters features Ursa Mackenzie, the daughter of an African-American mother and an Afro-Caribbean

MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE 841

father. Contrasting the black experience in the Caribbean with that of the American South, Marshall weaves together Ursa’s dissatisfaction with her academic life and her father, Primo’s, misguided politics. She and her mother foil Primo’s election campaign and save his Caribbean island from becoming a resort for wealthy white Westerners. Marshall’s most recent novel, The Fisher King, a complex work that begins in 1940s Brooklyn, describes a feud between two families that is ultimately resolved, after years of expatriation in Paris for the injured parties, by the appearance in Brooklyn of the eight-year-old grandson, Sonny Payne, proving the staying power of family over conflict, passion, or materialism. The novel unites Marshall’s concern with the historical displacement of black people with her belief in the possibility of spiritual healing through an embracing of her characters’ African heritage. Still a resident of New York City, Marshall lives with her husband, Nourry Menard, whom she married on July 30, 1970, after her 1963 divorce from Kenneth E. Marshall. They divide their time between New York and the West Indies.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Random House, 1959. The Chosen Place, The Timeless People. New York: Harcourt, 1969. Daughters. New York: Plume, 1991. The Fisher King. New York: Scribner, 2000. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Putnam, 1983. Soul Clap Hands and Sing. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press [1988], 1961.

SOURCES Bruck, Peter, and Wolfgang Karrer, eds. The Afro-American Novel since 1960. Amsterdam, Netherlands: B. R. Gruener, 1982. Busia, Abena P. “What Is Your Nation? Reconnecting Africa and Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl Wall, 126–211. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.

Collier, Eugenia. “The Closing of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 295–315. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Dennison, Dorothy Haner. The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. McCluskey, John, Jr. “And Called Every Generation Blessed: Theme, Setting, and Ritual in the Works of Paule Marshall.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 117–129. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984. Morgan, Janice T., Colette T. Hall, and Carol L. Snyder, eds. Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection. New York: Garland, 1991, 135–147. Pettis, Joyce Owens. Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Shaw, Harry B., ed. Perspectives of Black Popular Culture. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990, 93–100. Sorkin, Adam J., ed. Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989, 179–205. Spillers, Hortense. “Chosen Place, Timeless People: Some Figurations on the New World.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse, 151–175. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Wall, Cheryl A., ed. Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989, 196–211.

MARTIAN

CHRONICLES, THE RAY BRADBURY (1950) Ray BRADBURY’s The Martian Chronicles is a series of stories that form an episodic novel of first contact, settlement, abandonment, and then return to the planet Mars. The red planet has been a popular subject for science fiction writers, and The Martian Chronicles uses many stock ingredients of the genre: space travel, robots, mental telepathy, the last-

842 MARTIAN CHRONICLES, THE

man and last-woman gambit, the destruction of civilization on Earth. Yet The Martian Chronicles gained a much wider audience than devotees of science fiction, making it one of the best-selling books of the 1950s. Its popularity is a tribute to the beauty of Bradbury’s prose, but is also largely due to the book’s consideration of the social and political challenges facing Americans in the decades after World War II (the nuclear arms race, environmental degradation, racism, censorship). As Paul Brians observes, some of the stories “are very much in the mode of the horror tales which [Bradbury] had at first specialized in (collected in The October Country), and others are earnest parables of human folly. The Martians sometimes behave like monsters and sometimes like saints.” The clash of two cultures dominates the first several stories. In “Ylla,” a Martian woman dreams of a light-skinned creature coming down from the sky. Her jealous husband prevents her from leaving the house and ventures out himself to see whether there is any truth to her fantasy. When the rocket from Earth does land, he shoots the men. In “The Earth Men,” Martians (who are naturally telepathic) begin to hum American songs and have dreams of creatures from outer space. Astronauts from the second landing attempt to explain that they are from planet Earth, but those they meet believe the astronauts are crazy Martians, projecting their insane fantasy into other minds. Eventually they are all shot by a Martian psychologist. When the third expedition to Mars lands (in “The Third Expedition”), the astronauts find themselves in a small American town and are greeted by lost parents and siblings. They are caught up into the fantasy and split off to have dinner with their dead relatives only to realize that it is a trap set by the Martians, who then kill the astronauts. “And the Moon Still Be As Bright” chronicles the arrival of the fourth expedition on Mars a year later. They find an empty planet. Dr. Hathaway, a physician and geologist, determines that scores of Martians have died of chicken pox. The story parallels the European conquest of the Americas, which introduced diseases that devastated native populations. Drawing its title from Lord Byron’s poem “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” the tone of the story invokes a nostalgia for the now extinct civilization of Mars. Through the voice of

Spender it strongly criticizes the human propensity to show no respect or interest in the culture they have displaced—a theme revisited in other stories, “The Musicians” and “The Naming of Names.” Spender summarizes human self-interest when speaking to Wilder, the captain of the expedition: “We Earthmen have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose” (73). After the fourth expedition, Spender’s prophecy that Mars would be exploited for commercial interests is realized. Settlers finding work on the planet arrive with “small dreams or large dreams or none at all” (94). Subsequent stories describe the human desire to shape Mars into an Edenic world of new possibilities. In “The Green Morning,” it is Benjamin Driscoll’s job to plant trees that will terraform, or modify and improve, the planet. In “Night Meeting,” a worker, Tomas Gomez, meets a Martian late at night and discovers that they seem to exist at two different temporal moments. Whereas Gomez sees the ruins of an ancient Martian city, the Martian describes the city as lit and full of life. “Way in the Middle of the Air” takes the reader back to Earth, where African Americans in a segregated southern town have organized a mass emigration to Mars. When a racist store owner attempts to stop a young black man from joining the exodus by claiming that the young man owes him money, others pool together to pay his debt. As the spaceship, Over Jordan, takes off, the racist weeps and feels powerless. While Bradbury depicts Mars as representing in the eyes of his characters a last great frontier where true human independence and freedom can be found, he also summarily dismisses this vision of Edenic promise as a delusion (Wolfe). The first settlers work for large mining corporations, and the retirees who follow them bring laws, customs, and memories from Earth (“The Martian”). In “Usher II,” William Stendhal does battle against the powerful forces that have restricted freedom on Earth. He has built a hall of horrors called the House of Usher, filled with elements from Edgar Allan POE’s stories. Presenting a polemic against censorship that Bradbury would develop fully in Fahrenheit 451,

MARTIN DRESSLER 843

Stendhal uses his house to kill all the top members of the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy, an organization censoring art and literature deemed offensive to the “Moral Climate.” Stendhal’s trap would be easy to spot by someone who had read Poe—for instance, he leads one victim to a cellar under the pretense of showing him the Amontillado wine cellar. But the victims do not see their danger because they had not read Poe’s work. It had been banned (and burned) on Earth. The propensity for humans blindly to destroy a culture, even their own, is reiterated in the final stories of the book, which concern a nuclear holocaust on Earth. In “The Off Season,” a member of the fourth expedition, Sam Parkhill, sets up a hot-dog stand seemingly in the middle of nowhere. He is approached by Martians, whom he shoots, and flees until subdued by others in the group. They then give Parkhill deeds to half of Mars. Parkhill is astonished, but later he understands the irony of the act when he sees a vision of Earth bursting into flames. Nuclear war has begun. A mass exodus back to Earth begins, as a radio signal from Earth sends the message “Come Home.” One fortunate owner of a luggage shop sells all his stock in “The Luggage Store,” a story reminiscent of the flight of emigrants from Europe during both world wars. When nuclear war breaks out nearly every person evacuates the red planet. In “The Silent Towns,” a simplistic story meant for comic effect, Walter Gripp, who lives in the mountains, is left behind. When he realizes that he is alone, he searches desperately for a woman to keep him company, blindly calling beauty parlors in other towns. But when he finds Genevieve Selsor, he finds her disgusting and runs away, preferring solitude. The ideal family is portrayed in “The Long Years,” but with a note of irony. Captain Wilder returns to Mars after a 20-year journey to Saturn and Jupiter, and finds Dr. Hathaway, now the sole inhabitant, who has been living in idyllic harmony with his wife and grown children. When Hathaway dies, Wilder discovers that the harmonious family surrounding Hathaway are actually robots of his own creation. “There Will Come Soft Rains” counterpoises the Hathaway family by presenting a suburban house eerily devoid of people. The blackened silhouettes of the parents and children on its exterior walls are signs

that the inhabitants died in a nuclear holocaust. Yet colonization of a sort begins again in the final story, “The Million-Year Picnic,” which was the first short story of the collection to be published, in 1946. After the nuclear wars, a father brings his wife and two sons to Mars. As they investigate their surroundings and await another family, the boys ask their father when they will see Martians. The father eventually takes his children to a river and tells them to look into the water; there they will see the Martians. Of course, they see their own reflection.

SOURCES Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Wolfe, Gary. “The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury.” In Ray Bradbury, edited by Martin Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, 33–54. New York: Taplinger, 1980.

OTHER Brians, Paul. “Study Guide for Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles” (March 27, 2003). Available online. URL: http:// www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/science_fiction/martian_ chronicles.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Rebecca C. Potter

MARTIN DRESSLER

STEVEN MILLHAUSER (1996) Long admired by critics and fellow writers for his stories of strange and obsessed craftsmen and artists, Steven MILLHAUSER gained a wide audience in 1996 with the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Martin Dressler, a less eccentric and precious work than his early fiction. The subtitle of this, his seventh book, “The Tale of an American Dreamer,” suggests the two narrative streams that merge in Millhauser’s magical-realist style. Written in straightforward prose with keenly observed details, the novel explores a fantastical world imagined by a true turn-of-the-century visionary. Dressler, the eponymous hero, is at once a classic American entrepreneur straight out of a novel by Theodore DREISER, and an otherworldly dreamer more typical of the great fabulists, from Edgar Allan POE to Jorge Luis Borges. Dressler’s meteoric rise and strange ending find perfect expression in America’s Gilded Age, when fortune smiled on so many inventors and investors, and the cult of progress promised a world of endless possibility.

844 MARTIN EDEN

In Dickensian fashion, Millhauser begins his tale with Dressler’s humble beginnings as the son of a Manhattan cigar-store owner with Old World manners and values. From an early age, Dressler (unlike his father) demonstrates a fascination with marketing and salesmanship. His unbridled ambition and his innocent joy at the marvels of the age (e.g., elevators, the Brooklyn Bridge, trains) lead him astray from his father’s oldfashioned shop. Dressler excels at his first job as a bellhop at a moderately fancy hotel, where he is prized for his respectful attitude, patience, and discretion. The self-contained world of the hotel, with its emissaries from beyond New York, intrigues the young Dressler, who takes over the cigar stand in the lobby and soon rises to assistant manager. On walks in the city, he follows his curiosity all over town, mapping out the future of Manhattan development. Dressler’s business savvy makes his first independent venture a success, and soon his combination lunch-and-billiard parlors sprout all over town. As his fortunes rise, Dressler becomes enamored of his fellow hotel boarders, the Vernons: two intriguing young women protected by their widowed mother. Fair Caroline, an ethereal neurasthenic, haunts Dressler with her ghostlike appearance and her aloofness. Her sister, the dark and loquacious Emmeline, nurtures Dressler’s visions and eventually joins him as a business partner. Though Caroline and Dressler marry, their union is doomed from the start when the groom finds sexual solace in the arms of another. The sexually averse Caroline even encourages Dressler to bed her sister, but he shifts his attentions to more pressing financial matters—the growth of his little empire. As New York moves into the modern age, Dressler understands the growing popular desire for the “little worlds” of department stores and luxury hotels. He soon builds a string of extravagant and successful businesses, relying heavily on the latest in architectural design and advertising know-how. With each magnificent building, Dressler remains unsatisfied, and here is where the novel delves into the artificial and fanciful, as Dressler’s impractical ideas are translated into literary reality: hotels with deep subterranean arcades re-creating European outdoor scenes;

lobbies that resemble tableaux vivants, with actors hired to re-create elaborate historical sketches. As Dressler’s fantasies expand, his hotels become surreal in proportions, a strange mix of Hearst’s opulent estate, San Simeon, in California and the future Las Vegas. He seeks nothing less than “something as great as the world” itself. And this overreaching leads to his ultimate downfall, a strange decline that finds him courting madness. As Dressler decides to “slip out of his life,” he brings to mind the famously bored characters in the early modernist dramatic poem “Axel’s Castle,” by 19th-century French romantic writer Jean-Marie-MathiasPhillippe-August, Comte de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (also the inspiration for Edmund Wilson’s famous study with the same name). The world-weary aristocrats, tired of life, figure that they can leave living to the servants, much as Dressler hires actors to play his own family in his last hotel. Millhauser clearly means for us to see the limits of God-like ambition. Readers of his other works well know that Millhauser is a connoisseur of miniaturization and Old World arts and crafts, the very antithesis of Dressler’s expansive dreams. In this regard, Martin Dressler is less an attack on American enterprise than a cautionary tale: Millhauser employs the techniques of modernist art against modernity itself, with all its enervation and excess.

SOURCE Millhauser, Steven. Martin Dressler. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

OTHER Brothersjudd.com. “Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer.” Available online. URL: http://www.brothersjudd. com/index/cfmlfuseaction/reviews/detail/book_id/1079/ Martin%20Dress.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005. David Brottman

MARTIN EDEN JACK LONDON (1909) Many critics have argued that Martin Eden is the most autobiographical of the 50 books Jack LONDON produced during his short life. Condemned by both reviewers and the reading public as cynical and pessimistic at the time of its publication, Martin Eden has received more

MARTIN EDEN 845

attention in recent decades. London’s vivid and powerful description of the struggles that accompany the artistic process of writing fiction has inspired many and serves as a testament to London’s own struggles as a writer. Like Martin Eden, London, too, wished to achieve success through writing, but also like Martin Eden, London became disillusioned with the fame that accompanied his success. Martin Eden remains today a poignant illustration of the often contentious relationship between fame and artistry. Martin Eden undergoes significant changes throughout the course of the novel. London introduces Martin as an ignorant and unrefined sailor who is easily impressed by Ruth Morse and her family’s flashy display of material success and pseudoknowledge. He takes the presence in her home of a Swinburne volume as evidence of Ruth’s great knowledge and deep understanding. After setting off on his own quest to educate himself, Martin comes to recognize the shallowness of Ruth’s learning. His egoism and alienation created by his self-education is compounded by his heartfelt desire to become a successful artist. In the face of rejection, he becomes hardened, shunning both Ruth and the bohemian class of intellectuals with whom he has come to associate. Martin plunges himself into the creative process, producing fiction by his own fierce determination, rather than through any innate talent. Once he achieves success, his creative process and understanding of himself as an author is threatened by the stance he has taken toward his fellow human beings during the arduous task of becoming both an intellectual and a writer. His inability to cope with the demands of success and his failure to identify with other people leads to his suicide at the end of the novel. Martin Eden, then, is not merely about becoming a writer, though London does a fine job of re-creating the struggles of the starving artist who sacrifices everything for his art. The novel is also very much about human relationships and class struggle as Martin, attempting to break into Ruth’s class, finds it both shallow and hostile to outsiders. Ruth’s family, who at first find Martin far too rough and uncultured for their refined daughter, actually come groveling to Martin after he achieves his enormous success, further shak-

ing his faith in his fellow human beings. And just as he cannot become part of Ruth’s class, Martin, once he becomes “learned,” can no longer be a part of his own. He is equally alienated from the vital and available Lizzie Connolly, whose rough and worn working-class hands he finds just as intolerable as Ruth and her family’s pretensions. Because he is isolated from everyone, technically of his own doing of course, since he cannot seem to see beyond anyone’s shortcomings, including his own, Martin’s ultimate solution is to kill himself. Critics’ major complaint about Martin Eden is that the love relationships and their resulting class conflicts and London’s exploration of the creative process are somewhat watered down by the long discussions of socialism that break up the narrative and now seem dated to modern readers. London himself held radical political views. Fascinated by alternative forms of government and lifestyles, which included more rational and environmentally sound farming practices, London often brought such material into his novels. Though Martin Eden and the bohemian intellectual’s discussions about socialism may seem tedious to some readers today, Martin Eden would not be authentic Jack London without it. London seemed very much concerned with living out his ideals in life and with including them in his fiction, which he saw as a vehicle for ideas and not merely a form of entertainment, though that is what readers and critics demanded of him. Ultimately, Martin Eden was a failure in its own time because it was a novel of ideas, exploring the pessimistic and cynical side of the artist, from a writer who was expected to turn out entertaining adventures that celebrated the values of human ingenuity and perseverance in the struggle for survival. The novel turned out to be prescient, then, since London’s own experiences with its disappointing reception mirrored Martin Eden’s struggles with a reading public that demanded the superficial rather than the insightful. With the benefit of hindsight, readers today can more easily appreciate London’s undertaking.

SOURCE London, Jack. Martin Eden. New York: Penguin, 1993. Kathleen Hicks

846 MASON, BOBBIE ANN

MASON, BOBBIE ANN (1940– )

Bobbie Ann Mason has a secure niche in contemporary Southern fiction. Twice nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award—the second time for her novel Feather Crowns (1993)—which also received a Southern Book Award, Bobbie Ann Mason has written short stories, memoir, and critical essays. Her fiction is represented in major anthologies, and her work regularly appears on the reading lists of college courses. Stylistically, Mason is frequently called a minimalist, a writer identified with the “K-Mart school of fiction,” “dirty realism,” or “grit lit.” She was among the first to use the brand names of popular culture as background for her characters. Although best known for her short stories, Mason is widely admired for her Vietnam War novel In Country (1985), and she achieved critical success for her Kentucky love story, Spence + Lila (1988). Bobbie Ann Mason was born on May 1, 1940, in Mayfield, Kentucky, to Wilburn A. Mason, a dairy farmer, and Christianna Lee Mason. Reared in that state, she received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky in 1962, a master’s degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966, and a doctoral degree from the University of Connecticut in 1972. She married Roger B. Rawlings, a magazine editor and writer, on April 12, 1969, and, after publishing two scholarly books (one on the “girl sleuth” in fiction, the other on the novels of Vladimir NABOKOV), Mason published her first short fiction collection, Shiloh and Other Stories, in 1982. The novel In Country employs a female hero, unusual in the classic search-for-the-father theme: 17-year-old Samantha Hughes seeks to understand her father, who was killed in Vietnam, as well as her uncle Emmett, who was emotionally traumatized by his Vietnam experiences. Sam’s quest helps her to comprehend the “effects of the Vietnam War on the American psyche” (Flora, 278). In Spence + Lila, Mason uses a character from her short stories; Nancy Culpepper returns to help her mother, recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Lila’s mastectomy reinforces the decades-long love between this rural Kentucky farm couple. Feather Crowns, unlike Mason’s previous work, is set on a western Kentucky tobacco farm at the turn of the 19th century. Christie

and James Wheelers’ lives are dramatically changed by the birth of quintuplets. Bobbie Ann Mason has recently written Clear Springs, a memoir of her Kentucky childhood. She continues to chronicle the lives of her working-class characters. She reportedly lives in western Kentucky.

NOVELS Feather Crowns. New York: Harper, 1993. In Country. New York: Harper, 1985. Spence + Lila. New York: Harper, 1988.

SOURCES Barnes, Linda Adams. “The Freak Endures: The Southern Grotesque from Flannery O’Connor to Bobbie Ann Mason.” In Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story, edited by Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer, 133–141. Macomb: Western Illinois University, 1987. Flora, Joseph M. “Bobbie Ann Mason.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 275–285. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Kinney, Katherine. “ ‘Humping the Boonies’: Sex, Combat, and the Female in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, 38–48. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Women Writers of the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Stewart, Matthew C. “Realism, Verisimilitude, and the Depiction of Vietnam Veterans in In Country.” In Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature, edited by Philip K. Jason, 166–179. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Wilhelm, Albert. Bobbie Ann Mason: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998.

OTHER Catharton.com. Bobbie Ann Mason. Available online. URL: http://www.catharton.com/authors/254.htm. Accessed August 8, 2005. Bobbie Ann Mason’s Home Page. Available online. URL: http:// www.eiu.edu/~eng1002/authors/mason2. Accessed August 8, 2005.

MATTHIESSEN, PETER (1927– ) Peter Matthiessen, one of the few American authors to have received major awards in both fiction and nonfiction,

MATTHIESSEN, PETER 847

has enjoyed an impressive 40-year career. He received National Book Award nominations in 1966, for AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD, and in 1972, for The Tree Where Man was Born. He also won two National Book Awards in 1980, both for The Snow Leopard. A writer as well as a commercial fisherman, a deep-sea fishing boat captain, and a member of numerous worldwide expeditions, Matthiessen is better known in some circles for his nature and travel writings; nonetheless, as the scholar William Dowie points out, he “sees the novel as the form of his deepest inspirations and the role of novelist as his highest calling” (Dowie, 132). While contemporaries like John BARTH or Robert COOVER were experimenting with magical realism, Matthiessen “was suppressing the authorial narrator altogether, expressing action by dialogue, and using a narrative voice so impersonal that it assumes the face of nature itself” (Dowie, 130). Peter Matthiessen was born on May 22, 1927, in New York City, to Erard A. Matthiessen, an architect, and Elizabeth Carey Matthiessen. After serving in the navy from 1945 to 1947, he was educated at the Sorbonne, University of Paris, from 1948 to 1949, and at Yale University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950. In 1951 he married Patricia Southgate. They were divorced in 1958; he married Deborah Love in 1963. Matthiessen cofounded the Paris Review, of which he has been an editor since 1951. In Paris he was a member of the second wave of 20thcentury American expatriate writers who included James B ALDWIN , George Plimpton, Irwin S HAW, William STYRON, and Richard WRIGHT (Dowie, 15). His first novel, Race Rock (1954), written in Paris, features the young, wealthy George McConville. He feels guilty about inheriting riches from his family; he confronts the issue with two friends who are his peers and two others who include a half-breed Indian and the bastard son of a former landowner. Partisans (1955) is a thoughtful novel that grapples with similar questions. Set in Paris, a wealthy young Barney Sand flirts with but rejects communism. In Matthiessen’s third novel, Raditzer (1961), the central character, wealthy Charlie Stark, serves aboard a navy troop carrier where he meets his doppelgänger, Raditzer, an underprivileged orphan who compels Charlie to face his innermost self.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), set in the jungles of southeastern Peru, represents Matthiessen’s sole foray into the realistic novel. It is the first of his three major works and also his most popular, with nearly a million copies sold. The part-Cheyenne Lewis Moon becomes the focal character who meets with Indians and local officials, mercenaries and missionaries, all representing the clash of culture and nature. Far Tortuga (1975), according to Dowie, “is not only one of the great sea novels” but also among the top experimental novels of the last part of the 20th century (Dowie, 130). Set on a leaky ship called the Eden, Far Tortuga features old Captain Raib Avers and his crew, who are searching for turtles along the coast of Nicaragua; the poorly outfitted ship, coupled with the crew’s inability to see the ship’s direction, suggests Matthiessen’s view of modern humanity. KILLING MISTER WATSON (1990), set in the Florida Everglades in the 19th century and based on a true incident in 1920, tells the tale of the murder of Edgar J. (Jack) Watson. Lost Man’s River (1997), a dark and violent tale in which the past becomes central, continues the story of Edgar Watson through the eyes of the son he left behind. Matthiessen’s most recent novel, Bone by Bone, was published in 1999. Using a children’s playhouse as an office, Peter Matthiessen, a master of Zen, writes at his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, New York, where he lives with Maria Eckart, whom he married in 1980 after the death of his second wife from cancer in 1972. Several of his novels have been adapted to the screen: At Play in the Fields of the Lord was released by MGM in 1992, starring Aidan Quinn, Tom Berenger, Tom Waits, Kathy Bates, and John Lithgow. Adventure: Lost Man’s River—An Everglades Journey with Peter Matthiessen was produced by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) in 1991. Men’s Lives, adapted by Joe Pintauro, was performed in Sag Harbor, Long Island, at the Bay Street Theater Festival on July 28, 1992. Matthiessen was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1974.

NOVELS At Play in the Fields of the Lord. New York: Random House, 1965. Bone by Bone. New York: Random House, 1999. Far Tortuga. New York: Random House, 1975.

848 MAUD MARTHA

Killing Mister Watson. New York: Random House, 1990. Lost Man’s River. New York: Random House, 1997. Partisans. New York: Viking, 1955. Race Rock. New York: Harper, 1954. Raditzer. New York: Viking, 1961.

SOURCES Bawer, Bruce. “Nature Boy: The Novels of Peter Matthiessen,” New Criterion 6 (June 1988): 32–40. Becker, Peter. “Zen and the Art of Peter Matthiessen,” M Inc. 8 (July 1991): 54. Bender, Bert. “Far Tortuga and American Sea Fiction since Moby-Dick,” American Literature 56 (May 1984): 227–248. ———. Sea Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Peter Matthiessen,” Missouri Review 12, no. 2 (1989): 109–124. Cooley, John. “Matthiessen’s Voyages on the River Styx: Deathly Waters, Endangered Peoples,” in his Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. New York: Viking, 1958. Dowie, William. Peter Matthiessen. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Grove, James P. “Pastoralism and Anti-pastoralism in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga,” Critique 21, no. 2 (1979): 15–29. Heim, Michael. “The Mystic and the Myth: Thoughts on The Snow Leopard,” Studia Mystica 4 (Summer 1981): 3–9. Houy, Deborah. “A Moment with Peter Matthiessen,” Buzzworm 5 (March 1993): 28. Patteson, Richard F. “Holistic Vision and Fictional Form in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association 37, nos. 1–2 (1983): 70–81. ———. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord: The Imperialist Idea and the Discovery of the Self,” Critique 21, no. 2 (1979): 5–14. Plimpton, George. “The Craft of Fiction in Far Tortuga,” Paris Review 15 (Winter 1974): 79–82. Raglon, Rebecca. “Fact and Fiction: The Development of Ecological Form in Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga,” Critique 35 (Summer 1994): 245–259. Rea, Paul. “Causes and Creativity: An Interview with Peter Matthiessen,” Re Arts & Letters: A Liberal Arts Forum 15 (Fall 1989): 27–40. Shnayerson, Michael. “Higher Matthiessen,” Vanity Fair, December 1991, pp. 114–132.

Smith, Wendy. “PW Interviews Peter Matthiessen,” Publishers Weekly 229 (May 9, 1986): 240–241. Winterowd, W. Ross. “Peter Matthiessen’s Lyric Trek,” in his The Rhetoric of the “Other” Literature, 133–139. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. Young, James Dean. “A Peter Matthiessen Checklist,” Critique 21, no. 2 (1979): 30–38.

OTHER New York State Writers Institute (SUNY). Peter Matthiessen: State Author, 1995–1997. Available online. URL: http:// www.albany.edu/writers-inst/matsnsa.html. Accessed August 8, 2005.

MAUD MARTHA GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1953) Gwendolyn BROOKS is best known as a poet, and Maud Martha, her only novel, is genre-bending and poetic. Drawing extensively on autobiography (Hull, 95), the text is set in Chicago’s South Side, with its prominent 1950s backdrop of racism and social inequality, and follows the progress of Maud Martha Brown from age seven through dating, marriage, and childbirth. Although composed of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, Maud Martha conveys its themes in poetic ways, as Brooks affirms: “even in writing prose I find myself weighing the possibilities of every word just as I do in a poem” (Stavros, 49). Maud learns “to love moments for themselves” (78), and this is precisely what the text presents: moments. Indeed, Brooks uses the techniques of imagism, juxtaposing episodic snapshots that, taken together, form a cohesive narrative, if the reader is willing to fill in the gaps. Reading this elliptical text is an active, not a passive, pursuit and requires an investment of energy by the reader, much like reading poetry. Although the text is poetic, acknowledging its status as a novel is imperative, particularly since Brooks treats some of the same themes (and even introduces similar characters) in her poetry collections, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) and Annie Allen (1949), but to a different effect (Kent, 116). A contemporary reviewer claimed Maud Martha was “not a novel but a series of sketches” (Wright, 15), but this assessment ignores the powerful threads that unify the text. Admittedly, the plot tends to be implied rather than narrated, but it is there for those who look. For example, chapter 9 ends with Maud’s sister Helen

MAUD MARTHA 849

insisting, “You’ll never get a boyfriend . . . if you don’t stop reading those books” (39); the next chapter is entitled “first beau” (40). Thematically, the poetic diction or elevated language of Maud’s consciousness suggests the poetry within the everyday. Her word choice dignifies the disappointing and distances the sordid. During a party, for example, Maud recognizes that her husband, Paul, “was not a lover of tablecloths” and finds herself needing to “remove . . . from her waist the arm of Chuno Jones, Paul’s best friend” (107). However, while “death, negative displacement, survival of the unheroic, and the war with beauty” are thematically present (Shaw, 125), these do not negate the text’s fundamental commitment to life. The loss, disillusionment, and descent to grayness of Maud Martha’s hopes for her marriage and her kitchenette apartment are reminiscent of Langston HUGHES’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), yet her tone lacks Hughes’s weary fatalism and bitterness. Further, Brooks’s text provides an alternative vision to that of Ralph ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN (1952) or Richard WRIGHT’s NATIVE SON (1940). Rather than offering the intensity of an isolated protagonist’s search for identity on the urban and national stage, Brooks’s text focuses on the small home and familiar neighborhood of a woman embedded in her community (Lattin and Lattin, 137). Maud encounters plenty of difficulties, yet her story never becomes a tragedy (Newson-Horst, 167). Unlike the depressing and ultimately unsustainable setting of James BALDWIN’s expatriate domestic novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), for example, Maud Martha’s Chicago has potential. Maud maintains a dignity that society wishes to deny her by projecting a self outside herself. While in Toni MORRISON’s Sula (1973) an artist without an art form becomes both dangerous and (self-) destructive, Maud Martha participates in a life-preserving self-creation, becoming an artist by inventing herself and shaping her world through perception: She aims to “donate to the world a good Maud Martha” (22). The cramped kitchenette she lives in as an adult soon becomes a metaphor for her experience; she works within small spaces, finding ways to push the limits of the confined space allotted to her by society.

This propensity is encapsulated in Maud’s encounter with a mouse, described in chapter 17 (“Maud Martha spares the mouse”). This is the central chapter of the novel, utterly enclosed and therefore representative of Maud’s confinement (Lattin and Lattin, 142). The mouse is a metaphor for entrapment. Maud uses her imagination to create scenarios for the mouse, however, and ultimately transcends the victim-oppressor paradigm by acting benevolently and setting it free. Hence she finds empowerment in kindness: “a life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed” (70–71). Paradoxically, the encounter with the mouse means more to Maud Martha than to the mouse itself. The mouse’s fate is known from the chapter title; it is only by sharing Maud Martha’s thought process that the reader discovers the essential benefit to Maud Martha’s self-concept: “why, I’m good! I am good” (71). Form and function also come together in the structuring of chapter divisions. The 34 chapters, most no longer than a handful of pages, offer containment as a survival strategy: Brooks tightly controls her material to keep emotions under restraint, filtering the heartbreak of disappointment and the sting of racism through detached narration and presenting them in manageable doses. Although Maud’s rage is sublimated, she does imagine actions. For example, she fantasizes about “jerk[ing] trimming scissors from [her] purse and jab jab jab[bing the] evading eye” of the racist Santa who hurts her daughter’s feelings (175). Instead, Maud vents her rage in socially acceptable ways and “offers a philosophy of coping, a way of living and being in the world” (Newson-Horst, 166). A chapter ironically entitled “brotherly love” describes Maud Martha’s violent encounter with the chicken she is preparing for the family’s dinner. Unlike the forbearance she shows with the (live) mouse, Maud Martha viciously and unapologetically “hack[s]” (151) the chicken and “smack[s] her lips at the thought of her meal” (153). Significantly, the novel ends with the announcement of Maud’s second pregnancy. This is not, however, the fatalistic death-bearing pregnancy of Nella LARSEN’s Helga Crane at the end of Quicksand. Rather, it is a hopeful one that affirms life, flawed

850 MAUS I AND II

though it might be, as a satisfying adventure: “[S]he was going to have another baby. The weather was bidding her bon voyage” (180). Brooks’s reputation was made on her poetry. Although Maud Martha received positive contemporary reviews, it was out of sync with its audience and was not considered “successful” (Shaw, 124). But if the novel was not in step with its time, it certainly resonates with ours. The world has changed since 1953, but the need for imagination, coping strategies, and hope has not.

SOURCES Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. 1953. Chicago: Third World Press, 1993. Hull, Gloria T., and Posey Gallagher. “Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Gloria Wade Gayles, 85–103. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Lattin, Patricia H., and Vernon Lattin. “Dual Vision in Brooks’ Maud Martha.” In On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, edited by Stephen Caldwell Wright, 136–145. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Newson-Horst, Adele S. “Maud Martha Brown: A Study in Emergence.” In Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘Maud Martha,’ edited by Jacqueline Bryant, 161–181. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002. Shaw, Harry B. “Maud Martha.” In On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, edited by Stephen Caldwell Wright, 124–135. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Stavros, George. “An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks.” In Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Gloria Wade Gayles, 37–53. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Wright, Stephen Caldwell, ed. “From Poet to Novelist.” In On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, 15. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Jessica Rabin

MAUS I AND II ART SPIEGELMAN (1986, 1991) Born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 to parents who survived the Holocaust, the cartoonist Art SPIEGELMAN cofounded the comics magazine Raw, in which Maus: A

Survivor’s Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History was serialized before appearing as a book in 1986. Together with its sequel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began (1991), it won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, in spite of its unorthodox comic book format, for its compelling and original depiction of Jewish life in Hitler’s Europe. Crafted over a span of 13 years (1978–1991), Maus can be labeled as biography, memoir, graphic novel— it has even been shelved in the history section of stores—but it does not diminish Spiegelman’s accomplishment to call it a comic book, for it is chiefly his mastery of comics techniques that gives the book its narrative freshness and emotional integrity. Working in black ink on plain copy paper (he later switched to thin bristol board), Spiegelman repeatedly revised both the image and the text of every panel to achieve a highly pressurized effect that serves its subject faithfully. Envisioning the book as a plea for commonality (Bolhafner, 98), Spiegelman took his visual cue from the racist insults of Nazi propaganda, portraying Poles as pigs and Jews as mice (Germans appear as cats) to deconstruct and diffuse such supremacist verbiage. He also believed the animal faces would work like masks compelling readers to personalize the story for themselves (Bolhafner, 99). One of the wonders of Maus is how human its bestiary is and how, using dots for eyes and slits for mouths, Spiegelman evokes an impressive range of expression that never retreats from the demands of his tale, even at the extremes of human behavior. In both volumes of Maus, Spiegelman tells two parallel stories simultaneously: his father, Vladek’s, resourcefulness, resilience, and extraordinary luck in enduring the ferocity of the Nazi death machine, and the artist’s own attempt to elicit the facts from his ailing, irascible father. In part 1, scenes set in New York City, where Spiegelman, as an artist and as a son, grapples with his father’s handyman ethic, pack-rat pathology, and guilt-trip manipulations, are managed with such lively, acerbic humor that the shifts into the grimness of Vladek’s narrative can seem, by comparison, slightly plodding at first, as if the cartoonist were fulfilling a self-imposed assignment while his own tribu-

MCCARTHY, CORMAC 851

lations are of equal (if not more) interest to him and have clearly energized his great talent for the absurd. Part 2 suggests that Spiegelman is fully aware of this, for the father-son dynamic finds further expression there, and with the continuation of Vladek’s tale, with its endless variety of tortures that continue through the end of the war in Europe, the dual strands of Maus begin to call into question the very notion of a survivor. With memories like these, has anyone truly survived? The nightmare of Vladek’s past is inseparable from his present, for that is where it is still playing itself out. In being partially a tale about the hearing of a story and the process by which it is recalled and re-created, Maus is a novel—or a novelistic memoir—as much about the writing of history as it is about living it. It is also a reminder that vicarious witnessing can entail the absorption of existential horror that, for better and for worse, extends the dark life of a holocaustic event into further continents and generations. Integral to Spiegelman’s method is the investment of every page with the tone and the appearance of a psyche with its wounds laid open. The Yiddishisms in Vladek’s English—“It was for us waiting another destiny” (Spiegelman, 1986, 154); “And we came ’til the prison, and there they put us” (Spiegelman, 1986, 155)—are composed into a kind of poetry that imparts dramatic weight to the simplest thoughts. Despite the small-scale format of the book, the angle at which the reader views each scene is as carefully conceived as the storyboard for a film. And like a good director, Spiegelman never shortchanges a sequence by treating it as pure exposition. When Vladek and his wife, Anja, are wandering homeless in Poland, the reader is poised above them like a camera on a crane, looking down on desolate paths in the shape of a swastika. When Vladek recalls a family dinner in 1940, we see the scene from outside the window, where a camera might be placed to capture all 12 participants together and to emphasize the sense of secure—and precarious—domesticity. Spiegelman complicates this image with an insert of Vladek telling him the story on an exercise bicycle in Rego Park, Queens (a borough of New York City), and with a text—“The Germans couldn’t destroy every-

thing at one time” (Spiegelman, 1986, 74)—that gives the scene an aching poignancy, as the reader, who is not the only one watching these people, ready to move in, wonders how many of this grouping will survive. Like Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor Anthology (1986) and writer and artist Seth’s Clyde Fans (2004), Maus elevates the genre of the comic book by grappling with issues that are difficult challenges for any artistic endeavor, and by its trust in the potential of an outsider art form—avant-garde comics (sometimes called comix)—to chronicle the dark side of the earth and to ennoble individuals who find their destiny there. At the conclusion of Maus II, an actual photo of Vladek in the uniform of the camps is an emotional surprise for the reader who has known this man exclusively through the mask of a mouse. When mice-people appear, however briefly, in Spiegelman’s response to the September 11 attacks, In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), they carry entire worlds of connotation that further attest to his achievement in Maus. As Spiegelman has said, “Good comics can make an impression that lasts forever” (Smith).

SOURCES Bolhafner, J. Stephen. “Art for Art’s Sake: Spiegelman Speaks on RAW’s Past, Present and Future,” Comics Journal 145 (October 1991): 96–99. Spiegelman, Art. In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986. ———. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991.

OTHER Smith, Christopher Monte. “Art Spiegelman.” Interview posted on BookSense.com. n.d. Available online. URL: http://www. booksense.com/people/archive/spiegelmanart.jsp. Accessed September 23, 2005. Peter Josyph

MCCARTHY, CORMAC (CHARLES JOSEPH JR.) (1933– ) In the opinion of many critics, Cormac McCarthy is America’s most talented author of novels set in the West. They often divide his work into a Southern period and a Western period;

852 MCCARTHY, CORMAC

included in the former are the Tennessee-based novels, The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), CHILD OF GOD (1974), and SUTTREE (1979). McCarthy has been compared with Southern gothic and grotesque writers, especially William FAULKNER and Flannery O’CONNOR, and with Katherine Anne PORTER. Although his earlier novel about the West—BLOOD MERIDIAN; OR, THE EVENING REDNESS IN THE WEST (1985)—appears to be more violent, his Texas work constitutes a remarkable revisioning of the mythic American West. The McCarthy protagonist is nearly always a questing outsider, a self-reliant loner set apart from the conventional community, in a tradition dating from James Fenimore COOPER’s Leatherstocking Tales. Recognition for McCarthy’s talent resulted in both a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his best-selling ALL THE PRETTY HORSES (1992), the first book in the Border trilogy, which also includes The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998). Although for decades he remained unknown to most of the reading public, McCarthy was widely admired by scholars and critics, and his fellow novelists praised his stylistic brilliance and his moral and psychological insights. Charles McCarthy was born on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Charles Joseph McCarthy, an attorney, and Gladys McGrail McCarthy. They called him Cormac in honor of the 15th-century Irish king who built Blarney Castle. Reared in Tennessee from age four, McCarthy served in the U.S. Air Force from 1953 to 1957, married Lee Holleman in 1961, published The Orchard Keeper, and won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the most distinguished novel of 1965. The novel centers on the relationship among John Wesley Rattner, a young fatherless man struggling to achieve maturity, and his surrogate fathers, Uncle Ather, an orchard keeper, and Marion Sylder, a bootlegger. They are connected through the long-ago murder of John Wesley’s father by Marion; Uncle Ather tends the burial place, yet the author fatalistically undercuts these links because the characters have only partial knowledge of the events; Marion is sent to jail and Uncle Ather to the county home. In his next novel, the Faulknerian Outer Dark, McCarthy writes about the incest between Culla Holme and his sister Rainy—

and the inevitable guilt and tragedy that follows. The next two Tennessee novels, Child of God and Suttree, explore the deep mysteries of human behavior: Lester Ballard, a necrophiliac, appears in Child of God, and Gene Harrogate copulates with a watermelon in Suttree. Whereas some critics and readers deplore the violence and depravity depicted in these works, the reviewer and scholar Robert Coles contends that McCarthy is re-creating the inexplicable human weakness found in Greek tragedy. After divorcing his first wife, marrying and divorcing Anne de Lisle, and moving to El Paso, Texas, McCarthy wrote Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Another novel suffused in violence by both Indians and whites, Blood Meridian, set in Texas and Mexico of the 1840s and 1850s, features “the kid,” a nameless 14year-old boy who falls in with a ruthless gang of bounty hunters who are paid to scalp Indians. The presence of the law, Judge Holden, invites readers to examine and evaluate the goodness—or lack thereof—found in each character, including both “the kid” and the Judge himself. McCarthy had apparently found his métier, and, over the next decade and a half, wrote the novels of his Border trilogy. All the Pretty Horses is the story of 16year-old Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins, who—like the fictional duos of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, or Huck Finn and Jim—ride through the Old West and experience danger and romance along the way. This pair leaves Texas for Mexico in 1949. The Crossing, divided into three sections, follows Billy Parham as he crosses the border into Mexico three times: He has captured a wolf and tries to return it to Mexico, but, as in Jack LONDON’s WHITE FANG (1906), the wolf is stolen. Completely against his original intentions, Billy must kill the wolf to save it from its suffering in the dogfight arena. In the second section, Billy and his brother Boyd cross into Mexico in search of their parents’ murderers; they recover some of their stolen horses and Billy returns home with a Mexican woman. In the third section, Billy crosses into Mexico to bring home Boyd’s murdered body for burial on the New Mexico ranch. The final novel in the trilogy, Cities of the Plain, features again the idealistic Grady Cole and the disillusioned Billy Parham, cowboys on a ranch

MCCARTHY, MARY 853

near El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, in 1952. In this tale of two cities, they are propelled in their adventures by Grady’s love for Magdalena, a Mexican prostitute. Magdalena dies while trying to escape from her evil pimp, Eduardo; Grady meets his death in a brothel knife fight; and, again, Billy Parham returns home, the pessimistic and hapless survivor. Cormac McCarthy, who dislikes interviews or discussions of his work, is now the subject of several books, scores of articles, reviews, and doctoral dissertations, and the reason behind the Cormac McCarthy Society, the Cormac McCarthy Website, and the recently initiated Cormac McCarthy Review. He lives in El Paso with his third wife, Jennifer Winkley, whom he married in 1998.

NOVELS All the Pretty Horses. New York: Random House, 1992. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Random House, 1985. The Border Trilogy. New York: Knopf, 1999. Child of God. New York: Random House, 1974. Cities of the Plain. New York: Random House, 1998. The Crossing. New York: Random House, 1994. The Orchard Keeper. New York: Random House, 1965. Outer Dark. New York: Random House, 1968. Suttree. New York: Random House, 1979.

SOURCES Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce, eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Rev. ed., 1999. ———. A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Bell, James Luther. Cormac McCarthy’s West: The Border Trilogy Annotations. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Bell, Madison Smartt. “A Writer’s View of Cormac McCarthy.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 1–11. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000. Bell, Vereen. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. “Westward, Ho!: Contemporary Southern Writing and the American West.” In The Southern State of Mind, edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund, 203–311. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

Coles, Robert. “The Stranger,” The New Yorker, 26 August 1974, pp. 87–90. Ditsky, John. “Further into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy,” Hollins Critic 18 (April 1981): 1–11. Hall, Wade H., and Rick Wallach, eds. Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy: Selected Essays from the First McCarthy Conference. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. ———, eds. Sacred Violence. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Vol. 1: Cormac McCarthy’s Appalachian Works. Vol. 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2002. Holloway, David, ed. Proceedings of the First European Conference on Cormac McCarthy. Miami, Fla.: Cormac McCarthy Society, 1999. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997. Lilley, James D., ed. Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Owens, Barcley (Jay Barcley). Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. Louisville, Ky.: Bellarmine College Press, 1993. Wallach, Rich, ed. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000.

OTHER The Gardener’s Son (teleplay; produced as part of Visions series, Public Broadcasting System, 1977), published as The Gardener’s Son: A Screenplay. Hopewell, N.J.: Ecco Press, 1996.

MCCARTHY, MARY (MARY THERESE MCCARTHY) (1912–1989) Mary McCarthy earned a reputation as one of the foremost American intellectuals of the 20th century. McCarthy approached major sociological, political, and sexual issues by using multiple genres, particularly the novel and the essay, and often using satire to achieve her ends. McCarthy’s enduring topic was the meaning of America and of being American. To the general public, she remains best known for The GROUP (1963), a novel that characterized McCarthy’s own era. McCarthy wrote six other critically acclaimed novels, including The Company She Keeps (1942) and The Groves of Academe (1952). Five years before her death, McCarthy received the 1984 Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to literature, and the 1984 National Medal for

854 MCCARTHY, MARY

Literature, Harold K. Guinzburg Foundation, for her distinguished and continuing contribution to American letters. Mary McCarthy was born on June 21, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, to Roy Winfield McCarthy, a lawyer, and Therese Preston McCarthy. She earned a bachelor of arts degree at Vassar College in 1933. Quickly making a name for herself as a writer and critic, McCarthy became New York City editor and then drama critic of Partisan Review (PR), an influential quarterly magazine founded in 1934 by Philip Rahv and William Phillips; in its heyday (1930s–50s) it was considered the intellectual and artistic voice of the non-communist Left in America. PR’s final issue appeared on April 16, 2003. She also had a widely publicized romance with Philip Rahv, the Partisan Review editor. Although she was a committed socialist and had myriad friends on the Left, McCarthy did not join the Communist Party. She was married four times, to Harold Johnsrud, an actor and playwright (1933–36); Edmond Wilson, a writer and critic (1938–46); Bowden Broadwater, a writer and teacher (1946–61); and James Raymond West, a State Department official (1961–89). Although she began publishing nonfiction works early in her writing career, McCarthy did not write her first novel until 1942. The Company She Keeps, a series of coalescing stories, features Margaret Sargent, a young woman seeking truth and self-definition partly through psychoanalysis; critics described her as a New Woman, or a “woman’s libber.” McCarthy followed with a prizewinning novella, The Oasis (1949), a fictionalized rendition of a failed utopian experiment in upstate New York in which McCarthy had participated. The purists, led by MacDougal Macdermott, face off against the realists, led by Will Taub. The Groves of Academe, set at Jocelyn College in Pennsylvania during the era of the McCarthy HUAC hearings, is a satiric treatment of the academic community and its treatment of faculty member Henry Mulcahy, who is fired for his communist sympathies. A Charmed Life (1955) depicts Martha Sinnott, a writer living in New Leeds, a New England village. Martha, pregnant by a man she is no longer married to, must make a decision that will preserve her integrity and allow her to face up to the truth.

The Group, sensational for its time, tells the stories of eight 1930s Vassar women and follows them until the 1952 presidential election of Dwight Eisenhower. Framing the narrative with the marriage and death, seven years later, of Kay Strong, McCarthy depicts the women as they either succumb to or resist the ideas of science, progress, or materialism. The frank treatment of their sexual lives, so shocking then, is mild by today’s standards. In Birds of America (1971), McCarthy views nature and American ideals from the perspective of 20-year-old college student Peter Levi. He gradually loses his faith in American equality as he realizes that, like the great horned owl, a prominent symbol in the book, nature is dead at least partly because of false American values. Her last novel, Cannibals and Missionaries (1979), addresses the issue of terrorism as hijackers commandeer a plane carrying American art collectors and politicians; rather than follow their initial plan to use politicians as hostages, they offer the art collectors in return for their original artworks, which not only are valuable but also, McCarthy implies, may help educate people to live lives freed from hypocrisy and dedicated to truth. Mary McCarthy died of cancer on October 25, 1989, in New York City. Most of her manuscripts are housed at the University of Texas. In 1966, The Group was filmed by United Artists.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Birds of America. New York: Harcourt, 1971. Cannibals and Missionaries. New York: Harcourt, 1979. A Charmed Life. New York: Harcourt, 1955. The Company She Keeps. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942. The Groves of Academe. New York: Harcourt, 1952. The Group. New York: Harcourt, 1963. The Oasis. First published in Horizon. New York: Random House, 1949.

SOURCES Bennett, Joy, and Gabriella Hochmann. Mary McCarthy: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1992. Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: C. N. Potter, 1993. ———, ed. Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949–1975. New York: Harcourt, 1995. Gelderman, Carol. Mary McCarthy: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

MCCORKLE, JILL 855

———, ed. Conversations with Mary McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Grumbach, Doris. The Company She Kept: A Revealing Portrait of Mary McCarthy. New York: Coward, 1976. McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. New York: Harcourt, 1957. ———. On the Contrary. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961. ———. Ideas and the Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1980. McKenzie, Barbara. Mary McCarthy. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Moore, Harry T., ed. Contemporary American Novelists. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Stock, Irvin. Mary McCarthy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Stwertka, Eve, and Margo Viscusi, eds. Twenty-four Ways of Looking at Mary McCarthy: Essays by Scholars, Critics, and Friends. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, 2nd series. New York: Viking, 1963.

OTHER Mary McCarthy. Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/marymcc.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MCCORKLE, JILL (COLLINS) (1958– ) Jill McCorkle grew up in Lumberton, North Carolina, and most of her novels take place in that state. She writes about young women making their way to adulthood and enduring the often damaging social rituals of Southern life in small and unchanging communities. McCorkle first drew the attention of critics when she simultaneously published two novels in 1984: The CHEER LEADER and July 7th. In her subsequent novels— Tending to Virginia (1987), Ferris Beach (1990), and Carolina Moon (1996)—the women are older and more complicated. The same is true in Crash Diet (1992), a volume of short stories. The Cheer Leader depicts Jo Spencer, who moves from a successful last year of high school to a calamitous first year at college; she is aided by family and professionals who believe in her. In July 7th, Sam Swett, a young man bored with his small town, hitchhikes to New York City just in time to witness a murder. Sam, an aspiring writer, is finally able to

appreciate his close-knit community and its respect for individual differences. Jill McCorkle was born on July 7, 1958, to John Wesley McCorkle, a postal worker, and Melba Collins McCorkle, a medical secretary. She earned a bachelor’s degree with highest honors from the University of North Carolina in 1980 and a master’s degree from Hollins College in 1981. That same year she won the Andrew James Purdy Fiction Prize and married Steven Alexander. They were divorced in 1984. Tending to Virginia, which appeared the same year that McCorkle married Daniel Shapiro, traces the doubts, pain, and eventual healing of Virginia (Ginny-Sue) Turner Ballard by the women in her family. Ginny Sue’s mother, Hannah, her cousin Madge, and her grandmother, among others, help her to mature. With Ferris Beach, McCorkle examines three generations of women and the possibilities for bridging the gaps between social classes as well as age groups. In this coming-of-age novel, inspired by McCorkle’s reading of The Diary of Anne Frank (Summer, 45), Kate Burns gradually comprehends and accepts a complex world that is more understanding and forgiving than she had realized. Quee Purdy, the 60-year-old heroine of Carolina Moon, writes letters to a dead lover so that she can review and analyze the mistakes she has made in her earlier life. Despite the grim nature of some of those mistakes, the novel ends on the optimistic note that has become McCorkle’s trademark. A continuing interest for McCorkle is the significance of place. Writing in author and critic Mickey Pearlman’s A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (1996), she notes that she is impelled by the landscape of her childhood: “There is a feeling, like having a secret; it’s powerful and wonderful and it’s what keeps people and places alive. It’s why people have the urge to go back and why they tell stories.” Jill McCorkle, who lives in Boston, continues to write those stories and novels. In 1996, she was included on Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists list, and in 1999 she received the North Carolina Award for Literature.

NOVELS Carolina Moon. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1996. The Cheer Leader. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1984.

856 MCCRUMB, SHARYN

Ferris Beach. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1990. July 7th. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1984. Tending to Virginia. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1987.

SOURCES Bennett, Barbara. Understanding Jill McCorkle. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Bloom, Lynn. “Jill McCorkle.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 295–302. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Ginger, Mariann. “Do Ellen Gilchrist and Jill McCorkle Have Anything to Say?” Southern Literary Journal 35, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 128–132. McCorkle, Jill. “Secret Places.” In A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 86–97. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Summer, Bob. “Jill McCorkle,” Publishers Weekly 237 (October 12, 1990): 44–45.

OTHER McDaniel, Jan. “Jill McCorkle, Humanist Author.” Writers Write (December 18, 2001). Available online. URL: http:// www.writerswrite.com/journal/jun00/mccorkle.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MCCRUMB, SHARYN (1948– ) Awardwinning writer Sharyn McCrumb is acclaimed for all three of her mystery series: the “Ballad,” those featuring Elizabeth MacPherson, and the Jay Omega novels. Her novels combine murder with mystery, community, and ancestry, most of which is associated with the Appalachians. As McCrumb remarked in an interview, “I think our culture has become so huge that you have to specialize, you have to get yourself some kind of little personal identity . . . and in each one of my books, if you think about it, a murder is committed to protect an assumed cultural identity” (Herbert, 32). McCrumb has received two Agatha and two MacAvity Awards; She Walks These Hills (1994) received the Nero Award, Agatha Award, Anthony Award, and MacAvity Award for best novel. Sharyn McCrumb was born on February 26, 1948, in Wilmington, North Carolina, to Frank Arwood, a teacher, and Helen Bennet Arwood, a housewife. She

was educated at the University of North Carolina and at Virginia Tech, where she received a master’s degree and now teaches. Before McCrumb carved out her Appalachian territory, her books were described as humorous novels of manners. They include Sick of Shadows, Lovely in Her Bones, Highland Laddie Gone, and Paying the Piper. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O (1990) and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter (1992) marked the first of the Ballad novels, followed by She Walks These Hills (1995), the story of a pioneer woman Katie Wyler, kidnapped by the Shawnee in 1799: It is her ghost that haunts the contemporary characters in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Songcatcher (2001) features Lark McCourry, a contemporary country and western singer haunted by a ballad that wafts through seven generations of the McCourry family, Ghost Riders (2003), a Civil War novel in the Ballad series, has received rave reviews both for its authenticity and for McCrumb’s storytelling qualities. Zebulon Vance, a governor of North Carolina, is a Southerner with Union sympathies; Malinda “Sam” Blalock dresses as a man to join her husband in the army. Comparing her books to Appalachian quilts, McCrumb says, “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, ballads, fragments of rural life, and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South” (McCrumb). Sharyn McCrumb is the recipient of two Best Appalachian Novel Awards. Her latest novel, St. Dale (2005), set in the world of NASCAR, is modeled after Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and features a group of fans on a pilgramage to honor legendary race car champion Dale Earnhardt.

NOVELS “BALLAD” SERIES The Ballad of Frankie Silver. New York: Dutton, 1998. Ghost Riders. New York: Dutton, 2003. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. New York: Scribner, 1992. If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O. New York: Scribner, 1990. The Rosewood Casket. New York: Dutton, 1996. She Walks These Hills. New York: Scribner, 1994. The Songcatcher. New York: Dutton, 2001. St. Dale. New York: Kensington Publishing, 2005.

MCCULLERS, CARSON 857

“ELIZABETH MACPHERSON” SERIES If I’d Killed Him When I Met Him. . . . New York: Ballantine, 1995. MacPherson’s Lament. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Missing Susan. New York: Ballantine, 1991. The Windsor Knot. New York: Ballantine, 1990.

“JAY OMEGA” SERIES Bimbos of the Death Sun. Lake Geneva, Wis.: TSR Books, 1987. Zombies of the Gene Pool. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

SOURCES Bier, Lisa. Review of The Songcatcher, Library Journal 126, no. 12 (July 2001): 125. Bissey, Carey. Review of Ghost Riders, Booklist (June 1, 2003): 1,744. Fletcher, Connie. Review of The Songcatcher, Booklist 97, no. 18 (May 15, 2001): 1,733. Herbert, Rosemary. “Aiming Higher; Some of Today’s Top Crime Writers Are Breaking New Ground in Terms of Setting, Sleuths and Motivation,” Publishers Weekly 237, no. 15 (April 13, 1990): 30–33. Pearl, Nancy. “Something to Talk About: Book Group Reads.” Library Journal 126, no. 15 (September 15, 2001): 140. Unsigned review of Ghost Riders, Publishers Weekly 250, no. 20 (May 19, 2003): 49–50. Unsigned. “Rewriting the Civil War,” Library Journal 128 no. 11 (June 15, 2003): 100.

OTHER Sharyn McCrumb. Available online. URL: http:www. sharynmccrumb.com. Accessed August 8, 2005.

MCCULLERS, CARSON (LULA CARSON SMITH MCCULLERS) (1917–1967) A rarity among 20th-century American women writers, Carson McCullers, always associated with the writers of the Southern Gothic tradition, never went out of fashion and most of her work never went out of print. In a simple, fablelike style, McCullers produced short stories, novels, and plays, often marked by grotesque or violent plots, and featuring lonely, questing, adolescent protagonists. Compared favorably to William FAULKNER, Thomas WOLFE, Robert Penn WARREN, and Eudora WELTY, McCullers produced a remarkable amount of work before her untimely death

at age 50, of a stroke. The author of the short story “Wunderkind,” published when she was 19, McCullers is remembered for The HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER (1940) (published when she was 23), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), The BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE (1943), and The MEMBER OF THE WEDDING (1946). She wrote the novel Clock Without Hands (1961), along with several acclaimed television dramas and poems. As many critics have noted, at the center of McCullers’s work is a loneliness so poignantly evoked that it speaks directly to each individual reader. Her characters search for a sense of community but do not want to relinquish independence, difference, or the choice of rebellion. This struggle emanates from the dichotomies in McCullers’s own remarkable life. She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917, the eldest child of Lamar, a successful jeweler, and Marguerite Smith. At age 17, propelled by the mother who always believed in “Lulu’s” gifts, she moved to New York City to study at the Juilliard School of Music. Instead, she enrolled in writing courses at Columbia University and, later, in 1935, at New York University. By the following year, she had written “Wunderkind,” a story that so impressed Whit Burnett, one of her writing instructors, that he published it in Story, the magazine that he edited. One year later, McCullers, home in Columbus for the summer, met Reeve McCullers, an army corporal with writerly aspirations. At age 20, when McCullers had begun to write the prose that would bring her joy and renown, she married (for the first time; they remarried in 1945) the troubled man who would kill himself in 1953. The year, 1940, when she published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, was significant for McCullers. Already restless and unhappy in her marriage to Reeve, and soon to be divorced from him, she rented an old Brooklyn brownstone with George Davis, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, that became known as February House. Their boarders included playwright Christopher Isherwood, novelists Richard WRIGHT, Golo, son of German novelist Thomas Mann, Jane BOWLES and Paul BOWLES, poet W. H. Auden, and famous burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The frequent guests were equally impressive: novelist Anais

858 MCDERMOTT, ALICE

NIN, diarist composer Leonard Bernstein, Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, her close friend playwright and novelist Tennessee WILLIAMS, and the composer Aaron Copeland. Like Mick Kelly, the young hero of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter who yearns to leave the South, along with Frankie Adams of The Member of the Wedding and Amelia Evans of The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, McCullers had escaped Georgia, a place she found unspeakably dull; ironically, the South remained her central fictional subject and the source of her fame. Many critics believe that McCullers’s bisexual relationships, affairs, and breakups appear in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. McCullers fell in love with Annemarie Clare Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer. Miss Amelia falls in love with the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, but remains the love object of her husband, Marvin Macy, whom she comes to revile. Marvin seduces Lymon and steals him away from her. McCullers published The Member of the Wedding a year later, and here, too, the insecurity of adolescence is so freshly and originally evoked that Tennessee Williams persuaded her to transform it into a play. When it opened on Broadway in 1950 it proved a “smash success” (McDowell, 13), running for over 500 performances and winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. McCullers’s next works, a play entitled The Square Root of Wonderful and the ensuing novel, Clock Without Hands, did not receive her full attention; she was distracted by Reeve’s alcoholism and the emotional insecurities that culminated in his suicide, and by the death of her beloved mother, in 1955. The Square Root of Wonderful closed after only five weeks on Broadway, and Clock Without Hands—typed in bed with only one hand as a result of subsequent strokes, emerged as an evocation of the changing South of the 1950s. It is a fascinating if uneven work that deserves reexamination. Following another stroke in 1967, this Southern writer died in Nyack, New York, at the age of 50. She persisted until the end to overcome the physical and psychological obstacles in her path, and American literature is the richer for her struggle.

NOVELS The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. First published serially in Harper’s Bazaar, 1943.

Clock Without Hands. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940. The Member of the Wedding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946. Reflections in a Golden Eye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

SOURCES Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. Cook, Richard M. Carson McCullers. New York: Ungar, 1975. Edmonds, Dale. Carson McCullers. Austin, Tex.: SteckVaughn, 1969. Evans, Oliver. The Ballad of Carson McCullers. New York: Coward, 1966. Gossett, Louise Y. Violence in Recent Southern Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965. Graver, Lawrence. Carson McCullers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. James, Judith Giblin. Wunderkind: The Reputation of Carson McCullers, 1940–1990. Philadelphia: Camden House, 1995. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers From Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Kiernan, Robert F. Katherine Anne Porter and Carson McCullers: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. McDowell, Margaret B. Carson McCullers. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Seven American Women Writers of the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Shapiro, Adrian M., Jackson R. Bryer, and Kathleen Field, eds. McCullers: A Descriptive Listing and Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980. Smith, Margarita, ed. The Mortgaged Heart: The Previously Uncollected Writings of Carson McCullers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Steinbauer, Janine. Carson McCullers. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1995.

MCDERMOTT, ALICE (1953– ) For more than a decade, notes the reviewer Joan Acocella, Alice McDermott has been one of American fiction’s preeminent realists” (Acocella). She has earned praise and a devoted readership for her tales of first-, second-, and third-generation Irish Americans moving from

MCINERNEY, JAY 859

penury and loneliness to the upward mobility of the affluent and privately educated. In addition to her best-selling novel, AT WEDDINGS AND WAKES (1992), for many readers her masterpiece, McDermott won the National Book Award and American Book Award for Charming Billy (1999). Most of her many characters live in the Irish-Catholic areas of Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s, as did McDermott herself. Alice McDermott was born on June 27, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, to William J. McDermott, a utility company employee, and Mildred Lynch McDermott, a secretary and homemaker. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1975, published several stories in Ms., Seventeen, and Mademoiselle magazines, earned a master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978, and married David M. Armstrong, now a neuroscientist, on June 16, 1979. She published her first novel, A Bigamist’s Daughter, in 1982. It features the young editor in chief Elizabeth Connelly, who is awakened to life’s realities through a novel about a bigamist written by her lover, the author Tupper Daniels. That Night (1988), a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award, opens with memories of one Long Island night told by a 10year-old narrator. Those events, which involve the separation of the 15-year-old and pregnant Sheryl from her boyfriend, Rick, continue to affect the characters in adulthood as they look back nostalgically not only on that night but also on a quiet (and extinct) suburban 1960s way of life. At Weddings and Wakes takes place largely in the Brooklyn, New York, apartment of Lucy Towne (“Momma”) amid the family stories that affect her three “children” (who, it turns out, are Momma’s sister Annie’s children, whom she raised after Annie died in childbirth): May, a former nun; Veronica, an alcoholic recluse; Agnes, an executive secretary; and Lucy, full of complaints about her husband as they endure—and sometimes enjoy—the cycle of marriages and deaths that define their lives. Charming Billy opens with the death of Billy Lynch, the charmingly alcoholic World War II veteran whose fiancée Eva—unbeknown to Billy—has betrayed him and married another man.

Billy’s cousin Dennis tells him that Eva has died, thereby directing (or misdirecting?) the trajectory of Billy’s life. Not incidentally, he relates the story of his own love and high regard for Billy, and the events that motivate him and his large family, including his Seattle daughter who narrates the tale. Thus, as several reviewers note, the story is Dennis’s as well as Billy’s. McDermott’s most recent novel is Child of My Heart (2003), whose wistful and nostalgic evocation of IrishAmerican Long Island in the 1960s is conveyed through the 15-year-old narrator, Theresa, herself the center of this coming-of age novel. McDermott and her husband live in Bethesda, Maryland.

NOVELS At Weddings and Wakes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. A Bigamist’s Daughter. New York: Random House, 1982. Charming Billy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Child of My Heart. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. That Night. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.

SOURCES Acocella, Joan. “The Children’s Hour,” New Yorker, 11 November 2002. Prunty, Wyatt, ed. Sewanee Writers on Writing. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000, 125–137. Steinfels, Margaret O’Brien. “The Age of Innocence,” Commonweal 130, no. 2 (January 31, 2003): 28. Wadsworth, Lois. Review of Charming Billy, Biblio 4, no. 3 (March 1999): 58. Watkins, Karen Ahlefelder. Review of That Night, New Republic, 25 May 1987, pp. 37–39.

MCINERNEY, JAY (1955– )

Having gained national attention with the publication of BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY (1984), Jay McInerney gained a reputation as a modern-day F. Scott FITZGERALD, a chronicler of the glamorous and fast-paced New York City yuppie elite. In his five subsequent novels McInerney turned his satirist’s eye to the angst of the wealthy youth who turn to drugs and alcohol when they fail to reach their goals or discover the emptiness at the core of their lives. Particularly admired for his dry wit and his cynical, penetrating presentation of lost and fashionable degenerates, he has also become a representa-

860 MCINERNEY, JAY

tive of the “Literary Brat Pack” that includes Tama JANOWITZ, Bret Easton Ellis, and David LEAVITT. Jay McInerney (pronounced MAC-in-er-ney) was born on January 13, 1955, in Hartford, Connecticut, to John Barrett McInerney, a corporate executive, and Marilyn Jean Murphy McInerney. He was educated at Williams College, earning a B.A. in 1976. After working as a newspaper reporter, fact checker for the New Yorker, and editorial staffer for Random House, he published Bright Lights, Big City, a largely autobiographical novel— famously written in only six weeks—that tracks an unnamed twenty-something writer whose story is conveyed through a second-person point of view. The character is divorced, his mother dies of cancer, and he loses his dull magazine job, but at novel’s end he seems headed in a better, more meaningful direction. In Ransom (1985), Christopher Ransom escapes his father’s corporate ambitions for him by moving to Japan. He loses his rootless young American friends to drugrelated deaths and is eventually killed by a violent opponent in a karate match. Story of My Life (1988) features a 20-year-old Manhattanite, Alison Poole, who tells her first-person story. She is the survivor of a father who molested her in childhood and killed her favorite horse for the insurance money. Her survival is tenuous, however, as, unable to conquer her sexual preoccupations and cocaine and alcoholism addictions, she withdraws at novel’s end to a midwestern drug treatment center. Brightness Falls (1992) focuses on the deteriorating marriage of Russell Calloway, an editor, and his wife, Corinne, a stockbroker, and their preoccupations with marital affairs and postmodern greed. Their story ends on a happier note than earlier McInerney novels, however, with reconciliation and love. The Last of the Savages (1996) turns to the issue of race through the reminiscences of two Ivy League college roommates, Patrick Keane, a middle-class New Englander, now a corporate lawyer, and Will Savage, a wealthy and aristocratic descendant of Southern planters who uses drugs to treat his guilt over slavery. McInerney’s most recent books are Model Behavior: A Novel and Seven Stories (1998) and The Good Life (2006). Jay McInerney has been married three times. After the failure of his first marriage, he married Merry

Remond in 1984, then Helen Bransford, a jewelry designer, in 1991. After the breakup of this marriage, McInerney moved to New York, where he lives and writes. Bright Lights, Big City, which was made into a feature-length film starring Michael J. Fox, has sold more than 1 million copies.

NOVELS Bright Lights, Big City. New York: Random House, 1984. Brightness Falls. New York: Knopf, 1992. The Good Life. New York: Knopf, 2006. The Last of the Savages. New York: Knopf, 1996. Model Behavior: A Novel and Seven Stories. New York: Knopf, 1998. Ransom. New York: Random House, 1985. Story of My Life. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

SOURCES Birkerts, Sven. “McInerney’s Redemption,” Chicago Tribune Books, 7 June 1992, p. 3. Caro, Frank de. “The Three Great Lies: Riddles of Love and Death in a Postmodern Novel,” Southern Folklore 48, no. 3 (1991): 235–254. Caveney, Graham. “Psychodrama: Qu’est-ce que c’est? Jay McInerney and the Family Saga.” In Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction, edited by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, 43–74. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1992. Coleman, Carter. “Riding a Ghost Train. Gatsby-Style,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 9 June 1996, p. 10. Dyer, Geoff. “Freeing the Slaves,” New York Times Book Review, 26 May 1996, p. 11. Eder, Richard. “Campfire of the Vanities,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 June 1992, p. 3. Edwards, Thomas R. “Babylon Re-Revisited,” New York Review of Books, 23 May 1996, pp. 28–29. Faye, Jefferson. “Cultural/Familial Estrangement: Self-Exile and Self-Destruction in Jay McInerney’s Novels.” In The Literature of Emigration and Exile, edited by James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock, 115–130. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992. Gaiser. Carolyn. “Zonked Again,” New York Times Book Review, 25 September 1988, p. 12. Girard, Stephanie. “ ‘Standing at the Corner of Walk and Don’t Walk’: Vintage Contemporaries, Bright Lights, Big City, and the Problem of Betweenness,” American Literature 68, no. 1 (March 1996): 161–185.

MCKAY, CLAUDE 861

Hendin, Josephine. “Fictions of Acquisition.” In Culture in an Age of Money, edited by Nicolaus Mills and Ivan R. Dee, 216–233. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990. Kotzwinkle, William. A Review of Bright Lights, Big City, New York Times Book Review, 25 November 1984, p. 9. Loewinsohn, Ron. “Land of the Also Rising Sun,” New York Times Book Review, 29 September 1985, p. 42. MacDougall, Ruth Doan. “Having Fun in New York,” Christian Science Monitor, 5 October 1984, p. B5. Mills, Nicolaus, ed. Culture in an Age of Money. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990, 216–233. Moran, Terence. Review of Bright Lights, Big City, New Republic, 3 December 1984, pp. 41–42. O’Rourke, P. J. “Bookshelf: Story of My Life,” Wall Street Journal, 16 September 1988, p. 23. Olshan, Joseph. “A Golden Couple of the Age of Accretion,” Wall Street Journal, 12 June 1992, p. A12. Pinsker, Sanford. “Soft Lights, Academic Talk: A Conversation with Jay McInerney,” Literary Review 30, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 107–114. Schine, Cathleen. Review of Brightness Falls, New York Times Book Review, 31 May 1992, p. 7. Toynton, Evelyn. “High Life,” Commentary 94. no. 3 (September 1992): 56–57. Whitlark, James S., and Wendell Aycock, eds. The Literature of Emigration and Exile. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1992, 115–130. Wolcott, James. “Yada Yada Yada,” New Republic, 10 October 1988, pp. 38–41.

OTHER Garner, Dwight. “Bright Lights, Bad Reviews: Jay McInerney on the Aftermath of Literary Stardom.” The Salon Inverview. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salonmagazine. com/weekly/mcinerney1960527.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Hogan, Ray. “Jay McInerney.” Beatrice Interview. Beatrice.com. Available online. URL: http://beatrice.com/ interviews/mcinerney. Accessed September 23, 2005. Literary Kicks. “Jay McInerney.” Available online. URL: http:// www.litkicks.com/BestPages/page.jsp?what=JayMcInerney. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MCKAY, CLAUDE (FESTUS CLAUDIUS MCKAY) (1889–1948) Claude McKay was one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Although primarily known as a poet—he published four

collections—McKay also wrote novels and short fiction. HOME TO HARLEM (1928), a story about a black soldier who returns to Harlem after serving in France during World War I, was one of the earliest African-American novels to enjoy popular success and a large readership. McKay wrote two additional novels, Banjo: A Story without a Plot (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933), the most critically acclaimed of the three. In addition, McKay wrote his autobiography, A Long Way from Home (1937), full of intriguing anecdotes and commentary about his fellow writers but not, as the scholar Alan L. McLeod points out, always reliable; for instance, McKay denies his Communist Party affiliation during the 1930s. Festus Claudius McKay was born on September 15, 1889, on the West Indian island of Jamaica to Thomas Frances McKay and Anne Elizabeth Edwards McKay, both farmers. In 1912, having published poetry in Jamaica, he left for the United States, studied at Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and Kansas State College, moved to New York City, and married Eulalie Imelda Edwards on July 30, 1914. The marriage did not last. McKay joined the Communist Party and, together with such writers as Langston HUGHES, Jean TOOMER, Countee Cullen, and Alain Locke, became a leading voice in the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s. Home to Harlem focuses on two black men: Jake Brown, who leaves the army when he finds himself in a noncombat position and comes “home to Harlem,” and Ray, a Haitian who finds the racism in the United States so pervasive that he cannot cope with American life; he returns to Haiti. The two men present the emotional and cynical ways of dealing with the problem of racial oppression, but most critics agree that Jake is the wiser and more likable of the two; he reunites with Felice, the prostitute he loves, and together they leave New York for Chicago, determined to begin a new and better life. The book appeared on the best-seller lists, encouraging McKay to finish Banjo, the Marseilles-based sequel to Home to Harlem. Ray meets Lincoln Agrippa (Banjo) Daily, and in the course of their friendship they realize that true blackness lies with the ordinary man, not with the intelligentsia.

862 MCMILLAN, TERRY

Nearly all critics agree that McKay achieved his greatest success with Banana Bottom, a less didactic and more artistic novel than the two earlier ones. The female protagonist, Bita, after having been raped at a young age, is raised by white missionaries in the West Indies. Despite her Christian education Bita reconnects with her countrymen, marries a Jamaican workman, and takes pride in her blackness as she raises her child with West Indian values. Claude McKay died of heart failure on May 22, 1948, in Chicago, having succeeded in his attempt to wake up his readers to the humiliation, poverty, and bitterness of many American blacks (Cooper, 247). He is buried at Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, New York. The principal repository for his papers is the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at the Beinecke Library, Yale University.

NOVELS Banana Bottom. New York: Harper, 1933. Banjo: A Story without a Plot. New York: Harper, 1929. Home to Harlem. New York: Harper, 1928.

SOURCES Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Revised ed., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Bronze, Stephen. Roots of Negro Consciousness, the 1920’s: Three Harlem Renaissance Authors. New York: Libra, 1964. Conroy, Mary James. Claude McKay: Negro Poet and Novelist. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1968. Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance: A Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. Duberman, Martin, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr., eds. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: Meridian Books, 1989, 318–331. Giles, James R. Claude McKay. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Lang, Phyllis Martin. Claude McKay: The Later Years, 1934–48. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1973. LeSeur, Geta J. The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations. New York: Garland, 1989, 219–231. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Ramchand, Kenneth. “Claude McKay and Banana Bottom,” Southern Review 4, no. 1 (1970): 53–66. Rothenberg, Paula S., ed. Race, Class and Gender in the United States. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Samuels, Wilfred D. Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917–1929. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1977, 61–82. Wolfe, Susan J., and Julia Penelope, eds. Sexual Practice, Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism. London: Blackwell, 1993.

OTHER Giles, Freda Scott. “Claude McKay’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.uinc.edu/ map/spoets/m_r/mckay/life.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MCMILLAN, TERRY (L.) (1951– ) After publishing her first short story at age 25 and her first novel, Mama (1987), at age 26, Terry McMillan became one of the first African-American crossover novelists, a popular as well as a critical success, read by everyone, and appearing high on all the best-seller lists. Her third novel, WAITING TO EXHALE (1992), stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for months and has sold nearly 4 million copies. In 2001 she published her fifth novel, A Day Late and a Dollar Short; in 2002 she received the Essence Award for Excellence in Literature; and in 2003 she published her sixth novel, The Interruption of Everything. McMillan is also the editor of Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Fiction (1990). Feature-length films have been adapted from three of her five novels: Disappearing Acts (1989), Waiting to Exhale, and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996). McMillan is an urbane and witty social observer who creates earthy, realistic dialogue. Many of her characters are contemporary African-American women who have strong friendships with other women and puzzle, as all women do, over their frequently troubled relationships with men. Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951, in Port Huron, Michigan, to Edward Lewis McMillan and Madeline Washington Tillman. McMillan’s mother was abused by her alcoholic husband, whom she divorced

MCMURTRY, LARRY 863

in 1964 and reared her five children while she worked as a domestic and in factories. McMillan left for Los Angeles in 1968, earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1979, and moved to New York City, where she earned a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University. When she published Mama, about an African-American woman in Michigan who raises five children by herself, she dedicated the novel to her mother, because the novel clearly debunks the Christian myth of the joys of motherhood. Instead, it presents the reality of Mildred Peacock’s life as an indigent resident of inner-city Port Huron. Disappearing Acts, too, questions a myth, the centuries-old one that says a woman needs a man to be taken seriously in society. Numerous readers and critics also see it as a contemporary riff on Zora Neale HURSTON’s THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD: In McMillan’s version, Zora Banks and Franklin Swift struggle with their relationship until it becomes clear that Zora’s professional and personal successes have predated and will outlast her relationship with Franklin. The novel was produced for television by HBO films in 2001. Waiting to Exhale follows the myth-breaking pattern of McMillan’s first two novels; four African-American women—Savannah Jackson, Bernadine Harris, Gloria Matthews, and Robin Stokes—understand the falsity and harmful effects of the American beauty myth, particularly on African-American women. They gain strength through friendships and an appreciation of black art and culture. Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett play two of the starring roles in the 1996 Twentieth Century Fox adaptation of the novel. With yet another nod to Zora Neale Hurston, McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back refers to Their Eyes. Stella Payne, a successful securities analyst, falls in love with a younger man, Winston Shakespeare, on a vacation in Jamaica. The 1998 Twentieth Century Fox film made from the novel starred Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Chai Diggs, and Regina King. In 1998 McMillan married Jonathan Plummer, the model for Winston Shakespeare; in 2005, she filed for divorce. A Day Late and a Dollar Short returns to family themes, featuring the midlife complaints and crises of both Viola and Cecil Price as well as the problems of their children. In McMillan’s most recent novel,

The Interruption of Everything, the protagonist, Marilyn Grimes, plans to flee the empty nest of her marriage until those plans are suddenly “interrupted.” She continues to write from her home in northern California, where she lives with her family.

NOVELS A Day Late and a Dollar Short. New York: Viking, 2001. Disappearing Acts. New York: Viking, 1989. How Stella Got Her Groove Back. New York: Viking, 1996. The Interruption of Everything. New York: Viking, 2005. Mama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Waiting to Exhale. New York: Viking, 1992.

SOURCES Brown, L. M. “Terry Macmillan.” In American Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by C. H. Green and M. G. Mason, 284–286. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Dandridge, Rita B. “Debunking the Beauty Myth With Black Pop Culture in Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.” In Language, Rhythm, and Sound, edited by Joseph K. Adjaye and Adrianne R. Andrews, 121–133. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Patrick, Diane. Terry McMillan: The Unauthorized Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

MCMURTRY, LARRY (JEFF) (1936– ) Larry McMurtry, a descendant of Texas cattle ranchers, is the prize-winning author of more than 20 novels, mainly about frontier and modern Texans. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Lonesome Dove (1985), a work credited with forever changing the traditional Western, he is also particularly admired for such novels as Horseman, Pass By (originally published as Hud in 1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1975), and The Last Picture Show, all of which were made into popular feature-length films. The Last Picture Show, which McMurtry cowrote (with Peter Bogdanovich), won an Oscar for best screenplay. Central to many of McMurtry’s novels is the dreary, dry fictional town of Thalia; within its confines, McMurtry depicts the frustrating intellectual and spiritual barrenness for which promiscuous sex is often the only relief. Other novels contrast the mythic and

864 MCMURTRY, LARRY

actual histories of the cowboy and the Old West. McMurtry has been praised for his tales of initiation and of marital breakup, his sensitive portrayals of strong women and aging characters reluctant or unable to face change, and his depiction of the genuine staying power of the myth of the Old West, despite the widespread move off the land into the cities. In his imaginative creation of a region populated with a multitude of reappearing characters, McMurtry has been compared to James Fenimore COOPER and William FAULKNER; because he has written so many novels, he resembles such contemporaries as Joyce Carol OATES. Larry McMurtry was born on June 3, 1936, in Wichita Falls, Texas, to William Jefferson McMurtry, a rancher, and Hazel Ruth McIver McMurtry. Reared and educated in Texas, he earned a bachelor’s degree at North Texas State College in 1958 and a master’s degree at Rice University in 1960. His 1959 marriage to Josephine Ballard ended in 1966. McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), depicts the clash between Homer Bannon, emblematic of past values, and his ego-driven stepson Hud, who worships modern materialism and acquisitiveness. At Bannon’s death, his grandson Lonnie—who also narrates the tale—rejects Hud’s values and, although disturbed by his own attraction to the motherly black housekeeper Halmea, decides to accept the responsibilities of both the ranch and the land. In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), Molly Taylor rejects both Gideon, a rancher, and Johnny, a cowboy, for Eddie, an oil-rig worker. She gives birth to two boys, one fathered by Gideon and one by Johnny, and both sons lose their lives in World War II. With The Last Picture Show, McMurtry completes what became the Thalia trilogy: Here he focuses on the adolescent Sonny, Duane, and Jacy Farrow, the local beauty queen. The unexpected sexual pairings, including the hopelessly inappropriate ones between Sonny and two women old enough to be his mother, are clearly critiques of the small-town intellectual and spiritual emptiness that cripples its residents and leaves them in a perpetual state of adolescence. Texasville (1987) and Duane’s Depressed (1999) are also Thalia novels.

After his relocation to Washington, D.C., McMurtry wrote three novels (known as the Houston trilogy or urban trilogy) about marriage and divorce among Texans who move from a rural to a more urban environment: Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of Endearment. The first two feature academic settings and rodeos, professors and writers, ranchers and cowboys, whose relationships are disintegrating into infidelity and divorce; Terms of Endearment focuses on Aurora Greenway, a Boston widow who has moved to Houston, enjoys the attention of two suitors, and suffers as her daughter Emma Horton, who appeared in Moving On, dies of cancer. In all three novels, characters repeatedly drive around the western United States as do the characters in the trilogy. McMurtry followed this trilogy with another, referred to by some reviewers as his “trash” novels. They are set in Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas: Somebody’s Darling (1978) features Jill Peel of All My Friends, now a Hollywood film director, Cadillac Jack (1982) is a road journey novel about rodeo rider turned antiques dealer Jack McGraff, and The Desert Rose (1983) depicts Harmony, an aging but plucky showgirl in Las Vegas. But McMurtry’s next trilogy, all set in the Old West, brought him national recognition and acclaim. He earned praise not only for the flesh-and-blood characters, but for the realistic depiction of the isolation and violence in which many of them moved. In Lonesome Dove (1985) McMurtry creates an epic cast of characters around former Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae. This pioneering tale brims with sorrow, melancholy, and loss as well as with humor, exuberance, and accomplishment; in Anything for Billy (1987), famous Philadelphia dime novelist Ben Sippy helps transform a third-rate gunman into a deromanticized Billy the Kid; and in the largely epistolary Buffalo Girls (1990), the aging participants in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show perform in London for Queen Victoria—Sitting Bull, Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, and Buffalo Bill himself—and continue their lives into an old age paralleled by a tamed and shrinking West. McMurtry also revisited characters from earlier novels in five sequels: Texasville, sequel to The Last Picture

MCMURTRY, LARRY 865

Show, shows the growth of the adolescent Duane into a wealthy but unhappy middle-aged father; Some Can Whistle (1989) revisits the now middle-aged Danny Deck, the novelist, and T.R., the daughter he abandoned in All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers; The Evening Star (1992) focuses on Terms of Endearment’s Aurora Green, still sexy, still combative, living life to the fullest despite the disappointing failures who are her grandchildren; Streets of Laredo (1993) resurrects numerous characters from Lonesome Dove, most notably the women, including Joey’s mother, Maria, and schoolteacher Lorena, now wife to Pea Eye; and The Late Child (1995) is about Harmony of The Desert Rose and her daughter Pepper, who has died of AIDS, and Harmony’s five-year-old son, Eddie, born of Harmony’s affair with a truck driver. He also published two prequels to Lonesome Dove: Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997), the former featuring Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae as inexperienced young Texas Rangers, the latter depicting them near retirement. Duane’s Depressed completes the Thalia novels, ending with the portrait of the aged and eccentric Duane. With Diana Ossana, McMurtry wrote Pretty Boy Floyd (1994) and Zeke and Ned (1997), both set in Oklahoma. Three recent novels constitute another trilogy known as the BerryBender Narratives: Sin Killer (2002), The Wandering Hill (2003), and By Sorrow’s River (2003). Larry McMurtry, the author of more than 30 screenplays, has also written short story and essay collections, a biography of the Sioux warrior Chief Crazy Horse, and the memoirs Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond (1998) and Paradise (2001). With his companion and collaborator Diana Ossana, whom he met in Tucson, Arizona, in the mid-1980s, he divides his time between his Archer City, Texas, ranch and Washington, D.C., where he owns Booked Up, a Georgetown used-book store; he opened two other Booked Up stores, in Archer City in 1988 and in Tucson in the early 1990s. Films derived from his novels include Hud, based on Horseman, Pass By, starring Paul Newman, Patricia Neal, and Melvyn Douglas in 1962; Lovin’ Molly, based on Leaving Cheyenne, produced by Columbia in 1974; Terms of

Endearment, produced by Paramount in 1983 and winner of five Academy Awards; Lonesome Dove, produced as a CBS television miniseries in 1989; Return to Lonesome Dove, based on characters from Lonesome Dove, produced as a CBS television miniseries in 1993; Buffalo Girl and Streets of Laredo, both adapted as television miniseries in 1995; The Evening Star, starring Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson in their original roles; and Desert Rose, scripted by Nora and Delia Ephron, adapted by Columbia Pictures. An incomplete collection of McMurtry’s manuscripts, including The Last Picture Show and Leaving Cheyenne, is housed at the University of Houston, and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas has the typescript of the manuscript for Horseman, Pass By. In 2005, Larry McMurtry published the novel Loop Group. And in 2006, McMurtry’s screenplay for Brokeback Mountain, based on a short story by E. Annie PROULX, won the 2006 Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. The film was directed by Ang Lee and released by Focus Features.

NOVELS All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Anything for Billy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Buffalo Girls. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. By Sorrow’s River: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 3. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Cadillac Jack. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Comanche Moon. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Dead Man’s Walk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. The Desert Rose. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Duane’s Depressed (sequel to The Last Picture Show). New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. The Evening Star. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Horseman, Pass By. New York: Harper, 1961. Republished as Hud, New York: Popular Library, 1963. The Last Picture Show. New York: Dial, 1966. The Late Child. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Leaving Cheyenne. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Lonesome Dove. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. Loop Group. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Moving On. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. Pretty Boy Floyd: A Novel, by McMurtry and Diana Ossana. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.

866 MCNICKLE, D’ARCY

Sin Killer: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 1. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002. Some Can Whistle. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989. Somebody’s Darling. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. Streets of Laredo. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Terms of Endearment. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Texasville. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. The Wandering Hill: The Berrybender Narratives, Book 2. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Zeke and Ned, by McMurtry and Ossana. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

SOURCES Bennett, Patrick. Talking with Texas Writers: Twelve Interviews. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1980. Busby, Mark. Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1995. Jones, Roger Walton. Larry McMurtry and the Victorian Novel. Austin: Texas University Press, 1994. Landess, Thomas. Larry McMurtry. Austin: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. Lich, Lera Patrick Tyler. Larry McMurtry’s Texas: Evolution of the Myth. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1987. McMurtry, Larry. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin, Tex.: Encino Press, 1968. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971. Neinstein, Raymond L. The Ghost Country: A Study of the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976. Peavy, Charles D. Larry McMurtry. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Reynolds, Clay, ed. Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Schmidt, Dorey, ed. Larry McMurtry: Unredeemed Dreams. Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University, 1978.

OTHER Edwards, Jami. “Lary McMurtry.” Bookreporter.com. Available online. URL: http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/ au=mcmurtry=larry.asp. Accessed January 2006.

MCNICKLE, (WILLIAM) D’ARCY (1904– 1977) D’Arcy McNickle, a historian and educator who was an early advocate of Native American literature and ethnohistory, is best known for his novel The Surrounded (1936), a tragic evocation of white-Indian relationships and the first depiction of Indians in fiction who do not wish to assimilate with white culture. His

other adult novel, WIND FROM AN ENEMY SKY (1978), appeared posthumously. He worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and for numerous agencies that were trying to improve the lives of Native Americans. In his fiction he demonstrates the early use of the mixed-blood, or “half-breed,” protagonist who, alienated from white culture, attempts to reclaim his identity within the tribe. These themes would later become significant components of Native American literature. D’Arcy McNickle was born on January 18, 1904, in St. Ignatius, Montana, to William McNickle, an IrishAmerican rancher, and Philomene Parenteau McNickle, a Cree whose tribe was later adopted by the Salish-Kootenai Flatheads. Reared on the Flathead reservation, during the mid-1920s and early 1930s he attended the University of Montana; Oxford University, England; and the University of Grenoble, France. He married Joran Birkeland in November 1926. After their divorce in 1938, he married Roma Kauffman but divorced her in 1969 and married Viola Pfrommer. McNickle published his largely autobiographical first novel, The Surrounded, the best known of his three novels, in 1936. The protagonist, Archilde Leon, is, like McNickle, of mixed blood (in Leon’s case, Spanish and Flathead), trapped between tribal culture and white materialism. The novel is considered a masterful depiction of that struggle: At the bleak end of the story, Leon must “surrender” to the authorities, who falsely accuse him of murder. Runner in the Sun, a novel for young adults, appeared nearly two decades later, in 1954. Wind from an Enemy Sky, developed from an unpublished story titled “Feather Boy,” focuses on the spiritual attitudes of the fictional Little Elk tribe, here a microcosm of all Native Americans. Like The Surrounded, it realistically depicts the clash of the two cultures and uses two brothers, Henry Jim, who assimilates with the whites and is highly respected among them, and his younger brother Bull, chief of the Little Elk tribe; Henry Jim returns to the tribe and the brothers reunite before his death, but the reconciliation does not mitigate the novel’s pessimistic ending. D’Arcy McNickle died on October 18, 1977, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, of a heart attack, just weeks after his wife, Viola, had died of Alzheimer’s

MCTEAGUE 867

disease. He was involved in the founding of the National Congress of American Indians in 1944, and was program director of the Center for the History of the American Indians at Chicago’s Newberry Library. In his honor, the center was renamed for him at his death. McNickle’s papers are housed at the Newberry Library.

NOVELS The Surrounded. New York: Dodd, 1936. Reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. Wind from an Enemy Sky. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978.

SOURCES Hans, Birgit. “D’Arcy McNickle: Overview.” In Reference Guide to American Literature, 3rd ed., edited by Jim Kamp. New York: St. James Press, 1994. Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. ———. “Rejection: The Reluctant Return.” In American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978, 66–96. Marsh, Fred T. “A Novel of Old and New Americans,” New York Times Book Review, 16 February 1936, p. 7. Owens, Louis. “The ‘Map of the Mind’: D’Arcy McNickle and the American Indian Novel,” Western American Literature 19, no. 4 (February 1985): 275–283. Parker, Dorothy R. Singing an Indian Song: A Biography of D’Arcy McNickle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Purdy, John Lloyd. Word Ways: The Novels of D’Arcy McNickle. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990. ———, ed. The Legacy of D’Arcy McNickle. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. Ruppert, James. D’Arcy McNickle. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1988. ———. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. ———. “Politics and Culture in the Fiction of D’Arcy McNickle,” Rocky Mountain Review 42, no. 4 (1988): 185–195. Skinner, Constance Lindsay. “The War within the Indian,” New York Herald Tribune Books, 23 February 1936, p. 2. Vorse, Mary Heaton. “End of the Trail,” New Republic, 15 April 1936, pp. 295–296.

OTHER Internet Public Library. “D’Arcy William McNickle, 1904–1977.” Native American Authors Project. Available online. URL: http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/ A49. Accessed September 27, 2005.

MCTEAGUE FRANK NORRIS (1899)

The naturalist Frank NORRIS’s primary concern as a novelist was examining the influences of heredity and the environment on human behavior. One of his earliest and bestknown novels, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, which portrays what Norris viewed as the degenerate lifestyle of the lower class, is significantly different from the other fiction he produced, which focuses on the behavior of the more affluent. Unlike middle-class protagonists, such as Vandover in Vandover and the Brute (1914), who because of his superior breeding and heredity has the choice to act morally, Norris depicts the brutish lower-class McTeague and his miserly wife, Trina, as ignorant victims both of their defective heredity and their impoverished environment. At least implicitly, the novel argues that the lower classes’ status is marked by a flawed heredity that, when combined with poverty and alcoholism, prevents them from evolving to a higher plane of moral development. Instead, McTeague and Trina sink further into brutishness and savage violence as the novel progresses. One of McTeague’s greatest strengths is Norris’s attention to description and detail. A firm believer that the substance of fiction arises from real life and not fantasy, Norris strives to be as realistic as possible in his description of life in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Norris bases his novel on the true story of the unemployed ironworker, Pat Collins, who stabbed his wife, Sarah, 30 times, killing her, in San Francisco in 1893. Trina eventually meets the same shocking and sensational end in McTeague. Norris uses this attention to detail to catalogue the degeneracy of his characters. McTeague is described as an ignorant drunken brute, possessed of great strength and unable to control his animal nature. This is evident in an early scene when he cannot prevent himself from violently kissing Trina on the mouth while she is under anes-

868 MELVILLE, HERMAN

thesia in his dental chair. His violent tendencies erupt when he loses his dental practice and sinks into alcoholism. He crunches Trina’s fingers, which eventually must be amputated, between his teeth and ultimately commits a savage murder. Trina, too, after winning a $5,000 jackpot in the lottery, undergoes a process of degeneration that ultimately ruins her marriage. Obsessed with money, she becomes exceedingly frugal, denying her husband money when in need and eventually sinking them into abject poverty by hoarding. Trina’s frugality is responsible for McTeague’s alcoholism as he becomes drunk more often to escape his unhappy marriage to a miser. Norris presents a particularly disgusting scene where Trina, after polishing her gold coins, rubs them on her face and relishes their feel and smell. Norris also portrays Trina as a masochist who willingly subjects herself to ill treatment by her husband for her supposedly noble deed of pinching pennies. Perhaps, for modern readers, what can be viewed as McTeague’s greatest flaws outweigh Norris’s skillful attention to detail and plot development. Though his character descriptions are vivid and engaging, they are also based on highly stereotypical stock character traits that circulated freely in the writing of the time. The drunken and animalistic poor, Trina’s miserly and violent German-Swiss ancestors, and the degenerate, greedy Jew represent stereotypes with which Norris’s reading public would be intimately familiar. Norris skillfully draws on such stereotypes to create an extremely unflattering, yet not uncommon portrait of the non-Anglo poor of San Francisco, who are somehow trapped by flaws in their own biological makeup. Unfortunately, his deterministic view seems to have been representative of public opinion during the period. The novel’s ending is overly sensational. Rather than ending with Trina’s violent murder, Norris takes McTeague on a wild trek through the California desert, perhaps once more to highlight his descent into animalism. McTeague ends up dead in the wilds of the desert, much closer to the animals, with which he seems to have more in common than human beings. McTeague is both an engaging and important novel that

records an early 20th-century attempt to grapple with the influences of biology, heredity, and the environment on human behavior.

SOURCE Norris, Frank. McTeague. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kathleen Hicks

MELVILLE, HERMAN (1819–1891)

Famously rediscovered in the 1920s after decades of neglect, Herman Melville is today recognized as one of the most original, innovative, and prescient of American writers. At his death, in addition to his masterpiece, the metaphysical whaling novel MOBY-DICK (1850), he left behind a dozen novels or novellas, a number of fine stories, now collected, a number of poems, and his journals, which documented his considerable adventures and travels. Despite his patrician background—one grandfather, Major Thomas Melville, participated in the Boston Tea Party and another, General Peter Gansevoort, was the commander of Fort Stanwix, New York— Melville had to work for a living. His subsequent experiences as a sailor brought him into close contact with working men, many in desperate circumstances, who would later populate his fiction. Melville’s fiction, moreover, is filled with empathetic portraits of the despised, those who were condescended to or mistreated, from island natives to impoverished whites and African slaves. Herman Melville was born on August 1, 1819, in New York City, to Allan Melvill, a businessman, and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. (The “e” was added to the family name in the 1830s.) After his father’s death when Melville was 13, the family lived in genteel poverty; Melville made his first seagoing voyage at age 20 and, as he declared in Moby-Dick, his real education was on “a whale-ship, which was my Yale College and my Harvard.” The experiences of five years resulted in his first novel, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), an exotic tale featuring Tommo and Toby, two sailors who jump ship and are cared for by Kory-Kory and Fayaway, on their Polynesian island of Nukuhiva. The novel compares primitive to civilized man, and the latter, especially the missionaries, are found wanting.

MELVILLE, HERMAN 869

Melville followed with Omoo (1847), in which the narrator and his companion, Long Ghost, are jailed for mutiny after exploring the lush island of Tahiti and noting that the missionaries impose moral standards on the Polynesians of whose lives they are completely ignorant. (During this period, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts, on August 4, 1847.) Mardi (1849), considered by many to be Melville’s first mature novel, is the last of the island trilogy; it features the familiar ship jumper, this time called Taji, and his friends Jarl, Samoa, and Annatoo. Taji embarks on both a physical and an imaginative journey through the South Pacific. He rescues Jillah, the daughter of a Mardi high priest who is about to sacrifice her; they enjoy a brief romance until she vanishes. Then Taji pursues Jillah— who at least partially symbolizes Truth—throughout the remainder of the novel, pausing at each island for philosophical, poetic, and political discussions. Although Melville insisted he wrote Redburn (1849) and White Jacket: or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850) for money, they were immediately popular and have remained so into the 21st century. Wellington Redburn, an impoverished aristocrat, signs up on the Highlander as a naive ship’s “boy.” There he is witness to madness, suicide, and mass deaths. In White Jacket, set aboard ship, Melville implicitly demands reform in the U.S. Navy, cataloguing the abusive treatment of sailors, particularly the custom of flogging, and the arrogant, egotistical, and frequently ignorant behavior of the officers. Only Jack Chase, the white-jacketed and handsome early version of Billy Budd, pleads for the respect of sailors as individual human beings. He discards the constricting jacket of worn-out rituals and, literally, saves himself from death. Moby-Dick, dedicated to Melville’s friend Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, was written in the 18 months after Melville moved his family to Arrowhead, in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Melville elevated the whale hunt to an epic Shakespearian event and noted the dignity of the working men who keep the Pequod afloat. He confers equal grandeur on the inscrutable white whale, pursued obsessively by the insane Captain Ahab, who grapples with the enormous

and probably irreconcilable issues that face every human being. As Melville’s writing gained in brilliance and philosophical complexity, however, he began to lose his audience, a process that continued with the rest of his writings until his death. PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES (1852) received an even more hostile reaction than did Moby-Dick. The title character, a writer, becomes enmeshed in a welter of forbidden sex, including his own father’s affair, which results in an illegitimate daughter, Isabel. Pierre tries to protect Isabel in New York City by pretending to be her husband, and the two are joined by his fiancée, Lucy. Having abandoned his inheritance when he left home for New York, Pierre is confronted by Cousin Glen, who has inherited Pierre’s legacy and tries to take Lucy as well. Pierre shoots and kills Glen; Lucy drops dead while visiting him in prison, and Pierre and Isabel end their lives by ingesting poison. BENITO CERENO (1855) is often seen as a transitional novella that, unlike Moby-Dick and Pierre, returns to traditional narrative techniques. Cast in the form of a suspenseful Gothic tale, Captain Cereno comes to the aid of a Spanish ship, only to realize that it is controlled by a cargo of slaves. Melville’s abhorrence of slavery is painfully obvious to the modern mind. That same year, Melville wrote Israel Potter, an American Revolutionary War tale in which the title character is taken prisoner at the Battle of Bunker Hill, shipped to London, and enlisted as a trained spy disguised as a courier to Benjamin Franklin, America’s ambassador to France. Melville’s final novel, The CONFIDENCE MAN (1857), has attracted an increasing amount of attention from contemporary readers, who are drawn to its unplumbed ambiguities and trickster techniques. Set aboard the Fidele, a Mississippi steamboat, the novel presents a succession of confidence men (whom many see as the devil), who give way to Frank Goodman, whose status is Every Man—especially Every American. Whether these confidence men are evildoers or victims, devils or do-gooders, no one, particularly the reader, can be sure. In recent years, the novel has been viewed as a critique of American optimism and Christianity. His last work, BILLY BUDD (1891), a novella, tells the tale of the innocent and good seaman Billy Budd

870 MELVILLE, HERMAN

who strikes and kills a petty officer. He is tried and hanged, despite mitigating circumstances, so that naval discipline can be maintained. Herman Melville died on September 28, 1891, in New York City. His manuscripts are mainly housed at the Houghton Library at Harvard University; letters and family correspondence are at the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection and Duyckinck Collection; and published works may be found at Chicago’s Newberry Library.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Billy Budd and Other Prose Pieces, edited by Raymond Weaver, volume 13 of The Works of Herman Melville. London, Bombay & Sydney: Constable, 1924; “Billy Budd, Foretopman.” Republished in Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, edited by Weaver. New York: Liveright, 1928. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. New York: Dix, Edwards, 1857. Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. New York: Putnam, 1855. Mardi: And a Voyage Thither, 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1849. Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands; Or, A Peep at Polynesian Life. London: Murray, 1846. Republished as Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. During a Four Months’ Residence in a Valley of the Marquesas, With Notices of the French Occupation of Tahiti and the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands to Lord Paulet, 2 vols. New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1846. Rev. ed. with “The Story of Toby,” 2 vols. New York: Wiley & Putnam/London: Murray, 1846. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1847. Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities. New York: Harper, 1852. Redburn: His Voyage. Being the Sailor-Boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. New York: Harper, 1849. The Story of Toby, A Sequel to “Typee”. London: Murray, 1846. The Whale, 3 vols. London: Bentley, 1851. Republished as Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale, New York: Harper, 1851. White Jacket; Or, The World in a Man-of-War. New York: Harper, 1850.

SOURCES Bergmann, Johannes D. “Melville’s Tales.” In A Companion to Melville Studies, edited by John Bryant, 241–278. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986.

Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Bryant, John. Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Cook, Jonathan A. Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.” Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Dillingham, William B. Melville and His Circle: The Last Years. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Dimock, Wai-chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Finkelstein, Dorothee Metlitsky. Melville’s Orienda. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961. Gilman, William H. Melville’s Early Life and “Redburn.” New York: New York University Press, 1951. Goldman, Stan. Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in “Clarel.” Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993. Hayford, Harrison. “ ‘Unnecessary Duplicates’: A Key to the Writing of Moby-Dick.” In New Perspectives on Melville, edited by Faith Pullin, 128–161. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: T. Seltzer, 1923. Parker, Herschel. “Herman Melville’s The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology,” American Literature 62 (March 1990): 1–16. Post-Lauria, Sheila. Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Robillard, Douglas. Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997. Samson, John. White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Facts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Schultz, Elizabeth A. Unpainted to the Last: “Moby-Dick” and Twentieth-Century American Art. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995. Sealts, Merton M., Jr. Melville’s Reading. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Shurr, William. The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972. Sten, Christopher. The Weaver God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1996.

MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE 871

———, ed. Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. Stern, Milton R. The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957. ———. “Toward ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ ” In The Stoic Strain in American Literature, edited by Duane J. Macmillan, 19–41. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1979. Titus, David K. “Herman Melville at the Albany Academy,” Melville Society Extracts 42 (May 1980): 4–10. Vincent, Howard P. The Tailoring of Melville’s “White-Jacket.” Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. The Trying-Out of “Moby-Dick.” Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. Wallace, Robert K. Melville & Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. Wenke, John. Melville’s Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995. Wright, Nathalia. Melville’s Use of the Bible. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1949.

MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE CARSON MCCULLERS (1946) The Member of the Wedding is Carson MCCULLERS’s fourth novel, regarded by many as her masterpiece. It was well received and widely read, and it continues to be an adaptable work, garnering popular and critical acclaim as a novel, a Broadway play, and a Hollywood film. The Member of the Wedding’s resilience can be attributed to its sound conception and structure. The novel is theatrical and cinematic. It contains three parts and three main characters—Frankie Addams, Berenice Sadie Brown, and John Henry West. It has a simple setting, mostly within the kitchen of a sleepy, hot summertime southern town, and its sequence of events spans a brief period, a Friday afternoon and evening, a long Saturday, and a disastrous Sunday wedding. A short epilogue rings down the curtain on this carefully wrought novel. McCullers’s process in converting the novel to a play provides an intriguing view of a writer at work. In the summer of 1946, McCullers spent several weeks at a Nantucket cottage with her new friend, Tennessee Williams. Legend has it that they sat together at a dining room table, and as he wrote his play Summer and

Smoke, she dramatized The Member of the Wedding. Williams, already an accomplished playwright, provided company and support, but that was the extent of his contributions to her manuscript. In The Lonely Hunter, Virginia Spencer Carr’s biography of McCullers, Williams reports that he “did not suggest lines to her more than once or twice, and then she would usually have her own ideas and say, ‘Tenn, honey, thank you, but I know all I need to know’” (275). The Member of the Wedding, as a play, was an extraordinary success. It opened on Broadway in 1950 and ran for 501 performances. It was also chosen to appear in Best Plays of 1949–1950. In 1952, The Member of the Wedding was released as a film, starring Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon de Wilde. Julie Harris’s performance earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and Brandon de Wilde won a special Golden Globe award for Best Juvenile Actor. The film was remade in 1992, and the play has continued to be staged across the nation in small and large venues. The play follows the novel’s three-act, three-character format, though the play’s plot is more compressed, as drama necessitates. Furthermore, a significant difference between the novel and the play is that McCullers carefully tempered the novel’s atmosphere of menace when she adapted it. The novel’s opening line is “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was 12 years old” (461), and from there the novel unpacks this “it.” “It” certainly signifies the wedding itself (of Frankie’s brother, Jarvis, and his fiancée, Janice), as well as Frankie’s crazy resolution to become part of the event and make a happy trio with her brother and his bride, whom she calls “the we of me” (497). “It” also signifies Frankie’s introduction to adult social rituals. As the novel’s second part opens, Frankie Addams, the tomboy child, has recast herself as F. Jasmine, the hopeful member of the wedding. While making what she is certain are her last rounds of the town before she goes off to the wedding at Winter Hill, she meets a soldier. He is a tousled, drunk young man who seems unable to process social cues and information, including the fact that although Frankie is “a great big long-legged twelve-year-old blunderbuss” (481),

872 MEMBER OF THE WEDDING, THE

she is still a child. He buys her a beer, and she agrees to meet him later for a date, as if she were 19 or 20 instead of 12. Then she returns home to have a long, late dinner with John Henry and Berenice. Many readers see the disastrous wedding as the novel’s turning point, but it is predictable and, tellingly, not carefully rendered but rather reported after the fact. Instead, the last dinner scene provides a more dramatic, poignant, and productive turning point. What happens in this part of the novel is a familiar scene and theme in McCullers’s oeuvre: “as they ate they began to talk of love” (531). Berenice tells Frankie a story about her several marriages that “is to be a warning” (550), a cautionary tale for F. Jasmine. Berenice’s story is a history of her marriages: first to Ludie Freeman, her one true love, who died unexpectedly; then to Jamie Beal, “the sorry old liquor-drinker who was the second husband” (554); then to Henry Johnson, “the third husband . . . who had gone crazy” (554); and finally to Willis Rhodes, “the last and the worst of the four husbands, and he was so terrible that Berenice had had to call the Law on him” (554). Berenice says to Frankie, “I see what you have in your mind. Don’t think I don’t. You see something unheard of at Winter Hill tomorrow, and you right in the center. You think you going to march down the center of the aisle right in between your brother and the bride. You think you going to break into that wedding, and then Jesus knows what else” (556). To this accusation, Frankie responds, “No . . . I don’t see myself walking down the center of the aisle between them” (556). Nevertheless, Frankie does not fully articulate exactly how she sees herself as a member of the wedding. Berenice tries again: “What I’m warning is this. . . . If you start out falling in love with some unheard-of thing like that, what is going to happen to you? If you take a mania like this it won’t be the last time and of that you can be sure. So what will become of you? Will you be trying to break into weddings the rest of your days? And what kind of life would that be?” Frankie replies, “It makes me sick to listen at people who don’t have any sense” (556), but she keeps listening. The long dinner ends, and Berenice never explains what exactly happened between herself and Willis or

how her story really pertains to love. Furthermore, their conversation really is not, after all, about love. It is about marriages: ones that fail. Berenice offers an interesting, predictive observation about weddings: “I have heard of many a queer thing. . . . I have seen some of the most peculiar weddings anybody could conjecture. I have knew womens to love veritable Satans and thank Jesus when they put their split hooves over the threshold. I have knew boys to take it into their heads and fall in love with other boys. I have seen many a peculiar thing in my day. But one thing I never knew and never heard tell about. . . . I never before in all my days heard of anybody falling in love with a wedding. . . . So I have come to this conclusion. What you ought to begin thinking about is a beau” (531–533). F. Jasmine promptly rejects this conclusion. Her own conclusion is this: “Somehow we got off on the wrong kind of conversation” (560). Berenice’s words prove to be prophetic. Later that evening, after that wrong kind of conversation, Frankie meets the red-headed soldier at the Blue Moon Cafe. They have drinks that she “suspects have liquor in them,” and she feels that “the soldier talked a kind of double-talk that, try as she would, she could not follow—yet it was not so much the actual remarks as the tone underneath she failed to understand” (581). When the soldier grabs her upstairs in his dingy room, she still does not quite understand his words, though his actions are enough to make her react. She clocks him with a glass pitcher and runs “like a chased person fleeing from the crazy-house at Milledgeville” (584). Indeed, she flees like a madwoman from this introduction to heterosexuality: a drunken, fumbling, violent scene. Her flight foreshadows the scene she causes the next day at her brother’s wedding, when she has to be dragged, like a crazy person from Milledgeville, from the newlyweds’ festooned car. Upon her return from the wedding, F. Jasmine becomes Frances. Frances attempts to run away from home, but when her plot is foiled, the transformation is complete. Whereas the old Frankie was rough, dirty, and mean, Frances Addams is sedate, cleaned up, charming. Overall, The Member of the Wedding is a dense, complex novel, and its popular classification as a “young

MERIDIAN 873

adult” or “teen novel”—with the inherent suggestion that it is a not-too-complicated tale of adolescent angst—does both the novel and young adult readers a great disservice. In his Booklist article “Communicating with the Pubescent,” Richard Peck notes that The Member of the Wedding “wasn’t written for the young, of course. It was written for readers who’d made a safe passage to adulthood and dared to look back.” When he tried to assign the book to a class of seventh graders at an all-girls school, Peck recalls, the students flatly refused to read it. Recent critical work on The Member of the Wedding aims to rescue the novel from this inappropriate classification and focuses on the complex and challenging issues of sexuality and gender in McCullers’s work and life.

SOURCES Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Carson McCullers Society. Carson McCullers Society Newsletter 6. Edited by James Mayo. Jackson, Tenn: Jackson State Community College, 2004. McCullers, Carson. Carson McCullers Complete Novels. Edited by Carlos L. Dews. New York: Library of America, 2001. Peck, Richard. “Communicating with the Pubescent,” Booklist 90, nos. 19–20 (1 June 1994). Ellen Lansky

MERIDIAN ALICE WALKER (1976)

Meridian, the title character of Alice Walker’s novel, looks to politics and political life in her college years to help her find better relationships, somehow untouched by class issues. Meridian comes to college life having experienced in a short time the common conditions for a young African-American woman from a small town in the early 1960s: She lived with her parents’ frustrations with bad jobs and domesticity, her own teenage pregnancy and early marriage, the resultant poverty, and her own depression. She becomes active in the civil rights movement almost accidentally, and through it she meets college-educated African Americans. Meridian is shy and sensitive; she finds the decadence and frivolity of her new social group alarming.

Her mother, who had been enjoying relative economic freedom, respect, and independence as a schoolteacher, felt betrayed by her world when the marriage and motherhood she was encouraged to embrace led her to plummet into deprivation and constant obligation. Even as a child Meridian was conscious always of a feeling of guilt, yet she did not know of what she might be guilty. When she tried to express her feelings to her mother, her mother would only ask: “Have you stolen anything?” (49). The answer, Meridian discovers, is that, yes, she has stolen something: her mother’s rise up the educational and social ladder. Sex and culture have robbed Meridian’s mother of an identity she scarcely had grown to appreciate before it was gone. The consequence for Meridian is that she feels neither a right to her existence nor a sense of self-worth, making her class assimilation in college nearly impossible. Although Meridian lives in the college honors house, her background, her quiet self-deprecation, and her political activism make her a campus oddity. The majority of young women attending Saxon College in Meridian are doing so because their parents, African Americans who have achieved some financial success and status in their segregated community, hope that their daughters can surmount racial barriers by acquiring white, middle-class cultural tastes. Their education is about fitting an image, not about developing themselves and assisting others in their situation. Thus, the education Meridian is offered is bourgeois and oppressive, for while it acts under the aegis of race “advancement,” in reality it encourages her to abandon her origins in return for gaining the favor of her oppressor. Group social climbing in this case seems to offer even less fulfillment than individual social climbing. In this environment, Meridian finds herself meeting the respectable young male counterparts for whom these women are being prepared. Just as Meridian finds her maverick friend Anne-Marion, she also finds Truman Held, a boyfriend who reputedly is even more radical than Anne-Marion. Though Meridian shares with them a racial background, their social classes are far apart. Truman is well traveled, confident, and socially adept. He peppers his conversation with French (a way to mark himself as

874 MERRY MEN

distinct from the stereotype of the illiterate, poor black who labors) and dates white women who meet his criteria, which suggest his interest in a sexual smorgasbord. He also dates for social advancement and uses his college political community to meet liberal, middleclass, college-educated white women. He reads W. E. B DuBois and uses it to justify his sexual interest in white women (even though DuBois only calls for solidarity and commitment between black men and women; unlike Eldridge Cleaver later in the 20th century, DuBois did not advocate the vengeful sexual exploitation of white women). Class and gender differences account for Meridian’s response to Truman and his dissatisfaction with her response. Meridian comes from a background that is anything but casual about sexual relations. When, as a teenager, Meridian became pregnant, she had to get married; later, when she divorced and put her child up for adoption so that she could attend college, her mother was scandalized. Because of her experiences, Meridian was at odds with the popular attitude in the early 1960s that sexual relations were acceptable as long as one was in love. Because they are both black, Truman believes that Meridian should understand his distinction between sex with her and sex with white women. He expects, from reading DuBois, that they will have the same souls, the same understanding. But Meridian’s understanding derives from being black and poor and female. She knows that some white men prefer black women for sex and says so. Sex with black women helped white men gain experience and initiation into the adult world: “The maid, the cook, a stray child, anything not too old or repulsive would do” (107). Truman’s actions strike her as a similar to those of white men. Like them, he uses women of a certain color to make a statement about his status and masculinity. Meridian loves Truman, perhaps because of his aspiration to overcome oppression, but, in his youth, this turns out to be mostly self-interest. He loves Meridian as a symbol of black womanhood, which to him must be championed because it is oppressed, and Meridian is a better candidate because of her beauty and background than her well-heeled sorority sisters.

Meridian tries to give Truman the relationship he wants, but he is put off by her demand that they both be in love (as she is). In the end he leaves her to sleep with white women, and she undergoes an illegal abortion alone. The final insult is that months later, when Truman sees her, he tries to seduce her again, once more appealing to race solidarity as he tells her, “you're beautiful. . . . Have my beautiful black babies” (Walker 116). Meridian beats him bloody without speaking. To him, his statement is a playful, abstract way of saying she is attractive because she can help him create a future generation of black children. Truman does not for a moment understand the brutal truth of Meridian’s existence, nor does he understand that she had to abort his beautiful black baby because of his selfish refusal to wear a condom and his unwillingness to make a total commitment to any black woman. None of the characters in Meridian seem to find their way out of the destructive influences of race, class, and gender. Meridian becomes a kind of martyr saint to her race. She lives in ascetic, self-selected poverty; pares herself down to a thin, celibate androgyny; and literally lays her body down at various political protest sites. Her behavior seems less like transcendence and more like complete capitulation without any enjoyment of the few pleasures of her race, her class, and her gender.

SOURCES Walker, Alice. Meridian. San Diego: Harcourt, 1976. Carolyn Whitsun

MERRY MEN CAROLYN CHUTE (1994)

This novel takes an epic look at the history of an American farming community from the 1700s to the end of the 20th century. Beginning with a vignette of the first American settlers in Maine shooting the last Indian on their land, the novel jumps to the last farmers being dispersed and destroyed as corporate culture buys out farms to make vacation homes for city dwellers. The hardships of the ancestors of contemporary Egypt, Maine, act as reminders of what forms community identity and what small acts begin its destruction. Two characters act as the voices of the community as it dies. One is Lloyd Barrington, a graves keeper and

METALIOUS, GRACE 875

the lone college graduate in Egypt. His college education has marked him as suspicious in his community: He has been to the remote training ground of those who victimize the residents—the government officials, the urban professionals, the cultural experts. All of these educated people come into Egypt to exploit or demean the farmers by explaining to them that their way of life is wrong and dead, and that they must change. That Lloyd has returned to his community and refused to go away and make money (unlike most of the young there who go to college) makes him even more suspicious. The residents feel that he is judging them and perhaps laughing at them, as the outsiders do. His presence makes them uneasy, but Lloyd stays, doing his best to camouflage himself. What is Lloyd doing? He went to college to understand why his homeland is dying off, and the economic and cultural answers drive him to despair. He attempts to provide minor guerrilla theater to make statements on behalf of his community, such as leaving lifelike figures of vampirelike pirates in the vacation homes of corporate executives to make a point about their role in the community. In this aspect, Lloyd is a trickster figure, but whereas conventional trickster figures in American literature have been gleeful and empowered, the character of Lloyd Barrington stands out as despairing and defeated. Lloyd also acts as a secret “super” hero—he covertly aids the poor and struggling of Egypt, Maine. When the factory fires a woman whose body has been worn out working in its debilitating and hazardous environment, Lloyd leaves her groceries, a little money, and small American flags (from his work keeping veterans’ graves); he also finds a way to shame the corporation for its exploitation. The other main character of the story is Anneka Plummer. Anneka is a spirited young woman who longs to live the great tradition of her region—she wants to be a farmer’s wife. But, as her husband tells her, this way of life is dying, and anyone trying to make it against the incursions of agribusiness will be destroyed in the attempt. Anneka’s world comes crashing down as health care costs, economic hardship, and corporate indifference leave her with a stillborn infant

and a husband imprisoned for violence in resisting hospital attendants as they try to take his dead child from his arms. The novel ends with no love, no intact families, and no future—a devastating condemnation of the urban culture as it cannibalizes the rural culture that fostered it.

SOURCE Chute, Carolyn. Merry Men. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994. Carolyn Whitsun

METALIOUS, GRACE (GRACE DE REPENTIGNY METALIOUS) (1924–1964) Grace Metalious’s name is immortalized through her post–World War II soap opera novel, Peyton Place (1956). The tale of a small gossipy New England town and its scandals, the novel was bought in enormous numbers by the reading public but scorned by critics. It sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies to readers apparently intrigued by the dark side of a New England ordinarily idealized by such artists as Norman Rockwell. The novel eventually sold more than 20 million copies before it went out of print; it was reissued in 1999 and has metamorphosed into an icon of pop culture. The reporter Noel Holston notes that it is used in universitylevel courses in women’s studies (Holston). The critic Paul Nathan writes, “It is hard to recall how close to scandalous this small-town soap opera was [once] considered” (Nathan). In significant ways, this is a novel about essentially innocent youth rebellious against the rigidity of the older folk. It is also a tale about incest and sexual abuse. Grace Metalious was born on September 8, 1924, in Manchester, New Hampshire, to Alfred Albert de Repentigny and Laurette Royer de Repentigny. She married George Metalious in 1942, and they lived in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, a town much like its fictional counterpart, Peyton Place. Emily Toth, in an afterword to the 1999 reissue of her 1981 biography, suggests that the passing of time has helped her—and us—to understand Grace Metalious: Whereas two decades ago, Toth had attributed Metalious’s sadness to her need for the “perfect man,” she now believes that Metalious needed “a good mom” instead; if Toth were

876 MICHENER, JAMES A.

writing the biography now, she says, she would probably say “more about kitchens and less about bedrooms” (Toth, 376). In an intriguing comparison to the 19th-century writer Kate CHOPIN, she notes that Chopin’s career, unlike that of Metalious, was destroyed rather than enhanced by the publication of The AWAKENING, a novel “about a sexual woman who does what she pleases” (Toth, 381). Nonetheless, says Toth, both these Franco-American women “knew a thing or two that conventional Americans did not want to hear” (Toth, 381). In the novel, Constance MacKenzie, a Peyton Place dress shop owner, is estranged from her daughter Alison because of Alison’s relationship with Norman Page and her rebellious attitude. Alison returns for the murder trial of her friend Selena Cross, who has killed her violent, incestuous stepfather, Lucas. The material— rape, suicide, murder, buried bodies, incest, adultery, drunkenness, nudity, and illegitimacy—was scandalous for its era. In Return to Peyton Place, Alison MacKenzie becomes a writer, publishes a book very similar to Peyton Place, and moves to New York City. Although the opinions of readers will likely continue to be divided, Toth argues that not only Peyton Place but all Metalious’s novels were literary pioneers “in the fight for freedom of expression” (Toth, 241). The National Public Radio reporter Susan Stamberg calls Peyton Place “an early bombshell in the sexual revolution” (Stamberg). Grace Metalious, the “Pandora in blue jeans,” as the dust jacket described her, died in 1964, at age 39, of alcoholism and cirrhosis. Peyton Place was filmed in 1957, with Lana Turner playing Constance MacKenzie and Diane Varsi playing her daughter Alison; the film earned nine Academy Award nominations. Return to Peyton Place was filmed in 1961; both were filmed by Twentieth Century–Fox. Peyton Place was also a television series in the 1960s starring Mia Farrow as Alison, and a television movie called Murder in Peyton Place. Peyton Place: The Next Generation aired on television in 1985; and the rights to a musical drama were sold in 1994. In 1995–96, Peyton Place was named one of 100 Books of the Century in a New York Public Library exhibit. In classes on women and poverty, class, mass

culture, and regional literature, educators are making the case that Grace Metalious “was an acute observer of poverty, fear, and ethnic pride” (Toth 383, 384).

NOVELS No Adam in Eden. New York: Trident, 1963. Peyton Place. New York: Messner, 1956. Return to Peyton Place. New York: Messner, 1959. The Tight White Collar. New York: Messner, 1960.

SOURCES Holston, Noel. “Critic’s Choice.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 3 June 1999. Metalious, George. The Girl From Peyton Place. New York: Dell, 1965. Toth, Emily. Inside Peyton Place: The Life of Grace Metalious. New York: Doubleday, 1981. Reissued, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

OTHER Nathan, Paul, “Scandalous No More.” Publishers Weekly (June 13, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 16028948. Accessed September 27, 2005. Stamberg, Susan, and Scott Simon. “The Subject Is Sex, Part 6,” NPR Weekend Edition (January 21, 1995). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:28265319. Accessed September 27, 2005.

MICHENER, JAMES A(LBERT) (1907– 1997) One of the most popular writers of the last half of the 20th century, James Michener emerged on the American literary scene at age 40 with the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific (1947), a collection of short stories that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II adapted into the enormously successful Broadway musical South Pacific. It was later also made into a popular film. The author of 23 novels, Michener also published five volumes of short fiction and miscellany, and 26 volumes of nonfiction. His abiding appeal to readers, rooted in a technique that he used to great advantage, was to blend fact and story in the setting of a particular place. Michener used an enormous mass of detail evoked by the specific place, and he frequently focused on many generations of one family. A moral and spiritual writer, he believed that

MICHENER, JAMES A. 877

humanity fares better when everyone subscribes to cross-cultural understanding. Although some critics feel the “formula” was counterintuitive—asking the public to read long, traditionally told tales in an era of diminishing novel length—his readers number in the hundreds of millions, and the many films made from both the fiction and the nonfiction have proved extremely popular. James Michener was born on February 3, 1907, possibly in New York City, and was adopted from an orphanage in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, by Edwin Michener and Mabel Haddock Michener, who gave him a Quaker education in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Swarthmore College, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1929, and at Colorado State College of Education, earning a master’s degree in 1936. Michener married three times: to Patti Koon, from 1935 to 1948; to Vange Nord, from 1948 to 1955; and to Mari Yoriko Sabusawa, from 1955 until her death in 1994. He worked as a teacher from 1932 until 1941, when he joined the Naval Reserve, from 1942 to 1945, emerging as a lieutenant commander. Michener also worked as a book editor for Macmillan in New York City before turning to full-time writing in 1949. Michener’s first novel, The Fires of Spring, is a semiautobiographical bildungsroman featuring David Harper, an orphan trying to make sense of his life and aspiring to become a writer. Many of Michener’s early novels, including Tales of the South Pacific, take place during wartime: The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), set during the Korean War, features Harry Brubaker, a recalled World War II pilot, who attempts to accomplish his dangerous missions, destroying enemy bridges. Sayonara (1954), set in Tokyo, is an interracial love story; an American pilot, Major Lloyd (Ace) Gruber, falls in love with Hana-ogi, a Japanese woman, and faces down the racism and anger of his parents and his white American fiancée. Both novels were made into popular films. Michener’s breakthrough novel in terms of popularity with the reading public, however, was Hawaii (1959), the first in the innovative genre that made him not only popular but also accessible to a readership that had never yearned to read either history or fiction.

The panoramic Hawaii was followed by Caravans (1963), a novel following Bryn Mawr graduate Ellen Jaspar across Afghanistan, and The Source (1965), a look at the history and present-day concerns of Israel through an archaeological dig led by Makor Tell. The Drifters (1971), part guidebook, part exploration of the youth revolution, follows a youthful hippie in her wanderings with her disenchanted young friends across Spain, Portugal, and North Africa; Centennial (1974) covers about 200 years in Colorado; Chesapeake (1978) is about Maryland’s Eastern Shore; South Africa is the subject of The Covenant (1980), followed by Poland (1983), Texas (1985), Alaska (1988), and Caribbean (1989). Legacy (1987) is a fictionalized version of the IranContra scandal of the 1980s; it features army major Norman Starr as Colonel Oliver North. Miracle in Seville (1995), illustrated by the late artist and bullfighter John Fulton, has the quality of a fable; it follows Don Cayetano Mota on his quest to produce the perfect fighting bulls. In Recessional (1994), Michener focuses on the difficulties faced by the elderly; here Dr. Andy Zorn works with senior citizens at a Florida retirement home and regains his ability to heal others. The musical South Pacific was filmed in 1958. Return to Paradise, The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and Sayonara were all adapted into motion pictures, as were Until They Sail and Mr. Morgan, both from Return to Paradise; Forgotten Heroes of Korea was adapted into the film Men of the Fighting Lady (1954); Hawaii was adapted into the films Hawaii, United Artists (UA, 1966), and The Hawaiians (UA, 1970); Centennial was adapted for television, 1978–79; Space was adapted into a television miniseries, 1985. Michener’s papers are housed at Swarthmore College Library, the University of Hawaii Library, and the Library of Congress. He died on October 16, 1997, in Austin, Texas, after choosing to be removed from a kidney dialysis machine.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Alaska. New York: Random House, 1988. The Bridges at Toko-Ri (first published in Life magazine, July 6, 1953). New York: Random House, 1953.

878 MIDDLESEX

Caravans. New York: Random House, 1963. Caribbean. New York: Random House, 1989. Centennial. New York: Random House, 1974. Chesapeake (Illustrated by Alan Philips). New York: Random House, 1978. Illustrated selections published as The Watermen. New York: Random House, 1979. The Covenant. New York: Random House, 1980. Creatures of the Kingdom. New York: Random House, 1993. The Drifters. New York: Random House, 1971. The Fires of Spring. New York: Random House, 1949. Hawaii (first section originally published in Life magazine). New York: Random House, 1959. Journey. New York: Random House, 1989. Legacy. New York: Random House, 1987. Mexico. New York: Random House, 1992. Miracle in Seville. New York: Random House, 1995. The Novel. New York: Random House, 1991. Poland. New York: Random House, 1983. Recessional. New York: Random House, 1994. Sayonara. New York: Random House, 1954. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. South Pacific (a retelling of the musical South Pacific). New York: Harcourt, 1992. Space. New York: Random House, 1982. Tales of the South Pacific. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Texas. New York: Random House, 1985.

SOURCES Becker, G. J. James A. Michener. New York: Ungar, 1983. Day, A. Grove. James A. Michener. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Dybwad, G. L., and Joy V. Bliss. James A. Michener: The Beginning Teacher and His Textbooks. Albuquerque: The Book Stops Here, 1995. Groseclose, David A. James A. Michener: A Bibliography. Austin, Tex.: State House Press, 1995. Hayes, J. P. James A. Michener. Indianapolis, Ind.: BobbsMerrill, 1984. Kings, J. In Search of Centennial. New York: Random House, 1978. Michener, James A. Report of the County Chairman. New York: Random House, 1961. ———. Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections. New York: Random House, 1968. ———. About “Centennial”: Some Notes on the Novel. New York: Random House, 1974. Murrow, Edward Roscoe. This I Believe, vol. 2. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954.

Newquist, Roy. Conversations. New York: Rand McNally, 1967. Prescott, Orville. In My Opinion: An Inquiry into the Contemporary Novel. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952. Severson, Marilyn S. James A. Michener: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Stuckey, W. J. The Pulitzer Prize Novels. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966. Warfel, Harry Redcay. American Novelists of Today. New York: American Book Co., 1951.

MIDDLESEX JEFFREY EUGENIDES (2002) Nine years after receiving critical accolades for his first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1994), Jeffrey Eugenides received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his second, Middlesex. It has been called an epic, a rollicking adventure, a fairy tale, a hybrid, and it has been praised for the adroit use of wit and humor that balances the darker backdrop. Because the first-person narrator is a hermaphrodite, the title resonates with multiple associations: Calliope Helen Stephinedes (known as Callie until age 14 when s/he realizes that she prefers a male identity and the name Cal) bears a chromosomal anomaly that gradually changes her during adolescence from female to middle sex to male. The title also calls up Middlesex, the name of the house in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the wealthy Detroit suburb where the Stephinedes family is reared after their Greek grandparents emigrate from Asia Minor and become upwardly mobile. Callie’s split sexual identity is thus bound up with the story of her ancestors and, as numerous critics have noted, this novel is an amalgam, too, divided between an immigrant’s tale and a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. The Greek and middlesex connections are further underscored by frequent references not only to the mythological Hermaphroditus but also to such anatomically split beings as Teiresius and the Minotaur. In an interview with Dave Welch, Eugenides declared his intent: to use elements of several genres that blend with contemporary postmodern techniques. The author also points out that Detroit, a quintessentially American city, is a suitable setting for a story of immigrants, sexual uncertainty, and identity confusion—three themes

MIDDLESEX 879

that, among others, resonate with most Americans. Indeed, seeing his novel as “a family story,” Eugenides intended it as “a correlative” for these common uncertainties (Welch). The novel is narrated by the now 41-year-old Cal, who lives in Berlin and looks back on his adolescence in Middlesex. Calliope’s heritage is incestuous as well as confusing. She is the grandchild of Lefty and Desdemona Stephenides, brother and sister, who fled their tiny village of Bithynios on Mount Olympus only to be caught in the burning of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922. They married and immigrated to the United States, moving westward to Detroit, where they settled and bore two children, one of whom, Miltiades (Milt), married his first cousin Theodora (Tessie). In true immigrant fashion, Milt and Tessie become Americanized; Milt’s source of wealth is Hercules Hot Dogs, his successful chain of restaurants. The couple have two children: a son, referred to as Chapter Eleven, and a daughter, Calliope. Herein, the 41-year-old narrator, Cal, tells us later, is the source of the “mutated gene that had lain buried in our bloodline for two hundred and fifty years” and “started the chain of events that led up to me” (Middlesex, 361). The actual syndrome is called the 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, resulting, as Cal tells us, from the fact that his mother’s sister Sourmelina “wasn’t only my first cousin twice removed. She was also my grandmother. My father was his own mother’s (and father’s) nephew. In addition to being my grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty were my great-aunt and -uncle. My parents were my second cousins and Chapter Eleven was my third cousin as well as my brother.” In adolescence, Callie is romantically drawn to another girl, a red-head known only as the Obscure Object, or. O.O, although her first sexual encounter is with O.O.’s brother, Jerome. It is as she flees the brother that she has an accident and, in the hospital, is finally made aware of her unconventional genitalia. Her body has already undergone a “growth spurt of uncommon proportions” as it produces such masculine traits as facial hair (Middlesex, 303). She had developed neither hips nor breasts and had never menstruated (although, and Cal tells us later, she was a marvelous actress who could fake cramps with the best of them). Dr. Luce, the hippie sexologist

to whom her parents are referred, may be viewed as a fictional version of the real-life doctor John Money: Dr. Money, a sexologist, after examining the baby David Reimer, who had accidentally lost his penis, advised his parents to raise him as a girl. The results were tragic. In the novel, Callie, who prefers to become Cal, discovers that Dr. Luce wants her to remain female; he runs away to San Francisco, where, for a time, he appears in a freak show called OctoPussy. He eventually returns home to Middlesex as his grandmother lies dying and makes amends of sorts. The novel ends in Berlin, where Cal, now a State Department employee, ends his narration and hopes for a successful conclusion to his romance with Julie, an Asian-American artist. The backdrop against which the immigrant stories and genetic confusion occurs is of epic scope, beginning with the burning of Smyrna in 1922, moving from Ford production lines in 1930s Detroit, Prohibition, and World War II to the 1967 race riots, Watergate, even the ill-fated presidential run of Greek-American Michael Dukakis, among other events. Eugenides reminds us that it is not science but literature whose main purpose “is to map human consciousness at a certain time, remembering your thoughts” (3:AM Magazine). Stylistically, Eugenides has been linked with such contemporaries as John CHEEVER, Stanley ELKIN, Don DELILLO, and Jonathan FRANZEN, writers whose work he admires. He says, however, that he is also influenced by Vladimir NABOKOV, Tolstoy, Saul BELLOW, and, especially, Philip ROTH. The novel itself has inspired comparisons with Laurence Sterne’s 1760 novel Tristram Shandy, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Michel Foucault’s The Memoirs of Herculine Barbin, in which the woman, redefined as male, commits suicide. In Middlesex, Eugenides’ major point “is that we’re all an I before we’re a he or a she” (powells.com). That he succeeds admirably is summed up by interviewer Andrew O’Hehir, who sees that Eugenides regards “America, his much-maligned hometown of Detroit and even the most ridiculous members of the Stephanides family with unreserved and compassionate sympathy” (O’Hehir).

SOURCES Appleton, Susan Frelich. “Transgender Tales: Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex and Other Stories of Popular Culture,

880 MILLER, HENRY

Sex, and Law.” Washington University in Saint Louis School of Law Faculty Working Papers Series. Paper No. 04-01-03 (January 21, 2004). Available online: URL: http:// law.wustl.edu/Faculty/index.asp?id=195. Accessed October 20, 2005. Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002. ———. “Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides.” By Bram van Moorhem. 3:AM Magazine. Available online. URL: www. 3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/sep/interview_jeffrey eugenides.html. Accessed October 20, 2005. Welch, Dave. “Jeffrey Eugenides Has It Both Ways.” Powells. com. Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com/ authors/eugenides.html. Accessed October 20, 2005. O’Hehir, Andrew. “ ‘Middlesex’ by Jeffrey Eugenides.” Salon. com (September 5, 2002). Available online. URL: http:// www.salon.com/books/review/2002/09/05/eugenides. Accessed October 20, 2005. Unsigned review. “The Complete Review’s Review.” The Complete Review. Available online. URL: http://www.completereview.com/reviews/popus/eugenjl.htm. Accessed October 20, 2005. Zeidner, Lisa. “She Said, He Said.” Washington Post, September 15, 2002, p. BW08. Washington Post.com. Available online: URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn? pagename=article&contentId=A12474-2002Sep13& notFound=true. Accessed October 20, 2005. Zellar, Brad. Review of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Minneapolis Star Tribune. September 8, 2002. StarTribune.com. Available online. URL: http://www.startribune.com/stories/ 384/3198189.html. Accessed October 20, 2005.

MILLER, HENRY (VALENTINE) (1891– 1980) Henry Miller, famously associated with his expatriate Paris novels TROPIC OF CANCER (1934) and TROPIC OF CAPRICORN (1939), as well as the sketches and stories in Black Spring (1936), wrote highly autobiographical works attacking repression and technology, replete with obscene language and graphic sexual encounters. In addition to explicit depictions of sex, critics have singled out his rambling style. However, says the scholar Kingsley Widmer, “From the opening epigraph of Tropic of Cancer . . . through a nearly halfcentury literary career, Miller’s obsessive subject is himself” (Widmer, 1). His subject matter, including street sex and prostitution, caused his books to be banned in

the United States until the early 1960s. After a decade of expatriate life in France and Greece, Miller returned to the United States in 1939, moved to California’s Big Sur in 1944, and remained in California for the rest of his life. Critics agree on the confessional brilliance of these three early works. Some even suggest that Miller writes in the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman and that he is the ancestor of the Beat writers Jack KEROUAC, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William S. BURROUGHS. Many critics also agree that Miller’s genius declined after those first novels. Henry Miller was born on December 26, 1891, in Brooklyn, New York, to Heinrich Miller, a tailor, and Louise Nieting Miller. He married and divorced five times: Beatrice Sylvas Wickens (1917–24); June Smith Mansfield (1924–34); Janina Martha Lepska (1944–52); Eve McClure (1953–62); and Hoki Tokuda (1967–78). After moving to Paris in 1930, Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer, “one of the most outrageously affirmative books in American literature” (Widmer, 40). The novel features Mona, a character based on his second wife, June Mansfield; he wrote here about the seamy and the exalted aspects of life, particularly the human body, which he compares favorably with what he considered the travesty of technological progress. He used surrealism and naturalism to convey a sense of his own life in Paris. There Miller had an affair with the writer Anaïs NIN, whose diaries document both her affair with Miller and one with his wife, June. In 1992 these stories were popularized in the film Henry and June. In Tropic of Capricorn, Miller returns to his youth in Brooklyn. Miller’s trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus [1949], Plexus [1953], and Nexus [1960]) contains fictionalized depictions of his own life. Book of Friends (1978) is a novel whose source is, again, Miller’s youth in Brooklyn. Quiet Days in Clichy (1956), a companion to Tropic of Capricorn, returns to Miller’s Paris days. Miller also wrote a number of travelogues, critical works, and a book on his final days in California, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1958), an equivalent to Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Miller moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where he spent the last 17 years of his life and died there in 1980. In 1969 Joseph Strick produced and directed

MILLER, SUE 881

Tropic of Cancer as a feature film for Paramount. Robert Snyder produced the documentary The Henry Miller Odyssey in 1968. Quiet Days in Clichy was filmed by SBA-ABC Productions (Denmark) in 1969 and released in the United States as Henry Miller’s Not So Quiet Days. The majority of Miller’s papers are housed at the Henry Miller archives at the Library of the University of California at Los Angeles.

NOVELS Black Spring. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1936. New York: Grove, 1963. London: Calder, 1965. Crazy Cock. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991. Nexus, book 3 of The Rosy Crucifixion. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1960. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964. New York: Grove, 1965. Plexus, book 2 of The Rosy Crucifixion. Paris: Olympia, 1953. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963. New York: Grove, 1965. Sexus, book 1 of The Rosy Crucifixion. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1949. New York: Grove, 1965. London: Calder & Boyars, 1969. Tropic of Cancer. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934. New York: Medusa, 1940. New York: Grove, 1961. London: Calder, 1963. Tropic of Capricorn. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1939. New York: Grove, 1961. London: Calder, 1964.

SOURCES Dearborn, Mary V. The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Dick, Kenneth C. Henry Miller: Colossus of One. Groningen, Netherlands: Alberts-Sittard, 1967. Ferguson, Robert. “1933–34: Tropic of Cancer and ‘a Halfdozen Terrifying Words.’ ” In his Henry Miller: A Life, 208–234. London: Hutchinson, 1991. Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Critical Essays on Henry Miller. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Hutchison, E. R. Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship. New York: Grove, 1968. Jackson, Paul R. “Caterwauling and Harmony: Music in Tropic of Cancer,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 20, no. 3 (1979): 40–50. Jong, Erica. “Crazy Cock in the Land of Fuck.” In her The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller, 81–118. New York: Random House, 1993. Millett, Kate. “Henry Miller.” In her Sexual Politics, 294–313. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

Parkin, John. Henry Miller, the Modern Rabelais. Lewiston, Me.: E. Mellen Press, 1990. Tytell, John. “Henry and June and Anaïs.” In his Passionate Lives: D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath In Love, 143–197. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991. Wickes, George, ed. Henry Miller and the Critics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963. Widmer, Kingsley. “The Apocalyptic Comedian.” In his Henry Miller, 17–40. Boston: Twayne, 1963. ———. Henry Miller. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Winslow, Kathleen. Henry Miller: Full of Life. New York: Jeremy Tarcher Press, 1986. Woolf, Michael. “Beyond Ideology: Kate Millett and the Case for Henry Miller.” In Perspectives on Pornography: Sexuality in Film and Literature, edited by Gary Day and Clive Bloom, 113–128. London: Macmillan, 1988. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd series. New York: Viking, 1963. Young, Robert. From a Different Angle: A Personal Memoir of Henry Miller along with “Always Merry and Bright.” Ann Arbor, Mich.: Roger Jackson, 1997.

OTHER Henry Miller, American Author. Available online. URL: http:// www.geocities.com/steletti/. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MILLER, SUE (1943– )

“It seems we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us,” says the author Sue Miller in an interview with Ron Fletcher. “We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please” (Fletcher). These ideas surface in Miller’s controversial first novel, The Good Mother (1986), where it is clear that happiness for women requires more than a no-cost divorce. A talented stylist, Miller has been praised for her persuasive and divergent uses of perspective along with her thoughtful depiction of romance, marriage, and family. Through the use of realistic details and complex psychological characterization, she considers the changing impact of gender and class in the 21st century. For many of her admirers, Miller is the ultimate realist. Sue Miller was born on November 29, 1943, in Chicago, to James Hastings, a minister and teacher, and Judith Beach Nichols Hastings. She earned a bachelor’s

882 MILLER, WALTER M.

degree from Radcliffe College in 1964, along with subsequent master’s degrees from Harvard University, Boston University, and Wesleyan University. Her first marriage, to a medical student, ended in divorce in 1971, as did her second, in 1985, to Doug Bauer, a writer. The Good Mother was acclaimed for the characterization of Anna Dunlop, who takes her four-year-old daughter, Molly, divorces her husband, falls in love and moves in with Leo, and loses Molly through a court decision to her more conventional husband. The ending of the novel, in which Anna leaves Leo to maintain contact with Molly, elicited mixed reactions. Many readers felt that Anna gave in to society’s mores; some believed she found new strength through her powerful love for her daughter. Family Pictures (1990) followed The Good Mother to the best-seller lists. It was nominated in 1991 for a National Book Critics Circle Award. The photographer Nina Eberhardt has a complicated family; her father, David, blames her mother, Lainey, for the birth of an autistic child, Randall. Miller’s use of photographs as well as the alternating points of view for family members attracted many positive reviews. In Miller’s third novel, For Love (1993), Lottie Gardner, like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Gustav Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, yearns for the excitement of lovers to enliven her dull life with her husband, Jack. When her brother destroys his own marriage, however, through a devastating affair with old flame, Elizabeth, Lottie, a writer for women’s magazines, rejects her earlier romantic notions. In The Distinguished Guest (1996) Lily Maynard, the title character, is in her eighties. Ten years earlier, she had written a best-selling novel based on her marriage to a 1960s civil rights activist. While I Was Gone (1999) is a painfully detailed view of marital infidelity from the perspective of Jo Becker, a veterinarian married to Daniel, a minister, and her excursion into the past, spurred by the visit of an old friend. The World Below (2001) features two women: 52-year-old Cath Hubbard is a contemporary woman recovering at her grandparents’ Vermont farmhouse from her second divorce; she discovers the diary of her grandmother, Georgia, whose two lives, past and present, contrast and intersect.

Miller has also written The Story of My Father: A Memoir (2003), a moving account of her father’s Alzheimer’s disease. The Good Mother was adapted for film in 1988 and starred Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson; Family Pictures, adapted for television in 1993, starred Anjelica Huston and Sam Neill; and Inventing the Abbots was issued as a feature-length film in 1997.

NOVELS The Distinguished Guest. New York: Harper, 1995. Family Pictures. New York: Harper, 1990. For Love. New York: Harper, 1993. The Good Mother. New York: Harper, 1986. While I Was Gone. New York: Knopf, 1999. The World Below. New York: Knopf, 2001.

SOURCES Biggs, Melissa E., ed. In the Vernacular: Interviews at Yale with Sculptors of Culture. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1991, 169–177. Daly, Brenda. “The Rhetoric of Photography in Sue Miller’s Family Pictures,” WILLA 1 (Fall 1992): 20–25. Pearlman, Mickey. Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write. New York: Norton, 1993, 162–171. White, Roberta. “Anna’s Quotidian Love: Sue Miller’s The Good Mother.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Life, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 11–22. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Zinman, Toby Silverman. “The Good Old Days in The Good Mother,” Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Autumn 1988): 405–412.

OTHER Miller, Sue. “Where Heart Meets Hearth: A Conversation with Sue Miller.” By Ron Fletcher. Bookpage.com. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9902bp/sue_ miller.html. Accessed September 23, 2005. Random House.com. “A Conversation with Sue Miller” (March 24, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse. com.features/suemiller/qna.html. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MILLER, WALTER M(ICHAEL) (JR.) (1923–1996) Much of Walter Miller’s life seemed swathed in mystery. Recipient of two Hugo Awards— in 1955 for the novella The Darfstellar and in 1961 for

MILLHAUSER, STEVEN 883

the novel A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ—this writer was as private and reclusive as J. D. SALINGER. Walter M. Miller was born on January 23, 1923, in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, to Walter Michael and Ruth Adrian Jones Miller. He studied at the University of Tennessee (1940–42) and at the University of Texas (1947–49); from 1942 to 1945 he served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying 53 missions and earning an Air Medal with two oak leaf clusters. He married Anna Louise Becker in 1945 and, after a serious auto accident during his senior year at the University of Texas, began writing stories for science fiction pulp magazines like Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction. Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published 42 stories and wrote a number of television scripts, including the briefly popular Captain Video and His Video Rangers (Roberson and Battenfeld). The Darfsteller featured Ryan Thornier, an aging actor who unsuccessfully defends his spaceship from robots. As with other Miller stories, it predicts American victory over Soviet communism. A Canticle for Leibowitz, the work that many critics and readers consider the best science fiction novel ever written, has evoked comparison with the work of such 20th-century authors as Graham Greene and Walker PERCY. It has sold over a million copies and has been translated into at least six languages. Divided into three sections unified by the Wandering Jew, the novel provides a microcosm for human history and human nature. At the Leibowitz Abbey in Utah—named after scientist Isaac Edward Leibowitz—priests memorize old texts in the face of an overwhelming onslaught against intellect and education. Miller withdrew from writing and publishing and committed suicide in January 1996, shortly after his wife’s death. His unfinished novel was completed by Terry Bisson and published as Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman in 1997.

NOVELS A Canticle for Leibowitz. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960. Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (completed by Terry Bisson). New York: Bantam Books, 1997.

SOURCES Bennett, Michael Alan. “The Theme of Responsibility in Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” English Journal 59 (April 1970): 484–489.

Berger, Harold L. Science Fiction and the New Dark Age. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976, 151–155. Ducharme, Edward. “A Canticle for Miller,” English Journal 55 (November 1966): 1,042–1,044. Griffin, Russell. “Medievalism in A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Extrapolation 14 (May 1973): 112–125. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974, 140–148. Percy, Walker. “Walker Percy on Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz.” In Rediscoveries, edited by David Madden, 262–269. New York: Crown, 1971. Rank, Hugh. “Song Out of Season: A Canticle for Leibowitz,” Renascence 21 (Summer 1969): 213–221. Roberson, William H., and Robert L. Battenfeld. William M. Miller, Jr.: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Samuelson, David N. “Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz.” In his Visions of Tomorrow: Six Journeys From Outer to Inner Space, 221–279. New York: Arno, 1975. ———. “The Lost Canticles of Walter M. Miller, Jr.,” Science-Fiction Studies 3 (March 1976): 3–26. Scholes, Robert, and Eric Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, 221–226. Spinrad, Norman. Introduction to A Canticle for Leibowitz. Boston: Gregg Press, 1975.

MILLHAUSER, STEVEN (STEVEN LEWIS MILLHAUSER) (1943– ) The novels of Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser evoke the sweetness and pain of childhood and youth, although some of his witty, satiric recent work focuses on adulthood and the issues of love and betrayal. His work has been called magical, enchanting, and dreamlike, because many of his novels cross the boundary between the real and the unreal, or the actual and the illusory. Steven Millhauser was born on August 3, 1943, in New York City. He graduated with a B.A. from Columbia University (1965), pursued graduate studies at Brown University for several years, and won the 1975 Prix Medicis Étranger for his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954 (1972), an imaginative portrayal of Mullhouse, an 11-year-old novelist, seen through the eyes of

884 MINOT, SUSAN

Cartwright, his 12-year-old friend. The novel consciously alludes to earlier biographers like James Boswell (The Life of Samuel Johnson) and Leon Edel (a five-volume study of Henry James), as well as Vladimir NABOKOV (author of Pale Fire). In 1977, Millhauser published Portrait of a Romantic, a fictionalized autobiography of a boy’s life. The protagonist, 29-year-old Arthur Grumm, looks retrospectively at his life from ages 12 through 15, engaging in teenaged boredom and angst with his “double,” William Mainwaring, his “triple,” Philip Schoolcraft, based loosely on Edgar Allan POE’s similarly named protagonist William Wilson, and his love for the moodily romantic Eleanor Schramm. From the Realm of Morpheus, often likened to a modern-day Alice in Wonderland, features Carl Hausman. While watching a baseball game, Hausman chases a foul ball through an opening to the underworld, where he meets and mingles with characters from history and myth. The Pulitzer Prize–winning MARTIN DRESSLER: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) features a Horatio Alger-like protagonist, a son of immigrants who rises to become a hotel magnate in a New York–like city that like America itself exists largely within the imagination of the dreamer Martin. Millhauser’s novellas are noteworthy, beginning with In the Penny Arcade (1986), containing stories and one novella, and moving to the three novellas in Little Kingdoms (1993), Enchanted Night: A Novella (1999), and The King in the Tree: Three Novellas (2003). While all display Millhauser’s continued exploration of the gap—or lack thereof—between fantasy and reality, The King in the Tree contains no child protagonists. Instead, the three novellas— Revenge, An Adventure of Don Juan, and The King in the Tree—focus on the dark side of love, featuring a wronged and vengeful housewife; a reversal of Don Juan’s usual seductions; and a retelling of the Tristan and Isolde tragedy. Millhauser, who has been married to Cathy Allis since 1984, lives and writes in Saratoga Springs, New York.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943–1954. New York: Knopf, 1972. Enchanted Night: A Novella. New York: Crown, 1999.

From the Realm of Morpheus. New York: Morrow, 1986. In the Penny Arcade. New York: Knopf, 1986. The King in the Tree: Three Novellas. New York: Knopf, 2003. Little Kingdoms (three novellas). New York: Poseidon, 1993. Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. New York: Crown, 1996. Portrait of a Romantic. New York: Knopf, 1977.

SOURCES Balz, Douglas. “A Collection of Cunning Escape Routes for Fleeing the Mundane,” Chicago Tribune, 5 August 1990, p. 7. Birkerts, Sven. “A Review of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer,” Yale Review 85, no. 1 (January 1997): 144–149. Burroway, Janet. “Heartbreak Hotel,” New York Times Book Review, 12 May 1996, p. 8. Cantor, Jay. “Free Fall to Wonderland,” New York Times Book Review, 24 June 1990, p. 16. Kakutani, Michiko. “Where Everyday Life Intersects with the Magical,” New York Times, 12 June 1990, p. C17. Postlethwaite, Diana. “Cities of the Mind,” Nation, 6 May 1996, pp. 68–72. Rieckmann, Jens. “Mocking a Mock Biography: Steven Millhauser’s Edwin Mullhouse and Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.” In Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology, edited by Ann Fehn, Ingeborg Hoesterey, and Maria Tatar, 62–69. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. Saroyan, Aram. “The Surreal as Substance,” Los Angeles Times, 30 September 1990, p. 11. Schuessler, Jennifer. “Steven Millhauser: The Business of Dreaming,” Publishers Weekly, 6 May 1996, pp. 56–57. Sheppard, R. Z. “Trump, the Early Days,” Time, 10 June 1996, pp. 82–83. Smith, Dinitia. “Shy Author Likes to Live and Work in Obscurity,” New York Times, 9 April 1997, pp. C13, C18. Unsigned review of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, Publishers Weekly, 25 March 1996, pp. 62–63. “When Fairy Tales Come True,” Washington Post, 28 April 1996, p. 3.

OTHER Kuntz, Mary. “Tycoon’s Tale.” Businessweek. Available online. URL: http://www.businessweek.com/1996/30/b348536.htm. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MINOT, SUSAN (ANDERSON) (1956– ) Besides Monkeys, Minot’s first novel and winner of the 1988 Prix Femina, Susan Minot has written three addi-

MINOT, SUSAN 885

tional novels, Folly (1992), Evening (1999), and Rapture (2002), along with Lust and Other Stories (1989), a screenplay, Stealing Beauty (1996), and award-winning stories, as yet uncollected, published in Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Paris Review. Minot, a minimalist, has earned comparisons to J. D. SALINGER. Her use of realism and sensory detail underscores her revelation of inner psychological truths. Minot is particularly adept at revealing the feminist perspective of her often-disappointed women characters. According to the interviewer Marcie Thiebaux, Minot reads Henry JAMES, James Fenimore COOPER, William Dean HOWELLS, and John P. MARQUAND to “stir” her mind. (Thiebaux, 42). Susan Minot (her surname rhymes with “sign it” [Thiebaux, 42]) was born on December 7, 1956, in Manchester, Massachusetts, to George R. Minot and Carrie Minot. Reared in Boston, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in 1978, a master of fine arts from Columbia University in 1983, and published her first novel, Monkeys, in 1986. She married Davis McHenry, a filmmaker, on April 30, 1988 (they have since separated). Monkeys, partially based on Minot’s own Boston family, explores the ramifications of Mrs. Vincent’s death on her husband, an alcoholic, and their seven children. They try to cope with her absence during such emotionally charged holidays as Christmas and Thanksgiving. While presented through the various perspectives of the children, the novel is filtered principally through the mind of Sophie, the second-eldest daughter. Set during the Depression years of the 1930s, Folly features Lilian Eliot, a well-to-do but emotionally deprived Boston woman who falls in love with the charming and unreliable Walter Vail before he goes off to war. She then marries Gilbert Finch and lives the stultifying life of the Boston upper classes, mirrored in her husband’s chronic depression. Evening, a novella, focuses on Ann Grant Lord, a 65-year-old thrice married woman with four children who is dying of cancer. Neither the marriages nor the children occupy her mind as much as the passionate weekend affair she enjoyed in her youth, an affair shared only with the reader. Rapture, Minot’s most recent novel, is a tightly constructed account of the different emotions and expec-

tations of a man and a woman engaged in an intimate sexual act after several years of separation. Kay Bailey, a film production designer, and Benjamin Young, a filmmaker who never gave up his long-term affair with another woman, reveal different feelings, motivations, and goals. It is, says Minot in an interview, a book about “lost people” (Weich). Susan Minot, who lives and writes in New York City, “repeatedly” continues to find, in Weich’s words, “fresh, new ways to examine the emotional safeguards within family and romantic relations that hold people apart” (Weich).

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Evening. New York: Vintage, 1999. Folly. Boston: Houghton/Seymour Lawrence, 1992. Monkeys. New York: Dutton, 1986. Rapture. New York: Knopf, 2002.

SOURCES Ciuraru, Carmela. “Susan Minot: A Writer Who Gets Inside Lovers’ Heads and Writes Down the Things They’d Never Say,” Interview 32, no. 1 (February 2002): 78. Garrison, Deborah. “She’s Old-Fashioned,” New Yorker, 2 November 1992, pp. 113–114, 116–118. Gilbert, Matthew. “Minot’s Folly: Loveless Life in WWI Boston,” Boston Globe, 6 November 1992, Living section, p. 39. Miller, Laura. “Naked Lunch,” New York Times Book Review, 3 February 2002, 6. Robinson, Roxana. “Remains of the Day,” New York Times Book Review, 11 October 1998, p. 12. Stevens, Elizabeth. “Too Close for Comfort,” Women’s Review of Books 6, nos. 10–11 (July 1989): 42–43. Taliaferro, Frances. “Proper and Improper Bostonians,” Washington Post Book World, 11 October 1992, p. 4. Thiebaux, Marcelle. “Susan Minot: Understatement Is the Novelist’s Preference, in Her Writing as Well as in Her Conversation,” Publishers Weekly 239, no. 50 (November 16, 1992): 42. Wood, Michael. “The Art of Losing,” New York Review of Books, 18 February 1999, p. 7.

OTHER Minot, Susan. Author Interview. Bold Type. Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1098/minot. Accessed September 23, 2005. Weich, Dave. “Back in Bed with Susan Minot.” Powells.com. Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/ minot.html. Accessed September 23, 2005.

886 MIRELES, JOVITA GONZÁLEZ DE

MIRELES, JOVITA GONZÁLEZ DE (1904–1983) The achievements of Jovita González de Mireles were hidden after her death in 1983, reappearing only in 1992. Along with Mireles’s essays on Mexican Americans were two novels: Caballero: An Historical Novel (1996) and Dew on the Thorn (1997), both written in the 1930s and 1940s in collaboration with Eve Raleigh, and both published posthumously. According to the scholar Andrea R. Purdy, Mireles’s husband believed that her Caballero manuscript was destroyed, but apparently she had hidden it; it was discovered by Isabella Cruz, who inherited the Mireles home and donated Mireles’s papers to the Texas A & M University Corpus Christi Library. They were identified by Professor José E. Limon of the University of Texas at Austin. Caballero, initially viewed as Gone With the Wind Texas-style (Kreneck, 78), is now considered by scholars as a regional historical novel in the tradition of Willa CATHER and Sarah Orne JEWETT (Manriquez). Dew on the Thorn contains accounts of life along the Rio Grande, and both novels are early examples of literature about Mexican Americans in Texas (Purdy, 143–144). Jovita González de Mireles was born in 1899 or 1904 in Roma, Texas, to an upper-class family of SpanishAmerican ancestry. From 1910 she was reared in San Antonio and educated at Our Lady of the Lake College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1927, and at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a master’s degree in 1930. The first Mexican-American woman president of the Texas Folk-Lore Society, Mireles wrote often about Texas Mexicans before her 1935 marriage to Edmundo E. Mireles, an educator. They moved to Corpus Christi, where they published two multivolume Spanish-language textbooks. Because her family lived on land in the Rio Grande valley deeded to her great-great-grandfather by the Spanish king Charles V, Jovita González de Mireles had good reason to sympathize with resentful Mexican Americans who were often considered trespassers on land settled by Anglo Americans. In much of her published work she tries to bridge the hostilities between the two cultures. To date, much of the scholarship on Mireles focuses on her essays and stories, full as they are, of legend, folktale, and folk songs introduced by border vaqueros, or

Texas-Mexican cowboys. Recently, however, studies of the novels have begun to appear. Caballero begins as the “proud patriarch” Don Santiago de Mendoza y Sorio learns that his large hacienda is no longer in Mexico but in Texas, and that he and his family are now “Americanos.” The scholar B. J. Manriquez sees a feminist perspective in this novel that questions traditional roles for women and shows Don Santiago’s wife, sister-in-law, and daughters rebelling against his authoritarianism. Dew on the Thorn, like Caballero, is the imaginative, fictionalized result of Mireles’s extensive interviews with residents of the Rio Grande valley and illustrates the customs, traditions, hostilities, and bonds that characterize the TexasMexican experience in the early 20th century.

NOVELS Caballero: A Historical Novel. Edited by Jose Limon and Maria Cotera. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1996. Dew on the Thorn. Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, 1997.

SOURCES Kreneck, Thomas H. “Recovering the ‘Lost’ Manuscripts of Jovita González: The Production of South Texas MexicanAmerican Literature,” Texas Library Journal 74, no. 2 (1998): 76–79. Limon, Jose E. “Folklore, Gendered Repression, and Cultural Critique: The Case of Jovita González,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1993): 453–473. ———. “Mexican, Foundational Fictions, and the United States: Caballero, a Late Border Romance,” Modern Languages Quarterly 57 (1996): 341–353. Purdy, Andrea R. “Jovita González de Mireles.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 142–146. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

OTHER Manriquez, B. J. “Argument in Narrative: Tropology in Jovita González’s Caballero,” Bilingual Review. (May 1, 2000). Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/ library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:80898516. Accessed September 23, 2005. Review of Caballero, Publishers Weekly (May 20, 1996). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 18304239. Accessed September 23, 2005.

MISERY 887

MISERY STEPHEN KING (1987)

Stephen KING’s Misery is perhaps best known for its film adaptation, which won an academy award for Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes and revitalized the career of James Caan as Paul Sheldon. As with so many King novels, the filmmakers decided to simplify the complex, multilevel plot structure and eliminate the extensive parallel metaphors about the writing process. They concentrated instead on the horrific elements of the work, specifically stressing the physiological torture of Paul Sheldon by his number one fan, Annie Wilkes, placing a special emphasis on the removal of his injured foot with a dull ax. Consequently, far less time is spent in the film on the psychological torture that Sheldon undergoes, an aspect that forms a major element of the written text. Perhaps this decision was made because the silent inner speculation Paul experiences is not given an actual voice and because readers are made aware of his subconscious musings only through an omniscient narrator. No doubt the isolation and depression Sheldon endures mentally in the written version would not have translated well into the visual medium. In a similar decision to simplify the novel, much of the Misery Chastain subplot with all its melodramatic moments and harlequin romance clichés was also deleted from the film Clearly, the cleverly constructed study of writerly angst and the dilemmas faced by an artist gave way quickly to the horror genre with its instant audience appeal. Thus the abandonment of carefully layered imagery that portrays the difficulties a writer faces as he begins a new work makes the film version inferior to the written text, for it eliminates the portrait of a writer as godlike or as an individual who experiences a state not unlike a drug-induced high or a sexual climax when he composes. Instead, in the film Sheldon’s potential rescuers receive greater emphasis in the hope that such simplistic subplots will raise suspense and convince viewers that despite the writer’s desperate situation there is still hope that the hero will be rescued and the villain punished. Accordingly, given such distortions, few critics have lauded Misery, composed in 1987, nearly 13 years after King’s initial blockbuster, Carrie, nor have they exam-

ined it as a finely crafted study of the role of the author and perhaps as King’s ultimate plea to be taken seriously as a classic writer rather than as a creator of pulp fiction. Close examination reveals that Misery, far from being a hack novel, relies heavily on intensely interconnected imagery to weave a tale about the writer’s craft and what it takes to be a believable creator of fiction. For both Sheldon and King, writing has become a life-and-death matter, for Sheldon literally, for King metaphorically. Sheldon reveals his addiction to writing in several places in the book, suggesting that if he did not compose, his life would truly be worthless. For him, as for the readers of the Misery series, his novels have become a drug of choice, inducing highs that produce intense pleasure and require a frequent “fix” of new medicine. In the novel, Sheldon learns to exult in his power as a novelist, finding his words have the power to transport him to a different time and place and to remove him from the trial and terror he experiences from Annie Wilkes’s threats and her promises to harm him physically and even kill him if he does not resurrect Misery Chastain from the early grave he created for her in his “last” Misery novel. He also learns not to be ashamed of his craft, although it is employed in a literary genre that receives more criticism than praise. In an early section of the novel, Paul reminds himself of his skill at a childhood game titled “Can You?” in which the winner was the individual whose ending for a fabricated tale had the most plausibility. Sheldon finds that his composition of yet another novel in the Misery series possesses not only such plausibility but also has the power to entrance his readers with an exciting plotline, one that encourages them to return again and again for more Misery. While initially believing that writing more about Misery’s perils would bring him only a “miserable existence,” Sheldon discovers that just the opposite is true. He loses himself in his writing and in saving Misery succeeds in saving himself as well. To his surprise, he finds that the altered craft he has begun to practice in Fast Cars, his work of realistic fiction, is not better writing. It merely relies on foul language and violence to capture an audience and certainly does not please his number one fan, who considers the departure to a new style disgusting. As

888 MISS LONELYHEARTS

he is coerced into returning to Misery by Annie, Sheldon envies such writers as Hardy, Shakespeare, FAULKNER, and HEMINGWAY and demeans such writers as Danielle Steele, whose formulaic return to standard run of the mill plots show little or no skill. He certainly wishes to shape his work and reputation after the former writers rather than the latter. In fact, Sheldon (and perhaps King as well) seems to feel that rabid fans of the latter have controlled their output and encouraged their mediocrity and reliance upon contrivances. However, Annie Wilkes’s demanding critical reading of the developing Misery Returns conversely leads Sheldon to a higher quality of production than he has attained before. He must write and write well or he will receive neither food nor the pills that are so necessary to control his pain. He must employ cleverness and determination like Scheherazade, the narrator of 1,001 Arabian Nights. The story must be so good that the reader, like the sheikh who listens to the tales of a member of his harem, will desire not to murder or eliminate him, but to continue the entertainment for yet another night. As Sheldon resurrects Misery, it is clear that he resurrects his own artistic passion as well. The death of Misery Chastain is designed to parallel the death of her creator, and her return to life in the text signals a similar rebirth for Sheldon. Moreover, he comes to a realization that great fiction involves great stories and complex plotting and description. Thus writers like POE, Conan Doyle, Dickens, and Agatha Christie are just as worthy of praise as Joyce, Milton and T. S. Eliot. In fact, it is idolatry to suggest that the skills of the first group are less than the last since, according to King, the dichotomy between classic authors and those who write pulp fiction is not so easily made. At times, Misery portrays the craft of writing as almost a religious ceremony, at times as a struggle for life and death, and at times as an engendering or creation as pleasurable as sexual intercourse. It is a novel that needs to be read by potential authors, for it provides a clear picture of the dilemmas faced in the writing process. Its horrendous killings, its demented villain, and its seeming emphasis on plot rather than theme are only outward trappings that often deceive lackadaisical readers and may even impede their reception of the book’s true message: to depict the diffi-

culties of writing and the perils involved in determining whether one genre is better than another.

SOURCE King, Stephen. Misery. New York: Viking, 1987. Michael J. Meyer

MISS LONELYHEARTS NATHANAEL WEST (1933) The conception for Nathanael WEST’s second novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, dates from March 1929, when West’s future brother-in-law S. J. Perelman introduced him to a woman who wrote an advice column for the Brooklyn Eagle under the name “Susan Chester.” She thought Perelman might use some of the actual letters she received for his broadly comic purposes, but they instead proved more useful for West’s dark, tragicomic vision. West worked on the novel sporadically for the next three years while searching for a publisher for his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931). While the early work contains flashes of West’s ferocious wit, his more mature second novel, painstakingly revised, would prove to be his masterpiece. He wrote parts of it in Paris, at a writing camp in the Adirondacks, and in Manhattan while serving as manager of a hotel, before completing it in rural New Jersey. During this period, early versions of several chapters appeared in Contact, a little magazine West edited with William Carlos WILLIAMS. The novel’s title character, a man, is identified only by the pen name under which he writes his advice column for the New York Post-Dispatch. He is supposed to regard his assignment as a joke, dispensing clichéd advice to the hackneyed, inarticulate letter writers whose letters he receives. His feature editor, William Shrike, encourages him to take this attitude, and the examples of replies he dictates to Miss Lonelyhearts are savage parodies of the rhetoric of self-help, mocking every potential solution for troubled psyches from art to suicide. Miss Lonelyhearts, however, cannot regard his job as a joke. He is simultaneously touched and repulsed by the genuine suffering in the letters he receives, and he wants to offer authentic replies to their cries for help. As the son of a Baptist minister, his preferred solution is Christian salvation, but he is never quite able to take this remedy seriously, describ-

MISS LONELYHEARTS 889

ing himself with characteristically modern self-consciousness as having a “Christ complex.” His cynicism is bolstered, of course, by Shrike, who saves his most vicious parodies for religion, at one point calling Miss Lonelyhearts a member of “the First Church of Christ Dentist, where he is worshipped as Preventer of Decay. The church whose symbol is the trinity new-style: Father, Son and Wirehaired Fox Terrier—” (97–98). At a young age, West was a skilled cartoonist, and he evidently envisioned Miss Lonelyhearts as a comic-strip novel (401). This conception survives in the novel’s form, consisting of 15 vividly drawn, episodic chapters. Most of the episodes revolve around Miss Lonelyhearts’s experiences with sex or violence. In “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Lamb,” he recalls a horribly botched attempt to sacrifice a lamb after a drunken college argument over the existence of God. In “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Clean Old Man,” he and a colleague mercilessly harass a homosexual in a public toilet. “Miss Lonelyhearts and Shrike” recounts his failed attempt to seduce the boss’s wife. “Miss Lonelyhearts in the Country” details a trip to rural Connecticut with his sometime fiancée, Betty, a trip that ends in a sexual encounter amid images of decay. But the most fateful episode occurs when he receives a letter from a woman named Fay Doyle, who is “unhappily married to a cripple” and whose letter intimates that she wants more than advice from Miss Lonelyhearts (86). The sexually frustrated Miss Lonelyhearts agrees to meet her for sex and, in the process, hears the rest of her story. Her husband had been an upstairs neighbor, and when she got pregnant by a wealthy scoundrel, the neighbor married her and treated the child as his own. Some time later Miss Lonelyhearts receives a letter from her husband, Peter Doyle, who complains of his dead-end job as a meter reader and invites Miss Lonelyhearts to his apartment at his wife’s behest. Miss Lonelyhearts arrives at a brutal scene in which the wife humiliates her husband, then sends him out for gin while she tries to seduce Miss Lonelyhearts. This attempt shakes Miss Lonelyhearts out of his efforts to be Christ-like, and he brutally beats Mrs. Doyle to fight off her advances. Miss Lonelyhearts withdraws into a seclusion in which he rededicates himself to Christian humility,

imagining that he is an unshakable rock, but he is dragged to a party by Shrike, who introduces him to a game called “Everyman His Own Miss Lonelyhearts.” Miss Lonelyhearts leaves with Betty before he can hear Shrike read a letter from Peter Doyle, vowing revenge for the rape his wife claims to have occurred in their apartment. In his new state of tranquillity, Miss Lonelyhearts makes plans for a future life with Betty, but when he leaves his apartment the next morning, he finds Doyle waiting for him on the stairs. He approaches Doyle to embrace him, but the gun Doyle is carrying accidentally goes off, killing Miss Lonelyhearts. Many readings of the novel focus on Miss Lonelyhearts’s tortured psyche, often portraying Shrike’s cynical rants against his tenuous faith as an externalization of his own inward impulses. The novel’s associations of sexuality with violence or aggression have also provided fruitful material for psychoanalytic readings. Two somewhat different psychoanalytic readings of the novel can be found in the work of Stanley Edgar Hyman and Victor Comerchero. Other critics who focus on the psychology of the protagonist dwell more on the spiritual implications of his problems. William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience was an acknowledged source for Miss Lonelyhearts, and since the early work of Marcus Smith, a number of critics have explored the novel’s relationship to this and other works of religious psychology. The most contentious issue in scholarship on Miss Lonelyhearts, however, has divided not only individual critics but also entire generations. West’s novels went largely unnoticed in his lifetime, but since his death in 1940, he has enjoyed two distinct revivals in scholarly attention. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, critics found in West a precursor to the nihilistic black comic writing then on the rise in American fiction. Norman Podhoretz described West’s “particular kind of joking” as having “profoundly unpolitical implications; it is a way of saying that the universe is always rigged against us and that our efforts to contend with it inevitably lead to absurdity” (Podhoretz, 154). Daniel Aaron notes that despite his leftist political associations, for West “the real culprit is not capitalism but humanity” (Aaron, 164).

890 MISS LONELYHEARTS

In the 1990s, West once again came under scrutiny as a powerful social critic rather than a nihilist. The critic Jonathan Veitch has even reversed Aaron’s formulation, arguing that “in West’s fiction the real culprit is not humanity, but capitalism” (Veitch, 74). On the other hand, the hopelessly inarticulate letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives, undoubtedly laden with real human suffering, seem to represent something broader than an oppressed proletariat in West’s novel. Even Veitch acknowledges that the agony in the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives “emanates from a genetic defect, physical violence, and so on,” rather than specific social conditions (Veitch, 76). In the novel’s most momentous letter, Peter Doyle speaks for all the readers of Miss Lonelyhearts’s column when he says, “It aint the job that I am complaining about but what I want to no is what is the whole stinking business for” (111). The problems of these readers are not the public problems of social relations but the private problems of the search for meaning. Social analysis cannot quite explain away the novel’s preoccupation with a malady more like what W. H. Auden famously diagnosed as “West’s disease.” But West’s novel resists with equal force Auden’s own spiritual remedies. In the central chapter of Miss Lonelyhearts, entitled “Miss Lonelyhearts in the Dismal Swamp,” West describes the struggle for meaning or order as a universal problem: “Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in another. Mandolins are tuned GDAE. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature—the battle of the centuries” (93). West dramatizes the inadequacy of Miss Lonelyhearts’s spiritual ambitions by forcing them to confront stubborn, material realities. At the beginning of the chapter entitled “Miss Lonelyhearts and the Fat Thumb,” we are told that Miss Lonelyhearts has developed “an almost insane sensitiveness to order,” and West describes the result of this obsession as a futile battle against the world of things, ending when Miss Lonelyhearts is “decisively defeated by the spring of the alarm clock” (70). The recalcitrance of the material world constantly thwarts Miss Lonelyhearts’s efforts to affirm a higher spiritual reality. The most important part of that material world with which West’s characters must struggle is language.

After his defeat at the hands of the alarm clock, Miss Lonelyhearts flees into the street, where he encounters still more stubborn realities, including “the harsh clanging sound of street cars and the raw shouts of hucksters. No repeated group of words would fit their rhythm and no scale could give them meaning” (70). This portrayal of language as part of the chaotic order of material things is echoed much later when Peter Doyle tries to explain his problems to Miss Lonelyhearts. But the most obvious examples in the novel of tortured attempts to order a resistant language are the letters themselves, which are quite literally presented as part of the physical reality of the book that West’s readers must try to order through interpretation. These letters, with their mangled and clichéd English, bear all the scars of the private linguistic wars that Miss Lonelyhearts’s readers must wage to make some kind of sense out of their life stories. Significantly, the struggles of West’s characters against the material world take the form of West’s own struggle through the act of writing. Most critics who discuss the portrayal of writing in Miss Lonelyhearts identify West’s role as writer with that of the protagonist, but the character in the novel who most resembles West as a writer is the demonic editor, Shrike. Shrike’s characteristic mode of expression is deadpan, and so is West’s. The savage parodic style of Shrike’s monologues is, as many critics have noted, West’s writing at its most powerful. Furthermore, West portrays the particular superiority of Shrike in the novel as a function of his role as a writer. The virtue Shrike possesses that none of the other writers in the novel share is a striking aesthetic originality. The glaring lack of originality in the letters Miss Lonelyhearts receives is underscored from the very first page, where all the letters are described as alike, “stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife” (59). Shrike is the true original in Miss Lonelyhearts; all the other writers in the novel, including Miss Lonelyhearts, imitate him. The novel seems to valorize a particular kind of art as the best strategy for dealing with a world in which no redemption is possible. At one point, Miss Lonelyhearts describes his heart as “a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it” (74). This image captures the

MISS LULU BETT 891

conception of writing that the novel endorses: a kind of apocalyptic irony that mocks all efforts to give meaning or order to the world, without rocking the world itself by effecting actual social change. The novel’s affirmation of a purely private, ironist art makes West not quite the postmodern nihilist readers like Podhoretz and Aaron take him to be, nor exactly the crusading social critic readers like Veitch consider him. Instead, it places him in the mainstream of American modernism. The critic Harold Bloom has ranked Miss Lonelyhearts among the most significant American prose works of the 20th century.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner, 2000, 245–249. Comerchero, Victor. Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1964. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Nathanael West. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. ———, ed. Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. Podhoretz, Norman. “Nathanael West. A Particular Kind of Joking.” In Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jay Martin, 154–155. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. ———. “Late Thoughts on Nathanael West.” In Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jay Martin, 169. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930’s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. West, Nathanael. Novels and Other Writings. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: Library of America, 1997. Bryan Vescio

MISS LULU BETT ZONA GALE (1920)

Several pages into the novel Miss Lulu Bett, readers are introduced to Zona GALE’s inhibited heroine: “There emerged from the fringe of things, where she perpetually hovered, Mrs. Deacon’s older sister, Lulu Bett, who was ‘making her home with us.’ And that was precisely the case. They were not making her a home, goodness knows. Lulu was the family beast of burden” (3).

This introduction says much of what we need to know about Lulu and, if one interprets the “emerged” phrase expansively, explains much of what Gale’s 1920 novel is about: Lulu’s emergence from a life of drudgery and dependence. While the drab community of Warbleton absorbs some of Gale’s darts (the author has moved past the cloying sentimentality of Friendship Village that characterized her earlier work), the primary target here is the Deacon household where Lulu, the mousy housekeeper, finds herself trapped. Through description and dialogue, Gale captures the tedium and monotony of American family life. The Deacon household is painfully dull. The patriarch, Dwight Herbert Deacon, is a pompous, self-righteous oaf. According to Gale, “being married to Dwight was like a perpetual rehearsal, with Dwight’s self-importance for audience” (167). Not surprisingly, his wife, Ina, is timid and dim-witted. The three-generation family includes Mrs. Bett, Ina, and Lulu’s obtuse, hard-of-hearing mother, and two Deacon daughters. Di, in her late teens, is aggressively pursuing marriage to escape the stultifying setting. Much younger Monona is a whiny, finicky youngster, “the late birth of a late marriage” (4). Focusing on their ordinariness, Gale creates characters that everyone knows but who are rarely seen in literature. For instance, as Carl Van Doren noted, Mrs. Bett is an old woman who is not sweet and Monona is a child who is not cute. Furthermore, Gale dares to write genuinely dull dialogue. In typical family conversation, Mr. Deacon comes across as “the high priest of elaborate banality,” a title bestowed by Robert Benchley in his foreword to Gale’s dramatized version of the story. (This adaptation received the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1921, making Zona Gale the first woman so honored.) Into this humdrum existence comes Ninian Deacon, Dwight’s long-lost brother. Although Ninian has shortcomings, he is a fresh breeze blowing through the stale Deacon home. And he treats Lulu like an actual human being. Before long, in a clumsily contrived twist, Ninian and Lulu are married and go off to start their new life together. Within a short while, Lulu is back—alone. After a few days together, Ninian told Lulu that he had been married many years earlier. Eventually, he and his

892 MISTRESS OF SPICES, THE

then-wife parted ways and, when all communication stopped, he assumed she was dead. Casual handling of this previous relationship did not set right with Lulu’s small-town morality. Not knowing where else to turn, she comes back to the Deacon household and resumes her slavey role. But all is not the same, nor can it ever be. Lulu has glimpsed a larger world and will no longer automatically succumb to Dwight Deacon’s tyrannical decision making and selfish logic. In an outburst of candor, Lulu vents her pent-up frustration at Dwight: Can’t you understand anything? I’ve lived here all my life—on your money. . . . I’ve been glad to pay for my keep. . . . But there wasn’t anything about it I liked. . . . Well, then I got a little something, same as other folks. I thought I was married and I went off on the train and he bought me things and I saw different towns. And then it was all a mistake. I didn’t have any of it. I came back here and went into your kitchen again. . . . I s’pose because I’m most thirty-four and new things ain’t so easy any more—but what have I got or what’ll I ever have? And now you want folks [to] look at me and think he run off and left me, and having ’em all wonder. . . . I can’t stand it. (240–41) Lulu ends the conversation exclaiming, “Don’t you go around pitying me. . . . I’m glad the whole thing happened!” (244). As the new Lulu emerges, this transformation is observed by Neil Cornish, proprietor of Warbleton’s music store. In their loneliness, Neil and Lulu find each other. The novel concludes with the couple announcing their marriage to the Deacon household. Lulu’s emergence epitomizes changes taking place in the post–World War I era as well as changes in the author’s life. In 1929, Joseph Wood Krutch wrote that no contemporary author had an evolution more interesting than Zona Gale’s. Too much was happening in the world for Zona Gale, writing from her hometown of Portage, Wisconsin, to keep churning out sentimental community sketches. The author was active in state and national politics, fighting alongside Robert LaFollette, the Wisconsin governor and senator, who was the Progressive

Party presidential candidate in 1924, and she was an outspoken advocate for progressive causes—pacifism, women’s suffrage, trade unions, civil liberties, social welfare, and educational reform. Her pacifist activities prompted some neighbors to suspect Gale of German sympathies. Hurt by this reaction, it ultimately provided Gale with a broader view of the midwestern village, one that encompassed both positive and negative elements. In this novel, Gale zeroes in on the limited choices available to single women who often had no identity or sense of self and very limited resources, and generally remained in the background (something Lulu accomplishes even in a novel bearing her name). In the happy ending, which Gale labored over, seeking to meet readers’ and theatergoers’ expectations, marriage is presented as the sole opportunity for Lulu—and perhaps, for women in general—to experience a sense of fulfillment. In Miss Lulu Bett, Lulu emerges from the background where she had hovered for many years. With her, Zona Gale emerges also as an authentic, realistic chronicler of early 20th-century life in America.

SOURCES Brooks, Van Wyck. The Confident Years: 1885–1915. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952. Gale, Zona. Miss Lulu Bett. New York: D. Appleton, 1920. Herron, Ima Honaker. The Small Town in American Literature. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel, 1789–1939. Revised edition. New York: Macmillan, 1956. Kurt Meyer

MISTRESS OF SPICES, THE CHITRA BANERDIVAKARUNI (1997) The Mistress of Spices (1997) is the first novel of the poet and short-story writer Chitra Banerjee DIVAKARUNI, who was born in Calcutta, India, in 1956, and moved to the United States in 1977 to pursue higher education. Divakaruni’s experiences with women’s social service organizations and as cofounder and president of MAITRI, a help line for South Asian women in the San Francisco area, as well as her explicitly stated religious beliefs, have probably contributed to her depictions of Hindu mythologies and stories of spiritual healing in

JEE

MISTRESS OF SPICES, THE 893

the novel. Divakaruni has stated in interviews that she created the novel in response to a life-threatening surgery after the birth of her second son, which gave her an urgency to write about things magical, spiritual, and supernatural, and inspired her to take risks in the novel’s form, structure, and style. The Mistress of Spices is being made into a film by the Indo-British director Gurinder Chadha. Divakaruni’s magical-realist novel combines ancient Hindu mythology, religious superstitions, and traditional Ayurvedic medical wisdom with American sociocultural concerns of the 1990s. As Divakaruni explained in an interview, the novel “deals with a past that is set in a mythical India, but the present is very much set in Oakland, California” (Rasiah, 148). The allegorical fable and fantasy depicts the magical powers of a clairvoyant woman of Indian ancestry. Tilottama (Tilo), named after sesame seeds, the “spice of nourishment” (5), who runs an Indian grocery store, “Spice Bazaar,” in Oakland. Originally named Nayan Tara, “Star of the Eye” or “Starseer” (8), she has psychic abilities, which help her treat her multiracial and multigenerational shoppers’ physical, emotional, and spiritual illnesses. Tilo is self-conscious of her own influence and even claims near-divine power: “I who can make it all happen, green cards and promotions and girls with lotus eyes. I Tilo architect of the immigrant dream” (29). As she attempts cures with her secret spices, “the mistress” falls in love with an attractive male client, Raven, who is himself tormented by his half Native American identity and whom she secretly calls “My American.” Divakaruni comments on interethnic race relations in the United States by depicting the protagonists’ parallel search for identity as American minorities. Part of the attraction that Tilo and Raven feel for each other is due to their exoticization of the Other. Although Divakaruni attempts to represent Chicanos, Native Americans, and African Americans, she does not portray and European Americans as individualized characters. Through several interwoven stories of the numerous characters who visit Tilo’s spice shop, the writer depicts inner-city social problems in the 1990s, including cross-cultural understanding and boundaries, interracial tensions and intergenerational conflicts,

immigrants of color struggling for acceptance in American society, and the spiritual vacuum in the lives of the California technology-belt “rich Indians” (79) who own chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis. She also portrays teenage rebellion and the lure of drugs and gangs for the young turbaned Sikh boy Jagjit, who is the object of ridicule in school; parental objections and grandparental censure of an interracial romance between a second-generation Indian-American, professional woman, Geeta, and her Chicano boyfriend, Juan Cordero; the abusive arranged marriage that the childless Mrs. Ahuja escapes from; the racial hate crime and violent bashing that forces Mohan to shut down his Indian grocery store and return to India; and other immigrant concerns. Divakaruni’s strength lies in her poetic rhythms and evocative descriptions of the island culture and the magical power of spices. The novel provides interior monologues of multiple Indian women in the United States and depicts a sort of Indian American Every woman(/wife): “But here is another image. A woman in a kitchen, cooking my rice. She is fragrant as the grains she rolls between her fingers . . . Into a curry of cauliflowers like white fists, she mixes garam masala to bring patience and hope. Is she one, is she many, is she not the woman in a hundred Indian homes who is sprinkling, over sweet kheer that has simmered all afternoon, cardamom seeds from my shop for the dreams that keep us from going mad?” (63–64). Her male characters—especially Raven—however, remain flat and stereotypical. At the novel’s end, Tilo is renamed Maya and chooses between self-fulfillment through her romantic mortal love for Raven and her power to heal others as the immortal Spice Mistress. In an interview, Divakaruni claims that of all her characters she identifies most closely with Tilo, who is “very strong,” “the things she wants for herself and the way she straddles two cultures, wanting to have power but realizing the drawbacks of power, wanting to be special but wanting to be ordinary as well” (Smith). Divakaruni highlights the heterogeneity of Indian cooking by naming each chapter of the novel after a different spice, thereby defying stereotypical understandings of the generic so-called Indian curry powder.

894 MISTS OF AVALON, THE

The novel’s primary weakness lies in its unrealistic plot and occasionally stereotypical portrayals of immigrant culture. The majority of American reviews exoticize the novel, which was reviewed positively in the United States though criticized for its “literary gimmickry” in the Indian newspaper The Hindu (Suroor). Shashi Tharoor praises the novel as “an unusual, clever, and often exquisite first novel that stirs magical realism into the conventions of culinary fiction and the still-simmering cauldron of Indian immigrant life in America. The result is rather as if Isabel Allende met Laura Esquivel in the pages of Indian Currents—and it works” (10). Lara Merlin describes Mistress as an “exuberant first novel . . . an enchanted story upon the fault line in an American identity that lies between the self and the community.” The Mistress of Spices was short-listed for the Orange Prize (England) and chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1997. Divakaruni’s strength lies in her delineation of female protagonists and their hardships as well as in her evocative descriptions of ethnic foods, smells, and tastes and of people’s voices. Divakaruni’s later works include her novel Sister of My Heart (1999); its sequel, The Vine of Desire (2002); and the short story collection The Unknown Errors of Our Lives (2001).

SOURCES Rasiah, Dharini. “Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. Interview.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 140–153. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. Tharoor, Shashi. Review of Mistress of Spices. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 9 March 1997. Lavina Dhingra Shankar

MISTS OF AVALON, THE MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY (1982) Like Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, Marion Zimmer BRADLEY’s (1930–99) The Mists of Avalon retells the British legend of the rise and fall of King Arthur, who succeeded Uther Pendragon after the defeat of Rome. Unlike Malory’s narrative and earlier versions of this legend, Bradley’s epic novel is written through the perspectives

of the women in Arthur’s life: his mother, Igraine; his aunts Viviane and Morgause; his wife, Gwenhwyfar (a spelling of Guinevere in Welsh); and his half sister Morgaine, whose voice occasionally emerges through the omniscient third-person narration with her own first-person narrative. A well-known fantasy writer, Bradley published The Mists of Avalon, her most famous novel, as part of a saga that includes The Forest House (1994) and The Lady of Avalon (1997), among other installments. The Mists of Avalon juxtaposes the conflicted lives of Arthur’s women relatives with the conflict between the indigenous Goddess-centered druidism and the encroaching patriarchal Christianity, first introduced by the Romans. Negotiating bounden duty and personal desires, the women struggle to protect their own power in an increasingly patriarchal world, a struggle that parallels the tension between the two powerful religious ideologies, which manifest in the text through the dualities of goddess/god, priestess/priest, female power/male power, intuition/scripture, and magic/obedience. Bradley’s revision of the Arthurian legend asserts a feminist rereading of the story, which foregrounds the women’s lives and a powerful female deity. In this version, Arthur is granted his rule by the Goddess, whose will is carried out by the priestesses on the Isle of Avalon. However, he is eventually destroyed by the same power when he abandons his commitment to the old faith, making Britain a Christian land. The women characters, particularly Igraine, Morgaine, and Gwenhwyfar, embody the dualities that arise in the novel as they also play dual roles: They are both victimizers and victims entangled in Viviane’s plot to save Avalon from the threatening spread of Christianity. The novel opens after Viviane, Avalon’s highest priestess, or the Lady of the Lake, has given Igraine in marriage to Duke Gorlois of Cornwall. Gorlois is Morgaine’s father and is later slain by Uther Pendragon, who marries Igraine, making her the first to realize she is an integral part, as both an actor and a pawn, in Viviane’s plan. When Igraine understands that she will again be used by Viviane, this time to bring Uther to power and to bear his son Arthur, she reflects: “I did her will once, when I was a child and knew no better. But now I am grown,

MISTS OF AVALON, THE 895

I am a woman, not so easily led as the child she gave away to be Gorlois’s bride. Now I will do my own will, and not that of the Lady of the Lake” (19). Despite Igraine’s inward resistance to Viviane’s scheme, she recognizes her duty to the Goddess and soon submits to the part she must play, a role that will lead to Gorlois’s death. Years later at King Arthur’s court, Gwenhwyfar’s Christian piety puts her at odds with Morgaine. Although Morgaine lives in self-imposed exile from Avalon for most of her adult life, she still feels inextricably bound to the Goddess. Gwenhwyfar, though, uses her influence upon Arthur to break his ties to Avalon, despite his vow to protect the island and its people, and Christianize Britain. The emergent conflict between the two women goes beyond ideological differences and is complicated by the internal conflicts that torment them separately. Even before coming to Arthur’s court, Morgaine, who is designated to replace Viviane as the Lady of the Lake, wrestles with two polarizing forces in her life, her duty-bound loyalty to Avalon and her personal desires. Although she loves Arthur’s closest friend and knight, Lancelot, who does not reciprocate her love, these forces clash within Morgaine after she realizes that she and Arthur have been misled into an incestuous union during the Great Marriage, a druid rite that legitimizes Arthur’s claim to power. Her horror from the incest leads the young Morgaine to despair: “Why did you do this to us? Great Mother, Lady, why?” (181). Consequently, Morgaine leaves Avalon, bears Arthur’s son in secret, and abandons the child with Morgause, but these choices torture her conscience until she returns to Avalon as a much older woman. Gwenhwyfar also suffers inwardly, as she is given in marriage to Arthur, whom she does not love. Unable to bear an heir to the king, Gwenhwyfar is tormented by her exaggerated guilt as she mistakenly believes the Christian God has punished her for her sin: her secret love affair with Lancelet. Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar’s conflict dramatizes the polarization of the indigenous matriarchal druids and the patriarchal Christians and illuminates the broader struggle for power that the spread of Christianity creates. Igraine, who was also reared on the Isle of Avalon, points out that with Christianity the Romans brought a

shift in the way power is assigned: “[T]hese Romans counted their lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother; it was silly, for how could any man ever know precisely who had fathered any woman’s child?” (7). Although Igraine does not pass this criticism directly to her daughter, Morgaine also recognizes the logic of matrilineage and eventually understands that the Isle of Avalon will recede completely, disappearing into its surrounding mists with the spread of Christian belief, unless she is able to act more decisively and accordingly with the will of the Goddess. Morgaine’s return to Avalon to become its highest priestess after Viviane’s death signals her acceptance of her destiny. This turning point in her life also shows the primary distinction between the two religions; loyalty to the Goddess empowers women, and loyalty to the Christian God limits their power. Resuming her work as a priestess, Morgaine becomes far more powerful and effective in the world beyond Avalon’s borders, unlike Gwenhwyfar, who still struggles against the powerlessness that is reinforced by her own religious beliefs. Although Morgaine punishes all betrayers of the Goddess, she comes to recognize that Christianity has already co-opted druid belief when, visiting a convent, she sees a statue of the Virgin Mary that resembles the Goddess: “And I know it, and even if they think otherwise, these women know the power of the Immortal. Exile her as they may, she will prevail. The Goddess will never withdraw herself from mankind” (875). Morgaine’s new understanding reconciles her inner conflict. The opposing loyalties within her rest as she recognizes the mutability of the Goddess and the inherent power women exert in her name—a realization that causes her to see the necessity of her sacrifices and to affirm at last: “Her work was done” (876).

SOURCES Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon. New York: Del Rey, 1982. Hildebrand, Kristina. The Female Reader at the Round Table: Religion and Women in Three Contemporary Arthurian Texts. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University doctoral thesis, 2001. Heather Ostman

896 MITCHELL, MARGARET

MITCHELL, MARGARET (MUNNERLYN) (1900–1949) Margaret Mitchell wrote only GONE WITH THE WIND (1936), but it became one of the best-selling novels in American history and secured her literary legacy. Gone With the Wind, set in Georgia during the Confederacy and Reconstruction eras, reflects the point of view of Scarlett O’Hara, its strong-willed, rebellious central character. Although the novel seems at first glance to belong to the plantation novel genre— characterized by nostalgia, romance, and an attitude toward blacks that seems racist by contemporary standards—scholars in the last three decades have interpreted it differently. Many see through the “moonlight and magnolia” facade of the novel to the ironic, complex, and subtle subtext that far surpasses the plantation novel and addresses Southern history itself. Some critics still insist that the novel reflects attitudes of white supremacy, but others use feminist, biographical, Southern agrarian, and other critical approaches to show that the novel reveals Scarlett O’Hara and her society as imperfect and complicated. Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Eugene Muse Mitchell, an attorney, and Mary Isabelle Stephens Mitchell, a founder of the Georgia women’s suffrage movement. She was educated at Smith College for one year but was forced to return home when her mother died so that she could run her father’s household. Her fiancé, Clifford Henry, a young army officer, died in 1918 during World War I, and in September 1922, she married Berrian Kinnard Upshaw, a charming but violent, brutal alcoholic. They were divorced in 1924, and Mitchell married John Upshaw in 1925. Some critics have compared these three men, respectively, to Ashley Wilkes, Rhett Butler, and Charles Kennedy of Gone With the Wind. In any case, after four years as a reporter and then feature writer with the Atlanta Journal, Mitchell quit her job to become a full-time companion to her husband. According to Mitchell lore—and much of it abounds—it was enforced inactivity (due to a sprained ankle) that energized her to write Gone With the Wind. She began the novel in 1926 and completed it by 1930, when she was 29 years old. The novel was published in 1936, won a Pulitzer Prize that same year, and in 1939 was made into a

David O. Selznick feature-length film that won nine Academy Awards, including best picture, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara for best actress, and Hattie McDaniel as Mammy for best supporting actress. Mitchell claimed to have been overwhelmed by the publicity and attention to both the novel and the film, but like so much else that is contradictory in her life— her ladylike demeanor as opposed to her rebelliousness, for instance—these stories are complicated and are, finally, part of the myth. The fact that she ordered her manuscripts destroyed at her death has fueled these legends. Margaret Mitchell cared for both her father, who died in 1944, and her husband, who suffered a massive heart attack shortly afterward, but recovered. She was killed by an automobile while crossing an Atlanta street on August 11, 1949. Her remaining papers are collected at the University of Georgia.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Gone with the Wind. New York: Macmillan, 1936, Fiftieth Anniversary Facsimile Edition, 1986. Lost Laysen (written in 1916). Edited by Debra Freer. New York: Scribner, 1996.

SOURCES Austin, Rhonda. “Margaret Mitchell.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Edwards, Anne. Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. Eskridge, Jane, ed. Before Scarlett: Girlhood Writings of Margaret Mitchell. Athens, Ga.: Hill Street Press, 2000. Farr, Finis. Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of “Gone with the Wind.” New York: William Morrow, 1965. Hanson, Elizabeth I. Margaret Mitchell. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Harwell, Richard, ed. Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” Letters, 1936–1939. New York: Macmillan, 1976. Peacock, Jane Bonner, ed. A Dynamo Going to Waste: Letters to Allen Edee, 1919–1921. Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1985. Pyron, Darden Asbury. “Margaret Mitchell.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. ———. Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1983.

MOBY-DICK 897

———. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

MOBY-DICK HERMAN MELVILLE (1851) MobyDick is, first and foremost, a work of near-indescribable literary magnitude, invariably present on any respectable short list of candidates for the title Greatest American Novel Ever Written. It may be shocking to learn that at the time of publication, Moby-Dick not only failed to garner popular acclaim (we are more than used to great literature failing on this account), but critical respect as well. Panned as disjointed and uncategorizable, it was all but forgotten until being resurrected by the modernists, whom it both anticipated and—with the possible exception of the work of the Irish author James Joyce—surpassed, and set on course to the deified status we are familiar with. Its uncategorizability is, of course, responsible for much of its charm and a great deal of its power. Formally, Moby-Dick is indebted—just as Joyce later was— to epic lampoons like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Byron’s Don Juan, though it is far more serious than either. This is a crucial point, as seriousness had always been considered less malleable than comedy. Richard Brodhead observes that while “high literary forms [like] tragedy and epic . . . observe fairly strict literary protocols . . . Moby-Dick delights in being heterogeneous . . . amalgamating into itself every form of writing . . . always becoming something else, always deciding what kind of book it will be next.” The work is self-consciously a chowder of Shakespearean tragedy, Rabelaisian polyglot novel, epic poem, scripture, proletarian comedy, transcendental diary à la Thoreau, Gothic horror tale, nonfiction chronicle, and boys’ adventure story. One could read Moby-Dick’s protean formalism as American allegory—the people comprised of all peoples, flowing into the government improving upon all others. It was, after all, the avowed intention of MELVILLE’s New York circle to create a conspicuously American literature. The iconic opening line—“Call me Ishmael”—is itself an ironic decoy, as Ishmael cannot possibly be regarded as the sole narrator. For the first quarter of the book or so, we may see him as such—provided we can accept such a sharp philosophical mind and advanced

faculty of expression in an aimless New England seaman-for-hire of the mid–19th century—but once the Pequod leaves Nantucket for the open ocean, the narrative is no longer contained by a body. It will stay bound to Ishmael in terms of presentation, but not only will his linguistic resourcefulness (along with that of virtually every other character) far exceed what is even remotely believable for a man in his milieu, but he will begin to have access to impossible information, relating scenes for which he is not present. This fundamental presentational duality—Ishmael is and is not the narrator—blossoms into others: MobyDick (the book) as both chronicle and allegory; MobyDick (the whale) as both meaning and nothingness; and Captain Ahab as both hero and villain are only a few central ones. The text oscillates between moving the story forward and enlarging its philosophical scope— like a ship that advances when there is wind and undergoes repairs when there is not. Ishmael takes long breaks from relating events to edify the reader about whales: their biology, their behavior, the histories of their physical and symbolic values to humans. The coloration and exposition Ishmael heaps upon the literal storyline point to Moby-Dick’s being a book about ideas as much as actions. Insofar as it is epic, it is the modernist epic-as-nexus-of-histories. In the first of his “history” chapters, while presenting evidence of the honorable pedigree of whalers and whaling, Ishmael says, “It would be a hopeless, endless task to catalogue all these things” (152). The language self-consciously recalls the epic and transforms militarism into investigation—just as the procession of ships came to the world of the battle, so comes a procession of ideas to the world of the ship. “Endless” here means both perpetual and in vain: No book can contain all of life and history, even on a single subject, nor transmute information into experience, even regarding a single chain of events—even if one could, this alone would not signify; though we inevitably make meaning out of experience, experience alone is not meaning. It is, of course, the transformation—Ahab’s transformation—of experience into meaning that drives the book and the Pequod on to their conclusions. It is given that the white whale took Ahab’s leg, and that he is

898 MOBY-DICK

obsessed with slaying it, but it is never fully clear just what Moby-Dick represents to him. Is the white whale evil that must be hunted in the name of righteousness? Pure power to be defeated for the sake of pride? Or just the prize in the only game Ahab deems it logical to play? In response to the pious first mate Starbuck’s objection—“To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous”—Ahab unleashes a philosophy that seems to unite romantic metaphysics with late 20th-century literary theory: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event— in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me” (220–221). Carolyn Porter sees in Moby-Dick a pattern in which “boundaries are invoked in order to be crossed and finally blurred. First, and most notable, is the boundary between land and sea.” This passage suggests an even deeper primary boundary—the boundary between the self, where significance is interpreted into meaning, and the external world where the signifiers are. Moby-Dick’s darkest possible import is that our interpretation of our own fellows and surroundings is fundamentally every bit as specious as our interpretations of God and the spiritual world must be; that Donne was dead wrong, and every man is an island. Porter’s “most notable” boundary is the most apt analogy whether one is in Moby-Dick or not; it is no coincidence that Freud characterizes religion as only one facet of a bonding impulse he dubs the “oceanic feeling.” Discussions of what the white whale “symbolizes” should be at least partly predicated upon its significance to Ahab—but this speech implies an absence of inherent significance even to its pursuer. For Ishmael, on the subject of the placement of a whale’s eyes, biology naturally gives way to philosophy—“In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts); for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?” (428)—ending up as a contrast between the

whale’s ambiguity of purpose and Ahab’s singularity of purpose. The whale may be superior at the game, or not playing at all; its nature seems at times to unify the romantic sublime and duality-obsessed gynocritical theory into a maddening indistinguishability of the phallic and the vaginal—that which will crush you precisely because it eludes the significance you assign to it. “Is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction?” (429). Moby-Dick (as is always the case with supernatural beings) and Moby-Dick (as is always the case with epics) are usually interpreted in terms of good and evil. The pervading Gothic unspeakability the whale suggests shows the influence of HAWTHORNE, who asserted, in Charles Feidelson Jr.’s phrase, “the reality of doom in the face of all optimistic expansiveness.” Melville spoke of “the blackness in Hawthorne that . . . fixes and fascinates me” [italics author’s], but he builds upon this in Moby-Dick by replacing blackness (evil) with whiteness (ambiguity), and this one master conceptual stroke sets the work vaulting from one brilliance to another: An evil whale would have made for an unremarkable horror tale; a normal whale with evil projected onto it by humans makes for the grandest tragedy ever written in prose. Ahab’s—and our own— “optimistic expansiveness” does not encounter doom, it engenders doom. With regard to this, many have noted the similarities between Ahab and the Satan of Paradise Lost. They are obviously similar in terms of demeanor and rhetorical prowess, but with one important difference: Satan has been punished for a reason by a supreme intelligence, whereas Ahab has been punished for no reason by an utter absence of intelligence. Satan may contain a Hell within him, but the division between Heaven and Hell is externally real; with Ahab, the totality of the conflict is self-contained. For this reason Mizener is inaccurate in calling Ahab—in a reference to classical mythology by way of a reference to Frankenstein—an “American Prometheus.” Ahab neither steals nor discovers; he only invents.

MODERN INSTANCE, A 899

It is, finally, through Ahab’s role as inventor that the grandest duality of Moby-Dick takes shape: If the only way Ahab can live is by constructing meaning where there had been only existence, then his role is identical to the author’s. In the passage previously excerpted, Ahab could be a modernist critic describing the mission of art, and it is certainly no stretch to equate the whiteness of the whale with the whiteness of the blank page. So if Ahab is “writing” his book (Ishmael, then, is only reading to us from the Book of Ahab), why does his destruction seem so inevitable? The unrelenting symbolism—the coffin as life buoy; the Macbeth-like prophecies of Fedallah; the satanic baptism of the harpoons; the Pequod’s casting off on Christmas Day, as if sent to die by God—all seem to conspire to make Ahab’s free will a nonissue; but Ahab’s free will is the central issue. One is naturally tempted to regard MobyDick as allegory, even to the point of suspecting the literal element to be almost wholly arbitrary—as merely the most convenient delivery system for whatever codified import the book intends. The novel dares us to do this, even as it exhorts us not to; it is, of course, for doing precisely this that Ahab is ruined: He is powerless to refrain from imposing significance onto that which is mere existence and nothing more. Ahab’s relation to Moby-Dick the undefeatable whale must become the reader’s relation to Moby-Dick the undefeatable book. After all the prophecy has been fulfilled, Ishmael, lone survivor of the Pequod, floats to his eventual rescue on the empty coffin of his friend Queequeg. But those who try to find a moral explanation for Ishmael’s survival will be stymied, as, once again, the answer is devoid of significance: Ishmael does not survive because of anything; rather, he is the narrator because he survived—had he not, then someone else, or noone at all, would be telling the story. It has been said that the function of the epic is to parallel—and accordingly, assign meaning to—the very fact of human existence. Moby-Dick, in the end, assigns to life the most terrifying possible explanation: utter chance.

SOURCES Brodhead, Richard H. “Trying All Things: An Introduction to Moby-Dick.” In New Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by

Richard H. Brodhead. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———, ed. New Essays on Moby-Dick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Brodtkorb, Paul, Jr. Ishmael’s White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby-Dick. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Chase, Richard, ed. Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Gilmore, Michael T., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Moby-Dick: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Hicks, Granville. “A Re-Reading of Moby-Dick.” In Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, edited by Charles Shapiro. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1958. Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fable in American Fiction. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994. Kazin, Alfred. “ ‘Introduction’ to Moby-Dick.” In Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Chase. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. McSweeney, Kerry. Moby-Dick: Ishmael’s Mighty Book. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Edited with an introduction and annotations by Charles Feidelson Jr. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Mizener, Arthur. Twelve Great American Novels. New York: New American Library, 1967. Mumford, Lewis. Interpretations and Forecasts 1922–1972: Studies in Literature, History, Biography, Technics, and Contemporary Society. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Murray, Henry A. “In Nomine Diaboli.” In Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Chase. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962. Percival, M. O. A Reading of Moby-Dick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. Porter, Carolyn. “Call Me Ishmael, or How to Make DoubleTalk Speak.” In New Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by Richard H. Brodhead. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Chris O. Cook

MODERN INSTANCE, A WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1882) First published serially in Century magazine in 1882, William Dean HOWELLS’s A Modern Instance marked a significant departure from the previous work of this already established writer and editor.

900 MOHR, NICHOLASA

Howells’s prior works written in the 1870s, such as Their Wedding Journey and A Chance Acquaintance, were marked by their narrow focus on one or two engaging characters. A Modern Instance, however, is the first in a series of later novels in which Howells presents a much broader array of themes and settings, and a variety of characters to depict what he had come to see as the modern condition in America at the end of the 19th century. A Modern Instance is particularly broad in scope. Though the novel’s specific focus is on the relationship of Marcia and Bartley Hubbard, Howells presents a wide range of characters, such as Squire Gaylord, Ben Halleck, and Eustace Atherton, who though representing types, are nevertheless realistically and convincingly drawn. Howells then explores how each of these character types represents or contributes to the decline of values in modern America. Likewise, the novel is quite broad in its geographical scope, stretching from rural Maine, to cosmopolitan Boston, and finally to the wilds of Arizona. This wide array of characters and settings provides Howells with the opportunity to explore modern America from a variety of angles, while addressing controversial subjects such as divorce, promiscuity, and journalism, which had rarely been addressed in American literature up to this period. The novel begins in rural Equity, Maine, a declining, old-fashioned community that Howells characterizes as on the verge of extinction. The town seems to be smothering from its own petty, puritanical conventionalities. Its patriarch, Squire Gaylord, represents Equity’s out-of-touch values that are no longer appreciated by the quickly evolving American culture. Readers are introduced to Squire Gaylord’s daughter Marcia and her love interest, Bartley Hubbard, editor of the Equity Free Press, against this backdrop in Equity. Howells immediately calls Bartley’s moral fiber into question. With his tendency to overindulge—in food, aggression, and sex—Bartley is portrayed as the new man in modern society who can govern neither his appetites nor his intellect. His fiancée, Marcia, prone to bouts of jealous rage, is the same way. The couple’s character flaws, which are already blatant in Equity, are magnified when they move to Boston.

Boston, a vital center for the newspaper media and culture, is presented in no better light than Equity. There seem to be two distinct classes of people in Boston: those such as Clara Kingsbury and Eustace Atherton, who represent the often ignorant conventionalities of conservative upper-class Boston that are losing ground to the moral, religious, and cultural degeneracy of modern America, and those like Bartley, the new man, who is willing to take advantage of anyone, including his own friends like Kinney, to get what he wants. Though there are a few more admirable characters in the novel, such as Kinney, Halleck, and the newspaperman Ricker, they are few and far between. Most everyone else seems to be a holdover from the decaying past or to have bought into the new model of Americanism based on extreme egotistical drives for success. Significantly, Marcia’s marriage to Bartley ends in divorce, making A Modern Instance the first American novel to represent divorce in a positive light. Clearly, Howell portrays Marcia as being liberated from the animal-like Bartley, who is ruled by his base passions. Bartley eventually ends up in Whited Sepulchre, Arizona, an ironic biblical reference to his own corrupt inner nature. If Bartley, in his corruption and egotism, represents the new American condition, it would seem from Howells’s point of view that modern America was indeed facing a tremendous crisis of values at the end of the century. The old puritanical, conservative values of America’s forefathers seem to be losing ground to equally unsatisfying selfish individualism and materialism. Though Howells’s novel is subtle enough to avoid didacticism, it certainly rings with the truth that reliance on these new values will inevitably lead to the further moral decay of American society. Kathleen Hicks

MOHR, NICHOLASA (1938– )

A Puerto Rican American from New York (or Nuyorican), Nicholasa Mohr has set most of her novels and short stories in the Bronx or on the Lower East Side (Losaida) of Manhattan. Her protagonists are mainly Puerto Rican immigrant girls and women. Although some of her work is written for young adults, she also writes for adults, treating such themes as homosexual-

MOMADAY, N. SCOTT 901

ity, murder, drug use, prostitution—and art. Mohr’s depictions of both characters and their speech are sometimes earthy; she uses slang, street language, and Puerto Rican Spanish, folding it into the English used by her characters. Her characters are nearly always strong survivors who manage to draw on reserves of self-esteem and resiliency no matter what ethnic slurs are hurled at them. Nicholasa Mohr was born on November 1, 1938, in New York City, to Pedro Golpe, a Basque merchant marine seaman from La Coruña, Spain, and Nicholasa Rivera Golpe, who had emigrated from Puerto Rico at age 22. After Mohr’s brief marriage was annulled, she moved to Berkeley, California, and then returned to New York in 1957. Her marriage in 1957 to Irwin Mohr, a graduate student who became a child psychologist, lasted until his death in 1978. Mohr’s first novel, Nilda (1973), is set in the 1940s and is somewhat autobiographical. Like Mohr, Nilda has a Spanish father, a drugaddicted brother, and an artistic talent that allows her to escape the New York of stabbings, sex solicitation, drug peddling, and racial hostility endemic in her neighborhood. Although Nilda loses much of her family, her mother speaks to her on her deathbed, reminding her to remember her identity and uniqueness and to avoid bearing many children; Mohr has said that in real life, her mother was the first self-reliant woman she knew. Nilda narrates her own novel, but she reappears in EL BRONX REMEMBERED (1975), set in post–World War II New York and consisting of one novella and 11 stories, with a different perspective because the neighborhood has expanded and diversified. (For instance, in one story, the aging, lonely Jewish Mr. Mendelsohn becomes a loved and valued member of a Puerto Rican–American family.) Although most characters seem to be moving closer to a solid identity within El Bronx, Mohr is at pains to present characters on the margins, most memorably in the novella “Herman and Alice,” an early portrayal of homosexuality. Here Herman leaves his lover Daniel to marry the pregnant Alice and give her child a name. Mohr’s third novel, In Nueva York (1977), occurs in Losaida. Characters move in and out of the neighborhood, disappearing and reappearing. Rudi’s restaurant

is the central gathering place. Losaida is a microcosm of second- and third-generation Nuyoricans, both the achievers and the failures, particularly Rudi, present in nearly all the stories. Mohr presents all the characters as survivors. In the words of the reviewer Marilyn Sachs, “if any author could make you hear pulses beating from the pages, Nicholasa Mohr was the one” (Sachs, 30). The author lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Stories. New York: Harper, 1975. In Nueva York. New York: Dial, 1977. Nilda. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

SOURCES Blicksilver, Edith. The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests and Lifestyles. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall Hunt, 1978. Miller, John C. “The Emigrant and New York City: A Consideration of Four Puerto Rican Writers,” MELUS 5, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 82–99. Mohr, Eugene. The Nuyorican Experience: Literature of Puerto Rican Minorities. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Mohr, Nicholasa. In My Own Words: Growing Up inside the Sanctuary of My Imagination. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Sachs, Marilyn. Review of El Bronx Remembered, New York Times Book Review, 16 November 1975, p. 30. ———. Review of Nilda, New York Times Book Review, 4 November 1973, pp. 27–28.

OTHER Voices from the Gaps, Women Writers of Color. “Nicholasa Mohr.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/ bios/entries/mohr_nicholasa.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005.

MOMADAY, N(AVARRE) SCOTT (1934– ) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, N. Scott Momaday, a member of the Kiowa tribe, is often credited with creating reader interest in Native-American literature. He is also the author of The Way to Rainy Mountain, an experimental postmodernist work that blends several genres, and The Ancient Child (1989), an autobiographical novel. Central to all Momaday’s work is the land, his Kiowa ancesters, and

902 MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND

the significance of folklore and legend in anchoring Native Americans to their past. N. Scott Momaday was born on February 27, 1934, in Lawton, Oklahoma, to Alfred Morris, a Kiowa artist and art teacher, and Mayme Natachee Scott Momaday, a teacher and writer with white and Cherokee ancestry. He earned a B.A. at the University of New Mexico in 1958; at Stanford University he earned an M.A. in 1960 and a doctorate in 1963. He married Gaye Mangold in 1959; he married his second wife, Regina Heitzer, in 1978. House Made of Dawn opens and closes with Abel, the protagonist, in the act of running. Abel, a World War II veteran, has returned to the reservation with no sense of direction. He kills an albino, serves a prison term, hits bottom, then returns to the reservation, where he is reborn. At the end of the novel, as he runs at daybreak, he sings the ritual song “house made of dawn.” The Way to Rainy Mountain, considered a novel by most readers, is actually an amalgam of stories, myth, history, and autobiographical memory; the fragments are metaphors of the Kiowa experience in the 20th century. Momaday’s third novel, The Ancient Child, is also about the Indian search for identity. Set, the protagonist, is raised by whites but, on the death of his adoptive father, returns to his Kiowa roots. Using Indian myth along with Billy the Kid, a killer who supposedly had the redeeming traits of loyalty and courage, Momaday uses the Old West of cowboys and Indians. A central figure in Native-American literature, Momaday lives and writes in Arizona and teaches at the University of Arizona at Tucson. House Made of Dawn continues to be central to Native-American literature and courses in Native-American studies.

NOVELS The Ancient Child. New York: Doubleday, 1989. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper, 1968. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969.

SOURCES Allen, Paula Gunn. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, 563–579. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Blaeser, Kimberly. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Edited by Gerald Vizenor, 39–54. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Coltelli, Laura. “N. Scott Momaday.” In Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, 89–102. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Hogan, Linda. Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, edited by Paula Gunn Allen, 169–177. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. Lincoln, Kenneth. “Comic Accommodations: Momaday and Norman.” In his Indian Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America, 280–308. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Owens, Louis. “Acts of Imagination: The Novels of N. Scott Momaday.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, 90–127. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Papovich, J. Frank. “Landscape, Tradition, and Identity in The Way to Rainy Mountain,” Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 12 (1986): 13–19. Roemer, Kenneth, ed. Approaches to Teaching Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain.” New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1988. Scarberry-Garcia, Susan. Landmarks of Healing: A Study of “House Made of Dawn.” Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Schubnell, Matthias. N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Trimble, Martha Scott. Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain, 313–324. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982. Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Woodard, Charles. Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND GISH JEN (1996) This novel, the sequel to Typical American, continues to explore what it means to be American and the possibilities of the American dream. Here, Chinese-American writer Gish JEN turns her attention to Ralph and Helen Chang’s two daughters, Callie and Mona, the narrator of the novel. The Changs’ move to Scarshill, the immigrant’s promised land, is part of the

MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND 903

parents’ process of making their daughters more Americanized, a development they encourage as long as the girls do not abandon the Chinese ways they consider important. Growing up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mona begins to question and rethink her parents’ choices, partly as a teenager’s natural desire to be like everyone else and different from her parents, partly as a consequence of the social upheaval of the times, and also from a desire to assimilate into her neighborhood. Mona’s socialization process involves a stronger push toward being American, which does not mean what it did to her parents—economic stability and success—but the possibility of making (or remaking) herself. She therefore reexamines the meaning of authenticity, cultural possibilities and diversity, and ethnic identity and affiliation; her exposure to Judaism makes her decide to convert, making her the first Catholic-Chinese Jew in her community. Ralph and Helen are horrified by their daughter’s conversion, which they see as a step backward in the acculturation process. Helen, educated by Catholic nuns in Shanghai, China, never doubted the logic of her own conversion from Buddhism, while questioning the validity and sense of Mona’s decision, which eventually leads to their estrangement. The novel is brilliant and hilarious, as Mona explores the meaning of being authentically Chinese or Jewish or American. Mona and her friends Barbara Gugelstein, Seth Mandel, and Eloise Ingles are typical adolescents experimenting with the new freedoms of the 1970s. For Mona, as for her friends, growing up in a multiethnic community, transgressing the boundaries of race, religion, and class, is precisely the way of changing the system. They try to challenge prevailing race and class stereotypes by exploring the possibilities of cultural shifts and interracial relationships, and trying to achieve a microcosm of a just, classless society. At the center of the novel is the idea of authenticity, of the possibility of cultural choice, the shifting nature of cultural identity, of interethnic borrowing. The concept of culture as acquired, not innate, and that can be adopted or shed depending on the moment or circumstance is explored in diverse ways. Mona is not the only character who crosses cultural boundaries, as oth-

ers flaunt their American prerogative to choose cultural affiliations: Seth, who calls himself an authentic inauthentic Jew, lives in a teepee in his family’s backyard and wears a dashiki, an African shirt made popular by hippies; the friends participate in rap sessions at temple; Barbara undergoes surgery to straighten her nose. Naomi, Callie’s African-American roommate at Harvard/Radcliffe, speaks fluent Mandarin, wears a kilt at work, teaches Callie what it means to be Chinese, and cooks duck with burning tea leaves, rather than with Pepsi, as Helen does. Although the novel offers many instances of delight, there are dark undercurrents, as the teenagers realize that certain social structures cannot be easily changed. Proof of this is the Ingles family, whose members do not have to shift at all because they are already at the top of the social pyramid: white, upper class, and comfortable that way, they vacation at the resort where Callie and Naomi are waitresses. Jen engages a paradigm shift as she shows how the children of immigrants redefine their parents’ struggle for assimilation and success by multiplying versions of being American. The assimilationist ideal of the first-generation immigrant is replaced by their children’s multicultural awareness and the possibility of cultural choice. Jen exposes the humor of Mona’s highly original process of cultural assimilation, adoption, and choices. As a Chinese-American child, she establishes herself as an expert on China by repeating the only three expressions she knows, “stop acting crazy,” “rice gruel,” and “soy sauce,” and assures her friends that Chinese people get pregnant by drinking tea. When an Asian boy enters the class, her teacher asks Mona to watch over him, not realizing that Japanese Sherman Matsumoto and Mona have nothing in common. But he becomes her first “boyfriend,” and he challenges her ideas of what it is to be American and her flippant belief that it is easy to “switch” cultures. The sisters’ experience of interethnic possibilities leads them to rethink their own cultural allegiances and affirm their choices. Paradoxically, the experience of Judaism allows Mona to appreciate more deeply what it means to be Chinese. Callie’s rebellion against her parents’ heritage takes an interesting twist: She becomes “Asian American,” studies Mandarin at Harvard, calls herself Kailan, and

904 MONKEY WRENCH GANG, THE

engages a Chineseness that Ralph and Helen have suppressed in favor of their daughters’ Americanization. Ralph and Helen, more confused than ever by this cultural choice, decide that it is better to turn Jewish than Asian American. Interestingly, most of the characters eventually achieve the kind of traditional stability they rebelled against: Callie becomes a successful pediatrician, Mona and Seth go to graduate school, and Seth becomes a college professor. In the end, their marriage (Mona contemplates asking Seth to change his name to Changowitz) and the birth of their daughter Io (whose favorite food is Italian) leads to Mona’s reconciliation with her mother.

SOURCES Furman, Andrew. “Immigrant Dreams and Civic Promises: (Con-)Testing Identity in Early Jewish American Literature and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land,” MELUS 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 209–226. Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Knopf, 1996. Ling, Amy. “Cultural Cross-Dressing in Mona in the Promised Land.” Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance, 227–236. Hamburg, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2002. Simal González, Begoña. “The (Re)Birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the Promised Land,” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 225–243. Rocío G. Davis

MONKEY WRENCH GANG, THE EDWARD ABBEY (1975) Witty, sardonic, and inspiring, Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang assembles a cast of the most unlikely comrades: George Washington Hayduke, the crazed, beer-guzzling Vietnam veteran; Seldom Seen Smith, the irreverent Mormon wilderness guide; wealthy, billboard-burning Doc Sarvis; and Doc Sarvis’s youthful and attractive, marijuana-smoking companion, Bonnie Abbzug. The group’s purpose: to impede by any means necessary the further development of the American West by greed-driven big business and shortsighted government projects. Their ultimate goal: the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam, the symbol of all that is wrong with the ongoing devastation of the desert Southwest. Abbey combines this ragtag quartet and their unlawful

designs to create a funny, yet thoughtful and provoking ecological manifesto that has spurred many radical environmentalists to action in the United States. Though obviously a work of fiction based on largerthan-life heroes and a sensational plot, The Monkey Wrench Gang captures many of Abbey’s own deepestheld beliefs about the environment. A resident of the Southwest, Abbey was extremely enamored of its awesome and inspiring beauty. As a personal witness to its destruction, Abbey also became one of the loudest social critics of the industries and the government that were wantonly destroying its delicate ecological balance. Abbey’s primary nemesis: the Glen Canyon Dam. Built in 1962, the dam that created Lake Powell and disrupted the flow of the Colorado River flooded thousands of acres and destroyed innumerable desert habitats. Most enraging to Abbey was the desecration of Glen Canyon. Abbey’s own ire is reflected in the character of Seldom Seen Smith, who falls on his knees in the novel and prays that God will send a “little old precision-type earthquake” to destroy the concrete monstrosity. The destruction of the dam becomes the Monkey Wrench Gang’s quest and the framing device of the novel. In between the scenes of the dam’s destruction, however, the gang makes its way across the four-corners region reeking havoc on industry and government development sites. They pull up innumerable survey stakes, sabotage earth-moving equipment, and even blow a transport train off the tracks. Funded by Doc Sarvis and motivated by Hayduke’s zeal, and likewise aided by the survival skills Hayduke picked up during the Vietnam War, the group cuts a wide path of destruction through the Southwest before they are eventually brought down by their own poor planning and shortsightedness. Though they are ultimately caught at the end of the novel, trapped by the treacherous and hostile landscape they are trying to protect, Hayduke manages to escape an inescapable situation and none of the other monkey wrenchers is prosecuted. The “happy ending” is certainly unbelievable in the traditional sense, but Abbey uses it purposefully to make his point clear: We must protect the Earth, at all costs and by any means. The radical environmentalist group Earth First!

MONSTER 905

has taken his message to heart and has admitted to using Abbey’s novel as its own manifesto. Because Abbey’s book has inspired various acts of what is now known as “ecoterrorism” across the country, the novel has been considered dangerous. It also prompted an ongoing investigation of Abbey and his own actions by the FBI. Although its primary focus is on destroying property to disrupt the development of the Southwest, the novel also satirizes elements of the women’s liberation movement, which was gaining ground at the time of the book’s publication, and the often ridiculous nature of male and female sexual relationships. Bonnie, who considers herself a “new woman,” is often disgusted by the fact that she cannot keep her hands off Hayduke—a beastly and brutish man in her opinion. In all, the novel is both irreverent and filled with contradictions. Even Hayduke, the great liberator of the desert, cannot refrain from tossing beer cans out of his jeep as he barrels back and forth across the desert highways. Nonetheless, The Monkey Wrench Gang is a bold and daring statement by a man who loved the desert and firmly believed in his fictional gang’s cause to save it from what he recognized to be irrational and unsustainable development.

SOURCE Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Perennial, 2000. Kathleen Hicks

MONSTER WALTER DEAN MYERS (1999)

The multigenre novel Monster was the first book to win the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature, established in 2000. The novel also took Coretta Scott King honors (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award (1999), and garnered numerous other honors and awards for Myers, who writes prolifically for young adults. The author was honored with the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in 1994. In Monster’s opening pages, 16-year-old Steve Harmon reveals that he is being held at an adult detention facility in Manhattan, accused of acting as a lookout

during a Harlem robbery that left a drugstore owner, Mr. Nesbitt, dead. In Myers’s account of his teen narrator’s two-week felony murder trial, he weaves together a screenplay, journal entries, digitally edited photos, and other images. The question of Steve’s guilt builds suspense for readers, who—lacking any evidence that absolutely proves Steve’s role—must consider his journal comments and screenplay flashbacks as well as the arguments made for and against him in court in order to decide for themselves what “really” happened. While the question of Steve’s guilt drives the plot of the novel, it also contributes to the complexity of this work. As Myers explained in an interview for Booklist, “whether Steve [is] legally guilty or innocent doesn’t make any difference” (Myers, 2000, 1,101). It is Steve’s “moral stance” that matters. The theme of legal versus moral guilt was inspired by Myers’s interviews with prisoners; he was troubled by his observation that many young convicts focused on justifying their actions from a legal standpoint without regard for the moral implications of their decisions (Myers, “Escalating,” 702). By structuring the first-person narrative of the novel using alternating genres, Myers invites readers to question and critique Steve’s moral stance. The author’s choice to interrupt Steve’s screenplay account with his daily journal entries (and vice versa) prompts readers to “interrupt” and question Steve’s account of the murder, of the trial, and of his life inside and outside of prison. Myers sets up the journal entries in contrast to the screenplay in a manner that draws attention to what is absent from each. In his (purportedly private) journal entries, Steve is forthcoming regarding his fears about his prison life and his future. The teen narrator seems vulnerable, frightened about his powerlessness in the adult world of courtroom and prison, and he elicits readers’ sympathies with his private writing. But Steve does not use his journal to discuss his role in the crime in direct terms. He comes close to the subject, touches on it, then pulls back abruptly, as in this excerpt from one of his final entries: “I think about December of last year. . . . What decisions did I make? What decisions didn’t I make? But I don’t want to think about decisions, just my case” (270). Steve is unwilling to engage

906 MONSTER

himself in thought about the murder or the events leading up to it, let alone to consider his culpability in the crime. Steve’s refusal to be candid in his journal about his role in the robbery and murder raises flags about the screenplay segments that are juxtaposed with his journal entries. Myers points out that Steve’s decision as “writer” to craft a screenplay allows the young narrator to create distance between himself and the crime (Myers, 2000, 1,101). Creating a screenplay that is limited in scope and focused primarily on the trial enables Steve to focus readers’ (and his own) attention on how his life is affected by the murder—without grappling with the effects on the victim and his loved ones or confronting the callousness of the crime itself. Steve effectively employs the screenplay format to portray himself as a young black man fighting external conflicts as he is caught up in a “motion” trial (14). He does not, however, make use of monologues or other film conventions that permit insight into any internal turmoil he may be experiencing in relation to the crime. Ultimately, Steve uses the screenplay to make his case to his public audience, portraying himself as an innocent, even a victim, arguing his guiltlessness with flashbacks as well as court proceedings that show that he did not do anything (i.e., that he did not commit a crime). Ironically, Steve fails to realize that his failure to do anything—to prevent the crime, to stop it, to make apology or retribution for it—is the strongest argument that readers have for condemning his moral stance. Although the journal entries and screenplay segments stand in contrast to one another, they, along with the visual elements of this text, are tied together with a common thread: the emphasis on image. In the screenplay, the attention to image is built into the genre itself. Myers, in publishing one of the few screenplays intended to be read but not filmed, constantly directs readers to visualize scenes as Steve would have them visualized. Steve indicates where readers should gaze, and how (e.g., long shot, middle shot, or close-up). He dictates when his audience should look away, and again, how: either abruptly, by cutting from one image to the next, or more gradually, by fading out. Steve

manipulates the screenplay genre to control the audience’s image of him. The graphic elements incorporated into the text, typefaces, and book jacket also emphasize the importance of image. Done by Christopher Myers, the author’s son, the sketches and photos are “resonant in their references to mug shots, newspaper photos, TV news, and other media” (Campbell, 772). The label “illustration” fails to capture the importance of the photos, sketches, and other visual elements, all of which are integral to this text. Including these images—captured by someone other than Steve—allows the audience to read these texts against Steve’s written accounts in the novel, but it also suggests that there is something important about how readers imagine Steve, what image (in multiple senses) they form of him. Last, the journal entries that Myers creates for Steve point repeatedly to image. In the opening entry we learn the origin of the title of the novel and screenplay: Steve’s fear that others perceive him as Monster. Throughout the trial, Steve comments in his journal on the importance of his image. “I want to look like a good person,” he writes (62). He doesn’t want to “look weak” (64) in prison. He wants to appear “different in the eyes of the jury, different from Bobo and Osvaldo and King” (130). In prison, what matters to him is “the little surface stuff, how people look at you and what they say” (155). And finally, Steve’s closing words: “I want to look at myself a thousand times to look for one true image. When Miss O’Brien looked at me . . . what did she see that caused her to turn away? What did she see?” (281). Readers are left to wonder whether the narrator’s hyperawareness of his image will allow him to continue to see himself as a mere victim, or whether seeing himself through others’ eyes will finally prompt Steve to recognize his own moral culpability in the death of Mr. Nesbitt.

SOURCES Campbell, Patty. “Radical Monster,” Horn Book Magazine 75, no. 6 (1999): 769–773. Myers, Walter Dean. “Escalating Offenses,” Horn Book Magazine 77, no. 6 (2001): 701–702. ———. Monster. New York: HarperTempest, 2001. ———. “The Booklist Interview.” By Hazel Rochman. Booklist 96, no. 12 (2000): 1,101.

MOODY, RICK 907

Staunton, John A. Review of Monster, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 45, no. 8 (2002): 791–793. Leah A. Zuidema

MOO JANE SMILEY (1994) Set on a mythical midwestern land-grant university campus, Moo’s focal character and image, Earl Butz, a 700-pound Landrace hog, is housed in “Old Meats,” an old, practically abandoned building that somehow remains at the center of the campus just as Earl remains at the center of the novel. Part of an experiment operated under the auspices of the university, Earl Butz is allowed to eat as much as he desires to see how large he can grow unchecked. A large cast of other characters fills out many of the usual suspects to be found in a university setting, often in highly caricatured ways, including the bachelor brothers Ivar and Nils Harstead, the provost and extension dean, respectively; economics professor Lionel Gift; the mysterious leftover sixties activist “Chairman X” of the horticulture department; Lorraine Walker, the seeming all-knowing and all-powerful secretary; Bob Carlson, a student worker who cares for Earl Butz; paranoid farmer-inventor Loren Stroop; teachers Timothy Monahan and Cecelia Sanchez; and Governor Orville T. Early. Although all these characters have fairly welldeveloped plots of their own in the novel, the main plotline that pulls them all together involves Lionel Gift’s attempt along with a Texas billionaire to exploit a Costa Rican cloud forest for lucrative mining rights. Money, it seems, is part and parcel of university life in many ways. An example of the academic or campus novel, Moo differs from other examples such as F. Scott FITZGERALD’s This Side of Paradise and Richard RUSSO’s Straight Man as well as British versions like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World, which usually focus on one aspect of university life, either student or faculty. Moo’s multiple, parallel plotlines highlight the discrete threads of the various factions involved in the university, from student and faculty to administration and the various publics with which the university has ties, including state government, taxpayers, corporations, and parents. Through it all, the narrator depicts the

campus as provincial yet internationally influential, egoridden and subject to professional ambition, yet at the same time diverse and endearing. SMILEY taught at Iowa State University but denies any roman à clef identifications with a particular university. Rather than the nostalgic picture that John William’s Stoner presents of the University of Missouri, Moo becomes a fablelike criticism of academia as a whole. Published in 1994, Smiley’s novel responds to many of the issues surrounding a resurgence of critical examination of the university—such as budget cuts, job crisis, political correctness, sexual harassment, and the corporatization of higher education. It may be profitably read alongside such other critical books as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, and Charles Syke’s Profscam. Moo followed Smiley’s A THOUSAND ACRES (1991) and, although not subject to as much critical attention as her earlier novel, it did receive a great deal of notice and review on publication. Moo is a shift from the domestic realism and tragedy of her earlier success to comic satire, but as with that novel, Smiley expresses a larger point about technology and agriculture. Moo, with its interwoven structure of parallel threads, reflects an ecological thesis implicit in the novel’s plot.

SOURCES Nakadate, Neil. Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Pinsker, Sanford. “Who Cares If Roger Ackroyd Gets Tenure,” Partisan Review 66, no. 3 (1999): 439–452. Schaeffer, Judith. “Truth Through Glass: The Windows of Moo,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 29, no. 2 (1999): 3–4. Simmons, Ryan. “The Problems of Politics in Feminist Literary Criticism: Contending Voices in Two Contemporary Novels,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41 (2000): 319–334. Smiley, Jane. Moo. New York: Random House, 1998. Eric Leuschner

MOODY, RICK (HIRAM F., III) (1961– ) Often compared with John HAWKES and Don DELILLO, and with John CHEEVER and John UPDIKE, all of whom

908 MOODY, RICK

write in various ways about the upper-middle class, Rick Moody has won critical acclaim as a novelist and short story writer. He is praised for his experiments with language and form, and uses pop culture images to present a bleak but comic view of the emptiness of modern life. As Susan Salter Reynolds says, Moody “has become, for a generation of people in their 30s and 40s, a dark chronicler of American suburbia— mostly [of] the East Coast variety” (Reynolds, E1). Rick Moody was born on October 18, 1961, in New Canaan, Connecticut, to Hiram F. Moody Jr. and Margaret Maureen Flynn. He was educated at Brown University, where he studied under Robert COOVER and Stanley ELKIN. After working for various New York City publishers and battling depression, alcoholism, and drug use, Moody published his first novel, Garden State (1991). The book, which won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Award, follows three friends in a New Jersey suburb during one spring as they journey into adulthood, battling poverty, depression, disaster, and drug abuse. His second novel, The Ice Storm (1994), depicts the Hood and Williams families in New Canaan, Connecticut, during an icy Thanksgiving weekend. The father, Ben Hood, has an affair with Janey Williams, and his wife, Elena Hood, turns to self-help books and shoplifting; their children imitate the parents by experimenting with sex while the parents attend a spouse-swapping party. Purple America (1997) focuses on its protagonist, Hex Raitliffe (in addition to the long sentences, even the names are reminiscent of Faulkner), who returns home to care for his terminally ill mother. He comes to terms with people and incidents from his past. Rick Moody, who lost his sister in 1995 and has written poignantly about her death in several of his short stories, lives on Fishers Island, off Long Island, New York. He has taught writing at Bennington College since 1991. The Ice Storm was adapted into a movie in 1997, starring Kevin Kline as Ben Hood. Moody’s latest publication is a memoir, The Black Veil (2002).

NOVELS Garden State: A Novel. New York: Pushcart Press, 1991. The Ice Storm. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994. Purple America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1997.

SOURCES Akins, Ellen. “Voices in the Night,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 August 1994, p. 15. Allen, Brooke. “Cheever Country, 1994,” New Criterion 12, no. 10 (June 1994): 58–65. Begley, Adam. “Entering Gothic Suburbia, Where Dysfunction Romps Across Tidy Lawns,” Chicago Tribune Books, 29 May 1994, p. 5. Brady, Thomas J. “A Veiled Look into Voicing the Unspeakable,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 3 June 1998, p. Q02. Burroway, Janet. “Toxic Dreams,” New York Times Book Review, 27 April 1997, p. 7. Charbonneau, Jean. “Moody Rips the Suburbs Again,” Toronto Star, 4 February 2001, p. BK-03. Eder, Richard. “Dropping Out,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 20 August 1995, p. 3. Frank, Michael. “Purple Haze,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 20 April 1997, p. 12. Gorra, Michael. “Guttering Out,” New York Times Book Review, 20 August 1995, p. 7. Lampmann, Jane. “Gospel Musings by Younger Authors,” Christian Science Monitor, 26 February 1998, p. B3. Laurence, Alexander. Review of The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven, Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 154. Maliszewski, Paul. Review of Purple America, Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 226–227. Moher, Frank. “The Way It Was,” Saturday Night 112, no. 10 (December 1997–January 1998): 14. Moody, Rick. “Moody on Dark Humor, Bright Angels, and Quantum Leaps,” Poets & Writers 27, no. 2 (March–April 1999): 37, 39, 41. ———. “Rick Moody: A Nuclear Family Meltdown,” Publishers Weekly (March 31, 1997): 46–47. Moore, John Frederick. “Moody Indigo,” Poets & Writers 27, no. 2 (March–April 1999): 34–43. Nicholson, David. “Taking Care of Mother,” Washington Post, 8 April 1997, p. B2. Parry, Sally E. Review of Joyful Noise, Review of Contemporary Fiction 18, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 258. Reynolds, Susan Salter. “A Moody Kind of Suburbia,” Los Angeles Times, 21 February 2001, p. E1. Solomon, Andy. “A Full Day: Rick Moody’s Rich, Dazzling Novel of 24 Hours in the Life of a Troubled Family,” Chicago Tribune Books, 11 May 1997, p. 5. Star, Alexander. “Following the Fall-Out,” London Review of Books, 19 March 1998, pp. 22–23.

MORGESONS, THE 909

OTHER Hartlaub, Joe. Review of Demonology (April 23, 2002). Bookreporter.com. Available online. URL: http://www. bookreporter.com/reviews/0316588741.asp. Accessed September 24, 2005. Author Interview: Rick Moody. By Bill Goldstein (February 1, 2001). Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/ books/01/02/05/specials/moody_audio.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005.

MOORE, LORRIE (MARIE LORENA) (1957– ) Award-winning short story writer Lorrie MOORE has written two acclaimed novels as well, Anagrams (1986) and WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL? (1994). She is admired for her sardonic wit, wry sense of humor, and well-phrased one-liners, yet the overall mood of her work (particularly the endings) is somber and dark: Her characters realize that few of their youthful aspirations and dreams will be fulfilled. Lorrie Moore was born on January 13, 1957, in Glens Falls, New York, to Henry T. Moore, an insurance company executive, and Jeanne Day Moore, a nurse. She was educated at St. Lawrence University, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1978, and Cornell University, where she studied with the novelist Alison LURIE and earned a master of fine arts degree in 1982. Five years later she published Self-Help, her first collection of stories, and Anagrams appeared the following year. Actually structured as a “cubist novel,” as Moore describes it, with “the idea of shifting realities and parallel narratives” (Garner), the novel features a couple, Gerard Maines and his lover Benna Carpenter, both from Fitchville, U.S.A., whose relationship changes from chapter to chapter. Who will Run the Frog Hospital? features Berie Carr, a photography curator whose disillusionment with her marriage to Daniel prompts a long flashback to her 15th summer. Then, Berie and her best friend, Silsby Chaussée, were devoted to each other and believed in the rich possibilities of the future. Moore lives and writes in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband, a lawyer. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin, where she is Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities. Her most recent book is Birds of America (1998), a collection of stories that appeared

on the New York Times Best Books of 1998 list and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. In June 2005, Moore received the 18th annual Pen/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction.

NOVELS Anagrams. New York: Knopf, 1986. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New York: Random House, 1994.

SOURCES Blades, John. “Lorrie Moore: Flipping Death the Bird,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 34 (August 24, 1998): 3. Blyth, Catherine. “A Child’s-Eye View.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4,894 (January 27, 1997): 20. Brockway, Michelle. “The Art of Reading Lorrie Moore.” Poets and Writers 28, no. 5 (September–October 2000): 16–19. Griffith, Michael. “ ‘All of Us Dislike the Laws of Nature’: New Fiction in Review,” Southern Review 31, no. 2 (April 1995): 365–380. Lee, Don. “About Lorrie Moore.” Ploughshares 24, nos. 2–3 (Fall 1998): 224–229. Miner, Valerie. “Connections and Disconnections,” Women’s Review of Books 12, no. 7 (April 1995): 14–15. Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America. New York: Knopf, 1998. Shone, Tom. “Smart-Aleck Scenes.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4,779 (November 4, 1994): 22. Stabile, Carole. Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Belles Lettres 11, no. 1 (January 1996), 45–46. Urquhart, James. “Dysfunctional Sitcoms.” New Statesman 8 January 1999, p. 58.

OTHER Garner, Dwight. “Moore’s Better Blues.” The Salon Interview (October 27, 1998). Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/books/int/998/10/COV_ 27int.html. Accessed September 24, 2005.

MORGESONS, THE ELIZABETH STODDARD (1861) Elizabeth STODDARD’s The Morgesons, like much of her fiction, depicts small-town New England life through the eyes of someone stifled by its restrictions. The novel follows Cassandra Morgeson’s development from childhood to womanhood in the sheltered culture of New England affluence. Cassandra is the novel’s narrator and most dynamic figure: She is intense, adventurous, outspoken, and staunchly individualistic. Her sister Veronica is temperamental,

910 MORGESONS, THE

sickly, and closely tied to the family home—although Veronica is also individualistic and intense, she adheres more closely than Cassandra to the domestic, passive 19th-century feminine ideal. Veronica’s husband emphasizes the contrast to Cassandra: “I saw you first, so impetuous, yet self-contained! Incapable of insincerity, devoid of affection and courageously naturally beautiful. . . . unlike most women, you understood your instincts; that you dared to define them, and were impetuous enough to follow them . . . I must own that the man who is willing to marry you has more courage than I have. Is it strange that when I found your counterpart, Veronica, that I yielded? Her delicate, pure, ignorant soul suggests to me eternal repose” (226). The speaker recognizes not only Cassandra’s challenge to gender norms, but also her grandeur. The sisters’ fates defy mid–19th century morality and the sentimental conventions of popular fiction. Cassandra has a sexual affair with a married cousin, yet maintains a strong sense of self and finds happiness in marriage to another man. Veronica struggles— she suffers from chronic illness, perhaps an eating disorder, and marries an alcoholic who dies early in their marriage. By celebrating Cassandra’s passion, self-determination, and the emotional complexity gained from life experience, The Morgesons wins the interest of both feminist readers and scholars of 19thcentury individualism. The Morgesons is considered the most autobiographical of Stoddard’s three novels (Two Men was published in 1865, Temple House in 1867). Like Cassandra, Elizabeth Barstow (1823–1902) grew up in a wealthy New England family before leaving small-town society to mingle in the larger literary and artistic community of her day. She was known for her bluntness and dynamic, if abrasive, personality. Elizabeth married the poet Richard Stoddard, who supported her in her career as a writer. The Stoddards made a meager living by their writing, and Elizabeth sold mediocre, commercially produced prose when necessary throughout her career. In The Morgesons, however, Stoddard clearly aimed for something more than commercial marketability—not surprisingly, the novel had positive reviews but lackluster sales.

The Morgesons resists 19th-century conventions of genre and style, as well as morality. Stoddard resists the sentimentality commonly produced by best-selling “lady novelists” and instead draws influence from the most celebrated authors of her day. Like Charles Dickens, Stoddard works in the tradition of the bildungsroman—the novel of a young adult’s identity building and socialization. The Morgesons is often compared to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, which offer similar coming-of-age stories about strong, unique women. Like Brontë, Stoddard creates nuanced and realistic characters, but also the Gothic qualities of romantic fiction. Stoddard invokes the conventions of American romance used by HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, and POE—Cassandra’s narrative is rich with emotional intensity, physicality, and mystery. Yet Stoddard also predicts aspects of the realist movement, especially in her attention to regional culture and character. In her 1901 introduction to The Morgesons, Stoddard discusses the imaginative rebirth her fiction gives to the real people of her childhood: “If with these characters I have deserved the name of ‘realist,’ I have also clothed my skeletons with the robe of romance” (261). Much of the mystery and intensity of Stoddard’s writing emerges from her unique fictional style. The novel’s long sentences and fluid movement from impression to impression create vivid images that sometimes fit loosely within the context of the story. Stoddard critics Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell claim that Stoddard’s “astringent, elliptical style” makes her “next to Melville and Hawthorne, the most strikingly original voice in the mid–nineteenth-century American novel” (Buell and Zagarell, xi). Buell and Zagarell compare Stoddard to fellow New Englander Emily Dickinson. Like Dickinson’s poetry, Stoddard’s prose is imagistic, allusive, ironic, and rich in the drama of daily life. Cassandra’s story uses selective description and a flexible sense of time—although the novel proceeds linearly, it is difficult to judge how much time has passed between chapters and sections. This technique shadows some of the novel’s action but also deepens its reflection of Cassandra’s inner life. Although it did not gain a wide readership on initial publication, The Morgesons has experienced a renais-

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER 911

sance among literary scholars in the last three decades. Critics find value in its distinctive view of 19th-century womanhood, as well as its position as a bridge between the romantic and realist traditions. Nonetheless, the exploration of Stoddard’s work has only just begun.

SOURCES Baumgartner, Barbara. “Intimate Reflections: Body, Voice, and Identity in Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 47, no. 3 (2001): 185–211. Buell, Lawrence, and Sandra A. Zagarell, eds. “The Morgesons” and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished, by Elizabeth Stoddard. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Ford, Anne-Marie. “Gothic Legacies: Jane Eyre in Elizabeth Stoddard’s New England.” In Special Relationships: AngloAmerican Affinities and Antagonisms, 1854–1936, edited by Janet Beer and Bridget Bennett. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002. Matter-Seibel, Sabina. “Subverting the Sentimental: Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” Flip Sides: New Critical Essays in American Literature, edited by Klaus Schmidt. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1995. Penner, Louise. “Domesticity and Self-Possession in The Morgesons and Jane Eyre,” Studies in American Fiction 27, no. 2 (1999): 131–147. Smith, Robert McClure, and Ellen Weinauer, eds. American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Weir, Sybil. “The Morgesons: A Neglected Feminist Bildungsroman,” New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 427–439. Zagarell, Sandra A. “ ‘Strenuous Artistry’: Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons.” In The Cambridge Companion to NineteenthCentury American Women’s Writing, edited by Dale M. Bauer and Philip Gould. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lillie Craton

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER (DARLINGTON) (1890–1957) Among the most popular and prolific authors of his day, Christopher Morley was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, and founder of the Saturday Review of Literature. He wrote about the relationship of literature to the lives of ordinary people, and many of his novels feature people in the world of words: Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and its sequel,

The Haunted Bookshop (1919) (traveling booksellers and bookshop owners); Human Being (1932) (publisher and book salesman); and The Man Who Made Friends With Himself (literary agent). He was also an ardent proponent of other writers, especially the Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad. Morley’s most popular novel was Kitty Foyle, a 1939 best seller. Christopher Morley was born on May 5, 1890, in Haverford, Pennsylvania, to English immigrants Frank Morley, a mathematician, and Lilian Bird, a musician and poet. He was educated at Haverford College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1910, and at New College, Oxford University, England, where he was a Rhodes Scholar from 1910 to 1913. In 1914, he married an Englishwoman, Helen Booth Fairchild, and began his long writing career. Parnassus on Wheels (1917) is about bookseller Roger Mifflin, who is passionate about the inspirational qualities of literature and about Helen McGill, the farmer’s daughter he marries. Both Roger and Helen reappear in The Haunted Bookshop. Where the Blue Begins (1922) features a dog, Gissing (named after the British novelist George Gissing). In his next book, Thunder on the Left (1925), 10-year-old Martin spies on the indiscretions and witnesses the unhappiness of the adults in his life. Kitty Foyle was shocking to many because of its forthright look at the life of an Irish-American woman, a Philadelphian who has an affair, becomes pregnant, and has an abortion. Other novels include Thorofare (1942) and The Man Who Made Friends with Himself (1949). As the scholar Jonathan Bracker notes, taken together, “the novels of Christopher Morley comprise a kind of biography of literary life during the first half of the twentieth century” (Wallach and Bracker, 44). Christopher Morley was ahead of his time in his belief that the reader must participate in the act of reading, a theory that became known as “reader response theory.” Morley also cofounded the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of Sherlock Holmes admirers. He died on March 28, 1957, in Roslyn Heights, New York. The largest collection of his papers is housed at the University of Texas at Austin, with others located at the Haverford College Library and the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

912 MORRISON, TONI

NOVELS The Haunted Bookshop. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1919. Human Being. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. John Mistletoe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931. Kathleen. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1920. Kitty Foyle. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939. The Man Who Made Friends with Himself. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1949. Parnassus on Wheels. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1917. Pleased to Meet You. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1927. Swiss Family Manhattan. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. Thorofare. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Thunder on the Left. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925. The Trojan Horse. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937. Where the Blue Begins. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1922.

SOURCES Bender, J. Terry. Christopher Morley, A Comprehensive Exhibition. Freeport, N.Y.: Hofstra University Library, 1970. Canby, Henry Seidel. American Estimates. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929, 62ff. Hughes, Babette. Christopher Morley, Multi ex Uno. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1927. Oakley, Helen McK. Three Hours for Lunch, The Life and Times of Christopher Morley. Searingtown, N.Y.: Watermill, 1976. Overton, Grant. American Nights Entertainment. New York: Appleton, 1923, 363–376. Wallach, Mark I., and Jon Bracker. Christopher Morley. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976.

MORRISON, TONI (CHLOE ANTHONY WOFFORD MORRISON) (1931– ) Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature (1993), remains unparalleled in her ability to use her considerable literary talents as a voice for her passionate concerns about the condition of contemporary African Americans, particularly women. “I have never yet met a boring black person,” she has commented, and her incisively drawn characters reflect this (Samuels and Hudson-Weems, 1). Of equal importance to Morrison’s work, as Wilfred D. Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems point out, is her wish to “ ‘tell somebody something,’ something that has been lost and

forgotten, stories that have not been passed on” (Samuels and Hudson-Weems, 139). That she has done so with impressive results is attested to by her popularity with white and black readers alike, her place on university syllabi across the country, and her literary awards. In 1975 Morrison received a National Book Award nomination for SULA (1973); she also received a National Book Critics Circle Award and American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, both for SONG OF SOLOMON (1976). BELOVED (1987) garnered a Pulitzer Prize and an American Book Award, along with nominations for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1996, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2001, she received a National Humanities Medal. Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, to George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford. She was educated at Howard University (B.A., 1953) and at Cornell University, earning a master’s degree in 1955. Three years later, she married Harold Morrison; they divorced in 1964. Her teaching career began in 1955, and she published The BLUEST EYE in 1959. The Bluest Eye begins with the primer text from the Dick and Jane books that white schoolchildren read in the 1940s, when the action takes place. Like the then-popular Shirley Temple movies, these books mean nothing to Pecola Breedlove, the 11-year-old black girl who has been raped by her father. Her low self-opinion has driven her to think she would be prettier with a blue eye. The novel ends hopefully. Nonetheless, the violence that dooms Pecola recurs in nearly all of Morrison’s novels. In Sula, set in a place called the Bottom, infertile farmland where blacks were tricked to settle, suicides occur frequently. Men and women jump through air, drown, and die by fire. Sula Peace and Nel Wright, childhood friends, one traditional and obedient, the other rebellious and wild, are perceived by the Medallion, Ohio, community as threatening and disruptive. Although the friendship ruptures when Sula finds Nel in bed with her husband, the novel insists on the disruptive nature of men and the significance of maintaining female friendships.

MORRISON, TONI 913

For a number of readers, Song of Solomon is the most artistically perfect of Morrison’s novels. This is the odyssey of Milkman Dead and his metamorphosis from a spoiled, self-absorbed demeaner of women, including his mother, his sisters, and his lover. He discovers his roots near Danville, Virginia. His ancestor, Solomon, was an enslaved African who escaped his bondage by flying back to Africa. The myth of flying is significant to Milkman’s self-discovery. TAR BABY (1981) again illustrates the significance of understanding one’s heritage, but Morrison sets this contemporary novel on Isle de Chevaliers in the Caribbean, where Jadine, who traded in her Sorbonne art history education for a modeling career, and the handsome Son enjoy a passionate affair. Discussing the context of the “tar baby” in the novel, Missy Dehn Kubitschek suggests that the novel “becomes the 1980s revision of a tale told in African villages in the 1600s and in American theatres showing Walt Disney’s ‘Song of the South’ in the 1950s” (Kubitschek). Jadine, unlike earlier Morrison heroes, fails to learn from her affair, nor does she reaffirm her heritage; she returns to Paris, wearing the fur coat given to her by a white man. Beloved (1987) combines both the myth and the magic of the earlier novels with historical flashbacks to the Civil War. Halle, an ex-slave trying to raise her children during Reconstruction, kills her child, Baby Suggs, to prevent her from enslavement, and the ghost of Baby Suggs haunts Halle’s home, reappearing as an adolescent girl. JAZZ (1992) takes place during the 1920s. Readers meet earlier generations of blacks who have moved into urban areas where they were promised employment. The tension of the novel, narrated and structured according to the elements of jazz, is inherent in the love triangle among Violet, her husband, Joe, and 18-year-old Dorcas; it ends with Joe’s murder of Dorcas and Violet’s disfiguring of Dorcas’s corpse. PARADISE (1998) examines the tension among the men in the all-black town of Ruby. When they are threatened by the powerful women in the nearby convent, they massacre the women within its cloistered walls. In LOVE (2003), set in a deteriorating African-American resort, Morrison focuses on a battle between two women—Heed, the widow, and Christine, the granddaughter—over the

contents of a will left by Cosey, the deceased owner of the resort. Along with several other women, Heed and Christine loved this man. Toni Morrison lives and writes in Princeton, New Jersey, where, since 1989, she has been Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Her most recent work resulted in a libretto for Margaret Garner, an opera about a fugitive slave composed by Richard Danielpour that premiered at the Opera Company of Philadelphia in February 2006. Beloved was adapted as a 1998 film of the same title, starring Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, and Kimberly Elise, and was directed by Jonathan Demme.

NOVELS The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, 1969. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998. Love. New York: Knopf, 2003.

SOURCES Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Bloom, Harold, ed. Toni Morrison. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1990. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Century, Douglas. Toni Morrison. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1994. Cooper-Clark, Diana. Interviews with Contemporary Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Harding, Wendy, and Jacky Martin. A World of Difference: An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

914 MORTE D’URBAN

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Heinze, Denise. The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison’s Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Holloway, Karla, and Stephanie Dematrakopoulos. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Jones, Bessie W., and Audrey L. Vinson, eds. The World of Toni Morrison: Explorations in Literary Criticism. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1985. Kramer, Barbara. Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-Winning Author. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1996. Ledbetter, Mark. Victims and the Postmodern Narrative; or, Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. McKay, Nellie, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Mekkawi, Mod. Toni Morrison: A Bibliography. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Library, 1986. Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Morrison, Toni, and Slade Morrison. The Big Box. New York: Hyperion/Jump at the Sun, 1999. Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, eds. Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985, 205–207. Rice, Herbert William. Toni Morrison and the American Tradition: A Rhetorical Reading. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Ruas, Charles. Conversations with American Writers. New York: Knopf, 1985. Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Smith, Valerie, ed. New Essays on “Song of Solomon.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1986, 117–131.

Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Weinstein, Philip M. What Else but Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

OTHER About. Women’s History. “Toni Morrison.” Available online. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/biblio_ morrison_toni.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion/Online.” Greenwood Electronic Media. Available online by subscription. URL: http://gem.greenwood.com. Accessed September 24, 2005. Voices from the Gaps [VG]. “Toni Morrison.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/morrison_ toni.html. Accessed September 24, 2005.

MORTE D’URBAN J. F. POWERS (1962)

POWfirst novel, the National Book Award winner for 1963, Morte d’Urban, explores the same subject as most of the short stories in his two previous collections: the daily life of Roman Catholic priests in the United States. In fact, a number of the clerical characters from an early story, “Dawn” (in The Presence of Grace, 1956), reappear in the novel. But Powers’s priests are a far cry from the suffering cleric of French novelist Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest; nor, for that matter, are they like the sleazy and corrupt clergymen of John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions. Neither agonizingly spiritual nor grotesquely cynical, Powers’s ordinary priests are average men, dealing with the day-to-day difficulties of running religious institutions during the materialistic go-go years of the fifties. That clash—between a crass consumer culture and a search for religious salvation— animates the satire in Morte D’Urban. The 54-year-old Fr. Urban, born Harvey Roche in small-town Illinois, aspires to priestly greatness during his assignment in Chicago, where his order (Order of St. Clementine) is based. He is a popular speaker, sought by parishes for his charm and congeniality, and he fancies himself in pursuit of a higher tier of converts and benefactors. The only thing holding him back is the order ERS’s

MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN 915

itself, because the Clementines are an undistinguished bunch, a group “noted for nothing at all,” presided over by an old-school provincial who likes to keep matters simple: no ambitious building projects, no snazzy publications, no modern digs. Fr. Urban’s first big patron, the hale and hearty Billy Cosgrove, entertains his priestly companion at Chicago’s finest clubs and eventually donates a new building for the order’s headquarters. But Fr. Urban’s superior, Fr. Boniface, has other plans for the charismatic priest, and assigns the younger go-getter to the order’s white elephant: a remote rural retreat house on the Great Plains of Minnesota overseen by an unambitious, penny-pinching cleric who insists that Fr. Urban bear his share of the physical labor needed to keep up the rickety buildings. Soon Fr. Urban recharges his waning reputation on his weekend visits to neighboring parishes and in his speeches to local secular groups. His grand visions reemerge thereafter: He enlists the aid of the coarse but rich Cosgrove in order to build a golf course next to the retreat house, thereby enticing a “finer” sort of layperson to attend. His plan works wonderfully (he is a superb golfer himself), the retreat house thrives, and the diocesan bishop soon has his own designs on the property. The moment of crisis is anticipated by a fateful golf match: the bishop (a hacker) clocks Fr. Urban on the head, so that his figural bigheadedness now becomes literal. His worldly fall ensues: Another patron of the order reveals herself to be a mean-spirited shrew, and Cosgrove demonstrates his true colors on a dismal fishing trip as a profligate bully. Fr. Urban begins to realize that his career is built on compromises, that he has sacrificed religious principle for prideful accomplishment. Throughout the novel, Powers relies on numerous contrasts as the source of his comedy, especially the difference between city and country life, and the gap between the traditional and authoritarian Church of Rome and the managerial and entrepreneurial Church in America. The title of the novel recalls not only Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and suggests that Fr. Urban is a modern knight errant, but it also indicates that his citified (i.e., urban) ways will undergo a death of sorts. He resists temptation in many forms, recognizes his sinful pride,

and is finally rewarded with the prize he long seeks: He is appointed provincial of the order. But he is a changed man: The once urbane and modern clergyman now accepts the wisdom of his elders, eschewing innovation and finding true peace in rural Minnesota. A sad denouement or a call to worldly modesty? One recent critic sees the novel as a critique of pre–Vatican II conservatism (Castronovo, 168), and it is true that Fr. Urban’s colleagues are woefully old-fashioned and unsophisticated, but the novel is implicitly a far more specific challenge to the postwar church of the fifties. Powers suggests that the church is losing its way as it accommodates American individualism and expansionism, that it is becoming a religious version of the Rotarians. The contemplative life, focused on the sacraments, gets lost in the worldly pursuit of patronage and popularity. The latter presents many sticky situations in the novel: comical scenes with randy women, hard-drinking men, and goofy Protestants. What begins as a comedy of clerical manners ends as a moral fiction and as a brilliant historical look into the Americanization of the Roman Catholic priesthood.

SOURCES Castronovo, David. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit. New York: Continuum, 2004. Hagopian, John. J. F. Powers. Boston: Twayne, 1968. Powers, J. F. Morte D’Urban. 1962. New York: New York Review of Books, 2000. Thomas De Pietro

MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1939) Expanding ideas from a 1934 short story, “The Fire and the Cloud,” to create her third novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, Zora Neale HURSTON “kidnaps” Moses from Judeo-Christian scripture and “relocates” him in southern African-American folklore (Hemenway, 257–258). Initial reviews were mixed, with Louis Untermeyer referring to the novel’s “unfulfilled expectation,” Percy Hutchinson seeing it as “an exceptionally fine piece of work far off the beaten tracks of literature,” Carl Van Vechten declaring it the best work Hurston had ever done, and Hurston herself acknowledging a “feeling of disappointment” for not

916 MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

achieving all she intended (Gates, 26, 27; Kaplan, 422). Contemporary responses are equally mixed. Carla Kaplan argues that Moses concerns the inability of humans to understand and obey God (184); Sharon L. Jones contends it addresses race, class, and gender issues (99); Deborah G. Plant sees it as a “critique” of power from a Spinozan stance (125); John Lowe views it as a comic commentary on slavery, “racial leadership, sibling rivalry, father-son relations, people’s connection to God, and the sacral quality of life” (205). These critical perspectives acknowledge that, in altering Moses’s relation to God and in changing the image of other characters, Hurston alters the myth’s traditional biblical meaning. In Hurston’s version characters exemplify human failings, and Moses becomes the greatest hoodoo man in the Bible, an individual “revered because he had the power to go up the mountain and to bring down” laws. Because Moses’ power is largely self-made—the result of an inquisitive nature, diligent study, and careful observation—Moses illustrates that individual self-will, not divine intervention, leads to achievement and empowerment (Plant, 120, 140). Moses’ mastery of various languages—including the language of animals (from Mentu), of the folk (from Jethro), of the Book of Thoth when he subdues the deathless snake—may be the source of his power (Holloway, 40–41; Lowe, 224). Significantly, in Hurston’s version, Moses creates the Ten Commandments from the 10 words that God gives him; God does not give him the complete set of commandments. Even though the novel is situated in Egypt and the enslaved people are Hebrews, its initial scenes, beginning with a plea for God’s mercy, evoke images of slavery in America. In a manner similar to the travails of enslaved African Americans, the Hebrews suffer betrayal by fellow Israelites, the devastating loss of selfesteem, physical abuse, and infanticide to avoid Egyptians murdering male children. Although the Israelites’ conditions are deplorable, the first chapter establishes a humorous tone with Pharaoh issuing an impossible dictate telling unborn babies not to be born male. After Moses’ birth, Amram, Jochebed, and their older children, Miriam and Aaron, hide him for three months in

a hole and bicker about the danger of their secrecy. Finally, Jochebed places Moses in a basket, sets the baby afloat on the Nile, and stations Miriam to watch. In Hurston’s version, which explores the creation and purpose of myths (Wall, 197), Miriam falls asleep and, to escape punishment, concocts a tale of Pharaoh’s daughter rescuing the child. Her tale expands as she and others add details, and the story enters the people’s lore. Jochebed is entranced with being “kinfolks to the Pharaohs,” and the Hebrews relish Pharaoh getting a “Hebrew child for a grandson.” As Moses grows to manhood, learns the priests’ tricks, and is tutored by the stableman Mentu, the Hebrews endure, oppressed but happy that one of their own is installed in the palace. Racial identity and passing remain significant throughout as Moses changes from a highly esteemed prince to a despised Hebrew simply because Miriam claims kinship. Heretofore, except in Hebrew lore, Moses has been accepted as “Black,” the offspring of the princess and an Assyrian crown prince (Plant, 128). Powerless to prove his paternity since his mother is dead, Moses becomes Hebrew. Hurston adheres partially to the traditional biblical story line. Sympathizing with the Hebrews, Moses kills the Egyptian overseer, flees Egypt, and crosses the Red Sea. But in the novel, he learns of a natural phenomenon, a place where, at low tide, he can walk across safely to emerge on the other side “with clean feet.” The narrator emphasizes “crossing over” as his ceasing to be Egyptian. He becomes a “man sitting on a rock” with only his future ahead of him. Plant contends he has left everything traditionally conceived essential to being “somebody” and now is “his natural self” (130). His identity no longer depends on ethnic or class designations. Moses meets Jethro, becomes his adopted son, marries his daughter Zipporah, accepts Jethro’s god, “has the mountain for a friend,” and lives happily for many years. Moses wants only to “sit on the side of Mount Horeb and ask Nature some questions.” Through intense study of nature, he learns numerous tricks— lifting his right hand “to send swarms of every insect and reptile at will,” to turn water to blood, to inflict leprosy on “a malicious gossip.” He becomes in Jethro’s words “the finest hoodoo man in the world.”

MOSLEY, WALTER 917

He develops the smoke from the altar so that it hangs “stationary and huge”; his voice behind the cloud seems “like the voice of God.” Moses, in essence, creates God. Then he goes to Koptos, reads the Book of Thoth, and considers bringing God to the Israelites who are “down there in Egypt without no god of their own.” When Moses encounters the burning bush, God turns a snake into a rod for Moses and reveals himself as “I AM WHAT I AM.” Moses becomes “a man that has been called.” Hurston seems to be “demystifying God’s miracles” to shift readers’ interest “to the folk” (Lowe, 246). In Egypt, crucial differences between Moses and his siblings, Aaron and Miriam, emerge. While helping the Israelites motivates Moses, greed and prestige motivate them. Aaron is weak, Miriam a pseudohoodoo woman. Moses’ right hand holds power. His battles with Pharaoh are framed in terms of power, not simply that of inflicting plagues, but that of the mind. Once granted, freedom proves a heavy burden for the Hebrews. They resist leaving Egypt (as many African Americans resisted leaving the plantations), and in another instance of racial identity shift, they respond to Moses’ orders by calling him a “pure Egyptian” who has duped them. This vacillation continues— the Hebrews now happy about leaving Egypt, now unhappy—and culminates in Aaron’s creation of the golden idol. Finally Moses, realizing his only hope lies in the next generation, determines the Hebrews will spend 40 years wandering in the wilderness. Those who came from Egypt—including Aaron, whom God orders Moses to kill, and Miriam, whom he afflicts with leprosy—will not cross Jordan. Moses refuses to become king of the Hebrews, encounters a talking lizard on Mount Nebo (perhaps a reincarnation of Mentu), and in a radical departure from the biblical version, fakes his death, leaving the fate of the Hebrews in their own hands. The Hebrews are now “a people,” and Hurston seems to suggest that a new cycle is beginning for them and for Moses (Lowe, 247–248). Significantly, as part of Hurston’s allegorical representation of the Hebrews as African Americans, the group contains numerous mixed people who left Egypt with them. As she has shown throughout the novel,

racial identity is socially constructed. What matters is humanity—the gentle patience of Moses mixed with the wrath of God to create a community of self-reliant people. Throughout the novel she has “challenged and debated the presumed truth of three assumed authorities, the Bible . . . , white America, and the Black intelligentsia” (Plant, 138), via continued inversions of racial identities and concepts of hierarchy to illustrate the destructive nature of racism. In Moses, Hurston was doing precisely what Alain Locke and Richard WRIGHT had dared her to do—move beyond folklore and examine contemporary racial issues (Boyd, 336).

SOURCES Boyd, Valerie. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner, 2003. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Holloway, Karla F. C. The Character of the Word: The Texts of Zora Neale Hurston. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. Jones, Sharon L. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002. Kaplan, Carla. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Plant, Deborah G. Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Gloria Shearing

MOSLEY, WALTER (1952– ) One of the most popular and critically well regarded among contemporary detective novelists, Walter Mosley created Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, sometimes described as the African-American Philip Marlowe. Just as Marlowe’s creator, Raymond CHANDLER, wrote of the “mean streets” of Los Angeles, Mosley “reconstructs Los Angeles during the post–World War II era,” says the critic Sara M. Lomax, but “from an African-American perspective”

918 MOSLEY, WALTER

(Lomax, 32). Mosley’s talents far exceed those of a black Raymond Chandler, however. As the scholar Stephen Soitos points out, Mosley and other black detective fiction writers use this genre in unique ways to comment on the lives of contemporary African Americans. Influenced by such diverse writers as Langston HUGHES, Zora Neale HURSTON, and the French existential writer Albert Camus, Mosley is the author of 14 novels, including DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1990), adapted in 1995 by Carl Franklin as a TriStar Pictures feature film starring Denzel Washington as Easy Rawlins. Walter Mosley was born in 1952 in Los Angeles, California, to a white Jewish mother and a black Protestant father. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1975 from Johnson State University, Mosley moved in 1981 to New York City, where he still lives, but Los Angeles figures in many of his novels because, after World War II, for working-class African Americans from the South, California beckoned as a paradise or promised land. (This phenomenon is mirrored in the poor whites of John STEINBECK’s novels of the 1930s.) The Easy Rawlins series includes Devil in a Blue Dress, A Red Death (1991), White Butterfly (1992), Black Betty (1994), A Little Yellow Dog (1996), and Gone Fishin’ (1997). Beginning in 1948 when Easy returns from World War II, the novels depict the McCarthy era of the mid-1950s, Easy’s dealings with the Internal Revenue Service, his marriage, and a search for a serial killer. In the early sixties, Rawlins looks for a woman from his past, and for a missing schoolteacher and her family. His searching parallels his yearning to recover his prewar days in Texas and his friendship with Raymond “Mouse” Alexander. R.L.’s Dream (1995), a blues novel set in New York, presents the final days of Soupspoon Wise, a cancerstricken musician, as he reminisces about playing the blues with Robert “R.L.” Johnson. Mosley has also written Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories (1998), a work that critics call the “almost novel,” the “not quite novel,” linked stories that Mosley adapted as an HBO screenplay in 1998. Socrates Fortlow has served time in prison for rape and murder and now, in the Watts section of Los Angeles, tries to lead a good life. Walkin’ the Dog (1999) is another collection of interrelated stories. Mosley’s

experimentation with forms and genres continues in Blue Light (1998), a science fiction novel set in San Francisco. His most recent novels are 47 (2005) and The Wave (2006). Mosley’s efforts to create sympathetic and complicated heroes, along with his penchant for humor and realistic dialogue, show no signs of abating.

NOVELS Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories. New York: Norton, 1998. Bad Boy Brawley Brown. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. Black Betty. New York: Norton, 1994. Blue Light. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Norton, 1990. Fear Itself: A Mystery. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. Fearless Jones: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown, 2001. 47. Boston: Little, Brown, 2005. Futureland. New York: Warner Books, 2001. Gone Fishin’. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1997. Little Scarlet. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004. A Little Yellow Dog. New York: Norton, 1996. The Man in the Basement: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004. A Red Death. New York: Norton, 1991. R. L.’s Dream. New York: Norton, 1995. The Wave. New York: Warner Books, 2006. White Butterfly. New York: Norton, 1992.

SOURCES Frieberger, William. “James Ellroy, Walter Mosley, and the Politics of the Los Angeles Crime Novel,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 17, no. 2 (1996): 87–104. Lomax, Sara M. “Double Agent Easy Rawlins,” American Visions 7, no. 2 (April–May 1992): 32–34. Mason, Theodore O., Jr. “Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins: The Detective and Afro-American Fiction,” Kenyon Review 14, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 173–183. Mosley, Walter. Workin’ on the Chain Gang: Contemplating Our Chains at the End of the Millennium. New York: Ballantine, 1999. Mosley, Walter, Manthia Diawara, Clyde Taylor, and Regina Austin, eds. Black Genius: African-American Solutions to African-American Problems. New York: Norton, 1999. Muller, Gilbert. “Double Agent: The Los Angeles Crime Cycle of Walter Mosley.” In Los Angeles in Fiction: A Collection of Essays, edited by David Fine, 287–301. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Soitos, Stephen. The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

MOSQUITO COAST, THE 919

MOSQUITO COAST, THE PAUL THEROUX (1982) The life of the American novelist Paul THERhas been characterized by an extraordinary wanderlust. Traveling across every continent, on and off the usual tourist tracks, he has chronicled his travels in a series of remarkable books that, along with similar books by Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, Bill Bryson, Tony Horwitz, and Pico Iyer, have legitimized the travel narrative as a literary form. Although Theroux’s novels have not occasioned the same level of critical attention as his travel books, they, too, constitute a significant, sustained contribution to contemporary American letters. A large percentage of these 18 novels are set overseas and depict the misadventures of mercenary or morally confused American expatriates. Among these novels the most frequently recurring settings have been Southeast Asia and East Africa. The tenth of Theroux’s 18 novels to date, The Mosquito Coast (1982), is set in Central America. Like Peter MATTHIESSEN’s AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (1965) and Robert STONE’s A Flag for Sunrise (1981), The Mosquito Coast is a fictional exploration of the American ambivalence toward the Latin American and Caribbean regions. On the one hand, Americans have approached the region as an extension of the North American frontier, a place where resources and native populations are available for men of a certain grit and ruthless imagination to exploit. On the other hand, Americans have regarded the region as an essentially foreign place in which the Spanish and native cultures have combined mysteriously and dangerously, in a manner suggestive of the impenetrable and feverish depths of the tropical forests. Although Theroux received both an American Book Award and a James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Mosquito Coast, its salient place among his novels has also been accentuated by its successful adaptation to a film directed by Peter Weir, written by Paul Schrader, and starring Harrison Ford. Ford plays Allie Fox, a latter-day Tom Edison who is lost, but hardly resigned, to anonymity on a Massachusetts asparagus farm. He is full of contempt for the world, but one quickly realizes that, as bad as the world is, it has become a scapegoat for his own denial of the great discontinuity between OUX

his grandiose imagination and his pedestrian accomplishments. The novel is narrated by Allie’s son Charlie, whose gradual, painful recognition that his father is more a self-deluded fool than an unrecognized genius makes the novel a good deal more than a chronicle of a descent into madness. Improvising a destiny, Allie takes his family to Baltimore, where they board a ship called The Unicorn and head to Honduras. During the course of the voyage, Allie erases any remaining doubts that his selfabsorption represents a dangerous disconnection from reality. Although he obviously has no expertise related to seafaring, he tries to override the captain of The Unicorn at every turn and blatantly ignores the captain’s warnings during a harrowing storm, placing Charlie at great hazard. After they disembark at La Cieba, Honduras, Allie purchases a whole town in the Honduran interior. La Cieba itself has such an end-of-the-world atmosphere that a town in the interior hardly holds much promise. Before he has even seen it, Allie names the town he has purchased Jeronimo. After they arrive at the town, he invents a huge ice-making machine that he names Fat Boy. In this knowingly sardonic naming that becomes more deeply ironic in unintended and unanticipated ways, Allie tries to assume an Adamic role, as if defying the fates again to bring his schemes to disaster. Although he is ostensibly trying to escape America, Allie actually attempts to re-create it in the rain forest. In this way, Theroux makes it clear that Allie isn’t fleeing America, but his own failure. His lack of any understanding on this key point makes him a lunatic messiah rather than a more benignly quixotic character. Having seen the effect of the ice on the natives in a neighboring village, who have treated him as an emissary of a deity, if not as a deity itself, Allie decides to carry ice into the deep interior. But by the time he finds natives who might be impressed by the ice, the oppressive heat has reduced it to nothing, slivers that melt away as he attempts to show them to the natives. After Allie returns to Jeronimo, he discovers that three white men are plotting to seize the place. He tricks them into entering Fat Boy, locks them inside, and freezes them to death. True to its name, Fat Boy

920 MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

subsequently explodes just as they are in the process of burning, on Allie’s orders, much of the rest of the settlement. Allie’s confusion of destruction and creation is suggestive of the sort of madness recently played out on an apocalyptic scale by Hitler and Stalin. But closer to home, it also suggests the sort of madness played out in the name of progress on the American frontier with the annihilation of the Native Americans, the great game herds, and the prairie itself. Departing the ruins of Jeronimo, Allie takes his family downriver, where they disembark at an especially pestilential place to construct a houseboat out of the junk that has washed up on the riverbank. They travel back into the interior on this dilapidated craft, and gradually Charlie, his brother Jerry, and their “Mother” (who is never named) begin to wait for their opportunity to neutralize Allie. In a seemingly fortuitous turn, the family lands at the mission of a family whom they had met much earlier. In the middle of the rain forest, the missionaries live quite comfortably, enjoying ice cream without having to construct anything as out-of-scale as Fat Boy. Infuriated by their blatantly easy contentment, Allie goes on a rampage, damaging their generator and their plane, until the missionary mortally wounds him, shooting him in the chest. With Allie gradually expiring along the way, the family returns to the coast, where he finally does die, watching the vultures whose instinct and appetite is so strong that they will be driven only momentarily away from his corpse. In retrospect, that asparagus farm in Massachusetts seems a truly idyllic place. Theroux’s central observation here seems to be that American dreamers and adventurers have often been driven by discontent with an uncomplicated, almost Edenic existence, rather than by a desire to find a place where such an existence is possible.

SOURCES Bertens, Hans. “The Convention of the New Beginning in Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.” In Convention and Innovation in Literature, edited by Theo D’haen, Rainer Grubel, and Helmut Lethen, 389–403. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Benjamins, 1991. Candotti, Roberto. “Allie Fox: A Psychological Profile of ‘The Right Man’ in the Novel The Mosquito Coast,” CRUX: A Journal on the Teaching of English 28 (May 1994): 2–7.

Jacobs, J. U. “The Vanishing American in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast,” CRUX: A Journal on the Teaching of English 24 (May 1990): 3–15. Luebke, Steven R. “Self’s Dark Circle: The Home-Founding Journey in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast and Stephen Minot’s Ghost Images,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 30 (Summer 1989): 227–238. Stewart, Mathew C. “Devolution, Madness and American Myth in The Mosquito Coast,” Arkansas Review 4 (Fall 1995): 242–258. Martin Kich

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN JONATHAN LETHEM (1999) Read alongside earlier works that defined the genre of the American detective novel—that is, alongside earlier works by Mickey Spillane, Raymond CHANDLER, Dashiell HAMMETT, for example—Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn provides an interesting twist to the classic whodunit. The novel’s protagonist Lionel Essrog—“Liable Guesscog. Final Escrow. Ironic Pissclam” (7)—has Tourette’s syndrome, covering the world with an excess of language, uncovering clues through the contortions and the unraveling of his verbal tics, as opposed to traditional stealthy and erudite detective work. The winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, Motherless Brooklyn not only takes as its subject the particular case at hand and its complexity, but likewise captures a particular Brooklyn that has since passed. As Lethem noted in an interview with Lorin Stein: “It’s a fantasy of the Brooklyn I grew up in fulfilled in all its romantic potential. It’s a best-case scenario that all the mugs hanging out in front of the barbershop were really the neighborhood fixers, immensely powerful figures. The truth is they were probably just mugs with nothing better to do than hang around” (Stein). Beginning with the unsolved murder of Lionel’s boss/mentor Frank Minna, a local tough guy and proprietor of L&L Car Service (the front for a “detective agency”), the novel charts Lionel’s attempt to find Frank’s killer and, in so doing, expose previously unexplored or, perhaps, covered-over aspects of his own personality. The Frank Minna Detective Agency, the “Minna Men,” came into existence while Tony, Gilbert, Danny, and Lionel, in their youth, lived at the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in Brooklyn. For $20 a day, Minna

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN 921

would take the young boys out to do random jobs— usually involving the moving or loading/unloading of questionable merchandise under the guise of L&L Movers—which provided a reprieve from the loneliness of the orphanage; affectionately referring to the group of boys as “motherless Brooklyn” (71), Minna cultivated a deep-seated loyalty among the group, which later developed into the Minna Men of the present. Yet when Lionel and Gilbert cannot prevent Frank’s death, Lionel’s subsequent and self-appointed quest to avenge the murder—a terribly quixotic and chaotic journey—quickly dispels any notion of proper detective work or unobtrusive inquiry. Lionel gives his symptoms free rein, allowing his verbal permutations and unconscious deconstruction of language to break open the case. Lethem’s development and exploration of Lionel’s Tourettic symptoms looks at language through a number of productively distortional lenses, perhaps most notably through the use of jokes and linguistic punning. Lionel and Frank shared a bond through their mutual affection for humor and joke telling. Lionel remarks: “Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticking. It was rare that I could” (25). As he’s dying from stab wounds in the hospital, Minna reminds Lionel of a joke about “the Jewish lady goes to Tibet, wants to see the High Lama” (29), which provides the most important clue to solving his murder and uncovering a larger plot about which Lionel knows nothing. Through his investigation, Lionel’s verbal tics become more and more aggravated at times when he obsesses over the loss of Frank, who has always understood Lionel’s condition, good-humoredly dubbing him “Human Freakshow” and first alerting Lionel to the nature of Tourette’s syndrome: “With the help of Minna’s book I contextualized my symptoms as Tourette’s, then discovered just how little context that was” (82). However, through his seemingly unproductive meetings with the local mob bosses Rockaforte and Matricardi, the homicide detective Lucius Seminole, Frank’s widow, Julia, the garbage cop Loomis, and the curious cast of characters involved with the

Yorkville Zendo, Lionel bounces his language off of any and every surface, and what comes back, though never in the same form, provides the clues necessary for Lionel to reveal Frank’s killer(s). Sitting on the floor of the Yorkville Zendo—a Zen Buddhist place of meditation located in the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Lionel has returned to the last place he knows Frank to have visited before his murder. While practicing zazen (meditation through silent sitting), Lionel’s mind gives way to his Tourettic reprocessing and restructuring of language and perception: “Irving come home, went my brain. No soap, Zendo. Tibettapocamus. Chickenshack Zen. High Oscillama Talkalot” (200). The verbal play, impulsive and unconscious for Lionel, opens up associational aspects between words and their contextualization; while Lionel may want for context at times, feeling isolated by his lack of control over language, at another level the language responds to the situations it both creates and tries to represent. When language takes over, much of the hidden meaning—clues, if you will— come to the surface in unpredictable yet productive ways. In this case, as Lionel belatedly realizes: “I couldn’t say which got me there first, his profile in front of me or the joke’s subliminal nagging. Of course, the joke had been designed to get me there sooner” (200). Frank left Lionel the only clue he needed in the form of an encoded joke, a code Lionel breaks by means of his Tourette’s. The only calm in the storm of his sporadic outbursts and continual reprocessing of linguistic information comes when he meets Kimmery, becalmed by her presence and apparently released from the confines of uncontrolled language through sexual contact. Lionel contrasts his continual lack of context and myriad engagement with the world with his feelings upon touching Kimmery: “Then her hand fell lower, and mine too, and at that moment I felt my hand and mind lose their particularity, their pointiness, their countingness, instead become clouds of general awareness, dreamy and yielding with curiosity” (220). Though contented and rendered temporarily able to downplay his Tourettic compulsions, Lionel must leave Kimmery, unable any longer to “lose [his] Tourette’s self in tex-

922 MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE, THE

ture” (213), and reengage the case, which takes him out of the only context he’s ever known—New York— and to the Maine coast in his quest to overcome simultaneously the debilitating aspects of his condition and to get revenge for Minna’s murder. The novel’s anticlimactic resolution likewise works in contradistinction to a traditional ending by standards of the genre of detective fiction: Lionel does not get the girl or save the helpless victim (Kimmery returns to her ex-boyfriend), and complete vengeance remains elusive (Frank’s killer and the novel’s ostensible villain die; however, the larger power networks remain largely unaffected). But Lionel as character has solved, or at least unearthed, a number of the riddles of his condition that mediate between him and the external world. The generative nature of the Tourettic symptom solves the mystery, its own linguistic prowess reconsidered as a potential strength as opposed to weakness—a point Lionel comes to late, but not without struggle and continual movement.

SOURCES Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage, 1999. Mobilio, Albert. Review of Motherless Brooklyn, New York Times Book Review, 17 October 1999, p. 7. Uffen, Ellen. “A Novel Treatment of Tourette’s Syndrome.” Review of Motherless Brooklyn, ASHA Leader 6, no. 9 (2001): 20.

OTHER Stein, Lorin. “Who Killed Brooklyn.” Salon.com (September 23, 1999). Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ books/feature/1999/09/23/brooklyn. Accessed September 24, 2005. Zachary Weir

MOTHER’S RECOMPENSE, THE EDITH WHARTON (1925) After its publication in 1925, The Mother’s Recompense received a number of misreadings to which Edith Wharton responded on different occasions. Edith WHARTON noted that the readers had failed to understand the unhappy ending of the novel, had misunderstood “the mother’s recompense,” and had not noticed the epigraph “desolation is a delicate thing” to the novel.

If the reviewers in Wharton’s time had not done justice to the novel, some critical works of modern times would have made Wharton equally uneasy. Elizabeth Ammons and Louis AUCHINCLOSS contend that The Mother’s Recompense is nostalgic of the old standards and that Wharton was conservative. Such a conclusion depends on the misreading of significant textual details, insufficient attention to Kate Clephane’s developing consciousness, and the assumption that any novel following The Age of Innocence, which is dubiously believed to be nostalgic of old values, should follow the same trend. Kate Clephane, the protagonist of The Mother’s Recompense, returns to New York 18 years after deserting her husband and her daughter Anne out of suffocating patriarchal oppression and longing for individual existence, only to find no one wishes to acknowledge her past, especially her affair with Chris, which forms her essential existence. Anne merely inherits her father and grandmother’s values to impose on her mother, believing that Kate should sacrifice her individuality for the sake of her daughter. Similarly, Fred, the Drovers, and Arklow expect Kate to deny her inner self. Exposed to the double layers of oppression, Kate determines not to yield by marrying Fred “happily” to please either the fictive family or the expectant readers. She resolves to live in her own way, in the world of honesty, integrity, and tranquillity. The mother’s recompense is neither the happiness of her daughter nor Fred’s willingness to marry her; rather, it is her success in maintaining her self-integrity. Faced with oppressive patriarchal traditions, the young Kate resolutely breaks with the family and seeks her ideal existence. The disillusionment she experiences with Hylton Davies awakens her to the fact that intellectual companionship counts more than material luxury. Kate undertakes a blooming experience with Chris Fenno, who opens her eyes to passion and companionship, yet who also denies her the right to self-fulfillment. Kate’s role as a mother to Anne has a different unfolding in her two successive affairs, in that Kate feels guilty for her desertion of Anne when disillusioned by the similarly oppressive experience with Davies, whereas she devotes herself to “the cen-

MOUNTAIN LION, THE 923

tral fact of her experience” with Chris and is exhilarated by her discovery that “at thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him [Chris] she would never have had a self” (15). Critic Cynthia Griffin Wolff maintains that Kate’s confusion of present with past points to her being an unreliable central intelligence. Despite the confusion, however, the female protagonist’s sharp perception of the remnants of old New York values and her keen awareness of the evasion and indifference typical of the flapper culture evidence her unique intelligence as both an observer and a participant. For instance, Kate observes with keenness that her daughter Anne, the incarnation of her father and her grandmother, is strongly critical of her past when she says that “mothers oughtn’t ever to leave their daughters” (186). By inviting her mother back to New York, Anne conducts the mission of transforming her parent into a model mother in conventional terms because her father and her grandmother had failed in this respect. In the meantime, Kate also detects Anne showing indifference to her inner need, especially in facilitating a convenient marriage for her and Fred, for whom Kate feels no love at all. Thus, it is clear that Kate serves as a reliable central intelligence, feeling the pressure of old values in defining motherhood and preserving family honor. Kate, meeting the overwhelming force from her own daughter, for one moment almost complies with Anne’s standards. “Mrs. Clephane felt herself merged in the blessed anonymity of motherhood” (64). Furthermore, it is important to note the alternation between two addressing terms Kate and Mrs. Clephane, which implies the acute dilemma that Kate confronts. She has to find a solution to the dilemma: to be either Mrs. Clephane, the figurehead mother of the family who is required to contribute to the seemingly pleasant world, or Kate Clephane, the big true self whose central fact of existence yearns for acknowledgment. Moreover, Kate has been observant in detecting that Fred, Chris, the Drovers, and even Dr. Arklow seem to make joined efforts in cornering her into a deceptively “healthier, happier world” (195), the world of evasion and indifference. All that Kate Clephane ever expects out of the family circle is but a willingness to accept

her as she really has been, to acknowledge her success in breaking down the barriers of convention and seeking her real self. Nonetheless, the lingering existence of traditional values plus the prevailing flapper culture characterized by evasion and indifference weigh Kate down into yet an agonizing awareness of the threatening force on her developing selfhood. Kate declines Fred’s proposal at the last moment out of her utter disappointment with both the old values and the new culture that connive to deny any individual existence. The mother’s recompense, therefore, can be interpreted as Kate’s having succeeded in maintaining her inner self in spite of the twofold social oppression. Comparatively speaking, Kate leads a more fulfilled life, since she does not have to adopt others’ standards.

SOURCES Aguilar, Grace. “The Mother’s Recompense”: A Sequel to Home Influence, 2 vols. Leipzig, Germany: Tauchnitz, 1859. Aguilar, Sarah. Preface. “The Mother’s Recompense” A Sequel to Home Influence, by Grace Aguilar, 2 vols. Leipzig, Germany: Tauchnitz, 1859. Ammons, Elizabeth. Edith Wharton’s Argument with America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Auchincloss, Louis. Introduction. The Mother’s Recompense, by Edith Wharton. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Hutchinson, Thomas, ed. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 1905. London: Oxford University Press, 1956, Act I, 772–788. Lewis, R. W. B., and Nancy Lewis, eds. The Letters of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner, 1988. Wharton, Edith. The Mother’s Recompense. 1925. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, 2nd ed. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Li Jin

MOUNTAIN LION, THE JEAN STAFFORD (1947) The Mountain Lion, Jean STAFFORD’s second novel, was published in 1947. Composed for the most part in Maine at a time when Stafford’s marriage to Robert Lowell was disintegrating, it is a highly symbolic study of adolescence and tragic coming-of-age. Spare, taut, told in nine chapters of psychological intensity, the

924 MOUNTAIN LION, THE

novel evokes the alterations and developments in such childhood emotions as feeling out of place; considering oneself a misfit; hating one’s parent; hating oneself; and experiencing jealousy, isolation, sexual stirrings, lust for scandal, and the desire to kill or mutilate. Stafford returned throughout her writing life to the topic of childhood and chose to title her 1953 short story collection Children Are Bored on Sunday. In The Mountain Lion, she delights in precise prose and profuse symbolism amenable to a New Critical interpretation. While the narrated time of the novel covers four years and several distinct seasons, the setting in historical time is vague—somewhere in the mid- to late 1920s—underscoring its abiding themes instead of its topical relevance. Ralph and Molly, the younger children of Mrs. Fawcett, whose older daughters are aspiring debutantes, are each other’s best friends. Weakened by recent scarlet fever, bespectacled, awkward, and beset by frequent nosebleeds, they are intellectually alert, ruthlessly anatomize their environment, and are prone to telling scandalous stories to their mother’s “polite” company—such as Ralph’s tale of how their grandfather ostensibly killed a man. Much of the novel privileges Ralph’s consciousness, as he observes his sister and their environment, develops masculine interests such as hunting and crushes on girls, and slowly grows into adolescence. Molly, given to savage remarks, fails to develop in the same way as her brother. She increasingly withdraws into herself, communicating through obscure poems and with her diary, privileging her writing over the company of the people around her. In the later chapters, as the narrative focus turns from Ralph to Molly, we see her in the bathtub, negating her body and shielding it even from her own view, and we learn that she sequesters herself in a remote mountain glen to write. In earlier chapters, she ran a sewing machine needle through her finger, poured sulfuric acid on her hand, and added her own name “to the list of unforgivables” that includes practically everyone she knows. The delineation of Molly’s tragic, stunted adolescence is a singular achievement on Stafford’s part, and it recommends this novel afresh to a time that has begun to recognize more fully the psychological complications of female identity formation.

The settings of The Mountain Lion alternate between a bourgeois California home and a rugged Colorado ranch. The former is a feminine, placid, fussy environment dominated by the widowed Mrs. Fawcett and the dyspeptic Reverend Follansbee; the latter is a remote cattle ranch owned and run by Claude Kenyon, Mrs. Fawcett’s half-brother, and populated by ranch hands who speak in folksy non sequiturs. The California home might as well be in Connecticut, for all the talk of “the East,” college education, and the living room portrait of grandfather Bonney, the “merchant” whose motto was “Honesty.” Mrs. Fawcett has forbidden most outdoor pleasures to her children, since she feels obscurely responsible for her father’s death consequent upon his hurting himself on a nail while watching her jump an obstacle on a horse. By contrast, the Colorado ranch, where Ralph and Molly spend a few summers and later a whole year, has “a gun cabinet which looked like an upended coffin,” and here “Ralph realized that this was the first dining room he had ever seen in which there was not a still life of fruits or fish or a rare roast of beef” (84). As Ralph and Uncle Claude grow closer, the bond between Ralph and Molly weakens, though it is temporarily restored during their times together back in California. At the beginning of their fourth summer in Colorado, which will stretch into a year, Ralph has begun to fantasize about girls while Molly confirms herself in asexuality, believing that she will marry either Ralph or the neighboring mastiff named Schoeneshund and resisting the knowledge of the difference between a stallion and a gelding, preferring to think “that they were simply two different breeds of horses” (185). Ralph’s bond with Molly breaks as, during a train ride through a tunnel, he antagonizes and scandalizes her by requesting that she “tell [him] all the dirty words [she] know[s]” (158). As their year draws to a close, the now 14-year-old Ralph accidentally kills his sister as he and Uncle Claude simultaneously shoot at an elusive mountain lion incongruously named Goldilocks. By this time, Ralph has long ceased to wear his glasses, suggesting his inability to recognize or comprehend reality. Charlotte Goodman persuasively interprets the novel as a “double Bildungsroman,” while Ann Hulbert offers

MOURNING DOVE 925

a sensitive reading of the psychological kinship between Stafford and Molly (Hulbert, 196–210). Blanche Gelfant and Melody Graulich investigate gender issues and literary tradition in a Western setting. Susan Rosowski calls attention to the “thinly veiled psychosexual violence in western literature” (Rosowski, 137) and to Stafford’s rewriting the formula western as an encounter of violence and logos (Rosowski, 153). Indeed, from the post–World War I stoning of a German immigrant alluded to in the first few pages through the various acts of self-mutilation, slaughtering, poisoning, and shooting to the climactic killing of Molly and the mountain lion, the novel is dominated by acts of violence. In The Mountain Lion, Stafford portrays childhood tragedy in an America that sharply separates male and female adolescence and condones violence as self-expression.

SOURCES Gelfant, Blanche. “Reconsiderations: The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford,” New Republic, 10 May 1975, pp. 22–25. Goodman, Charlotte. Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Graulich, Melody. “Jean Stafford’s Western Childhood: Huck Finn Joins the Campfire Girls,” Denver Quarterly 18 (Spring 1983): 39–55. Hulbert, Ann. The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford. New York: Knopf, 1992. Krasteva, Yonka. “Liminal Landscape and Individuation in Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 18 (March 1997): 88–101. Rosowski, Susan. “Stafford Rewrites the Western.” In Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Stafford, Jean. The Mountain Lion. New York: Dutton, 1972. Thomas Austenfeld

MOURNING DOVE (1888?–1936)

Mourning Dove, the English translation of the Salishan word Humishima, is the pen name of Christine Quintasket, the author of the novel COGEWEA, THE HALF-BLOOD: A DEPICTION OF THE GREAT MONTANA CATTLE RANGE (1927) and one of the earliest Native-American women to write a novel. As the scholar Beverly G. Six notes, however, despite the recent finding of Alice Callahan’s earlier Wynema (1891), Mourning Dove was “the first Native American woman to publish a novel that con-

veyed Native history, cultural practices, and religion through the blending of fictional narrative and folktales” (Six, 253). Mourning Dove also wrote a collection of tales entitled Coyote Stories (1931), Tales of the Okanogans (1976), and Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography (1990). Although the exact date of her birth is uncertain, Mourning Dove was born between 1882 and 1888 to Lucy Stukin, a member of the Colvile tribe of Washington State, and Joseph Quintasket, an Okanogan from Canada. She was educated for a short time at mission schools and for three years at the Fort Shaw Indian School in Great Falls, Montana. Briefly married to Hector McLeod, a Flathead, Mourning Dove began writing Cogewea as early as 1912, married Fred Galler, a Wenatchee, in 1919, and published Cogewea, edited by Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, in 1927. McWhorter encouraged Mourning Dove in her literary efforts, but scholars still debate the extent of his editing, additions, and alterations. There can be no doubt, however, of Mourning Dove’s intent to preserve and illuminate Native-American customs and cultural identity, particularly regarding mixed-blood identity, a pervasive theme in 20th-century Native-American fiction. Cogewea focuses on a mixed-blood woman on the Flathead Reservation who inherits a ranch, rejects the unwelcome sexual overtures of Densmore, a white man, and eventually marries Jim LaGrinder, a “halfbreed” like herself. Although critics continue to debate the elements of didacticism and western romance that permeate much of the novel, Cogewea clearly illustrates the dilemma endemic to many Native Americans not just at the turn of the 19th century, but at the turn of the 20th as well: to what degree should one assimilate? Cogewea has two sisters, one of whom chooses the way of their grandmother, Stemteema, and has practically no contact with the modern outside world. The other marries a white man and denies her Indian blood. Cogewea tries to belong to both worlds and finds herself fully accepted in neither. Mourning Dove died on August 8, 1936, and was buried in Okanogan, Washington. Her papers are housed at Washington State University and the University of Washington.

926 MOVEABLE FEAST, A

NOVEL Co-Ge-We-A, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range. Boston: Four Seas Company, 1927.

SOURCES Brown, Alanna Kathleen. “Mourning Dove’s Canadian Recovery Years, 1917–1919,” Canadian Literature 124–125 (Spring-Summer 1990): 113–121. Mourning Dove. Coyote Stories. Edited by Jay Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ———. Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Edited by Jay Miller. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Six, Beverly G. “Mourning Dove (Hum-ishu-Ma) [Christine Quintasket].” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Biobibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 252–257. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Viehmann, Martha L. “ ‘My People . . . My Kind’: Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, the Half-Blood as a Narrative of Mixed Descent.” In Native American Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 227–242. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Wilson, Michael. “Writing a Friendship Dance: Orality in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20, no. 1 (1996): 27–41.

MOVEABLE FEAST, A ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1964) This is one of the most reader-friendly works by a great American author. Divided into 20 short chapters with informative titles like “A Good Cafe On the Place St.-Michel,” “Hunger Was Good Discipline,” and “There Is Never Any End to Paris,” this fictionalized memoir offers luminous, deceptively simple sentences. Set chiefly on the Left Bank of Paris in the early 1920s, when the young Hemingway is making his way in the world of fiction, A Moveable Feast is unequaled in representing the special relationship between a writer and the city in which he works. Forces within his psyche and his social circumstances that can dissolve that creative symbiosis are examined in different ways, sometimes by an almost evasive insinuation, sometimes with startling and illuminating directness. Similarly destructive forces threaten the author’s marriage, so that the beauty of being in love in Paris is tempered by a foreboding of the couple’s breakup. The city of great discovery is, inevitably, a city of loss and sorrow. As the book develops the details of Paris life for Hemingway—its food, alcohol, weather, gambling, beautiful women,

wonderfully named streets and cafés, malingerers, angels, and artists—the reader feels increasingly less distance between Paris as a city and Paris as the soul of the author himself. Written in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, and in Sun Valley, Idaho, in the three years before Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, A Moveable Feast was published posthumously in 1964 after significant editing by his widow and an editor at Scribner, including the choice of a title from a list left by Hemingway. Produced at a time when his clinical depression, alcoholism, hypercombative egoism, a long list of other ailments, and a succession of serious accidents had glaringly degenerated his literary prowess, A Moveable Feast shows that in revisiting Paris, Hemingway returned, for one last time, to the refined application of the aesthetic on which he had built his reputation. This aesthetic centers around the principle of the iceberg—“seveneighths of it underwater to one part that shows” (Bruccoli, 125)—by which an author learns to trust that his knowledge is communicable even when it is not overtly expressed. Samuel Shaw calls it “a suspension of the need for full rational explanation of people and events” (Shaw, 123), and the principle is perfectly operational here. As Tom Dardis has written, the book “reads like Hemingway’s early fiction” and contains “dazzlingly clear portraits” (Dardis, 207) of expatriates like Gertrude STEIN, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. A beautifully bittersweet chapter on the poet Evan Shipman is more memorably evocative in eight short pages than many a full-length novel, and the three famous—or infamous, because they are so unflattering—chapters about the Fitzgeralds are a novella within the novel itself. The one dull character in the book is the author’s wife, who converses in an adoring submissiveness that is typical of weakly drawn women in Hemingway. As Hemingway’s protagonists are often, in large part, Hemingway, sharing their creator’s memories, preferences, and turns of phrase, they also partake of Hemingway’s Paris, so that places and events in A Moveable Feast figure prominently in some of his best-known short stories and novels (e.g., “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” The SUN ALSO RISES). The Paris staging of Hem-

MOVIEGOER, THE 927

ingway’s fiction, perceptively analyzed in J. Gerald Kennedy’s Imagining Paris, is a complex process in which the location, reputation, and clientele of a café can signal a subtle identification, antipathy, or ambivalence in a character. Hemingway, appearing as himself here, is also a fictional construct, for both on and off the page he worked as hard as any writer—at times too hard—to generate a compelling self-image. When, in his brief preface, Hemingway says: “If the reader prefers, the book may be regarded as fiction” (Hemingway, i), he is not necessarily inviting the reader to do so, for the statement itself is a literary device geared to elicit the reader’s suspension of disbelief. But most great memoirs traffic as much in amusing exaggerations, lapses of memory, and lies of vengeance and other distortions as in biographical accuracy, and viewing this work as an autobiographical novel highlights rather than obscures its artistry. In a coy understatement, Hemingway suggests that “there is always the chance that what is written as fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact” (Hemingway, i). Concerning the city of Paris, readers can judge for themselves. Although the population of Paris, its social structure, and its artistic atmosphere have changed greatly during the last century, all the streets so affectionately rendered in the novel can still be walked by any visitor, and nearly all of Hemingway’s cafés, bistros, and houses are still projecting their oblique ways of welcoming a writer, still inspiring the love for the city that is, after all, the great subject of this book.

SOURCES Bruccoli. Matthew J., ed. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Dardis, Tom. The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1986. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964. Kennedy, J. Gerald. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Shaw, Samuel. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973. Peter Josyph

MOVIEGOER, THE WALKER PERCY (1961) In Walker PERCY’s award-winning novel, The Moviegoer, it can be argued that the main character is not an individual but an emotion-state, despair, a sickness of the spirit and the self. Percy sets the stage for his existential novel with a quotation from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: that it is unaware of being despair.” Despair is inescapable, inevitable—the abyss that threatens to devour humanity and from which the authentic self must be retrieved. John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling is Percy’s “moviegoer,” a 29-year-old small-time suburban New Orleans stockbroker. Binx squanders his time and potential in superficial pursuits, epitomized by the movies in which he immerses himself. The films he frequents are shallow and lack substance, much as does Binx’s own life. He has been a model tenant and a model citizen whose wallet is full of credit cards, ID cards, and other laminated testimonies to his fulfillment of appropriate social obligations, yet one Mardi Gras, when the novel begins, Binx awakens to the vague feeling that something less laminated and more real is needed in his life—fulfillment and authenticity—and the reader follows Binx as he searches for substance that transcends everyday life. Throughout his search, Binx is caught between two strong influences: the stiff Southern traditions and values represented by his Aunt Emily, and the mystery and seeming unpredictability of Roman Catholicism, as embodied by his mother. When he becomes involved with his beautiful distant cousin, Kate, he connects with a kindred spirit. Binx and Kate are the only self-aware characters in Percy’s novel—the only two to recognize the inherent falsity in the theater of everyday life that surrounds them. But while both are locked into a world of ennui and alienation, each responds differently. Binx glides through life, making little impact, yet drawing desperate fragments of meaning from obsessively noting the details of the world around him, while Kate wrenches the world from the rut of the everyday by creating crises and havoc. After they marry, Binx finds his fulfillment and authenticity through his relationship with Kate. His direction and

928 MOVING TARGET, THE

careful attention to detail ground her and give her focus, and she, in turn, allows him to fulfill his potential and move from passive observer to active orchestrator—perhaps even, as one reviewer notes, the director of his own movie (Anonymous). In its exploration of the nature of despair and the human journey through it and away, the novel introduces Percy’s concept of the “malaise”—the angst of a lucid man attempting to make his way through a godless world. In Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard describes despair—the awareness of being a lost self— as a fundamental element of human existence, which cannot be avoided. Binx’s malaise leads him to move from his monotonous existence of money, shallow love affairs, and movies to a search for meaning, which ultimately delivers him to despair. The Alabama-born Walker Percy may be said to belong to the “wasteland” school of modern literature, with views of the contemporary world resembling those of T. S. Eliot, F. Scott FITZGERALD, and his fellow Southerner William FAULKNER. Like his predecessors, Percy finds that “the values of the past no longer work and the majority of men are spiritually dead, abstracted, and if sensitive, ingrown and cut off from life outside themselves” (Stuckey, 1,075). In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award (1962), collected in Signposts in a Strange Land, Percy speculates: “It is perhaps not too farfetched to compare it [The Moviegoer] in one respect with the science of pathology . . . that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like ‘the dignity of the individual’ and ‘self-realization’ are being heard more frequently than ever. In short, the book attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man . . . is a wayfarer and a pilgrim” (246). Percy uses Binx to explore the notion that despite the excesses and trappings of modernity, all people are essentially lost and in need of salvation to be rescued from their alienation and despair. Through Binx’s search, with all its stumblings, repetitions, and reiterations, Percy tutors the reader by example, so that each may reconsider the human condition and begin her or his own search for authenticity and transcendence.

SOURCES Coles, Robert. Walker Percy, An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Percy, Walker. Signposts in a Strange Land. Edited by Patrick Samway. New York: Noonday Press, 1992. Poteat, Patricia Lewis. Walker Percy and the Old Modern Age: Reflections on Language, Argument, and the Telling of Stories. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Stuckey, W. J. “Walker Percy.” In Contemporary Novelists, edited by James Vinson. London: St. James Press, 1976.

OTHER Coulihan, Jack. “Percy, Walker; The Moviegoer.” Literature Annotations: Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. Available online. URL: http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/ lit-med-db. Accessed September 27, 2005. Howell, Ted. “Out of the Malaise: Exploring the Possibilities of the Search in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.” Available online. URL: http://eastern.edu/academic/trad_undg/sas/ depts/english/_private/Howell_1.htm. Accessed September 27, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

MOVING TARGET, THE ROSS MACDONALD (1949) The Moving Target is the first of 18 Lew Archer novels published between 1949 and 1976. Before The Moving Target, Kenneth Millar had published four crime and suspense novels under his own name, each featuring a different protagonist. In those books he had shown himself to be a student of the Dashiell HAMMETT–Raymond CHANDLER tradition; now, writing as Ross MACDONALD, he would make a claim to be their heir, a successful claim in the eyes of many critics. Macdonald’s great achievement, however, consists more in the 18-novel series (there are also nine Lew Archer short stories) than in any single novel. It is a series characterized by consistently sharp observation of lives and relationships played out in the social and natural environments of California from the post–World War II boom to the unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. There is an evolution in the nature of the problems that Archer is called upon to investigate, and

MOVING TARGET, THE 929

there is also an obsessive repetition of certain patterns, most notably a fascination with Oedipal stories of love and hate between parents and children. Macdonald, with a doctorate in literature from the University of Michigan, was an articulate exponent of his own art of the detective story (see On Crime Writing and Self-Portrait, Ceaselessly Into the Past), and it is clear that both the evolution and the repetition were the result of thoughtful design. Lew Archer and his world were not fully conceived in The Moving Target, and only a view that encompasses the entire series can do full justice to any single segment of it. Nonetheless, The Moving Target can stand alone as an important novel that presses a familiar icon—the hard-boiled private eye—in a new direction and presents a significant advance in the art of the detective story. Lew Archer is, in important respects, cast in the Philip Marlowe mode. Like Marlowe, he is a former policeman, fired because he cannot stand the corruption of the system. The first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep, opens with Marlowe visiting a very rich invalid and accepting the assignment to look for his missing son-in-law; The Moving Target opens with Archer visiting a very rich invalid, Mrs. Sampson, and accepting the assignment to look for her missing husband. The contrast between the lives of the wealthy, who can make choices and usually make bad ones, and of the middle class and the poor, who have fewer choices or none, was a standard motif in Chandler’s novels and, indeed, in the entire tradition of the hard-boiled detective. The Sampsons live in Cabrillo Canyon, a gated green enclave with a millionaire’s view of the Pacific Ocean, located just outside Santa Teresa (modeled on Santa Barbara, where Macdonald lived most of his adult life). The city, by contrast, is far from Edenic: “We drove through miles of slums: collapsing shacks and storefront tabernacles, dirt paths where sidewalks should have been, black and brown children playing in the dust” (17). Ralph Sampson himself had once been poor, but having acquired a fortune during and after the war, he has utterly divorced himself from the lives of the parents of those black and brown children. He derives income from a ranch, but, his daughter reports, “He can’t seem to see that Mexican field-workers are

people” (110), and he is engaged in a struggle to break the workers’ strike for better wages. But where for Chandler, the sociology of these competing classes was of primary interest, it is subordinated to more individual and familial issues in Macdonald’s novels. Sampson, who never appears alive in the narrative, is troubled by his wealth, and he attempts, for example, to compensate for his success as a ruthless capitalist by subscribing to astrological flummery (and by actually donating a mountain to a bearded mystic), but Macdonald locates the real source of unhappiness in his family: His son was killed in the war he profited from; his paralyzed wife is, by her own admission, coldbloodedly calculating the potential monetary consequences of his charities, his infidelities, and his death; his daughter, Miranda, is afraid that she has been an inadequate substitute for her dead brother, is in love with the pilot whom her father has employed, and is herself beloved by the family attorney. It is that attorney, Albert Graves, who brings Archer into the case when Sampson disappears from a Burbank airport. It appears at first to be a voluntary disappearance. Archer is sent looking for Sampson to prevent him from injuring himself (or his estate). The search takes Archer to Hollywood, where he plays up to an aging film star, Fay Estabrook, and meets the “ex-chorus boy” and current tough guy, Dwight Troy, and his beetle-browed enforcer, Puddler. Estabrook, Troy, and Puddler prove to be red herrings: They are not involved in Sampson’s disappearance, but they have been using Sampson’s mountain ranch as a staging ground for importing hundreds of illegal aliens who will be marketed as strike-breaking field hands to owners such as Sampson. At one point, they capture Archer and imprison him on a pier. In escaping, Archer fights with Puddler, and when they fall into the ocean, is responsible for Puddler’s death, a responsibility that haunts him in later novels (see The Blue Hammer, 1976). Midway through the novel, a ransom note makes apparent that the disappearance is indeed a kidnapping, and that there is an insider in the conspiracy. Archer realizes that Alan Taggert, the young pilot whom Sampson trusted (and Miranda loved), is an accomplice. Taggert threatens to kill Archer but is shot

930 MRS. BRIDGE AND MR. BRIDGE

and killed by the lawyer Graves. Miranda now agrees to marry Graves, but the novel ends with Archer’s revelation that Graves, though not implicated in the kidnapping, has murdered Sampson. Graves turns himself in, and the novel’s final scene has Archer driving Miranda home. These complicated emotional relationships make Miranda a focal character. Macdonald carefully observes her uncertain advances toward men—her father, Taggert, Graves, and Archer himself. The first three fail her in different ways; Archer, though clearly tempted by her nubile appeal, resists the easy solution: “I could have put my arms around her and taken her over” (245). Instead, unable to save the father, he will respect the daughter and release her into her own life. The women of hard-boiled fiction were usually sexually experienced, and the private eye responded to them without qualms. Archer encounters hard-boiled women in The Moving Target, but his ambivalent relationship with Miranda is the key one. The age disparity (which Macdonald emphasizes: Archer is 35 to Miranda’s 20) and the sensitivity with which Archer examines his own motives as well as the motives of others point to the direction Ross Macdonald wants to move the detective and the detective story. Archer explains his method to Miranda: “Most of my work is watching people, and judging them” (110). He is, in fact, more of a watcher than a judge. And The Moving Target illustrates how careful a watcher Ross Macdonald is, carefully noting the textures of postwar California and reporting the nuances of intimate relationships in troubled families.

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew J. Ross Macdonald/Kenneth Millar: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983. Gale, Robert L. A Ross Macdonald Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Macdonald, Ross. Inward Journey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Cordelia Editions, 1984. ———. The Moving Target. Boston: Gregg Press, 1979. ———. On Crime Writing. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1973. ———. Self-Portrait, Ceaselessly into the Past. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra Press, 1981.

Mahan, Jeffrey H. A Long Way from Solving That One: Psycho/Social and Ethical Implications of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer Tales. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990. Moss, Robert F. “Ross Macdonald.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers, edited by Robin Winks and Maureen Corrigan, 633–655. New York: Scribner, 1998. Nolan, Tom. Ross Macdonald: A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1999. Schopen, Bernard. Ross Macdonald. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. Spier, Jerry. Ross Macdonald. New York: Ungar, 1978. Wolfe, Peter. Dreamers Who Live Their Dreams: The World of Ross Macdonald’s Novels. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1976. J. K. Van Dover

MRS. BRIDGE (1959) and MR. BRIDGE (1969) EVAN S. CONNELL These novels are two halves of one story, the domestic history of an uppermiddle-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, during the years between World War I and World War II. Rather than being a continuous narrative, the Bridge books consist of a series of loosely connected vignettes, episodes that reveal in a small space a great deal about the outer and inner lives of the characters. Many of the same events occur in both books but are refracted through the very different minds of husband and wife. Walter Bridge is a respected lawyer, a pillar of the community, a man who insists on keeping up appearances but who has “not yet believed a single thing only because it was believed by others.” His wife, whose somewhat exotic name of India doesn’t fit her very well, is what used to be called a country-club matron, a lady whose exquisite breeding and unerring sense of propriety cannot save her from perplexity at the rapidly changing world and the behavior of her own children. Ruth, the eldest, is the rebel, seemingly immune to her mother’s efforts to inculcate ladylike deportment. Mrs. Bridge finds herself half-wondering, “Is my daughter mine?” and Ruth, for her part, is counting the days till she can escape from the stiflingly bourgeois atmosphere of Kansas City’s Mission Hills

MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE 931

district. Carolyn, on the other hand, is the good girl who plays by the rules and, indeed, loves rules. Yet she is self-willed to the point of selfishness and frequently treats her mother like a servant. Douglas, the youngest, is the all-American kid who likes horsing around with his friends and playing the clown at the dinner table, yet there is something different about him. To Mrs. Bridge, “he had always seemed very normal—though a little more laconic than most boys.” While he seems bewildered by the emotional outbursts of his sisters and mother and diffident in the face of his father’s lectures, it is clear that Douglas is, more or less, the young Evan Connell, absorbing and processing the events around him for later transmutation into literature. And what literature! The Bridge novels are marvels of subtlety, relating events both comic and tragic in an understated fashion that matches the stiff-upper-lip Protestantism of the protagonists while at the same time granting them the utmost understanding and compassion. Connell shows us the beating heart underneath the skin, as in the episode when Mr. Bridge, on vacation in Paris with his wife, has a chance meeting with a Kansas City acquaintance, a young man who has visited a famous ruin in the Arabian desert. The careful attorney, who has worked six- and sevenday weeks his whole life to provide security and a modicum of luxury for his family, is suddenly unmasked as a romantic and as a disappointed man. “ ‘So you’ve been to Petra, have you!’ Mr. Bridge remarked as though reluctant to believe it. ‘The rosered city half as old as time—and you have been there!’ Gazing at Morgan Hager, he wondered how an insignificant, fatuous boy had managed to do what he had merely dreamed of doing.” Mrs. Bridge is less given to difficult reflections than her husband, and she strives mightily to put the best face on everything, come what may. Her strongest oath is “My word!” When her best friend gets drunk at a party and starts a rather subversive political rant, Mrs. Bridge responds with, “It does sound as if we’ve done some dreadful things, Grace, but isn’t it possible that when you investigate fully you’ll discover the Seminoles attacked us?” No matter how often an unbearably

boring couple tires her out with their visits, she always warmly invites them back. And in one particularly poignant vignette, Mrs. Bridge bakes her husband his favorite pineapple bread as a special treat, but she is so out of practice that it gets ruined. Rather than make him uncomfortable by showing her mortification and grief, she goes into the kitchen to get control of herself and then returns with a smile. Not all the vignettes are poignant, though. These books are often downright funny, both because everyday life is funny and because of the author’s pitch-perfect ear for the way people speak. Their voices, from Douglas’s boyish mumblings to Mr. Bridge’s measured and formal pronouncements to the slightly pretentious style of Harriet, the Bridges’ peppery maid, come through loud and clear. They sound as real as if we were in the room with them, over three quarters of a century ago. But as the years pass, the story takes a darker turn. Ruth moves to New York and rejects her family’s values, Carolyn makes an unsatisfactory marriage, and Douglas enlists in the army as the United States enters World War II. As her children slip away from her, Mrs. Bridge succumbs to anxiety and sadness. Somewhere deep inside, she knows that the war will sweep away the tranquil and comfortable world she has always known. The world of Mr. and Mrs. Bridge is definitely gone and, in Connell’s view, not very much to be missed. But despite the sometimes brutal realism of his portrayal, it is very much a labor of love. And despite the limitations and hypocrisies of the Bridge family, we cannot help loving them too. John Dorfman

MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE SUI SIN FAR (1912) Edith Maude Eaton, born to an English painter and his Chinese wife, wrote Mrs. Spring Fragrance and other fiction, articles, and autobiography under the Cantonese pseudonym SUI SIN FAR. She grew up in the United States and Canada, where she had less contact with her Chinese heritage and society’s racial biases than readers might expect, perhaps because her features were Caucasian. Her initial view of Chinese

932 MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE

immigrants was negative, but she quickly grew to use her writing to counter negative stereotypes of her mother’s ancestry. Mrs. Spring Fragrance, collected with other writings and republished in 1995, was her only book publication, perhaps, in part, because she died at age 49. Amy Ling, in the introduction to the 1995 edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance, notes that the 1912 edition consisted of two sections. The first section, with the title “Mrs. Spring Fragrance,” includes 17 stories; 15 of these are included in the 1995 edition. The second section of the original edition, “Tales of Chinese Children,” is less than half as long and includes 20 stories, many very short; nine of those pieces are included in the 1995 republication. Sui Sin Far’s accomplishment is especially significant when viewed within its historical context. Mrs. Spring Fragrance offered—to a largely white readership—positive images of Chinese immigrants, women, and the working classes at a time when prejudice against and overt abuse of those groups was widespread. The fiction appeared during the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned Chinese immigration to the United States. In the late 19th century, stereotypes of Chinese opium addicts, rat eaters, and slavishly obedient women abounded, and many believed the Chinese could never assimilate into North American culture. Moreover, women in general lacked many of the rights taken for granted today. Sui Sin Far’s advocating of racial and sexual equality, though at times subtle to present-day readers, was a bold theme for her fiction when it was first published. The title story of Mrs. Spring Fragrance revolves around the title character, a Chinese woman who moves to Seattle without knowing a word of English and masters the language within five years. Mr. and Mrs. Spring Fragrance live in a Chinese neighborhood but have become, in the word of their contemporary Westerners, “Americanized.” The story is especially adept at calling attention to the manipulation, ambiguity, and irony of words and the ways in which people shape situations open to interpretation with the words they choose. Jade Spring Fragrance, for instance, does not so much ask as inform her husband that she will extend a trip so that she can witness American fudge

making; her husband then goes on to inform a neighbor that he has asked his wife to extend her trip so that he might have a smoking party. Throughout the story, the couple vacillates between appreciation and disparagement of things American. In addition, the story explores the impending marriage of Laura, a neighbor whose parents are progressively American in their dress and home decoration but traditional in attitudes toward marriage. Laura has been betrothed to the son of a Chinese government schoolteacher in San Francisco but is in love with an American-born baseball player, Kai Tzu. It is no coincidence, of course, that Mrs. Spring Fragrance’s extended trip is to San Francisco, where she is able to introduce a rather naughty and beautiful local girl to Laura’s betrothed. Nor is it beside the point that the women of this story lead the way from traditional Chinese practices to new, Americanized lifestyles. By the end of the story, both the young couple and the older couple find happiness and stability without allowing the different cultural influences to clash directly. Other stories in the collection that revolve around feminist themes of self-determination and the value of women in society include “The Inferior Woman,” “Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese,” and, from the second section, “The Heart’s Desire.” The story “The Wisdom of the New” focuses on the tragic pressures a mother faces living in a bicultural society, and “The Prize China Baby,” another tragic story, shows a mother who disobeys her husband out of fear he will give her child away. While some of the writing is light and witty, many of the stories have dark aspects or outcomes, in part because of the realism Sui Sin Far wanted to create. One of the more overtly political stories appears in the second section of the book, among the children’s tales. “A Chinese Boy-Girl” follows Ku Yum, a motherless schoolgirl who is often truant and manipulative, though also intelligent and generous. When the white teacher, Miss Mason, confronts Ku Yum’s father because “his daughter was growing up in ignorance of all home duties and, worse than that, shared the sports of boy children,” the father shrugs and replies, “Too bad!” The teacher presses on, having Ku Yum placed in a home for

MUKHERJEE, BHARATI 933

Chinese girls. The teacher, however, begins to question whether it was right to separate the daughter and father; she begins “to wish with all her heart that she had not interfered in the matter.” Sui Sin Far’s fiction often resonates with assertions that people are best left to determine their own futures and that individuals need not fit into predetermined racial or sexual categories. In addition, the fiction is full of unexpected yet seamless characters, dialogue, and consequences. The style of Sui Sin Far’s fiction, however, might be criticized as flowery or sentimental, though at its original publication it might not have seemed so, particularly for a woman writer. Even with its tinges of sentimentality, the stories are often stark, understated, and ironic. The work might also be seen as somehow purposefully exotic and, therefore, exploitive, but that view discounts the context in which the author wrote and the complexity of the characters and the collection taken as a whole. The accumulation of stories in the original edition must have functioned much like a short story cycle, in that each weaves into the others to form a fuller view of the Chinese-American life than was otherwise available at the time. The stories work together, with recurring themes and places, to offer the larger story Sui Sin Far experienced. The 1995 edition, however, includes only some of the original selections and adds a variety of journalistic pieces from newspapers and magazines. Thus, the recent, more widely available edition of Mrs. Spring Fragrance is valuable as a collected works of Sui Sin Far. With her more popular sister, Winnifred Eaton, who wrote romance novels as Onoto WATANNA, Sui Sin Far marks the birth of Asian-American literature, thereby establishing the foundation for future writers such as Maxine Hong KINGSTON and Amy TAN. In part because of the success of Tan and other contemporary AsianAmerican novelists, both scholars and general readers have renewed interest in Mrs. Spring Fragrance.

SOURCES Ling, Amy. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist,” American Literary Realism 16 (Autumn 1983): 287–289.

McCann, Sean. “Connecting Links: The Anti-Progressivism of Sui Sin Far,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 1 (1999): 73–88. Sui Sin Far. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. White-Parks, Annette. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Young, Mary E. “Sui Sin Far to Amy Tan.” In Mules and Dragons: Popular Culture Images in the Selected Writings of African-American and Chinese-American Women Writers, 109–131. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Anna Leahy

MUKHERJEE, BHARATI (1940– ) The author of five novels—The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), WIFE (1975), JASMINE (1989), The Holder of the World (1993), and Leave It to Me (1997)—and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for her collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian women who successfully transform themselves into free and empowered individuals once they immigrate to the United States. In the words of the critic Jaspal Kaur Singh, we see in her novels a “rejection of the tradition-bound society of the East as she reaches out for the more empowering, individualistic society of the West” (Singh, 241). In Wife, for example, Dimple, trapped in an arranged marriage, feels torn between images of the passive loyal Bengali wife and the examples of free women she sees in New York. She is the only one of Mukherjee’s protagonists who fails to make the transition from one world to another; similarly, Tara Bannerjee (in The Tiger’s Daughter) feels caught between the two worlds. In Jasmine, the widowed protagonist moves to the United States, traveling ever westward as she joyously Americanizes herself. Mukherjee’s style has been praised as powerful, deep, compelling, and utterly fitting for her subject matter. Her two latest novels, Desirable Daughters (2002) and The Tree Bride (2005), are part of a projected trilogy depicting three Calcutta-born sisters as they explore their heritage and move about different countries, including the United States. Mukherjee was born on July 27, 1940, in Calcutta, India, to a Brahmin Bengali family. She received an M.A.

934 MUMBO JUMBO

in English and ancient Indian culture in 1961, an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1963, and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1969. Although she and her husband, Clark Blaise, lived in Canada for 12 years, they moved permanently to the United States in 1980, where Mukherjee became a naturalized American citizen. An extremely popular writer, Mukherjee dislikes being identified as a “hyphenated” author; nor does she worry about her unpopularity with the postcolonialist critics, who see her exuberant celebration of America as a denigration of her native country.

NOVELS Desirable Daughters. New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2002. The Holder of the World. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Jasmine. New York: Viking, Penguin, 1989. Leave It to Me. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1997. The Tiger’s Daughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. The Tree Bride. New York: Theia/Hyperion, 2005. Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

SOURCES Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1996. Nelson, Emmanuel S., ed. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland, 1993, 65–88.

OTHER Soderberg, Erin. “Bharati Mukherjee.” Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/ bios/entries/mukherjee_bharati.html. Accesssed September 24, 2005. Welch, Dave. “Bharati Mukherjee Runs the West Coast Offense.” Powells.com. Available online. URL: http://www. powells.com/authors/mukherjee.html. Accessed January 10, 2006.

MUMBO JUMBO ISHMAEL REED (1972)

AfricanAmerican novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, activist, anthologist, and—perhaps most important—satirist, Ishmael REED has a literary career that spans several decades and several genres. He has published nine novels as well as several poetry and essay collections. He created several publishing companies, including the respected Before Columbus Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting multicultural, multiracial voices in American literature. Among these accomplishments, Mumbo Jumbo, his third novel, is widely considered his masterpiece. He currently

teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and resides in Oakland, California. Mumbo Jumbo is a challenging intertextual collage, full of photographs and illustrations, diagrams, excerpts of dance manuals, letters, news flashes, Time-Life history books, and even a partial bibliography. Because of its stylistic experimentation, many literary critics have called it a “postmodern” text. More recent scholarship has strongly contested this characterization, however, arguing for an interpretation that honors the novel’s roots in West African cosmology as well as the novel’s own “generative” rather than indeterminate, aesthetic (Butler, 187). It is a satire, a detective novel, ostensibly set during the Harlem Renaissance. Reed uses the Harlem Renaissance to signify on multiple time periods, including his own “present” of the late 1960s–early 1970s. New readers of Mumbo Jumbo encounter not only a bewildering array of texts and characters, but seemingly anachronistic movements between time periods. Yet this movement is intentional. In a 1974 interview, Reed remarked that he wrote the novel as a way to signify on multiple time periods: “I wanted to write about a time like the present, or to use the past to prophesy about the future—a process that our ancestors called ‘Necromancy.’ I chose the 20’s because [that period was] very similar to [what was] happening [in the late 1960s–early 1970s]” (Reed, 1995, 60). Readers might consult Reginald Martin’s article for several annotations of these characters and Tamiko Nimura’s explication of the novel’s multiple chronologies. Reed’s own poems “The NeoHooDoo Aesthetic” and “NeoHooDoo Manifesto” also provide further background for many of the novel’s guiding aesthetics and principles. Before an initial reading, some basic background knowledge of the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural history is also strongly recommended. The impetus for Mumbo Jumbo’s plot is an “antiplague,” “Jes’Grew.” It was named so because, like James Weldon JOHNSON’s metaphor for early ragtime songs, Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s character Topsy, it “jes’grew.” As the novel opens, we find that Jes’Grew has struck another victim, but Jes’Grew is an anti-plague because it is an “enlivening” plague, one that causes its carriers to be emotionally moved and to dance. Though Reed

MURAYAMA, MILTON 935

specifically mentions “Jes’Grew carriers” like Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, anyone is susceptible to catch Jes’Grew; anyone can be emotionally moved, and anyone can “shake that thing.” A doctor attending Jes’Grew “victims” agonizes, “There are no isolated cases in this thing. It knows no class no race no consciousness. It is self-propagating and you can never tell when it will hit” (Reed, 1972, 5). In this 1920s incarnation of the novel, Jes’Grew is a “liturgy without a text” (Reed, 1972, 6)—in other words, a literature seeking its theory, a message seeking its medium. Locating Jes Grew’s origins constitutes the novel’s central mystery. At least two main groups of characters devote themselves to locating the source of this 1920s “flair-up” of Jes’Grew (4). The novel alternates between these groups, which are often conflicted internally regarding the ways and means of combating or aiding the spread of Jes’Grew. The first group consists of Hinckle Von Vampton, Biff Musclewhite, and members of the Wallflower Order. These characters share a dedication to an Atonist, or overly singular, intolerant, and dogmatic theology and worldview. Among others, the Wallflower Order enlists the help of one individual Woodrow Wilson Jefferson, a “Talking Android” (or token Negro), to represent the “Negro viewpoint” in its entirety. The second group consists largely of “Jes’Grew carriers.” Though these characters differ in terms of means and ends, they share a belief in pluralistic, pantheistic worldviews. At the Mumbo Jumbo Kathedral in Harlem, PaPa LaBas (an incarnation of the African trickster figure Legba) and his assistant Earline work to “feed the loas,” or propitiate and honor ancestral spirits. Herman Berbelang and the Mu’tafikah are a multiracial coalition of art-nappers who remove valuable artifacts from museums and restore them to their original cultural contexts so that they might perform their original intended work. The two groups work closer and closer, often at cross-purposes, to locate the origin of Jes’Grew. These efforts come to a head at a poetry salon. PaPa LaBas explains that Jes’Grew’s origins might be located in an ideological split between the ancient Egyptian deities Set, Isis, and Osiris. The novel ends by tracking PaPa LaBas on the 1960s lecture circuit. Though LaBas

reflects on the end of Jes’Grew’s 1920s “flair-up” in the epilogue, the final scene hints at Jes’Grew’s return in the 1960s, the survival of Jes’Grew carriers, and the enlivening, pluralistic spirit of Jes’Grew itself.

SOURCES Butler, Johnnella. “Mumbo Jumbo, Theory, and the Aesthetics of Wholeness.” In Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, edited by Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne, 175–193. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2002. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “ ‘the Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” In Studies in Black American Literature, edited by Joe Weixlmann and Chester Fontenot, vol. I, Black American Prose Theory, 129–181. Greenwood, Fla.: Penkevill, 1984. Jessee, Sharon A. “Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” MELUS 21, no. 4 (1996): 127–139. Ludwig, Sami. “Ishmael Reed’s Inductive Narratology of Detection,” African American Review 32, no. 3 (1998): 435–445. Martin, Reginald. “Hoodoo as Literary Method: Ishmael Reed’s ‘True Afro-American Aesthetic.’” In Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics, 63–108. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Mason, Theodore O. “Performance, History, and Myth: The Problem of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” Modern Fiction Studies 34, no. 1 (1988): 97–109. Nimura, Tamiko. “‘Time is not a river’: The Implications of Mumbo Jumbo’s Pendulum Chronology for Coalition Politics,” Ethnic Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2003). Parks, John G. “Mining and Undermining the Old Plots: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” Centennial Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 163–170. Reed, Ishmael. Mumbo Jumbo. New York: Scribner, 1972. ———. “The Writer as Seer: Ishmael Reed on Ishmael Reed.” In Conversations with Ishmael Reed, edited by Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh, 59–73. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. Tamiko Nimura

MURAYAMA, MILTON (1923– )

Milton Murayama, the author of a planned tetralogy that examines the Japanese-American experience in Hawaii, has thus far published three of his projected four novels depicting the Oyama clan, a plantation family struggling with the often irreconcilable cultural clashes between ancestral Japanese traditions and the sometimes radically different Hawaiian and American cus-

936 MUSIC OF CHANCE, THE

toms. The first, ALL I ASKING FOR IS MY BODY (1988), addresses issues of ethnicity and class on the plantation where the Oyama family lives and works. Although the novel faced the usual difficulties in finding a publisher, it triumphed by winning the 1980 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. It was followed by Five Years on a Rock (1994), told from the mother’s perspective: Sawa Oyama, an issei (a Japanese who was ineligible by law, until 1952, to become an American citizen), uses traditional Japanese coping mechanisms to survive the often harrowing changes in her daily life. The third novel, Plantation Boy (1998), features Toshio, the elder Oyama son, who fails the physical examination for the U.S. Army but, through much effort and hard work, manages to leave the plantation. Milton Murayama was born on April 10, 1923, in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii, to Japanese immigrants from Kyushu, Japan. He studied at the University of Hawaii. At the outbreak of World War II, while serving in the Territorial Guard, he, along with all other Japanese Americans, was immediately discharged after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He volunteered to work with military intelligence in 1944, and served in the China-Burma-India theater. As a bilingual officer, he was involved in the Japanese surrender and repatriation in Taiwan. After the war, he received a B.A. from the University of Hawaii and earned an M.A. in Chinese and Japanese at Columbia University in 1950. Although he and his wife, Dawn, live in San Francisco, he continues to write about the Japanese-American experience in Hawaii, making this part of U.S. history available to all Americans.

NOVELS All I Asking for Is My Body. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988. Five Years on a Rock. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994. Plantation Boy. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998.

SOURCES Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.

Luangphinith, Seri. “Milton Murayama.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 281–288. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Sumida, Stephen H. And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai’i. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993.

MUSIC OF CHANCE, THE PAUL AUSTER (1990) In The Music of Chance, Paul AUSTER’s examination of the postmodern theme of self-willed solitude does not end in purposelessness. Although Auster uses a recurrent motif of the inheritance that alters the daily routine for the main character, and the gradual squandering of the money until the character is left with nothing, the true subject of the novel is freedom. Through Jim Nashe, Auster questions the American notion of freedom: the impulse to risk everything at a drop of a card. By the end of the novel, as Nashe clears his mind, his notion of freedom changes. Although Nashe is trapped in a rigidly determined manufactured system, he has transcended everything he had been, and he now sees himself “as a man destined for great things” (203): a great figure, who understands himself. The novel begins with Jim Nashe sitting behind the wheel of a car, crisscrossing America as he waits for his money to run out. One year earlier when Nashe received an inheritance from his father, he quit his job as a fireman in Boston, left his daughter Juliette with his sister, sold his possessions, bought a red two-door Saab 900, and stocked it with classical cassettes before he took to the road. Although Jim Nashe had not planned to leave his past behind for more than a few weeks, he became imprisoned by his desire for what he believed to be the notion of freedom. Every morning, before Nashe fell asleep, he would convince himself that he would end his adventure, but he was addicted to the idea of motion, and, therefore, every afternoon when he awoke, he had the insatiable urge to get back into his car. Nashe “wanted the solitude again, that nightlong rush through the

MUSIC OF CHANCE, THE 937

emptiness, that rumbling of the road along his skin” (7). Unable to curb his need for more time behind the wheel, Nashe felt he had no burdens, and “he was unencumbered by even the slightest particle of his former life” (12). Therefore, it is sheer coincidence that on the third day of the 13th month, Nashe, after stashing the remainder of his inheritance in the Saab’s glove compartment, meets Jack Pozzi, a young gambler who calls himself Jackpot. Nashe immediately decides to back Pozzi in a poker game against Bill Flower and Willie Stone, a couple of eccentrics supposed to be easy marks. Even though Pozzi is down on his luck, he metaphorically represents “the hole in the wall that would get [Nashe] from one side to the other” (36). Pozzi was solely “an opportunity in the shape of a human being, a card-playing specter whose one purpose in the world was to help Nashe win back his freedom” (36–37). But because Nashe perceives freedom as something produced by forces beyond his control, freedom remains an illusion for him. An easy comparison for The Music of Chance is to a jigsaw puzzle: The pieces are interesting because they foretell a larger picture they will combine to form. Once Nashe learns that Pozzi’s boyhood is reminiscent of his own—the absent father, the unexpected gifts of money, and the eternal anger—he no longer looks at Pozzi as a “card-playing specter” but as a link to his own past. Therefore, after Nashe and Pozzi arrive at the Pennsylvania estate, Nashe begins to question whether chance is divine or humanmade. When Flower, a former accountant, gives Nashe and Pozzi a rambling account of how he and Stone made their fortune, his logic that “Numbers have souls” (73) obliterates the idea that what seems to be chance may not be chance at all. While they tour the mansion, Nashe ponders the absurdity of his being there as he enumerates “the odd conjunctions of chance that had put him in this particular house at this particular moment” (77). Nashe’s impression of Flower and Stone changes now that he sees that this pair of eccentrics, who he first thought appeared daft but harmless, were “under all

the cuteness and intricacy” (87) cruel and revengeful. Nashe is astounded by Stone’s ability to construct a model of a totalitarian world, where good triumphs over evil, and he is haunted by Flower’s museum: “a graveyard of shadows” (84). As Flower expounds that Americans destroy their past and rush “headlong into the future, our cousins on the other side of the pond are more attached to their history, they belong to a tradition” (84). Nashe understands that Flower’s memorabilia had nothing to do with history but was collected solely for material purpose, and “condemned by Flower to go on existing for no reason at all” (84). Nashe comprehends that Flower and Stone believe they won the lottery because they were chosen by God. As Nashe is about to gamble away his life on their table, he is acutely aware that the rich can do anything they wish because the law is on their side, and that the barriers they build to keep things out may serve as well to keep things in. In the game, Pozzi’s luck fails; Nashe puts up his Saab as collateral and loses it, then plunges $10,000 into debt on a single cut of the cards. Nashe and Pozzi find themselves compelled to remain on the estate, hand-building a wall to pay off their debt, and Nashe now recognizes that by following the appealing rhythms of chance, he is now trapped in a rigidly determined humanmade system. Often Auster’s stories interact with reality as he refers to his own experience, to literature, or to actual historical figures and events. In The Music of Chance, he introduces a “fifteenth century Irish castle destroyed by Oliver Cromwell” (85) to suggest that “our cousins” also destroy the past. Therefore, Stone’s “architectural closure,” an invented utopian world where powerful men’s dark dreams are enacted, symbolizes any rigidly determined humanmade system. Is it a coincidence that Stone, like Cromwell, believes it was not society but one’s behavior within society that must be reformed? Or that Cromwell, after legally executing Charles I, cut himself off from justifications of political authority rooted in the past? Or that his self-justification lay in the future, in the belief that he was fulfilling God’s will? Is it pure chance that like Auster, Nashe

938 MY ÁNTONIA

opens FAULKNER’s novel The Sound and the Fury and comes “across these words in the middle of a sentence: ‘until someday in very disgust he risks everything on the single blind turn of a card’ ” (202)? If Pozzi metaphorically represents “the hole in the wall that would get [Nashe] from one side to the other,” then perhaps Auster’s concern is how one reacts when imprisoned behind walls. Nashe finally imagines that he was living inside Stone’s model, and when “Flower and Stone would look down on him then, and he would suddenly be able to see himself through their eyes—as if he were no larger than a thumb a little gray mouse darting back and forth in his cage” (178). Therefore, although uncanny and often disturbing, Auster’s work intersects with reality. The Music of Chance suggests that the appealing rhythms of chance are illusory and that all of us are trapped in a rigidly determined humanmade system.

SOURCES Auster, Paul. The Music of Chance. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———. The Art of Hunger. New York: Penguin, 1997. Harriet Gold

MY ÁNTONIA WILLA CATHER (1918)

Narrated by Jim Burden as a memoir of his childhood and early youth in the prairies, Willa CATHER’s My Ántonia centers on the life of the pioneers in the wild borderland of Nebraska in the late 19th century. Jim’s memories are constructed around a pivotal character, Ántonia Shimerda, one of the children of Bohemian immigrants who settle in the area at the same time that Jim, an orphan, arrives at his grandparents’ farm. Thus, both children begin their lives in Nebraska by having to face the harshness of life in the prairie. Jim’s position is a privileged one—his grandparents are long-established farmers—but the Shimerdas live in misery and need their neighbors’ help. Given this context, the friendship between Jim and Ántonia is not limited to children’s games. He becomes her English teacher, and learning the language becomes her vehicle of socialization and integration into soci-

ety. The principal bond between them, however, arises because Jim alone can understand Ántonia’s sorrow after her father’s suicide. Mr. Shimerda, raised as a city man, fails to adapt to the stern country life of Nebraska; too spiritual to bear his failure as a farmer and lacking his daughter’s inner strength, Mr. Shimerda cannot cope with the harsh changes that immigrant life demands of him. His wife, a mean woman as desperate and unhappy as her husband, at least finds an outlet in constant complaining. Ántonia, who inherits both her father’s love of beauty and art and her mother’s survival instinct, turns to Jim, who shares her poetic sensibility and becomes her source of confidence and reliability. Jim witnesses Ántonia’s struggle against nature, poverty, and her own family. He sees her work hard on the farm, enjoy the pleasures of youth while employed as a hired girl in town, suffer the desertion of her baby’s father, and reach a respectable though modest position as a farmer’s wife and the mother of a big family. Their relationship is intermittent, punctuated by longer and longer separations, but always tender, and each of them continues to be a referent for the other. For Jim, Ántonia is not only a dear friend but also the symbol of the life in the prairies. The novel also focuses on diverse European immigrant characters who struggle to establish themselves in the United States, suffering misfortune as they battle the forces of nature in the prairies. Simultaneously, though, their belief in the American dream and the human power to overcome nature keeps them moving forward, starting over and then over again, as necessary. The Norwegian Lena Lingard, the Swedish Tiny Soderball, the three Bohemian Marys, and the young Danish women from the laundry all come from povertystricken households to which they send the money they earn as hired women. At the same time, however, all these young immigrant women demonstrate a love of life that Jim appreciates and misses in the well-bred “town girls.” Cather’s presentation suggests that town life alienates people from the traditional values and strengths that their immigrant forbears brought with them. It is important that the descriptions of the land-

MY NEXT BRIDE 939

scape and farming routines are full of color and symbolism, as when Jim and the young women see a plough standing against the setting sun as emblematic of reconciliation between humankind and nature. Many critics have observed that the land becomes another character in the novel—its changing face seeming to mock the farmers in the winter and offer its treasures in spring. Jim’s killing of the big snake is in fact not the success he and Ántonia had first thought, because the snake is old, tired, and not used to fighting. This is one of the ironies of a land that does not easily succumb to defeat. Cather incorporates personal experience in this novel, and readers frequently notice the autobiographical parallels. To many, Jim is an evident representation of Cather, and the settings and most characters have clear sources in real life. Ántonia might in fact be Anna Pavelka, a Bohemian acquaintance of Cather whose life resembles in several aspects that of the character in the novel. On the other hand, in a feminist reading, Ántonia may also represent the life that Cather would have lived had she not left Nebraska: Ántonia’s life is satisfactory in many respects, but conventional, perhaps, in terms of the passion and promise shown in her girlhood. My Ántonia continues to be read as a valuable report of the making of a new country at a point when and a place where everybody was still foreign, and cultural differences were overlooked on behalf of the common enterprise. At first, Mrs. Burden—Jim’s grandmother—does not realize the needs of the Bohemian family, and she criticizes Mrs. Shimerda’s domestic skills, but her good sense impels her to be charitable with the immigrant woman. The religious distance between both families is also bridged by the magnanimous Mr. Burden. Moreover, the Burdens’ farm workers, Jake and Otto, are portrayed as rough men full of generosity and loyalty, the very spirit of the pioneers. In this novel, Cather offers a portrait of America in its process of developing through work and the intermingling of cultures. The different fates of the characters show the opportunities that pioneers seized and the victories they achieved for their descendants: Jim goes to university and becomes a

lawyer, Ántonia becomes the wife of a prosperous farmer, Lena establishes herself as a successful dressmaker, Tiny becomes rich because of gold mining. None of them, however, forgets her origins and the roots that tied them to the land.

SOURCE Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Ana Beatriz Delgado

MY NEXT BRIDE KAY BOYLE (1934) Although the author’s note to My Next Bride states that “the characters in this novel are entirely fictitious, and have no reference whatsoever to real people, living or dead,” Kay BOYLE’s fourth novel is an autobiographical retelling of her own 1928 experiences at Raymond Duncan’s Grecian colony in the Neuilly suburb of Paris. Victoria John (Boyle’s character) arrives in Paris from Montreal, Canada, looking for work. Renting a room in a run-down boarding house, she shares an impoverished lifestyle with two older Russian noblewomen, Miss Fira and Miss Grusha. It is her troubled financial situation that takes Victoria to work at Sorrel’s (Duncan’s) commune, where she is fed, paid to work, and free to paint. Victoria’s contribution to the commune is to maintain the colony’s shop in town that sells tunics, scarves, and carpets supposedly made by colony members. Sorrel’s “wife” Matilde is jealous of Victoria, which prevents her from sleeping at the colony; this nightly separation from Sorrel and his followers creates an opportunity for Victoria to live a limited private life. Outside of the commune culture, the wealthy Antony pulls Victoria into Paris nightlife. On the morning after a boat party, Victoria’s fuzzy memory, sore body, and muddy cape indicate she has been raped. Victoria’s sexual fall from innocence is paralleled with her fall from Sorrel’s graces as she lets two wealthy American women leave the shop without spending all their money. Sorrel himself undergoes a spiritual fall: His choice to use the women’s money to buy an expensive American car instead of investing in

940 MY NEXT BRIDE

a printing press or looms for the colony reveals his selfish, materialistic motives. Victoria’s life is further complicated when she discovers she is pregnant and unsure of the father. Deciding that she does not want the child, Victoria obtains the requisite pills for her self-ministered chemical abortion, but it makes her very ill and is not effective. In Antony’s absence, the relationship between Fontana (his elusive wife) and Victoria grows stronger. The women make numerous plans together, including a surgical abortion for Victoria. The night before the operation, the women fall asleep in each other’s arms; the following morning, both women read of Antony’s suicide in a newspaper. Readers familiar with Boyle’s 1968 reissue of Being Geniuses Together (1938) may find it difficult to separate the story line of My Next Bride from Boyle’s memoir. Victoria’s unwanted pregnancy corresponds to Boyle’s own, which also ended in abortion (paid for by her lover, American expatriate poet Harry Crosby). The physical pain Victoria suffers reflects Boyle’s attack of spinal meningitis, probably contracted from the courtyard privy described in the novel. The two stories diverge, however, on Boyle’s departure from the colony. Raymond and the other colony members were prepared to let Boyle leave the commune, but she had to devise an elaborate plan to leave with her daughter Sharon (Boyle, 324–326). Other autobiographical connections include roman à clef identifications in addition to the Boyle/Victoria and Duncan/Sorrel characters. The critic Doris Grumbach maintains that Antony and Fontana represent heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim and sculptor and writer Laurence Vail (Boyle’s future spouse), whereas others, such as Hugh Ford, stipulate that the couple corresponds more directly to Harry Crosby and his wife, Caresse (Morse, 323; Ford, 191). The latter is more likely the case, as My Next Bride was dedicated to Caresse Crosby, and Boyle wanted to prove through the example of her characters Victoria and Antony that though she and Harry spent much time together, there was never a physical relationship between them (thus neither between their corresponding characters).

Kay Boyle is known as a master of short stories, particularly for her elegant imagery and wordplays. The negative contemporary criticism of Bride, however, indicates it was not well received (Mellen, 189). Even if this early work lacks the sophistication evident in later pieces, the psychological relationships evoked across the text require examination. For Boyle, the story is “a history of women . . . and of that nameless and nonsexual thing that can bind women to each other closer than can any relationship with men” (Mellen, 188). Since two of the three parts of the novel (“Sorrel,” “Antony,” and “Fontana”) are named after men and treat Victoria’s relationship with them, it may be easy to overlook the female interactions evoked in Boyle’s statement. There are numerous female relationships that can be explored, though, in the simultaneous microcosms of the boardinghouse and the colony. In both situations, women claim power over other women, such as the female owner and housekeeper who rule by instilling fear in the two codependent elderly sisters; Matilde, Sorrel’s mistress, controls the colony by deciding who will do what work and how. Another form of female influence comes from the “absent” yet present women: The photographs of Victoria’s mother and Mary de Lacey, Victoria’s mentor, speak to Victoria, especially as she comes to terms with her rape. Fontana is present by name only all through the second part of the novel, preventing a romantic relationship between Victoria and Antony, physically appearing in the third part (after Antony’s departure). A final example of female power is an economic one: Sorrel’s colony is dependent on the financial support of women, such as the women who come for tea and the rich American women who buy Sorrel’s products. Reclaimed by second-wave feminists for its treatment of these female power relationships, female sexuality, and abortion, Bride was reissued by Virago Modern Classics in 1986.

SOURCES Boyle, Kay, and Robert McAlmon. Being Geniuses Together. 1938. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. Ford, Hugh. Four Lives in Paris. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987. Grumbach, Doris. Afterword to My Next Bride, by Kay Boyle, 321–330. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.

MY NEXT BRIDE 941

Mellen, Joan. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Morse, Deborah Denenholz. “My Next Bride: Kay Boyle’s Text of the Female Artist,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 34, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 334–346.

Werlock, Abby H. “Advancing Literary Women: Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, and My Next Bride.” In Critical Essays on Kay Boyle, edited by Marilyn Elkins. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Amy D. Lynn

C

ND

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR (VLADIMIROVICH) (1899–1977) Vladimir Nabokov is uni-

England at Cambridge University, earning a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in 1925. That same year he married Vera Evseevna Slonim on April 15, and published his first novel, Mashen’ka, later translated as Mary, a 1920s story of love and loss in Berlin. He followed with Korol’, dama, valet, translated as King, Queen, Knave. The plot involved a love triangle and a murder. Although he continued to write in Russian, Nabokov’s successful translation of one of his Russian novels, Otchayanie (1934), into Despair (1937) bolstered his decision to write in English. After the Berlin and Paris years, Nabokov emigrated to the United States, where he remained for 21 years. His last move was to Switzerland, where he lived for the rest of his life. Not surprisingly, since he was a perpetual exile after the age of 19, Nabokov wrote from a sense of irretrievable loss and a store of memories. It has become customary to focus on Nabokov’s writing based on where he was living. These break down into four phases: Berlin (1919–37), Paris (1937–40); Ithaca, New York (1948–58); and Montreux, Switzerland (1960–77). His Russian novels remained untranslated until the 1950s and therefore unavailable to most American readers, but Nabokov remedied that obstacle by translating his own works with the help of his son, Dmitry. During the first two phases, Nabokov wrote under the pseudonym V. Sirin, leaving the name Vladimir Nabokov for works written by his father. After his father was fatally shot at a political meeting in Berlin,

versally revered for his contributions to the literature of the United States and Russia. A trilingual novelist, scholar, literary critic, translator, poet, essay writer, and lepidopterist, he helped bring European modernism to the United States. His enormous body of work includes nearly a score of novels, eight of which were written in English, the most famous being LOLITA, published in Paris in 1955 and in New York in 1958. Also much admired are PALE FIRE (1962) and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). A writer of enormous complexity, Nabokov delighted in playing word games—through puns, acrostics, anagrams, and the like—with the reader and in this respect anticipated one of the major tenets of postmodernism. He was also deeply concerned with the relationship among art, memory, and individual reality, and the meaningful connection that can be made among seemingly disparate strands. In 1969 he was awarded the Medal of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 1973, the National Medal for Literature. Vladimir Nabokov (pronounced Vla-DEE-meer Nah-BOKE-off) was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a lawyer and statesman, and Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov Nabokova. During the upheavals of the Russian Revolution the family fled to Berlin in 1919, moved to Paris, and, from 1937 to 1940, Nabokov studied in 942

NABOKOV, VLADIMIR 943

however, he used Vladimir Nabokov, the name associated with his debut as an American author. In his 1941 American debut novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov tells of the narrator’s search for the truth about Sebastian Knight, his half brother and a Russian writer; the unresolved ending raises the possibility that the narrator is actually Sebastian, or even a mysterious third person. He followed with Bend Sinister (1947), featuring an ideological and physical battle between the philosopher Adam Krug and The Toad, the dictator of an imaginary European country. His next American novel, Lolita, is, on the surface, a lurid tale about a middle-aged Frenchman who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl and travels across the United States with her until she escapes. The novel continues to fascinate readers because of Nabokov’s ability to persuade them to put aside their shock and moral reactions and become mesmerized not only by the characters themselves but also by the author’s artistic depiction of the 20th-century United States. Nabokov’s successful presentation of Humbert Humbert, who convinces readers that his is a love story, and that he is not a pervert, pederast, or an abuser of children, is an impressive accomplishment, about which Nabokov stated, “I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (Nabokov, 193). In 1957 Nabokov satirized academia in America from the perspective of a Russian immigrant professor in Pnin. His widely admired autobiography, Speak, Memory (originally entitled Conclusive Evidence), appeared in 1951. It was revised in 1966. The success of Lolita meant that Nabokov could devote full time to his writing, and he and his wife moved to Montreux, Switzerland, to be near their son, an opera singer. He continued to write in English, publishing one of his most complex novels, Pale Fire (1962). Structured as commentary on a poem in four cantos, the novel’s story is fully revealed only as the reader follows clues, moving backward and forward, reading and rereading. His last significant work, Ada, became, like Lolita, an instant best-seller. A tale of incest, it features

the youthful Van Veen and his cousin who fall in love, only to learn that they are brother and sister. Their separation lasts until middle age, when they live amicably together until old age, illustrating one of Nabokov’s main ideas, the link between memory and time. Even though he left the United States for Switzerland in 1961, Nabokov never lost his feeling for the United States, telling a BBC interviewer that he intended to return to America, which he thought of “with tenderness,” the moment the opportunity arose: “The thrill with which I think of certain trails in the Rockies is only matched by visions of my Russian woods, which I will never revisit” (123). In Switzerland he published Transparent Things (1972), a novella featuring Hugh Person, a mild-mannered husband who strangles his wife, Armande, to death. Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Nabokov’s last novel, is narrated by a Nabokov-like author who mocks those who try to connect writers with the characters who people their novels. Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, of a viral infection, in Montreux, Switzerland. He had been working on a novel, still unpublished and in fragmentary form, called “The Original of Laura.” Laughter in the Dark was adapted by Edward Bond as a featurelength film in 1969; and King, Queen, Knave was adapted as a film by David Wolper-Maran Productions in 1972. Invitation to a Beheading was dramatized for the stage and produced in New York in 1969, and Lolita, My Love, a musical version of Nabokov’s novel Lolita, was produced on Broadway in 1971.

NOVELS IN ENGLISH Ada. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. Bend Sinister. New York: Holt, 1947. Conclusive Evidence. New York: Harper, 1951. Eugene Onegin. Alexander Pushkin, 4 vols. Translator and annotater, New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1963. Lolita. Paris: Olympia, 1955. New York: Putnam’s, 1958. Look at the Harlequins! New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam’s, 1962. Pnin. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Speak, Memory (revised memoirs originally published as Conclusive Evidence [1951]). New York: Putnam’s, 1966. Transparent Things. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972.

944 NAKED AND THE DEAD, THE

SOURCES Appel, Alfred, Jr., ed. The Annotated Lolita. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. ———, and Charles Newman, eds. Nabokov: Criticisms, Reminiscences, Translations, and Tributes. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970. ———. Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1972. Bader, Julia. Crystall Land: Artifice in Nabokov’s English Novels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Blot, Jean. Nabokov. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995. Clancy, Laurie. The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Macmillan, 1984. Connolly, Julian, ed. Invitation to a Beheading: A Critical Companion. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Desternes, Jean, ed. L’Affaire Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press, 1959. Diment, Galya. Pniniad: Vladimir Nabokov and Marc Szeftel. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Field, Andrew. Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. ———. V. N.: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown, 1986. Fowler, Douglas. Reading Nabokov. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974. Grabes, H. Fictitious Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov’s English Novels. Hawthorne, N.Y.: Mouton, 1977. Grayson, Jane. Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1976. Hyde, G. M. Vladimir Nabokov: America’s Russian Novelist. New York: Marion Boyars, 1978. Johnson, Kurt. Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Lee, L. L. Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Long, Michael. Marvell, Nabokov: Childhood and Arcadia. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984. Mason, Bobbie Ann. Nabokov’s Garden: A Guide to Ada. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Press, 1974. Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. New York: McGrawHill, 1973. Packman, David. Vladimir Nabokov: The Structure of Literary Desire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Proffer, Carl. Keys to Lolita. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———, ed. A Book of Things about Vladimir Nabokov. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Press, 1973.

Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Robinson, Robert. “The Last Interview.” In Vladimir Nabokov, His Life, His Work, His World: A Tribute, edited by Peter Quennell, 119–125. 1977. Reprinted, New York: William Morrow, 1980. Roth, Phyllis A. Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Schuman, Samuel. Vladimir Nabokov: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Toker, Leona. Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structure. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. Wood, Michael. The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Zimmer, Dieter E. A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths. Hamburg, Germany: D. E. Zimmer, 1996.

NAKED AND THE DEAD, THE NORMAN MAILER (1948) Norman MAILER’s first published novel, The Naked and the Dead, tracks the movements of a reconnaissance platoon stationed on the fictional island of Anopopei in the Pacific theater of World War II. In Norman Mailer Revisited, Robert Merrill notes that Mailer volunteered for the reconnaissance division during his time in the service between 1944 and 1946. Because Mailer had already written a “short novel that can only be considered a trial run for The Naked and the Dead,” Merrill suggests that Mailer used his war experience as a background for the novel he had already envisioned, warning against reading the novel as a “transcription” of events of the war (Merrill, 12). Mailer focuses relatively little of the novel on details of combat or military strategy and instead deals primarily with the interactions of the men in the platoon. Mailer’s four main characters, General Cummings, Lieutenant Hearn, Sergeant Croft, and the enlisted Red Valsen, as well as the ensemble of other men who make up the platoon, represent a wide range of military experience. These men’s individual personalities drive not only the dramatic action of the novel but also the military operations on Anopopei. Just as the rise of fascism and Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor prodded America into action, Mailer provides plenty within his novel to motivate his characters

NAKED AND THE DEAD, THE 945

into action. The men chafe against Cummings and Croft, two fascist-like characters, and they all rebel against their control to a greater or lesser degree. The character of Goldstein alludes further to the particular politics of the war in his statement about officers versus enlisted men: “But that’s why we can’t afford to have such an attitude. We’re fighting against that” (53). The novel explores the recognition of the dangers of totalitarianism and of the value of diversity and cultural acceptance. After a lengthy introduction to the characters, the action of The Naked and Dead centers on a singularly intense patrol by a reconnaissance platoon under the command of General Cummings. By structuring the novel in this way, Mailer simultaneously examines the men as a collective—the platoon and its experiences on the island patrol—and as individuals, something Mailer takes great pains to do by alternating the narrative from the different perspectives of the men and dedicating “The Time Machine” chapters to the premilitary lives of his most important protagonists. “The Time Machine” chapters are important to the narrative of the novel because of the way they interweave civilian and military life, emphasizing that the same autonomy and ideology men have in their individual lives they bring with them to the service. Consequently, the traditional narrative of America versus the enemy is downplayed in the novel so it should not eclipse the conflicts within the individual men that are just as heavily rooted in the cultural and political context of the novel. The epigraph to the third and final portion of the novel addresses the conflict between “the beast and seer in man,” a theme running through Mailer’s novel. Mailer includes a quotation from Nietzsche: “Even the wisest among you is only a disharmony and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I bid you become phantoms or plants?” The conflict between “the beast and the seer in man” is an important part of the novel and Mailer’s characterization. Merrill explains his perspective on the epigraph: “This rhetorical question implies that man should be neither ‘plant’ nor ‘phantom’ exclusively; neither all body nor all soul; neither beast nor seer. . . . The ultimate effect of Mailer’s parallel plots is to emphasize this ‘disharmony’ in each character” (Merrill, 25). None

of Mailer’s characters stands out as an unadulterated hero, but many of them have an aspect of the heroic about them, and together they work as a successful unit, balancing each other out to create a functioning group. Mailer highlights his construction of character: “The Naked and Dead is concerned more with characters than military action” (Merrill, 14). Examining his characters and their interactions with one another becomes an important way to work through the novel. The mission the men work so hard at throughout the novel proves fruitless to the taking of Anopopei from the Japanese. Although their mission seems hopeless and their service meaningless, Mailer sees his novel as anything but, explaining: People say it is a novel without hope. . . . Actually, it offers a good deal of hope. I intended it to be a parable about the movement of man through history. I tried to explore the outrageous proportions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society. The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world. (Lennon, 14) In the struggles of the reconnaissance platoon that the reader experiences intimately, Mailer exposes the tyranny of fascism, the importance of individuality, the value of sensitivity, and the ultimate ability of men to strive for—and reach—something better.

SOURCES Leigh, Nigel. Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Conversations with Norman Mailer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Mailer, Norman. The Naked and the Dead: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Picador USA, 1998. Merrill, Robert. Norman Mailer Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Wilson, Raymond J., III. “Control and Freedom in The Naked and the Dead,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 164–181. Zivah Perel

946 NAKED LUNCH

NAKED LUNCH WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1959) Naked Lunch is not a conventional novel by either current or historical standards. Although coherent ideas run through some of its various sections, BURROUGHS’s burlesque treatments of the general concept of addiction appear as a series of “routines,” vignettes that are not necessarily connected thematically, although a reader may make connections as one might in sequences of dreams or nightmares. Therefore, reading Naked Lunch demands some unconventional habits from an audience. Burroughs himself suggests that the book can be picked up and read at any point between its covers. In a letter to the poet Allen Ginsberg dated October 28, 1957, Burroughs wrote of the developing manuscript that if “anyone finds this form confusing, it is because they are accustomed to the historical novel form, which is a three-dimensional chronology of events happening to someone already, for the purposes of the novel, dead. That is the usual novel has happened. This novel is happening.” The fragmentary nature of Naked Lunch probably derives from the psychological chaos Burroughs suffered around the time he began making notes and sketches in the form of routines. The satirical, darkly funny, and perverse scenarios of Naked Lunch were composed after a lengthy and crippling period of detoxification from heroin and Eukodol, an addictive morphinelike compound that Burroughs compares to a “speedball,” a combination of cocaine and heroin. Burroughs has provided us with routines inspired by this withdrawal. As Burroughs says in the introduction to Naked Lunch, he “apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium.” The routines of Naked Lunch, composed after his detoxification (not incidentally aided by his frequent use of marijuana) and later revised, include metaphorical caricatures of certain human “types,” as is true with the best satire. Burroughs’s routines are true to the principle described by the 18th-century British novelist and essayist Jonathan Swift in a letter to the poet and essayist Alexander Pope: In this famous exchange between the two satirists, Swift attempts to empathize with individuals, reserving his venom for representatives of “nations, professions, and communities.”

The various “chapters” in Naked Lunch take aim at those for whom power and social and political control are as addictive as a drug. Some of Burroughs’s most famous characters, Dr. Benway and AJ, are satirical caricatures of burgeoning, unethical technological medicine: To Benway and his ilk, humans are, first and foremost, programmable thinking machines. The administration of heroin, among other methods, is a tool vital to this programming. Benway and his appendage “Dr. ‘Fingers’ Schafer, The Lobotomy Kid,” are recurrent figures throughout Burroughs’s fiction, first unleashed upon the reader of Naked Lunch. Benway and Schafer are evil twins represented in satirical caricature, calling attention to what Burroughs presciently calls “Technical Psychiatry,” the unethical misapplication of biological science that can produce “The Complete All American Deanxietized Man,” reducible to “a compact and abbreviated spinal column,” the brain becoming vestigial and going “the way of the adenoid, the wisdom tooth, the appendix.” Dr. Benway and his illegitimate offspring Schafer typify the tendency to abandon ethics in favor of expedience and, most important, call attention to the corruption of the “human artifact” made possible when medicine has the power to redesign and reprogram it according to some “innaresting” models. Benway and Schafer seem to have, “in some unspeakable manner,” presaged the current ethical dilemmas emerging from advances in genetic engineering. In short, Benway is a control addict. “The Black Meat” routine, which introduces the Mugwump, is another of the book’s many metaphorical treatments of addiction. The Mugwump is a creature that exudes “an addicting fluid from [its] erect penis” for the benefit of “Reptiles,” chameleon-like addicts of Mugwump fluid. Reptiles are, in effect, junkies placed in an otherworldly, hallucinatory scene. Naked Lunch also contains many graphic depictions of violence and sexual rituals and encounters. Most disturbing, perhaps, are the descriptions of unconventional sex and sexual hanging in “AJ’s Annual Party.” (Such shocking scenes led to the book’s prohibition and its eventual exoneration on First Amendment grounds by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts in 1966.) While critics like to interpret this ritual as a

NAMESAKE, THE 947

metaphor describing the psychological connection between sex and death, between creation and destruction, pain and pleasure, it might also be, as the author himself suggests, “written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism that it is. As always the lunch is naked.” Nevertheless, as Burroughs claims, “authors are the poorest judges of their own work.” We are left, ultimately, to assign significance to fiction, and the multilayered, savage complexities of Naked Lunch allow us ample opportunity to do so. Naked Lunch demands multiple readings. As the heroin addict never becomes completely free of the lure of the drug that “describes, limits, and defines addiction,” the rest of William Burroughs’s fiction is predominantly an extension of these routines, tales that include the further adventures of his characters. Naked Lunch is the first installment of, indeed it is the template for, the entire mythological system that is his body of work.

SOURCES Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 1990. ———. Queer. New York: Penguin, 1987. Harris, Oliver, ed. The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945–1959. New York: Viking, 1993. David Schwankle

NAMESAKE, THE JHUMPA LAHIRI (2003) Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her short story anthology, The Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has now published her first novel, The Namesake. Like her earlier work, the text tells the story of first- and second-generation Bengali Americans and has received critical acclaim. The reason for its success could be that Lahiri is among the latest American writers to tell the nation’s unfolding story in a revealing and refreshing way. Writing from a lesser-known perspective—she sees herself as part of a literary minority (Bahadur)—she focuses on character and individual lives in The Namesake, while recording the ethnocul-

tural changes to American society since national immigration policy was liberalized in 1965. Gogol Ganguli, the protagonist of The Namesake, is born in Boston in 1968 and is so called because his newly emigrated parents, Ashoke and Ashima, are still awaiting a letter from Ashima’s grandmother in Calcutta instructing them what to name their child. When the letter mysteriously never arrives, the Gangulis are forced to find an official name for their son. Following the Bengali tradition of two names—a “good” one for external use and a “pet” one for family situations—they register him under his pet name, Gogol. Ashoke makes this unusual choice because, as a student in Calcutta in the early 1960s, he is rescued from the wreckage of a train accident when he is spotted clutching a page from his prized book of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s stories. While recovering from the accident, he remembers a conversation on the train with Mr. Ghosh, a stranger who had reluctantly returned to India from Britain and had urged him to emigrate, and Ashoke resolves to move as far from home as possible. He applies, and is accepted, for a Ph.D. program at MIT. The conjunction between Ashoke’s near-death experience and his love of literature underpins the novel’s central trope of naming, which symbolizes and frames the clash of Euro-American and incipient South Asian American cultures. This conflict, which takes place against the canonical literary landscape of New England, is embodied most of all by Gogol himself. As he is growing up, he associates his name with his parents’ culture and longs to rid himself of both the name and the traditions. This culminates in his decision at 18 to change his name legally to Nikhil, the “good” name he initially rejected when his parents tried to call him that as a child entering kindergarten. Life as Nikhil (itself a “respectable” Bengali name that also echoes Nikolai, the first part of his Russian namesake’s name) proves happier and marks the dawning of independence for Lahiri’s protagonist. He goes on to receive an Ivy League education before moving to New York City to become an architect, and he enjoys several romantic relationships, always with glamorous, white American women.

948 NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, THE

Lahiri maintains, however, that “Nikhil” will always be “Gogol”—the name he continues to be called by her third-person narrator. The unmistakable implication is that the person he was as a child and teenager remains in some way his true essence, and that therefore his identity, while clearly not Russian like his “namesake,” is also neither entirely American nor South Asian. More obliquely, Lahiri suggests (like a number of other Asian-American writers) that one’s ancestral culture is ultimately inescapable. Gogol can never move very far from the sphere of his family. This point is made geographically, as he never leaves the northeastern United States. It is also made emotionally when, following his father’s sudden death, he decides to marry a fellow Bengali American, Moushumi, whose family are part of the same close-knit circle as his parents. At the same time Lahiri problematizes Gogol’s adult response to his Indian heritage. Although he genuinely loves Moushumi and relishes their shared cultural background, the differences between them prove insurmountable, with Moushumi effectively ending the relationship when she has an affair. Through subtly shifting narrative perspectives, Lahiri sympathetically elucidates the thoughts of Gogol, Ashoke, Ashima, and Moushumi. Her use of the present tense allows her to create the impression that Gogol is a work in progress and to eschew the conventional, retrospective tone of a traditional bildungsroman. This narrative strategy also concentrates the reader’s mind on the series of subtle observations upon which the text is predicated. Besides her overt references to Nikolai Gogol, Lahiri engages with his work in a more indirect way through her similarly precise attention to apparently minor details. Like fellow South Asian–American writer Bharati Mukherjee, Lahiri repeatedly signals that the first generation is clear-sighted, brave, and pioneering in making a new life on the other side of the world. (Gogol’s passivity and confusion appear in almost direct, inverse proportion to such dynamism and practicality.) Meanwhile, Ashima’s reverse migration to Calcutta at the end of the novel is sensitively explored, her ambivalent feelings about “home” echoing those of other South-Asian

migrants—such as Chitra Banerjee DIVAKARUNI’s Indianborn matriarchs—in American literature. The novel implies that while first-generation Indian Americans like Ashima generally hold on to old-country values, assimilation and Americanization are inevitable for their children. The faultlines of Gogol’s short-lived marriage reflect the fragility of this ancestral culture once it has been transplanted. Lahiri makes the further point, through her sustained portrait of pre-9/11 New York, that the small-town values of Ashoke and Ashima have not survived into the next generation. It is telling that the future marriage, announced toward the end of the novel, of Gogol’s sister Sonia to a non-Bengali, Ben (himself a biracial American), is treated with more optimism than that of Gogol to Moushumi. The novel closes in elegiac fashion on Christmas Eve 2000, with Gogol mourning the end of his marriage, his mother’s imminent departure for India, and—perhaps most poignant of all—his father’s premature death and the things left unsaid between them. He is still caught in a “cultural borderland between India and the United States” (Field, 167).

SOURCES Field, Robin E. “Writing the Second Generation: Negotiating Cultural Borderlands in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake,” South Asian Review 25, no. 2 (2004): 165–177. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Interpreter of Maladies. London: Flamingo, 1999. ———. The Namesake. London: Flamingo, 2004.

OTHER Bahadur, Gaiutra. “20 questions: Jhumpa Lahiri.” Philadelphia Citypaper.net (September 16–23, 1999). Available online. URL: http://citypaper.net/articles/091699/feat.20q. shtml. Accessed September 24, 2005. Ruth Maxey

NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, THE EDGAR ALLAN POE (1838) Edgar Allan POE’s only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, remains, as Frederick Frank observes, the “current Bermuda Triangle in Poe studies” (Frank, 117).

NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, THE 949

Although Frank offered this comment in 1981, continuing critical debates and book-length surveys of the critical history of this novel testify to its impenetrable vortices of meaning. More recently, this novel has been described as one that “prefigures the spiritual dilemma that now conditions our reading of the protagonist’s struggle against meaninglessness” (Kennedy, 13); is historically “beset by controversy in almost every particular” (Farrell, 214); and reveals what can happen when readers “stare too long at the formal aspects of anything” (Sanborn, 175). A strange voyage of false starts and beginnings, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym simultaneously sheds insight into and complicates Poe’s relation to the Gothic tale of terror, his emerging romantic ideas about the cosmos, and his attitudes toward race and his Southern cultural heritage. Long regarded as a problem text in the Poe canon, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym recounts both the plausible and the implausible sea adventures of a narrator identifying himself as Arthur Gordon Pym. In the first three chapters, Pym introduces the reader to his passion for the sea and sailing boat, the Ariel, and to his friend Augustus, son of a sea captain. One night, the two young men attempt to go sailing in Pym’s boat, which is destroyed—not only because of Augustus’s unfit, drunken state, but also because of a terrible storm. Eighteen months later, Augustus plans to join his father, Captain Barnard, aboard the Grampus, a whaling vessel, and he persuades Pym to stowaway. Once the voyage begins, Pym quickly finds himself forgotten by Augustus and stranded in a typically Poesque situation, that is, trapped in unbearably cramped quarters and facing possible death. When Pym finally surfaces, he discovers there has been a mutiny, with many men killed and Augustus’s father set adrift. His narrative then transforms into a sea journal, one that begins on July 3 and ends on March 22. It is Pym’s sea journal that has provoked critical discussion not only about the meaning of the novel, but also about Poe’s sources. Two of the more controversial are Benjamin Morrel’s A Narrative of Four Voyages (1832), an actual voyage from which Poe liberally borrowed and even directly copied to create the latter half of Pym’s narrative; and Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery

(1820), a widely read, early work of science fiction by “Capt. Adam Seaborn.” Seaborn was a pseudonym for John Cleves Symmes, the scientist who authored the theory of concentric spheres and believed that the Earth was hollow. Like the bulk of Poe’s novel, Symzonia offers a metaphoric account of a voyage toward emptiness, though Poe’s actual knowledge of Symmes’s novel remains debatable. In his sea journal, Pym chronicles, first, his terrifying survival among the mutineers, including an unsettling encounter with a mysterious Dutch ship filled with rotting corpses, a horrific episode of cannibalism among the survivors, the slow decay and death of his friend Augustus, and a sea filled with treacherous winds, water, and sharks. Like other of Poe’s narrators, such as those of “Ms. Found in a Bottle” (1833) and “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), Pym records his terrified impressions of these extreme situations, his feelings of powerlessness before awesome natural forces, and his awareness of the pervasive presence of death in human affairs. After eight chapters of torment, Pym and one of the mutineers, Dirk Peters, are rescued by Captain Guy and his vessel, the Jane Guy, a trading schooner bound for the South Seas. This rescue, however, proves only temporary. After discussing the general topography, wildlife, and narrative voyages taken by sea explorers such as Captain Cook, Pym finds himself tossed back into nightmarish realms when Captain Guy decides to veer off course and go where no navigator has gone before: toward the unknown regions of the Antarctic. In this final portion of the book, Pym and the crew of the Jane Guy experience not only more “unfortunate and bloody events,” but also discover both the island of Tsalal and, later, “one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed” the attention of science (526). What this secret “is” remains unknown, due to the “late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym,” and the “irrecoverable” loss of the final chapters (561). However, the final details of Pym’s journal continue to provoke critical discussion. Readers are informed that the crew and captain of the Jane Guy are betrayed and killed by the unfriendly “jet black” natives of Tsalal (528); and also that Pym and Dirk Peters are, again, the

950 NARROW ROOMS

only survivors. Assisted by other friendly Tsalalian natives, they are reduced to traveling, first by foot and finally by canoe in an increasingly terrifying journey “south” and into the heart of the Antarctic. Here, they see mysterious hieroglyphics about “shadow or darkness” and “brilliancy and whiteness” (562) that may, Poe suggests, have cosmic significance—or, as many of his critics suggest, racial significance. Pym’s journal ends with glimpses of a figure with a “hue of the skin” that is “of the perfect whiteness of the snow” and whose presence renders Peters mute and kills Pym’s native assistant, Nu-Nu (560). Although Poe expressed disdain for the novel as a genre and regarded himself as a writer and critic of poetry and short fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, published at the midpoint of his authorial career, offers readers an important, experimental narration that not only utilizes two of Poe’s favorite genres (Gothic and science fiction), but also continues to raise provocative, if not insoluble, aesthetic and cultural questions about his romantic artistry.

SOURCES Farrell, Grace. “Dream Texts: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and The Journal of Julius Rodman.” In A Companion to Poe Studies, edited by Eric W. Carlson, 209–235. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Frank, Frederick S. “Polarized Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Bulletin of Bibliography 38 (1981): 117–127. Harvey, Ronald C. The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: ‘A Dialogue with Unreason’. New York: Garland, 1998. Kennedy, J. Gerald. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Abyss of Interpretation. New York: Twayne, 1995. Kopley, Richard. Poe’s Pym: Critical Explorations. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by G. R. Thompson, 429–563. New York: Norton, 2004. Sanborn, Geoffrey. “A Confused Beginning: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket.” In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, 163–177. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Beverly Hume

NARROW ROOMS JAMES PURDY (1978) James PURDY’s career has extended over half a century. He has produced notable work in four genres—the novel, the short story, drama, and poetry. Taken together, this work constitutes a significant contribution to American literature in the post–World War II period. After producing a series of novels and stories that, despite their idiosyncratic content and style, seemed readily classifiable as existential fables (Malcolm, 1959), neorealistic character studies (The Nephew, 1961), and acerbic satires on contemporary culture (Cabot Wright Begins, 1964), Purdy began to produce much more technically and thematically challenging works that critics initially tried to classify as “Northern gothic” or “Midwestern gothic.” Starting with Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1965), Purdy seemed to travel more deeply into the landscape of his own eccentric vision and further from the mainstream—and even the avant-garde fringe—of American fiction. It is significant that the three book-length critical studies of Purdy’s work were all published between 1968 and 1976, and that almost no critical attention has been paid to his later works such as Narrow Rooms. Set in West Virginia, Narrow Rooms exploits many of the commonplace negative stereotypes of Appalachian culture. Purdy’s characters are physically and psychologically damaged; they are so wholly at home in a landscape so marginally sustaining that the name of the region has become synonymous with economic stagnation and social backwardness. If Flannery O’CONNOR’s work is the embodiment of the “Southern gothic” tradition, Narrow Rooms makes her most harrowing work seem tame by comparison. Exploring the linkages among four gay young men, Narrow Rooms is a carefully modulated tale of sadomasochistic relationships that ultimately lead to a crucifixion of sorts (the victim is nailed not to a cross but to a barn door), the disinterment of a corpse to allow him to “witness” this punishment, and a multiple murder during a standoff with the police. Even within a cultural context commonly associated with such eccentric religious practices as faith healing and snake handling, this climax is way over the top.

NARROW ROOMS 951

Purdy’s novel opens with Sidney De Lakes’s release from prison after his brother, Vance, has successfully petitioned the governor for his early release. A highschool football hero of somewhat limited intelligence, Sidney had been convicted of the murder of Brian McPhee. The scars on Sidney’s body testify to his mistreatment in prison, but it soon becomes clear that whatever he might reveal about his experiences in prison, they have simply been an extension of the twisted passions that led up to his killing of McPhee. When they had been in high school, Sidney De Lakes and Roy Sturtevant had carried on a secret sexual relationship. Roy had been the class valedictorian and had been responsible for Sidney’s getting enough passing grades to graduate. Yet at the graduation party, Sidney had publicly rejected Roy, slapping him across the face. Although Roy has subsequently earned a college degree and parlayed an unexpectedly substantial inheritance into a good-sized fortune, he has remained haunted by his mother’s early death and by Sidney’s rejection of him. Unable to redress his mother’s seeming abandonment of him, he has focused obsessively on exacting retribution from Sidney De Lakes. Seducing Brian McPhee with sex and dope, Roy had convinced him to use a hunting trip as an opportunity to seduce and then to kill Sidney. But Brian had not been capable of killing Sidney and had, instead, gotten himself killed. So, after Sidney had been sent to prison, Roy revenged himself on Sidney through Sidney’s friend Gareth Vaisey, taunting him into trying to outrace a train to a crossing. On horseback, Roy made it across the tracks, but Gareth’s carriage was struck by the train, which killed his father and brothers. Although Gareth survives, he has been reduced to an invalid state. Following Sidney’s release from prison, Roy secretly arranges for him to work as Gareth’s nurse. Eventually, Roy realizes that he needs to expiate his guilt for the deaths he has caused, and he conceives of the plan that enables him to force Sidney to nail him to the barn door. Ironically, Sidney’s sense of awe at Roy’s willingness to imagine and face such a gruesome fate finally brings the two of them to a passionate reconciliation. Gareth, who had wanted revenge on Roy, feels betrayed by Sidney and kills

them both well before he is himself overwhelmed by the police. The resolution to the novel emphasizes how this story is subsequently disseminated by the national media and becomes part of the regional folklore. Even though reviewers of the novel have almost insistently referred to Roy Sturtevant as if he were a mysterious monster in the Gothic mode, the story has many levels that make it much more complex than any fable, however dark. For instance, Purdy is very careful to show how complex the social backgrounds of the characters are and how much they have served to define their relationships. The Sturtevants have been stigmatized by Roy’s grandfather’s occupation as an animal renderer. Roy himself represents the newly wealthy who can buy and sell the “old” families of the community, such as the De Lakes and the Vaiseys, but who cannot purchase the respectability in their family histories. In addition, Purdy brings in the world well beyond the West Virginia mountains through accounts of Brian McPhee’s sexual misadventures in New York City and Washington, D.C. These boys are not all rubes. Indeed, the novel seems to suggest that the gay subculture might just as easily have liberated them from their demons as made them victims of those demons. Their terrible ends have everything to do with their being gay and yet are not at all simply the result of their being gay or, for that matter, of their living in Appalachia.

SOURCES Adams, Stephen D. James Purdy. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976. Chupack, Henry. James Purdy. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Lane, Christopher. “Out with James Purdy: An Interview,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40 (Fall 1998): 71–89. Morrison, James. “James Purdy (1923– ).” In Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 328–339. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Purdy, James. Narrow Rooms. New York: Arbor House, 1978. Schwarzschild, Bettina. The Not-Right House: Essays on James Purdy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968. Martin Kich

952 NATIVE SON

NATIVE SON RICHARD WRIGHT (1940)

Considered by many to be Richard WRIGHT’s central work, Native Son carefully triangulates art, politics, and sociology in an attempt to illuminate an apparently hidden structure of American society. Wright, himself a member of the Communist Party, articulates an issue much bigger than an individual character, an issue at the very heart of a white capitalistic society. The novel’s perceived Marxist attack on American cultural roles fueled an emotional controversy when it was first published in 1940, but it still finds resonance in the reading public today. The novel is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate, each corresponding to the plight of the main character Bigger Thomas, a young man growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s. In the family’s single-room apartment Bigger corners and kills a frightened black rat that is acting out aggressively as its only means of survival, a rat the reader will come to identify with Bigger himself. As Bigger walks the streets of the neighborhood, Wright emphasizes the lack of opportunity that young black men face. Much like the rat, Bigger is trapped in his environment, one that will forever prevent him from moving beyond the isolated walls created by a wealthy white power structure. Bigger Thomas is so far outside the societal boundaries that he has even lost connection with his own cultural identity as his mother is quick to point out. “Some of these days you going to set down and cry. Some of these days you going to wish you had made something out of yourself, instead of just a tramp” (13). He meets with his gang of hoodlums, G.H., Gus, and Jack, and makes plans to rob Blum’s store, a store owned by a white man. The four have no problem robbing blacks, but for Bigger, as well as the others, the idea of penetrating the white power structure fills him with so much fear that he ultimately backs down, blaming the others for ruining the opportunity. At the continual urging of his mother, Bigger reluctantly accepts a position working for the Dalton’s, the family that coincidentally owns the apartment building where Bigger and his family live. Mr. Dalton and his blind wife are the literal embodiment of the white power structure that keeps the poor black population

confined to the South Side through questionable housing practices, while at the same time blinding themselves through limited and often misguided philanthropic actions. Bigger’s job is to act as a family chauffeur for $25 a week. One of his major responsibilities is to make sure that the Dalton’s daughter, Mary, gets to and from school. At this point in the novel, the worlds of Black and White, Bigger and the Daltons, are brought dangerously close together, and Mary and her boyfriend Jan will ultimately rupture the volatile boundaries separating the two. Jan Erlone, a member of the Communist Party who actively strives to help the disenfranchised black community, insists that Bigger drive him and Mary into the heart of a black neighborhood. Bigger fears the violation of the defined modes of behavior as Jan further presses his communist position as an act of equality and goodwill. Bigger withdraws from these advances, unable to accept such a blatant cultural trespass. By the end of the evening, Mary is so drunk that Bigger must help her into the house and up to her bedroom. He is very aware of this as an ultimate transgression of social taboo, and when Mary’s blind mother happens to enter the room, Bigger cover’s Mary’s face with a pillow to prevent her from making a sound. The result is the accidental death of Mary and a turning point for the character of Bigger. Bigger realizes that it was an accident, but more important, he realizes that society would be blind to his actions as anything but rape and murder. In an ultimate act of desperation and fear, he dismembers Mary’s body and burns the remains in the basement furnace. Section two of the novel, Flight, illustrates a change in Bigger, one in which his confidence grows. He attempts to frame Jan for the crime, realizing that the police are suspicious of Jan’s communist connections, and this ignites within him a sense of self-empowerment that ultimately stretches beyond the confines so inherently binding in the opening section. Fear becomes less of a motif in Bigger’s actions, and flight both from the crime and from the fear which was its ultimate catalyst, becomes the driving force behind his decision making. As an act of this newly found self-empowerment, Bigger decides to extort money from Daltons by mak-

NATIVE SPEAKER 953

ing them think that Mary had been kidnapped. With the help of his girlfriend Bessie, Bigger sends a ransom note to the Daltons and instructs Bessie to pick up the money. However, the Daltons’ hired detective, Britten, questions Bigger who has trouble keeping up with the lies and the general direction of the story he had created. When bones are discovered in the furnace, Bigger flees with Bessie to an abandoned building on the South Side. Unable to take Bessie with him, and afraid to leave her behind, he crushes her skull with a brick and throws her body down an elevator shaft. This second determined and gruesome murder, when juxtaposed with the killing of Mary, illustrates the change in Bigger’s attitude. In each section of the novel a character is killed (including Bigger himself, in the final section). Bigger reacts with fear when he kills Mary Dalton and out of a sense of flight when he kills Bessie. As the novel progresses, Bigger becomes a disturbingly unsympathetic character who in turn forces the reader to address the true emotional identity of the character without being allowed to romanticize him. This way of approaching the main character is a focal point for the power derived from the narrative and the way that violence is used throughout. Violence is at the heart of the novel, surrounding the deaths of both Mary and Bessie and also inherent in the disenfranchisement central to the story. Bigger is chased through the streets in a scene textually and thematically similar to the final scenes of James Whale’s 1931 film version of Frankenstein where the creature is hunted down and ultimately destroyed. Bigger is blinded by a raging snow storm, all around him white, that reminds the reader that no matter how hard Bigger runs, the white world will always engulf him, filling his eyes and mouth. Unable to escape the storm of white, he is captured. Bigger’s lawyer Boris Max and the state prosecutor Buckley serve to direct the novel toward an articulation of American culture and the roles both blacks and whites play. The focus of the final section of the novel shifts from Bigger to the wider spectrum of American culture both black and white. As Max tells Bigger before the trial, “This thing’s bigger than you son. In a certain sense, every Negro in America’s on trial out

there today” (340). The emphasis is bigger than the man. Looking solely at the individual, society is blind to the forces that create him. The reader is not led to feel a great deal of sympathy toward such an individual. Max tells the judge, “I do not claim that this boy is a victim of injustice, nor do I ask that this court be sympathetic with him” (358). But at the heart of Max’s defense is a plea that we step back from the individual and strive to understand the process by which one such as Bigger is created by the society surrounding him. “I plead with you to see a mode of life in our midst, a mode of life stunted and distorted, but possessing its own laws and claims, an existence of men, growing out of the soil prepared by the collective but blind will of a hundred million people” (358). The mob, again like the one in pursuit of Frankenstein’s monster, calls for the death of Bigger and all like him, passively unaware of the ideological force driving American society to create more Biggers. Wright’s final section, Fate, closes with Bigger asking Max to tell Jan hello, an act that reveals that Bigger has been able, if only in small part, to separate the individual from society. Bigger’s fate is sealed as he will be led to his death, but the ultimate question that resonates beyond the clang of the steel prison door is clear: Is the fate portrayed in the final section Bigger’s, or something bigger?

SOURCE Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper & Row, 1940. Paul L Yoder

NATIVE SPEAKER CHANG-RAE LEE (1995) Native Speaker, published in 1995, is Chang-rae LEE’s first novel. It met with acclaim and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the American Library Association Notable Book of the Year Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN West Award. The Voice Literary Supplement referred to the book as a “work of tremendous grace and discomforting resonance.” Author Gish Jen described it as “[b]eautifully crafted, enlightening, and heart-wrenching.” To the

954 NATIVE SPEAKER

New York Times Book Review, Native Speaker is a “tender meditation on love, loss, and family,” whereas the Los Angelese Times Book Review characterized it as a “novel of a newer, rawer immigrant experience.” The novel is set in contemporary New York City and narrated by its conflicted protagonist, Korean-American Henry Park, a 30-something American-born only child of successful and now deceased immigrant parents. As the narrative opens, Henry’s marriage to Lelia, an American woman of European ancestry, has collapsed following the accidental death of their beloved young son, Mitt. Lelia has left Henry over what she sees as his unemotional response to Mitt’s sudden and devastating decease. Her departure sets up one of the two main plots in the novel, as Henry tries to reestablish their marital bonds that are strong but strained by cultural differences, mostly involving patterns of selfexpression. She is confounded by Henry’s reserve and calls him an “emotional alien,” a charge that he accepts. The second and parallel plot involves the unraveling of Henry’s career in a private spy agency. There, his capacity for self-repression and “multiple roles,” both products of Henry’s “assimilist” route to acceptance in America, prepares him to move among and, in acts of betrayal, gather damaging data on his “own kind,” including “foreign workers, immigrants, first-generationals, [and] neo-Americans.” Consistent with the novel’s epigraph by Walt Whitman, the parallel plots present Henry’s struggle for selfknowledge and self-expression. Through reflection, retrospection, and action, the intelligent and sensitive narrator attempts to become a “Native Speaker” not only of mainstream culture but also of himself, and thereby overcome a deeply painful “silence borne of the tongue and the heart and the mind.” Commentaries on Native Speaker have many emphases, but almost all of them focus on Henry and his “outsider’s longing for place and identity.” If read as a bildungsroman, the consensus is that the novel ends on a hopeful note. Henry leaves behind his work as a spy, having decided to cease with his own “live burial” and stop “murdering himself inside” with constant and crippling self-betrayal.

The catalyst for retirement is Henry’s assignment to cover John Kwang, a charismatic Korean-American politician with a multicultural vision. They are drawn to each other, and although Kwang embodies the “contingencies of multiple identifications” and finally falls in disgrace, Henry sees in the confident Kwang what he “imagined a Korean could be,” and what he “will search out now for the long remainder” of his life. Henry also reunites with Lelia and in the last scene literally removes his mask. In an image of self-unity Henry says, “my voice moves in time with my mouth, truly belongs to my face.” Calling himself “as American as anyone, as graced and flawed and righteous,” Henry hears the “strangest chorale” of polyglot New York City and understands that in the United States “you must make yourself belong” (344). Henry’s predicament, his “dance of estrangement and love” with American society, is not unique. It has been noted that in the United States the Asian is always “the ‘foreigner within’ ” whose putative differences mark Asian Americans as “internal others.” Thus, not surprisingly, Henry reports that even as a child he would “look in the mirror, desperately hoping . . . to catch a glimpse of who I truly was” (323). Not all critics are supportive of Henry. Some have asserted that in a process of “self-evisceration” he has “resolved his identity crisis by unwittingly casting himself as a white manqué.” Others read through Henry and the “legitimation of a male immigrant subject” to the backdrop of “shadowy figures” of Korean women who “disrupt Lee’s narrative” with their “isolation, despair, hope, and fantasy.” Some claim that the novel is a “de facto commentary on Korean American life,” and as an expression of Korean American subjectivity and self-representation, the text has been deemed problematic. In 2002, Native Speaker was selected for inclusion in the first One Book, One New York reading program, but there were concomitant protests that it conveys a “restrictive” and “unflattering” image of Korean Americans. In 1999, the Korean-born Lee, who heads the Creative Writing Program at Hunter College of the City University of New York, was chosen by The New Yorker magazine as one of the 20 best American writers under

NATURAL, THE 955

40. His impact as an author is no longer limited to an anglophone readership, since several years ago Native Speaker was translated from English into Korean and is now well known in Korea.

SOURCES Dwyer, June. “Speaking and Listening: The Immigrant as Spy Who Comes in from the Cold.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature, edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, 73–82. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Engles, Tim. “ ‘Visions of Me in the Whitest Raw Light’: Assimilation and Doxic Whiteness in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” Hitting Critical Mass 4, no. 2 (1997): 27–48. Huh, Joonok. “ ‘Strangest Chorale’: New York City in East Goes West and Native Speaker.” The Image of the Twentieth Century in Literature, Media, and Society, edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan, 419–422. Pueblo: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2000. Hurst, Mary Jane. “Presidential Address: Language, Gender, and Community in American Fiction at the End of the Century,” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 17, no. 1 (1998): 1–13. Lee, Chang-rae. Native Speaker. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Park, You-me, and Gayle Wald. “Native Daughters in the Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 607–633. Song, Min Hyoung. “A Diasporic Future? Native Speaker and Historical Trauma,” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 12, no. 1 (2001): 79–98. Geoffrey L. Middlebrook

NATURAL, THE BERNARD MALAMUD (1952) Bernard MALAMUD’s first novel continues to find new audiences in courses ranging from Middle Age mythology, Jewish-American writing, the modern novel, baseball history, to film studies. Despite its variety of contexts, the majority of The Natural’s criticism focuses on its complex configuration of myth and archetype. Led by influential essays from Leslie Fiedler and Earl Wasserman, this line of interpretation explores Malamud’s incorporation of legends of Arthurian knights, the

Fisher King, and the quest for the Holy Grail into the tradition of baseball in America. Malamud establishes Roy Hobbs as a modern-day Percival, the country yokel who becomes enamored of the idea of being a knight without contemplating its broader implications. Initially, Percival simply wants to defeat other knights in jousts, while Roy, likewise focusing on personal glory, wants to be “the best there ever was in the game” (26). When Roy strikes out Walter “The Whammer” Whambold (an aging Babe Ruth figure), Malamud invites the reader to see the contest as epochal, one of the novel’s “medieval jousts with distinct overtones of Freud and ritual combat between the aging winter king and the young daimon of spring” (Hays, 87). After seeing Hobbs’s victory, Harriet Bird—an archetypal figure “in the tradition of grail literature [who] has been sent to test the hero’s worthiness and exact punishment when he fails” (Richman, 33)—sees the contest as “Sir Percy lancing Sir Maldemer” (24). Harriet does inflict punishment, shooting the naive Roy in the stomach after he incorrectly answers her questions about the nature of his “quest.” Rather than seeing anything selfless and important in becoming a baseball player, Roy wants only to be “the best that ever was in the game” (26). The team to which Roy returns after a 15-year absence from the game is the New York Knights, managed by Pop Fisher, a modern-day Fisher King, the legendary lord of the barren Wasteland whom Percival must heal to bring fertility and life. Pop is immediately connected to the earth, and his “domain”—the baseball field—is a wasteland: “No rains at all . . . My heart feels as dry as dirt for the little I have to show for all my years in the game” (37–38). Merlin the Magician and Morgan le Fay find their counterparts in the bookie Gus Sands and Memo Paris, the temptress who contributes to Roy’s collapse. Iris Lemon, who reawakens the power of Roy’s bat “Wonderboy” (his Excalibur) during a hitting slump, is the Lady of the Lake, a life-giving force who restores knights. She reminds Roy that his purpose goes beyond his statistics or his desire to be “the best in the game”; that his quest for immortality has less to do with himself and more with giving hope to others: “Without heroes we’re all plain people and don’t know

956 NATURAL, THE

how far we can go” (141). Roy, though, wants to break every baseball record, because by doing so “[y]ou sorta never die” (141). His quest for immortality is misguided, Iris notes, because true heroes must sacrifice, give up a part of themselves (141). Feeling he has already sacrificed too much, Roy self-pityingly laments his bad luck, to which Iris answers, “Suffering is what brings us toward happiness” (145). After a “baptism” in the lake symbolically suggests Roy’s acceptance of this idea, he abandons Iris after she confesses that she is a 33-year-old grandmother. Richman notes the mythological implication of Iris’s revelation as “the ancient hag whom the knight must marry in order to attain his goal” (38). By forsaking her, Roy also turns his back on the chance for redemption. Running back to Memo, he gorges himself on food, is hospitalized, and complies with Judge Goodwill Banner, the Knights’ owner, in throwing the pennant. Reinforcing the vegetative myth that informs the entire novel, Roy’s story ends where it began: with a young “natural” from the country with the suggestive last name of Youngberry defeating the aging Roy (French for “king”). Some early reviews of The Natural saw Malamud’s use of allegory as forced, shallow, and confusing (Salzberg, 1–2). Richman calls it “one of the most baffling novels of the 1950s” (Richman, 28). Part of this confusion is retrospective. Looking at Malamud’s subsequent work, which deals almost exclusively with Jewish characters and settings, critics have puzzled over their absence in this novel. However, Malamud’s infamous statement that “All men are Jews” is perhaps a way to see The Natural’s connection to the later work. His comment suggests that he uses Jewish characters metaphorically to convey the idea of universal suffering humanity. Though other Jewish writers, such as Philip ROTH, found fault with this strategy, seeing it as ignoring the real social atmosphere for Jews in America, many thought it effective, transforming his stories into rich parables. Thus, The Natural is not as dissimilar to the rest of Malamud’s work as it first appears. Rather than using Judaism, Malamud “chose to present his first allegory on suffering in the context of another great symbolic system,” baseball. In this context, Roy becomes “the wandering, suffering Jew” (Hoyt, 183).

Using religious and mythological frameworks perhaps belies Malamud’s desire to establish a common coherence in a society that has lost its orientation, an attempt to reestablish absolutes in a post-bomb, postHolocaust age. The novel’s pessimistic ending—Roy’s inability to comprehend his ultimate role—suggests that the fullness and coherence of the past is corrupted by the modern age. The renewed interest in baseball history in the 1990s has given the novel a new context for study. Echoes in the novel of baseball heroes and disgraces, from Babe Ruth to the 1919 Chicago “Black” Sox, have made it a central text in the study of sports in literature. In addition, many have written on the religious and mythological aspects of our national pastime, positioning baseball as the functional, civic religion of America. The role of “faith” and hope in baseball and religion allows us to see baseball as a religion, for in both “our good words (or our suffering) somehow will offer the promise of a better future” (Evans and Herzog, 2). The promise of hope, in baseball and religion, helps to deal with life’s inevitable mistakes, defeats, and disappointments. Baseball’s timeless symbolism inevitably connects the past to the present for everyone entering a ballpark. Its rites, codes of conduct, and rituals allow all of us to become a part of something that connects us, something larger than the individual. Ultimately, Roy does not understand this, and it leads to his downfall. Though mythological criticism dominates discussions of the book, many critics also view Malamud as using baseball to examine the best and worst aspects of American culture, notably materialism and the cult of celebrity. Notable among the critics that focus on Malamud’s social criticism is Iska Alter, who sees Roy’s story as the “democratic dilemma” of having to choose between becoming the self-made man “faithful to his natural talent and individual possibility” and becoming a “cultural product” who succumbs to material success by betraying his abilities “as one of Nature’s noblemen” (Alter, 3–4). Finally, any discussion of The Natural must mention its 1984 film adaptation, directed by Barry Levinson, for there are important differences. Most notable is the celluloid story’s happy Hollywood ending, which ultimately

NAYLOR, GLORIA 957

leaves audiences with a different vision of America than Malamud’s novel and deflates the novel’s theme of suffering and its suggestion about the depths of corruption and materialism in American culture. Perhaps in the midst of Reagan-era optimism, cynicism toward our national pastime was unacceptable. The game-winning home run hit by Robert Redford’s Roy Hobbs, however, not only defies Banner, Memo, and Gus Sands, but also Malamud’s paradoxical and ambiguous understanding of human nature and the American Dream.

SOURCES Alter, Iska. The Good Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud. New York: AMS Press, 1981. Evans, Christopher H., and William R. Herzog, III, eds. The Faith of Fifty Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture. Louisville, Ky.: John Knox, 2002. Fiedler, Leslie. “In the Interest of Surprise and Delight,” Folio 20, no. 3 (1955): 17–20. Hays, Peter L. “Malamud’s Yiddish-Accented Medieval Stories.” In The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, edited by Richard Astro and Jackson J. Benson, 87–96. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977. Hoyt, Charles Alva. “Bernard Malamud and the New Romanticism.” In Contemporary American Novelists, edited by Harry Thorton Moore, 65–79. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Malamud, Bernard. The Natural. 1952. New York: Perennial Classics, 2000. Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Salzberg, Joel. Bernard Malamud: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Wasserman, Earl R. “The Natural: Malamud’s World Ceres,” Centennial Review 9 (1965): 438–460. Lance Rubin

NAYLOR, GLORIA (1950– ) Although Gloria Naylor usually examines the lives of contemporary African Americans, in her five novels to date, she has also taken care to address how African-American history is central to her fiction. Naylor is acutely aware of how the past enslavement of her ancestors and a legacy of oppression, separated families, and motherless children resonates today. Her women characters, however, gain strength through motherhood, nurturing, community, and the black matriarchal tradition. She understands

their predicaments, as well, and does not flinch from exposing the contributions of white greed and hypocrisy. Her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982), winner of an American Book Award (now the National Book Award) for first fiction, was selected by Oprah Winfrey’s production company to be remade as a television miniseries. Men of Brewster Place (1998) is its sequel. Naylor’s other novels include LINDEN HILLS (1985), the story of an abused wife in a black upper-middle-class neighborhood; MAMA DAY (1988), focusing on the mythical powers of women; and Bailey’s Café (1992). Gloria Naylor was born on January 25, 1950, to Roosevelt Naylor, who had moved from Robinsonville, Mississippi, to New York City shortly before Naylor’s birth, and Alberta McAlpin Naylor. As a result, Naylor grew up knowing both Northern and Southern culture. In 1981 she received a bachelor’s degree in English from Brooklyn College, completed her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, and divorced her husband, to whom she had been married for only a short time. She earned a master’s degree in Afro-American studies from Yale University in 1983. The Women of Brewster Place explores African-American women’s issues. Set on a dead-end street in a fictitious Northern city (in some ways a metaphor for every community), it relates the widely varied stories of the women residents, who are linked to one another through the matriarchal figure, Mattie Michael. The women struggle with accidental death, rape, and lesbianism. In Linden Hills, her second novel, Naylor creates an affluent African-American community whose entanglement with materialism energizes its downward progress. She alludes in this novel to Dante’s Inferno and suggests that only Willie Mason and Willa Nedeed, who have deeply held beliefs and values, and selfrespect, will extricate themselves from this community of lost souls. Mama Day, Naylor’s third novel, takes place on a mystical island populated solely by African Americans. Naylor uses numerous narrators to reverse Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Instead of a male sorcerer, she creates Sapphira Wade, a slave and conjure woman who inherited the island from her white husband, Bascombe Wade, and bequeathed it to her black descen-

958 NEUROMANCER

dants. Now Mama Day rules the island and, using shards, fragments, and oral tales, begins to re-create the history of her people. Bailey’s Café also uses the perspectives of multiple narrators, and the café itself becomes a metaphor for a safe harbor for suffering individuals, mainly women. The central male figure, the café’s proprietor, is empathetic and compassionate; he cares deeply for these women. Naylor continues her exploration of the male side of the story in The Men of Brewster Place, published in 1998.

NOVELS Bailey’s Café. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992. Linden Hills. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1986. Mama Day. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1988. The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion, 1998. The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories. New York: Viking, 1982.

SOURCES Awkward, Michael. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Brown, Amy Benson. “The Bible and Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café.” In Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, edited by Catherine Wiley and Fiona Barnes, 23–42. New York: Garland, 1996. Christol, Helene. “Reconstructing American History: Land and Genealogy in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” In The Black Columbiad, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, 347–356. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. Felton, Sharon, and Michelle C. Loris, eds. The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997, 199–210. Fowler, Virginia C. Gloria Naylor: In Charge of Sanctuary. New York: Twayne/Simon & Schuster, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1988. Harris, Trudier. The Power of the Porch: The Storyteller’s Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor and Randall Kenan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Holloway, Karla F. Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Juhasz, Suzanne. “The Magic Circle: Fictions of the Good Mother in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” In Reading from the

Heart: Women, Literature and the Search for True Love. New York: Viking, 1994. Odamtten, Vincent O. “Reviewing Gloria Naylor: Toward a Neo-African Critique.” In Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers, edited by Femi Ojo-Ade, 115–128. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pearlman, Mickey. “Gloria Naylor.” In Talks with America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson, 23–29. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Stave, Shirley, ed. Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001, 44–76. Winsbro, Bonnie C. Supernatural Forces: Belief, Difference and Power in Contemporary Novels: Ethnic Women. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, 109–128.

NEUROMANCER WILLIAM GIBSON (1984) Gibson’s quest romance put cyberspace on the literary map and made cyberpunk a vehicle for the entry of postmodern sensibility into mass consciousness, once films and comic books had appropriated its plotlines, character types, iconography, vocabulary, and themes. If Neuromancer is a neural romance in which an emblematic hero’s search to retrieve an object of ultimate value is played out on and in the nervous system, its plot and tonal register, as well as many of its characters, nevertheless derive from older, hard-boiled detective fiction and its cinematic equivalent, film noir. The world-weary, hard-bitten private eye who, caught between the cops, the crooks, and the femme fatale, struggles to maintain his unaligned free agency is here prosthetically enhanced and biochemically morphed into cyberpunk’s prematurely jaded, streetwise prodigy, a suicidal computer hacker, Case, who, coerced and co-opted by black marketeers, venal corporations, and artificial intelligences, struggles to maintain his unaligned free agency. As in the paranoid noir narrative, Gibson’s antihero gradually uncovers the hidden, labyrinthine connections between a sleazy criminal underworld and a meretriciously glamorous, equally brutal “high orbit” elite operating behind the scenes to manipulate and control those who do not even know it exists. All this is by way of saying that

NEUROMANCER 959

much of Neuromancer is pastiche, a stylistically imitative mode sometimes said to epitomize postmodernity because it is all about surfaces insofar as it mobilizes a system of already established and therefore immediately recognizable cultural signs that carry little authentic conviction in themselves, but that successfully establish a tonal register through a ready-made set of signifiers of mood and attitude. The brilliance of Neuromancer is not in its characters or plot but in the play of its surfaces: its verbally constructed look and tonal register, its evocation of a ready-made mood, its style. The pixel-prose of flashy, poeticized bytes of image-laden information produces a syntactical flicker and blip that reproduces the “sensorium” of a jacked-up, jacked-in neural circuitry: hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. . . . a blurred fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now. . . . And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening. (68) Gibson’s look is very much an appeal to the mind’s inner eye. The appeal to the eye is both a narrative strategy and a persistently recurring plot incident, to say nothing of the book’s fixated eye for outré fashion and cosmetics and for the patina of neon and chrome. It is also a thematic preoccupation, witness the addicting triumph of the scopic mode, which allows the aptly named Case to be “totally engaged but set apart from all” (26). Gibson uses stylistic strategies and pyrotechnic mannerisms, such as synaesthetic descriptions that cross the border between sensory modes, to dazzle and estrange the reader much in the manner established by the New Wave science fiction writers of the late 1950s through the mid-1970s (compare the works of Alfred Bester and J. G. BALLARD). By doing so, he produces an impression of the “peculiar horror” of spatial and cognitive disorientation (249). This vertiginous disorientation is also mimetically conveyed by the relentlessly nonchalant deployment of unfamiliar lingo: neolo-

gisms, Japanese slang, and subcultural idioms (here the model is William BURROUGHS) that are intended to intimidate the reader. The reader, in turn, is compelled to stabilize, process, and assimilate this terminology with the author’s aid: “simstim . . . was basically a meat toy . . . a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input” (71). This guided estrangement lures the reader (not unlike the way Case is lured) to penetrate further in the hopes of gaining control; and in so doing it gains the reader’s consent to the narrated world, which is as much a matrix of “consensual hallucination” as cyberspace is said to be (12). Similarly, Gibson’s production of opaque, or just barely translucent, images engenders the same “worrying impression of solid fluidity,” a “complexity that cut[s] the eye,” that cyberspace is said to engender. By rendering amphetamized consciousness at the speed of bytes, he vividly conveys the experience of entering the matrix, an unthinkably complex “graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system . . . ranged in the nonspace of the mind” (67). He cleverly exploits its unthinkability to turn it into a visual display, into a phantasmatic spectacle (closely identified with the stuff of acid dreams) that is at the same time an infinite landscape that can be moved through and affected by the prosthetic extensions of his mental traveler. Analogies further help to establish cyperspace as a topography equivalent to the “sprawl” of the megalopolis, just as each is conceived as a “field of data” (26). By depicting cyberspace as a spectacular, traversable topography akin to an illuminated megalopolis, and by depicting Night City as “a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself” (19), Gibson could be thought to belie Frederic Jameson’s influential argument that the intricacy of the information network and the rapidity of the flow of global capital through it outstrip the culture’s capacity to represent them adequately. On the other hand, by making the “bright lattices of logic unfolding across the colorless void” (11) available to the visual imagination, and by then going on to show how “the interior of a given data construct possessed [an] unlimited subjective dimension” (81), Gibson seems to illustrate a similar understanding of the paranoid response to new technologies.

960 NEW YORK TRILOGY, THE

The premise of Gibson’s cyberpunk fictions relies on cybernetics, the theoretical study of the flow of information in and between electronic, mechanical, and biological systems, particularly the way information processes function as mechanisms of order and control. Neuromancer endorses the model of cybernetics by conceiving human self-awareness as feedback and data loop. But the thematic significance of its story and imagery is that it locates cybernetic looping processes within the circuitry of what postmodern cultural theory, conflating the thought of Marx and Freud, has termed “the libidinal economy”; that is, Gibson and cyberpunk evocatively exploit, while appearing to critique, the way that desire not only channels the flow of information, but also actually constitutes its essence within both the capitalist economic system and the psychology it engenders in its consumerist citizenry. In Gibson’s extrapolated near future, data have become erotic, something (ICE) must be penetrated to obtain it, it gives a buzz, and it costs the price of the body and soul. Further, as in the postmodernity analyzed by Jean Baudrillard and other theorists that he seems to have read, every aspect of human activity—including acts of resistance and subversion—can be rendered commodities for sale in a global marketplace characterized by an incessant, stupefyingly fast flow of inescapable and only temporarily satisfying fantasies that would substitute for or disguise the lost autonomy of the individual. Gibson’s techno-romanticism reflects how the very idea of rapid technological innovation is fetishized and made into a commodity in contemporary culture. Yet he explicitly satirizes how prematurely archaic technologies and skills (our technologies and skills) are superseded: “There was . . . something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived subcults and replicated them at odd intervals” (75). All prosthetically enhanced capacities and skills, the subcutaneous chips and “image-amp” implants, are instrumentalized; that is, they ultimately are made to serve utilitarian functions within the perverse, fetishistic fusion of desire and data that is the libidinal economy. There is no transcendence of this process short of uploading consciousness into a computer program and becoming a simulacra. Case experiences himself as

encased in flesh; when he is not experiencing “the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,” he falls “into the prison of his own flesh,” feels reduced to “meat” (12). Technological distillation of the inefficient body into pure information offers the only possibility of transcendence into the realm of the marvelous and sublime that might be, or might as well be, the supramundane realm of spirit. But transcendence is transitory, like the chemically induced highs that so often provide the experiential basis for what passes for visionary revelation. And as with such highs, the very transience stimulates the desire for a permanent fix. Indeed, any project of escape or transcendence becomes but a more intricate binding up within a totalized and totalizing system of data addiction and desire.

SOURCES Broderick, Damien. Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1995. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-modern Science Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone, 2000. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. McCaffery, Larry, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991 Slusser, George, and Tom Shippey, eds. Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. David Brottman

NEW YORK TRILOGY, THE PAUL AUSTER (1990)

Comprised of three distinct, yet eerily related novellas—City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy reworks, rewrites, and rethinks the genre of the traditional American detective novel. Deconstructing not only the form of the detective genre, but also conventional notions of character, plot, and development, the three works collected in The New York Trilogy interrogate the

NEW YORK TRILOGY, THE 961

acts of reading and writing just as much if not more so than the characters under surveillance within the text. As Bernd Herzogenrath notes: “The ‘common denominator’ of these novels is the fact that they are all ‘rewritings,’ that is, that they dwell more on the question of ‘structure’ than on the traditional mystery” (Herzogenrath, 27). Authorial intrusions (Auster himself appears as a character in City of Glass and not as narrator), character doubling/tripling, and constant inversions and reversions of the plot each function to force the reader into the position of detective—like the main characters/narrators of the three novellas: always challenged to put the pieces together, force competing and contradictory stories and anecdotes into meaningful dialogue, weigh evidence carefully. In City of Glass, the doubling/tripling of identity blurs the lines between characters from the first page, all beginning with a wrong number that will force Daniel Quinn—pseudonym: William Wilson, author of the Max Work detective novels—to engage in detective work of his own, except under the name of Paul Auster. Though the phone call asking for Paul Auster the detective initiates the case under rather strange circumstances in its own right, Quinn/Auster’s immersion in Peter Stillman’s case—tailing his recently released from prison father, Peter Stillman, Sr.—soon evolves into an obsessional quest for Quinn, yet a quest without resolution and not for lack of movement. Importantly, not even the narrator retains an objective distance, a position outside of the intricacies of the case. Madeleine Sorapure makes such a point explicit, as she writes: “Toward the end of the novel we realize that the story has been told not by an omniscient author but by a narrator who is himself a character in the story, and who is, like Quinn, engaged in a detective’s activity of piecing together the facts of a case, Quinn’s case” (Sorapure, 75). As the narrator reconstructs Quinn’s involvement with the case, all she/he has is an unremarkable red notebook as evidence of Quinn’s existence: a motif and intertextual element that reemerges in each of the three novellas. The red notebook, however, much like The New York Trilogy itself, offers more questions than answers, more space for interpretation than conclusive detective erudition.

Ghosts, the second novella of the trilogy and set in the late 1940s, introduces the reader to a cast of colorfully named characters and their myriad games of detection. Blue—protégé of the retired private detective Brown—has been hired by White to spy on Black, faithfully recording his every move, and then to submit typed reports to an anonymous post office box in return for an agreed upon amount of money. The deeper Blue involves himself in the life of Black, the more he recedes from his former life, his former conception of self. Ilana Shiloh portrays Blue’s immersion in the indeterminacies of his assignment in terms of its disorienting effects: “But if in the past words, for Blue, used to correspond to facts, in this case there are no facts that he can see. He invents therefore facts of his own, formulating theories or recalling stories that might shed light on his mysterious assignment” (Shiloh, 59). Blue’s attempt to make sense of his assignment pushes him to take risks, engaging Black personally, though in disguise, only to finally drive his obsession to the breaking point, forcing entry into Black’s apartment and rummaging through his papers. Though Blue has determined that Black ostensibly writes for a living, what he finds on Black’s desk tests the limits of possibility and probability: Blue uncovers his own typed reports, detailing his spying on Black, which breaks open the watcher/watched dyad in a most unexpected and complicated manner. The reader must again question the distinction between player and pawn, especially when in Auster’s hands. Even reports, based on apparent and observable data, do not escape the realm of contingency, chance, and multiple possibilities. The last installment of the trilogy, The Locked Room— though not as overtly steeped in the framing of the noir detective tradition—returns to the motifs of literary obsession, writing, and disappearing characters. Fanshawe, the narrator’s childhood best friend and confidant, has vanished from his life, leaving his beautiful wife, Sophie, newborn son, Ben, and a formidable body of unpublished literary work behind. The narrator—a writer himself, but first and foremost a critic—learns that Fanshawe, whom he has not seen since the end of childhood, achieved everything that the narrator has not. Though Fanshawe disappeared without the slight-

962 NG, FAE MYENNE

est trace, the narrator knows that the quality of his fiction, poetry, and plays will guarantee him posthumous (if he is dead, but on this point the reader and narrator can never be completely sure) fame and enduring literary reputation. While collecting Fanshawe’s work for publication, the narrator—whom many characters liken physically to Fanshawe—curiously falls into his former friend’s vacated life: He marries Fanshawe’s wife, Sophie, adopts his son, Ben, and lives off the profit generated from the other writer’s work. This type of blurring the lines between the narrator and Fanshawe has structural and narrative implications, as Aliki Varvogli highlights: “The boundaries that separate the two men threaten to dissolve, as the narrator contemplates writing books under Fanshawe’s name” (Varvogli, 54). This effect becomes apparent when—charged with writing Fanshawe’s biography—the narrator loses himself deep within the smoke and mirrors of Fanshawe’s psyche, making the reader constantly question where Fanshawe’s life ends and the narrator’s begins. Again, Auster leaves the reader with more questions than answers, unraveling expectations for a clear-cut resolution and fortifying the thread of ambiguity and uncertainty that sets the tenor for the work as a whole. In each of the three novellas, the narrators and main characters become involved with and inseparable from their respective “cases,” vertiginously probing the boundaries between the text of the investigation and the context of their own lives and consciousnesses. The recurring literary allusions, subplots, and direct references more than inform the particular cases: For Auster, reading and writing represent the case itself, the case of constructing and deconstructing the literary text. Though deceptively simple in its direct and engaging prose style, The New York Trilogy leaves readers constantly grabbing for more clues, more evidence to grasp fully the complexity of the text. As the narrator in The Locked Room comes to the end of his investigation/narrative, he notes: “He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again” (370). Questions lead to more questions, never definitive answers. Just like the narrators/characters of the novellas, obsessive and intensive reading and inter-

preting will always fall short in uncovering anything absolute; anything that does not continually turn in upon itself; anything that does not resist subsequent attempts at resolution. Chance dictates the work’s direction and play, as Auster leaves carefully measured gaps and disjuncts, giving it all the autonomy it enjoys outside of the book.

SOURCES Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin, 1990. Herzogenrath, Bernd. An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1999. Shiloh, Ilana. Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Sorapure, Madeleine. “The Detective and the Author.” In Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, edited by Dennis Barone, 71–87. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Varvogli, Aliki. The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press, 2001. Zachary Weir

NG, FAE MYENNE (1957– ) It took Fae Myenne Ng 10 years to write BONE, but after its publication in 1993, she received almost unqualified praise for this riveting and harshly realistic portrayal of a Chinese-American family in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The central event is the suicide of Ona, who jumps from the 13th story of a tenement building. Her death causes feelings of guilt in all the other family members: in older half-sister Leila Fu, the teacher attempting to assert her identity without deserting her Chinese elders; in younger sister Nina, a flight attendant who has abandoned so much of her heritage that she uses chopsticks only for holding up her hair; in Mah, their mother, who has filled her husband’s long absences with an adulterous and unfulfilling affair; and in Leon, father and stepfather, who believes that Ona’s suicide is brought on by his failure to return the bones of his immigration sponsor—his “paper father”—to China, as he had promised to do. Born in 1957, Fae Myenne Ng, like her fictional family, was reared in San Francisco to a mother and father who worked as a seamstress and a laborer, respectively. She earned a master of fine arts degree at

NIGHT 963

Columbia University. Admired as a fresh voice in Asian-American fiction, Ng writes about America as the “gold mountain,” or land of money and good luck, the feelings of bitterness and alienation on the part of many immigrants, and the conflicting claims of family loyalty and individualism (Yen, 262–63). In the words of the novelist Cristina GARCIA, Ng captures “the profound loneliness at the heart of [the] immigration experience” (Yen, 264). Ng has succeeded in portraying the risks and the courage, as well as the tragedies, inherent in beginning life anew in a different world.

NOVEL Bone. New York: Hyperion, 1993.

SOURCE Yen, Xiaoping. “Fae Myenne Ng.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 261–266. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000.

OTHER Arias, Mercedes Leonor, Marta Artemenko, Cynthia Lee Conoran, Tara Catherine Cooper, and Kelly Marie Hopler. “Fae Myenne Ng.” Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://www.voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/ng_fae_ myenne.html. Accessed September 24, 2005.

NIGHT ELIE WIESEL (1960)

The autobiographical novel Night stands alongside Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl as a crucial Holocaust memoir. While Frank’s Diary is set before she reaches the concentration camps, Night chronicles the horror of the camps themselves, as seen through the eyes of 15-year-old Eliezer. Ellen S. Fine explains that the title of the book “encompasses the overall Holocaust landscape—a world synonymous with methodical brutality and radical evil. . . . WIESEL uses the word ‘night’ throughout his writing to denote this strange sphere, unreal and unimaginable in its otherworldliness.” It is a short book, terse and lean. According to the scholar Simon P. Sibelman, Night is an example of “a paradox common to Holocaust literature. The survivor must bear witness to what has been; yet aspects of that reality cannot be told.” He finds the theme of silence pervades the book. Eliezer’s story depicts the silence

enforced on the victims in the camps, the silence and indifference of the outside world, the silence of God, the final silencing of loved ones’ voices. Through the large white spaces Wiesel inserts in the text, the reader recognizes that what he leaves out says just as much as what he put in. Eliezer is a happy, pious, and loving boy when the German soldiers first arrive in his small town of Sighet, Transylvania, in present-day Romania, in the spring of 1944. The Jews are told to move to one small section of town. Warnings to escape go unheeded, as no one can believe he or she is really in danger. Soon they are all placed on railway cars, destination unknown. After a long, fearful ride, they arrive at Auschwitz, a huge complex of concentration and death camps in Poland. Eliezer watches in horror as children are thrown into a huge fire. Separated from his mother and sisters, Eliezer and his father are forced to put on prison uniforms and identification numbers are tattooed on their arms. They live on bread and water, always fearing that they will be the next victims of the unbridled cruelty of the SS guards. Soon Eliezer and his father are sent to another camp, Buna, where they are put to work doing manual labor. By this point Eliezer has long forsaken God, and the only thing keeping him alive is his love and concern for his ailing father. Their relationship is all they have left, and they cling to it fervently. Every day they watch people being taken off to the gas chambers or hung in the middle of the camp. That winter, fleeing the approaching Red Army, Eliezer and his father are forced to trudge through the snow in the bitter cold to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. Most of their companions die along the way, and only a few days later Eliezer’s beloved father is taken to the crematorium. Three months later, the 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald are liberated by the Allied forces. The scholar Irving Halperin considers Night to be a tale about one boy’s loss of innocence and faith in God. Lea Hamaoui adds that it is also “a series of shattered expectations [both the character’s and the reader’s], and a quest for truth.” Early in the story there is so much hope, most of it based on the victims’ belief in the innate goodness of people and a strong faith in

964 NIGHTS

God’s protection. For Eliezer, the shattering of these two beliefs leaves him feeling angry, empty, and betrayed. When his father is eventually taken away, the final thread linking Eliezer to his former relationship with humanity is severed and he is left feeling truly dead inside. By focusing on the bond between Eliezer and his father, Wiesel speaks for all the fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, who were taken from each other, and shows the importance of committing to each other as long as possible. Wiesel, who decades later would win the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote, “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp which has turned my life into one long night. Never shall I forget that smoke. . . . Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.” By telling his story, Wiesel is ensuring that readers will not forget either.

SOURCES Cargas, Harry James. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. South Bend, Ind.: Justice Books, 1992. Fine, Ellen S. Legacy of Night. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Halperin, Irving. Messengers from the Dead: Literature of the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980. Hamaoui, Lea. “Historical Horror and the Shape of Night.” In Elie Wiesel: Between Memory and Hope, edited by Carol Rittner. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Mass, Wendy, ed. Readings on Night. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Sibelman, Simon P. Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Wiesel, Elie. Night. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. Wendy Maas

NIGHTS H. D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1934) Nights presents itself as the last work of fiction by a female author who has committed suicide, with a prologue by a male acquaintance. Hovering over the novel, but never unambiguously answered, is the question, why has Natalia Saunderson killed herself by skating into the middle of a mountain lake? In one sense, H.D.’s novel is about the tension between the need for rational explanation and the truths of the creative unconscious. Nights is also a psychoanalytic novel—not only is Freud (Dr.

Frank) and psychoanalysis mentioned throughout, but H. D. wrote the two parts shortly before and after her own analysis with Freud in 1933–34. Yet the novel is not a fictionalization of Freudian concepts, as H. D. maintained a critical distance from the more purely theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis, even while she developed a reverential respect for Freud, as described in her famous memoir, Tribute to Freud (1956). The “prologue” is written, somewhat reluctantly, by John Helforth (the name under which H. D. originally published Nights) at the request of Renne Saunderson, who is the lesbian sister of Natalia’s husband, Neil. The incident that lies behind Natalia’s suicide is her husband’s desertion. He has gone off to southern Italy with a boy lover. Since this is an artistic bohemian group, however, in which transgressive and experimental sexuality is taken for granted, there is no question of Natalia’s moral disapproval either of Neil’s homosexuality or his failure as a husband, although his leaving has clearly left a deep wound. Helforth explains Natalia’s suicide as a failure of her writing to fill the void of Neil’s abandonment. Helforth is himself a writer but stresses that his own work is a type of popular writing Natalia would never stoop to. Her writing is an impossible effort to manifest visionary experience directly: “She seemed to work actually in radium or electricity” (22). Presumably the work that follows was her final attempt, which, at least from Helforth’s perspective, is doomed to failure, however much he admires the aspiration. Helforth apparently sees Natalia’s suicide as a final successful “gesture” to realize the impossible, of literally going beyond the restraints of this existence and language over to “infinity” (10). He is particularly fascinated that before skating off, Natalia carefully left a watch on a muff by the shore, which turns out to belong to Renne. Renne and Helforth psychoanalytically interpret this to mean that Natalia wanted to be the rational and strong Renne, although it is more likely that Natalia is leaving behind the last vestiges of rational control, identified with both clock time and Renne, for an alternative psychological dimension. The fact that Helforth recently had analysis with Dr. Frank might be taken as an ironic comment on the Freudian “cure,” since Helforth has achieved balance and adjustment at

NIGHT TRAVELLERS, THE 965

the cost of being distanced from the unconscious sources of creativity that he envies in Natalia. The 12 short sections of Helforth’s prologue are matched by the 12 “nights” of Natalia’s account, which although presented in the third person are, Helforth assumes, a faithful record of Natalia’s thoughts and feelings. These 12 nights take place literally in the beds of Natalia or her younger lover, David Leavenworth, a long-term guest in the Saunderson house. The immediate action is the intimate lovemaking between the two, although any outward action is mediated through Natalia’s highly poetic mind. Natalia’s writing belongs alongside similar psychologically oriented works of experimental modernist fiction, such as those of Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson, both of whom H. D. knew. Natalia’s writing is strongly impressionistic and follows the drift of her thoughts and memories, as if to express the bodily and unconscious roots of thought, always focused on immediate details without offering a stabilizing setting or narrative. As mentioned, Neil’s absence constantly haunts Natalia as marking a sense of severance or trauma. Her relationship with Neil was one of merged identity and even a blurring of genders, as Neil is often described in feminine terms, while David calls Natalia “Nat” or “Neith.” H. D. constantly returns to such double characters, particularly in her fiction, in part because of her own vexed bisexuality, but also she was fascinated by the spiritual merging of selves. David is in no sense a substitute for this severance from Neil, and Natalia repeatedly says that she does not love him. She seems to hope a heterosexual relationship will help her to realize a new self independent of Neil, but ultimately she is using David as an instrument of erotic surcharge to release her unconscious and enter into a higher spiritual state: “the dream is greater than reality!” (88). Toward the end, sea imagery becomes increasingly prominent with the suggestion that it is luring Natalia, and presumably her suicide follows shortly after as she embraces the sea of the unconscious, finally abandoning all attachment to a distinct selfhood. More than once it is mentioned that the lake in which she drowns herself has never been sounded, is bottomless, as well as being fed by a hidden river, all obviously enough

evoking the unconscious and its connection with the reservoir of humankind’s mythic memory. Natalia’s writing is crisscrossed by numerous references to archaic civilizations, mythology, occultism, and exoticism, which all point toward the collective unconscious springs of creativity. Viewed from one perspective, the novel presents a work of writing that leads directly to the female author’s suicide and is offered to the public by a male editor. This would suggest that Natalia’s suicide is a typical act of female failure that would identify the various images of death throughout her writing as symptoms of an oppressive male and rationalistic control. Yet it is evident from her own account that Natalia’s suicide is deliberately worked toward and embraced, representing the release from the restrictions of an old self and its tangle of definitions to some kind of existence beyond selfhood. Natalia reiterates one of H. D.’s favorite puns, tomb/womb, the mythic truth of death as rebirth. From this perspective, Natalia’s suicide could be interpreted as an escape from both the rationalizations of and the dependencies on those closest to her into a mysticlike existence.

SOURCES Chisholm, Dianne. H. D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H. D.’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. H. D. [John Helforth]. Nights. New York: New Directions, 1986. Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

NIGHT TRAVELLERS, THE ELIZABETH SPENCER (1991) In The Night Travellers, a Vietnam War novel set in North Carolina and Canada, SPENCER revisits two of her common themes, the tensions between parents and children and the tensions between the artist and her community—conflicts that Spencer says she experienced in her own life. The individual parent-child relationships in this novel symbolize the country’s, or fatherland’s, interactions with the generation of youth who came of age during the Vietnam War.

966

NIGHT TRAVELLERS, THE

Though it is a young man, Jefferson Blaise, who actually protests and is later sent to the war, the main characters are Kate Harbison, a beautiful scientist who longs for a more glamorous life, and her daughter Mary Kerr, a dancer. The tension between mother and daughter begins early, when Mary’s closeness to her father isolates Kate and makes her jealous of their love. But when Mary attempts to express her feelings for her sickly father, the results are catastrophic. Meeting him walking home one hot summer day, she begins to dance on the sidewalk, gaining his praise and admiration. Not strong enough to withstand the hot sun, however, her father suffers a heart attack and dies. Kate blames Mary for his death. “Didn’t you know better” (12), she asks, believing that Mary’s dancing lured her father into the strong sun where he withered. After several years, Kate remarries, but the tension between mother and daughter continues. On a business trip Kate meets Fred Davis, a man whom she needs more than she loves: “What he had, of course, was obviously money” (101). As her interest in the new man increases, Kate begins to see Mary’s dancing as a means to get her daughter out of the way. She borrows money to send Mary away from Kingsbury, North Carolina, to a dance school in Winston, and it is here that Mary first comes into her own as an artist. Though she is free of Kate, Mary’s struggle is still not over. Her lover, Jefferson Blaise, never tries to stop her dancing, but his own work against the war is always more important. When they discover she is pregnant, the couple moves to Canada, where they marry, and Mary leaves behind her home and family. Pregnant, she also loses her ability to dance, her creative voice. In Canada, without a support system, Mary is first emotionally and then physically abandoned by Jeff. When, sick and tired, she loses interest in sex for a while after the baby is born, Jeff has an affair with the couple’s landlady and friend, Madeline Spivak. Then, feeling stifled by their exile in Canada, Jeff returns to the United States to write for an underground newspaper. He leaves Mary behind to care for the baby with only an unreliable network of war activists for support. Idealist that he is, Jeff pursues the life of the mind, the important work of shaping culture, leaving Mary at home to do the messy

job of rearing his offspring. Mary, without the money to pay for the dancing that “balances” her, attempts to vanish from the cruel world in which she finds herself. Leaving her baby with a neighbor, she tries to hang herself from a heating pipe in her apartment, only to be cut down at the last moment by rescuers whom the vigilant neighbor summons. Given back her life, then, Mary must rediscover herself on her own terms. Reviving her artistic voice is a major part of Mary’s healing, and the first thing she does when released by the authorities is borrow money for dance lessons. As if to mark her rebirth, Mary Kerr adopts a new stage name, Marie Caree, by which she becomes known as a talented professional. She finds her center in herself. Mary’s escape from home marks the beginning of her journey to independence, but it also marks the beginning of her mother’s decline. Her daughter’s boyfriend, though she does not approve of his politics, has always held a special fascination that Kate cannot shake. When Mary and Jeff’s relationship begins to develop despite her objections, Kate invites him over for a private meeting. Whether because of her own attraction to him or because of an attempt to break up her daughter’s unacceptable liaison, she makes a pass at Jeff. Her beauty is not without its effect—he later says she is the sexiest woman he ever saw—but he rejects her advances. To Kate, then, Jeff becomes the one who got away, and she does not easily shake the image of this young and attractive man. Through Kate, Spencer explores the dangerous seductiveness of the Southern belle image. Kate longs to be an alluring belle herself, and she also attempts to live this failed dream through her daughter. Yet she wonders to herself, “However would Mary Kerr know what to do with him? What could the child understand about the nature I know he has?” (83), and her nights are disturbed by erotic dreams of him. Kate tortures herself with the memory that Jeff refused her, preferring her daughter, Mary, instead. Jeff and Mary’s relationship reminds her of the romantic love she will never have (both her marriages were for prestige and money, rather than love), and his refusal reminds her that her youth and beauty are fading. When he dismisses her final advance, at a political rally in New

NIGHTWOOD 967

York, Kate returns home a drunken wreck. Her husband, Fred, decides to act on Kate’s earlier suggestion and have Jeff permanently removed from the scene. He uses his political connections to have Jeff found, at which time he is given the option of going to Vietnam or to prison. Jeff chooses the war. But when she learns of this trap, Kate suffers a total collapse. She believes that her manipulations have sentenced her son-in-law to almost certain death, and the self-reproach is paralyzing. Faced with her guilt at destroying her daughter’s marriage as well as the object of her own great infatuation, Kate becomes a pathetic, wrecked creature, leaving Fred to think of psychiatrists and lithium. But Mary, without Jeff, survives. Surrounded by her dance company in a country house in Montreal, she is finally in her element. Mary realizes that she has grown beyond the limitations set for her by her mother. Basking in the afterglow of a successful performance and giving advice to a younger dancer, the once fragile and timid Mary is now centered and confident. Sure of herself after having found her community, Mary turns to look at her own daughter, Kathy: “In the firelight they were happy around her. Mary cautioned Kathy, who behind them was swinging on the banister of the stairway, too high up, but sure she would never fall” (365). In Mary, Spencer shows us a strong woman artist creating her art, inspiring her own daughter and her readers alike.

SOURCES Entzminger, Betina. The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women and the Dark Seductress. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Greene, Sally. “Re-Placing the Hero: The Night Travellers as Novel of Female Self-Discovery,” Southern Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1994): 33–39. Roberts, Terry. Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Spencer, Elizabeth. The Night Travellers. New York: Viking, 1991. Betina Entzminger

NIGHTWOOD DJUNA BARNES (1937)

Djuna BARNES worked as a freelance journalist, illustrator, and

artist in New York City in the 1920s. She garnered fame as a journalist who involved herself in “action pieces”: sliding down ropes with firemen, force-fed like suffragettes on hunger strikes struggling to gain the vote. When she moved to Paris in 1919, she met many of her most important influences, such as James Joyce. While in Paris she joined the salon that met at Natalie Burney’s home. There they studied the work of the Greek poet Sappho and critiqued each other’s work. This circle is parodied, with Burney’s blessing, in Barnes’s Ladies Almanack. This is but one example of her thinly veiled fictionalization of her life. Her novel Ryder, a best-seller for a short time, is a mock-Elizabethan chronicle of her family. Loved by Dylan Thomas, admired by T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett, Barnes wrote Nightwood over the course of nine years. It is the artist’s portrait of herself as Nora and her relationship with Thelma Wood. Nightwood begins Genesis-like, with a listing of family, but it is a farce. It quickly moves through the death of Guido Volkbein; the birth of his son, Felix; and then the death of Felix’s mother. Guido spent his life creating a past for his family. He purchases a painting of a man and a painting of a woman and claims they are his noble parents. Guido knows little about his ancestors, and because Felix loses his family so young, Felix has little knowledge of his past except for a sense that his grandparents, portrayed in the paintings, were great people. Many years later, while at a hotel bar, Felix’s friend Dr. Matthew O’Connor assists a beautiful and boylike Robin Vote (note the allusion to women’s suffrage). Felix sees O’Connor is a fraud when the doctor merely splashes water on Robin’s face to wake her. Felix falls in love with Robin. They marry and have one child, Guido, who is named after Felix’s father, and then, in a flash, Robin leaves them. Felix learns later that Robin left him for the dark-haired, long-legged beauty Nora Flood. Robin meets Nora at a circus in New York and they settle in Paris. As quickly as Robin left Felix, she leaves Nora. Nora is crushed when she finds Robin left for America with a woman named Jenny. The novel performs several slights-of-hand. Its opening suggests the story will follow Felix. The story

968 NIN, ANAÏS

quickly moves to Robin and is the person on whom the story turns, but Robin rarely speaks in her own right. Nora, then, seems to be the focus of the story, but she spends much of her time asking Dr. O’Connor (a family friend and the person who delivered her at birth) his opinions about love and loss. While Dr. O’Connor’s monologues seem to be backdrops to the novel, they are its heart. His ramblings explain the positions of each of the characters, including himself, in the novel; his insights are alternately sacred or profane, humorous or horrifying. In their totality he suggests life is filled with sexual ambiguity, moral uncertainty, and unspeakable truths. The narrator describes the doctor, and sometimes the doctor describes himself, as a Tiresias character. Like Tiresias in Eliot’s The Waste Land, he is oracle, sometime narrator, and, as a cross-dresser, he embodies both sexes. At one point he exclaims, “No man knows it as I know it. I who am the god of darkness” (126). Much of what Dr. O’Connor says is eminently quotable, strangely like Confucius or Buddha. He calls sleep “that unpeopled annihilation” (88). He suggests his relationship to Christ when he “roars,” “Mother of God! I wanted to be your son—the unknown beloved second would have done!” (149–50). At one point he prescribes “Meat-Axe Day” as a solution to heartache: “Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart” (129). Some of his quips could be the Gothic version of a Hallmark card: “Life, the permission to know death” (83). The novel is decidedly gothic in the descriptions of Robin as a “femme fatale,” a vamp: “The dark, mysterious woman with her sinister affinities for violent crime, perverse sex, and the larger members of the cat family” (Levine, 272). The doctor explains her selfish habits to Nora: Robin was outside the “human type”— a wild thing caught in a woman’s skin, monstrously alone, monstrously vain. Every bed she leaves, without caring. She has made her “escape” again. That’s why she can’t “put herself in another’s place”; she herself is the only “position” (146). It is significant that Nora, Robin, and Dr. O’Connor are all Americans, and Felix’s lack of a past symbolically makes him American. Ahmed Nimeiri points out:

American expatriation . . . is not a pilgrimage to a new life away from America but an experience that ends in a retreat and entrapment into a life more sinister than that which has initially prompted the American to leave his country. (101) T.S. Eliot, who edited the book, says in his introduction that the novel is best read by readers of poetry (xii). The novel is dense, poetic, and dark. Nightwood challenges its readers. The gospel, as spoken by Matthew, suggests his answer to the novel: “None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last” (138). Cheryl Plumb’s restored and carefully annotated version of Nightwood was published in 1995.

SOURCES Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New York: New Directions, 1961. Levine, Nancy. “ ‘I’ve Always Suffered from Sirens’: The Cinema Vamp and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood,” Women’s Studies 16 (1989): 271–281. Nimeiri, Ahmed. “Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and ‘the Experience of America,’” Critique 35, no. 2 (1993): 100–112. Plumb, Cheryl, ed. Nightwood. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1995. James M. Wilson

NIN, ANAÏS (1903–1977) Anaïs Nin was an experimental expatriate writer who wrote subjective, imaginative novels and a series of diaries (covering the years 1914 to 1974), often about taboo sexual issues, including an incestuous relationship with her father. The work that Nin called her “continuous novel,” Cities of the Interior (1974), comprised five novels, held together by three women characters. These novels appeared separately between 1946 and 1961: Ladders to Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The Four-Chambered Heart (1950), A SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE (1950), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). Nin also wrote five collections of short stories; like the novels, they were characterized by a dreamlike, surrealistic quality that exudes a psychological if not a physical reality. The five novels of Cities of the Interior are linked by the reflective Djuna, the violent Lillian, and the unrealistic and fantasy-absorbed Sabina. Lillian, dissat-

NIN, ANAÏS 969

isfied with both her husband, Larry, and her lover, Gerard, is the major character in Ladders to Fire. Djuna, who assumes importance near the end of Ladders, is the major character in both Children of the Albatross, where she displays her psychological incompleteness after her father’s desertion of the family, and The FourChambered Heart, along with Rango, her instinctive Guatemalan lover. A Spy in the House of Love, the best known of the five novels, portrays Sabina and her many lovers; she finally learns from Djuna that her promiscuity has denied her the love she seeks. Lillian, who returns in Seduction of the Minotaur, loses her Mexican doctor-lover to drug dealers. Anaïs Nin (pronounced Anna-ees Neen) was born on February 21, 1902, to Joachin Nin, a Spanish pianist and composer, and Rosa Culmell Nin, a singer of Danish and French heritage. Nin’s father deserted the family when she was 11 years old, and as a result her mother immigrated with Nin and her two brothers to the United States in 1914, the year Nin began keeping her diaries. Nin was reared in New York City, left public school at age 16, married Hugh Guiler, a banker, at age 17, and shortly thereafter moved with him to Paris, where she published her first book in 1932. There she met Henry and June MILLER and the avant-garde writers of the Villa Seurat circle. After undergoing and studying psychoanalysis with the famed psychiatrist Otto Rank, Nin published her first novel, Winter of Artifice, in 1939; the original Paris edition contained three novellas: “Djuna,” “Lilith,” and “The Voice.” “Djuna” is widely regarded as a fictionalized account of Nin’s relationship with Henry Miller and his wife June. As World War II approached, Nin and her husband returned to New York, where her reputation as an avant-garde artist grew. Her subjects included incest and adultery. Anaïs Nin died of cancer on January 14, 1977, in Los Angeles. After her death, her erotic short fictions Delta of Venus (1977) and Little Birds (1979)—books she had written to make money—became popular because of their poetic and distinctly female perspectives on sexuality. Many of her manuscripts, including her diaries, are housed at the University of California at Los Angeles. Northwestern University Library also

holds a large collection of Nin’s published and unpublished work. Although Nin sold the film rights to A Spy in the House of Love in 1970, the novel has yet to be filmed. Nin was famously involved in love affairs with numerous men and women, the most celebrated of which was with the experimental novelist Henry Miller and his wife, June Miller. The film Henry & June, the story of Nin’s relationships with both Millers, starring Maria de Medeiros as Anaïs Nin, Fred Ward as Henry Miller, and Uma Thurman as June Miller, was released by Universal in 1990.

NOVELS Children of the Albatross. New York: Dutton, 1947. Cities of the Interior (contains Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, and Solar Barque). Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1959. Reprinted, with Seduction of the Minotaur replacing Solar Barque. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1961. Collages. Denver, Colo.: Swallow Press, 1964. The Four-Chambered Heart. New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1950. Ladders to Fire. New York: Dutton, 1946. Solar Barque. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1958. Enlarged edition published as Seduction of the Minotaur. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1961. A Spy in the House of Love. New York: British Book Centre, 1954. This Hunger. New York: Gemor Press, 1945. The Winter of Artifice. Paris: Obelisk Press, 1939. Published as Winter of Artifice: Three Novelettes. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1958. Revised edition published as Winter of Artifice [and] House of Incest. London: P. Owen, 1974.

SOURCES DuBow, Wendy M., ed. Conversations with Anaïs Nin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Felber, Lynette. “The Three Faces of June: Anaïs Nin’s Appropriation of Feminine Writing,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (Fall 1995): 309–324. Fitch, Noël Riley. Anaïs: The Erotic Life of Anaïs Nin. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Jaas, Ekbert. “ ‘The Barbaric Friendship with Robert’: A Biographical Palimpsest,” Mosaic 11, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 141–152. Jason, Philip K. Anaïs Nin and Her Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

970 NISEI DAUGHTER

Kamboureli, Smaro. “Discourse and Intercourse, Design and Desire in the Erotica of Anaïs Nin,” Journal of Modern Literature 11, no. 1 (March 1984): 143–158. Klinger, Judson. “Henry and June,” American Film 15, no. 12 (September 1990): 22–29, 46–48. McEvilly, Wayne. “The Bread of Tradition: Reflections on the Diary of Anaïs Nin,” Prairie Schooner 45, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 161–167. Nalbantian, Suzanne. Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Nin, Anaïs, with Barbara Freeman. “A Dialogue with Anaïs Nin,” Chicago Review 24, no. 2 (1972): 29–35. Richard-Allerdyce, Diane. Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity. Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998. Schneider, Duane. “Anaïs Nin in the Diary: The Creation and Development of a Persona,” Mosaic 11, no. 2 (Winter 1978): 9–19. Scholar, Nancy. Anaïs Nin. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Zaller, Robert, ed. A Casebook on Anaïs Nin. New York: NAL/Meridian, 1974.

OTHER Anaïs Nin. Homepage. Available online. URL: http://www.Anaïs-nin.de/. Accessed September 24, 2005. About. Women’s History. “Anaïs Nin.” Available online. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_ nin_Anaïs.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005.

NISEI DAUGHTER MONICA SONE (1953) Though Nisei Daughter is Monica Sone’s only known published work, it has become perhaps the bestknown memoir of the World War II Japanese-American internment. Originally published in 1953 by Little, Brown, the University of Washington Press resurrected it in 1979 at the height of the Japanese-American redress movement. The 1979 edition, which includes a preface by the sociologist S. Frank Miyamoto and a preface by Sone herself, has undergone numerous reprintings. Sone is married with several children and grandchildren and lives in Ohio. Because of its accessible language and detailed realism—and, perhaps, its humor and nonconfrontational style—Nisei Daughter is often used in classrooms as a “direct” historical account of internment. Sone’s contemporary reviewers, in fact, emphasized and praised

the “humor” and “warmth” of Nisei Daughter. But it is crucial to remember that Sone initially published her memoir in a climate of post–World War II anti-Japanese American hostility. Sone participated in the War Department’s relocation program, which allowed nisei to leave camp by applying for colleges in the Midwest and the East Coast. As a result, she and other participants felt paradoxical pressures both to represent all of Japanese America to white midwestern environments and to fit into these environments as seamlessly as possible. Thus, as with other racialized ethnic authors, readers should carefully consider the mediating pressures of historical context and audience on the text. The book’s title combines the Japanese word nisei (second-generation Japanese American) with the “American” word daughter, a combination that reflects the narrator’s struggle throughout the memoir. In keeping with contemporary sociological discourse about the nisei, Sone often refers to herself as having a dual personality, a “Japanese” one and an “American” one, even referring to herself as a “two-headed monstrosity” (236). Following this thread of duality, the narrator is “Kazuko Itoi” (her maiden name) for most of the memoir until the last chapter, when she becomes “Monica” for the purposes of the relocation program. Because of the bleak tone of the final chapters, several critics (Simpson, Lowe) urge readers to read the memoir’s final triumphant note of integration of the narrator’s dual personalities with some skepticism. Although Nisei Daughter is most commonly known as a memoir of internment, only two chapters of the 12 focus directly on internment life. It is also an account of growing up in pre–World War II Seattle. With several important exceptions, many of the early chapters portray a happy middle-class family, containing humorous descriptions of Sone’s life in “American” and Japanese grammar schools, mistaken identities, a school picnic, and a trip to Japan. The exceptions include racial profiling, housing discrimination against Japanese Americans, anti-Japanese immigrant laws, and Sone’s own nervous breakdown, which sends her to a sanatorium. As the memoir draws inexorably closer to the Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, the memoir’s tone becomes noticeably more

NO-NO BOY 971

somber. Though the two chapters of internment carefully treat the high points of “camp life,” including a wedding and a comical tea party, several moments of bitterness and discontent remain. It is important, therefore, to read the memoir with an appreciation of its humor, but also with a sensitivity to the darker notes of prejudice and discrimination that surface. Readers might also contrast the tone and political consciousness of Sone’s 1979 preface (written at the height of the Japanese-American reparations movement) with the tone and consciousness of the chapters involving internment life. Although early scholarship criticized Nisei Daughter’s themes of assimilation, recent scholarship by Asian-Americanist literary critics has treated Sone’s text with attention to genre. These critics treat the memoir variously as an autobiography (Yamamoto), as a text with themes of maternality (Lim) and protest (Sumida), and as a bildungsroman, or novel of development (Lowe). Yamamoto’s reading is particularly useful for understanding the function of genre and audience for Japanese-American women autobiographers like Sone (Masking). An accurate reading of Nisei Daughter, then, must account for both the memoir’s initially cheerful tone and the melancholy tone of its concluding chapters.

SOURCES Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.” In Asian-American Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 89–107. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1999. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Simpson, Caroline Chung. An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–1960. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. Sumida, Stephen H. “Protest and Accommodation, SelfSatire and Self-Effacement, and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter.” In Multicultural Autobiography: American Lives, edited by James Robert Payne, 207–245. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

———. “Nisei Daughter, by Monica Sone.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Stephen H. Sumida and Sau-Ling Wong, 151–158. New York: MLA, 2001. Tamiko Nimura

NO-NO BOY JOHN OKADA (1957)

John OKADA’s No-No Boy is recognized as the first Japanese-American nonautobiographical novel. Written in the 1950s, the novel is concerned with the very real division and trauma created within the Japanese-American community in the aftermath of their internment by the U.S. government during World War II. Rather than focusing on internment camp experiences as many autobiographies do, the novel follows the return of a young Japanese American, Ichiro Yamada, to his hometown of Seattle after he has been imprisoned for refusing the draft to fight for the Americans during the war. The novel follows his painfully thwarted attempts at reintegration into the Japanese-American community in which he grew up as he is hampered by the divisions within the community itself regarding its differing reactions to the internment and draft. The publishing history and reception of Okada’s novel are often discussed in critical articles as they reveal the strong connection between the content of the novel and the actuality of the Japanese-American community. For instance, when the novel was first published in 1957, it sold very few copies and was generally rejected by the potential Japanese-American readership, who saw it as an unsettling attempt to open old wounds and to create trouble with the U.S. government. The timing of the first publication is a crucial factor in its failure. It was written at a time when attention was turned toward the civil rights movement of African Americans and the cold war with communism, due to which, in contrast, Japanese Americans were enjoying and clinging to the status of the “model minority” (Ling, 361). The novel’s later success following its republication in the 1970s at a time of increased interest in Asian-American history was due to its unique quality of being the only Japanese-American novel about the aftermath of internment and the draft. Called a “no-no boy,” Ichiro represents the many young Japanese-American men who when asked if

972 NO-NO BOY

they would be drafted into the U.S. armed forces by the authorities replied negatively to two questions: Would they swear complete allegiance to America and would they reject any allegiances to the emperor and Japan. Much of the novel is concerned with Ichiro’s self-analysis and his attempts to understand why he took the action to become a no-no boy. His decision, he realizes, has brought him nothing but rejection by the majority of his peers and most particularly his brother and his army veteran friends. In a discussion with his fatally wounded veteran friend Kenji, he admits that the rejection he experiences and his own self-loathing make him feel spiritually dead to an extent that he would swap positions with Kenji despite his amputation and impending death. Many critics, such as William Yeh, see the novel structured around a search for rebirth from the spiritual death gripping Ichiro (Yeh, 131). The novel is structured around a journey of discovery through a few weeks of his life during which he witnesses many actual deaths: his mother’s, and those of his friends Kenji and Freddie. By comparing these deaths to his own state, he goes through a gradual process to reach the will to live. Ironically, he finds the will to live in the idea that he still has a future in America and as an American. Ichiro’s friend Emi tells him that America is “a big country with a big heart. There’s room here for all kinds of people” (Okada, 95). After his many experiences in which he notes the reactions of people to his No-No Boy status, Ichiro considers “there had been a lot of goodness that he had not expected. There was room for all kinds of people. Possibly, even for one like him” (233). It is a point of contention among critics about how successful his search for rebirth ultimately is. Jinqi Ling questions to what extent the attempt at ending the novel on a positive note has compromised the earlier strongly critical stance expressed by Ichiro in relation to the racism of the U.S. government and society and the reactions of complicity and internalized racism within the Japanese-American community (Ling, 373). As Jinqi Ling notes, for most of the book Okada appears to have written an ethnic novel of dissent. The reliance for an optimistic ending on a sentimental

understanding of America as a nation with a heart does appear to undermine this. Several feminist critics such as Gayle Fujita Sato and Apollo Amoko also object that the novel appears to portray a racist and male chauvinist idea of a Japanese woman in the figure of Ichiro’s mother. Ichiro blames his mother for his predicament, claiming that it is caused by the fact that she has brought him up without ever having adapted to America and by doing so has instilled in him a sense of being Japanese and therefore different from Americans. Apollo Amoko argues that Ichiro is able to liberate himself from his self-loathing and his hatred for his mother only following her increasing mental illness and her eventual suicide (Amoko, 43). They allow Ichiro to find a distance from her and her point of view and ultimately to liberate himself from that part of him that allowed her to influence him and his “no-no” answer. Sato suggests that Ichiro’s release from his mother’s influence also provides a suspect logical link portrayed by the novel: linking all things Japanese with childhood and all things adult with America (Sato, 241). According to Gayle Fujita Sato and Apollo Amoko, by projecting these negative aspects onto Ichiro’s mother, the novel relinquishes a large part of the responsibility for Ichiro’s own actions and the full responsibility of the racist policies of the U.S. government (Amoko, 43; Sato, 239). Thus, it allows Ichiro and his friend Emi to find an innocent aspect of America to which to cling and in which to find renewal. Many approach an analysis of the novel by interpreting the use of the Japanese myth of Momotaro by Okada (Ling, 363). In the novel Ichiro thinks back to his childhood in terms of this myth, in which a boy is found in a peach stone and is lovingly brought up by the couple who find him. In the myth Momotaro goes to war to fight for his family honor and returns in triumph. Does Ichiro fight against the draft to uphold his Japanese family honor? Does Ichiro fight the draft to make a stand against the racism of the U.S. government for the sake of his Japanese-American family and community? Or is Okada making an ironic use of the Momotaro myth that emphasizes that Ichiro refuses his chance to fight for the honor of his family as an American? The novel appears

NORRIS, FRANK 973

to sit between all of these interpretations, as they are all aspects of the confusing ambiguity that Okada portrays of being a Japanese American during World War II, caught between loyalty to a country that has rejected him and loyalty to a country that has declared war on him.

SOURCES Amoko, Apollo O. “Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Boy, Obasan and the Limits of Minority Discourse,” Mosaic 33, no. 3 (September 2000): 35–55. Ling, Jinqi. “Race, Power, and Cultural Politics in John Okada’s No-No Boy,” American Literature 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 359–381. Okada, John. No-No Boy. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. Sato, Gayle K., and Fujita Sato. “Momotaro’s Exile: John Okada’s No-No Boy.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Amy Ling, 239–258. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Yeh, William. “To Belong or Not to Belong: The Liminality of John Okada’s No-No Boy,” Amerasia Journal 19, no. 1 (1993): 121–133. Yogi, Stan. “ ‘You Had to Be One or the Other’ Oppositions and Reconciliation,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (1996): 63–77. ———. “Japanese American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by KingKok Cheung, 125–155. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Maggie Ann Bowers

NORRIS, FRANK (BENJAMIN FRANKLIN) (1870–1902) Frank Norris, one of the most influential practitioners of American naturalism, became “the touchstone for turn-of-the-century changes in art and thought” (McElrath, ix). His work not only depicts his era but also, in sometimes graphic, sometimes brutal detail, reflects the cultural changes taking place as one century ended and another began. Influenced by the French naturalism of Émile Zola, Norris, along with Stephen CRANE and Hamlin GARLAND, wrote about the problems of the poor and the down-and-out, although literature about the genteel life was in fashion. He is remembered today for his novels MCTEAGUE: A STORY OF SAN FRANCISCO (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California

(1901), and The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903). Five of his seven novels are set in California. Frank Norris was born on March 5, 1870, in Chicago to Benjamin Franklin Norris, a wholesale jeweler and real estate investor, and Gertrude G. Doggett Norris, an actress. After studying art in Paris and marrying Jeanette Black in 1890, he was educated at the University of California at Berkeley (1890–94) and at Harvard University (1894–95). He failed to graduate from either because he did not complete the mathematics requirement. But he had written parts of McTeague and Moran of the Lady Letty (1898), the former considered by a number of critics to be his masterpiece. Moran of the Lady Letty, a Darwinian tale of adventure and love between the shanghaied Ross Wilbur and Moran, the amazonlike daughter of a ship’s captain, was serialized in The Wave in 1898. It brought him popularity and a position with McClure’s magazine. In McTeague, the title character, a dentist, gradually loses his home, his dental practice, and his money. He also murders his wife, Trina, and steals her savings. In the final image, which represents his downfall, the fugitive McTeague is handcuffed to the man he has just murdered; this man was seeking to avenge Trina McTeague’s murder. Greed, a 1925 MGM film based on McTeague, was directed by Erich von Stroheim. McTeague was to have been the middle novel in Norris’s planned San Francisco trilogy, with Blix (1899) preceding it and Vandover the Brute (published posthumously in 1914) following. Travis “Blix” Bessimer leaves her decadent life in San Francisco, meets the reporter Condy Rivers (a youthful Norris), and saves him from indecision and lack of focus. She plans to enter medical school in New York, where Condy now has a job with a New York publisher. A Man’s Woman (1900) includes Lloyd Searight, a registered nurse and 1890s New Woman whose rebelliousness and independence falter when she falls in love with Ward Bennett, who goes off to the North Pole. Norris followed with The Octopus, the first in a projected three-volume “Epic of Wheat.” Here all American social milieus would be portrayed through the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat

974 NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER

in California, Chicago, and Europe. The Octopus depicts the struggle between the farmers and the railroad (the octopus of the title) and features Annixter, a farmer; Shelgrim, the social Darwinist railroad manager; Genslinger, a newspaper editor; and Presley, a poet. The second volume, The Pit, addresses speculation in the Chicago grain market and features Curtis Jadwin, who avariciously attempts to take it over, and his strong-willed wife, Laura, who has an affair with Sheldon Corthell, an artist. The Wolf, which was to have followed American wheat to an impoverished European village, remained in the planning stages when Norris died from appendicitis. Numerous incomplete writings, including Vandover and the Brute, Norris’s first novel, were discovered and published in 1914. Loosely autobiographical, Vandover and the Brute tells the tale of a San Francisco magnate who lacks any sort of spiritual or ethical rudder that would slow his descent into depravity. Frank Norris died on October 25, 1902, in San Francisco, and was buried in Oakland, California. The largest collection of Norris letters and manuscripts is housed at the Frank Norris Collection at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

NOVELS Blix. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. London: Richards, 1900. A Man’s Woman. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1900. London: Richards, 1900. McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. London: Richards, 1899. Moran of the Lady Letty: A Story of Adventure off the California Coast. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1898. Republished as Shanghaied. London: Richards, 1899. The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1901. London: Richards, 1901. The Pit: A Story of Chicago. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903. London: Richards, 1903. Vandover and the Brute. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1914. London: Heinemann, 1914.

SOURCES Boyd, Jennifer. Frank Norris: Spatial Form and Narrative Time. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Cooper, Frederic Taber. Some American Story Tellers. n.p.: Holt, 1911. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968. French, Warren. Frank Norris. Boston: Twayne, 1962. Graham, Don. The Fiction of Frank Norris: The Aesthetic Context. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Hicks, Granville. The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since the Civil War, rev. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1935, 164–206. Hochman, Barbara. The Art of Frank Norris, Storyteller. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr. Frank Norris: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992. ———. Frank Norris Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1992. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Frank Norris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956, 114–156. Walker, Franklin. Frank Norris: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932.

OTHER Albert, Janice. “Frank Norris (1870–1902).” California Association of Teachers of English. Available online. URL: http:// www.cateweb.org/CA_Authors/Norris.html. Accessed August 8, 2005. Frank Norris. William Dean Howells Society Site. Available online. URL: http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/campbell/ howells/norris.htm. Accessed August 8, 2005. Frank Norris. American Literature on the Web. Available online. URL: http://www.nagasaki-gaigo.ac.jp/ishikawa/ amlit/n/norris19re.htm. Accessed August 8, 2005.

NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER LANGSTON HUGHES (1930) The story of a young boy’s awakening to the realities of black life in a small Kansas town in the 1920s, Not Without Laughter is Langston HUGHES’s first and most highly acclaimed novel. Hughes, an American poet and central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wraps his narrative in dialect and jazz rhythms to convey the tempo and rich complexity of African-American life in this story of race, family, music, religion, and coming-of-age. Winner of the Harmon gold medal for literature, Not Without Laughter was published the year after Hughes’s college graduation, when he was 28.

NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER 975

Not Without Laughter tells the story of Sandy Rodgers, a young boy growing up in the fictional town of Stanton, Kansas. Sandy lives with his grandmother, whom everyone calls “Aunt Hagar,” his mother, Annjee, and his Aunt Harriett, in Hagar’s tiny house. Sandy’s father, Jimboy Rodgers, turns up occasionally but never stays long. Much of the novel is semiautobiographical, loosely based on Hughes’s own experiences and acquaintances growing up in Lawrence, Kansas. Racial discrimination and segregation were a harsh reality for the inhabitants of both Lawrence and the fictional Stanton during Hughes’s childhood, as they were throughout the United States, and Sandy’s story is punctuated by illustrations of prejudice and pain, such as when Sandy and his young friends are turned away from a children’s day party at an amusement park because they are black, or when a teacher seats all the African-American children in the back of the room. In his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), Hughes explains that his intent in Not Without Laughter was to “write about a typical Negro family in the Middle West, about people like those I had known in Kansas.” Hughes admits, however, that his was not that typical Negro family—his mother was a newspaperwoman for the Topeka Plaindealer and a legal stenographer, his granduncle, John Mercer Langston, was a U.S. congressman and minister to Haiti, and his father lived in Mexico City. For purposes of the novel, Hughes created around himself what seemed to be a family and life more typical of African-American life in Kansas. “I gave myself aunts that I didn’t have, modeled after other children’s aunts whom I had known.” Through these fictionalized characters, Hughes explores the relationships, joys, and pains of being African American in the 1920s, rather than the imposed characterizations typical of works about blacks by white authors. The personalities that animate Sandy’s world are realistic and flawed, but they are whole and unapologetic for their faults, goals, hopes, troubles, and pleasures. Sandy’s father is a good-looking, irresponsible wanderer whose music is soul-stirring; Aunt Hagar conceals a wise, humble heart beneath a strong, dominating exterior. They stand as symbols of “everyman” and “everywoman”—graceful sufferers who may often

fail but are not failures. In Black Writers of the Thirties (1973), James Young cites the significance of Not Without Laughter as one of the first novels by a black author in which the life of “common folk” is examined on its own terms, rather than for humor or quaintness. Through Hughes’s writing, the young Sandy sees and feels the hardships and discrimination that afflict the African-American community and, mirroring Hughes’s own reflections, bears witness to the apparent futility of the day-to-day struggles that surround him. Ultimately, though, Sandy grows to see the depth and dimension of the lives of his friends and neighbors, and comes to realize that the reason “poverty-stricken old Negros like Uncle Dan Givens lived so long” was because “no matter how hard life might be, it was not without laughter.” In the United States, the 1920s stands out as a period of romantic primitivism in the arts. White writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Sherwood ANDERSON, and Carl Van Vechten demonstrated a growing interest in dramatizing black life—in what John Cooley suggests represents “the search of white Americans . . . for cultural forms and lifestyles that seemed more alive than their own” (Cooley, 90). This literary trend set the stage for African-American writers such as Hughes both by establishing a sympathetic audience and by creating the context for patronages that made possible much of the writing and art produced by black Americans during the decade (Shields). Hughes wrote under one such patron, the wealthy Charlotte Mason, and as a result, the composition of Not Without Laughter has been the subject of controversy among scholars of African-American literature. In The Big Sea, Hughes writes of Mason and her considerable influence on Not Without Laughter, revealing that she discouraged him from expressing his political convictions in the novel, labeling passages that expressed Hughes’s political sentiments as “propaganda.” Mason’s numerous criticisms during the writing of the novel caused the removal or alteration of many passages that originally turned a critical eye toward whites’ treatment of blacks. Hughes reflected on this censorship and loss of authenticity in “Poet to Patron”: What right has anyone to say That I Must throw out pieces of my heart for pay?

976 NOT WITHOUT LAUGHTER

For bread that helps to make My heart beat true, I must sell myself To you? A factory shift’s better, A week’s meagre pay, Than a perfumed note asking What poems today? (147) Despite this struggle over its authenticity of political spirit, Not Without Laughter stands as an unsentimental reflection of African-American life in the early 20th century. Hughes’s later works on African-American experiences included numerous volumes of poetry, several plays, children’s books, and newspaper sketches of his satirical character, Jesse B. Simple.

SOURCES Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958, 75–77. Butler, Maria. “Not Without Laughter: Hughes Contrasts Best, Worst of His Life in Lawrence,” Lawrence JournalWorld, 3 February 2002.

Cooley, John R. Savages and Naturals: Black Portraits by White Writers in Modern American Literature. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1982. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Knopf, 1940. ———. “Poet to Patron,” American Mercury, June 1939, p. 147. Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Perry, Margaret. Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976, 45–53. Young, James. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

OTHER Shields, John P. “ ‘Never Cross the Divide’: Reconstructing Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter.” African-American Review (December 22, 1994). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http:www.highbeam.com. Accessed August 8, 2005. Cynthia J. Miller

C

OD and for her novels. For the last decade and a half, she also has written less literary novels under the pseudonym Rosalind Smith. Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, to Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer, and Caroline Bush Oates. She was educated at Syracuse University (B.A., 1960) and at the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1961). That same year, on January 23, Oates married Raymond Joseph Smith. After some years of teaching at various universities, Oates wrote her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, in 1963, a dark, violent tale of a romance between teenager Karen Herz and Shar Rule, a 30-year-old racing driver who dies in an accident was much desired by Karen, whose father had commanded her to kill the man who had brutally beaten him. Oates’s locales are often derived from the rural, upstate New York area where she was reared (the mythical Eden County in her early fiction) and from her six years in Detroit, which provided her with a locus for urban decay and brutality. Her characters are ordinary working-class people (THEM, Because It Is Bitter), often nearly destitute, or the migrant poor (Garden of Earthly Delights). When she writes of suburbanites, Oates exposes—when she sees it—their shallowness, their pretensions, and their hypocrisy with biting satire (Expensive People, AMERICAN APPETITES). Likewise, she takes on whole institutions and explores their corruption, focusing on the law (Do With Me What You Will), the academy (Unholy Loves),

OATES, JOYCE CAROL (1938– )

Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most talented and prolific American writers of our era, belongs to a long tradition of serious literary novelists who also have broad popular appeal. These include her American predecessors Edith WHARTON and Henry JAMES, and their British counterparts George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Fanny Burney. Her more than 40 novels appear on both best-seller lists and university syllabi, and impressive numbers of them have been nominees or winners of he National Book Award: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), EXPENSIVE PEOPLE (1968), THEM (1969), and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1989). Black Water (1993) was a National Book Critics Circle Award nominee and Pulitzer Prize finalist. What I Lived For (1994) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Zombie (1995) won the Bram Stoker Award. Blonde (2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Some of her detractors have been suspicious of a writer whose productivity is nothing short of staggering and have tended to underestimate her talent, complaining of the looseness of her writing, the sensationalistic nature of many of her stories, and her lurid imagination. But those criticisms are balanced by an even greater number of enthusiasts who are in awe of her vision and of her ability to excel in every genre of American fiction. Although admired for her literary criticism, poetry, and plays, Oates is better known for her frequently anthologized short stories 977

978

OATES, JOYCE CAROL

excessive religiosity (Son of the Morning), and politics (The Assassins: A Book of Hours). Readers often think of her as the descendant of Edgar Allan POE, William FAULKNER, and Flannery O’CONNOR. Certainly Oates understands and depicts the dark underbelly of modern life, injecting violence and horror into seemingly mundane situations. In them, for instance, Loretta Wendall awakens to the sight of her brother shooting her sleeping lover in the head. She is then raped by a police officer who forces her to marry him. In Do With Me What You Will, a young girl is kidnapped from a playground. In Wonderland (1992), a father murders his family before he commits suicide; Zombie portrays Quentin P., a drugand alcohol-driven serial killer based on the real-life Jeffrey Dahmer; and Bellefleur (1980) contains a hermaphrodite, a vulture, a vampire, and a cannibal. Indeed, Oates has written three works in the tradition of the 18th-century gothic novel: Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn. In Bellefleur, as with Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s New England or Faulkner’s Southern families, generations of the Adirondack Mountain Bellefleur family are woven into actual historical events. In three of her most noteworthy eviscerations of the wealthy upper middle class, Oates exposes not only hypocrisy and arrogance but also the male’s ability to escape culpability. In American Appetites, she describes the enviable lives of Ian and Glynnis McCullough—he works in a nearby think tank, her cookbooks are on the New York Times best-seller list. But their lives are literally shattered when, during an argument over his love affair, Ian hurls her through a plate-glass window. After much psychological probing, Ian is found not guilty of his wife’s death and marries his young lover. Similarly, in Black Water (1992)—clearly derived from Senator Edward Kennedy’s involvement in the 1969 Chappaquiddick death of Mary Jo Kopechne—a powerful senator drives off a bridge and leaves his young woman companion to die. The novel is told from the dead young woman’s point of view; given the power and wealth stacked up against her, she was fated to meet a watery death. We Were the Mulvaneys, an Oprah Winfrey choice, rose to number one on the New York

Times best-seller list. It contains Oates’s trademark violence but is also an examination of the behavior that affects women, either emotionally or physically or both. In a well-to-do, popular family in upstate New York, Michael and Corinne Mulvaney live apparently enviable lives until their daughter, Marianne, is raped by one of her fellow students. The damage done by the rapist is exacerbated by Michael’s shamed banishment of his daughter, his descent into alcoholism, his loss of job and home, and the parallel fall of the other family members. Family violence, as Faulkner and Wharton were only too well aware, leaves scars that are usually impossible to erase or ignore. In Marya (1986), the title character, a successful academic, cannot resist seeking the alcoholic mother who abused her as a child. In YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS (1987), a former boxer commits incest with his niece. In Wonderland, Jesse Pederson is the sole survivor of his father’s massacre. Although he eventually becomes a successful brain surgeon, Jesse is psychologically incapable of happiness, only tolerating his unhappy marriage, his unruly and alienated children, and even an unsuccessful love affair. Joyce Carol Oates continues to bend her genius to the kaleidoscopic complexity of 21st-century America. Her most recent novels are The Falls (2004), winner of the Prix Femina, the French literary prize, and Sexy (2005), an exploration of teenage identity and sexuality. She lives with her husband in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. Several of Oates’s novels and short stories have been adapted to the screen. Foxfire was made in 1996; Getting to Know You, a film based on Oates’s 1992 short-story collection Heat, was made in 2000; and We Were the Mulvaneys was adapted as a teleplay for the Lifetime network in 2002.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS American Appetites. New York: Dutton, 1989. Angel of Light. New York: Dutton, 1981. The Assassins: A Book of Hours. New York: Vanguard Press, 1975. Beasts. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002. Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. New York: Dutton, 1990.

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR 979

Bellefleur. New York: Dutton, 1980. Black Water. New York: Dutton, 1992. Blonde: A Novel. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. A Bloodsmoor Romance. New York: Dutton, 1982. Broke Heart Blues: A Novel. New York: Dutton, 1999. Childwold. New York: Vanguard Press, 1976. Cybele. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. Do With Me What You Will. New York: Vanguard Press, 1973. Expensive People. New York: Vanguard Press, 1967. The Falls: A Novel. New York: Ecco, 2004. First Love: A Gothic Tale. New York: Ecco Press, 1996. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. New York: Dutton, 1993. A Garden of Earthly Delights. New York: Vanguard Press, 1967. Revised edition, New York: Random House, 2003. I’ll Take You There: A Novel. New York: Ecco, 2002. I Lock My Door upon Myself. New York: Ecco Press, 1990. Revised edition, Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 2002. Man Crazy. New York: Dutton, 1997. Marya: A Life. New York: Dutton, 1986. Middle Age: A Romance. New York: Ecco Press, 2001. My Heart Laid Bare. New York: Dutton, 1998. Mysteries of Winterthurn. New York: Dutton, 1984. Rape: A Love Story. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003. The Rise of Life on Earth. New York: New Directions, 1991. Sexy. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. Solstice. New York: Dutton, 1985. Rev ed., Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 2000. Son of the Morning. New York: Vanguard Press, 1978. The Tattooed Girl: A Novel. New York: Ecco, 2003. Tenderness. New York: Ontario Review Press, 1996. them. New York: Vanguard Press, 1969. Reprinted with introduction by Greg Johnson and afterword by the author, New York: Modern Library, 2000. Triumph of the Spider Monkey: The First-Person Confession of the Maniac Bobby Gotteson As Told to Joyce Carol Oates. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Unholy Loves. New York: Vanguard Press, 1979. We Were the Mulvaneys. New York: Dutton, 1996. What I Lived For. New York: Dutton, 1994. With Shuddering Fall. New York: Vanguard Press, 1964. Wonderland. New York: Vanguard Press, 1971. Revised, New York: Ontario Review Press, 1992. You Must Remember This. New York: Dutton, 1987. Zombie. New York: Dutton, 1995.

NOVELS, UNDER PSEUDONYM ROSAMOND SMITH The Barrens. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001. Double Delight. New York: Dutton, 1997. Lives of the Twins. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988. Nemesis. New York: Dutton, 1990. Snake Eyes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Soul/Mate. New York: Dutton, 1989. Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon. New York: Dutton, 1999. You Can’t Catch Me. New York: Dutton, 1995.

SOURCES Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Bender, Eileen. Joyce Carol Oates. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Daly, Brenda O. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987. ———. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1994. ———. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. Mayer, Sigrid, and Martha Hanscom. The Reception of Joyce Carol Oates’s and Gabriele Wohlmann’s Short Fiction. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998. Wagner, Linda W., ed. Joyce Carol Oates: The Critical Reception. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Watanabe, Nancy Ann. Love Eclipsed: Joyce Carol Oates’s Faustian Moral Vision. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997.

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR KATHARINE WEBER (1995) Katharine WEBER explores the distinctions between reality and perception in her debut novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Harriet Rose, a photographer fascinated by reflections, realizes she holds a distorted image of her best friend, Anne Gor-

980 OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

don. Harriet tends to project her values and desires onto those around her. Throughout the book, she struggles with a dilemma: Should she try saving Anne from the clutches of a toxic relationship? The novel ponders whether one can rescue somebody who does not ask to be saved. The novel was honored as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year. It was also listed under Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year and San Francisco Review of Books Best Books of the Year. Granta named Weber a regional winner in its Best Young American Novelists campaign. At the book’s outset, Harriet has won a travel grant to Switzerland and is bunking with her former roommate, Anne, who has moved to Geneva in pursuit of a destructive relationship with a married man. The book begins with a series of journal entries written as letters from Harriet to her boyfriend Benedict. Harriet describes how the friend she thought she knew so well had morphed into a “strange new mistress-person.” The new “Anne of Cleavage” is involved in a disastrous affair with an elderly man who survived Auschwitz with Anne’s father. Through her characters, Weber asks the question, when is intervening in someone else’s life assisting and when is it interfering? The author turns to Harriet’s past for insight into the present situation. Harriet flashes back to memories of her childhood. She recalls an incident when her grandmother Gay saw a little boy run into oncoming traffic. Gay pulled him to safety only to be attacked with a barrage of profanity. The child Gay rescued was actually a middle-aged dwarf. Harriet recalls another instance when, as a child, she placed an anonymous phone call to police because she believed her neighbor’s nanny was abusing one of the children. In this case, the abuse was real and the nanny turned out to be an impostor. The adult Harriet struggles to determine whether Anne needs saving. It is not until Anne’s tragic suicide that readers realize just how much rescuing Anne needs. The novel explores how two people with similarly tragic pasts could turn out so different. One ends up miserable and self-destructive. The other finds happiness. The women seem to have a lot in common. They

are both in their mid-20s and survived traumatic childhood experiences. However, Harriet has been able to overcome her history and create a happy life, while Anne gets stuck in a web of misery that dooms her by the end of the book. Richard Eder describes both women as “eaten away by childhood nightmares. Only Harriet learns to outdistance the gnawing” by writing letters to her boyfriend and snapping photographs of herself reflected in mirrors (Eder). The novel’s conclusion reveals the key: The absence of love leads to tragedy, while the presence of love has the power to redeem. The title of the book refers to the statement etched on rearview mirrors in cars. It emerges as a major theme in the novel: The past continually influences the present. Elizabeth Benedict explains, “Neither objects nor people, seen through the lens of a camera, a mirror or our own eyes, are what they seem” (Benedict, 20). Alice Joyce describes the novel as “compelling from the outset, due in large part to an enchantingly vulnerable, articulate, clever, yet candid protagonist, Harriet Rose, a photographer enjoying both the accolades of the New York art world and a delirious new love (who appears to be ‘the one’).” Weber describes writing as, “something that comes so naturally to me that I would have to say that the question of finding ideas for my writing is more about filtering out material than it is about searching for inspiration. Everything is potentially of interest to the fiction writer who works the way I do, like a magpie, snatching up glittering bits of detritus from the dirty sidewalk to take home to the nest. My fiction is not literally autobiographical, in that the characters are made up, the events described have never occurred—but at the same time, the sensibilities of certain characters are authentically my own” (www.katharineweber.com).

SOURCES Benedict, Elizabeth. Review of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, New York Times Book Review, 30 April 1995, p. 20. Eder, Richard. “Crossing a Perilous Bridge to Adulthood,” Newsday, 11 May 1995. Joyce, Alice. Review of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear. Booklist 91, no. 17 (May 1, 1995): 1,554.

O’BRIEN, TIM 981

Katharine Weber. Available online. URL: http://www. katharineweber.com. Accessed September 26, 2005. Levon Kornreich

O’BRIEN, (WILLIAM) TIM(OTHY) (1946–

) Tim O’Brien once said that he would be proud to have written the relatively small but excellent body of fiction by Tillie OLSEN. Like Olsen, his own oeuvre has maintained the same high quality that characterized his second novel, GOING AFTER CACCIATO (1978), winner of the National Book Award and widely considered the finest literary work about the Vietnam War. O’Brien has continued to mine his combat experiences in Vietnam, honing his craft and combining a spare prose style with an eloquent quality and a penchant for humor and dreamlike symbolism. Although the Vietnam War still appears in his fiction, many critics believe that his imaginative powers and originality make him more universal than a “war novel” writer, an artist who writes of the universal spirit. Tim O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946, in Austin, Minnesota, to William T. O’Brien, an insurance salesman, and Ava Schulz O’Brien, a teacher. Shortly after he graduated, summa cum laude, with a bachelor’s degree from Macalester College (1968), he was drafted into the U.S. Army. O’Brien served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, where he was awarded a Purple Heart. His first novel (some call it a memoir) If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, begun while O’Brien was in Vietnam but not published until 1973, features Paul Perry, an idealistic young man who is introduced to the war through newspaper and magazine articles. Northern Lights (1975), his second novel, set in Sawmill Landing, Minnesota, features two brothers who seek to define themselves during a savage snowstorm. Paul has remained at home while Harvey has been fighting in Vietnam, but now Paul rises to the challenge of the blizzard and saves both his brother and himself. Three years later, O’Brien published Going After Cacciato, a novel that will be considered his masterpiece. A literary work of imagination, history, and memory, it alternates between its focus on Cacciato, the foot soldier who has left his unit to walk the 8,000 miles to

Paris, site of the peace talks, and Specialist Fourth Class Paul Berlin, a writer who, with others, is sent to find Cacciato and to reunite him with Third Squad. Seven years afterward, O’Brien published The Nuclear Age (1985), his only non-Vietnam novel. Montana protagonist William Cowling seeks shelter for himself and his family from the nuclear holocaust he fears. He takes the reader back to the 1950s fears of a Soviet attack and forward through the protests of the 1960s and 1970s. O’Brien returned to Vietnam in The THINGS THEY CARRIED: A WORK OF FICTION (1990). Although this book includes a character named Tim O’Brien, who has written a novel named Going After Cacciato, this postmodern book is actually an intriguing mix of combat stories, journalism, autobiography, fact, fiction, and metafiction. In the Lake of the Woods (1994), depicts John Wade, a Vietnam veteran and politician whose participation in the My Lai massacre is ruining his political career; his wife, Kathy, has also mysteriously disappeared. In postmodern fashion, the reader must sift through many possible solutions to the mystery but never can be certain of the truth. Although she is speaking of Going After Cacciato, critic and scholar Catherine Calloway’s observation applies to all of O’Brien’s mature novels and short fiction: They are “postmodernist works that carry their readers far beyond a one-dimensional view of reality”; they project “multiple visions, moral complexities, and unsolvable oppositions,” and “prove that there is no one definite way” to tell a story (Calloway, 224). Most recently, O’Brien has written Twinkle, Twinkle (1994); Tomcat in Love (1998); and July, July (2002). He lives with Ann O’Brien, his wife since 1973, in Boxwood, Massachusetts.

NOVELS Going after Cacciato. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978. If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. In the Lake of the Woods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. July, July. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002. Northern Lights. New York: Delacorte Press, 1975. The Nuclear Age. Portland, Ore.: Press 22, 1981. The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

982

O’CONNOR, EDWIN

Tomcat in Love. New York: Broadway Books, 1998. Twinkle, Twinkle. Racine, Wis.: Western Pub. Co., 1994.

SOURCES Beidler, Philip D. American Literature and the Experience of Vietnam. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. ———. Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Calloway, Catherine. “Pluralities of Vision: Going after Cacciato and Tim O’Brien’s Short Fiction.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, 213–224. New York: Garland, 1990. Herzog, T. C. Tim O’Brien. London, England: Prentice Hall International, 1997. Jason, Philip K. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Jones, Dale W. “The Vietnam of Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien: Tales of Disintegration and Integration,” Canadian Review of American Studies 13 (Winter 1982): 309–320. Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O’Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Searle, William J., ed. Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1988.

O’CONNOR, EDWIN (GREENE) (1918– 1968) Edwin O’Connor, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and radio broadcaster, is remembered today chiefly for two of the six novels he wrote during his relatively brief lifetime: The Last Hurrah (1956), a novel about an Irish-American Boston political boss, contributed its title phrase to the American lexicon and became a classic American film directed by John Ford; and The Edge of Sadness, winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize, chronicled three generations of an Irish-American family and is the first American “priest novel” (Rank, 191). Both books were highly praised and helped form O’Connor’s reputation as a spokesman for Irish-American people and as a chronicler of Boston life, but for most readers, as O’Connor scholar Hugh Rank points out, he was no mere ethnic or regional writer, but one whose novels spoke to all (Rank, 192).

Edwin O’Connor was born on July 19, 1918, in Providence, Rhode Island, to John Vincent, a doctor, and Mary Greene O’Connor. He was educated at the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1939. He worked as a freelance radio announcer until the outbreak of World War II, when he served three years with the U.S. Coast Guard. His first novel, The Oracle (1951), is based on O’Connor’s radio experiences. His second novel, The Last Hurrah, is still acclaimed by political aficionados—and numerous literary ones—as the best, most insightful, and funniest presentation of old-fashioned corrupt politicians ever written. At the time of publication, many critics tried to link O’Connor’s portrait of the larger-than-life fictional mayor Frank Skeffington with real-life Boston mayor James Michael Curly, who unsuccessfully fought the release of the film. Nor was its appeal limited to an American readership: When John Kenneth Galbraith was ambassador to India, he gave the novel to then prime minister Nehru, who said it was “the best political novel he had ever read” (quoted in Rank, 86). The Edge of Sadness, considered by many critics to be O’Connor’s most artistically perfect work, relates the stories of the Carmody clan, headed by patriarch Charlie Carmody and narrated by Father Hugh Kennedy. Despite his disclaimer, the first-person priest-narrator reveals a great deal about himself as he ostensibly focuses on the Carmodys. Despite the melancholy mood of the novel, it contains a discernible sense of hope and remained O’Connor’s personal favorite. Between The Edge of Sadness and All in the Family (1964), O’Connor found happiness in a late marriage, to Veniette Caswell Weil, on September 2, 1962. All in the Family (not to be confused with the popular television series about Archie Bunker that was aired later in the decade) is a tale of the dissolution of the American family; critics were fond of saying that, like The Last Hurrah, All in the Family taught more sociology than a welter of experts would do. Despite some critics’ attempts to link O’Connor’s fictional Kinsella clan to the American Kennedy clan, the novel, like the post–World War II era that is its subject, is profitably read as a farewell to the traditional family.

O’CONNOR, FLANNERY 983

Edwin O’Connor died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on March 23, 1968, at his home in Boston. His work has remained in print, and it deserves further scholarly evaluation.

NOVELS All in the Family. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. Benjy: A Ferocious Fairy Tale. Boston: Little, Brown, 1957. The Edge of Sadness. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961. I Was Dancing. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. The Last Hurrah. Boston: Little, Brown, 1956. The Oracle. New York: Harper, 1951.

SOURCES Duffy, Charles F. A Family of His Own: A Life of Edwin O’Connor. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 2004. Rank, Hugh. Edwin O’Connor. Boston: Twayne, 1974.

OTHER Edwin O’Connor, Boston novelist (1918–1968). Available online. URL: http://www.jdedman.com/eoc.html. Accessed September 24, 2005.

O’CONNOR, FLANNERY (1925–1964)

The critical esteem regarding Flannery O’Connor shows no signs of diminishing. In her stories, always set in the South, her rural middle-class characters confront darkness, violence, and evil; her fiction has variously been labeled ironic, Southern grotesque or gothic, black humor, or sardonic, tinged with elements of O’Connor’s Roman Catholic faith. Her work contains a distinctly original and brilliant blend of comedy and moral seriousness. Although best known for her short stories, O’Connor also wrote two novels, WISE BLOOD (1952) and The VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY (1960), both of which appear often on class syllabi in college courses. Since O’Connor’s death in 1964, scholarly books and articles have continued to appear at a steady rate. Mary Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, 1925, to Edward O’Connor and Regina Cline O’Connor, and lived there until the family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, when she was 12. After attending Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia State College), she studied at the University of Iowa, where she received a master’s degree in 1948.

O’Connor’s work depicts the increasing rationalism of the modern age, in opposition to the mysteries of a non-materialistic world. In her first novel, Wise Blood, army veteran Hazel Motes desperately tries to adhere to his belief in a sensory world and flees from thoughts of Christ and the church; he establishes “the Church of Christ Without Christ,” only to encounter the emptiness and despair of nihilism. His spiritual odyssey takes him to Taulkinham, Tennessee, where he engages in immoral behavior to prove his belief that there is no God. He becomes, metaphorically, a blind man who can finally see; although he is a man whose blood has been “unwise,” he becomes a penitent martyr who, most critics and readers believe, ultimately attains salvation. Like Hazel, Francis Marion Tarwater of The Violent Bear It Away seeks to escape the Christianity forced upon him by his granduncle. Tarwater, who is often compared to Mark TWAIN’s Huck Finn in his need to escape oppressive adults in his family, moves to the city to escape his legacy; there he experiences rape and murder. He returns to his backwoods home in Powderhead, Tennessee, and accepts the mission to bring Christian mercy to the city’s inhabitants. Although interpretations of the novel’s title are widely diverse, the text suggests that only the violently enthusiastic can disseminate the Word and preach redemption. O’Connor, who worked slowly and deliberately (The Violent Bear It Away was seven years in the writing), also wrote the much-acclaimed story collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965. After 14 years of suffering from disseminated lupus, the disease that killed her father at age 41, Flannery O’Connor died at age 39 on August 3, 1964, in Milledgeville, Georgia. Her papers are housed in the Georgia College Library.

NOVELS The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960. Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

SOURCES Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Balee, Susan. Flannery O’Connor: Literary Prophet of the South. New York: Chelsea, 1994.

984

OF MICE AND MEN

Bloom, Harold, ed. Flannery O’Connor: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Clark, Friedman, and Beverly Lyon, eds. Critical Essays on Flannery O’Connor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Desmond, John F. Risen Sons: Flannery O’Connor’s Vision of History. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Di Renzo, Anthony. American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Fickett, Harold, and Douglas R. Gilbert. Flannery O’Connor: Images of Grace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1986. Gentry, Marshall Bruce. Flannery O’Connor’s Religion of the Grotesque. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Golden, Robert E., and Mary C. Sullivan. Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Johansen, Ruthann Knechel. The Narrative Secret of Flannery O’Connor: The Trickster as Interpreter. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Kinney, Arthur F. Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Magee, Rosemary M., ed. Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. McMullen, Joanne Halleran. Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1996. Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Visionary Art of Flannery O’Connor.” In New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature, 174–176. New York: Vanguard Press, 1974. Orville, Miles. Flannery O’Connor: An Introduction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Quinn, John J. Flannery O’Connor: A Memorial. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 1995. Ragen, Brian Abel. A Wreck on the Road to Damascus: Innocence, Guilt and Conversion in Flannery O’Connor. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1989. Rath, Sura P., and Mary Neff Shaw. Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Correspondence of Flannery O’Connor and the Brainard Cheneys. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

OF MICE AND MEN JOHN STEINBECK (1937) Published in January 1937, the novel Of Mice and Men marks a deliberate change from Steinbeck’s previous book, In Dubious Battle (1936), a novel about a contemporary farm strike. Only a short time before the composition of Of Mice and Men, thousands of itinerant single men had roamed the western states following the harvests. Many of them traveled by rail, arriving in the fields in empty boxcars that were later used to transport the grain. Starting in the second half of the 19th century, such farm laborers spread rapidly, and by the year 1900, about 125,000 threshers were migrating to the western states. The subject of migrant laborers and the theme of loneliness in Of Mice and Men reflected Steinbeck’s efforts to write about a specific time in American history. The story takes place during a historic decline in ranch laborers’ migration. Loneliness and frustration set the tone of the novel, a story about ranch workers’ lives and dreams. Steinbeck took a line from Robert Burns’s poem for the title of the novel: “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men / Gang aft a-gley / An’ leave us nought but grief an’ pain / For promised joy.” Steinbeck especially liked the parallels suggested by the poem’s story line, which depicts the random destruction of a mouse’s home by a plow. The new title fit the message Steinbeck was intent on conveying to his reading public. Of Mice and Men was an immediate success upon its publication, even though Steinbeck said he was not expecting a large sale. The novel was chosen as a Bookof-the-Month Club selection and 117,000 copies were sold in advance of the official publication date, February 25, 1937. An obvious characteristic of the novel is its conversational style. Perhaps one of the most convincing bases for interpretation is Peter Lisca, who notes that “the world of Of Mice and Men is a fallen one, inhabited by sons of Cain, forever exiled from Eden, the little farm of which they dream” (quoted in Owens, “Of Mice and Men:

OF MICE AND MEN 985

The Dream of Commitment,” 145). Extending this observation, Louis Owens points out that there are no Edens in Steinbeck’s writing, only illusions of Eden, and that in the fallen world of the Salinas Valley, the Promised Land is an illusory and painful fantasy. Lennie’s yearning for the rabbits and for all soft living things symbolizes the yearning all men have for warm, living contact. It is this yearning, as Owens has put it, that makes George need Lennie just as much as Lennie needs George and that sends Curley’s wife wandering despairingly about the ranch in search of companionship. Though life is hard for the ranch hands, the hardship for a woman to live on the ranch as presented in the novel should not be ignored. This is particularly true in Steinbeck’s portrayal of Curley’s wife, a character whose loneliness has been generally ignored. Curley’s wife may at first appear to be a minor character in relation to George and Lennie, but closer study by critics in recent years reveals that she is not only a major influence in the novel but also a well-developed character. She has been denied a name not because Steinbeck considered her an unimportant character, as some feminist critics have argued. Rather, it is more likely Steinbeck deliberately removed her name so that her role in the novel would be gender-neutral. For men, there is an emotional outlet; their need for warmth and female companionship is satisfied in part by the whore at Susy’s house. Unfortunately there is no such outlet for Curley’s wife. She tries to make men understand her situation: “I get lonely . . . You can talk to people, but I can’t talk to nobody but Curley.” When Lennie, afraid to get in trouble, refuses to talk to her, she cries out, “Ain’t I got a right to talk to nobody? Whatta they think I am, anyways? I ain’t doin’ no harm to you” (84). Curley’s wife is totally isolated on the farm, and, most of the time, men misinterpret her friendly advances as sexual wantonness. For decades critics have focused on Steinbeck’s treatment of a recurring theme in Of Mice and Men: the inherent loneliness of the itinerant farm laborers and their desperate desire for land of their own. As the tale begins, readers are introduced to George Milton and Lennie Small, two nomadic men who travel California and help to harvest its myriad crops. George is small

but quick, whereas Lennie is huge but mentally deficient. The story begins by the Salinas River bank near Soledad in California. The first scene of the novel shows George and Lennie on their way to a ranch where they will work as farmhands. It is late afternoon on a hot Thursday, and they are getting ready to spend the night, having just left the ranch where they were previously employed. From the conversations between George and Lennie, the reader learns that Lennie is always in trouble because he loves to stroke soft things; but because he is so strong, he kills whatever he strokes. In his pockets, he has a dead mouse, whose fate has been decided by Lennie’s propensity to hold tight to everything he likes. The reader also learns why this unlikely duo left the previous ranch—they had to run away because Lennie tried to touch a girl’s dress, but the girl, fearing violence, reacted in terror. George had to hide Lennie in a ditch to save him from a lynch mob who assumed Lennie had assaulted the girl. Issuing a warning that has obviously been repeated frequently before, George warns Lennie to stay out of trouble so they can have a new life. This dream of a shared future includes making enough money to buy a piece of land where he and Lennie can have their own place. Whenever George talks about their dream (“we’re gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an’ a cow and some pigs”) Lennie breaks into an almost call-response pattern, adding that George needs to remember that “we’re gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages” (20). Lennie’s reaction to this story reveals his passionate hope that such a positive change could take place in their itinerant nomadic life. The dilemma of controlling such a companion is immediately evident and is emphasized when, soon after they start working, Curley, the Boss’s son, tries to pick a fight with Lennie. Curley’s hostility is based on the fact that he is small of stature and that large men make him feel inferior. Therefore, when Curley meets Lennie, he is quick to pick a scrap. To make matters worse, George learns that Curley’s wife has the reputation of a tart who “gives the eye” to the ranch hands. Given Lennie’s previous history, George immediately feels the danger from this woman and warns Lennie to

986

OF MICE AND MEN

stay away from her. A little later, George and Lennie see Curley’s wife for the first time when she appears in the doorway to “look for Curley.” In fact, “looking for Curley” is merely an excuse to come out to find someone to talk with, for, like the two bindlestiffs, she is also beset by loneliness and non-acceptance on the all-male ranch. At the new ranch, it seems that George and Lennie’s dream is about to be realized when, unfortunately, Lennie gets in trouble. One day Curley comes to the bunkhouse to look for his wife, since he suspects that she is having an affair with Slim, a lead ranch hand. Embarrassed by Slim, who ridicules him, Curley is ready to pick a fight with anyone. When other ranch hands join Slim to attack Curley, Curley picks Lennie to fight because Lennie is standing aside and laughing, an act that Curley feels is insulting, especially from a big guy. In the ensuing struggle, Lennie crushes Curley’s hand. George and Lennie’s fate is not simply determined by their actual encounters on the ranch; their destiny also seems to be unavoidably related to what is happening around them, including the actions of fellow ranch hands, Curley, Curley’s wife, Crooks, Slim, Candy, and even the dog. For example, the fight between Curley and Lennie was triggered by the conflict between Slim and Curley; Lennie is simply a scapegoat in their hostility. Another bad omen for the future is the shooting of Candy’s old dog. Steinbeck vividly describes this incident. Candy, the old swamper in the bunkhouse, has a dog that is too old to eat and walk properly. Carlson encourages Candy to have the dog killed to save him from further suffering because he considers the old dog useless. Steinbeck links the dog’s fate to Lennie’s imminent death. The story reaches its climax on Sunday afternoon when the ranch hands play horseshoes. Curley’s wife comes to the bunkhouse to seek some companionship in Lennie and finds him stroking his dead puppy that he has just killed, and she learns that Lennie likes soft things. In an attempt to get Lennie’s attention, she assumes a seductive pose in front of Lennie. She tells Lennie that she does not love Curley, and she even compliments Lennie for his strength and congratulates

him for hurting Curley’s hand in the fight. Then she encourages Lennie to stroke her hair but panics when Lennie holds on too tightly. In an attempt to quiet her screams, Lennie accidentally breaks her neck and kills her. Knowing that he has once again gotten in trouble, Lennie vanishes into the brush to hide himself. The farmhands find the body of Curley’s wife, and an enraged Curley organizes a searching party. Late in the afternoon, Lennie comes to the river, knowing that he has broken his promise to George that he will never get George in trouble. Developed by Lennie’s weak mind, a huge imaginary rabbit foretells that George will leave him. At this very moment, George shows up and ironically reassures Lennie of their dreams to own their own place and to tend the rabbits. While keeping Lennie talking about their dreams, George puts a gun to the base of Lennie’s skull and fires before the other men arrive. The novel ends outdoors, returning to the same spot where George earlier told Lennie to hide himself when in danger. Slim, who now better understands George, tries to calm him down by saying, “Never you mind. A guy got to sometimes,” and invites him to a drink (100). According to Steinbeck, George is a hero who is “able to rise to greatness . . . to kill his friend to save him” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, 562–563). However, readers should not consider the novel simply as an advocate for heroism in such brotherhood. A careful reading should also stress developing an understanding of the deep loneliness shared by characters in the pursuit of their American dreams.

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Hadella, Charlotte Cook. Of Mice and Men: A Kinship of Powerlessness. New York: Twayne, 1995. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

O’HARA, JOHN 987

———. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. ———. “Of Mice and Men: The Dream of Commitment.” In John Steinbeck, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Facts On File, 1987. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Steinbeck, John. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1975. Michael J. Meyer

O’HARA, JOHN (HENRY) (1905–1970) One of the most prolific and financially successful writers of the 20th century, John O’Hara won the 1956 National Book Award for Ten North Frederick and the 1952 New York Drama Critics’ Circle and Donaldson awards (both for the musical Pal Joey) and wrote 18 novels. Indelibly associated with the New Yorker, he wrote 374 short stories for that magazine. His fiction was always grounded in realism and naturalism, and he had an infallible ear for believable American dialogue. His work typically included characters who collided with an essentially predetermined future; he treated class prejudices and sexual issues with frankness. As scholar Sheldon Norman Grebstein noted, despite O’Hara’s “wanderings” and relocations, O’Hara returned most often “to Pennsylvania . . . for much of the subject matter of his best work” (Grebstein, 23). Gibbsville, the locale for much of his fiction, was based on Pottsville, the town where he was reared. O’Hara also wrote for both the Hollywood screen and the Broadway stage. John O’Hara was born on January 31, 1905, in Pottsville, to Patrick Henry O’Hara, a physician, and Katherine Elizabeth Delaney O’Hara. He graduated from a preparatory school in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1924, but his father’s death left the family in a state of unaccustomed poverty. Instead of attending college,

O’Hara held a variety of jobs, until he published his first novel. He married Helen Pettit in 1931 and, after their divorce in 1933, was married to Belle Mulford Wylie from 1937 until her death in January 1954. In January 1955, he married Katherine Barnes Bryan. O’Hara’s first novel, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA (1934), is generally deemed his best. Set during the Great Depression, it features Gibbsville’s Julian English and the Christmastime account of events leading inescapably to his suicide. Butterfield 8 (1935), his second novel, depicts the doomed life of Gloria Wandrous, based on the infamous and promiscuous Starr Faithful, famous during the 1920s before her mysterious death by drowning in 1931. Like Butterfield 8, Hope of Heaven (1938), set in Hollywood, features Jimmy Malloy, a former Gibbsville reporter now writing scripts in Hollywood. In this novel Malloy becomes a full-fledged narrator as well as protagonist. Pal Joey (1940) is a novel composed of 14 stories focusing on the caddish nightclub rogue Joey. Set in Fort Penn (a fictionalized Harrisburg), Pennsylvania, O’Hara’s blockbuster A Rage to Live (1949) depicts the stormy marriage of Sidney and Grace Tate, and the social, cultural, and historical details of the years between 1900 and 1920. Ten North Frederick (1955) returns to Gibbsville to tell the story of the fall from grace of Joe Chapin, an American success story whose presidential hopes are ruined. From the Terrace (1958), like Ten North Frederick and A Rage to Live, chronicles the manners and mood of the era while it tells the story of Alfred Eaton, who leaves his small Pennsylvania town for New York and Washington, only to realize the emptiness of his life. O’Hara considered this his greatest novel. Ourselves to Know (1960) is the complicated tale of Robert Millhouser. He murders Hedda, his beautiful, amoral, and adulterous wife. The novel explores the reasons behind the murder. After The Big Laugh (1962), O’Hara’s second Hollywood novel, O’Hara published Elizabeth Appleton (1963), an academic novel. Dean John Appleton fails in his hope to be president of a small Pennsylvania college. His wife, Elizabeth, the real center of the novel, responds to this disappointment with an extramarital affair. The Lockwood Concern (1966) was O’Hara’s last

988 O’HARA, JOHN

major novel; set in Gibbsville, the novel focuses on George, the third generation of the socially prominent Lockwood family, who, in a heavily metaphorical scene, dies on a secret stairway in his house where no one can hear his cries. John O’Hara died of a heart attack on April 10, 1970, in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1961 he was named an honorary citizen of the city of Philadelphia, and in 1964 he received the Gold Medal Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Three of O’Hara’s novels were adapted as featurelength films: Ten North Frederick, starring Gary Cooper, for 20th Century-Fox, in 1958; Butterfield 8, starring Elizabeth Taylor, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, in 1960; and From the Terrace, starring Paul Newman, for 20th Century-Fox, in 1960. Most of his manuscripts and letters are housed in the Pattee Library at the Pennsylvania State University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Appointment in Samarra. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. The Big Laugh. New York: Random House, 1962. Butterfield 8. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Elizabeth Appleton. New York: Random House, 1963. The Ewings. New York: Random House, 1972. A Family Party. New York: Random House, 1956. The Farmers Hotel. New York: Random House, 1951. From the Terrace. New York: Random House, 1958. Hope of Heaven. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. The Instrument. New York: Random House, 1967. The Lockwood Concern. New York: Random House, 1966. Lovey Childs: A Philadelphian’s Story. New York: Random House, 1969. Ourselves to Know. New York: Random House, 1960. Pal Joey. New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1940. A Rage to Live. New York: Random House, 1949. The Second Ewings (fragment). Bloomfield Hills, Mich. & Columbia, S.C.: Bruccoli Clark, 1977. Sermons and Soda Water, 3 vols. (The Girl on the Baggage Truck, Imagine Kissing Pete, and We’re Friends Again). New York: Random House, 1960. Ten North Frederick. New York: Random House, 1955.

SOURCES Bassett, Charles. “John O’Hara: Irishman and American,” John O’Hara Journal 1 (Summer 1979): 1–81.

———. “John O’Hara and the Noble Experiment: The Use of Alcohol in Appointment in Samarra,” John O’Hara Journal 1 (Winter 1978–1979): 1–12. ———. “Naturalism Revisited: The Case of John O’Hara,” Colby Library Quarterly 11 (December 1975): 198–218. ———. “O’Hara’s Roots,” Pottsville Republican, 21 March 1971–8 January 1972. Bier, Jesse. “O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra: His First and Only Real Novel,” College English 25 (November 1963): 135–141. Bruccoli, Matthew J. The O’Hara Concern: A Biography of John O’Hara. New York: Random House, 1975. Carson, E. Russell. The Fiction of John O’Hara. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961. Cobbs, John. “Caste and Class War: The Society of John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live,” John O’Hara Journal 2 (Winter 1979–1980): 24–34. Eppard, Philip B., ed. Critical Essays on John O’Hara. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1994. Farr, Finis. O’Hara: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. Forczek, Deborah. “ ‘He Told the Truth about His Time’: John O’Hara and the 1930’s,” John O’Hara Journal 2 (Winter 1979–1980): 46–65. Gary, Beverly. “A Post Portrait: John O’Hara,” New York Post, 24 May 1959, pp.18–22. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. John O’Hara. Boston: Twayne, 1966. John O’Hara Journal, special issue, 3 (Fall/Winter 1980). Long, Robert Emmet. John O’Hara. New York: Ungar, 1983. McCormick, Bernard. “A John O’Hara Geography,” Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970–1971): 151–168. MacShane, Frank. The Life of John O’Hara. New York: Dutton, 1980. Portz, John. “John O’Hara Up to Now,” College English 16 (May 1955): 493–499, 516. Schanche, Don. “John O’Hara Is Alive and Well in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” Esquire, August 1969, pp. 84–86, 142–149. Shawen, Edgar. “The Unity of John O’Hara’s Waiting for Winter,” John O’Hara Journal 5 (Winter 1982–83): 25–32. Trilling, Lionel. Introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara. New York: Modern Library, 1956. Tuttleton, James. The Novel of Manners in America. New York: Norton, 1972. Walcutt, Charles. John O’Hara. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.

OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL 989

Walker, Nancy. “ ‘All That You Need to Know’: John O’Hara’s Achievement in the Novella,” John O’Hara Journal 4 (Spring/Summer 1981): 61–80.

OKADA, JOHN (1923–1971) Author of the forgotten, resurrected, and now classic NO-NO BOY (1957), John Okada wrote about the much maligned and regrettable relocation centers that the United States government forced Japanese Americans into during World War II, after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. Part of the reason that his manuscript was repeatedly rejected by publishers before its eventual success is related to this unfair treatment of American citizens of Japanese descent. After publication, the novel sold poorly, rejected even by the JapaneseAmerican community, which felt shamed by the book (Chen). It disappeared from sight for two decades until Frank CHIN and other Asian-American writers rediscovered it and arranged for its republication in 1976. John Okada was born in the old Merchant’s Hotel in Seattle in 1923. He received bachelor’s degrees in both English and library science from the University of Washington, where he met Dorothy, his wife-to-be. During World War II, he and his family were evacuated and interned at Minidoka, Idaho, one of the nine relocation centers. Okada volunteered to join the air force and served as a sergeant until his discharge in 1946. After the war, Okada married Dorothy and found work as a librarian in Seattle, Detroit, and Los Angeles. During this period, he completed his novel, apparently based on the true experiences of a “no-no boy” named Hajiime Jim Akutsu (Chen, 281). By the end of the 20th century, Okada’s novel had been examined from nearly every conceivable perspective, including gender; politics; mother-son, fatherson, and sibling relationships; dual identity; autobiography; and folklore. Firmly established in the canon of American literature, No-No Boy continues to intrigue and to shock new generations of readers. NOVEL No-No Boy. 1957. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.

SOURCES Chan, Jeffery Paul, et al., eds. Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. ———, et al., eds. The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature. New York: Meridian, 1991. Chen, Fu-jen. “John Okada.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Questia. Available online by subscription. URL: questia.com. Accessed September 26, 2005. Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Chin, Frank. “Afterword.” No-No Boy. 1957. Reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976.

OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL ALLAN GURGANUS (1984) In his first book, Allan GURGANUS attempts a monumental task: not only to tell the story of his narrator, 99-yearold Lucy Marsden, the oldest living Confederate widow, but also to recount, through Lucy, a multiplicity of other stories: that of Lucy’s much older husband, William More Marsden; that of Castalia, a former slave; even that of the South as a whole, ripped apart by the Civil War and a very long time healing from that wound. The resultant story is as long as it is ambitious. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All takes as its subject the history of the American South and merges a historical narrative with the imagination of fiction (Tolson, 37–38). Indeed, Widow, despite its enormity, is not at all a dry history text. Its narrator, who has lived almost an entire century, tells her story and that of the people closest to her in a witty and sometimes acerbic voice seasoned with the experience of her many years. She speaks very much as a denizen of the 20th century, frequently using the expressions and slang of modern times to describe the long-ago past of her husband and her own childhood. Lucy’s confidence and richness of description belie her age, and Lucy is not at all reserved, modest, or ashamed of any element of her past. Instead, especially when speaking of her own sexual experiences, both heterosexual and mildly homo-

990

OLD MAN AND THE SEA, THE

sexual, Lucy speaks with a frankness unexpected of a girl born in the South in the late 1800s. Gurganus consistently stays true to the nature of his narrative; his storyteller sometimes wanders away from uncomfortable or painful memories, only to return to them later, and she also is occasionally drawn away from her principal story into tangents. Lucy’s intent really is to tell two stories: her own, as the widow of the title, and that of her Confederate husband. She follows a roughly chronological progression, beginning with her husband’s boyhood. William Marsden is a young boy, barely a teenager, when he and his closest friend march off to fight in the Civil War. Permanently traumatized by the war, especially by the loss of his best friend, Ned, Marsden loses his innocence and continues to fight the war all his life, until in his senility he tries to kill Lucy, seeing in her the enemies who have overwhelmed his adult mind. Lucy, a 15-year-old child herself, eventually marries the 50-year-old Marsden for two reasons: her father’s encouragement and her own desire to rescue the child Will, lost years ago in the war. She suffers a brutal, violent, and agonizing wedding night, and proceeds to produce child after child. In her husband, Lucy witnesses the South at its worst and most damaged after the war, and only at the very end of the book, far above the land in an airplane, does Lucy see tangible evidence that the South has begun to heal from Sherman’s relentless March to the Sea. During her lifetime, unfortunately, Lucy saw little evidence of that eventual recovery. There are few, if any, successful relationships in the novel, and only at the very end of her life, in a nursing home, does Lucy finally become friends with a man. Indeed, Lucy’s experience with heterosexuality is never satisfying and generally verges on rape. Gurganus suggests the repression of natural desires as one of the principal causes of the war, and he underscores a psychosexual component to the war (Tolson, 39–41). However, despite the opportunity for male closeness that the war permits and demands of its soldiers, Widow depicts no functioning adult sexual relationships, and human relationships seem to be the most persistent causalities of the war. Will Marsden remains

in love with his dead friend Ned throughout his life; Lucy has a more graphically sexual encounter with her own childhood girlfriend. Lucy also has a strange, sometimes antagonistic relationship with the former slave Castalia, who recalls being sexually propositioned by Marsden’s mother. None of these relationships persist, though, and none allows for real love. Nor do they offer hope for romance, and though Lucy and her husband have children, their relationship is not truly productive or fertile, and Lucy herself is not interested in recalling any grandchildren that she may or may not have had. All her children, she notes, are dead. The picture that Widow paints of the South after the Civil War and through most of the 20th century, thus, is a sterile one, characterized by brutality and violence by both men and women. Nevertheless, the book’s main character, Lucy, endures and manages to have a rich, fulfilling life in the aftermath of the devastation wrought by the Civil War. The book’s true tribute, then, is not to the possibility of future generations but to Lucy’s own individual strength of character and determination to retain her individuality despite the pressures of her husband and a changing world.

SOURCES Broder, Michael. “Allan Gurganus: Overview.” In Gay and Lesbian Literature. Vol. 1, edited by Sharon Malinowski. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1994. Gurganus, Allan. Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. New York: Vintage, 2001. Ketchin, Susan. “When I’m Fog on a Coffin Lid: An Interview With Allan Gurganus,” The Southern Review 29, no. 4 (1993): 645–663. Tolson, Jay. Review of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus, New Republic, 30 October 1989, pp. 37–41. Winter Elliott

OLD MAN AND THE SEA, THE ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1952) The Old Man and the Sea—a short novel that some critics call a rather long short story—earned Ernest HEMINGWAY the 1952 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and its tremendous success contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize two years later. When the novel was published, William FAULKNER wrote that it

OLD MAN AND THE SEA, THE 991

was Hemingway’s best, and that time may show it to be the best single piece of any of them, meaning Hemingway and Faulkner’s contemporaries. Hemingway himself said that he had achieved what he had been working for all his life. The Old Man and the Sea relates the story of Santiago, an old and poor fisherman who lives in Cuba and is one of the many Canary Islanders who immigrated to Cuba during his youth. Santiago had been going to sea for 84 days without taking a fish. The sail of his skiff “was patched with flour sacks and, furled, . . . looked like the flag of permanent defeat,” but the eyes of the old man “were the same colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.” These two contrasting descriptions at the very opening of the novel give us the theme developed by the narrative: The dignity of the human being lies not so much in the consequences of his or her personal fight as in the struggle itself; and thus, to use the old man’s words, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Both at the beginning and at the end of the novel, Hemingway depicts the tender father-son, master-disciple relationship between the old man and a boy, Manolín: “The old man had taught the boy to fish and the boy loved him.” Manolín used to go out to sea with Santiago but, after 40 days without a fish, the boy’s parents tell him to go in a different boat because the old man was “salao, which is the worst form of unlucky.” However, the boy’s admiration for Santiago is unquestioned: “There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.” And so is his concern about the old man’s welfare. Similarly, the old man will miss the boy in his lone venture, and Santiago will repeat several times, “I wish the boy was here.” Eventually, on the 85th day, Santiago decides to go “far out to come when the wind shifts” and hooks a giant marlin. The bulk of the novel centers on the twoday contest, first between the fisherman and the fish, “which is towing the old man’s skiff further out to sea,” and then with the sharks, after he has managed to harpoon the marlin and lash it to his skiff. The sharks will devour the old man’s marlin until there is nothing left of it except the skeleton, the head, and the tail. It appears that the old man has been beaten, but the real-

ity is that he has remained undefeated in his struggle against himself, his exhaustion, and the temptation to abandon the fight. Hemingway’s reverence for the human being—pervasive all through his literary production—is particularly apparent in The Old Man and the Sea. The writer wants to reflect in his works a somewhat pessimistic view of the world, of the conditions in which men and women must lead their lives, of death as an essential element to the understanding of our existence. Accordingly, the American writer presents readers with the tough lives of tough characters—soldiers, bullfighters, boxers, hunters, fishermen, criminals—for whom the only hope resides in their determination not to give up their fight. Hemingway’s maxim of many years—il faut d’abord durer (First, one must last)—contains the essence of the dignity of the human being. It is Santiago’s determination not to be defeated, even if he can be destroyed, that makes him a paradigm of Hemingway’s conviction that heroism is the only way to transcend the tragedy of the human condition. In spite of Hemingway’s assertions to the contrary, a series of symbolic elements are fundamental to The Old Man and the Sea. For instance, Santiago is the name of one of the Apostles, Saint James, the patron saint of Spain—the country that Hemingway was said to love most, after his own—and a fisherman, as the protagonist of the novel, who happens to be a Spaniard; Manolín is an affectionate nickname for Manuel, which is Spanish for Emmanuel, the name given to Jesus in the Bible; and the character of the Christ-like figure of the old man is patent: “the line . . . held across his shoulders,” “a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.” Some critics consider the novel an allegory of Hemingway’s personal struggle and his determination as a writer; the fishing of the marlin has been described in terms of a crucifixion-like ordeal; the relationship between Santiago and Manolín has been seen as a parable of youth and age; and the work has also been regarded as Hemingway’s real epilogue to his writing about Spain. All these possible approaches notwithstanding, if we analyse the narrative, we find just bare facts expressed

992 OLSEN, TILLIE

through Hemingway’s characteristically transparent, deceptively simple language, which allows a very wide breadth of interpretation. The novel—as is always the case with Hemingway—can be read at a level for which no previous literary experience is required; still, at this basic level the reader gains enormously by just understanding his or her human condition as the necessary background for the reading of the text. And this might well be the secret of one of the best and most successful novels written by Ernest Hemingway.

SOURCES Baker, Carlos. Hemingway. The Writer as Artist, 4th ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Bloom, Harold, ed. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Brenner, Gerry. The Old Man and the Sea: Story of a Common Man. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Donaldson, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribner, 1952. Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Hemingway. Seven Decades of Criticism. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998. José Gabriel Rodríguez Pazos

OLSEN, TILLIE (TILLIE LERNER OLSEN) (1913– ) Tillie Olsen is an iconic figure among feminist writers and thinkers of the late 20th century; she has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and honorary degrees. More important, TELL ME A RIDDLE (1961) is required reading in many American literature and women’s literature classes, and has been anthologized more than 100 times, and Olsen’s rediscovered novel Yonnondio: from the Thirties (1974) is thought by many important critics to be the best novel published about the 1930s. For her writing, she received the 1975 American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, and for her political activism and concern for the underprivileged, in 1981 the city of San Francisco designated an official Tillie Olsen Day.

Tillie Olsen was born on January 14, 1913, in Wahoo, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish immigrants Samuel Lerner, state secretary of the Socialist Party of Nebraska, and Ida Beber Lerner. She attended the Nebraska public schools but was largely self-educated. She married Jack Olsen, a warehouseman and printer, in 1936; she worked as a writer for such socialist periodicals as Partisan Review, the Waterfront Worker, and the Daily Worker. Tell Me a Riddle, a novella, and Yonnondio were not published until after 1960, when Olsen had time to write and when the unfinished and long-lost parts of Yonnondio surfaced. The much admired Tell Me a Riddle depicts both the love and the friction between David and Eva, Russian immigrants married 37 years and now facing Eva’s death from cancer; through numerous flashbacks, the novel recalls their youthful revolutionary activity in Russia and delineates the sacrifices on Eva’s part while raising her four children. The novel expresses the love that has sustained this family. Yonnondio, unrevised from the original 1931 version, reveals through sensuous imagery, lyrical prose, and artistic balance and structure the lives of an impoverished family. Mary and Jim Holbrook are viewed chiefly through the perspective of Maizie, their young daughter, as all of them migrate from Wyoming to North Dakota to Chicago, always looking for work. The Great Depression takes its toll on everyone: Jim succumbs to alcoholism and Mary barely endures his often violent treatment of her. The novel, both a tribute to human strength and love, and an indictment of a society that oppressed families like the Holbrooks, has never been completed. Tillie Olsen lives in Berkeley, where she recently moved from her beloved San Francisco and the apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up, that she shared for many years with Jack Olsen. Many of Olsen’s manuscripts and papers are housed in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Tell Me a Riddle. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961. “Tell Me a Riddle.” Edited by Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST 993

Yonnondio: From the Thirties. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1974.

SOURCES Cardoni, Agnes Toloczko. Women’s Ethical Coming of Age: Adolescent Female Characters in the Prose Fiction of Tillie Olsen. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997. Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Faulkner, Mara. Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. Frye, Joanne S. Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1995. Nelson, Kay Hoyle, and Nancy Huse, eds. The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978. Orr, Elaine Neil. Tillie Olsen and a Feminist Spiritual Vision. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Pearlman, Mickey, and Abby H. P. Werlock. Tillie Olsen. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Roberts, Nora Ruth. Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst. New York: Garland, 1996.

OTHER Nebraska Center for Writers. “Tillie Olsen.” Available online. URL: http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/olsen.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST KEN KESEY (1962) Published in 1962, Ken KESEY’s first novel depicts the struggle for power within a mental-hospital ward between a newly admitted inmate, Randall Patrick McMurphy, and the woman in charge, Nurse Ratched. As told through the perspective of Chief Bromden, a half-Indian inmate who believes that Ratched and her staff are members of a nationwide conspiracy that controls the inmates through hidden machinery and implanted wires and circuits, the story details the transformative effect of McMurphy’s nonconformist attitude on the disheartened male patients. In contrast to Ratched’s passive-aggressive methods of ther-

apy, which psychologically cripple the inmates, McMurphy’s masculine ethos comes to provide the men with a model of self-determination. McMurphy has the strongest effect on Bromden, who stops pretending that he is deaf and mute and who begins to remember his past, the white world’s treatment of his people, and his father’s sale of native lands to the government. Oddly enough, Bromden relates the story of McMurphy’s rise and fall by employing Christian symbolism and highlighting McMurphy’s self-sacrifice for the men’s liberation. In the end, Bromden escapes from the hospital and decides to rejoin his tribe and to reassert their right to their Native fishing grounds on the Columbia River. In addition to the use of Christian elements, the influence of the Western genre is evident in McMurphy’s crusade to wrestle control away from Ratched’s despotic rule. The plot reads curiously similar to that of the film The Seven Samurai (1954) and its American counterpart, The Magnificent Seven (1960), where the heroic actions of marginalized male outsiders inspire the demoralized residents of a town to stand up against the powerful and corrupt people who have been bullying them. Like KEROUAC’s ON THE ROAD and other works of the beat generation, Kesey’s novel celebrates the sexual power of the male individual and condemns the stifling conformity of the 1950s, in this case embodied by the puritanical matriarch of Nurse Ratched. As powerful as this critique may initially appear, though, these tactics often lead the narrative into flat, cartoonish depictions of both sexes and into outright misogyny. The roles for women are often limited; either they are castrating harpies such as Ratched and Harding’s wife or sexualized pleasers such as Candy and Sandy. For the structuralist critic, versed in identifying and examining binary oppositions, the novel is a veritable treasure trove of dichotomies: machine/human, society/individual, female/male, repression/sexuality, and white/Indian. On closer examination, however, these oppositions tend to break down and blur. For instance, the natural environment of the Native fishing grounds to which Bromden plans on returning is one that will have to be shared with the machinery of the dam and

994 ON THE ROAD

the white world that runs it. In addition, the hospital stands not in the middle of the concrete jungle of the city but in the outskirts, so far out that Bromden is eventually able to smell the scents of nature through an opened window. Harding, one of the other inmates, eventually checks himself out of the hospital once he reconciles himself to both the masculine and feminine aspects of his personality. Like Herman MELVILLE’s MOBY-DICK, this narrative too may imply that rigid adherence to any extreme is destructive. After all, McMurphy’s over-the-top celebration of his sexuality and Ratched’s extreme denial of her own leave little room for compromise and make conflict unavoidable, and this unyielding stubbornness ruins both of them as well as contributes to Cheswick’s freak drowning and to Billy Bibbit’s suicide. If McMurphy with his whale-print underpants stands in as this narrative’s Captain Ahab and Ratched with her starched-white uniform represents the white whale (whose “pasteboard mask” McMurphy works to uncover), then Moby-Dick’s concern about the dangers of monomania and binary oppositions most certainly surface in this narrative as well. Bromden may be this narrative’s Ishmael, surviving to recount the story in mythic terms, but he also embodies the otherness of Queequeg. His mixed ethnic identity and his appropriation of distinctively white literary symbolism disrupt the white/Indian opposition and his last name—his white mother’s maiden name—conflates the female/male dichotomy. Both Melville’s and Kesey’s central antagonists are relentless in their quests to prevail over the other, and the secondary characters who emerge from these battles—Ishmael, Harding, Sefelt, Bromden—do so only after the demise of Ahab, McMurphy, and Ratched, when some semblance of balance can be restored, when stark black and white have combined into shades of gray.

SOURCES Leeds, Barry H. Ken Kesey. New York: F. Ungar, 1981. Porter, M. Gilbert. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Rising to Heroism. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Pratt, John Clark, ed. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: Text and Criticism. 1977. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1996.

Searles, George J., ed. A Casebook on Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Tanner, Stephen L. Ken Kesey. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Monty Kozbial Ernst

ON THE ROAD JACK KEROUAC (1957)

On the Road is an outburst of youthful energy erupting from post–World War II American culture. Many veterans of the war and the American wartime homefront were looking for adventure and relief from the conformity of postwar prosperity and security. The rejection of this stasis is expressed in KEROUAC’s novel. Indeed, the ethos of freedom found in On the Road became the pattern for a generation of young, bohemian Americans; the novel became an expression of the spirit, which formed a generation of blue-jeanclad hitchhiking bohemians looking to find an alternative to the constricting culture of the late 1940s and the 1950s. The novel is a study of Dean Moriarty, the wild, yahooing, Western boomer of Sal Paradise’s imagination. Moriarty is “free” in that he does not care what the rest of “square” society thinks of him. He smokes marijuana, digs jazz, is sexually promiscuous, and has an uncontrollable need to move, leading him to beg, borrow, or steal cars and just go. Sal sees Dean as the embodiment of the myth of the American West transferred to postwar America. Dean’s horse is a Chrysler. His redeye is a reefer. Dean’s father, “old Dean Moriarty,” is not a product of the European settlement of the East Coast but an alcoholic bum, a product of the Great Depression and the westward Okie migration from the dust bowl to (in his case) Denver’s skid row. And Sal is just along for the ride, wandering back and forth across the North American continent with Dean or, when without Dean, thinking of him, wondering what he would do, trying to live as Dean in America, experiencing its “raw land” and the adventure of its highways as a free man, open to experience, not letting any opportunity for kicks and insight escape, attempting to live a romantic vision of the possibilities of America.

O PIONEERS! 995

On the Road is also nostalgic. Its protagonists attempt to live in the present while yearning for a “lost” America, the America of Kerouac/Paradise/Moriarty’s youth—a free America; an America that allows one to move without constraint; an America that allows one to do as one will without any interference; an America in which the frontier consciousness of westward migration is still present, where one is allowed to mind one’s own business unfettered by the rigid social codes of the East. One of the novel’s major themes is illumination. The seemingly aimless wanderings of Sal and Dean become a kind of pilgrimage as Sal is receptive, “opened up,” to the multitude of unfettered kicks available in all “that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the west coast.” Central to this opening is Paradise’s romanticization of the “Fellaheen,” a term borrowed from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. For Sal, “Fellaheen” are indigenous peoples who are generally tribal, nomadic, and/or poor. These are the people that best exemplify the concept of Beat as Kerouac originally intended it to mean: down and out, certainly, but also beatific. It is these people that Kerouac sees as the most holy and closest to God. For example, Sal Paradise refers to Huck, the Times Square junky hustler, as “martyred”; Dean is “Holy” and angelic. Sal’s sojourn in Mexico is essentially a holy sojourn, as is Sal’s time with Terry in the grape and cotton fields of central California. Published after Kerouac’s The Town and the City, On the Road is the first volume in what eventually becomes known as the Duluoz legend. Jack Duluoz, a variant of Sal Paradise and other of Kerouac’s narrators, is a mythologized persona, and direct correlations may be made between him and Sal Paradise and between the various characters in Kerouac’s novels and “real” people, some of them famous literary figures in their own right, like William BURROUGHS and Allen Ginsberg. In terms of Kerouac’s mythmaking, however, these precise autobiographical connections become rather beside the point. The body of Kerouac’s work is a series of adventures in which Kerouac’s narrative persona tries to find truth and meaning in a rapidly changing America. Ultimately, Kerouac’s view of America forces one to question the meaning and value of nostalgia and

why the myth of America requires a golden age. In this sense, Kerouac follows the tradition of Mark TWAIN and Thomas WOLFE. Kerouac’s plan to organize his novels in a chronological succession according to this “Duluoz legend” was never realized because of his dissipation and early death from alcoholism in 1969 at age 47. On the Road’s influence on the cultural history of the United States cannot be overstated. The extreme popularity of the novel after its publication in 1957 began the spread of a bohemianism that eventually would become known as the “beatnik” phenomenon, essentially a vulgarization and pop-culture caricature of those values and lifestyles presented in the novel. Its success helped jazz become wildly popular in the mid- to late 1950s, a creative flood spilling from Harlem and other African-American communities into white society and middle America. The fame of On the Road also gave Kerouac celebrity status—a position that eventually did him more harm than good. Ultimately, the pop phenomenon spawned by On the Road’s publication “opened,” according to William Burroughs, “a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes.” Woodstock rises from his pages (Burroughs, 181). Now, almost 50 years after its publication, one can look back at On the Road with nostalgia, but the novel continues to interest young people, and it appears in more college and university courses each year.

SOURCES Burroughs, William S. “Remembering Jack Kerouac.” In The Adding Machine, 176–81. New York: Arcade, 1986. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Jack’s Book. New York: St. Martin’s, 1978. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1991. ———. Vanity of Duluoz. New York: Penguin, 1994. Max Shenk

O PIONEERS! WILLA CATHER (1913) Willa Cather’s novel is a complex investigation into the supposedly ideal West and noble act of building America, through the telling of the story of a family that resists the cultural norms of that nation. When John Bergson dies and leaves his farm to his capable daughter, Alexandra,

996

OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, THE

rather than his two other farmer sons Lou and Otto, or the too-young Emil, he goes against the patriarchal tradition of passing on the property to the male heirs. Granted, Lou and Otto still have rights to the land, but it is Alexandra who has the control of the farmstead. When other farming families, like the Linstrums, leave the area due to drought and poor harvest, Alexandra stays and works the land—experimenting with new farming methods. Even after the immense tragedy of Emil and Marie’s deaths, Alexandra looks for the positive in an overwhelmingly negative situation. In resolving to win a pardon for the farmer Frank Shabata after he shoots Emil and Marie, Alexandra demonstrates an understanding of the human condition that remains much more profound than any of those who surround her. The critic Janis P. Stout claims not only that Cather draws upon herself in the character of Alexandra, but also that the “heroic” character becomes “a variant of the classic metaphor of the earth as woman or woman as earth” (Stout, 113). Referring to Kolodny’s concept of the American landscape as a passive female body or “virgin land,” Stout shows how Cather’s androgynous characterization of Alexandra allows her to give power to the woman agriculturalist who works with the land, as opposed to men who penetrate or strip the earth of her resources. Likewise, Sharon O’Brien claims that in this novel Cather is able to rectify the parts of herself that identified with her mother, as well as with her father, through the female farmer. Demaree C. Peck asserts, too, that the writing of this novel allowed Cather to once again embrace Nebraska instead of her young view that the state only stifled the artist, destroying the artistic imagination. According to Stout, O’Brien, and Peck, the writing of this novel allowed Cather to work out contradictions that the author observed in society, and ones she found in herself as well. The violence in O Pioneers! that shocks Cather’s readers acts as an American gothic undercurrent of the life Cather imagines in the West, as a counterpart to the lives Edith WHARTON imagined in shabby, dilapidated farmhouses of western Massachusetts. Published in 1913, the novel O Pioneers! gives a startling image of a newer form of woman who combines both masculine and feminine traits—who will make the unprofitable America profitable once again.

SOURCES Butler, Judith. “Dangerous Crossing: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names.” In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Lilienfeld, Jane. “Willa Cather.” In The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Lindemann, Marilee. Willa Cather: Queering America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. O’Brien, Sharon. Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Peck, Demaree C. The Imaginative Claims of the Artist in Willa Cather’s Fiction. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1996. Stout, Janis P. Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Sharon Kehl Califano

OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, THE EUDORA WELTY (1972) In her last novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, published first as a long short story in the New Yorker, Eudora WELTY explores themes that are prominent in most of her works, such as the relationship between the individual and the community, the significance of place, and the relationship of the artist to society. In this work, the point-of-view character, a middle-aged female artist, comes to terms with the past after having left the South and her family behind. Laurel McKelva Hand, a widowed designer, lives in Chicago, where she had gone to college and married another artist. She seldom sees her family, even after the death of her mother leaves her elderly father on his own, and she is therefore surprised when he remarries to a much younger woman. As the novel opens, Laurel visits her father after a year and a half’s absence to accompany him and his wife to an eye specialist for vision problems he has recently developed. His increased frailty, coupled with her sense that the young wife, Fay, is not worthy of him, awakens Laurel’s feelings of guilt. It is Fay herself who puts accusatory words to Laurel’s suppressed feelings. All her relatives have died back in Texas, Fay says: “Oh, I wouldn’t have run off and left anybody that needed me. Just to call myself an artist and make a lot of money” (37). And Fay is not the only one to accuse her. Her father’s elderly friend, Mrs. Pease, says what the

OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, THE 997

whole community appears to be thinking that “Laurel should have stayed home after Becky died. He needed him somebody in that house, girl” (137). Through the woman he chose to occupy his house, Fay Chisolm McKelva, Welty explores stereotypes of class and gender. Younger than her new stepdaughter, Fay is a classic golddigger, having met the judge while working in the secretarial pool. That her selfishness and superficiality are at first so extreme that we cannot take her seriously suggests her parodic function. To the doctor’s explanation of her husband’s condition and the necessary eye surgery, Fay’s only response is, “I don’t see why this had to happen to me” (15). The green stilettoheeled shoes and matching dangling earrings with which Fay tries to tempt the judge from what turns out to be his deathbed are talismans of her exaggerated sexuality. Later, when they return to the family home and Laurel wakes Fay, the stepdaughter is shocked to see the sensuous peach satin covering the windows and bed in what was formerly Laurel’s parents’ dignified bedroom. And here she also notes the same green shoes “placed like ornaments on top of the mantel shelf” (75) above the bed. Her seductive selfishness reaches a destructive height when, on her birthday, she screams at him that “Enough is enough!” and attempts to pull him from the bed. The shock proves too much for the old man, and he silently passes away. The town’s ladies interpret Fay’s sexually enticing behavior as further indication of her lack of breeding. Laurel later hears from the town ladies of her father and Fay “billing and cooing” scandalously over Sunday dinners at the Iona Hotel. Welty also highlights class difference through Missouri, the judge’s black cook. It is Missouri who disapprovingly tells Laurel that Fay habitually sleeps late and has breakfast in bed, an indication of her sensuality, her laziness, and her attempts to climb the social ladder. Though she waits on the judge, Missouri feels that Fay is unworthy, perhaps because of her class background. And it is Missouri who sends Laurel upstairs to find the seductive transformations wrought by Fay on her parents’ bedroom. Though Laurel bristles at the community’s censure of her own conduct, she feels no compunction about joining the community’s condemnation of Fay. Upon closer

inspection, however, the reader notices many similarities between these two women. Both are widows in their forties, both are alone in the world, and Fay, like Laurel, goes to her family home after the funeral to settle her relationship with the past. In a moment of personal despair and self-doubt, Laurel does begin to identify these similarities between herself and this woman she despises. Longing to tell her mother about Fay’s role in her father’s death, she realizes that this deed would equal any of Fay’s in its selfishness. Peter Schmidt writes that “Welty’s best comedies, early or late, capture how women either resist or are petrified by stereotypes of the feminine” (263). In helping Laurel realize that she is like Fay, but also like Fay’s opposite, Welty helps her to overcome confining stereotypes of class and gender. Throughout this novel, Laurel’s mother, Becky, stands as the counterpoint to Fay. As a proper lady— who, significantly, is dead before the novel begins— Becky knew how to act and what to say in social situations, but perhaps more important, Becky knew when to say nothing at all. On the last night Laurel spends at home, trapped in her mother’s sewing room while hiding from a chimney swift who got trapped in the house, Laurel confronts the memory of her. As Laurel comes to terms with her past, we see that it is the author’s past as well. Written just after the illness and death of her mother, The Optimist’s Daughter is Welty’s most autobiographical novel. The West Virginia home of Laurel’s mother is, in many details, identical to that of Welty’s own mother as described in her autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings. Having left her family in West Virginia to be with her husband in Mississippi, just as Welty’s mother had done, Becky longs to return to them on her deathbed. Welty’s own mother suffered similar feelings near her death. Perhaps in The Optimist’s Daughter, Welty comes to terms with the memory of her mother, whose life was so much like that of her character Becky. Here she also comes to terms with the possibility of her mother’s opposite, Fay, the woman she might fear becoming if she does not follow in her mother’s footsteps. What Laurel seems to learn from the night alone in Becky’s sewing room is that everyone has had to leave someone behind and that a life of self-denial rewards no

998

OREGON TRAIL, THE

one in the end. She owes it to her mother’s memory and to herself to live her own life. Laurel’s final confrontation with the past takes place over a symbolic token. A breadboard, made by Laurel’s husband’s skilled and loving hands, has been defiled by Fay’s careless use. Laurel, as she raises the symbolically and physically weighty breadboard above her head to strike Fay, suddenly realizes the necessity of remembering the past while looking toward the future. Breadboards are made to be used, and one’s life is one’s own to live. Fay’s use of the breadboard does not diminish Laurel’s memory of it or of the man who made it, and Laurel’s choosing her own path does not diminish her love for her mother and father. Leaving the breadboard, she flies back to her Chicago art world, her memories safe but unencumbered by self-sacrificing devotion.

SOURCES Gretlund, Jan Nordby, and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. The Late Novels of Eudora Welty. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Gygax, Franziska. Serious Daring from Within: Female Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty’s Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Hardy, John Edward. “Marrying Down in Eudora Welty’s Novels.” In Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 93–119. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. MacKethan, Lucinda H. Daughters of Time: Creating Woman’s Voice in Southern Story. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Schmidt, Peter. The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty’s Short Fiction. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginning. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. The Optimist’s Daughter. 1972. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Betina Entzminger

OREGON TRAIL, THE FRANCIS PARKMAN (1849) Francis PARKMAN (1823–93) was, in the words of one of his biographers, “the greatest writer among American historians.” He is now best remembered as author of a massive seven-part history of France and England in North America (1865–84),

which begins with the first French colonization of the new world and ends with the British conquest of New France in 1763. As this suggests, Parkman’s great story, his contribution to what another historian has called “history as romantic art,” was the interplay between the two rival colonial powers and a third force, the Native peoples, in North America. While still a young man, Parkman had decided on this project as his life’s work, so in the spring of 1846 he set out from his native Boston to see firsthand the American far West and its Native peoples, still living largely as they traditionally had. Descended from one of Boston’s best-known and established families, he embarked with a friend whose very name, Quincy Adams Shaw, triply signified the same patrician background they shared. Shaw saw the trip as an adventure: Theirs was to be, as the original subtitle of this book had it, “A Summer’s Journey Out of Bounds.” But given the actual social conditions of the western plains the two young men traveled that summer—with traders, emigrants for the West Coast, and several Native groups becoming aware of the Euroamerican threat to their way of life—Parkman and Shaw were also embarked on what historian Mason Wade called “an extremely foolhardy adventure.” Although attached for part of the time to a larger group of Englishmen, Parkman and Shaw made much of the trip in a group as small as four—too few for real safety. They could easily have been attacked and killed. They took a triangular route, leaving in early May from Westport (Kansas City, Missouri) across the prairies and along the Oregon Trail to Fort Laramie, Wyoming, then south along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains to the Arkansas River, which they followed east and eventually back to Westport in September. Beyond preparation for the histories Parkman would write, this trip also produced The Oregon Trail, his first book. First published serially in The Knickerbocker Magazine (1847–49) and then as The California and Oregon Trail by Putnam in 1849—the reference to California was added, irrelevantly, because gold had been discovered there—the book has proved an enduring classic of the pre–Civil War American West. Simply, Parkman was the right person in the right place at the right time. Through a combination of

OREGON TRAIL, THE 999

patrician background, education, raw determination to observe the West (and especially the Native American), timing, and a bit of luck, Parkman and his circumstances combined to produce the most enduring first-person account of America’s prewar western expansion. When Parkman headed to the plains in 1846, the United States’ war for additional territory with Mexico was just beginning, though its move west had already begun in earnest, since there were between 2,000 and 3,000 emigrants on the trails west at about the same time. Historian Bernard De Voto called 1846 “the year of decision” for American western ambitions. Still very much a student, Parkman was then 22 years old, had graduated from Harvard College in 1844 and read law, had taken his Grand Tour of Europe, and had visited many of the sites of French-English-Native confrontation in New England and Canada. And despite frail health and the hardships of the trail that exacerbated it, Parkman headed west that spring well-read and well-prepared for the conditions he hoped to find— “My business,” he later wrote in his preface to the book’s fourth edition (1872), “was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it.” Pay dearly he did, for the hardships of that summer came very near to ruining his eyesight and directly affecting his health—results that were to plague him for the rest of his life. That Parkman minimizes his personal difficulties in The Oregon Trail, creating something of a holiday air when that was not really the case, is indicative of the book. Throughout there is far more going on in its pages than is readily apparent. This stems from its moment in history and who Parkman was as a person. De Voto wrote that it “was Parkman’s fortune to witness and take part in one of the greatest national experiences, at the moment and site of its occurrence,” but he continues to claim that Parkman “did not understand the smallest part of it”— that the future historian was not able to comprehend what was in front of him, though he did see and describe it. Owing to his background, Parkman was something of a snob; he had neither the desire nor the ability to get to know the Oregon-bound emigrants whom he met and shunned on the trail.

The Natives, however, were another matter. Owing to his good fortune in having Henry Chatillon, a wellexperienced mountain man who had married into the Sioux, as his guide, Parkman managed through his three-week visit living among them to obtain real insight into their ways. Beyond the Sioux, who in the 1870s became infamous for their defeat of General Custer at the Little Big Horn, Parkman found Kansas, Shawnee, Delaware, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Pawnee—and he heard firsthand of other groups. The image of the Native that emerges from the pages of The Oregon Trail then proved to be radical and affecting, for having seen so extensive a range of Native groups, Parkman retains little of James Fenimore COOPER’s noble-savage illusion. This aspect of the book proved upsetting to Parkman’s readers, especially Herman MELVILLE, who reviewed The Oregon Trail anonymously for The Literary World. Melville’s review recognized The Oregon Trail’s significance to American literature, for in the changed image of the Native was also the changing visage of the nation, moving westward to confront the Native even as sectional discord and civil war loomed. For even though his analysis of social change is wanting in The Oregon Trail—and it is—Parkman offers a range of images and actions that proved prescient and affecting. His journey looked back to, and used, the literary conventions of Cooper—Chatillon is cast throughout as another Leatherstocking—while demonstrating again the literary currency of the westward movement. Washington Irving had seized the West as the American theme when he returned from Europe to America in 1832, though his convention-laden A Tour on the Prairies (1835) pales in comparison to Parkman’s book. Emerson, HAWTHORNE, Melville, POE, Thoreau, Whitman, and even Dickinson—each major author of the American Renaissance acknowledged the westward movement. Of these, Melville bore the clearest marks of The Oregon Trail; after reviewing it, he seems to have redoubled his western references, for in Moby-Dick (1851) whales are likened to buffalo as often as not and, despite its ocean setting, it contains a chapter entitled “The Prairie.” And Francis Parkman, not yet ready to write the histories that would be his life’s work, was ready to respond to the West when he went there in 1846.

1000

ORMOND; OR THE SECRET WITNESS

Respond he did. Whatever its analytical deficiencies for historians, The Oregon Trail is a critical document of American literature that offers Parkman’s vivid and well-informed responses to the West: its landscapes, its harsh conditions, and especially its Native peoples. Traveling after the first explorers and traders, relying on their experiences and their texts, yet viewing conditions before the large-scale settlement that would not occur until after the Civil War, Parkman passed through at a crucial moment. Descended from Boston’s most prominent citizens, schooled in that American literary center’s cultured ways, Parkman was well able to test its understandings and its myths— like the noble savage—against what he found on the Oregon Trail. That confrontation is what we still find vividly in The Oregon Trail. And in the subsequent work of Francis Parkman, who revised this book along with his maturing understanding of North America’s development—the 1892 edition is significantly different from the young man’s 1849 edition—we have an enduring text that, among many other things, traces America’s passage from pioneering toward power.

SOURCES De Voto, Bernard. The Year of Decision: 1846. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. Jacobs. Wilbur R. Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. ———, ed. The Letters of Francis Parkman, 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. Levin, David. History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959. Wade, Mason, ed. The Journals of Francis Parkman, 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1947. ———. Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian. New York: Viking, 1942. Robert Thacker

ORMOND; OR THE SECRET WITNESS CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1799–1800) The second of what critics call Charles Brockden BROWN’s “four major novels,” Ormond; or the Secret Witness was published in 1799. Along with Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (Part One, 1799; Part Two, 1800), and Edgar

Huntly (1799), Ormond belongs to a body of work that makes Brown the most critically acclaimed of 18thcentury American literary writers. In addition to these novels, Brown wrote two sentimental novels—Jane Talbot (1801) and Clara Howard (1801)—essays, criticism, short stories, and served as editor of several magazines. For his entire body of work Brown is often described as “America’s first professional man of letters” (Matthiessen quoted in Chapman, 10), and for this reason alone is regarded with respect by American literary critics. Brown also created the American gothic genre, which Ormond is an example of, later made popular by POE and HAWTHORNE. Additionally, recent critics have suggested yet another contribution from Brown. They argue that his psychologically complex and deeply haunting stories, along with his often disjointed narratives, represent the early republic in crisis. As Mary Chapman points out in her introduction to a modern edition of Ormond. All the controversial issues being debated in the new nation—“the location of authority in a democratic state; the construction of American national character and identity; postenlightenment views of gender and sexuality; the balance between individual freedom and communal responsibilities; and the shifting values of the era in which America moved from an agrarian community valuing civic responsibility to a capitalist economy valuing trade”—are explored by Brown (14). In Ormond, Brown centers on the issue of private and public life as a young woman, Constantia Dudley, tries to maintain the boundary between the two. From the beginning, the narrator, Sophia Westwyn Courtland, Dudley’s closest friend, informs the reader (a mysterious—and genderless—I. E. Rosenberg) that she will “relate [authentic] events in no artificial or elaborate order, and without that harmonious congruity and luminous amplification which might justly be displayed in a tale flowing merely from invention” (37). The most common criticism of Brown’s second novel is its incoherence; the central narrative stops and starts as characters enter Dudley’s life and tell their own stories. But while early critics saw this as a narrative failing on Brown’s part, recent critics have argued “such tangents and marginalia become the repositories of Brown’s

ORMOND; OR THE SECRET WITNESS 1001

deepest meaning” (Stern, 156). For example, these digressions illustrate the difficulty in maintaining a private narrative when individual lives cross into the public world. The boundary between the two worlds becomes blurred and confusing at times, and Brown’s narrative enacts that turmoil. Though Ormond is a narrative patchwork of sorts, which makes it hard to keep all the characters and story lines straight, it represents the chaos of everyday life where the master narrative is not often apparent. Yet with all these plot detours, Dudley remains unvarying—her given name is Constantia—in her commitment to virtue and purity. Everything that happens to her proves her to be patient, kind, intelligent, and brave. This is the thread that holds the tale together, suggesting that throughout the disjuncture of private and public life, what remains most important for both spheres is the virtue of a woman. When Dudley is in her mid-teens, her father loses his entire fortune. The financial fall effectively kills Dudley’s mother and humiliates her father. Stephen Dudley is particularly mortified because the loss is a result of his misplaced trust in Thomas Craig, a shameless confidence man. Craig spent years ingratiating himself in the Dudley family until made a partner in the apothecary business and given full access to their financial and personal lives. Ruined, Stephen Dudley changes his name, moves his family to Philadelphia, and makes a feeble living from painting until he loses his sight. He becomes depressed and completely dependent on his daughter, who must then support the two of them and a servant girl with the earnings from her needlepoint. Despite the sudden change in circumstance, Constantia Dudley remains cheerful, happy to work and to live frugally. Even when the yellow fever comes through Philadelphia, killing more than half the inhabitants, Dudley remains optimistic. All three survive but face financial ruin when the heartless landlord insists upon his monthly payment despite the extraordinary conditions. Without food, money, or fuel, Dudley is about to beg from a former acquaintance of her father when by chance she spies the duplicitous Thomas Craig. Dudley leaves him a note, asking only for immediate relief, but his wealthy

friend, Ormond, takes an interest in her situation, secretly supplies the family with sufficient funds on which to live, and begins courting Dudley. Ormond is a wealthy, arrogant man who is certain no woman could ever be worthy of his love. Upon meeting Dudley, his entire philosophy of women changes, though his motives do not: He has no intention of marrying Dudley if any other means of having her will prevail. Ormond patiently presses his suit with Dudley while steadily losing interest in his mistress Helena Cleves. Cleves and Dudley were childhood friends in New York, and when Cleves kills herself after Ormond declares he no longer cares for her, she leaves her slender fortune (acquired from Ormond) to Dudley. Thus are the Dudleys restored to some semblance of tranquillity, and in further debt to Ormond. Continuing their good fortune, Ormond, ever hopeful of gaining access to Dudley’s heart, has doctors perform an operation that restores Stephen Dudley’s sight. While grateful for his vision, Stephen Dudley remains unimpressed with Ormond and his clandestine ways. He urges his daughter to accompany him to live in Italy, away from Ormond’s influences. Constantia Dudley has just decided to comply with her father’s wishes when he is found savagely murdered in his bed. In her sad and troubled state of mind, Dudley longs for her dearest friend Sophia Westwyn (the narrator), from whom she has been separated for more than four years. In a string of miraculous events, the two women are reunited and begin to make plans for Dudley to join Westwyn and her new husband, Courtland, in England. To leave with Westwyn Courtland means breaking ties with Ormond, something Westwyn Courtland encourages, but Dudley is reluctant to do. Just as she resolves to do so, Ormond appears suddenly at her door, bitterly informs her he knows of her decision to leave him, passionately declares her a coward for rejecting him, and calmly prophesies a fate worse than death for her. Dudley is perplexed, but not frightened; she considers Ormond fervent but harmless. She continues to believe so until her last week in the United States. Dudley has retired to her childhood summer home to spend the remaining moments in her native land in a place of fond memories. Alone in the house,

1002

ORMOND; OR THE SECRET WITNESS

with the nearest neighbor miles away, Dudley unexpectedly sees Ormond arrive. He enters without invitation, bolts her within her private chambers, and prepares to rape her—the forewarned fate worse than death. Westwyn Courtland fortunately arrives with help soon after, but not until Dudley has killed Ormond with the penknife she’d threatened to use on herself rather than suffer the loss of virtue at his hand. Though the narrator insists Dudley was not raped, Westwyn Courtland’s description of her after her encounter with Ormond sounds like a violated woman: “Her hands were clasped on her breast, her eyes wildly fixed upon the ceiling and streaming with tears, and her hair unbound and falling confusedly over her bosom and neck” (272). Dudley even refers to herself in that moment as “the lost Constantia.” Throughout the novel, hard work, humiliating poverty, her mother’s death, her father’s dependence and even death reveal only Dudley’s amazing fortitude; she comes undone only when her sexual virtue is threatened. That Ormond might have succeeded apparently unnerves Dudley. From this experience she does not easily recover, which is why her friend and matchmaker Westwyn Courtland writes this long letter to explain Dudley’s condition (and testify that her virtue remains intact) to a possible suitor. The title character proves himself a villain to Dudley in this last scene, but until that moment Dudley does not imagine him evil. Indeed, Ormond is not the typical villain; he is “the most intellectually vigorous character” in the novel (Hinds, 57), and with his wealth he relieves the burden of poverty from several other households, including the Dudleys. As one critic explains, “Ormond plays the role of God, not so much practicing benevolence as bestowing beneficence, anonymously, upon those in more vulnerable circumstances than himself” (Hinds, 58–59). And like God, Ormond secretly witnesses (the novel’s subtitle) what goes on around him, through the use of expert disguise and other mysterious means. The problem is that his motivation and what he does with this knowledge are not in accord with a kind god. Ormond is willing to restore Stephen Dudley’s sight, for example, to get closer to Dudley, but equally willing to orchestrate

Stephen Dudley’s murder for the same reason. He justifies both actions to Dudley without remorse (265). “His skewed brand of benevolence makes of Ormond a parody of [a] publicly virtuous man. Where Ormond strays from the republican ideal is in his self-interest, not of the enlightened sort that joins duty to the private world and commitment to the marketplace” (Hinds, 60). That Ormond often appears virtuous is what makes him particularly treacherous. In her editorial appendices, Mary Chapman makes a compelling argument that Brown writes Ormond in response to rising fears in the new republic of a group of European thinkers named the Illuminati. This group believed in “the propriety of employing, for a good purpose, the means which the wicked employed for evil purposes; and it was taught that the preponderancy of good in the ultimate result consecrated every mean employed; and that wisdom and virtue consisted in properly determining the balance” (Robison quoted in Chapman, 290). Americans imagined that such a society of men planned to undermine the new government and step in to replace it once it fell. Ormond embodies those fears, and the novel sounds a warning while suggesting the only way to be rid of this danger is through the kind of virtue Dudley possesses. The rest of the novel supports this central argument. Like Ormond, a continual succession of characters illustrate the dangers of judgment based on appearances. Thomas Craig convinces Stephen Dudley to trust him with his fortune and causes financial ruin. The husband of Sarah Baxter, Dudley’s washerwoman, spies a young French woman burying a man Baxter assumes (1) to be her father, and (2) to have died of the fever. Baxter dies soon after, “an example of the force of imagination,” certain that he’s contracted the fever from them (93). And Martinette de Beauvais, the young French woman Baxter observes, appears to Dudley “a companion fitted to partake in all her sympathies” (188), but as a former soldier in revolutionary France she is too masculine for Dudley’s sensibilities (Hinds, 52). (De Beauvais is also later revealed as the sister of Ormond, though this is not held against her.) The text abounds with those who would deceive the public good. Though virtue offers some protection,

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS 1003

Dudley’s shattered state suggests that the only permanent solution is the departure from a society that allows this dissimulation.

SOURCES Allen, Paul. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975. Axelrod, Alan. An American Tale: Charles Brockden Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Brown, Charles Brockden. Ormond. Edited and with an introduction by Mary Chapman. Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Literary Texts, 1999. Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Lewis, Paul. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Gendered Canon of Early American Fiction,” Early American Literature 31 (1996): 167–188. Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Descent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Wiley, Lulu Rumsey. The Sources and Influence of the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. New York: Vantage Press, 1950. H. L. Johnson

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS TRUCAPOTE (1948) Truman CAPOTE once claimed: “I always had a marked homosexual preference, and I never had any guilt about it at all. As time goes on, you finally settle down on one side or another, homosexual or heterosexual. And I was homosexual” (Clark, 63). Despite this cavalier and dubious assertion, Capote’s

MAN

fiction suggests a great deal of ambivalence about the role of homosexuality in art. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, presents homosexuality as a somewhat viable alternative to heterosexuality but does so in a setting where most of the characters have been deformed or paralyzed by love. Other Voices, Other Rooms is the coming-of-age story of Joel Harrison Knox, a 13-year-old boy who comes to live with his estranged father (Ed Sansom) and wraithlike stepmother (Amy) at Skully’s Landing. Like Sutpen’s Hundred in William FAULKNER’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and 124 Bluestone Road in Toni MORRISON’s Beloved (1988), the decaying mansion at Skully’s Landing embodies both a shattered family and a tragic history. As Joel explains, “it was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it” (117). Joel too fears sinking into the apathetic misery of this place, but holds on to the hope that his father might rescue him. After experiencing his mother’s death and aunt’s neglect, Joel simply wants to belong, to feel loved, and he believes that “fitting in” somewhere will mitigate his sexual confusion. Yet for Joel, Skully’s Landing and the nearby Noon City are freakish, arid places populated by unusual people whose damaged bodies remind him of his own inability to “fit in.” When he first meets Idabel Thompkins, for example, she is described as a wild, feisty troublemaker whose tomboyish behavior makes her a freak in the eyes of the town: “ ‘Well, it wasn’t no revelation to me cause I always knew she was a freak, no ma’am, never saw that Idabel Thompkins in a dress yet’ ” (21). At first Joel is repulsed by her strangeness and that of the other townspeople, such as the one-armed barber, the crippled dwarf, and Randolph’s bearded mother. This reaction reflects Joel’s desire to feel normal—to “go away to a school where everybody was like everybody else” (110–111). Still afraid of his ambivalent sexual desires, he worries that deviating from socially constructed norms will make him freakish, like those who live near his father’s house. In order to perceive himself as normal, that is, heterosexual, Joel hopes that his father, whom he has never met, will embody heterosexual manhood. Joel

1004

OUR NIG

even worries that his own body is too effeminate: “He was too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; . . . and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes” (4). Not a powerful father figure, however, Mr. Sansom is paralyzed and completely dependent on others: “The eyes were a teary grey; they watched Joel with a kind of dumb glitter, and soon, as if to acknowledge him, they closed in a solemn double wink, and turned—so that he saw them only as part of a head, a shaved head lying with invalid looseness on unsanitary pillows” (121). Sansom had already failed as a father, abandoning Joel and his mother 13 years earlier, and now he fails as a model for masculinity. “If only he’d never seen Mr. Sansom! Then he could have gone on picturing him as looking this and that wonderful way, as talking in a kind of strong voice, as being really his father. Certainly this Mr. Sansom was not his father” (171). Though this failed image of masculinity (which undermines Joel’s assumptions about manhood) brings him closer to accepting his own homosexuality, it is ultimately Idabel’s (and to some extent Randolph’s) ability to find love by rejecting traditional heterosexual relationships that offers Joel a model for happiness. Idabel not only rejects stereotypically feminine behavior but also finds happiness in her infatuation for another woman, a sideshow performer. Frustrated with the ways the town labels her a freak, Idabel considers running away with the traveling circus, where she meets Miss Wisteria: “At the 10 cents Tent, they saw [her]. They did not quite believe she was a midget, though Miss Wisteria herself claimed to be twenty-five years old” (191). Idabel’s infatuation with Miss Wisteria gradually becomes clear to Joel: “Then a queer thing happened: Idabel, borrowing the lipstick, painted an awkward clownish line across her mouth, and Miss Wisteria, clapping her little hands, shrieked with a kind of sassy pleasure. . . . But as she continued to fawn over tiny yellow-haired Miss Wisteria it came to him that Idabel was in love” (192–93). Ironically, Miss Wisteria attributes Idabel’s behavior to freakishness: “ ‘Poor child, is it that she believes she is a freak, too?’ ” (195). But Idabel’s happiness opens Joel up to the possibility of same-sex love. In the last lines of the novel, he goes to Randolph, who, dressed as a woman, beck-

ons him to his room. Looking at Randolph, he gains a new sense of self: “I am Joel, we are the same people” (227). As these words suggest, Joel embraces homosexual desire, but we are still left wondering to what extent he has come into his own. A teenager being seduced by an older man is far from ideal, but this experience has enabled Joel to break free from heterosexist imperatives. In the end, Joel is listening to other voices and occupying other rooms. He embraces a new possibility for finding and experiencing love, and at this moment, he embraces the central theme of Capote’s novel—that “love, having no geography, knows no boundaries. . . . Any love is natural and beautiful that lies within a person’s nature” (147).

SOURCES Bogdan, Robert. Freak Shows: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Capote, Truman. Other Voices, Other Rooms. 1948. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1994. Christensen, Peter G., “Capote as Gay American Author.” In The Critical Response to Truman Capote, edited by Joseph and John Waldmeir, 61–67. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Clark, Gerald. Capote: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. Thomas Fahy

OUR NIG HARRIET E. WILSON (1859) In Our Nig, Harriet E. WILSON presents a hybrid form of writing that combines autobiography with traditional tropes from sentimental fiction and literary conventions from slave narratives. The title in its entirety, Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, contains many clues that tell of the work’s complexity and Wilson’s own personal investment in the text itself. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., claims that “Harriet Wilson became most probably the first Afro-American to publish a novel in the United States, the fifth AfroAmerican to publish fiction in English (after Frederick Douglass, William Wells BROWN, Frank J. Webb, and Martin R. Delany) and . . . one of the first two black

OUR NIG 1005

women to publish a novel in any language” (xiii). The George C. Rand and Avery Company printed the novel for Wilson, which “first appeared on September 5, 1859” (xi), as a means of raising money for the livelihood of both Wilson and her fever-stricken son, who died six months after the book’s publication. The title Wilson used for her novel, Our Nig, remains a powerful one today. Gates deftly explains that the title is an ironic one: “Transformed into an object of abuse and scorn by her enemies, the ‘object,’ the heroine of Our Nig, reverses this relationship by renaming herself not Our Nig but ‘Our Nig,’ thereby transforming herself into a subject” (li). By using quotation marks around the “Our Nig,” Wilson appropriates a pejorative phrase used by whites to make her feel inferior and rejects that power dynamic by renaming herself—signifying the change through punctuation. R. J. Ellis, in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: A Cultural Biography of a ‘Two Story’ African American Novel, shows that Wilson’s play on words in the title also occurs in her use of a “Two-Story White House.” Ellis asserts that Wilson does not solely describe a multilevel house, typical of New England farmhouses that are painted white, but also points out the duality of stories—one story presented to the public outside the house, and the story told from within by Wilson, of the hypocrisy of a supposedly Christian white family who keep a racially mixed slave: “The novel does indeed tell two stories: one is the story of a well-connected, reasonably affluent, New England farm family, a story of outside respectability: the other is an inside story, a portrait of their sadistic mistreatment of Alfrado” (15). To avoid alienating her readers, Wilson cleverly employs an apologetic voice of self-effacement in her preface to appeal to not only a white audience, but also to call upon the aid of her “colored brethren,” asking for financial support through the purchase of her book. Wilson chose to base her novel largely on her own life and experiences in New Hampshire, preferring to use the narrative form of the novel to appeal to a wide audience and to disarm potentially biased readers. The story is told from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrative voice who addresses the reader using conventions from traditional sentimental novels,

such as in addressing the reader—for example, “You can philosophize, gentle reader, upon the impropriety of such unions” (2)—or in the use of dramatic punctuation. The novel opens with an abandoned, fallen white woman, Mag, and her resultant interracial marriage to Jim, which produces two children before the death of her husband. Desperate and a social pariah, Mag decides to take a lover, who eventually convinces her to abandon her children. As a result, Mag leaves her daughter Frado with the Bellmont family, a respected white family with a terrible matriarch. During her years with the Bellmont family, Frado, a clever girl, finds allies and ways to endure the horrible abuse—beatings, whippings, solitary confinement, starvation, endless work—she suffers under the watch of her “overseer,” Mrs. Bellmont. Barbara A. White provides insightful research into Wilson’s past, revealing that the Nehemiah Hayward family of Milford, New Hampshire, served as the model for the Bellmonts. White contends that Mrs. Bellmont’s severity and ruthlessness stemmed from the historical figure of Rebecca Hutchinson Hayward: “The living patterns of the Hayward family, in addition to the history of violence in Rebecca’s background, suggest that Wilson based her characterization of Mrs. Bellmont as a shedevil on reality” (xxi). Wilson’s narrative includes literary elements from the tradition of the slave narrative in describing her abuse from her northern captors. Frado must rely on the support of Bellmont family members, like James and Aunt Abby, who not only give her the strength to bear Mrs. Bellmont’s relentless wrath but also guide Frado to turn to religion and prayer to help her endure such an adversary. Throughout the novel, Frado’s wit, intelligence, and intense goodness give her the power to resist and challenge the oppression of the northern “shadow” of slavery—indentured servitude in the guise of freedom. With the knowledge that Frado’s story is actually that of Harriet Wilson, the book Our Nig stands as a work of powerful resistance. In Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature, John Ernest reveals that the recovery and republication of Wilson’s text itself involves the reader in a delayed economic exchange, through the purchase of the novel.

1006

OUTSIDER, THE

Ernest cleverly asserts: “Ultimately, the argument embedded in Our Nig is that communal self-purchase begins with this book; the story of the life produced by this culture serves as a catalyst for new cultural productions in the ongoing quest to convert disparate cultural property into a common humanity” (79). Ernest suggests that, though the lives of Wilson and her son may have been lost, perhaps the life of her literary brainchild can be saved. Through the modern reader’s acknowledgment of the cultural past Wilson (re)presents, and the self-examination that stems from recognizing aspects of that reader’s self in such ancestors, the social reform for which Wilson petitions might still come to fruition.

SOURCES Ellis, R. J. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: A Cultural Biography of a ‘Two Story’ African American Novel. New York: Rodopi, 2003. Ernest, John. Resistance and Reformation in Nineteenth-Century African-American Literature: Brown, Wilson, Jacobs, Delany, Douglass and Harper. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Leveen, Lois. “Dwelling in the House of Oppression: The Spatial, Racial and Textual Dynamics of Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” African American Review 35, no. 4 (December 2001): 561–580. Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from a Life of a Free Black. Introduction Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. Afterword Barbara A. White. New York: Vintage, 2002. Sharon Kehl Califano

OUTSIDER, THE RICHARD WRIGHT (1953) WRIGHT’s novel concerns Cross Damon, a proud and self-loathing man whose psychological impulses and radical personal philosophy have led him to a nihilistic alienation from basic social obligations and cultural presuppositions. Feeling oppressed and coerced by personal relationships and faced with the prospect of indebtedness and imprisonment, Cross is fortuitously involved in a subway train accident, which produces a corpse that is mistakenly thought to be his. “[E]mbracing the opportunities” this affords him, he jettisons his identity, appropriates the name of a dead man, and initiates a number of ill-fated attempts to establish a new life:

His repudiation of his ties was as though his feelings had been water and those watery feelings had been projected by his desires out upon the surface of the world, like water upon pavements and roofs after a spring rain; and his loyalty to that world, like the sun, had brightened that world and made it glitter with meaning; and now, since last night, since he had broken all of the promises and pledges he had ever made, the water of meaning had begun to drain off the world, had begun to dry up and leave the look of things changed; and now he was seeing an alien and unjustifiable world completely different from him. It was no longer his world, it was just a world. (461) The titles of the book’s five sections indicate something of the trajectory of accumulating fatality: Dread, Dream, Descent, Despair, Decision. Along the way he is led to first murder a friend, for fear his deception will be exposed, and then to murder three white men who “outrage” and insult his sense of the nature and requirements of authentic existence. This is a novel of ideas, which is to say that its plot contrives to provide a psychological case study of a philosophically reflective character—“the hungry type of mind that needed only a scrap of an idea to feed upon, to start his analytical process rolling” (584)— whose real function is to be a vehicle for the explicit expression of a set of propositions. These propositions can be designated as follows: (1) the compulsive, often criminal, acts of a social and psychological “outsider” most clearly evidence the dialectical relationship between desire and “voluptuous dread” that is intrinsic to all human beings, although this relationship is usually disavowed, repressed, and evaded; (2) the outsider type sees too deeply for his own good that most human beings cannot tolerate the freedom that the instability of existence affords them; (3) as a consequence of industrialization, modern civilization has produced a pervasive attitude that is paradoxically both relativistic and absolutistic—a mundane and complacent failure to abide by any transcendent truth such that each individual must function as his/her own god and law-

OUTSIDER, THE 1007

maker; (4) this combination of the desire to evade freedom and the dreadful absence of conviction has produced a situation ripe for totalitarianism, which is less an expression of one or another political ideology than a psychological predisposition, and a sensual predilection, that uses ideas as a guise for exerting the will to power over others. There is a perhaps surprising insistence throughout the book that race is not a central element in the development of Cross’s attitudes, ideas, and actions. After Cross decides to adopt a new identity and go on the lam, his sense of freedom and isolation is said to have “no racial tone. . . . he was just a man, any man who had had an opportunity to flee and had seized upon it” (455). What’s more, “[i]t was not because he was a Negro that he found his obligations intolerable” but despite it, insofar as “a sharp sense of freedom . . . had somehow escaped being dulled by intimidating conditions” (774). This insistence may reflect the author’s desire to escape the ghetto of critical attribution by demonstrating the wider scope of his concerns. It may also reflect a seemingly contradictory conviction— whether the author’s or the character’s, it is hard to say—that, at least for a certain type of person, unconstrained subjectivity is itself a transcendental truth. Or it may constitute a denial or evasion that serves to characterize the extremity of Cross’s alienation and to indicate one more reason why he is doomed. Refusing out of pride “to regard himself as an exploited victim” and lacking “the itch to right wrongs done to others, though those wrongs did at times agitate him,” Cross deplores “color consciousness” as a humiliatingly narrow and an insufficiently detached perspective on human existence (815). And he rejects racial identification as just another form of self-deluding affiliation; he makes no demand “that he be given his share of a mythical heritage” (573) because “the insistent claims of his own inner life had made him too concerned with himself to cast his lot wholeheartedly with Negroes in terms of racial struggle. . . . [H]is decisive life struggle was a personal fight for the realization of himself” (525). It is indicative that race figures less as emotional motivation or contextual explanation than as a forum for existential analysis. Wright has a

second outsider type, the deeply ambiguous, white district attorney, Houston, develop an idea probably derived from W. E. B. DuBois’s famous argument that the American Negro has developed a “double consciousness” as a consequence of living simultaneously “inside and outside of our culture”; but in Houston’s speculation, derived from looking into his own heart, the outsider condition will remain with Negroes even after civil rights are fully granted because that condition has made them “centers of knowing,” and this will make it difficult for them to “live the normal, vulgar, day-to-day life of the average white American” (500). As a novel of ideas, Wright’s book is in quite conscious dialogue with a set of precedent texts that had done much to establish the tenets of existentialism, a philosophy of life very influential at the time of the book’s composition, which emphasized that there is no objective principle of absolute value and that a human being has no defining essence: Maybe man is nothing in particular. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? . . . And every move he makes, might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man. . . . (507) In fear and trembling at the likelihood of loneliness, ostracism, and punishment, the outsider must, with radical innocence, undertake to define himself through actions that are authentic to his individualistic subjectivity. However, most people succumb to “bad faith,” willful, but often unconscious, denial that is to varying degrees “an indigenous part of living”: “The daily stifling of one’s sense of terror in the face of life, the farflung conspiracy of pretending that life was tending toward a goal of redemption, the reasonless assumption that one’s dreams and desires were realizable” (572). The extended, sometimes ponderous expository speeches that Wright puts in the mouths of Cross and Houston show his familiarity with Friedrich Niet-

1008 OXBOW INCIDENT, THE

zsche’s excoriations of institutionalized delusion and suppression of the self, The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power and with Soren Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread. While elements of the plot owe much to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, a study of a murderer driven to confess his crime to a detective because he recognizes he is not the superman above the moral law that he thought he was, and to Albert Camus’s just recently published novel, The Stranger (published in England as The Outsider), a study of alienation, indifference, and contingency that culminates in accidental murder and execution (compare Houston’s shock at Cross’s lack of emotion upon hearing that he has caused his mother’s death—“the greatest and last crime of all”—with a similar reaction recorded in Camus’s book). Closer to home, Wright’s story demands to be read in the light of Ralph ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN (published a year earlier), just as that novel demands to be read in the darkness of Wright’s long short story “The Man Who Lived Underground” (published in 1945). In both Invisible Man and The Outsider, a man is expelled by contingency from the organizing structures of normal life, adopts a perspective of extreme alienation that allows him to discover the pervasive human need for self-delusion, becomes involved with and repudiates the Communist Party’s attempts to exploit racial antagonism for its own ends, discovers that he can manipulate the prejudiced expectations and projected fantasies of white people, and develops the credo that man makes himself. Finally, it must be said that in many respects The Outsider seems intended as dialogic counterpoint to the book that had made Wright’s reputation, NATIVE SON, particularly in regard to the dramatic difference between the two protagonists. Bigger Thomas is as much a victim of his inarticulate lack of self-awareness as he is of the social forces and circumstances he could never comprehend; whereas, Cross Damon victimizes himself, in equal measure, by means of his articulate hyperconsciousness and his disdain for those same social forces. It is all there in his name: Wright’s protagonist is a cross of burden and suffering for himself and for all who would try to know him; but he is kept from personifying expiation because he belongs to

another line entirely, that of the daimon, the Greek term for a spirit or power that is beyond good and evil—a being part-human, part-god—from which Christianity derived demon (for purposes closely related to the book’s analysis of the institutional will to power and the human need to renounce freedom).

SOURCES Alsen, Eberhard. “Toward the Living Sun: Richard Wright’s Change of Heart from The Outsider to The Long Dream,” CLA Journal 38 (December 1994): 211–227. Fishburn, Katherine. Richard Wright’s Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Singh, Amritjit. “Richard Wright’s The Outsider: Existentialist Exemplar or Critique?” CLA Journal 27 (June 1984): 357–370. Wright, Richard, “I Tried to Be a Communist.” In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Wright, Richard. Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger); The Outsider. New York: Library of America, 1991. David Brottman

OXBOW INCIDENT, THE WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK (1940) One of the most significant western novels of the 20th century, The Oxbow Incident made literary history with its groundbreaking style that many critics refer to as anti-Western or anti–romantic Western. Walter Van Tilburg CLARK took all the ingredients of the familiar cowboy novel—the saloons, ranch hands, stagecoaches, and cattle rustling made familiar by such writers as Zane GREY Owen WISTER, and Hamlin GARLAND—and invested his novel with a somber quality at once new to readers and essential to a realistic look at the settling of the American West. Implicit in the title is the irony of the novel’s relation to the traditional novel of the region: The Oxbow Valley is the setting of the tragic “incident” in which three innocent men are lynched by an unlawful posse that dispenses mob justice. The message is national as well as regional and, indeed, The Oxbow Incident transcends the genre of the western to take its place as an American, even a universal novel. The tale opens in Nevada in 1885 as Art Croft and Gil Carter, two cowboys who have been holed up over

OXBOW INCIDENT, THE 1009

the winter, “just the two of us in that shack in the snow,” crest the ridge to view their destination, the town of Bridger’s Wells. As scholar Max Westbrook notes, Art, the more sensitive of the two, is one of a number of creative or intellectual characters Clark created with that name (“Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream”). The first-person narrator, Art, is paired with (and sometimes clashes with) Gil, an essentially good man and the more typical cowboy, having a love of poker games, barroom brawls, and fast women. After a long winter on the range, Gil comes to town craving entertainment and companionship. At Canby’s saloon, Gil, disappointed to learn that Rose Mapen, the woman he had hoped would wait for him, has left for San Francisco, turns to poker and drink and, as the inevitable arguments ensue, is knocked unconscious. But the focus quickly shifts from this familiar western set piece to the news that rustlers have stolen cattle and killed a rancher named Larry Kinkaid. The plot intensifies with the myriad reactions to the murder and theft. Significantly, with the temporary absence of Sheriff Risley, law enforcement is missing, so the debate rages among the men on what action to take. The local magistrate Judge Tyler, the town storekeeper Davies, and the Baptist minister Reverend Osgood take the side of due process, while the angry cowboy Farnley; the brutal, swaggering deputy sheriff Mapes; and the power-hungry ex-Confederate Major Tetley all argue for avenging the murder through swift frontier justice. Those on the side of law and order appear to sway the arguments briefly, but the angry mob rule ultimately dominates in favor of an illegal posse and quick revenge. Those advocating the rule of law are feminized—Reverend Osgood is called “gran’ma” and Major Tetley calls his son Gerald a “female boy”— whereas masculine imagery characterizes those who urge the lynching of the killers, including boardinghouse owner Jenny “Ma” Greer, who is described in mannish terms. Despite Judge Tyler’s warning that he is breaking the law, Mapes deputizes some 40 men and leads them toward the rustlers, who have been sighted by Amigo, Major Tetley’s cowhand. Everyone, including Art and Gil, goes along with the posse,

some, like Davies, in the hopes that they can yet make reason prevail. When a stagecoach approaches the posse from the opposite direction, the driver, mistaking the group for bandits, shoots Art in the chest before stopping. Art’s wound is treated as the passengers—who include Rose Mapen, Gil’s former girlfriend, and her new husband, Swanson—relate their sighting of the rustlers at Oxbow, a valley so named because of the river that switches back on itself. The posse finds three men sleeping around a campfire: Donald Martin, who protests his innocence but cannot produce the bill of sale for the 40 head of cattle he insists that he bought from Harley Drew; a feebleminded old man named Alva Hardwick; and a Mexican named Morez. Realizing that his fate is sealed, that the group is intent on hanging him, Martin writes a moving letter to his wife and extracts a promise from Davies to deliver it to her; the Mexican bravely removes a bullet from his own leg and cauterizes it with his fire-heated knife; and the old man becomes increasingly disoriented. Ropes are secured to a tree limb, the three outlaws are mounted on horseback, and two of them die quickly as the horses are jerked away. Martin, however, must be shot because Gerald, whose father forces him to participate, bungles his effort to move the horse from under Martin. The lynchings complete, the men head for Bridger’s Wells, only to encounter Sheriff Risley; Judge Tyler; Harley Drew, who did indeed sell 50 cows to Martin; and Kinkaid, injured but very much alive. Although they realize their mistake, few seem to understand that the murder of the three innocent men constitutes not only a crime but a horrific tragedy. The sheriff announces that he cannot prosecute anyone because he lacks evidence pointing to the perpetrators. The toll of the murders is nevertheless high: Gerald Tetley hangs himself and, on hearing of his son’s death, Major Tetley, too, commits suicide. Davies is bowed down with guilt for not having prevented the murders, and Art and Gil, who had intended to settle in Bridger’s Wells, hear laughter in the bar and change their minds: “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” says Gil, and Art agrees. Clark has transformed the romantic western into a darkly tragic tale emblematic of a modern reality. Even

1010 OXBOW INCIDENT, THE

nature and the weather appear to be against the town as the incipient spring of the novel’s opening pages is displaced by the black night and blowing snow in which the murders are conceived. Although the novel is set in the late 19th century, its lessons, like those of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or William FAULKNER’s LIGHT IN AUGUST (1939), demonstrate the dangers of demagoguery and mob rule, particularly in terms of the looming awareness of Nazis during the late 1930s when Clark wrote the novel. As several critics note, Clark is interested not in the settlement of towns, the building of railroads, or the driving of cattle. Instead, he depicts the aftermath of these events in a town that the railroad has passed by: Far from romanticized, the town is desiccated and monotonous. The slim, handsome cowboys of earlier novels have here been replaced by paunchy ranch hands who exude a seedy aura and, in Max Westbrook’s words, fail “to translate the macho energy of a fading history into the life they are now leading” (“Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream,” 3). The arrival of the outsiders, Gil and Art, suggests generally the Americans who continued to settle the West and, with Gil’s pent-up emotions and their violent outlet, more immediately the far more significant breach of law and justice that will ensue. Art and Gil are basically good human beings, but how many good men and women have the moral courage to stand independently and resist a mob? The novel raises numerous questions about the ways in which the right and the good may be advocated, including whether using force to fight evil is ever justified. At the end of the novel, Davies is mired in guilt for having failed to persuade the majority to act according to the law in which he so fervently believes: “True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right or wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has evolved with mankind.” But this day, in Oxbow, it has failed. The Oxbow Incident has no hero, as has often been remarked. The tragedy occurs precisely because no one steps up to take a stand against evil. Although the novel was not a popular success when it appeared, its significance in American literary history

has been noted by literary critics and continues into contemporary times. Critic Clifton Fadiman called it “the year’s finest novel.” Clark’s eloquent employment of the land and the scenery is frequently lauded, and his use of gritty, realistic dialogue has drawn praise from both readers and critics who have not infrequently compared Clark’s style to that of Ernest HEMINGWAY. Although his novels differ notably from those of Wister and Grey, for instance, they bear an ironic resemblance to James Fenimore COOPER’s LEATHERSTOCKING TALES in their mournful depiction of human folly against the backdrop of the grandeur of the American land. The 1943 William Wellman film, starring Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, and others, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and is repeatedly referred to by film critics as a masterpiece. As recently as 2005, mayor Richard Daley and library commissioner Karen Danczak Lyons named The Oxbow Incident as the citywide book of the year.

SOURCES Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Oxbow Incident. New York: Random House, 1940. Cochran, Robert W. “Nature and the Nature of Man in The Ox-Bow Incident,” Western American Literature 5 (Winter 1971): 253–264. Fadiman, Clifton. “Make Way for Mr. Clark,” The New Yorker, 12 October 1940. Hada, Kenneth. “Clark’s The Oxbow Incident,” The Explicator (Spring 2001): 147–149. Kich, Martin. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Oxbow Incident.” The Literary Encyclopedia. 14 January 2004. The Literary Dictionary Company. Available online. URL: http:// www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID= 13855. Accessed April 19, 2006. Lee, L. L. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boise: Boise State College, 1973. Milton, John R. The Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark.” Chicago Public Library: One Book, One Chicago. Available online. URL: www.chipublib. org/003cpl/oboc/oxbow/author.html. Accessed April 19, 2006. Westbrook, Max. Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Boston: Twayne, 1969.

OZICK, CYNTHIA 1011

———. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark and the American Dream.” Available online. URL: http://72.14.203.104/ search?q=cache:1rPPafHicocJ:www2.tcu.edu/depts/prs/ amwest/pdf/wl0989.pdf+walter+van+tilburg+clark&hl= en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9. Accessed April 18, 2006. Wilner, Herbert. “Walter Van Tilburg Clark.” The Western Review 20 (Winter 1956): 103–122.

OZICK, CYNTHIA (1928– )

Cynthia Ozick is one of the preeminent writers of “Jewish American” fiction; she prefers, however, to eschew this label, stating in an article in The Forward entitled “What’s a Jewish Book?” that too many readers and critics mistake “ethnicity for literature.” Ozick believes that Saul BELLOW and Philip ROTH are the “living Jewish luminaries of American literature,” and that they are, first and foremost, great writers whose heritage is “powerfully there.” Nonetheless, numerous critics would place Ozick herself among the luminaries she mentions: Her numerous awards include three National Book Critics Circle Award nominations, in 1982, 1983, and 1990; a PEN/Faulkner award nomination in 1984, and a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, Jewish Book Council, 1977, for Bloodshed and Three Novellas. Ozick’s themes are nearly always related to Jewish identity, history, culture, and art, while her often-praised style includes magical realism, fantasy, mysticism, paradox, comedy, and satire. Although known widely for her collections of short fiction, she has written several novels and novellas that examine the role of the artist in relation to Jewish history and theology. Cynthia Ozick was born on April 17, 1928, in the Yorkville neighborhood of New York City, to William Ozick, a pharmacist, and Shiphra (Celia) Regelson Ozick. Reared in New York, she was educated there and in Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree from New York University in 1949 and a master’s degree from Ohio State University in 1950. She married Bernard Hallote, a lawyer, in 1952. In 1966 she published Trust, a Jamesian exploration of the clash between personal desire and moral responsibility; the unnamed young narrator investigates the lives of her mother, Allegra, and Allegra’s two husbands, and searches for

her biological father, an enigmatic and highly sexed presence named Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck. He is a drifter, a bum, and a hedonist, in contrast with Enoch, Allegra’s second husband, a moral man seeking truth. Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976) further illustrates the struggle between the amoral and the holy, and, additionally, addresses Ozick’s concern that writers worship their tales as idols and that it is in direct confrontation with the Old Testament law against idolatry. All these tales are linked by characters fleeing from, and returning (sometimes reluctantly) to, Jewish identity. She followed with The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), a novel that addresses the issue of Jewish assimilation in a post-Holocaust America. Ozick’s technique is to trace the development of Joseph Brill, a school principal who survived the Holocaust by hiding and denying his desires and his talents. Helped by his confrontations with linguist Hester Lilt, Brill arrives at self-definition. In The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), orphaned protagonist Lars Andemening convinces himself that he is the son of Polish writer Bruno Schultz, gunned down by Nazis in 1942. For a time he lives in a passive fantasy world until he awakens, metaphorically gives birth to himself, and creates a solid identity. In 1989, Ozick published THE SHAWL: A Story and a Novella, in The New Yorker. Reissued in one volume, The Shawl recounts the forced march to a Nazi death camp and the subsequent murder of Magda, Rosa’s baby. Rosa, the novella sequel, follows this character to Miami, where she has been sent after she destroys her store. In Miami, she pieces together her losses and her life, aided by Simon Perksy, an old Polish Jew. A more recent novel, The Puttermesser Papers (1997), features attorney Rosa Puttermesser, a character from one of Ozick’s short stories, and follows her from middle age until after her death. Cynthia Ozick lives and writes at her home in New Rochelle, New York.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Bloodshed and Three Novellas. New York: Knopf, 1976. The Cannibal Galaxy. New York: Knopf, 1983. Heir to the Glimmering World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. The Messiah of Stockholm. New York: Knopf, 1987.

1012 OZICK, CYNTHIA

The Puttermesser Papers. New York: Knopf, 1997. The Shawl. New York: Knopf, 1989. Trust. New York: New American Library, 1966.

SOURCES Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle,” Partisan Review 65, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 49. Bloom, Harold, ed. Cynthia Ozick: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Cohen, Sarah Blacher. Cynthia Ozick’s Comic Art: From Levity to Liturgy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Friedman, Lawrence S. Understanding Cynthia Ozick. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Lakritz, Andrew. “Cynthia Ozick and the End of the Modern,” Chicago Review 40, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 98. Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Ozick, Cynthia. “An Interview with Cynthia Ozick,” Contemporary Literature 34, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 358. Pinksker, Sanford. The Uncompromising Fictions of Cynthia Ozick. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Powers, Peter Kerry. “Disruptive Memories: Cynthia Ozick, Assimilation, and the Invented Past,” Melus 20, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 79–97. Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, eds. Three Contemporary Women Novelists: Hazzard, Ozick, and Redmon. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

Rovit, Earl. “The Two Languages of Cynthia Ozick,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 34–47. Strandberg, Victor H. Greek Mind/Jewish Soul: The Conflicted Art of Cynthia Ozick. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Walden, Daniel, ed. The World of Cynthia Ozick: Studies in American Jewish Literature. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1987. Wilner, Arlene Fish. “The Jewish-American Woman as Artist: Cynthia Ozick and the ‘Paleface’ Tradition,” College Literature 20, no. 2 (June 1993): 12–32.

OTHER Ozick, Cynthia. “What’s a Jewish Book? Cynthia Ozick: Promoting Virtue Through Learning,” Forward (October 26, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1: 79273498. Accessed September 24, 2005. The Atlantic Online. Fact and Fiction: Cynthia Ozick. Available online to subscribers. URL: http://www.theatlantic. com/unbound/factfict/ozick.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005. Valencia Community College, West Campus LRC: “Cynthia Ozick.” Available online. URL: http://valenciacc.edu/ lrcwest/Author_Pathfinders/ozick.html. Accessed September 24, 2004.

T H E FA C T S O N F I L E COMPANION TO THE

AMERICAN NOVEL VOLUME III P–Z

CD EDITED BY ABBY H. P. WERLOCK ASSISTANT EDITOR: JAMES P. WERLOCK

To my father, Thomas Kennedy Potter, Jr. (1917–2003)

The Facts On File Companion to the American Novel Copyright © 2006 by Abby H. P. Werlock All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Facts On File, Inc. An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Facts On File companion to the American novel / [edited by] Abby H. P. Werlock. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8160-4528-3 (set: hardcover: alk. paper) 1. American fiction—Encyclopedias. 2. American fiction—Bio-bibliography. 3. American fiction— Stories, plots, etc. I. Title: Companion to the American novel. II. Werlock, Abby H. P. III. Facts on File, Inc. IV. Title. PS371.F33 2005 813′.003—dc22

2005012437

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com Text design adapted by James Scotto-Lavino Cover design by Cathy Rincon Printed in the United States of America VB Hermitage 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS CD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv INTRODUCTION vi ENTRIES A TO F 1 VOLUME II ENTRIES G TO O 473 VOLUME III ENTRIES P TO Z 1013 SUBJECT ENTRIES 1417 THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1417 THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1421 THE LATINO NOVEL 1426 THE DETECTIVE NOVEL 1434 THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL 1437 APPENDICES I. LIST OF MAJOR PRIZEWINNERS 1441 II. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1449 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 1453 INDEX 1455

C

PD

PACO’S STORY LARRY HEINEMANN (1986) Paco’s Story is Larry HEINEMANN’s second Vietnam War novel, after Close Quarters, which was published in 1977. Both novels draw from Heinemann’s 1967–68 tour of duty in Vietnam as a combat infantryman with the 25th Division. Paco’s Story is one of the most significant fictional works on American experiences of the Vietnam War and its aftermath, and the novel has garnered Heinemann lasting recognition and a number of awards, including the 1987 National Book Award. The opening introduces the reader to the novel’s protagonist while he is still in Vietnam: A massive bombardment, probably “friendly fire,” has devastated Alpha Company, and Paco is the only survivor. The reader follows Paco through treatments and hospitals, and then travels with him stateside to a quiet town, where he takes up a job as dishwasher at a diner named The Texas Lunch. In the end, Paco realizes that despite his dedication to the job and his modest attempts at making a life for himself, he will never be accepted as an equal within the community and resolves to leave town for good. Interestingly, Paco never fully tells his own story. When found among the corpses, he is unable to answer questions about who he is and what has happened. Later, he tells his tale only in the most abbreviated form: “I was wounded in the war” (103). The details of Paco’s Vietnam experiences and their lasting mark on his appearance and behavior are provided instead through the observations of him by others,

including the medic who finds him among the bodies and, unlike Paco, will “tell the story [of finding Paco]. . . . over and over again” (20); the bus driver who drops him off at a Texaco station outside the small town; the mechanic at the station who gives him a ride into town; and—most important—the disembodied voice belonging to an American soldier killed in the bombardment that narrates the past and present experiences of Paco throughout the book. Marilyn Durham has addressed the nature and effects of this peculiar narrative voice in the novel, writing that the voice possesses “a special authority,” as it belongs to someone who had been there with Paco during the bombardment, and simultaneously conveys a sense of immediacy and invites our sympathy and identification with both the masses of dead and the sole survivor (100). Other critical commentary on Paco’s Story ranges from attention to the structuring of the narrative to analysis of larger gender and class conflicts represented in the novel. Nancy Anisfield provides a long catalog of novels on the Vietnam War that include a “final gut-wrenching climactic event” serving simultaneously to thrill and convince the reader of the permanent damage to the protagonist’s psyche (America Rediscovered 1990, 276). Paco’s Story, she argues, is quite different in that the physical and emotional devastation comes at the novel’s opening—with the many torn, burned corpses and the details of Paco’s long suffering among them— whereas the climax at the narrative’s end involves a far

1013

1014 PAINTED BIRD, THE

more passive and interior event: Paco reads entries in the diary of Cathy, the niece of his landlord, and learns that he will never be viewed as a member of the community. In this analysis, however, Anisfield overlooks two surprising juxtapositions in the novel’s closing chapters. The second-to-last chapter pairs Paco’s thoughts about Cathy—whom he hears making love with her boyfriend in the adjacent apartment—with memories of the gang rape and execution of a young Vietnamese woman that he witnessed firsthand, and the final chapter pairs Paco’s quiet break-in into Cathy’s apartment with detailed descriptions of his nightly forays into the Vietnamese jungle to set booby traps to kill the enemy. The thrilling and devastating experiences that characterize the final chapters of much of the fiction on the Vietnam war, as identified by Anisfield, are thus also present in the closing chapters of Heinemann’s novel. Indeed, at least one critic, Grant F. Scott, characterizes the rape of the Vietnamese woman as the “climactic moment” of the work (Scott, 69). Like Scott, Susan Jeffords focuses on the larger gender conflicts underlying the actions in the novel and convincingly demonstrates a number of parallels between Paco and the raped and executed Vietnamese woman. Jeffords goes on to find multiple meanings in the scars covering Paco’s body. For one, they serve as a metaphor for the war itself in their unreadability and purposelessness (209). Louis K. Greiff provides a gendered reading of a different sort, analyzing the functions of various names within Paco’s Story while developing the argument that the book expresses a need “to establish the brotherhood of all American men of that generation who need reconciliation after a second Civil War” (Greiff, 382). A second source of conflict—one based on class difference—is the focus of Milton J. Bates’s discussion of the novel. In a book-length study, Bates argues that the military involvement in Vietnam intensified specific cultural conflicts already raging in American society during the 1960s and that these conflicts (including ones structured around race, class, gender, and generation) shape both the form and content of Vietnam fiction. In his chapter “The Class War,” Bates describes various class divisions in 1960s America, including the disproportionately high numbers of working-class

youths sent overseas to fight the war, and then discusses how Paco’s Story, alongside Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night and Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” transforms such class conflicts into compelling tales. This range of critical approaches attests to the novel’s richness and enduring interest.

SOURCES Anisfield, Nancy. “After the Apocalypse: Narrative Movement in Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, 275–281. New York: Garland, 1990. Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1996. Durham, Marilyn. “Narrative Strategies in Recent Vietnam War Fiction.” In America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, 100–108. New York: Garland, 1990. Greiff, Louis K. “In the Name of the Brother: Larry Heinemann’s Paco’s Story and Male America,” Critique 41, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 381–389. Heinemann, Larry. Paco’s Story. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. Jeffords, Susan. “Tattoos, Scars, Diaries, and Writing Masculinity.” In The Vietnam War and American Culture, edited by John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg, 208–228. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Scott, Grant F. “Paco’s Story and the Ethics of Violence,” Critique 36, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 69–80. James Kelley

PAINTED BIRD, THE JERZY KOSINSKI (1965) Set for the most part in the eastern European countryside during World War II, The Painted Bird chronicles the largely nightmarish experiences of a young, darkcomplexioned boy. His parents have sent him out of the city in which they have lived so that he might escape the Nazi persecution. Because the boy is never identified as Jewish and could very well be a gypsy, because he is never named, and because even the setting is never specifically identified, his seemingly singular, darkly fantastical passage to adulthood becomes, on many levels, emblematic of a whole generation’s maturation under extraordinarily harsh conditions.

PAINTED BIRD, THE 1015

The title of the novel refers to an ordinary bird captured by one of the characters. He paints its feathers in bright colors and then rereleases it to join its flock. But the bird now looks so different that the others in the flock do not recognize it as one of their kind. At first they simply ignore it, then they try to drive it off, and finally they attack it savagely. The bird’s predicament becomes symbolic of the main character’s mounting desperation to be accepted and the perverse escalation in the peasants’ rejection of him. For the most part, the peasants among whom the boy lives are the antithesis of the kindly country folk that populate the bucolic pasturelands of genteel American fiction. These are more the hard-natured and often sadistic, the perpetually ruttish and often depraved, the superstitious and often madly deluded inbred brutes and freaks of Erskine CALDWELL’s backcountry. First, he lives with an eccentric old woman who is regarded as a witch. He subsequently becomes attached to a bovine young woman named Ludmilla who becomes the victim of a vicious sexual assault—ironically, because she is perceived as dangerously promiscuous. Then he becomes infatuated with an elfin farm girl named Ewka, whose father and brothers subject her to grotesque sexual abuse. Later, he is dangled from a meat hook above a farmer’s vicious dogs. And, at one point, he is hurled by a whole church congregation into the communal dung pit for a mishap that they regard as sacrilegious. This outrage leaves him mute. A turning point of sorts occurs when he has a hand in an S.S. officer’s falling into a dark cavity full of hungry rats. Eventually, he is befriended by soldiers of the liberating Soviet army, and he becomes particularly close to a renowned sniper who, in a sense, formalizes the lessons that the boy has learned about survival. After the war, he is placed in a loosely controlled orphanage in a city and essentially becomes a street kid. He and his friends not only become adept at negotiating the bombed out streets but engage in acts of revenge that are so disproportionate to the specific offenses against them that they amount to terrorism. The boy is saved from a criminal life only by his being reunited with his parents and by an accident that restores his speech and, more broadly, allows him a less sociopathic mode of self-expression and self-appraisal.

The Painted Bird has often been described as a picaresque with many mythic elements. Indeed, it seemed an extraordinary literary achievement for an author who had defected from Poland only a decade earlier. Its immediacy was partly explained by its being to some degree autobiographical. Moreover, it stood out from other novels about the Holocaust because it seemed to bridge the genres of novel and memoir, because it presented a child’s perspective on the horrors, and because it dealt with circumstances outside the ghettos and the concentration camps. In interviews, KOSINSKI quickly became a master at sketching just enough of his personal history to invite curiosity and then leaving much of the detail ambiguous. Eventually this predilection would come to seem, to some, more a deliberate misrepresentation than an eccentric artifice. When, late in his career, Kosinski was publicly accused of having hired out much of the writing of his novels, the effect was very damaging, for all the old insinuations about his distortions of the facts of his life resurfaced. For instance, although Kosinski had been sent into the countryside to escape the Nazis, his experiences were apparently much less grotesque and damaging than those endured by the boy in The Painted Bird. In the midst of all of this controversy over authorship and literary credibility, several right-wing Polish and Ukrainian groups even made scurrilous attacks against him, framed in anti-Semitic code words, for defaming the behavior and ignoring the sufferings of the peasantry of those countries during the war.

SOURCES Carpenter, John. “Jerzy Kosinski and The Painted Bird,” Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European Culture 11 (1992): 139–152. Corngold, Stanley. “Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird: Language Lost and Regained,” Mosaic 6, no. 4 (1973): 153–167. Granofsky, Ronald. “Circle and Line: Modern and Postmodern Constructs of the Self in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” Essays in Literature 18 (Fall 1991): 254–268. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Survival in and of The Painted Bird: The Career of Jerzy Kozinski,” Georgia Review 35 (Spring 1981): 142–157. Jarniewicz, Jerzy. “The Terror of Normality in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” Polish Review 49, no. 1 (2004): 641–652.

1016 PALAHNIUK, CHUCK

Lale, Meta, and John S. Williams. “The Narrator of The Painted Bird: A Case Study,” Renascence 24 (1972): 198–206. McGinnis, Wayne D. “Transcendence and Primitive Sympathy in Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” Studies in the Humanities 8, no. 1 (1980): 22–27. Meszaros, Patricia K. “Hero with a Thousand Faces, Child with No Name: Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” College Literature 6 (1979): 232–244. Piwinski, David J. “Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” Explicator 40, no. 1 (Fall 1981): 62–63. Richter, David H. “The Three Denouements of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird,” Contemporary Literature 15 (1974): 370–385. Sloan, James Park. “Kosinski’s War.” In Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, 236–246. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Spendal, R. J. “The Structure of The Painted Bird,” Journal of Narrative Technique 6 (1976): 132–136. Weales, Gerald. “Jerzy Kosinski: The Painted Bird and Other Disguises.” In Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupack, 142–152. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Martin Kich

PALAHNIUK, CHUCK (1962– ) Chuck Palahniuk’s experience is that of a man who liberated himself by writing. After graduating from the University of Oregon with a degree in journalism, he began a short-lived career as a news reporter in Portland. Discouraged, he quit and became a diesel mechanic at a Freightliner plant. He hated his job. At night, he went out drinking and occasionally got into bar brawls. He broke into open houses with his friends, raiding medicine cabinets for prescription drugs. He lived in the most extreme state of misery and deprivation until a self-help seminar prompted him to write. Palahniuk would frantically jot down words and phrases on notes and scraps of paper at work and at the gym. Later, he synthesized them while listening to the music of Nine Inch Nails. He attended writing workshops led by his mentor Tom Spanbauer, from whom he learned the techniques of minimalism. His initial attempts at publication failed: His second novel, Invisible Monsters, was rejected by publishers for its allegedly “unpleasant” subject matter. His first pub-

lished novel, the revolutionary FIGHT CLUB (1996), was written as an affront to those who refused to publish Invisible Monsters and as a diatribe against a culture that denied him and others recognition. It was received with critical acclaim. Fight Club won the Oregon Book Award and the Pacific Northwestern Booksellers’ Award. In the past five years, he has published four novels: Survivor (1999), a revised version of Invisible Monsters (1999), Choke (2001), and Lullaby (2002), as well as numerous articles. His work has attracted the attention of musicians such as Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson, as well as the filmmaking industry. The first cinematic interpretation of his work, David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), ensured Palahniuk a lasting cult following. Part of his work’s appeal for an ever-widening young readership lies in its orientation around the question of freedom. Palahniuk’s antiheroes revolt against mainstream culture. In Fight Club, violence appears as a means through which members of a consumer culture are able to free themselves from their mechanical and meaningless lives. An underground boxing network, the fight club seems to break with the capitalist world and yet reveals itself as its reverse image. In the extraordinary Invisible Monsters, a fashion model is grotesquely disfigured by a shotgun blast. She moves from absolute visibility to absolute invisibility. Now an outsider, she becomes the enemy of the culture that refuses to acknowledge her. Her external position allows her to transform herself entirely. She teams up with Brandy Alexander, a pre-operation transsexual, who teaches her that the past is essentially linguistic. For the one who exists beyond all fields of visibility, she learns, anything is possible. Sexual compulsiveness affords Victor Mancini, the narrator of the wonderfully strange and fascinating Choke, a kind of transcendence from the colonial amusement-park world that he inhabits—a world that is frozen in an immemorial past. Through their rebellion, Chuck Palahniuk’s protagonists seek to provoke God’s indifference. They prefer the chaos of a broken world to a culture that deprives them of freedom.

NOVELS Choke. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Diary. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

PALE FIRE 1017

Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Invisible Monsters. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Lullaby. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Survivor. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

SOURCES Gaughan, Thomas. Review of Fight Club, Booklist (July 1996): 1,804. Kaufmann, Stanley. Review of Fight Club, New Republic, November 8, 1999, p. 64. Maslin, Janet. “An Immature Con Man with a Mom Problem,” New York Times, 24 May 2001. Needham, George. Review of Invisible Monsters, Booklist (September 15, 1999): 233. Ott, Bill. Review of Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Booklist (July 2003): 1,858. Patterson, Troy. “Hard to Swallow: In Choke, the Latest from the Author of Fight Club. Chuck Palahniuk’s Hip Nihilism Comes to Naught,” Entertainment Weekly, 25 May 2001, p. 72. Unsigned. “Chuck Palahniuk: Road Trips and Romance,” PW Interview, Publishers Weekly 249, no. 35 (September 2, 2002): 49.

OTHER Donadoni, Serena. “Going for Broke.” Orlando Weekly (October 15, 1999). Available online. URL: http://www. orlandoweekly.com/film/story.asp?id=1512. Accessed January 11, 2006. Jeffries, Stuart. “Bruise Control.” Guardian Unlimited, (May 12, 2000). Available online. URL: http://books.guardian. co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,219740,00. html. Accessed January 11, 2006. Tomlinson, Sarah. “Is It Fistfighting, or Just Multitasking?” Salon.com. (October 13, 1999). Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/int/1999/10/13/ palahniuk. Accessed January 11, 2006. Joseph Suglia

PALE FIRE VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1962) Pale Fire, Vladimir NABOKOV’s 14th novel (his fifth in English), is unlike almost any other novel written before or since. A reader, not knowing this was a novel, might at first mistake it for an annotated volume of poetry: Pale Fire presents itself as a previously unpublished, 999-line poem by the murdered poet John Shade, along with commentary by his sometime colleague, Charles Kinbote. There is also a scholarly

introduction and a self-referential index to the “study.” However, Shade and his family, Kinbote and his homeland of Zembla, and “Pale Fire” (the poem) are all really the creations of Nabokov. The foreword tells how the poem came into Kinbote’s hands in the first place. Shade was murdered in his home, having lived in the same neighborhood as Kinbote. Throughout the foreword, Kinbote as narrator assures us that Shade and his wife, Sybil, liked and trusted him, though, he concedes, others had a difficult time understanding their relationship. What becomes clear in Kinbote’s commentary on “Pale Fire,” however, is that John and Sybil Shade could barely stand Charles Kinbote, but Kinbote is blissfully unaware of this. Immediately following the foreword is the poem itself. “Pale Fire” is in iambic pentameter, separated into four cantos. Interestingly, the final line of the poem—“Trundling an empty barrow up the lane”— rhymes with the first—“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain”—suggesting a circular nature to the poem. The content of the poem is primarily autobiographical, dealing with the difficult life and premature death of John and Sybil Shade’s daughter, Hazel. Hazel is never named directly in “Pale Fire” itself; instead the reference to her is “clarified” by Kinbote in the commentary section. It is in this commentary section, as throughout Nabokov’s LOLITA (1955), that the success of the novel depends on the unreliability of the narrator. While two narratives emerge in the commentary section—one telling the story of Hazel Shade and one regarding the political situation in Zembla—neither can be counted on as true because, as becomes more and more clear as the reader makes his or her way through Pale Fire, the narrator is either insane or not who he originally presents himself as. So, as a result, we can never be sure whether the tragic story of Hazel that Kinbote relates in the commentary was really intended by John Shade to tell this story. Once the reader reaches the commentary section, it becomes immediately apparent that Kinbote is no traditional critic. From the beginning, he inserts personal recollections of his relationship with the Shades, as well as reminiscences of his life in his native land of

1018 PARADISE

Zembla. For instance, while commenting on the first four lines of “Pale Fire,” Kinbote inserts a thought beginning, “When, in the last year of Shade’s life I had the fortune of being [Shade’s] neighbor . . .” (45). Clearly, despite the continuing importance of New Criticism in literary circles in 1962, Kinbote is not a critic afraid to insert his own point of view. According to critic William Monroe, Nabokov is characterizing “the reductionist tendency of theory in the character of Charles Kinbote” (Monroe, 157). Similarly, on the second page of the commentary, the first of several mentions is made of King Charles II the Beloved of Zembla, who, we are told, was born in 1915 and reigned as the last king of Zembla from 1936 to 1958. While, on the one hand, it might be considered natural for a critic comfortable writing in the first person to insert aspects of his or her own ethnic or national background into his or her work, the obsession of Kinbote with the fate of Charles II continues throughout the commentary section, with more and more details of how Charles’s reign was brought to an end, shoving to the margins any serious explication of Shade’s poem. Eventually, Kinbote drops all pretenses, presenting himself as the exiled king in the flesh and bemoaning the fact that the bullet intended for his own assassination struck his “friend” Shade. Thus the commentary section concludes, with the index referring the reader not just to themes raised in the poem but also in the commentary section and having nothing to do with Hazel Shade’s premature death or the Shade family in general. The index contains several spurious entries, including a reference to “word golf,” with “see also” notes for “lass,” “mass,” and “male,” all of which point back to the initial entry. Critics remain perplexed as to the “solution” to Pale Fire. “As early as 1966–67, a number of critics began to raise with some insistance [sic] the question of who invented whom in Pale Fire,” writes Maurice Couturier. Is Kinbote crazy, or is he really the exiled king? Or is Shade the real narrator hiding behind his psychotic creation, Charles Kinbote? Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd writes that Kinbote “is actually Vseslav Botkin, a Russian émigré, whose paranoia is edging him towards suicide” (Boyd, “Shade”). As with Humbert, we are left

with no definitive answers, despite the fictional front and back matter offered by Nabokov.

SOURCES Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Connolly, Julian W., ed. Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Monroe, William. Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putman, 1962. Rampton, David. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

OTHER Boyd, Brian. “Shade and Shape in Pale Fire,” Nabokov Studies 4 (1997): 173–224. Available online. URL: http://www. libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/boydpf1.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005. Couturier, Maurice. “ ‘Which Is to Be Master’ in Pale Fire,” Zembla. (January 29, 2005). Available online. URL: http:// www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/coutpf.htm. Accessed September 24, 2005. Andrew Mathis

PARADISE TONI MORRISON (1998) Her first novel since being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993, Paradise continues MORRISON’s long-standing project of memorializing (or remembering) details of AfricanAmerican history that have been ignored by mainstream accounts of what it is to be American. This time, though, Morrison is also carefully interrogating that project. Not only does Paradise seek to fill in gaps in the American “grand narrative” of history, but it scrutinizes the process of re-creating “grand narratives” in its depiction of the town of Ruby. In this way, the novel continues the meditation on reading and readership that characterizes BELOVED and JAZZ; at issue as we read is how we can accurately and ethically “pass on” or “re-make” the story. Inspired by an advertisement for an African-American town that Morrison came across in a late 19th-century newspaper that read, “Come prepared or not at all,” Paradise takes root in a specific and largely unrecorded historical situation, the westward migration of former slaves into Oklahoma territory following the Civil War.

PARETSKY, SARA 1019

Ruby is an all-black town that has managed to survive as such into the 1970s, when the novel is largely set; however, the larger world “Out There” (and myriad unspeakable problems within) seems to be threatening the hegemony of the town’s ruling families. These angry, inflexible men find exquisitely blamable victims in a group of wayward women residing in a house, known as “the Convent,” at the edge of town. The violence of the eventual clash of the two groups and the town’s irrational and uncompromising drive to maintain its “integrity” in the face of a world spinning out of control (i.e., the 1960s) are summed up and foreshadowed in the first line of the novel: “They shot the white girl first” (1). Racial categorizations are both crucial and ignored in Paradise, since we begin with the murder of a “white girl” but are not told which of the convent women is actually white. This narrative strategy (which Morrison earlier experimented with in her short story “Recitatif”) contrasts with the skin-conscious ideology of Ruby, which built itself up and maintained itself away from the larger white society and from the lighter-skinned blacks who once rejected Ruby’s forefathers for the darkness of their skin. The town has created its own semireligious mythology, which begins in that moment of rejection—“The Disallowing”—and which centers itself on certain individuals and objects, such as the original leader of the ex-slaves, Zechariah Morgan, and the community oven. The irony of this creation myth is that in the violence with which it is enforced as the official history of the people, the men of Ruby have created an exclusive community just as brutally intolerant as the white and “light” ones that originally “disallowed” their grandfathers. This strict patriarchy is contrasted with the loose atmosphere of “the Convent,” which is actually an embezzler’s lurid mansion turned Catholic “asylum” for Native American girls and mostly abandoned by the 1970s, although the harried women who come across it do seek “asylum” with Consolata, the last remaining occupant. At a glance, the Convent is a female-centered utopia, but actually the women there are as lost and damaged and in some cases as morally bankrupt as the men of Ruby. It is not until Consolata shakes off her alcoholic haze and forces the women to

come to terms with themselves and each other that the Convent begins to represent a real “haven” or utopia. It is at this point, however, that the men of Ruby gun down the women in cold blood. In the final section of Paradise, each of the murdered women reappears as a ghost and a warrior. Their resurrection corresponds to Connie’s ability to “step in” or, as she prefers to call it, “see in” to a dying person and bring him or her back to life. This “insight” is, as Philip Page describes it, an act “of extreme self-projection, of ultimate empathy, of total transfer of the self to the other” (641). It is also a model for reading. When the Convent women reappear, our “insight” into them helps give them new life. Paradise, then, explores racism, exclusion, notions of purity, the need for home, and the possibilities and dangers of rewriting history, but it places most of its hope for ethical action, for understanding, and even for rebirth in the act of reading.

SOURCES Krumholz, Linda J. “Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 36, no. 1 (2002): 21–34. Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Morrison, Toni. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998. ———. “Recitatif.” In Confirmation, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka, 243–261. New York: Morrow, 1983. Page, Philip. “Furrowing All the Brows: Interpretation and the Transcendent in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 35, no. 4 (2001): 637–648. Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Woman Writers and the Crisis of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Monika Hogan

PARETSKY, SARA (1947– ) One of the most prominent detective fiction writers to emerge in the late 20th century, Sara Paretsky is the creator of the much admired sleuth V. I. (Victoria Iphigenia) Warshawski. Paretsky (and Warshawski) redefined the traditional private-eye novel as honed by Raymond CHANDLER and Dashiell HAMMETT. Unlike the male-created Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, the street-smart loner-orphan Warshawski has an extensive community

1020 PARIS TROUT

of friends and supporters, and even shows her emotions on occasion. Moreover, as critic Jane S. Bakerman notes, Warshawski regularly “measures both her professional and personal humanity against her surviving relatives, the memories of her parents, and her constructed family of friends and lovers” (Bakerman, 135). In Paretsky’s carefully plotted novels, her realistic and complicated characters travel the mean streets of Chicago. Sara Paretsky was born on June 8, 1947, in Ames, Iowa, to David Paretsky, a scientist, and Mary Edwards, a librarian. She was educated at the University of Kansas, earning a bachelor’s degree (1967), and at the University of Chicago (M.A. and Ph.d., 1977). In Paretsky’s first novel, Indemnity Only (1982), the halfPolish, half-Italian Warshawski searches for a missing University of Chicago woman; she uncovers a corpse, a corrupt union, and an insurance scam. Deadlock (1984) is about corruption and crime in the insurance and shipping business, and Killing Orders (1985) reveals a criminal connection between the Catholic Church and a long-ago promise between Warshawski and her mother. Paretsky’s pattern is to present a simple mystery that unfolds to reveal corruption in supposedly respectable institutions. For instance, Bitter Medicine (1987) exposes medical malfeasance in a large hospital, Blood Shot (1988) deals with a cover-up of environmental hazards in the chemical industry, and Burn Marks (1990) exposes the collusion of police and corporate executives that has ramifications for the homeless. Social concern are evident too in Guardian Angel (1992), involving the persecution of an old woman; Tunnel Vision (1994) focuses on social services and a homeless family; and Hard Time (1999) refers to Warshawski’s own jail time, which grew from her confrontation with a media executive while she was investigating the murder of a homeless immigrant woman. One of the founders of Sisters in Crime, Paretsky served as the organization’s first president in 1986. In 1991 Indemnity Only was adapted for a feature-length film retitled V. I. Warshawski and starring Kathleen Turner as the private eye. In 1987 Ms. Magazine named Paretsky one of the Women of the Year; among Paretsky’s numerous honors and awards is the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1988 for her novel Blood Shot.

NOVELS Bitter Medicine. New York: Morrow, 1987. Blacklist. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2003. Blood Shot. New York: Delacorte, 1988. Published in England as Toxic Shock. London: Gollancz, 1988. Burn Marks. New York: Delacorte, 1990. Deadlock. New York: Dial, 1984. Fire Sale. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005. Ghost Country. New York: Delacorte, 1998. Guardian Angel. New York: Delacorte, 1992. Hard Time. New York: Delacorte Press, 1999. Indemnity Only. New York: Dial, 1982. Killing Orders. New York: Morrow, 1985. Total Recall. New York: Delacorte, 2001. Tunnel Vision. New York: Delacorte, 1994. V. I. Times Two: Photo Finish and Publicity Stunts. Chicago, Ill.: Women and Children First, 2002.

SOURCES Bakerman, Jane, ed. And Then There Were Nine: More Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1985. St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. 4th ed. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1996.

OTHER First Person: Book Page. Available online. URL: http://www. bookpage.com/9806bp/sara_paretsky.html. Accessed September 24, 2005. Sara Paretsky. Available online. URL: http://www.saraparetsky. com. Accessed September 24, 2005. Valencia West “Sara Paretsky.” Available online. URL: http:// valencia.cc.fl.us/lrcwest/Author_Pathfinders/paretsky.hmtl. Accessed September 24, 2005.

PARIS TROUT PETER DEXTER (1988) Published in 1988, Paris Trout is the third and most celebrated of journalist Peter DEXTER’s five novels. Described as a “masterpiece” by one reviewer, it won the National Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Surprisingly, given its warm critical reception and best-seller status, scholars have for the most part ignored the novel, which was made into a movie in 1991. Set in the small town of Cotton Point, Georgia, in the 1950s, events develop around the title character, a psychotic 59-year-old white merchant who acts as a loan shark to local African Americans. The chronolog-

PARIS TROUT 1021

ically ordered third-person narrative begins with Trout’s murder of a poor and innocent young black girl and proceeds through his arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, appeal, escape, and return. Chapters move back and forth among the main characters, who include Trout, his wife Hanna, his lawyer Seagraves, and another attorney, Bonner, who represents Hanna in her divorce case. Critics have praised the characterization in the book; for instance, one said that the characters are “stroked boldly” with “voices that ring true,” and another that they are portrayed with “marvelous sharpness.” Some commentators have likened Dexter to William FAULKNER and Flannery O’CONNOR and have called Paris Trout “a southern novel” that ranks with “the best fiction of the South.” Dexter, however, has insisted that the novel “could have happened anywhere,” since it examines and condemns phenomena that are not unique to a particular region: violent and exploitative racism, classism, and sexism. Read with an eye on race, class, and gender, Paris Trout reveals crimes of commission and omission. The very name of Cotton Point evokes a color and class line that is disturbingly at play in the novel. This is clearly seen when Trout justifies killing the girl on a race- and class-based “natural order of things” (77). Initially, the town’s white community tacitly supports this rationale, as it looks the other way. Race- and class-driven homicide is not Trout’s only offense. He abuses his younger wife emotionally, psychologically, physically, and sexually after first stealing her life savings and putting her to work in his store. Here, too, the community accommodates. When she reports her abuse, Hanna is dismissed by the town’s distinguished doctor and told that this kind of thing “is common enough even in the best households” (121). With Trout as blight, the race, class, and gender reading resolves through his death by suicide. Though Seagraves notes that it is not “easy to put him behind you,” at the end the local newspaper, known as “The Conscience of the South,” indicts Trout, who is buried in an isolated and “poisoned” site where the “Monument to the Unknown Confederate Dead . . . cast a shadow across his grave” (303). While the novel should be read socio-culturally, an equally important if not more interesting approach

calls for a psychological or psychoanalytic reading, in particular of Trout and his disintegration. Although one critic objected that Dexter erred in making Trout “an out-and-out psychotic,” the reader is challenged to ascertain the origins and dimensions of Trout’s madness, and here the text is richly suggestive. Trout is brutal, remorseless, possessive, and obsessive, and his mother seems to be at the core of his pathology. Trout wed late in life, after his mother was muted by a stroke, and the town speculation was that he had married “to replace his mother.” This is implied in an early family photo in which young Paris sits in front of his mother, who touches him in “some secret connection,” as his father stands to the side (119). While on trial, Trout sketches scenes of animals shooting and killing each other, and also a family tree, at the top of which is his mother’s name and a spider with a face. On a recess, Trout walks to the nursing home and stares silently at his naked mother as she is being bathed. Then, back in court, he states that “we were all somebody’s baby once,” and later that “we are all somebody’s baby” (179). Hanna is at first outspoken but after two years of marriage is silenced by Trout’s threats and attacks, which include a degrading rape. Initially drawn to his “dark side,” she acknowledges that Trout “had stolen her direction” and “isolated her.” When she realizes that Trout fears he is losing control of her, Hanna drives him from the house, where there are “spider webs in the corners” (50), by playing off his paranoia. Out of the house, Trout ironically moves into the honeymoon suite of the local hotel as his deterioration accelerates and his rage intensifies. After killing Bonner and Seagraves, Trout shoots his mother in the head, wets himself with urine, and kills himself with a gun in his mouth. Staying with an established motif, the narrator tells us that “at the corner of the ceiling, bits of . . . [Trout] hung in a spider web” (297). Unlike the socio-cultural approach, a psychological or psychoanalytic reading does not resolve the many issues of the novel, and the reader is left to ponder Trout’s psychosis and the place of his mother in it. Did he love her, and was he trying to release them both from frustration over the stroke? Did he hate her, and had she sexually abused him as a child? Hanna is the

1022 PASSING

only main character who is alive at the end, and she provides no clues.

SOURCES Axthelm, Pete. Review of Paris Trout by Pete Dexter, Newsweek, 26 September 1988, p. 75. Dexter, Pete. Paris Trout. New York: Penguin Books, 1989. Predmore, Richard. “Ownership in Dexter’s Paris Trout,” The Southern Quarterly 33, nos. 2–3 (1995): 147–150. Towers, Robert. Review of Paris Trout by Pete Dexter, New York Review of Books, 16 February 1989, pp. 18–20. Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. New York: Methuen, 1984. Geoffrey C. Middlebrook

PASSING NELLA LARSEN (1929) Following her achievement with her first two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing, Nella LARSEN was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, becoming the first female African-American writer to receive this prize and establishing herself as the most promising writer of the Harlem Renaissance. Passing depicts the reencounter of two AfricanAmerican girlhood friends, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who have not seen each other for 12 years. The entanglement of the two women’s lives is unraveled by a third-person narrator, mostly through the eyes of Irene Redfield. The novel opens in the Redfields’ New York home, where Irene receives a letter from Clare, to which she is disinclined to reply due to the recollection of their chance meeting in Chicago. Two years before the arrival of the letter, the two women had met on a hot day on the rooftop of the luxurious Drayton Hotel in Chicago, their native city, where they were both visiting, and reminisced about the past and related their present lives to each other. After the death of her father in a parlor fight, Clare was brought up by her father’s aunts, who suppressed her African-American past. Daring, willful, selfish, and pretty, Clare secures her happiness as the wife of a wealthy businessman, John Bellew, and mother of a 10-year-old girl, Margery, as long as she can conceal her racial identity from her bigoted husband, who deeply dislikes African Americans. Unlike Clare, Irene takes advantage of her fair skin only sometimes, for the sake of entering hotels or restaurants, and adheres to

stability, permanence, and her African-American identity. Happy and secure in her marriage with an AfricanAmerican physician, Brian Redfield, and two sons, Brian Jr. and Theodore, Irene is also an active member of Harlem’s uplift affairs. Unable to resist Clare’s insistent invitation, Irene visits her on the next day at her Chicago hotel, where she finds a common acquaintance, Gertrude Martin, whose husband, unlike Clare’s, is aware of her racial identity. Irene’s feeling of uneasiness in the company of the two passing women turns into perturbation when John Bellew makes racist comments, unaware that he is in the presence of three African-American women. Irene’s loyalty to her own race prevents her from betraying Clare but not from severing her ties with her. Two years later, still vividly feeling the bitterness of this experience, Irene leaves Clare’s letter unanswered. Nevertheless, unpredictable Clare appears uninvited at the Redfields’ residence and, whenever her husband leaves town on business, maintains a regular presence at the Redfields’ parties and follows them to their Harlem outings on the pretext that she feels nostalgic for the African-American community. The opposition between the characters of conservative Irene and adventurous Clare contrasts with the affinity between those of Clare and Brian, as Irene’s conformity to the stability of her life in Harlem remains unchanged despite Brian’s desire to immigrate to Brazil. Irene’s anxiety over Clare’s recklessness in risking the safety of her meticulously constructed identity and marriage and the future of her daughter to her indulgence in amusement in Harlem, and her jealousy for the attraction between her husband and Clare bring her to the brink of wishing Clare dead. On a cold December day in New York, with her African-American friend Felise Freeland, Irene runs into John Bellew, who notices the racial link between the two women. This meeting prompts John Bellew to seek the truth about his wife’s identity, which he pursues at an African-American soirée in the sixth-floor apartment of the Freelands, where Clare is enjoying the evening in the company of the Redfields. Frightened by the raging Bellew’s bolt into the apartment, Irene rushes to the side of Clare, who is calmly standing by the open window. At the novel’s end, Clare tum-

PASTURES OF HEAVEN, THE 1023

bles to her death from the sixth-floor window. The unreliable narrator of the novel leaves it to the reader to decide whether, having lost everything, Claire has committed suicide or whether she is pushed down by her jealous friend Irene. Considered one of the finest novels dealing with the themes of “racial passing” and the “tragic mulatto” of late 19th- and early 20th-century fiction, Passing also indicates the division within African-American society by social class. Without the middle-class veneer that Clare has acquired through her marriage to John Bellew, she would not be accepted to Harlem’s bourgeoisie, which is represented by the Redfields, who consider themselves socially above their servants. The novel explores the sexual aspect of passing. A dormant homoerotic desire exists beneath the ostensible irritation Irene feels toward Clare and the friendly affection Clare displays for Irene. Although Clare’s racial passing and daring attitude to life seem to create Irene’s repulsion toward her friend, Irene is subconsciously attracted to Clare’s risk-taking tendency that she herself lacks. Clare’s outward longing for the African-American community veils an inward lesbian yearning for her friend. The similarity between the two women’s personal sacrifices to preserve their marriages underlines women’s plight in the 1920s, including the novel’s journey into social as well as psychological realism. For both Clare and Irene, economic survival means dependence on a husband. Irene perceives that Clare’s passing is a price paid for safety and security, which she highly values and also maintains through marriage. This aspect of the novel surpasses the issues of the limits of African-American women and addresses the question of limitations to the freedom of all women.

SOURCES Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1996. Goldsmith, Meredith. “Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Bodily Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen.” In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, 97–120. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, edited by Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Miller, Erica M. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Wells-Barnett, Grimké, and Larsen. New York: Garland, 2000. Sullivan, Neil. “Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Fading Subject,” African American Review 32, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 373–387. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Ferdâ Asya

PASTURES OF HEAVEN, THE JOHN STEINBECK (1932) STEINBECK’s biographer Jackson J. Benson notes that during the first two decades of the century, American and European authors were being influenced by a great deal of experimental fiction. Citing such works as Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and The Dubliners (1916) as representative of the experimentation that was taking place, Benson suggests that during the 1920s and 1930s, Steinbeck was intrigued by innovation and that the construction of The Pastures of Heaven, his second novel, may have been influenced by these newly rebellious structures in fiction as well as by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, published in 1919 and considered the first attempt in America at what was later labeled the short story cycle (Benson, 201). As far as inspiration for the volume, most critics agree that the central idea for Pastures was supplied by Steinbeck’s friend and fellow writer, Beth Ingels, who had been raised in Corral de Tierra, a little valley in the hills west of Salinas. Originally, Ingels envisioned a book about the strange people whose fates influenced the emotional development of a young girl and the interaction of people in a small confined valley (Benson, 208). However, when she repeated her ideas within the intellectual circle of friends fostered by John and Carol Steinbeck, it was inevitable that the more

1024 PASTURES OF HEAVEN, THE

famous author would pick up on a potential story line and shape it to fit his own ends. Yet the concept was hardly Ingels’s exclusive property, and the resulting novel certainly includes many traits that indicate Steinbeck’s personal thematic emphases rather than those of Ingels. In fact, already in 1930, Steinbeck wrote his friend Ted Miller about his desire to fashion together a series of short stories in Decameron fashion (Benson, 209). Thus, by combining his interest in experimental form and in Jungian actions motivated by the unconscious, along with the biblical myth of fallen Eden and separated generations, the essential qualities that comprise The Pastures of Heaven were generated. According to Benson, another letter to Miller in May 1931 specifies Steinbeck’s intention to interrelate the stories with each other and to draw a parallel to a Miltonian Lucifer (Benson, 211). Jay Parini in his 1994 biography suggests a further tie to Milton’s Paradise Lost: “the fact that evil becomes a necessary agent of righteousness” (Parini, 130). He also calls attention to the influence of Steinbeck’s reading of John Elof Boodin (Cosmic Evolution) and William Emerson Ritter (The Natural History of Our Conduct), both of whom theorized that evil was not entirely negative and that at times it even suggested or motivated creative possibilities. Both biographers also agree that initially the plan called for five to six stories that would then be combined with Steinbeck’s in-progress novella, Dissonant Symphony. Eventually, however, Pastures was engendered as a separate work and gained a life of its own. Pastures, like Steinbeck’s earlier To a God Unkown, can be said to emphasize a mechanistic world in which there is no ultimate cause or design (Benson, 245). In fact, Benson suggests that Pastures provides one of the first indications that Steinbeck was attracted to “isthinking” or non-teleological philosophy, a philosophical stance that grew even more significant during his association and long friendship with Ed Ricketts in the later 1930s. “Is thinking,” the belief that one should not ask why or look for causes, was motivated by Steinbeck’s desire to be totally objective, to merely see what things were and how they worked, not to “show exactly why people act as they do, but to show the psychological steps that precede and clear the way for an

act” (Benson, 202). Another significant influence for the author at the time of the composition of The Pastures of Heaven were the writings of Carl Jung. In Jung’s terminology, the shadow world of the residents of La Pastura may be far more responsible for their situations than the family they choose to blame. Although The Pastures of Heaven sold poorly in its first printing, it was initially well received by critics, who noted its author’s “development in creating greater social and psychological realism in his characters” (Lisca, 47). Recent assessments have tended to stress the book’s reliance on biblical mythology and its portrait of a type of “fallen” Eden. John Timmerman, for example, states that “the Eden of Pastures measures what the inhabitants could be but more decisively what they are, mortals discovering the fallenness of human nature, not sons of God” (Timmerman, 56). Timmerman goes on to draw three distinct parallels to the biblical Eden myth in the story cycle, pointing out that Pastures displays not only disorientation from God that leads to enmity with neighbors but also an initiation into human knowledge of evil as a personal experience and an exile from the rich beneficence of Eden to a lifetime of toil and troubles (Timmerman, 56). Similarly, Louis Owens recalls the words of Satan in Paradise Lost in his analysis, citing the lines “the mind itself is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n” (Owens, 75). But while giving credit to biblical allusion and acknowledging earlier critics in the process, Owens shifts his personal assessment to private human illusions, stressing their connection to the greater illusion of an American Eden that can somehow be regained (Owens, 88). Owens implies that Steinbeck’s intent is to draw the reader into a deceptive trap of blaming the Munroes for the decay in Pastures rather than acknowledging that every dilemma faced there is attributable to human nature rather than to an individual scapegoat. Perhaps the closest reading of the interconnectedness of the stories is provided in Fontenrose’s Steinbeck’s Unhappy Valley. In this insightful study, Fontenrose outlines the complexity of this outwardly simple book and explains how Steinbeck manipulates the effect of time and the importance of the locale (houses, gardens, and farms) in order to create gener-

PATCHETT, ANN 1025

ous parallel and antithetical elements that exist between each story and its precursors as well as its followers. Further chapters describe how the Battle farm impacts each of the sections or episodes and how religious and mythological referents also are incorporated, many times in a reversal of their original meaning. Finally, in a more recent and as yet unpublished analysis of Pastures, Kevin Hearle places Pastures as a novel of social protest in which Steinbeck carefully dissects and dismantles the stereotypical American dreams of a pastoral idyllic setting where “all is well.” Even after 70 years, the fields of Steinbeck’s second novel can still be tilled effectively and produce new food for thought.

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984. French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. ———. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. Lisca, Peter. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1978. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Timmerman, John. John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Michael J. Meyer

PATCHETT, ANN (1963– )

Ann Patchett is the author of four novels, the third of which, Bel Canto (2001), won the PEN/Faulkner Award and England’s Orange Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has been praised especially for her realistic and widely diver-

gent characters. In the opinion of writer and reviewer Laurie Parker, Patchett’s books seem almost like “oral histories recorded by a kind and forgiving transcriber,” as Patchett creates “characters of such varied races and backgrounds, making each one’s voice and life so utterly believable” (Miller). Ann Patchett was born on December 2, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, to Frank Patchett, a police captain, and Jeanne Ray Wilkinson Patchett, a nurse. Patchett was educated at Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1984, and the University of Iowa, where she earned her master of fine arts degree in 1987. Her first novel, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), opens as Martha Rose, 23 years old and pregnant, flees her husband, Thomas, in California and heads east to Kentucky and St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers. Once at St. Elizabeth’s, however, she not only realizes she cannot give up the baby but meets a man named Son who wants to marry her and adopt the child, Cecilia. The reappearance of Thomas, however, changes the lives of both Rose and Cecilia. Taft (1994) tells a tale about fathers: Black ex-jazz musician John Nickel is devastated when his only son is taken from him. Continuing to run his Memphis bar, Muddy’s, he becomes involved in the lives of Fay, a white waitress who works for him, and her brother Carl. Nickel becomes obsessed with reconstructing the life of their father, Taft, and discovering truths about unconventional love and family. In The Magician’s Assistant (1997), Patchett creates an intriguing relationship among Sabine, architect and assistant to the magician Parsifal, a gay man in love with Phan, a quiet Vietnamese who designs computer software. When Phan dies of AIDS, Parsifal discovers that he, too, is afflicted with the disease, and marries Sabine—who has always been in love with him—to ensure that she will inherit his assets. After Parsifal’s death, and a surprising disclosure, Sabine embarks on a love affair of her own. Bel Canto (2001), as Ann Patchett has discussed with several interviewers, is based on the 1996 takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, by Tupac Amaru terrorists. Although in reality, all women and children were released, Patchett’s novel creates famous American opera singer Roxane Coss, the only woman who remains a hostage with the 57 men. She sings arias twice a day during the long ordeal that

1026 PEACOCK, NANCY

ultimately celebrate the triumph of human goodness in the face of evil. Patchett wrote the screenplay for The Patron Saint of Liars that aired as a television film for CBS in 1998. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.

NOVELS Bel Canto. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. The Magician’s Assistant. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. The Patron Saint of Liars. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

SOURCES Maslin, Janet. “Uninvited Guests Wearing You Down? Listen to Opera.” New York Times, 31 May 2001, p. E–7. Review of Bel Canto. Publisher’s Weekly (April, 16, 2001): 42.

OTHER Ann Patchett. Available online. URL: http://www.annpatchett.com. Accessed September 24, 2005. Bookreporter. “On the Road with Ann Patchett, Week 1.” Available online. URL: http://www.bookreporter.com.lectures/ road/patchett-1asp. Accessed September 24, 2005. Clark, Alex. “Danger Arias,” Guardian Unlimited (July 14, 2001). Available online. URL: http://books.guardian.co.uk. reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,521254,00.html. Accessed September 24, 2005. “A Conversation with Ann Patchett, Author of Bel Canto.” BookBrowse.com. Available online. URL: http://www. bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_ number=645. Accessed September 24, 2005. Miller, Laura. “Bel Canto by Ann Patchett,” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://dir.salon.com/books/review/2001/ 06/22/patchett/index.html?sid=1036831. Accessed September 24, 2005. Parker, Laurie. Review of The Magician’s Assistant. Bookpage.com. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage. com/9710bp/fiction/themagiciansassistant.html. Accessed on September 24, 2005. Patchett, Ann. “Ann Patchett: Turning a News Story into a Novel.” Bookpage.com Available online. URL: http://www. bookpage.com/0106bp/ann_patchett.html. Accessed September 24, 2005. Valby, Karen. Review of Bel Canto, Entertainment Weekly (June 8, 2001). Available online by subscription. URL: http:// www.ew.com/ew/article/review/book/0,6115,256647_5_ 0_,00html. Accessed September 24, 2005. Welch, Dave. “Ann Patchett Hits All the Right Notes.” Powells.com. Available online. URL: http://www.powells.com. authors/patchett.html. Accessed September 24, 2005.

PEACOCK, NANCY (1954– ) Nancy Peacock is the author of Life without Water (1996), which has been praised for its realistic rendering of the hippie era of the 1960s, and Home Across the Road (1999), lauded for its poetically rendered stories of both a black family and a white family from 1855 until 1971. Nancy Peacock was born on June 19, 1954, in Wilmington, Delaware, to Alton Edward Peacock, a chemist, and Margaret Weston Peacock, a social worker. Her parents divorced and Peacock lived with her mother in Alabama and in North Carolina. She worked as a dairy-farm milker and stable mucker before Life Without Water, set in Chatham County, North Carolina, during the turbulent 1960s, was published. Cedar, born in 1969, grows in experience, as does her young mother Sara, who dropped out of college to be with Sol, Cedar’s father and a marijuana-smoking hippie artist. Sara leaves Sol, taking Cedar to a commune on the West Coast, where Sara becomes pregnant by Daniel; he abandons her for another woman before the new baby is born. Despite her disillusionment with the free-love philosophy, Sara is admirable in the love she gives and shares with Cedar, who narrates the novel. Home across the Road begins during slavery. As reviewer Judith Kicinski points out, the novel, centering on the slave Cally Redd, and her great-granddaughter China Redd, born free in 1912, has “the scope, but not the length, of an epic” (Skicinski, 107). Cally, a slave at the Roseberry plantation owned by the Redds, is part of the black Redd family, who eventually move to a house across the road. The five generations of the two families—along with several intricately employed symbols, including a heirloom pair of earrings—show the intertwining histories of the two families and two races in 100 years of race relations in the South. For the “black Redds,” the earrings are not only a reminder of the repeated rapes and abuse they suffered at the hands of the “white Redds,” but also, as critic Gene Hyde notes, a “powerful symbol for their tenacious independence” as they emerge from the legacy of slavery. Nancy Peacock lives and works in Pittsboro, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is reportedly writing a memoir.

PEARL, THE 1027

NOVELS Home across the Road. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet, 1999. Life without Water. Atlanta, Ga.: Longstreet, 1996.

SOURCES Chamberlain, Marlene. Review of Home across the Road, Booklist (November 15, 1999): 606. Prose, Francine. “Up in Smoke,” New York Times Book Review, November 24, 1996, p. 23. Skicinski, Judith. Review of Home Across the Road, Library Journal 124, no. 17 (October 15, 1999): 107. Unsigned review of Home Across the Road, Publishers Weekly 246, no. 43 (October 25, 1999): 52. Unsigned review of Life Without Water, Publishers Weekly 243, no. 37 (September 9, 1996): 65.

OTHER Barnhill, Anne C. “Lessons from a Flower Child.” The News & Record (Piedmont Triad, N.C.) (November 24, 1996). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:74773774. Accessed September 24, 2005. Hyde, Gene. “Three Novels By North Carolinians Living with the Legacy Of Slavery.” The News & Record (Piedmont Triad, N.C.) (October 31, 1999). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:74539865. Accessed September 24, 2005.

PEARL, THE JOHN STEINBECK (1947) When STEINBECK and his close friend Edward F. Ricketts made a scientific expedition in the Gulf of California in 1940, they learned of a folktale that Steinbeck reported in the “Narrative” section of The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1941). It was a story of a native Mexican boy who accidentally found an enormous pearl. He knew its value was so great that he might get “drunk as long as he wished and marry any one of a number of girls” (103). But every pearl broker offered him so little that he refused to sell it, and instead hid it under a stone. Then he was waylaid, attacked, and tortured. Finally he got angry, cursed the pearl, and threw it into the sea to make himself a free man again, and “laughed a great deal about it” (103). Steinbeck considered the Indian boy “too heroic, too wise,” and the legend “far too reasonable to be true,” but he thought it “probably true” (103). Nonetheless, Steinbeck nursed the story in his mind for four years before he started writing the novella The

Pearl, expanding the original one-page narrative in The Log to a complex novella of more than 100 pages. He finished the first draft by early February 1945, and the story first appeared in the Woman’s Home Companion (December 1945) under the title The Pearl of the World. Its publication in book form as The Pearl was delayed until December 1947, when the first edition appeared from the Viking Press. In the early stages of the expansion of the story, Steinbeck had thoughts of making it into a screenplay. In the hopes of universalizing the young Indian boy, he converted him to a young married man, Kino, who has a wife, Juana, and an infant son, Coyotito. With these social responsibilities, he has far more obligations than the single native resident of the folktale. Although some of the details of the original story were retained (e.g., the pearl buyers’ conspiracy, the physical attack on the pearl’s owner), Steinbeck added still others, creating a scenario where the pearl becomes a necessity to its young discoverer and is equated with his very soul. The novella begins with a description of Kino and his family in the early morning, living a simple and peaceful life. The opening scenes are developed effectively with symbolic imagery of light and darkness and musical sounds that fluctuate between the comforting soft “Song of the Family” and the threatening “Song of Evil” that is heard when a scorpion appears and stings Kino’s baby son, Coyotito, on the shoulder. As the peacefulness of the small family suddenly turns into a panic, Kino’s wife, Juana, sucks the poison from the wound but desperately wants to see the doctor in the town to make sure her child is safe. Unfortunately, the doctor refuses to see the baby because Kino has no money, his “fortune consisting of only several valueless seed pearls.” Steinbeck makes sure to carefully associate the doctor as a descendent of the early Spanish invaders or “conquistadors,” and to establish the fact that Kino’s race has been exploited by such men in the past. After the doctor’s refusal, the family sets out to sea in search of food and the ever-elusive pearl sought by all divers. As he continues to dive, Kino sees a pale glimmer and to his amazement discovers a pearl that is as large as a seagull’s egg. The find seems to be an answer to his prayers, since it will no doubt convince the doctor to pay a visit and assure Kino and Juana of

1028 PEARL, THE

their son’s future health. As he gazes at the silver surface of the pearl in his small thatched hut on land, Kino is transformed by the potential he sees for a life change. Ignoring his present condition of happiness, he begins to envision what he can attain when he becomes rich. At first, he dreams of fine new clothes and a new harpoon, but the vision soon expands to include education for Coyotito and respectability accorded by a church wedding with his common-law wife. Steinbeck even inserts a passing reference to a rifle as a symbol of Kino’s newfound power. Though he had previously lacked strength due to his poverty and lower social class, he can now forcefully assert his equality to others as a result of the potential wealth that accompanies the pearl. Angered at his former rejection by the doctor, he now sees the pearl as his salvation, a lever to force the physician to offer his medical advice, thus overcoming the stigma of Kino’s native and peasant status. As news of Kino’s “pearl” spreads, the doctor surprisingly agrees to make a house call, changing his mind about treating Coyotito now that Kino possesses wealth beyond belief. Though Kino at first welcomes the doctor’s visit, shortly after he administers medicine to Coyotito, the child begins to sicken, allowing the doctor a chance to “save” him. Kino’s fears escalate as he considers the possibility that the physician has caused this relapse, rather than bringing the family healing and relief from worry and concern. Not surprisingly, Kino hides the pearl, burying it in the ground and fearing that others, both friends and enemies, have a greed that surpasses even the doctor’s. Despite his skills, the motives of the doctor remain suspect, and Steinbeck seems to suggest that his keen eye observes Kino’s unintentional revelation of the treasure’s hiding place. Later in the night, an intruder enters Kino’s house and attempts to steal the pearl. Though Kino wounds the thief, he is also hurt in the struggle, prompting Juana to proclaim the pearl a thing of evil, a danger that is destined to destroy the family. Reluctant to part with this windfall of good luck, Kino refuses to listen to his wife’s warning and, for the moment at least, convinces her that the treasure will ultimately be beneficial. The following morning, he sets out to offer the pearl to the buyers in La Paz.

Unfortunately, however, he is unable to sell the pearl for the price he has expected and finds that they denigrate his find as “monstrous” and “ugly” because of its size. Nonetheless, he refuses to part with it for the offers made by the consortium of buyers, nor does he believe their claims of its worthlessness. All too soon, he comes to a realization that he and his people have always been cheated by the pearl buyers, who have set prices for pearls far below their real worth, depending upon native ignorance and naiveté to manipulate and dupe the local divers. Impetuously, Kino declares that he will sell his pearl in the capital, an act that defies the established social structure and suggests his unwillingness to be the pawn of those who have power. Although his actions are seemingly justified and correct, they are seen by his friends and relatives as a betrayal of his people’s way of life and traditions, and as a defiance that will inevitably cause tragedy for the family as well as for the Indian society they belong to. He has stepped outside the well-known boundaries established for his people. Before he sets out on his journey to escape the dishonesty and trickery of the buyers, he returns home a second time. Though he is forced to endure another physical attack, this time he kills the potential thief, only to discover later that his canoe has been ruthlessly destroyed and his house has been burnt down. Thus destitute and homeless, the three leave the village and become fugitives. Since the pearl is taken with them as a potential solution to their plight, it is not surprising that three “dark trackers” follow the family. For a while, they elude these men, but eventually a confrontation takes place in the barren mountains that separate Kino and his family from escape and redemption. In the ensuing struggle, Kino manages to kill the trackers, but a stray shot from a rifle hits Coyotito in the head, causing his death. Then, at last, Kino and Juana return to La Paz and walk straight to the beach. This time the gender differences seem to have disappeared as the couple walks hand in hand rather than separately. Kino offers Juana the opportunity to throw the great but cursed pearl back into the sea, but Steinbeck ultimately chooses to let his protagonist demonstrate the knowledge he has gained from his misfortunes, and it is Kino who

PEARL, THE 1029

tosses the treasure back into the murky depths from whence it came. The story is a morality play as well as a parable. Steinbeck notes in his introductory remarks, “as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere” (2). Yet this introductory statement may also be seen as a facetious comment, for there are many interpretations and lenses through which a reader can view the story’s meaning. Thus, everything in the story seems to possess a dual quality, the quality of which has been embodied, for instance, in the history of Mexico as a country of native Mexicans and the descendants of the conquistadors. For example, when a scorpion moves delicately down the rope to Coyotito at the outset of the novella, Kino hears in his mind “the Song of Evil” on top of “the Song of the Family,” whereas Juana “repeated an ancient magic to guard against such evil, and on top of that she muttered a Hail Mary between clenched teeth” (10). Similarly, the great pearl is only beautiful when it is possessed in the hand of a person of pure heart. Its negative qualities are evident in the last scene of the story, when Kino looks into the surface of the pearl and finds that “it was gray and ulcerous. And the pearl was ugly like a malignant growth.” The evil faces of the trackers Kino kills appear to “peer from it into his eyes,” and Kino sees his son’s body “with the top of his head shot away” (121) in its reflection. Once the pearl settles into the water at the end of the tale, however, “The lights on its surface were green and lovely” (122). Additionally, in order to overlap the dual quality of the landscape and environment, Steinbeck incorporates an atmosphere of hazy mirage into this story [whose locale is La Paz, though the author actually came across the story around Pulmo and in Estero de la Luna on the eastern coast of the Gulf (Sea of Cortez, “Log,” 254)]. The use of such dubious imagery is designed to show how the local people “trust things of the spirit and things of the imagination, but they do not trust their eyes” (21). The Pearl is “a brutal story but with flashes of beauty” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, 279), in which ruthless, deadly fights for survival take place in the dark. In the middle of chapter 3 in The Pearl, the people in the

house can hear the swish of a tightly woven school of small fishes and the bouncing splash of the bigger fishes from the estuary as the slaughter goes on (47). The passage, based on a phenomenon Steinbeck witnessed not in La Paz but near Guaymas on the other side of the Gulf (Sea of Cortez, “Log,” 240), symbolically falls between the doctor’s two visits to Kino’s house at night. One can readily suspect his medical treatment for the baby to be dishonest. One may even suspect that he is deeply involved in the whole criminal plot of robbing Kino of the great pearl. Furthermore, the estuary, like a tide pool, represents a microcosm, just as a town represents a human habitat. To Steinbeck, a town epitomizes the universe, as does a human community like Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row in Monterey, California. The microcosm functions as part of a greater ecosystem. It is a motif Steinbeck persistently uses in his entire canon. The thesis of this interrelationship between the parts and the whole is considered to be developed from his “phalanx theory,” which is first introduced in his June 21, 1933, letter to Carlton Sheffield and also in a letter to George Albee (ca. July 1933), both included in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (74–77, 79–82). Another significant landscape description in the story is that of the mountainous area where Kino’s family arrives and finds an oasis and life-giving water during their desperate flight (107–108) from the dark trackers (just as Pepé Torres does in Steinbeck’s short story “Flight”). In fact, the family surely would have died had they not found the little pools. Undoubtedly, the description of the pools is based on the camping place where Steinbeck and Ricketts stayed overnight on March 25, 1940, which is located close to Loreto (Sea of Cortez, “Log,” 161–162). By incorporating facts into fiction, Steinbeck chooses to ignore the fact that it would have been almost impossible for the Kino family to walk to Loreto, which is located 220 miles away from La Paz. Again, to Steinbeck, the little pools are, like the Great Tide Pool in Cannery Row, not only “places of life” but “places of killing because of the water” (108). Robert S. Hughes’s poignant argument that “the two most important strands of Steinbeck’s thinking in Cannery Row [are] the moral and the ecological” (119) is true of The Pearl as

1030 PEMBROKE

well. The Pearl is a symbolic parable with moral lessons, and also a realistic, humanistic novella with ecological and sociological insights. As Jackson J. Benson calls Cannery Row “an ecological parable” (25), The Pearl also fits this literary description. The surface stories of the two are quite different from each other, and yet on deeper levels they reveal similar thematic features. In the final impressive scene of the novella, the only thing Kino holds in his hand is a rifle that he has taken from the dark trackers. At the outset of the story, Kino and Juana had a brush house, a canoe, and, most of all, their beloved son, Coyotito. As the story ends, they have lost everything. Many readers might question the ending: How will they be able to live when all they possess is a rifle, and nothing to live by and on? Surely Kino will always be in danger of being shot by another “dark thing.” Nothing meaningful and productive can be achieved by violence. As Roy S. Simmonds contends, “The logical ending to the story is future tragedy and death” (182). Fortunately, given the dualistic nature of life, another option exists: the possibility that Kino and Juana have walked through trial and temptation and have come out, not unscathed, but as survivors who are filled with an understanding of life’s complexity, a vision which would have been impossible without undergoing the troubling discoveries about their own human natures that come with ownership of the pearl. Seen through Western eyes, the novel seems to condemn patriarchal class structure and the oppression of the poor, while from an Eastern perspective, it is Kino’s own discontent and refusal to accept a lowly place in society (he is constantly striving for materialistic gain) that eventually causes his downfall. The complexity of the novella, its layers of meanings, cyclical pattern, and disturbing ambiguous ending, suggests that Steinbeck had truly discovered how to write without offering merely didactic or reductive moral messages. He had discovered the ambiguities that plague all human beings as they struggle between choices of good and evil.

SOURCES Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984.

———, ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. 1947. ———. The Sea of Cortez. 1941. ———. Steinback: A Life in Letters. Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1974. Michael J. Meyer

PEMBROKE MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1894) Much of the fiction of Mary Wilkins FREEMAN invites feminist readings because her works deal with the struggles of women in patriarchal societies. However, Freeman’s 1894 Pembroke resists a purely feminist reading primarily because of the negative portrayal of Deborah Thayer. Among the several rural New England households described in the novel, the father is generally the overbearing parent who stubbornly sticks to his “way” (11), thereby complicating the relationships of his children. The brothers-in-law Cephas Barnard and Silas Berry impose their own unreasonable will on their children, especially when it comes to their love interests. What prevents Pembroke from lumping all fathers into one type is that the character who seems to have the most profoundly negative impact on the next generation is actually the female character, Deborah Thayer, whose husband Caleb does whatever she says. Although some critics attribute Rebecca Thayer’s descent into “fallen woman” status on the spinelessness of her father Caleb, most readers wonder how anyone could stand up to a domineering woman like Mrs. Thayer. She even admits that her son Barney, whose rash actions dominate the text, inherited her stubborn streak. The novel presents more and more evidence that the heart of Barney’s problem is not so much genetic as it is a matter of example. His mother had been a model of stubborn and unreasonable pride all his life, so it seems natural for him to refuse to marry Charlotte simply to spite her father. A consistent theme throughout the novel is often uttered by its characters with the expression, “You’re putting your own eyes

PEMBROKE 1031

out” (122). Indeed, numerous inhabitants of Pembroke practice self-destructive behavior, thinking they are getting back at someone else. Despite Deborah Thayer’s hopes that her oldest son, Barney, will finally marry Charlotte Barnard, she uses this conflict as an excuse to prevent her daughter Rebecca from marrying William Berry simply because he is Charlotte’s cousin. Her ridiculous refusal to bend on this matter forces Rebecca to meet William secretly, and the end result is an unplanned pregnancy. When Deborah realizes that her daughter is expecting, she orders her out of the house, and Rebecca walks out into a blizzard without anything warm to wear. Mrs. Thayer then consciously keeps her husband from looking for their daughter by ordering him to keep on shucking corn, and he “obeyed” (195). She finally decides to send their son Barney to make William marry her. Although Freeman’s description of this conflict seems to absolve William of any error in judgment, it is a realistic representation of a society that places all the blame on the woman who “gets herself in trouble.” The author’s reticence on the subject of the baby that dies makes readers wonder about the exact cause of death. Tracing Rebecca’s circumstances reveal that her mother was most to blame for everything bad that happened. If the baby died from the physical and psychological distress of the mother, Deborah Thayer is culpable. While the characters in the novel and many critics view most of the village of Pembroke’s problems on Barney’s stubborn action, the destructive will can perhaps better be traced to Deborah Thayer. Toward the end of the novel, Deborah is absolved of the blame of her son Ephraim’s death when she learns that Ephraim had been secretly sledding in the middle of the cold night. Since Ephraim has always been in poor health, such activity probably did cause his sudden death. However, if Deborah had not been so strict with Ephraim, he would not have been tempted to sneak out. Freeman’s inclusion of the controlling Mrs. Thayer limits the gender bias of the novel. It is also unique that Freeman’s male characters in this novel are the ones who most often “sob” (291) their dialogue, while the female characters seem stronger in many ways. Despite their earlier jilting, Charlotte Barnard and Sylvia Crane develop from unbearable patience

into memorable forces by the end. Pembroke reveals the selfish motives behind the petty behavior of all its characters and explores the strengths and weaknesses of both genders. In a comprehensive study of American realism and regionalism, Eric Sundquist aptly notes that “Freeman surpasses Jewett in her ability to combine contemporary social problems with a stylistically detailed apprehension of regional character” (Sundquist, 509). Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s writing style in Pembroke is straightforward and a pleasure to read, but the novel bears some striking similarities to The SCARLET LETTER. Heather Kirk Thomas notes the way Charlotte Barnard becomes “analogous to HAWTHORNE’s Hester Prynne” (Thomas, 32) when she sews for the village. Rebecca’s embarrassment over having gotten pregnant before marriage is also described in a similar way to Hester Prynne’s shame when seeing any stranger in town, for it seemed “her old disgrace had assumed in this new mind a hideous freshness” (308). Still, Freeman’s overall depiction of women is original. Although the characters are extreme, they never seem exaggerated. Many examples are humorous in their irony, such as when Hannah Berry treats her sisters and niece abominably but defies anyone else to treat them badly. Like many of us with priorities out of whack, “Hannah Berry had a species of loyalty in her nature, inasmuch as she would tolerate ill-treatment of her kin from nobody but her own self” (273). It is true that Mary Wilkins Freeman “devoted [herself] to telling the stories of female loneliness, isolation, and frustration” (Showalter, 70), in addition to describing the local color of settings, much as JEWETT and CHOPIN did. Indeed, Sylvia Crane as the “old maid” is quite touching in Pembroke, but this novel actually presents the effect of lost love as being equally painful for its male characters. Both Richard Alger and Barney Thayer learn what they were missing because of their pride, and Freeman’s narrative questions whether what is considered “proper” between men and women is something about which we should even worry.

SOURCES Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. Pembroke. 1894. Reprinted, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002.

1032 PENHALLY

Menke, Pamela Glenn. “The Catalyst of Color and Women’s Regional Writing: At Fault, Pembroke, and The Awakening,” Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 37, no. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1999): 9–20. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Sundquist, Eric J. “Realism and Regionalism.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, 501–524. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Thomas, Heather Kirk. “ ‘It’s Your Father’s Way’: The FatherDaughter Narrative and Female Development in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke,” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 26–39. Rachel G. Wall

PENHALLY CAROLINE GORDON (1931) Released in 1931, Penhally—Caroline GORDON’s first published novel—tells the story of four generations of the Llewellyn family and their lives on the great plantation of Penhally. Gordon divides the text into three sections and tells the story of the current generation in each section. Because Lucy and John’s son—Frank—kills himself, Gordon gives us the story of his two sons—Nick and Chance—in the last section, thus encompassing the lives of the four generations. Within the text, one of the obvious concerns is that of land and the entailment of land to the firstborn male. Through her use of local color, Gordon develops the plot around Penhally, so much so that Penhally becomes the main protagonist. In fact, it could be easily argued that Gordon’s primary focus is on land and how it affects familial relations: Gordon opens the novel with a land-related disturbance (between Nicholas and Ralph) and closes it with the murder of Nick by his brother Chance over Nick’s decision to sell Penhally. Although much of the novel evolves around land and the inherent evils of entailment, Gordon develops strong female characters that are often overlooked because they are hidden within the development of the novel—readers must look beyond the stereotypes. In contrast to the male characters, the female characters make well-thought-out choices that affect their lives and the lives of those around them. In fact, female characters from Cousin Jess to Alice Blair give strength and support to the tragic stories of the Llewellyns.

Whereas the male characters focus on land and inheritance and make grave mistakes in their decisions, female characters portray the ability to make reasonable choices even when faced with negative situations. And Gordon often portrays them in a humorous light. For instance, Gordon gives us this depiction of Cousin Jess: “Cousin Jess would come right along and take the bell out of his hand. She had an energy that contrasted oddly with her tired voice. She seemed always on the point of doing something for you, better, of course, than you could do it yourself” (55). This glimpse of Cousin Jess tells us that she has the ability to get things done, even if others have to listen to her bragging about her abilities. For Nancylee Jonza, Alice is the most reliable and stable female character in Gordon’s text. Alice knows that she must marry a man who is able to take care of his family, and we see this when she is contemplating her possible future with John: “On the face of it, John was the better match of the two. But the old gentleman was likely to make half a dozen more wills before he died. . . . John would never be able to fend for himself if he were cut off ” (72). And even though this scene shows Alice’s dependence on marriage, Gordon depicts Alice as strong and wise enough to be aware of her limited choices. Although limited, Alice is a character capable of making her own choices, choices that have the ability to change her life. Another important female character in the novel is Lucy. Although our glimpses of Lucy are contrasting (in one scene she is pouring out buttermilk in front of a woman and her two children, thereby denying them the opportunity to utilize the buttermilk), Gordon gives us at least one scene where she stands up to her uncle, Nicholas. In this scene, Nicholas is contemplating how his power and influence intimidates most of his family as he addresses Lucy: Leaning back in his chair he waited, pleasantly alert, for her answer. He always enjoyed introducing his brother’s name into conversation like that. It made people jump. They hardly ever knew how to take it, their assumption being usually that he chose to forget that he had ever

PEOPLE OF DARKNESS 1033

had a brother, while the attitude that he really took was that the brother, whose existence he perfectly recognized, was no more to him than a casual acquaintance. But Lucy did not jump. (64) And so we see Lucy as a woman who is not so easily intimidated. She calmly answers her uncle, and she refuses to bow to him. In addition, Gordon foreshadows the Llewellyn’s ruin, for Nicholas’s own disagreeable temperament will jeopardize the family’s inheritance. In contrast to Lucy’s iron will, Nicholas makes emotional decisions that are purely “in the moment.” His inattention to others’ feelings and his preoccupation with land and primogeniture serve to lay the groundwork for the family’s eventual demise. For Caroline Gordon, the South played an intrinsic part in her life and her novels. In Penhally, she uses the land and the estate to frame a novel that focuses on the eventual downfall of the Llewellyn family—a family grounded in the old traditions of the South. However, Gordon—through careful characterization and plot development—creates a text that is both entertaining and critical of a bygone era. Although much of the focus of Penhally is on male characters, Gordon writes about women who utilize their surroundings as best they can. These women—Cousin Jess, Alice, and Lucy—all portray able women who, through their comments, actions, and lives, add to the flavor of Gordon’s novel.

SOURCES Fraistat, Rose Ann C. Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Gordon, Caroline. Penhally. Nashville, Tenn.: J. S. Sanders & Company, 1931. Jonza, Nancylee Novell. The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Christopher Lee Massey

PEOPLE OF DARKNESS TONY HILLERMAN (1980) It is not an overstatement to assert that the publication of Tony HILLERMAN’s Navajo novels has

been as significant to the history of the mysterydetective genre as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of Sherlock Holmes and Dashiell HAMMETT’s and Raymond CHANDLER’s popularization of the hard-boiled style through the novels and stories featuring Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, respectively. Before Hillerman’s series, the multicultural contributions to the genre were anomalies, curiosities ranging from Earl Derr BIGGERS’s immensely popular series featuring Charlie Chan, a generally benign caricature of the “Oriental” sensibility, to Arthur W. Upfield’s long-running Australian series featuring the half-Aborigine police detective Napoleon Bonaparte. The commercial and critical success of Hillerman’s series has made multiculturalism much more the norm than the exception in the genre. Not only are there now more than a dozen established series featuring Native American detectives, but there are even more series featuring African-American and Hispanic detectives, as well as series featuring detectives of European ancestry that emphasize ethnic heritage in a pointed and extended manner that was uncommon before Hillerman’s series. Indeed, the much broadened popularity of the genre in all regions of the world and, even more, the increased demand for English translations of foreign contributions to the genre can be attributed to Hillerman’s influence. And this new diversity in the genre has had the ancillary effect of greatly expanding the list of the occupations in which amateur detectives are employed, so that there are now established series featuring everything from meter readers to exotic dancers. Hillerman’s “Navajo” series now includes 19 novels. It has evolved in an unusual way. In three of his first four novels, the detective is Joe Leaphorn, a middleaged Navajo tribal policeman (the second novel, The Fly on the Wall [1971], features an investigative reporter named John Cotton). Then in the fifth novel in the series, People of Darkness (1980), Hillerman introduces another detective, a younger tribal policeman named Jim Chee. Ironically, the younger Chee is more traditional in his attitudes than Leaphorn, whose greater experience as an investigator has its corollary in a more cosmopolitan and cynical sensibility. Chee is also the protagonist in the sixth and seventh novels in

1034 PEOPLE OF DARKNESS

the series. There were pragmatic as well as creative reasons for the shift to Chee. Hillerman had sold the television rights to the Leaphorn character, and it would take him several years to regain the complete rights to the character. When Hillerman finally teamed Leaphorn and Chee in Skinwalkers (1986) and in A Thief of Time (1988), he achieved a sort of breakthrough commercially and critically. Although each of his earlier novels had had better sales, he became a fixture on the best-seller lists with these two novels, and critics responded enthusiastically to the greater dramatic, thematic, and tonal complexity generated by the pairing of the two very distinctive detectives. Although there may be other instances in which a novelist has developed two detectives separately before bringing them together, the only other example that comes immediately to my mind is James Crumley’s delayed teaming of his investigators Milo Milodragovitch and C. W. Sughrue. Interestingly, it is generally acknowledged that Hillerman’s first few novels were very unevenly written. But by the time he wrote People of Darkness, his style had begun to complement his more intuitively exquisite conception of his narratives. The novel opens in Albuquerque, with a pickup truck exploding outside the offices of a bacteriologist at the University of New Mexico Hospital. Having accumulated 30 days of leave time, Jimmy Chee is hired by Rosemary Vines, the second wife of a well-to-do rancher, B. J. Vines, to recover a stolen box of keepsakes belonging to her husband. Mrs. Vines claims that the thieves are the “people of darkness,” who are somehow connected to a Navajo named Dillon Charley. Her husband had given Dillon Charley something from the box of keepsakes before it was stolen, but Dillon Charley is now buried near the first Mrs. Vines. It turns out that the exploding pickup truck belonged to Dillon Charley’s son, Emerson, who is now a cancer patient at the hospital. B. J. Vines tries to persuade Chee to drop his investigation of the missing box, claiming that his wife herself is responsible for its theft. Remaining on the case, Chee begins to focus on Cotton Wolf as a suspect in the explosion of the pickup truck. In the course of his investigation, Chee meets a teacher named Mary Landon, with whom he gradually develops a long-term

relationship. Meanwhile, Emerson Charley dies, ostensibly from his cancer, but his corpse disappears from the morgue. His son, Tomas Charley, reveals to Chee the whereabouts of Vines’ missing box, but when Chee goes there with Mary, they find Tomas dead and are stalked by Cotton Wolf. It turns out that the whole case hinges on revelations about an explosion on an oil rig some 40 years earlier, when Dillon Charley had been the foreman of the rig’s drilling crew.

SOURCES Bakerman, Jane S. “Joe Leaphorn and the Navaho Way: Tony Hillerman’s Indian Detective Fiction,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 2 (Spring–Summer 1981): 9–16. ———. “Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.” In Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen, edited by Earl Bargainnier and George N. Dove, 98–112. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. Browne, Ray B. “The Ethnic Detective: Arthur W. Upfield, Tony Hillerman, and Beyond.” In Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage, I–II, edited by Robin W. Winks and Maureen Corrigan, 1,029–1,046. New York: Scribner, 1998. Engel, Leonard. “Landscape and Place in Tony Hillerman’s Mysteries,” Western American Literature 28 (August 1993): 111–122. Erisman, Fred. “Hillerman’s Uses of the Southwest,” Roundup Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 9–18. ———. Tony Hillerman. Western Writers Series, No. 87. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1989. Grape, Jan. “Tony Hillerman,” Mystery Scene 58 (1997): 42–45. Hillerman, Tony. “Making Mysteries with Navajo Materials.” In Literature and Anthropology. Studies in Comparative Literature, no. 20, edited by Philip Dennis and Wendell Aycock, 5–13. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989. O’Sullivan, Maurice J. “Tony Hillerman and the Navajo Way.” In Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest: Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands, edited by Steve Glassman and Maurice J. O’Sullivan, 163–176. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Parfit, Michael. “Weaving Mysteries That Tell of Life among the Navajos,” Smithsonian 21 (December 1990): 92–105. Roush, Jan. “The Developing Art of Tony Hillerman,” Western American Literature 28 (August 1993): 99–110. ———. “Tony Hillerman.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook, 468–474. Fort Worth: Western

PERCY, WALKER 1035

Literature Association/Texas Christian University Press, 1997. Schneider, Jack W. “Crime and Navajo Punishment: Tony Hillerman’s Novels of Detection,” Southwest Review 67 (Spring 1982): 151–160. Sobol, John. Tony Hillerman: A Public Life. Toronto: ECW, 1994. Martin Kich

PERCY, WALKER (1916–1990)

In addition to essays on contemporary language and literature, Walker Percy wrote six novels during his lifetime, all populated by characters who are consumed by a need to understand their identities and to relate to other human beings. His ability to combine intellectual and existential issues with realistically drawn, witty characters, who understand what they see, distinguished Percy from the beginning of his career. His first novel, The MOVIEGOER (1961), won the National Book Award because it clearly portrayed one individual’s attempt to find meaning in his shallow life. His second novel, The LAST GENTLEMAN (1966), was a runner-up for the same award; LOVE IN THE RUINS (1971) cemented Percy’s reputation as a writer who could combine the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, European existentialism, and Helen Keller with the role of language and his own brand of Roman Catholicism, in readable, intriguing, yet comic, fiction. Walker Percy was born on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Leroy Pratt Percy and Martha Phinizy Percy. After his father committed suicide in 1929, and his mother was killed in an automobile accident two years later, Percy was adopted by his father’s cousin, William Alexander Percy. Percy, a cultivated and wealthy intellectual known for his friendships with historians, novelists, poets, and psychologists— and later for his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941)—provided a stimulating atmosphere for Percy and his two brothers at their new home in Greenville, Mississippi. Percy was educated at the University of North Carolina, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1937 and his medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. Because of medical problems resulting from recurring tuberculosis, Percy decided to leave the medical profession for the world

of letters. In 1946, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, with whom he lived, mostly in Covington, Louisiana, until his death in 1990. In The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling coins the term “Everydayness” to describe his hollow existence, because Binx recognizes that he needs to overcome the despair and find meaningful human contact. His future seems brighter at the novel’s end. In The Last Gentleman Percy focuses on Will Barrett, an engineer. His rambling odyssey from New York City to the South and then to the New Mexico desert causes a malaise so strong that he nearly commits suicide. (This separation of body and soul is one of Percy’s recurring concepts.) Will reappears 20 years later (as a lawyer rather than an engineer) in Percy’s fifth novel, The Second Coming (1980). There he demands proof of God’s existence and finds love with Allie, a sanatorium escapee who helps him overcome his angst and suggests that together they can survive and grow. Percy’s third novel, Love in the Ruins, features Dr. Tom More, who is descended from the Elizabethan Sir Thomas More. He attempts with the help of his invention, the “Lapsometer,” to cure people of their despair; ironically, however, instead of offering solutions, the Lapsometer merely makes people behave in extreme ways, providing grist for the mill of Percy’s redoubtable humor. To wit, Tom waits for the apocalypse in the shell of an old Howard Johnson motel, pinned down by a sniper but comfortable as long as his Early Times bourbon does not run out. Tom More reappears in Percy’s last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), in which he fights the scientists who are contaminating the public water supplies with a mind-altering drug that results in loss of individuality and free will. LANCELOT (1977), Percy’s fourth novel, is perhaps the most powerful in its angry indictment of American cultural values. Lance, the insane protagonist who is angry over his wife’s infidelity, commits multiple murders, for which he is imprisoned as the novel opens. However, even Lance’s bitterness is ameliorated by Percy’s use of dark humor. Walker Percy died on May 10, 1990, of cancer, in Louisiana. Appreciation of Walker Percy’s novels continues to rise, helped by hundreds of doctoral dissertations and articles, and scores of scholarly books on

1036 PETRY, ANN

both his fiction and his nonfiction articles on language, religion, and philosophy.

NOVELS Lancelot. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977. The Last Gentleman. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1966. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971. The Moviegoer. New York: Knopf, 1961. The Second Coming. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1980. The Thanatos Syndrome. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987.

SOURCES Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Walker Percy. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. Three Catholic Writers of the South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Ciuba, Gary M. Walker Percy: Books of Revelation. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Crowley, J. Donald, and Sue Mitchell Crowley, eds. Walker Percy: Critical Essays. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Publishing Company, 1997. Gretlund, Jan Nordby, and Karl Heinz, eds. Walker Percy: Novelist and Philosopher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Hobson, Linda Whitney. Walker Percy: A Comprehensive Descriptive Bibliography. Columbia, S.C.: Faust, 1988. ———. Understanding Walker Percy. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Kramer, Victor, ed. Andrew Lytle, Walker Percy, Peter Taylor: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Lawson, Lewis A., ed. Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy’s Work. Albany, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1987. ———. Still Following Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Lawson, Lewis A., and Victor A. Kramer, eds. Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. ———, eds. More Conversations with Walker Percy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Lawson, Lewis A., and Elzbieta Oleksy. Walker Percy’s Feminine Characters. Albany, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing Co., 1995. Poteat, Patricia Lewis. Percy and the Old Modern Age. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Quinlan, Kieran. Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Samway, Patrick H. Walker Percy: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1997. Taylor, L. Jerome. In Search of Self: Life, Death, and Walker Percy. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley, 1986. Tharpe, Jac, ed. Walker Percy: Art and Ethics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980. ———. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Tolson, Jay. Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1994. Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

OTHER “Walker Percy: An Introduction.” Available online. URL: http://metalab.unc.edu/wpercy/who.html. Accessed September 26, 2005.

PETRY, ANN (1908–1997)

Ann Petry, novelist and short story writer, occupies a secure place in American literature. Her subject matter includes not only racial oppression and poverty on the streets of Harlem but also the smug hypocrisy of small-town white America immediately after World War II, miscegenation, and the precarious nature of the American dream. Her most famous novel, The STREET (1946) sold more than a million copies, earning for Petry both popular and critical esteem. Two additional novels followed: Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), as well as the short fiction collection Miss Muriel and Other Stories and several young adult novels. These include portraits of slave women and Harriet Tubman, a hero of the Underground Railroad. Petry was born on October 12, 1908, in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to Bertha James Lane, a chiropodist and hairdresser, and Peter Clark Lane, Jr., a pharmacist. Educated at the Connecticut College of Pharmacy, from which she graduated in 1921, Petry worked at the family drugstore until her marriage in 1938 to George Petry. They moved to New York, where Petry worked as a journalist and took creative writing classes at Columbia

PET SEMATARY 1037

University. From the experience of living in Harlem arose Petry’s stylistically forceful novel, The Street, largely about Lutie Johnson’s struggle to overcome poverty and racism. Three years later, Petry published Country Place, whose characters are white New England inhabitants of Lennox, Connecticut. The residents are unhappy and often unprincipled. The novel did not enjoy the success of The Street; at its end, the returning World War II character, Johnnie Roane, leaves Lennox in disgust at the racism and venality just below the surface of the American Dream he fought to defend. With The Narrows, Petry turned her attention to interracial relationships. Again set in a small New England town, the novel traces the love affair between Link Williams, an AfricanAmerican graduate of Dartmouth College, and Camilo Treadway Sheffield, a white married woman and heiress to an enormous fortune. The relationship is doomed. Both this novel and Country Place deserve more attention than they have received to date. Ann Petry’s novels have been compared thematically with those of Richard WRIGHT, Gloria NAYLOR, Toni MORRISON, and Alice WALKER. She was also a naturalist in the tradition of Stephen CRANE, Chester HIMES, and Theodore DREISER. After Petry’s death in 1997, her papers were moved to the Boston University Mugar Memorial Library.

NOVELS Country Place. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. The Narrows. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. The Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

SOURCES Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bone, Robert A. The Negro Novel in America. Rev. ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965, pp. 157, 180–185. Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Davis, Arthur Press. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers from 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.

Gayle, Addison, Jr. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975. Holladay, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996. Interviews with Black Writers. Edited by John O’Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Photograph, p. 153. Littlejohn, David. Black on White. New York: Grossman, 1966. Noble, Jeanne. Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

PET SEMATARY STEPHEN KING (1983) In 1980, during an interview with Abe Peck of Rolling Stone, Stephen KING said of Pet Sematary: “It’s done, but it’s put away. I have no plans to publish it in the near future. It’s too horrible. It’s worse than The Shining or any of the other things. It’s terrifying” (Underwood, 100). The idea for Pet Sematary came from a sequence of events from King’s own life and began as any of his novels do, with a “what if” question. He planned to expand his idea into a modern retelling of W. W. Jacob’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” During the writing, however, King said, “the book ceased being a novel to me, and became instead a gloomy exercise, like an endless marathon run. It never left my mind; it never ceased to trouble me” (Winter, 131). Pet Sematary was written between January and May 1979, and it was published against King’s wishes in 1982 to satisfy his ending contract with Doubleday. King wrote the screenplay for the movie in 1989, but he says he will never reread the novel. In spite of King’s feelings, Pet Sematary is one of his bestknown novels. The characters’ realism in the beginning is due largely to the autobiographical elements from King’s own life. His use of narration, point of view, and flashback pulls readers into the story immediately and keeps them captivated far beyond its conclusion. Pet Sematary is divided into three parts. At the opening of part 1, entitled “The Pet Sematary,” the Creed family arrives at their new home in Ludlow, Maine. Louis, the patriarch, has accepted a job as the resident physician at the University of Maine. The family quickly bonds with the Crandalls, an elderly couple who live across the road. Jed Crandall becomes a father figure for Louis, and the two men spend many evenings together. One afternoon, Jed takes the whole Creed

1038

PET SEMATARY

family up a path behind the Creeds’ house to see the Pet Sematary, a burial ground set up by children many decades before. Several days later, Louis deals with a tragedy at the university: An automobile-pedestrian accident kills a student, Victor Pascow. Pascow’s is the first of many untimely deaths Louis deals with in the novel. As Thanksgiving comes, Rachel takes the children, five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage, back to Chicago. While they are away, Church, Ellie’s beloved cat, is hit and killed by a truck passing in front of the Creed home. Jed offers to help Louis bury Church and guides him up to the Pet Sematary, and then to the Micmac ancient burial ground beyond. Jed explains, “The Micmacs believed this hill was a magic place” (117). He also indicates that the Micmacs stopped using the burial ground because they believed it had been possessed by a Wendigo, an evil, cannibalistic spirit. Louis buries Church, and the next day, Church returns alive but different. Part two, “The Micmac Burial Ground,” centers wholly on a second, far more dreadful tragedy that has befallen the Creed household. Another truck passing on the road in front of the house kills not a pet but a child. The family falls apart, and Louis feels the pull of the Micmac burial ground, believing that using it will restore his family to its prior, happier state. Jed warns Louis to stay away from the burial ground, saying, “Sometimes dead is better.” Louis, in his grief, goes against Jed’s warnings and uses the burial ground again to resurrect the child. Part three, “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,” is brief and acute. The deceased child returns to the Creed home, but as a soulless physical shell infected by the evil of the Wendigo. Louis must deal with the consequences of his choices as the remnants of his family are destroyed. Typically, King introduces sections of his novels with pertinent song lyrics. In Pet Sematary, he deviates from this pattern to quote the story of Lazarus rising from the dead from the gospel of John. While the context of Pet Sematary is not overtly biblical, the story of Lazarus parallels the story line of human resurrection and its implications. The title page of “The Pet Sematary” shows the disciples telling Jesus that Lazarus is sleeping. Jesus corrects them and explains that Lazarus is, in fact, dead. “The Micmac Burial Ground” shows Lazarus dead for four days. Jesus promises Martha that her

brother “shall rise again” (201). “Oz the Gweat and Tewwible” begins with Lazarus rising from the dead. Jesus orders Martha to “loose him” from his burial clothing and “let him go” (341). King’s quotation of the Lazarus story opposes Louis Creed’s self-proclaimed role of God. When faced with the very human powerlessness of death, Creed falls into a cataclysmic state of denial. He believes that he has found the power to restore life, as Christ restored Lazarus. His tunnel vision evokes both pity and anger in the rational reader as he works his family into complete destruction in a vain attempt to restore it. Pet Sematary came to be as a result of several real-life events: the death of Naomi King’s cat, “Smucky” (whose name appears on a headstone in the fictional pet sematary); the road in front of their rented Orrington, Maine, home where trucks regularly sped by; and an occasion where Owen, his youngest son, began running toward the road and King pulled him back to safety. The pet sematary was also real; it existed in the woods behind the Orrington house (Winter, 129). While King believes in the fantastic and fictional to create horror, he also believes firmly that the most effective way truly to frighten people is to show them events, people, and situations they see in everyday life. “The more frightened people become about the real world the easier they are to scare” (Nelson, 2). King’s exquisite command of narration, point of view, and flashback allows him to weave them together seamlessly. His realistic narration hooks the reader, and the scene is set by the family making a risky move across the country. By the end of page 3, readers are already rooting for this family man, his wife, and their two adorable children. While in third person, it is Louis who narrates parts 1, 2, and the early portion of 3. Readers view the world through his eyes. In the latter portion of part 3, King switches the point of view to a more omniscient approach, which again helps to engage the reader by showing a broader scope of the ultimate effects of Louis’s actions. By far the most effective element in the novel is the use of a flashback during the novel’s most horrific event. Rather than narrate the death of Louis’s child directly, King allows him to remember it in graphic, nightmarish detail. Louis describes the moments prior to, during, and immedi-

PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, THE 1039

ately following the accident with the guilt-ridden thoughts of a parent who believes he could have stopped this tragedy. Pet Sematary is truly one of King’s finest works; it is made all the more special because of the knowledge that it nearly was not published. It is far more than his original intention, a modern “The Monkey’s Paw.” Pet Sematary touches on religion, morality, and the worst fear for many, the death of a loved one.

SOURCES King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1983. Nelson, Harold. Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers. 1st edition. Edited by Laura Standley Berger. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1994. Underwood, Tim, and Chuck Miller, eds. Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King. New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1988. Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: New American Library, 1986. Kelly Flanagan

PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH, THE NORTON JUSTER (1961) Two generations of children have now experienced the wondrously wacky world that young Milo found when he drove his tiny electric car through the little purple tollbooth that had mysteriously appeared in his bedroom. What elevates The Phantom Tollbooth—best categorized as an allegorical fantasy—to its place in the canon of children’s literature is the fact that Juster kept his eye on the prize the whole time—he educated children without them realizing it. The result is that children continue to form a deep attachment to this book, this allegory on the development of the mind. Milo’s journey becomes their journey. When Milo returns from his adventure, he is better able to appreciate his life and the world around him. So too is the young reader. Using puns, humor, and clever wordplay, Juster creates a world where literary terminology and mathematics are literally embodied by the characters. Poor Milo is always bored. In fact, “Wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” (9). He drives through the tollbooth for lack of anything better to do and finds

himself in the Land of Expectations, the place you must always go before you get to where you’re going (19). Soon after, he meets the watchdog Tock, whose job it is to make sure no one wastes time. Tock becomes Milo’s faithful companion and together they arrive at the city of Dictionopolis, where all the world’s words grow on trees and are sold at the marketplace. There they meet the Humbug and learn of the dispute between King Azaz of Dictionopolis and his brother, the Mathemagician of Digitopolis (where numbers are dug up in deep mines), over the superiority of letters or numbers. This argument led to the imprisonment of the princesses Rhyme and Reason, which, in turn, has aversely affected the entire Kingdom of Wisdom. Milo agrees to try to rescue the princesses, unite the two cities, and restore order to the kingdom. At each turn, Milo is confronted by someone who at first frightens and then delights him as he learns more about the world. He narrowly escapes the Island of Conclusions, which you can only get to by jumping (and only leave by swimming through the Sea of Knowledge). In the city of Ignorance he meets the Terrible Trivium, from whom he learns the dangers of giving oneself over to petty tasks and forces of habit. In the land of Reality—which has become virtually invisible because people stopped noticing the things around them—he recognizes the dangers in just floating through the world without noticing the wonders around you. He finally realizes he can overcome the limitations he has placed on himself when he Princess Reason tells him, “What you can do is often simply a matter of what you will do” (247). By grasping the usefulness of both math and language, he becomes the hero of his own story. Although widely used in classrooms to teach mathematical concepts or literary terminology, The Phantom Tollbooth actually serves as a commentary on the way the modern educational system may do children a disservice. Juster believes that throwing so much varied information at a child without linking it together allows the child to dismiss it as unimportant and not relevant to his life. Through the book, he shows the reader the power of information and education, for it is through the clear communication of ideas that Milo is ultimately successful.

1040 PHELPS, ELIZABETH STUART

SOURCES Juster, Norman. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Random House, 1961. Sadler, Glenn Edward, ed. Teaching Children’s Literature: Issues, Pedagogy, Resources. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992. Swinfen, Ann. In Defence of Fantasy: A Study of the Genre in English and American Literature since 1945. London: Routledge, 1984.

OTHER Miller, Laura. “The Road to Dictionopolis: An interview with Norton Juster.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http:// www.salon.com/books/inf/2001/03/12/juster. Accessed September 25, 2005. Wendy Maas

PHELPS, ELIZABETH STUART (ELIZABETH WOOSTER STUART PHELPS WARD) (1815–1852) Not to be confused with her daughter, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, a novelist and short story writer, this Elizabeth Phelps wrote short stories for magazines and novels, the most popular of which, The Sunny Side; or, the Country Minister’s Wife, sold 100,000 copies the year it appeared. Phelps, moreover, penned the “Kitty Brown” books (1851–53), one of the earliest series of novels for girls. Her story “The Angel over the Right Shoulder” (1852), a work originally published as a Christmas book, is now routinely used in feminist history and literature courses. Born on August 13, 1815, to Abigail Clark Stuart and Moses Stuart in Andover, Massachusetts, Phelps was reared in a religious and literary millieu. Her father, a Congregationalist minister, taught at Andover Theological Seminary. Phelps, who was educated at Abbot Academy and Mount Vernon School, began publishing stories in the Reverend Jacob Abbot’s magazine under the name H. Trusta, an anagram of her own surname, a pseudonym she continued to use both on her adult novels and her children’s books. Although she was in poor health with an illness characterized as a “cerebral disease,” Elizabeth married Austin Phelps, who became a theology professor at the Andover Seminary, in 1842. Her daughter, Mary Gray Phelps, who legally had her name changed to her mother’s (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps), was born in 1844.

Despite her blinding headaches, temporary paralysis, and partial blindness, Phelps continued to write. Her own favorite novel, published in the last year of her life, was A Peep At “Number Five”; or, A Chapter in the Life of a City Pastor (1852). Apparently autobiographical, it served as a companion piece to The Sunny Side. Phelps died in 1852 at age 37, fewer than three months after giving birth to her third child. She left a legacy of domestic, realistic novels that have been widely translated. Her papers are housed at the Andover Historical Society.

NOVELS A Peep at “Number Five”; or, A Chapter in the Life of a City Pastor, as H. Trusta. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1852. The Sunny Side; or, the Country Minister’s Wife, as H. Trusta. Philadelphia and New York: American Sunday-School Union, 1851.

SOURCES Fetterly, Judith, ed. “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1815–52).” In Provisions: A Reader from 19th-Century Women, 203–209. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Kessler, Carol Farley. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Boston: Twayne, 1982.

PHILADELPHIA FIRE JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN (1990) On May 13, 1985, Philadelphia police fired tear gas, water cannons, and automatic weapons, and dropped a satchel bomb upon a row of tenements on the 6200 block of Osage Avenue. Their target was a single row house, the home and headquarters of the MOVE Organization, an Afrocentric back-to-nature religious movement. After the smoke cleared from the bomb’s resultant fire, 60 other homes had been destroyed, leaving more than 250 people homeless. Eleven MOVE members had been killed. Five were children. Five years later, John Edgar WIDEMAN published Philadelphia Fire, his record-setting second PEN/ Faulkner Award-winning novel (his first was the 1984 Sent for You Yesterday). In this novel, which Time found “reminiscent of Ralph ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN,” Wideman, a Pennsylvania native, explores the ruins of the Osage Avenue atrocity. What he seeks to understand is not the assault’s cause so much as its aftermath. Working their way through the rubble are two writers, the

PHILADELPHIA FIRE 1041

novel’s main protagonists, the imaginary Cudjoe and the very real Wideman, both of whose thoughts, temptations, and torments we gain access to in this haunting, memoir-tinged historical novel. While Wideman’s subject here is harrowing, there remains more than a glimmer of hope in the two men’s journeys through their pasts to discover themselves and the voices with which they can express their outrage and pain. And it is Wideman’s voice suffused throughout this novel—his spirited and exuberant prose style, and his unflinching examination of our national and personal crises of conscience—that finally liberates us from the despair and self-destruction that court the two writers as they investigate this often overlooked American heartbreak. Divided into three sections, the novel first focuses on Cudjoe and his quest through the city of Philadelphia to find a rumored child survivor of the bombing, Simba, and with him a story that Cudjoe hopes to write that will help save them both. Simba’s vaporous escape from the flames parallels Cudjoe’s own flight from his past and reminds him of his failures as a black schoolteacher in the late 1960s to “save” his young black students by teaching them to protest creatively through literature. (Whether ironic or not, Cudjoe shares his name with the famous leader of the Maroons in Jamaica, a group of runaway slaves who resisted British rule and fought bravely for their independence almost 300 years ago; the Maroon leader too was very much divided between peaceful reconciliation and sustained resistance.) As a writer struggling to piece together Simba’s story and his own, Cudjoe must confront the ghosts from his own life as well as the ghosts of the city, not all of whom, we learn, are dead. The city of Philadelphia, then, is itself a character in this drama, a force even, and a site of disaster and despair. It is a city of lost children in a book about lost children. Simba is still missing. Cudjoe is the prodigal son returning home from his self-exile abroad only to remember the students he left behind. And an underground kid cult splashes the city walls with cryptic graffiti manifestoes intimating a conspiracy to overthrow the adults who have forsaken them: adults like Wilson Goode, who was mayor at the time of the bombing, and the community’s adults, who,

too, swiftly forgot about it. Also lost is Wideman’s own son, who was incarcerated for manslaughter and with whom the author seeks sadly in the novel’s second section to maintain telephone communication despite the decaying connection between them. This novel is not only about the struggle to speak up and out then, but also the struggle to speak at all. These are struggles fraught with fits, false starts, and ambivalence, and the novel evokes these uncertainties in its very form—in digressions, abrupt shifts in point of view, and a fragmented and snaking narrative. And yet, in its sweeping lyricism, the novel also captures moments of exhilaration and affirmation; for instance, we are reminded in Wideman’s rhythmic description of a street basketball game, in his headfake and jump-shot prose, that we must find hope and beauty in the everyday, the ordinary events made luminous through language and reverence. It should here be noted that while this novel dazzles us aesthetically—riffing on postmodernist self-reflexivity and intertextuality and employing quite brilliantly at times a quasi-expressionistic jazz-inflected lyricism—it also owes much to the subtle moral shadings of Shakespeare (whose The Tempest Wideman explicitly references) and the revitalized realism and naturalism one finds in the works of Wideman’s fine contemporaries Russell BANKS and Robert STONE. Moreover, as with other recent historical novels such as Cormac MCCARTHY’s BLOOD MERIDIAN and Don DELILLO’s LIBRA, Philadelphia Fire reimagines a historical event not only to better understand its effects on a community but also to probe philosophically the very nature of received and perceived historical “truth.” The bombing, then, is not precisely the novel’s centerpiece. Rather, the focus seems to be on the protagonist Cudjoe’s quest through the wreckage of the past: the community’s as well as his own personal past. In his journeys, he seeks not only to discover the truth about the atrocity and save a young boy’s life in the process; he struggles also to discover and save himself, even if only through the fictions he tells himself, the histories he invents to order his world. And Cudjoe’s quest is also Wideman’s. Both are writers and witnesses, each testifying in the novel to the possibilities and limitations of fictional testimonies to counteract the nightmares of histories personal,

1042 PHILLIPS, JAYNE ANNE

political, and national. Both struggle to express through writing their frustration, sorrow, and pain, yet neither finds true closure come the novel’s end. Cudjoe attends a memorial service for the victims of the bombing. He stands holding a candle, frozen, wishing he could run, and outraged by the poor turnout, he begins populating the empty square with ghosts. Like Wideman, he can neither escape nor reverse the past; his fictions will not change history. The bomb has been dropped. It has destroyed and altered lives. The two writers cannot invent ways around these realities. Not merely the novel’s backdrop, the bombing is intertwined with the writers’ lives and the lives and histories of a city and its citizens. Whether those citizens are fictional like Cudjoe or actual like Wideman himself, many of them struggle to find meaning in and hope beyond the trauma caused in one day. Theirs is not an uncommon struggle either; two decades later another American city will tremble, and its citizens, shaken by terror and disbelief, will look to the skies for meaning. Some of Wideman’s characters, members of the Philadelphia community, react to the tragedy with anger, others with mourning, and too many with silence. Their responses remind us of September 11, 2001, and the myriad reactions of citizens across the nation and the actions they took (or did not) to restore order to their lives. For weeks after the terrorist attack, the nation saw most clearly what our democracy operating at its best and worst looks like: on one hand, individuals speaking up and people working together to ensure safety and bring hope and succor, and on the other, blind patriotism and a renewed racist hysteria. This novel examines such a traumatic event not by speculating on its causes and offering “clarifying” conspiracies; instead Wideman dramatizes the event’s aftermath so as to capture the moral and spiritual crises we face when looking for someone to blame rather than a reason to reflect and imagine, for a moment at least, a better world. He focuses on the aftermath also to humanize more fully the many victims and survivors: some silent, others forgotten, yet many outspoken about the need to bear witness and remember history. And here we discover this novel’s lesson: Never forget. Because of this message—and despite its bleak subject matter and lack of closure—Philadelphia Fire is a

hopeful novel. And with its chorus of voices, vigorous prose, and history lesson, it is also a democratic novel, and one that demands we don’t forget. It is a warning to those who would like to evade the past that we can never escape the ghosts that haunt us. It is a dark message, to be sure, but also a hopeful one if heeded. As both Cudjoe and Wideman know, we must learn to speak for the silenced, self-exiled, and forgotten lest we wish to live forever with ghosts. That is, we must discover our voices and tell our private and public stories to honor and understand the lives of the lost: the 11 bombing victims, Wideman’s imprisoned child, Cudjoe’s forgotten schoolchildren, and the still-missing Simba, the city’s invisible son.

SOURCES Carden, Mary Paniccia. “ ‘If the City Is a Man’: Founders and Cities and Sons in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 3 (2003): 472–500. Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Dubey, Madhu. “Literature and Urban Crisis: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire,” African American Review 32, no. 4 (1998): 579–595. Lee, James Kyung-Jin. “Where the Talented Tenth Meets the Model Minority,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 35, no. 2 (2002): 231–257. Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. Pearsall, Susan M. “ ‘Narratives of Self’ and the Abdication of Authority in Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire,” MELUS 26, no. 2 (2001): 15–46. TuSmith, Bonnie. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Varsava, Jerry. “ ‘Woven of Many Strands’: Multiple Subjectivity in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire,” Critique 41, no. 4 (2000): 425–444. Zachary Dobbins

PHILLIPS, JAYNE ANNE (1952– ) As scholar Dorothy Combs Hill notes, all the works of Jayne Ann Phillips, a daughter of West Virginia, feel universal rather than regional, and “no one has labeled Phillips a Southern writer or a woman writer; her relentless intelligence breaks those boundaries” (Hill, 348).

PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES 1043

Phillips writes about the uniqueness of each individual, about post-Vietnam war society, closeness and communication, loneliness and the absence of love, and about family relationships, particularly those between mothers and daughters. Her first novel, Machine Dreams (1984), received a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and appeared on the New York Times Best Books of 1984 list. Her third novel, Shelter (1994), was chosen one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Jayne Anne Phillips was born on July 19, 1952, in Buckhannon, West Virginia (where her family had settled two centuries earlier), to Russell R. Phillips, a contractor, and Martha Jane Thornhill Phillips, a teacher, who encouraged her independence and writerly talents. She earned a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) from West Virginia University in 1974 and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1978. She married a Boston doctor. After publishing Sweethearts (1976) and Counting (1978) with small presses (novels that have never been reissued), Phillips broke into mainstream publishing with Machine Dreams. This novel depicts the lives of several generations, from World War II until the Vietnam War, and implicates the Vietnam war in the erosion of the family. Told from each family member’s perspective, the novel chronicles the helpless, hapless Jean and Mitch Hampson, their daughter Danner, and their son Billy. In Shelter, four characters talk about good and evil at a West Virginia summer camp in July 1963. Two sisters, Lenny and Alma Swenson, Lenny’s friend Cap Brierly, and Alma’s friend Delia Campbell are joined in the narrative by Carmody, an insane ex-convict, and by eight-year-old Buddy, the cook’s son. MotherKind (2000), Phillips’s most recent novel, takes place in the Boston suburbs and features a mother and daughter known simply as Katherine and Kate, respectively. Kate returns to West Virginia to tell her cancer-stricken mother that she is pregnant. Within the parameters of imminent birth and death, Phillips explores the joys of the motherdaughter bond and the difficulties of marriage and divorce, children and stepchildren. Jayne Anne Phillips lives with her husband in the Boston area, where she teaches and writes. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1997.

NOVELS Counting. New York: Vehicle Editions, 1978. Machine Dreams. New York: Dutton, 1984. MotherKind. New York: Knopf, 2000. Shelter. Boston: Houghton, 1994. Sweethearts. Carrboro, N.C.: Truck Press, 1976.

SOURCES Carter, Susanne. “Variations on Vietnam: Women’s Innovative Interpretations of the Vietnam War Experience,” Extrapolation 32, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 170–183. Delbanco, Andrew. Review of Shelter, New Republic, 26 December 1994, pp. 39–40. Eder, Richard. “A Summer of Transformations,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 4 September 1994, pp. 3, 5. Hawthorne, Mary. “Carry on Camping,” London Review of Books, 6 April 1995, p. 24. Hill, Dorothy Combs. “Jayne Anne Phillips.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Larson, Leslie. “A Window on the Underworld,” Women’s Review of Books 12, no. 7 (April, 1995): 5. Lassner, Phyllis. “Jayne Anne Phillips: Women’s Narrative and the Recreation of History.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 193–210. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989. Schwartz, Deb. “Look Homeward, Angels,” Nation, 14 November 1994, pp. 585–588. Schwartz, Miranda, “To Bury the Violence,” Belles Lettres 10, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 11.

OTHER Jayne Anne Phillips Homepage. Available online. URL: http:// www.JayneAnnePhillips.com. Accessed September 25, 2005.

PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES HERMAN MELVILLE (1852)

The publication of Herman MELVILLE’s Pierre; or The Ambiguities was followed by scathing denunciations of the novel, which called Melville’s prose a “string of nonsense,” “trash,” and “crazy rigamarole” and the entire work a “dead failure” (quoted in Higgins and Parker, 33; 40). The novel seemed to defy categorization. Some literary critics argued that it was a sentimental gothic novel, pointing to the mysterious face that haunts the protagonist,

1044 PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES

Pierre Glendinning, and portends his family’s ruination. Others suggested that Melville’s book lampooned sentimental and domestic novels with its overblown language and sexual transgressions. Melville’s unreliable narrative voice and his novel’s postmodern tendencies annoyed other early critics. In 1930, E. L. Grant Watson reexamined Pierre and rescued the work from its literary exile. Since that time, critics and scholars have continued to debate the merit of Melville’s Pierre. In 1978, Melville scholars Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker wrote that Pierre’s “best readers” recognized the “heroic intellectual tasks” undertaken by Melville (Higgins and Parker, 241). Contemporary scholars often point out that numerous parallels to Melville’s life indicate Pierre is a thinly veiled autobiography: An extant letter confirms that Melville, like Pierre, had an illegitimate sister; Pierre’s frustrations as a writer mirror Melville’s own at the time Pierre was written; and the picturesque setting of Saddle Meadows resembles places Melville frequented, including the Berkshire Mountains, the Hudson River Valley, and the farmhouse of his friend Nathaniel HAWTHORNE. In a more recent Melville biography, Laurie RobertsonLorant called the work “one of the first great modern psychological novels in Western literature,” exploring the same murky waters of human nature as Melville’s MOBY-DICK (Robertson-Lorant, 304). Pierre’s psychological demise is strongly influenced by the environments he inhabits. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of Pierre is the novel’s ostensible division into two parts: the country and the city. The first half of the novel is set in Saddle Meadows, the Glendinning family’s rural estate, while the second half takes place in the quintessentially urban New York City. “Nature planted our Pierre” wrote Melville, “because Nature intended a rare and original development in Pierre” (13). Pierre’s “rare and original development” is shaped by themes of economic inequity, class division, and unconventional sexual relationships set against these rural and urban landscapes. At Saddle Meadows, Pierre enjoys a bourgeois life with his mother, Mary Glendinning, taking in commanding views of a landscape paid for by the displacement of Native Americans. Pierre shares an intense relationship with his mother that resembles the roman-

tic love of siblings, referring to his mother as “sister” while she calls him “brother.” Set to marry his social and economic equal, Lucy Tartan, Pierre soon discovers that his deceased father has an illegitimate daughter, Isabel Banford. After anguished deliberation, Pierre dismisses Lucy and assumes responsibility for Isabel by agreeing to marry her. In this way, reconciles Pierre, their family secret will remain undisclosed and Isabel will be removed from a life of abject poverty. After his mother disowns him for this apparent social faux pas, however, Pierre leaves the rural, emotional, and financial comfort of Saddle Meadows for the “urban labyrinth” of New York City with his “wife” Isabel and her mute companion Delly (Kelley, 396). Thus Pierre’s mental anguish, the redefinition of his relationships, and his movement away from the country upset not only the appearance of pastoral tranquility but also the reality of his psychological well-being. The second half of the novel begins when Pierre, Isabel, and Delly enter New York City by way of a dark, desolated, and foreboding street. Seeking shelter with his cousin, Glendinning Stanly, Pierre and his traveling companions meet with disappointment when Glendinning shuns Pierre. Homeless and destitute, Pierre, Isabel, and Delly are forced to live in an abandoned church, known as the Church of the Apostles, where impoverished city dwellers find refuge. In this urban environment, readers suddenly discover that Pierre is a well-known writer, and the novel takes a decided turn into the frustrations of Pierre’s work as an author and his further psychological deterioration. Meanwhile, his mother dies of shame and grief and Lucy joins the group at the Church of the Apostles. Lucy’s action does not sit well with Glendinning, or with her older brother, Frederic, and the men confront Pierre. In the end, the urban labyrinth—both a physical and a mental construct—confounds them all: Pierre kills Glendinning and is incarcerated, Lucy and Isabel kill themselves over Pierre’s imprisonment, and Pierre ultimately commits suicide. Melville’s Pierre anticipated literary theories that examine the associations and images in the country/city dichotomy and the role of rural and urban landscapes in 19th-century American literature (Otter, 352). Raymond Williams, for instance, argues that

PLAGUED BY THE NIGHTINGALE 1045

images of the “country as past” and the “city as future” represent “a growth and alteration of consciousness: a history repeated in many lives and many places which is fundamentally an alteration of perception and relationship” (Williams, 297). For Pierre, this alteration of perception is the result of dislocation from his past life at Saddle Meadows and relocation to New York City and a life of ambiguous meaning. To read Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, then, is to imagine two landscapes—the country and the city—that collide like colored patterns in a kaleidoscope, leaving human identities distorted, rearranged, and reframed, and to call each reader to envision a unique collision of light and shape.

SOURCES Higgins, Brian, and Hershal Parker. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities.” Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. Kelley, Wyn. “Pierre in a Labyrinth: The Mysteries and Miseries of New York.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 393–406. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1997. Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Edited by William C. Spengemann. New York: Penguin, 1996. Otter, Samuel. “The Overwrought Landscape of Pierre.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays, edited by John Bryant and Robert Milder, 349–374. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1997. Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996. Watson, E. L. Grant. “Melville’s Pierre.” New England Quarterly 3 (April 1930), 195–234. Reprinted in Critics on Melville. Readings in Literary Criticism, vol. 12, edited by Thomas J. Rountree. 94–100. Miami, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1972. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Jennifer Hughes Westerman

PLAGUED BY THE NIGHTINGALE KAY BOYLE (1931) Plagued by the Nightingale, written between 1924 and 1927 (Spanier, 57), published in 1931 in New York and republished in 1966 by Southern Illinois University Press, had long been considered Kay BOYLE’s first novel until Sandra Spanier discovered and published the 1924 manuscript Process in 2001. Plagued by the Nightingale takes its title from a 1923

poem by Marianne Moore quoted in context as the epigraph of the novel. Boyle omits the poem’s title (“Marriage”), suggesting that her novel is an obscure meditation on the topic of marriage. It is that, and far more. Drawing on autobiographical material from her marriage to Frenchman Richard Brault, with whom she left for France in 1923 to live with his family in Brittany, Boyle develops a scathing, occasionally funny, and ultimately tragic portrayal of a well-to-do provincial French family beset by a debilitating bone disease in the line of male inheritance and preoccupied with marriage, procreation, and living comme il faut. Joan Mellon has called the novel a “satire” (Mellon, 57). Boyle’s long expatriate sojourn in Europe makes her a particularly astute commentator on the cultural clash between a progressive American woman and a traditional French family. In her subsequent novels set in France, Austria, and Germany, Boyle made a 20thcentury version of the “international theme” her own characteristic literary territory. Vignette-length chapters show family members in interaction with each other, rarely with outsiders. Papa and Maman fill their traditional roles as ruler and enforcer of the family, respectively. A nearly incestuous familial closeness is suggested by the older daughter Charlotte’s life in the neighboring house. A papal dispensation was required for her marriage to her first cousin. Together with their five young children, they represent the older generation’s ideal family. Papa’s and Maman’s three youngest daughters are all in love with the same young man, a physician named Luc, who is the only outsider admitted into this closely knit circle. Bridget, the young American woman who has married into the clan, learns over the course of a summer that her husband Nicholas will gain access to his family’s economic opportunities only if the young couple produce a child. Nicholas, impeded in his vitality by his ever-weakening legs, will not consent to having a child and tacitly encourages Bridget’s and Luc’s apparent mutual affection. Religious observations, proper dress and behavior, and extravagant verbal expressions of affection en famille fill this family’s existence. Uncle Robert, residing in nearby St. Malo, completes the picture: the younger girls’ dowries as well as Nicholas’s future

1046 PLAINSONG

depend on his whim and munificence. The family’s persistence in tradition and their apparent imperturbability amount to a resignation that refuses to recognize the passage of time. When a large acacia tree is felled by a storm, Charlotte’s husband Jean plans on planting a new tree, “ ‘and, you’ll see, in two hundred years it will amount to the same thing.’ He spoke of these two centuries as if they were years in which the children would be growing up—mild and unalterable” (172). In her ability to sketch the psychological portraits of her characters both in their actions and in their thoughts, Boyle is heir to Edith WHARTON. Abby Werlock fully explores the Wharton/Boyle connection in her claim that “both invented new ways of writing the Bildungsroman” (Werlock, 263). In her use of symbols such as the fallen tree, the rushing tide on Brittany’s coast, a fire in the village, the debilitating bone disease of the male characters, and finally the silent, caged nightingale, Boyle works in the vitalist tradition of the 1910s and 1920s that also finds expression in D. H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers, 1913) and Rose Macaulay (Dangerous Ages, 1921). Boyle critiques the stifling trappings of French bourgeois culture but does not advocate a revolution of morals in this novel. Bridget witnesses dramatic events, but her presence also decisively changes the dynamics of interaction in the French family. The early chapters are dominated by her linguistic insufficiency, while in the latter part of the novel both Bridget’s speech and her decisions determine the family’s future. Charlotte’s sixth pregnancy, at age 32, brings about her death. Nicholas’s wish to emigrate to North Africa has been thwarted. By summer’s end, Luc has decided not to marry any of the three younger sisters but to emigrate to Indo-China instead. When he obliquely invites Bridget to escape with him, she refuses and tells him that she and Nicholas will have a child instead. Boyle leaves it to the reader to decide whether Bridget’s acquiescence to the family’s wish is a defeat or is either a loving or a pragmatic gesture of assistance to her fatalist husband. Dianne Chambers makes the convincing case that “Bridget’s American blood represents the possibility of regeneration” (Chambers, 254). Suzanne Clark interprets Bridget’s gesture as her claim to “the sexuality of the maternal,” which becomes a rebellion “against the

bourgeois family’s manipulative economy” (Clark, 140–141). Boyle herself would not return to the United States until the middle of World War II, even as her character Bridget has recognized, in Chambers’s words, that “tradition exacts a price that runs counter to specifically identified American values of independence and individuality” (Chambers, 256). By thematizing a woman’s conflict between self-determination and familial obligation, Plagued by the Nightingale also asks a central modernist question: Where can an individual still be at home in an international, culturally deracinated world?

SOURCES Boyle, Kay. Plagued by the Nightingale. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966. Chambers, Dianne. “Female Roles and National Identity in Kay Boyle’s Plagued by the Nightingale and Edith Wharton’s Madame de Treymes.” In Critical Essays on Kay Boyle, edited by Marilyn Elkins, 241–261. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Mellon, Joan. Kay Boyle: Author of Herself. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. Spanier, Sandra. Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist. New York: Paragon House, 1988. Werlock, Abby. “Advancing Literary Women: Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, and My Next Bride.” In Critical Essays on Kay Boyle, edited by Marilyn Elkins, 262–275. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. Thomas Austenfeld

PLAINSONG KENT HARUF (1999) Plainsong, by Kent HARUF, is a widely acclaimed, strong, and heartfelt novel of life in a rural farming and ranching town in western Colorado. The coming together of Haruf’s original and fully realized characters creates a story sparsely but beautifully told of life in a remote and isolated small community. To a reader more accustomed to life in a big city with its multitude of social strife and urban problems, it may come as a surprise to find similar stress, pain, and coping mechanisms in a radically different environment. In the hands of another, lessaccomplished author, this might have become a soap opera—or worse, a repetition of confessional stories we

PLAINSONG 1047

have all heard before. But Kent Haruf is an accomplished and talented writer. He has lived in towns like this one and understands and respects these people. He tells his story in a straightforward manner, and his readers quickly become immersed in the book. Haruf does not delve into or analyze anyone’s psyche. Rather, he allows us to see human strengths and weaknesses, humor and curiosity, and ultimately resilience. Haruf’s writing style echoes both the laconic and direct speech of these people and the sparse harshness of the wideopen land. Emotions run deep here. This is an author who respects the multidimensional characters he has created. As we enter into their homes and lives, we not only are absorbed in their stories but also recognize the universality of family strife and joy. An astute reader should be able to go from the specifics of this story to the larger human condition. There is much here to enjoy and to value. The plot is easy to ride along with. Haruf blends the tales of several disparate individuals whose lives converge as their paths intersect. The chapters bear the name of each main character. We do not get confused. The McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, are two seasoned farmers who spend their days working the land that has become theirs since the death of their parents, when the boys were still in their teens. Their work is hard. Farming and ranching require days spent with demanding and endless time-consuming chores. The men tend to their cattle on the family ranch and live an isolated life, rarely going into the small town nearby, and having very little to do with any other people. They are men of few words. Tom Guthrie is a high school teacher who lives a lonely life as he raises his two young sons. Guthrie’s wife has been depressed for years, their marriage a failure. She withdraws from her family life, first emotionally involved only with her own unhappiness, and finally actually moving away from the town in which they live. Haruf, without being maudlin or sentimental, allows the reader to see how her departure affects the lives of everyone in her family. Guthrie often helps the McPherson brothers, providing a needed extra hand on the ranch. He often brings his boys with him, and we begin to see a natural mixing of the generations. Perhaps the most com-

pelling character here is a young pregnant high school girl, Victoria Roubideaux, who has been kicked out of the home she lived in with her mother and literally finds herself with nowhere to go. She turns to Maggie Jones, a warm-hearted high school teacher who in turn turns to the McPherson brothers and convinces them to allow Victoria to live with them. Maggie knows the brothers well enough to be certain they will be kind and decent to the girl, and that she in turn will provide an antidote to their isolation and loneliness. This interweaving of lives, often somewhat improbable, becomes believable and convincing in Haruf’s hands. These taciturn, hard-working farmers are decent people. Victoria is young and confused, but as they learn to adjust to living together, all grow in respect, caring, and love. Haruf writes with an emotional wisdom. In the epigraph to this novel, Haruf explains that the title, Plainsong, refers to the simple and unadorned melody used in the Christian church from early times on. It is an apt analogy for his book. In his understated voice, direct and laconic, his writing exists within a narrow range of notes and tones. As author and teacher Mickey Pearlman has stated, “There is no harmony here—only melody.” This is a story about family, but it is also strongly a story about a specific locale. These people are products of where they live. The descriptions of the land with its rocky, rough terrain and the harsh weathers’ cold and bitter winds bring us into a clearly drawn portrait of part of American life today. This sense of place is very important to the book, as it is in the more recently published Eventide (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). Haruf knows his territory. Like William FAULKNER’s Yoknapatawpha County, John UPDIKE’s New England suburbia, and Cormac MCCARTHY’s Plains, Kent Haruf has made a specific community a significant focus point. Unlike those in many postmodern novels, these lives do not exist in a vague anywhere or anytime. The author has found a locality that offers him much richness to mine. The deeper he goes into its uniqueness—the larger the scope of its impact. Plainsong is neither a “woman’s novel,” nor a “man’s book.” Full of the cadences and plainspoken manner of the plains, the writing transcends limitations or type, a

1048 PLAINS SONG: FOR FEMALE VOICES

fresh and original voice that makes the novel both compassionate and compelling. There is great authenticity here. Ultimately, we are left thinking about the absolute necessity of family, the solace of real friendship, and the possibility of finding courage and love in community. In Plainsong, we are shown pain but also dignity, humor, and love. It is an understated and a hard-toput-down book. As Howard Frank Mosher has stated, “Kent Haruf has created an American masterwork”— an “account of a place where family and community still come first.”

SOURCES Haruf, Kent. Plainsong. New York: Knopf, 1999. Mosher, Howard Frank. Plainsong book jacket blurb. New York: Knopf, 1999, Mona Dukess

PLAINS SONG: FOR FEMALE VOICES WRIGHT MORRIS (1980) For this, his final novel, Wright MORRIS received an American Book Award. Although many of his previous novels had featured female characters, most of those characters had been seen through male points of view or characterized largely by their effect on the men around them. Although Morris had typically taken some pains to make his female characters credible and complex, they had often seemed projections of male failure, frustration, or fantasy. Ranging from emasculating matriarchs to sexual playthings, these female characters would hardly appeal to feminist critics. So the publication of Plains Song, a multigenerational family saga told from multiple female points of view and demonstrating a sympathetic understanding of those points of view, could hardly have been anticipated. Plains Song is framed by the last hours of Cora Atkins, who is introduced in a coma at the beginning of the novel and finally expires near the close. Throughout her adult life, Cora has been the embodiment of endurance, of the values associated with a willingness to commit oneself to hard work. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Cora had moved to Ohio to work in an uncle’s hotel. There she met a Nebraska homesteader named Emerson Atkins, whom she agreed to marry even though she knew even less about him than about Nebraska. It would be 10 days before they consummated their mar-

riage during their journey back to his homestead, and it would be the last time they ever had sexual relations. Cora found the experience so traumatic that she put her fist in her mouth to stifle her cries and bit through to the bone. Still, despite his brutish awkwardness, Emerson managed to make her pregnant, and after a long and difficult labor in which she refused to scream, Cora gave birth to her daughter, Madge. Emerson’s brother married an Arkansas woman named Belle who was in every way Cora’s opposite. Sensuous but delicate, Belle would eventually die in childbirth but not before she produced three daughters, two of whom, Sharon Rose and Fayrene, would live to adulthood. Ironically, Cora’s daughter, Madge, seemed temperamentally to take after her Aunt Belle, while Belle’s oldest daughter, Sharon Rose, seemed more to take after Cora. Madge eventually married Ned Kibbee, with whom she had two daughters, Caroline and Blanche. Sharon Rose, however, remained single and moved to Chicago, where she entered into a long career as a music teacher. When Blanche came to live for a time with Sharon Rose, the girl’s sexual precociousness caused her aunt to send her back to Nebraska much earlier than planned. Yet, despite her involvements with a series of men, Blanche has never married. Caroline, who has from a young age admired Sharon Rose’s independence and self-reliance, has become an ardent feminist who regards marriage as an anachronism. At the other end of the spectrum, the fate of Sharon Rose’s younger sister, Fayrene, represented everything that Sharon Rose was determined to escape. Fayrene had become pregnant by, and then married, a loutish farmhand named Avery Dickel. Especially in the connections between Cora, Sharon Rose, and Caroline, Morris is able to explore the linkages and gaps between memory and truth and between sympathy and understanding. Most pointedly, Sharon Rose has literally as well as figuratively tried to distance herself from her family and her past. But when she returns to Nebraska for Cora’s funeral, Sharon Rose feels all sorts of unexpected bonds to the other women in her family, regardless of how much she disapproves of or is simply bewildered by some of their life choices. In the context of these profound but inexplicable sympathies, not just the men but the dramatic historical

PLATH, SYLVIA 1049

events of the century are rendered almost extraneous to the essence of these women’s lives. Cora’s death causes the women in this extended family to recognize, each in her own way, that their shared experience is ultimately more significant than the differences by which they have defined themselves and distinguished themselves from each other. Of course, the conclusion of the novel contains some underlying ambiguities, the chief one being the suggestion of Sharon Rose’s lesbianism. Certainly, the occasion of Cora’s death has heightened the women’s senses of connection, and time, distance, and routine will cause their differences to resurface. Still, the intensity of their sense of connection at this moment will ensure that it, too, will carry over.

SOURCES Arnold, Marilyn. “Wright Morris’s Plains Song: Woman’s Search for Harmony,” South Dakota Review 20 (Autumn 1982): 50–62. Bird, Roy K. Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Crump, Gail Bruce. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. ———. “Wright Morris.” In A Literary History of the American West, edited by Max Westbrook, 777–791. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses, 153–167. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Lewis, Linda M. “Plains Song: Wright Morris’s New Melody for Audacious Female Voices,” Great Plains Quarterly 8 (Winter 1988): 29–37. Madden, David. Wright Morris. Boston: Twayne, 1964. Morris, Wright. Plains Song: For Female Voices. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Waldeland, Lynne. “Plains Song: Women’s Voices in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24 (Fall 1982): 7–20. Wydeven, Joseph J. “Visual Artistry in Wright Morris’s Plains Song for Female Voices,” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 19 (1992): 116–126. ———. “Wright Morris: An Update.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook, 685–692. Fort Worth: Western Literature Association/Texas Christian University Press, 1997. ———. Wright Morris Revisited. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, no. 703. New York: Twayne, 1998. Martin Kich

PLATH, SYLVIA (1932–1963)

Since her 1963 suicide at age 30, Sylvia Plath’s already fine reputation has burgeoned. It rests on her autobiographical novel The BELL JAR (1963), the extraordinary poetry in Colossus (1960), and her posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982. Her poems are a blend of brilliant, imaginative, sometimes violent metaphor and image combined with passion, anger, a concern with feminism, and a compelling need to be understood. The Bell Jar recounts a young woman’s search for identity, her rebellion against convention, mental collapse, and recovery. The novel, taught in many high school and college courses, continues to sell steadily in numerous countries, implying the still powerful nature of its message, particularly for women. Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Otto Plath, a college professor who had immigrated from Germany, and Aurelia Schober, who taught secretarial studies at Boston University. Her father died when Plath was eight years old, and much of her poetry concerns her ambivalent, often tormented feelings about him. Plath matriculated at Smith College; she wrote and published poetry even while still a student. While at Smith she suffered the mental breakdown and attempted suicide she would describe some years later in The Bell Jar; after six months of treatment, however, Plath recovered, returned to Smith, and graduated summa cum laude in 1955. With a Fulbright grant, she traveled to England, met the English poet Ted Hughes, and married him on June 16, 1956. She continued to write and to publish poetry but also typed his manuscripts. In 1962, after learning of his affair with another woman, Plath separated from Hughes. She wrote poetry now recognized as stunningly original in its anger, its vivid colors, and its depiction of sunshine, energy, and life juxtaposed to the seductive lure of despair, emptiness, and darkness. The Bell Jar, poignantly depicting the pain of adolescence, has been compared to such other American classics as J. D. SALINGER’s The CATCHER IN THE RYE. It chronicles the potential and manic depression of Esther Greenwood, a student at a New England college, who, like Plath, through therapy and electroshock treatments, manages to return to a normal life. It was published, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in England, in

1050 PLAY IT AS IT LAYS

January 1963. Despite its hopeful ending, Plath scholar Caroline King Barnard notes “a note of warning” for The Bell Jar’s author, “for whom the prognosis” was “dark indeed” (Barnard, 33). Within a month, Plath was dead; she inhaled gas from her kitchen stove. If anything, interest in Plath’s work and life have increased in the last few years. In 1978, Avco-Embassy produced a film version of The Bell Jar. In 2003, the BBC produced the film Sylvia, about Plath’s relationship with Ted Hughes; it was written by John Brownlow and directed by Christine Jeffs and starred Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath. The film was objected to by the Hughes family, represented by Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes, who refused permission for the use of any of her mother’s poetry. The film also spawned at least one lawsuit, successfully brought by Dr. Jane V. Anderson, who was the model for Esther Greenwood’s friend Joan Gilling in the novel (Lacayo). Sylvia Plath’s papers are housed at the Lilly Library of Indiana University, Bloomington, and the Rare Book Room at Smith College.

NOVEL The Bell Jar. (Under pseudonym Victoria Lucas). London, England: Heinemann, 1963.

SOURCES Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York: Viking, 1991. Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Barnard, Caroline King. Sylvia Plath. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Broe, Mary Lynn. Protean Poetic: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Columbia: University of Missouri, 1980. Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Sylvia Plath. Revised. Boston: Twayne, 1998. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. The Journey toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poems of 1956–1959. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1994. Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1991. Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998. Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper, 1976. Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough. New York: Ballantine, 1983. ———. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London: Virago, 1991. Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: The Undiscovered Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Strangeways, Al. Sylvia Plath: The Shaping of Shadows. East Brunswick, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Tabor, Stephen. Sylvia Plath: An Analytical Bibliography. London: Mansell, 1987. Tennant, Emma. Sylvia and Ted. New York: Holt, 2001. Van Dyke, Susan R. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Bell Jar: A Novel of the Fifties. Boston: Twayne, 1992. ———. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. ———. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988.

OTHER The Academy of American Poets Poetry Exhibits: Sylvia Plath. Available online. URL: http://www.poets.org/poets/ poets.cfm?prmID=11. Accessed September 25, 2005. Lacayo, Richard. “Of Whom the Bell Told; Mixed Message from a Legal Battle over Facts and Fiction.” Time. (February 9, 2003). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 4645445. Accessed September 25, 2005. The Sylvia Plath Forum. Available online. URL: http://www. sylviaplathforum.com. Accessed September 25, 2005.

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS JOAN DIDION (1970) Joan DIDION sets her second novel, Play It as It Lays, in Hollywood and on the freeway and desert surrounding it. The Los Angeles area serves less as a subject than as a background for exploring protagonist Maria (pronounced mar-EYE-ah) Wyeth’s depersonalizing experience of the Hollywood lifestyle popularized in movies and fiction. Unlike starlets who make it big in Hollywood, Maria leads a decidedly unglamorous life: She gets only bit parts acting; her four-year-old daughter, Kate, is hospitalized with some undefined condition demanding

PLAY IT AS IT LAYS 1051

treatment with early forms of Ritalin; her marriage to filmmaker Carter Lang (who featured Maria in two of his films) is falling apart; and she illegally aborts a pregnancy at Carter’s insistence. Though Maria’s precise reasons for having the abortion remain unclear, the novel presents her uncertainty about paternity and Carter’s threat to Maria’s custody of Kate as two possibilities, among others. To cope with the trauma, Maria takes to driving aimlessly on the freeways until she realizes the peril in constant movement, and turns to numbing her distress with alcohol, sex, and drugs. The emotional vertigo of the abortion prompts much of Maria’s behavior throughout the text, which culminates in Maria’s complicity in BZ’s suicide. She finds herself in bed with BZ, her husband’s gay producer, who is intent not on sex but on swallowing the Seconal that results in his dying in Maria’s arms. The reader discerns these circumstances in three narrated monologues by Maria, Helene, and Carter, which open the book, and in 84 rapid-fire sections, some comprising only a couple of sentences. Written in Didion’s characteristically sparse style and focusing, like Didion’s other work, on the characters’ response to their environments, Play It as It Lays’s large amount of white space on the page reiterates the existential angst Maria feels. Maria’s seeming lack of concern and her inability to respond have prompted some to read the novel as nihilistic, or as Didion’s indictment of contemporary moral relativism. Some read Maria’s abortion as a consequence of the Hollywood lifestyle, specifically, or of the breakdown in American morals, generally. To some, Maria emerges as rather nonchalant about moral values: She does not question what makes Iago evil, presumably because she either already knows or simply does not care; she goes along with Carter’s suggested abortion without raising the issue with Les Goodwin, whom she suspects of fathering the child; and she makes no move to stop BZ from committing suicide, instead holding his hand as he dies. Such judgments not only deny the decidedly feminine nature of her crisis, they also disable the reader’s identification of influences underlying Maria’s actions. Maria inherited a confused sense of how to be in the world from her father, Harry. He taught her to “play the game as it lays,” and to watch for rattlesnakes under

the rocks, but she discovers that these lessons do not “apply” in real life. For example, while giving life advice, Harry Wyeth continually insists that Maria is “holding all the aces” (7), but the game he talks about playing is craps, not poker. Maria sees the rattlesnakes, said by some critics to symbolize evil, as merely situational hazards that lurk everywhere. As part of the general malaise, they provide no system for understanding good and evil. When the reader considers that Maria has heretofore sought to live by her father’s rules, only to discover their inefficacy, her mode of handling situations seems less a product of a failed moral vision, or of a world altogether devoid of one, than of a woman perpetually at the mercy of men around her and unable to affect change using her arsenal of experience and information about life. Maria endures a crisis because of the suffering of others, including her aborted fetus, but appears not to seek a means of understanding that crisis in moral terms. Nevertheless, the novel entertains the possibility that she will benefit from her experience of tragedy and transform her life. When deciding to have the abortion, Maria thinks that “she would do this one last thing and then they would never be able to touch her again” (73), as if bent on a course of future action. Maria emerges, then, as a woman bereft of a heritage, moral or otherwise, which Didion poignantly symbolizes through her self-asserted “trouble with as it was” (5) and the disappearance of her hometown, Silver Wells, which sat in what is now the middle of a nuclear missile testing range. Maria’s individual legacy thus becomes intertwined with America’s, her inheritance literally subsumed by the nation’s struggle for dominance via superior nuclear capability. This dubious future serves as a major theme of Didion’s novel Democracy (1984) and her essay collections on California: Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), The White Album (1979), and Where I Was From (2003). Play It As It Lays does not warn or chide; instead, it explores how the promise of prosperity (what Maria seeks in her entrée to Hollywood) has been derailed by attempts to control its trajectory by characters like BZ, Carter, even Harry Wyeth, while those without hope for control languish in circumstances not entirely of their own making.

1052 PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, THE

At the end of Play It As It Lays, Maria appears to be in a sanatorium or a neuropsychiatric ward. The reader learns of this fallout after BZ’s suicide during the opening narratives, which only resonate upon completion of the novel, and from italicized sections from the journal Maria keeps at her doctors’ behest. In the journal, she grapples with the “as it was” she has always forsworn and indicates another attempt to understand the present in terms of the past. But her thoughts are now largely turned toward a future with Kate, and, having not opted to kill herself alongside BZ, she has clearly determined that life is worth living. Though bleak, the ending thus also flickers with hope, because given all she has already endured, she appears quite equipped to survive. Perhaps, the novel suggests, “playing it as it lays” means surviving against the odds.

SOURCES Didion, Joan. Play It as It Lays. New York: Pocket Books, 1970. Friedman, Ellen G., ed. Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984. Henderson, Katherine Usher. Joan Didion. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, Co., 1981. Wynchell, Mark Royden. Joan Didion: Revised Edition. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Jon Adams

PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, THE PHILIP ROTH (2004) Although Philip ROTH is one of the most significant American novelists writing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, his critical success has not always translated into book sales. PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, Roth’s scandalous (for the time) and highly comic foray into male sexuality ruled the best-seller lists in 1969, but since then few of his novels have matched its “highly flammable,” and popularly successful, combination of controversy and timeliness. That is, until The Plot against America in 2004. In Roth’s most recent novel, an alternate history in which aviator hero Charles A. Lindbergh runs against the popular Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and wins the presidency, he once again turns to 20th-century American history as his narrative backdrop, as he did in the American Trilogy (AMERICAN PASTORAL, 1997; I Married a Communist, 1998; and The Human Stain, 2000). And

also as in the trilogy, he uses the historical moment to show how individuals define themselves by, and at the same time become hostages to, the many cultural and political forces that surround them. Yet what has made The Plot against America such a popular (as well as critical) success is twofold: Roth’s willingness to take on and “retextualize” a heroic American icon, and the perceived relevance of the novel’s themes to its current sociopolitical contexts. What has garnered the most attention in this novel is its alternate historical premise. The isolationist wing of the Republican Party, frustrated after eight years of political marginalization and resentful of FDR’s interventionist policies against Nazi Germany, decides to nominate Charles Lindbergh over Wendell L. Wilkie for president of the United States in 1940. The wildly popular Lindbergh—supported by the America First Committee, traveling around the country in his legendary Spirit of St. Louis, and campaigning under the slogan “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War”—defeats FDR in a landslide. Within the first two years of his presidency, Lindbergh institutes a series of policies, all of which suggest an appeasement to Hitler’s militaristic and racist strategies: signing nonaggression pacts with both Germany (the “Iceland Understanding”) and Japan (the “Hawaii Understanding”); creating Just Folks, a volunteer work program managed under the newly formed Office of American Absorption, whose purpose is to introduce urban youth (read Jews) to “the traditional ways of heartland life” (84); and instituting Homestead 42, legislation reminiscent of the Homestead Act of 1862, but this time one designed to disperse and relocate inner-city ethnic Americans (again, read Jews) into rural regions of the country under the euphemistic goals of “provid[ing] a challenging environment steeped in our country’s oldest traditions where parents and children can enrich their Americanness over the generations” (204–205). However, all these alternate historical events, as provocative as they may be, are nothing more than a backdrop to the primary focus of the novel: Roth’s family. Lindbergh’s presidency and its many ramifications are rarely the primary subject of novel but are instead filtered through the dialogue and conflicts among a young Philip Roth, his family, and their Jewish com-

PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, THE

munity in the Weequahic section of Newark, New Jersey. As Roth does in his autobiographical tetralogy— The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993)—he uses “Philip Roth” as his protagonist, a fictional construct/character who nonetheless shares with his real-life counterpart an almost identical appearance, psychology, and history. The action in The Plot against America takes place over a period of young Philip’s life from June 1940, when he is a seven-year-old third grader, to October 1942. During this time, he and his family struggle to make sense of the events unfolding around them, circumstances that as Americanized Jews they would have never predicted to encounter. Along the way Philip’s older brother, Sandy, is willingly “absorbed” into the Just Folks program (and subsequently comes to appreciate both Lindbergh and pork products); a cousin, Alvin, runs off to Canada to enlist in their commando forces and fight against Hitler, losing his left leg in the process; their Aunt Evelyn marries Rabbi Lionel Benglesdorf, a bigwig in the Office of American Absorption and self-deluded Jewish front for the Lindbergh administration’s anti-Semitic policies; and one of the family’s former neighbors dies in America’s first pogrom, sparked by the incendiary anti-Lindbergh rhetoric of journalist Walter Winchell, who, in 1942, becomes an early front-runner for the 1944 Democratic Party nomination. One of the things that make The Plot against America so striking is Roth’s handling not only of American history, but of America’s heroic icons, most obviously Charles Lindbergh (who, in real life, was a member of the America First Committee, did receive the Iron Cross from Herman Goering, and did give a speech in 1941 calling American Jews, along with those in the Roosevelt administration, warmongers). This is not the kind of alternate history found in much science fiction, where the emphasis is placed on the political actions themselves, where grand figures stride across the narrative and immovable forces slowly unfold the text of history. In this novel, Roth shows us how American subjects, individuals as well as political ideas, have been given iconic status through a variety of texts: newspaper accounts, cinematic newsreels, gossip columns, history textbooks, congressional legislation,

1053

and literary narrative. Roth indirectly demonstrates how constructed these identities are by “retextualizing” American history and, more specifically, the Norman Rockwellesque ideal of American identity as embodied in Charles A. Lindbergh. In much the same way he does in earlier novels such as The Ghost Writer (1979) and The Counterlife (1987), where the thematic emphasis is placed on postmodern constructions of the individual subject, Roth in his most recent novel focuses on the “text” of the self—except here, the contingency of identity is placed on the larger national stage. Coming as it does after the historical sweep of the American Trilogy, Roth’s narrative focus in The Plot against America could not be otherwise. Perhaps even more notable, at least in terms of the novel’s popularity, are the ways in which readers approach The Plot against America as a roman à clef of current events (for example, the unlikeliness of the George W. Bush presidency, the 9/11 attacks, the Patriot Act and its restrictions on civil liberties). But Roth himself has warned against such a reading. His goal, as he bluntly stated in the New York Times Book Review immediately preceding the novel’s publication, was merely to “reconstruct the years 1940–42 as they might have been if Lindbergh, instead of Roosevelt, had been elected president in the 1940 election. I am not pretending to be interested in those two years—I am interested in those two years” (New York Times Book Review 2004, 10). Yet how much are we to believe the author when, in the same New York Times Book Review essay, he blasts the current president as “a man unfit to run a hardware store let alone a nation like this one” (New York Times Book Review 2004, 10), and who brackets The Plot against America with the phrase “perpetual fear” (in the first sentence of the novel and the title of the last chapter)—an ambiguous emotional state that in many ways defines our post-9/11 world? Perhaps Philip Roth, well-known for his mischievous and labyrinthine textual play between fact and fiction, is wanting it both ways. Such a narrative stance brings to mind the profound romantic irony found in the works of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Herman MELVILLE, Henry JAMES, and William FAULKNER. For an aging contemporary novelist securing his place in American letters, this is not such bad company.

1054 POE, EDGAR ALLAN

SOURCES Roth, Philip. Interview with Jeffrey Brown. News Hour with Jim Lehrer. PBS. WNET, New York. October 27, 2004, and November 10, 2004. (Two-part interview) ———. Interview with Kurt Anderson. Studio 360. WNYC, New York. November 6, 2004. (Full interview, http://www.wnyc.org/studio360/show110604.html) ———. “Mrs. Lindbergh, Mr. Ciardi, and the Teeth and Claws of the Civilized World,” Chicago Review 11 (1957): 72–76. ———. “Novelist Philip Roth.” Interview with Tom Ashbrook. On Point. WBUR, Boston. December 3, 2004. ———. The Plot against America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. ———. “Pulitzer Prize–Winning Novelist Philip Roth.” Interview with Terry Gross. Fresh Air. Natl. Public Radio. WHYY, Philadelphia. October 11, 2004. ———. “Roth Rewrites History with The Plot against America.” Interview with Robert Siegel. All Things Considered. Natl. Public Radio. WNYC, New York. September 23, 2004. ———. “The Story behind The Plot against America,” New York Times Book Review, 19 September 2004, p. 10. Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Derek Royal

POE, EDGAR ALLAN (1809–1849) Edgar Allan Poe is forever identified with his eerie poem “The Raven,” with his many gothic horror stories, and as the father of the detective story. His perspicacious literary criticism still influences literature in both the United States and Europe. Today’s classroom discussions are often about his addictions to drugs and alcohol, his marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, and his still unexplained early death at age 40 (was he drunk? was he rabid?). In addition to Eureka (1848), his novel-length prose poem, he wrote The NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, OF NANTUCKET (1838). Increasing interest in this novel, from myriad perspectives, attests to its significance in the American literary canon. Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, to David Poe, Jr., and Elizabeth Arnold, both talented actors. Orphaned at age two, Poe was reared by his godfather, John Allan, a Richmond, Virginia, merchant. Allan raised Poe as a Southern

patrician gentleman and educated him in England and at the University of Virginia and West Point. He married Virginia Clemmon May 16, 1836. Poe was publishing volumes of verse and, after being expelled from West Point, settled in Baltimore, where he began to write stories, and then in Richmond, where he became an influential editor of the Southern Literary Messenger; there he serialized The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and then extensively revised it before it was published in book form with the author’s name “anonymous” in 1838. The novel is about a journal kept by Pym, who sails on a whaler from Nantucket, Massachusetts, and survives repeated and extended moments of horror on the high seas, until the ship disappears into a swirling chasm that dissolves into pure whiteness. Scholar Vincent Buranelli points out that A. Gordon Pym is so well developed “that it may have a descendant in [Herman MELVILLE’s] MOBY-DICK” (Buranelli, 70). After A. Gordon Pym appeared, Poe moved to Philadelphia, then New York, where he edited Burlington Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, the Evening Mirror, and the Broadway Journal, and published most of his most celebrated stories. His wife died of tuberculosis in 1847 and Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Maryland. He is buried alongside his wife and her mother. Scholars continue to debate the meaning and depth of A. Gordon Pym in terms of Jungian psychology, philosophy, the Bible, good and evil, race relations, myth, and chaos theory.

NOVEL The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket. Anonymous. New York: Harper, 1838.

SOURCES Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe. 2 vols. New York: Doran, 1926. Benton. Richard P., ed. New Approaches to Poe: A Symposium, Hartford, Conn.: Transcendental Books, 1970. Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Griswold, Rufus Wilmot. “Memoir of the Author.” In The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. 4 vols. III: vii–xxxix. New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850–1856. Ingram, John H. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters and Opinions. 2 vols. London: John Hogg, 1880.

POISONWOOD BIBLE, THE 1055

Mabbott, Thomas Ollive. “Annals of Poe’s Life.” In Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. 3 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969–1978, I: 527–572. Mankowitz, Wolf. The Extraordinary Mr. Poe. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978. Miller, John Carl, ed. Building Poe Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. ———, ed. Poe’s Helen Remembers. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979. Pollin, Burton R. Discoveries in Poe. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941. Symons, Julian. The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Thomas, David K., and Dwight Thomas. The Poe Log; A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Whitman, Sarah Helen. Edgar Poe and His Critics. New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1860. Woodberry, George Edward. The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, Personal and Literary. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.

OTHER The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. Available online. URL: http://www.eapoe.org/index.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher. Available online. URL: http:// www.comnet.ca/~forrest. Accessed September 25, 2005. Online Literature Library Edgar Allan Poe. Available online. URL: http://www.literature.org/authors/poe-edgar-allan. Accessed on September 25, 2005. The Poe Decoder. Available online. URL: http://www.poedecoder. com. Accessed September 25, 2005. The Poetry Archives: Edgar Allen Poe. Available online. URL: http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=overview&author=15. Accessed September 25, 2005. A Poe Webliography. Available online. URL: http://andromeda. rutgers.edu/~ehrlich/poesites.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

POISONWOOD BIBLE, THE BARBARA KINGSOLVER (1998) This intricately structured, multivocal novel is at once an engrossing saga of an American missionary family and an important political allegory about the ethnocentricity with which the United States

and Europe have historically approached Africa. Spanning roughly three decades, the novel begins in 1959, when Nathan Price, a domineering evangelical Baptist from Georgia, packs up his wife and four daughters and sets out to convert the heathen in what was then the Belgian Congo. Equipped with Bibles and Betty Crocker cake mixes, the Prices are repeatedly foiled in their attempts to transplant their lifestyle and worldview to a place with its own rich culture and a scarcity of resources for survival. Particularly thwarted is Nathan, whose imperious attitude is manifest as much in his abusive treatment of his family as in his disregard for the indigenous culture: He tramples on local customs and ignorantly blasphemes in the native language—mistranslating “Jesus” as both “fish bait” and “poisonwood.” His inadvertent preaching of the gospel as poisonwood (yielding the title and a central theme of the novel) is more than a linguistic mistake; the chauvinistic attitudes that accompany Nathan’s frequent mistranslations are “poison” to the indigenous culture. While Nathan is symbolically central to the novel, this is not his story. Instead, KINGSOLVER masterfully weaves the story together from the perspectives of the wife and daughters. The mother, Orleana, narrates retrospectively from Sanderling Island, Georgia, while the girls (Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May) narrate from the moment, as if recording their reflections in a diary. In the first section, Orleana cues the reader that “disaster is coming” (6), and from that point the narrative burns at both ends, as the girls’ telling of events gradually catches up to the mother’s later vantage point. Each narrator relates how she has been profoundly shaped by her experiences in Africa; even Rachel, the least open-minded, declares, “You can’t just sashay into the jungle aiming to change it all over the Christian style, without expecting the jungle to change you right back” (515). The personal and political narratives intersect when the Prices lose their youngest daughter the same day that the newly independent Congo loses its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba—murdered after having been deposed in a CIA-backed coup. Readers not familiar with this history will piece together an understanding of events along with the characters, learning that Lumumba’s suspected alliance with the Soviet

1056 POISONWOOD BIBLE, THE

Union made him a casualty of Cold War politics, and that in his place, the United States installed the purportedly “pro-Western” Mobutu, a corrupt ruler who went on to become one of the wealthiest men in the world while ruling over one of the poorest African nations. Kingsolver suggests that she and her readers are in a position analogous to that of the narrators: “We didn’t make the awful decisions our government imposed on Africa. We didn’t call for the assassination of Lumumba; we hardly even knew about it. We just inherited these decisions, and now have to reconcile them with our sense of who we are” (www.kingsolver.com, “Poisonwood Bible Questions and Answers”). The family tragedy is the catalyst that gives Orleana and the girls the courage to leave Nathan, though they will spend their lifetimes making sense of these events. This, then, is a story of reckoning—of assessing responsibility for personal and political events—as each woman grapples with finding a way to live with what she’s learned and what she’s become. Kingsolver’s earlier novels (The BEAN TREES, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven) also take on serious social and political issues, from the erasure of Native American cultures to industrial pollution. In fact, Kingsolver regards writing as a form of political activism, an extension of the anti-Vietnam protests and feminist consciousness-raising that she participated in while in college. While this overtly political focus leads some reviewers and critics to regard The Poisonwood Bible as polemical or reductive (see Kunz; Kakutani), the novel has garnered many popular and critical accolades, including winner of the Patterson Fiction Prize and the ABBY (American Booksellers Book of the Year) award, runner-up for PEN/Faulkner and Pulitzer prizes, and selection for Oprah’s book-of-the-month club. Regarding her writing process, Kingsolver explains, “I don’t start building the story around pre-existing characters or incidents. I begin with a theme. I devise a very big question whose answers I believe will be amazing, and maybe shift the world a little bit on its axis” (www.kingsolver.com, “Other Questions and Answers”). For The Poisonwood Bible, that question is roughly, “What did we do to Africa, and how do we feel about it?” Kingsolver creates a fictional world that can accommodate the complexity of this question by

addressing it from five distinct perspectives, and by giving the bulk of the narration to children, who draw the reader in with their wide-eyed observations, candidness, and productive naïveté—that is, the ability to report without judging or even fully understanding. This flexible consciousness makes the girls good ethnographers, not only of the new culture in which they are immersed, but also of their own. The Poisonwood Bible is divided into seven books, six of which borrow their titles from either the King James Bible or the Apocrypha, which Nathan, unlike most Baptist preachers, regards as legitimate scripture. Corresponding quotations serve as epigraphs, introducing important themes. For instance, the epigraph of Book I (appropriately titled “Genesis”) is “And God said unto them,/ Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,/ and subdue it: and have dominion/ over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,/ and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Nathan twists these words to justify his assuming absolute authority over “every living thing”—a presumption rapidly belied when, ignoring a native woman’s advice, he squanders half the family’s seed supply in a garden planted for the fields of Georgia, not for the delugeprone Congo. The scriptural epigraphs serve to convey the extent to which the Bible permeates the Prices’ lives: The girls are able to quote scripture partly because they are frequently made to copy long passages as punishment for trivial infractions. The first five books begin with a section by the mother, in which she addresses the spirit of her lost daughter, Ruth May. Orleana’s voice combines lament, confession, and self-justification: Haunted by the past, she seeks both understanding and absolution. In part, she suggests, she was “a captive witness,” a subservient housewife thrust into “a life she never bargained for”— and “What is the conqueror’s wife if not a conquest herself?” (9). Yet she realizes that this characterization does not tell the whole story: “You’ll say I walked across Africa with my wrists unshackled, and now I am one more soul walking free in a white skin, wearing some thread of the stolen goods: cotton or diamonds, freedom at the very least, prosperity” (9). The absolution Orleana seeks is not only for her possible failings as a mother, then, but also for playing an inadvertent role in

POISONWOOD BIBLE, THE 1057

a larger history of conquest and exploitation. The question of complicity is a central one in the novel, and one the reader must also grapple with, for, as Orleana goes on to suggest, we all wear stolen goods; the question is, “How do we aim to live with it?” (9). Alternating sections by the daughters follow Orleana’s reflections. The youngest is Ruth May, whose naive voice reminds the reader of the cultural baggage the Prices bring from Georgia, where, as Ruth tells it, the “children of Ham” go to a separate church and separate restaurants: “Jimmy Crow says that, and he makes the laws” (20). Though her young age and her early death buffer her from the larger political drama of which the other narrators gradually become aware, as a missionary’s daughter, Ruth is still absorbed by issues of culpability and punishment. The eldest daughter is Rachel: Blond, vain, and shallow, she verges on caricature, while providing comic relief with her spirited reenactments of television commercials (“Aren’t you glad you use Dial?”) and frequent malapropisms that are often unintentionally apt (“Christians have our own system of marriage; it’s called Monotony,” 405). Her materialistic focus embodies the values of American consumer culture at its worst, serving to remind the reader of the enormous asymmetry of wealth that divide the typical American family from the people of Kilanga. Winding up as a wealthy hotel owner in South Africa, Rachel is uncritical of white supremacy, and untroubled by the feelings of complicity that preoccupy her mother and sisters. Between these two are the twins: Leah, who is lithe and strong, and Adah, whom hemiplegia has rendered “crooked” and mute. Leah first idolizes her father, craving his approval as when she helps him plant his garden, until she comes to the terrifying realization that he is fallible and in some ways dangerous. She turns to the indigenous culture that seemingly offers a model of living more in harmony with the natural world. Her assimilation extends to marrying the local schoolteacher and skeptical translator of her father’s sermons, Anatole, with whom she eventually has children and settles down with in Angola. Leah comes to regard whiteness itself as inextricable from a history of domination that she finds reprehensible. Looking at her children, “the colors of silt, loam, dusty, and clay,”

she has the solace that “time erases whiteness altogether” (526). If Leah is critical of ethnocentricity (indeed, of whiteness), Adah is critical of a perspective that privileges normalcy, and ultimately, of one that privileges humans. Her silence cloaks rich insight and clever wordplay, often in the form of palindromes like “Live was I ere I saw evil”—to which she adds the Conrad–like qualification: “perhaps it was not evil I saw but merely the way of all hearts when fear has stripped off the husk of kind pretensions” (305). Playing on her asymmetrical posture, Adah invokes a line from her favorite poet Emily Dickinson, suggesting that one should “tell the truth but tell it slant.” Adah’s “slant,” then, is construed not as disability but as perspective, as the basis for her unique vision. Used to encountering prejudice, Adah is surprised to discover that she does not stand out in Kilanga, where a woman who has lost the use of her legs shuffles about on her hands, and where bodies routinely “wear out” from malnutrition and hard labor. She is accepted for the first time here, her Kikongo name, b”nduka, signifying a new, dual identity: “B”nduka is the bent-sideways girl who walks slowly, but b”nduka is also the name of a fastflying bird, the swallow with curved wings who darts crookedly quick through trees near the river.” After Adah returns to the United States and goes through therapy that “corrects” the limp, she mourns for the loss of that old self: “Here there is no good name for my gift, so it died without ceremony” (493). For Adah, survival itself is fraught with a sense of guilt. She observes, “in our seventeenth months in Kilanga, thirty-one children died, including Ruth May. Why not Adah? I can think of no answer that exonerates me” (413). She begins to question the presumptiveness of humanity in general for assuming that our species should be the dominant one, and in her study of tropical diseases, deposes humans from that central position by avowing the fundamental “right of a plant or virus to rule the world” (531). The novel is brought to a powerful conclusion with the seventh and final book that circles back to the beginning, with a title taken from the novel’s first page: “I want you to be ‘the eyes in the trees.’ ” Throughout the novel, Leah and Adah have wrestled with feelings

1058 PORTER, CONNIE

of culpability, and Orleana has pleaded with Ruth May’s spirit for forgiveness; here is an answer. The mystical voice emanates from the youngest daughter merged with the spirit of Africa, the vantage point high in the trees recalling her earlier fantasy of retreating into the form of a mamba snake—the one “safe place” Ruth could envision in times of danger. The last words from “the eyes in the trees” offer the long-sought redemption, ironically echoing Nathan’s desperate urgings to the African children whom he wishes to baptize in the rain to “Walk forward into the light.” In her most ambitious novel to date, with moments of narrative brilliance and a mostly seamless joining of the personal with the political, many readers feel that Kingsolver succeeds in tilting the world a bit on its axis.

SOURCES DeMarr, Mary Jean. Barbara Kingsolver: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Kakutani, Michiko. “ ‘The Poisonwood Bible’: A Family Heart of Darkness,” New York Times Book Review, 16 October 1998. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperPerennial, 1998. Kunz, Diane. “White Men in Africa: On Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.” In Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America’s Past (and Each Other), edited by Mark Carnes, 285–300. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. Kwitny, Jonathan. Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984. Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interviews. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Wagner-Martin, Linda. The Poisonwood Bible: A Reader’s Guide. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2001.

OTHER Barbara Kingsolver. Available online. URL: www.kingsolver. com. Accessed September 26, 2005. Carey Snyder

PORTER, CONNIE (CONNIE ROSE PORTER) (1959– ) Connie Porter impressed critics and readers alike with her first novel, All-Bright Court (1991), the tale of a black family’s life in a rundown tenement in Lackawanna, New York, where

Samuel Taylor and his wife Mary Kate have moved from Tupelo, Mississippi, in the early 1960s. Shortly thereafter, Porter contracted with the American Girls series to write Civil War–era books that feature Addy, a nineyear-old slave who escapes to freedom with her family; Porter has said that these children’s books constitute a tribute to “all the brave and hardworking women in my family who had gone before me” (Maughan Interview). In 1998, she wrote her second novel for adults, Imani All Mine, about a single mother who survives a brutal rape and still completes her education and cares for her daughter. By 1999, Porter’s American Girl books and novels had sold more than four and a half million copies, and All-Bright Court was popular with book clubs all over the country. The residents of All-Bright Court, whose lives reflect the decaying steel mill, cope with disillusion and disappointment. The gifted boy Mikey has had a privileged education among white students, which confuses him about his racial heritage. Imani All Mine, set in the inner city, is told in street dialect from the perspective of its hero, 15-year-old Tasha, who survives rape, delivers her baby daughter, and returns to school, only to discover that her rapist is enrolled in the same school and does not even recognize her. Tasha loves the baby, Imani (meaning “faith”), since she looks nothing like her rapist father; but the infant is killed by a stray bullet during a gang war. Tasha, whose own mother had hoped for a brighter future for her, finds solace in religious faith and in bringing another child into the world. Connie Porter was born in 1959 in New York City before her family moved to the Baker Homes housing project in Buffalo, New York. She was educated at the State University of New York at Albany, where she earned her bachelor’s degree, and at Louisiana State University, where she earned her master of fine arts degree. Inspired in her writing by the girls and young women she meets around the United States, Connie Porter says she will “always want to give a voice to someone who might not otherwise have a voice” (Barker). She lives and writes in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

NOVELS All-Bright Court. Boston: Houghton, 1991. Imani All Mine. Boston: Houghton, 1998.

PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE 1059

SOURCES

PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE (1890–1980)

Bush, Vanessa. Review of Imani All Mine, Booklist, August 1993, p. 2,063; January 1, 1999, p. 834. Kakutani, Michiko. Review of All-Bright Court, New York Times, 10 September 1991, p. C14. Krist, Gary. Review of All-Bright Court, Hudson Review (Spring 1992): 141–142. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 13 October 1991, p. 9; September 6, 1992, p. 11. New Yorker, September 9, 1991, p. 96. New York Times Book Review, October 27, 1991, 12; August 16, 1992, 32. Oktenberg, Adrian. Review of All-Bright Court, Women’s Review of Books, April 1992, pp. 16–17. Review of Addy Learns a Lesson, Publishers Weekly, July 5, 1993, p. 73. Review of Imani All Mine, Library Journal, 1 February 1999, p. 122. Review of Imani All Mine, Publishers Weekly, 23 November 1998, p. 58. Tribune Books (Chicago, Ill.), August 25, 1991, p. 4. Washington Post Book World, 11 August 1991, p. 3; 1 December 1991, p. 3; 26 July 1992, p. 12.

Recipient of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and the 1966 National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, this author is known as one of the premier 20th-century American short story writers. A number of Porter’s stories, usually set in Texas or Mexico, about her autobiographical character, Miranda Gay, are actually novellas—notably, Hacienda: A Story of Mexico (1934) and Noon Wine (1937). Along with Pale Horse, Pale Rider, they are considered to be her most skillfully written works. Her only novel, SHIP OF FOOLS (1962), although less critically acclaimed than her shorter fictions, was popular with readers. Although her output was slim, each piece of writing was carefully crafted, a blend of imagism and symbolism filled with subtle resonances and subtexts, particularly about women’s experience and a particular epiphany within a patriarchal structure. Born Callie Russell and later renamed Katherine Anne, Porter was the great-great-great granddaughter of Jonathan Boone, Daniel Boone’s younger brother. She was born on May 15, 1890, in Indian Creek, Texas, to Harrison Boone and Mary Alice Jones Porter, who died when Porter was two. Because her father could not support his four children, Porter and her siblings were raised in Kyle, Texas, by their paternal grandmother, Catherine Anne Porter, the indomitable model for the grandmother figures in Porter’s stories. In 1906, at age 16, she married John Henry Koontz, a railway clerk. After their divorce in 1915, Porter— henceforth known as Katherine Anne Porter—was married three more times: to Ernest Stock, in 1925; to Eugene Dove Pressly, employed with the American Consulate in Paris, from 1933 to 1938; and to Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., a professor of English, from 1938 to 1942. In a restless, peripatetic life that took her from New York and New England to Mexico and Europe, Porter made lifelong friendships with the Southern writers Carolyn GORDON, Robert Penn WARREN, Allen Tate, and Andrew Lytle. During her Greenwich Village days, she became friends with the poet Elinor Wylie, and the proletarian novelist Josephine Herbst. In her novella Hacienda, an American and a Russian communist filmmaker try to produce a documentary on life in Mexico. Porter’s unnamed female narrator

OTHER Barker, Sandra J. “A Conversation with Connie Porter.” Contemporary Women’s Issues Database (March 1, 1998). Available online. Highbeam Research. URL: http:// www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1: 29030069. Connie Rose Porter. Interview. Houghton Mifflin. Available online. URL: http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/ authordetail.cfm?authorID=1244. Accessed January 11, 2006. Peterson, V. R. “Connie Porter: Writing About Home,” Essence. (September 1, 1991). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:11204340. Accessed September 26, 2005. Porter, Connie Rose. Interview with Connie Porter. By Shannon Maughan. Available online. URL: http://www.kidsreads. com/authors/au-porter-connie.asp. Accessed September 26, 2005. Profile of Connie Porter. Canisius College. Formerly available online. URL: http://www2.canisius.edu. Accessed September 26, 2005. Wynn, Judith. “New U.S. Writers Turn Out Masterful Fiction,” The Boston Herald. (March 7, 1999). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:57117039. Accessed September 26, 2005.

1060 PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE

comments on the awkward interaction among the Mexicans, with whose revolution she had become disillusioned, and the foreigners, whose clumsy humanitarianism she describes with irony. Pale Horse, Pale Rider contains three novellas: Old Mortality and Noon Wine, earlier published separately, and Pale Horse, Pale Rider, the title novella. Old Mortality, divided into three sections, focuses on Miranda Gay: The first section stresses the family tendency to romanticize the past; the second features Miranda and her sister during their New Orleans convent-school days when reality changes the nature of the family myths. In the third section, Miranda, home for an uncle’s funeral, decides to divorce her husband and strike out on her own. Noon Wine is the powerful story of a senseless murder. When a stranger who shows up at the Thompson homestead seeking Helton, the hired man who is responsible for saving this failing farm, Thompson commits the murder. He is acquitted, but his own rural Texas community rejects him and he commits suicide. Many readers view this tale as Porter’s condemnation of Texas, a state to which she returned only after her death. Most critics and reviewers view the title novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, as her most artistically skilled example in this genre. Miranda Gay, like Porter herself 20 years earlier, becomes ill during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Using dream sequences and symbols to evoke the psychological complexities of her characters, including Adam, Miranda’s boyfriend who dies from the flu while nursing her, Porter recounts Miranda’s emotional disillusionment with Germany and its war mentality. Pale Horse, Pale Rider was awarded the first annual gold medal from the Society of the Libraries of New York University in 1940. Ship of Fools, Porter’s best-selling novel, takes place on the German ship Vera (truth) on its way from Veracruz, New Mexico, to Bremerhaven, Germany, in the summer of 1931. Drawing on her own European experiences, she tells the episodic stories of the passengers, most of whom cannot maintain lasting relationships. The novel, based on a 15th-century Christian allegory of the same title, has an international cast of characters—German, American, Mexican, Spanish, and Cuban—who transmit a pessimistic view of the world prior to World War II. Ship of Fools was filmed by

Columbia in 1965. Noon Wine was adapted for the television show “ABC Stage 67” in 1967. Katherine Anne Porter died on September 18, 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland, of cancer. She is buried near her mother in Indian Springs, Texas. The Katherine Anne Porter Room at the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland is the chief repository of Porter material.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Hacienda: A Story of Mexico. New York: Harrison of Paris, 1934. Noon Wine. Detroit, Mich.: Schuman’s, 1937. Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. Ship of Fools. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

SOURCES Alvarez, Ruth M., and Thomas F. Walsh, eds. Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Bayley. Isabel. ed. Letters of Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990. Chandra, Lakshmi. Katherine Anne Porter: Fiction as History. New Delhi, India: Arnold, 1992. Givner, Joan. Katherine Anne Porter: A Life. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Hardy, J. E. Katherine Anne Porter. New York: Ungar, 1973. Hartley, L. C., and G. Core, eds. Katherine Anne Porter. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969. Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick. Katherine Anne Porter. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Hilt, Kathryn, and Ruth M. Alvarez. Katherine Anne Porter: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1990. Machann, Clinton, and William Bedford Clark, eds. Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1990. Stout, Janis P. Katherine Anne Porter: A Sense of the Times. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. ———. Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Joan Didion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Tanner, James T. F. The Texas Legacy of Katherine Anne Porter. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1991. Unrue, Darlene Harbour. Understanding Katherine Anne Porter. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. ———, ed. This Strange, Old World and Other Book Reviews. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Walsh, Thomas F. Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico: The Illusion of Eden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

PORTIS, CHARLES 1061

OTHER Katherine Porter Library. University of Maryland. University Libraries. Available online. URL: http://www.lib.umd.edu/ RARE/SpecialCollection/kap.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. “Katherine Anne Porter.” Available online. URL: http://www. accd.edu/sac/english/mcquien/htmlfils/Kaporter.htm. Accessed January 11, 2006. PAL: Perspectives in American Literature. Katherine Anne Porter. Available online. URL: http://www.csustan.edu/ english/reuben/pal/chap7/porter.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Valencia Community College, West Campus LRC. Porter, Katherine Anne. Available online. URL: http://valenciacc. edu/lrcwest/Author_Pathfinders/porter.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

PORTIS, CHARLES (MCCOLL) (1933– ) Although Arkansas-born Charles Portis’s reputation rests largely on the best-selling True Grit (1968), he wrote several other novels. His first novel was Norwood (1966), followed by The Dog of the South (1979), Masters of Atlantis: A Novel (1985), and Gringos (1991). Writing in the picaresque tradition associated with his native Southwest and Mexico, Portis has earned praise from critics who see him not as a regionalist but as a writer who has transformed the contemporary western through the use of parody, comedy, and myth. Influenced by the new journalism of Tom WOLFE and others, he creates restless characters who seek self-definition; they also exact revenge for unforgivable wrongs and demand that justice be enforced in the western wastelands. Charles McColl Portis was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, on December 28, 1933, to Samuel Portis, a superintendent of public schools, and Alice Waddell Portis. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1952 to 1955, Portis attended the University of Arkansas. He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1958, spent several years writing for newspapers in Tennessee, Arkansas, and New York, where he spent four years with the New York Herald Tribune until, in Tom Wolfe’s words, Portis “quit cold one day,” moved to Arkansas, and six months later published “a beautiful little novel called Norwood” (Wolfe, 9). Former Marine Norwood Pratt leaves Texas and goes on the road on a Trailways bus, aiming to collect a debt,

and, like Voltaire’s Candide or Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, encounters hypocrisy and evil as he makes his way to New York City and returns to Arkansas via North Carolina. True Grit, set in the 1870s, follows Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old girl whose father, farmer Frank Ross, is shot and killed by Tom Chaney, one of his hired hands. A half century later, Mattie, the Huck Finn–like character who clearly has “true grit,” narrates the story of her participation in the murder of Chaney, thereby vindicating her father’s murder. In the more overtly comic The Dog of the South, Portis focuses on Ray Midge as he follows his wife Norma, who has run off with her former husband to Belize. The novel includes a large cast of comic characters, all encountered by Ray on his quest. Masters of Atlantis, peopled with such characters as Lamar Jimmerson, another Portis picaresque, and Cezar Golescu, a Hungarian scientist seeking innovative ways to extract gold, and Gringos, his most recent novel, demonstrate Portis’s increasing attention in his fiction to the seriocomic possibilities of American speech and ideas in the late 20th century. As scholar John L. Idol, Jr., notes, “His ear is as good as Mark TWAIN’s or Sinclair LEWIS’, his eyes as attentive as those of H. L. Mencken. And his disgust that Americans abuse their tongue is as profound as that of William Safire or Edwin Newman” (Idol, 364). Charles Portis continues to live and write in Little Rock, Arkansas.

NOVELS The Dog of the South. New York: Knopf, 1979. Gringos. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Masters of Atlantis: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1985. Norwood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. True Grit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.

SOURCES Ditsky, John. “True ‘Grit’ and ‘True Grit,’ ” Ariel 4, no. 2 (1973): 18–31. Idol, John L., Jr. “Charles [McColl] Portis.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 360–370. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Wolfe, Tom. The New Journalism. New York: Harper, 1973.

1062 PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT

PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT PHILIP ROTH (1969) Since the late 1980s, Philip ROTH has been redefining himself as a novelist. Beginning with The Counterlife (1987), his postmodern tour de force, Roth’s narratives have been increasingly ambitious and display an artistry that has far surpassed his earlier works. His autobiographical tetralogy—The Facts (1988), Deception (1990), Patrimony (1991), and Operation Shylock (1993)—1995’s SABBATH’S THEATER, and his American Trilogy, composed of American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000), have earned him every major American literary award, not to mention an international standing as one the 20th century’s most important novelists. And there is every reason to believe that he is on the short list for the Nobel Prize in literature. Yet as much as his writing has developed, as canonical as his fiction has become, and as many awards and recognitions as he continues to accumulate, many readers still know him solely as the bad boy of American literature, the author of the scandalously hilarious best-seller Portnoy’s Complaint. The setup, and the setting, of Portnoy’s Complaint is straightforward enough: Alexander Portnoy, the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York, is lying on the couch of his psychoanalyst, Dr. O. Spielvogel, describing his many problems with women and relating them to his troubled relationship with his mother. The stereotype of the Jewish mother, as many critics have noted, is perhaps this voluble novel’s most celebrated target. The adult Portnoy is desperate to extricate himself from his mother’s overbearing, overnurturing, and overanxious grasp, and as such he reverts to adolescent rebellion: “Because to be bad, Mother,” he rants at one point, “that’s the real struggle; to be bad—and enjoy it! That’s what makes men of us boys, Mother.” Then follows one of the book’s most memorable lines: “LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!” (123–124). The novel is one long monologue (or kvetch), spoken, significantly enough, out of time—it is uncertain whether or not this is one long therapeutic session or a series of “highlights” spanning several—and structured as a sequence of recollections that are strung together in a free associative manner, suggestive of the psychotherapeutic process.

In many ways it can be read as a modern confessional novel, reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Fall, Saul BELLOW’s HERZOG, and Nicholson BAKER’s The Fermata, a form that Roth will return to later in The Dying Animal (2001). In a 1974 essay titled “How Did You Come to Write That Book, Anyway?” Roth narrates the genesis of Portnoy’s Complaint. In the early manifestations of the novel, he noticed two distinct personality types coming to the fore. The first he calls the “Jewboy,” a marginalized yet all-too-curious young man who longs to partake of forbidden fruit, and the other he described as the “nice Jewish boy,” the respectable and reliable kind of man whom every mother would be proud to have as her son. Roth admits that both of these figures are largely stereotypes, and he needed a way to blend both of these character types into one protagonist. The result is the hopelessly neurotic Alexander Portnoy. The gist of Portnoy’s spiel (his analyst’s name is no accident) revolves around his inability to find emotional as well as sexual satisfaction in his relationships with women, almost all of them shiksas (young nonJewish women), each one receiving an objectifying, yet comically revealing, nickname. As a young boy he fantasizes about Thereal McCoy (the real McCoy), a slutty and experienced woman—a sexual holy grail to his adolescent imagination—who will satisfy every sexual need, no matter how extravagant or perverse. In his real life there is The Pilgrim, Sarah Abbott Maulsby, the “Supergoy . . . one hundred and fourteen pounds of Republican refinement, and the pertest pair of nipples in all New England” (232, 234), and a woman he sleeps with as revenge against the anti-Semitic gentile establishment. Then there is The Pumpkin, Kay Campbell, a woman whose genteel and reserved upbringing so profoundly contrasts his own. But the most notable, and notorious, woman in Portnoy’s life is Mary Jane Reed, The Monkey. She gets her moniker after revealing to Portnoy that she had once watched a couple have sex while eating a banana. She, more than any of the other women in his life, tries to submerge herself thoroughly in Portnoy’s identity, and in this way becomes the central Oedipal link of the novel. Coming as it did at the tail end of the “swinging ’60s,” many saw Portnoy’s Complaint as the novelistic

PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE 1063

embodiment of the freewheeling and sexually liberating decade, helping propel the book to the top of the best-seller lists. With chapter titles such as “Wacking Off” and “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” how could readers thing otherwise? Those in the literary/critical establishment, such as Irving Howe and Norman Podhoretz, were not so amused. They condemned the novel as a base form of entertainment, the “sit-down” version of the abusive, inyour-face comedy found in the stand-up acts of performers such as Lenny Bruce. Howe was particularly unforgiving with Roth. He had been one of Roth’s early admirers, seeing in Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories a promising voice in American literature. But in his (in)famous essay, “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Howe blasted Roth for his adolescent condescension toward Jewish life and culture, especially the postwar suburban variety. What is more, he believed that novels such as Portnoy’s Complaint lacked worldhistoric amplitude due to its immersion in the author’s superficial cultural experience and his angry, overly aggressive need to score comic points in the literary marketplace. (Eleven years after Howe’s critical attack, Roth would get his revenge through a literary surrogate. In The Anatomy Lesson, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, outraged at literary/cultural critic Milton Appel for an unforgivingly scathing review, gets even with his nemesis by assuming Appel’s name in public and claiming that he is the publisher of the pornographic magazine Lickety Split and owner of the swinging sex club Milton’s Millennia.) The novel has also been condemned as a blatant exercise in literary chauvinism, and many have argued that the women in Portnoy’s Complaint—indeed, the women in most of Roth’s work—are nothing more than objectified and demeaning caricatures. Largely because of this novel, charges of misogyny have followed Roth throughout his career (although these attacks have been greatly tempered since the 1990s). Regardless of how Portnoy’s Complaint is read—as misogynistic rant, as literary masturbation, or as Jewish vernacular masterpiece—one cannot deny the comedic power behind the novel. Even detractors, although they might not admit it, probably laugh out loud when they read about Portnoy’s dysfunctional family, his adoles-

cent experiences in the bathroom, the hand job session with 18-year-old Bubbles Girardi, and the imagination he demonstrates with raw liver. But underlying the laughs, as with all great comedy, is a bitterness longing to be expressed. “Doctor Spielvogel,” Portnoy pleads early in the novel, “this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? . . . [W]hy, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat?” (35). As readers of Philip Roth well know, humor born of pain is a hallmark of his fiction and one that he uses with sheer exploitive brilliance.

SOURCES Bettelheim, Bruno. “Portnoy Psychoanalyzed,” Midstream 15 (1969): 3–10. Bloom, Harold, ed. Portnoy’s Complaint: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 2004. Brauner, David. “Masturbation and Its Discontents, or, Serious Relief: Freudian Comedy in Portnoy’s Complaint,” Critical Review 40 (2000): 75–90. Cohen, Eileen Z. “Alex in Wonderland, or Portnoy’s Complaint,” Twentieth-Century Literature 17 (1971): 161–168. Gross, Barry. “Seduction of the Innocent: Portnoy’s Complaint and Popular Culture,” MELUS 8, no. 4 (1981): 81–92. Howe, Irving. “Philip Roth Reconsidered,” Commentary, December 1972, pp. 69–77. Podhoretz, Norman. “Laureate of the New Class,” Commentary, December 1972, pp. 4–7. Roth, Philip. “How Did You Come to Write That Book, Anyway?” In Reading Myself and Others, 33–41. Expanded edition. New York: Penguin, 1985. ———. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random, 1969. Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005. Workman, Mark E. “The Serious Consequences of Ethnic Humor in Portnoy’s Complaint,” Midwest Folklore 13, no. 7 (1987): 16–26. Derek P. Royal

PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE HENRY JAMES (1881) Considered one of Henry JAMES’s best novels, as well as one of his most popular, The Portrait of a Lady raises many questions for contemporary readers. Whereas Isabel Archer appears to herald the “new woman,” she makes choices that relegate her to the old

1064 PORTRAIT OF A LADY, THE

Victorian standards of marriage and propriety. Though American, she is a lady formed not through birth but through hardship. Although this novel marks James’s development of stronger female protagonists, Isabel Archer does not tell her own story. The novel commences with Ralph Touchett, Mr. Touchett, and Lord Warburton anticipating her arrival and speculating upon what kind of woman she might be. Throughout the novel, the omniscient narrator maintains an insightful distance from the heroine and controls her psychological portrait just as her fellow characters convey her physical portrait. One of the main themes involves freedom and its dangers. Early in the narrative Isabel values her freedom to choose, even if she makes the wrong choice. Having been orphaned at the death of her father, Isabel finds herself “rescued” by an unconventional aunt, Mrs. Touchett, a women who is more than willing to give Isabel the space to make her own acquaintances. Her husband, retired banker Mr. Touchett, seems the exact opposite of Isabel’s late father, a man who squandered his wealth and kept no permanent home. The Touchetts are Americans abroad, and their son Ralph has adopted all the mannerisms of the European. His invalid state provides him with freedom from the demands of the American Protestant work ethic, and he revels in the role of connoisseur. Ralph discovers too late that art’s values do not correspond with human values; in fact, most of the characters scrutinize each other as if they were subtle and complex paintings to understand and manipulate. Upon meeting Isabel, Ralph decides that his observation of her is even more important than the possibility of love. He perceives her as a masterpiece in progress—the new woman of initiative, cleverness, and perceptiveness—and upon his father’s death provides her with the financial means to live independently and determine her own course. Although Isabel is perceived as the perfect “specimen” by her circle, she finds herself misled by her own independence and willfulness. Despite her financial independence, she is not freed from the Victorian pressures of marriage and family. She is pursued by Lord Warburton and staunch, severe, ambitious Caspar Goodwood, who continues his suit even after her marriage to Gilbert Osmond. Whereas Isabel imagines that

she is choosing an educated refined husband, she is actually falling into a trap set by Mme Serena Merle, who wishes to provide for her illegitimate daughter, Pansy. Ralph’s generous gift of his inheritance “only serve[s] to usher Isabel into the old father-daughter marriage after all” (Habegger, 176). In James’s European society, women can only retain their freedom by knowing and comprehending the subtext with all its secrets and obscured details. With Osmond, Isabel comes to see that art does not equal life. Osmond’s refinement makes him cold and calculating. His psychological games seek to enslave Isabel’s mind; in fact, he achieves this with his daughter Pansy, whom he considers his living work of art, the perfect daughter. Only toward the end of the novel does Pansy reveal her awareness of this tortured existence. Unlike the long-suffering daughter, Isabel is able to abandon Rome for Gardencourt, honesty, and Ralph, if only temporarily. The conclusion of the novel shows her turning her back on the possibility of freedom from the consequences of her mistakes and turning toward duty. Some critics indict James as a writer who could never escape his father’s authoritarian point of view, one that included negative opinions of women. James created a female protagonist who possesses all the advantages and characteristics admired during her age, yet she still suffers from poor choices, is manipulated, loses her wealth to a husband, and tethers herself to a Victorian sense of duty. Having lost their fathers, both Isabel and Ralph display an obsession with the image of father, and this image cripples them to lives that are ordinary and inactive. Like Ralph, James was a passive connoisseur of people. According to critic Alfred Habegger, The Portrait of a Lady reveals less about a woman caught between Victorian and turn-of-the-century society, American and European, than about “James’s indirect engagement with his father’s authoritarianism—the authoritarianism that had sent Alice [his sister] to spend a winter with an antifeminist physician specializing in women’s troubles just as Osmond sends Pansy back to the convent” (Habegger, 179). Like the character Isabel Archer, James’s cousin Minnie Temple exhibited to his eyes a “brilliant potential [that came] to nothing,” and his portrait ends as a

POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, THE 1065

“refusal to imagine that his cousin could have survived on her own terms” (Habegger, 181). James’s pessimistic conclusion exposes his own disheartened view of the women in his life and his own inability to escape his father’s control.

SOURCES Allen, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984. Blackmur, R. P. Studies in Henry James. New York: New Directions, 1983. Cameron, Sharon. Thinking in Henry James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Chapman, Sara S. Henry James’s Portrait of the Writer as Hero. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: Harper, 1985. Fowler, Virginia C. Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Fussell, Edwin Sill. The French Side of Henry James. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Griffin, Susan M. The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. Habegger, Alfred. Henry James and the “Woman Business.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Porte, Joel, ed. New Essays on The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Walton, Priscilla. The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Kerri A. Horrine

POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, THE JAMES M. CAIN (1934) The Postman is the first and by far the most famous novel by this prolific and popular specialist in hard-boiled or “tough guy” fiction. The well-known plot was literally “torn from the headlines”—not for nothing did Edmund Wilson call James CAIN and his school the “poets of the tabloid murder” (Wilson, 21). In 1927 Cain, then a successful newspaperman, followed with interest the sensational trial of one Ruth Snyder and her lover, Henry Judd Gray, who were eventually found guilty and executed for the murder of Snyder’s husband. The case fascinated the media and the public: Snyder and Judd seemed to reflect the tenor of the times, the illusory promises of the era twisted into frightening spectacles of lust and violence. As William Marling has suggested, the press saw them

“not as criminals but representative products of the Jazz age” (Marling, 152). Cain’s 1934 novel borrows a great deal from the Snyder-Gray case, folding in many of his own ideas about romantic obsession and a bleak fatalism that he saw as endemic to American experience. Narrator Frank Chambers begins the novel (retrospectively spoken, we later learn, as a death-row confession) by dropping off a California hay truck and walking into the Twin Oaks Tavern, “nothing but a roadside sandwich joint” (1). At first sight, Frank and Cora Papadakis, the owner’s young wife, realize they share an intense, animal-like passion. And within a very few clipped, intense pages they have become lovers, taking advantage of her husband Nick’s blind good nature (and his need for another hand at Twin Oaks) to initiate a stormy affair. With an eerie sense of their own unavoidable destiny, Frank and Cora hatch a plan to kill “the Greek”—an overelaborate scheme that comes to nothing, with Nick wounded but unsuspecting, and Frank prudently headed for Los Angeles. Yet, as even Frank seems to understand, this is not, indeed cannot be, the end of the story. Through an uncanny series of coincidences, Frank is lured back to Twin Oaks, Cora, and thoughts of murder. The second attempt is successful—not so much because of better planning or luck, but through the subtle legal machinations of their lawyer, Katz, who works out an ingenious courtroom maneuver that springs the two murderers. Once freed, though, Frank and Cora are thrown back on themselves, forced to deal with the fact that under the pressure of possible punishment for their crime, both had been willing to betray the other. And yet Frank and Cora feel helpless in the face of their mutual fate: Rather than separate or seek a new life elsewhere, they doggedly pursue a “better life” at Twin Oaks, using Nick’s insurance money to transform the sandwich joint into a roadside beer garden, marrying, and even conceiving a child. Even so, both seem to doubt their chances of making a go of it in the straight world. Their intimations of doom turn out to be well grounded when, in yet another bitterly ironic twist, Cora is killed in a genuine car accident, and Frank is sentenced to death not for his real crimes, but for this senseless tragedy. Cain’s narrative works with the inexorable logic of a nightmare destiny; every line

1066 POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, THE

betrays what Joyce Carol OATES calls the “iron pattern of necessity” (Oates, 111). Much of the plot outlined above derives directly from Cain’s thoughts on the 1927 murder case, yet his conception of the novel goes beyond a retelling of that sordid story. By 1933, when he began work on Postman, Cain added at least two new, but crucial, elements. First, the New York crime was transferred to the strange California landscape that fascinated so many tough-guy writers, like Raymond CHANDLER or Horace McCoy. The change of locale is crucial, as it reflects so well the many ambivalences at work in the novel. California can offer immense rewards, like the tantalizing promise that brought Cora all the way from Iowa in search of stardom in the movies. Yet the novel’s California is also essentially false and treacherous, a landscape of plenty wrested at great cost from the desert, a land of promise that turns to nightmare (Nyman, 85). Second, Cain emphasizes the unavoidable specter of the Depression, which lends the narrative a new sense of socioeconomic desperation. Gray had been a married, relatively conventional traveling salesman, a man who had bought into the Jazz Age’s American promise of prosperity; Frank Chambers in Postman is a Depression-era bum, a man who has cheerfully opted out of the game. It is only when he comes into contact with Cora that Frank is reconnected to networks of desire and economics. Cain’s reworking of the murder victim is also suggestive. Albert Snyder had been an unassuming middle-class suburban New York magazine editor. Cain reimagines him as Nick Papadakis, Greek immigrant, naive aspirant to the American Dream—an innocent victim that Frank, even after the murder, cannot help but remember fondly. The novel’s depiction of Nick is contradictory. On the one hand, he is unquestionably the injured party: He invites Frank into his home and his business, and is cuckolded, injured, and eventually murdered for his open-hearted generosity. Then, too, Nick is obliquely shown to be part of a genuine and living immigrant Greek subculture. His scrapbook features items on his “accident” (the first murder attempt) from the local Greek newspaper, and at his funeral there is a real sense of his friends and community rallying around a fallen comrade. Yet everything we know

of Nick is filtered through Frank’s narration. Thus, Nick is mostly reduced to either Cora’s virulently racist distaste for his “greasy hair,” his nights filled with romantic Greek folk songs and sweet Greek wines, or Frank’s syrupy sentimental blubbering at his funeral. This strange contradiction—routine racism and romanticized nostalgia—is a common one in Postman. It shows up again in the motif of Mexico and points further south, both locus of the threatening other (Cora is insistent that her dark hair doesn’t make her “Mex”) and paradoxically Frank’s destination of choice when he temporarily flees the uncomfortable reality of life with Cora. His idyll down south is a desperate bid to reclaim some of the freedom he has lost. But it is doomed to failure, a fact he recognizes himself: “It came to me then that Nicaragua wouldn’t be quite far enough” (83). The ambiguous status of the “foreign” in the novel stands as only one of Cain’s more striking uncertainties. Postman has always drawn a strangely mixed reception, with critics alternately fascinated and repelled by its calculatedly lurid, sexually charged minimalism. Edmund Wilson (writing in 1940) approaches the novel as an ivory tower aesthete curious about what “people” are actually reading. Joyce Carol Oates admits that it may be interesting but is not “art,” and considers it most significant as a link between 19th-century realism and 20thcentury existentialism (with Albert Camus’s The Stranger explicitly inspired by Cain’s novel). There remains a certain unease as regards Postman: To what extent is Cain analyzing, or simply reflecting, the violence of American life? This perhaps unanswerable question lies at the heart of the novel’s fascination—we read Cain today with the sure knowledge that his nightmare narrative, with its refusal to judge, psychologize, or contextualize the crimes it depicts, has touched on the very quintessence of modernity.

SOURCES Bradbury, Richard. “Sexuality, Guilt and Detection: Tension Between History and Suspense.” In American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, edited by Brian Docherty. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Cain, James M. “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” In Cain x 3, 1–100. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Madden, David. James M. Cain. Boston: Twayne, 1970.

POTOK, CHAIM 1067

Marling, William. The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain and Chandler. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Nyman, Jopi. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Dark Romanticism. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang, 1998. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Man under Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain.” In Tough-Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by David Madden, 110–128. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Wilson, Edmund. “The Boys in the Back Room.” In Classics and Commercials, edited by David Costronovo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1950. Andy Miller

POTOK, CHAIM (1929–2002) Chaim Potok, novelist and ordained rabbi, is known particularly for The CHOSEN (1967), winner of the National Book Award, and for The Gift of Asher Lev, winner of the 1997 Jewish National Book Award. He writes about real and unending tensions between secular and observant Jews, between the modern world and the world of tradition, between a yearning for art or secular higher education and a genuinely pious attachment to Orthodox Judaism, which rejects that training. In Potok’s hands, the conflicts between deeply held convictions inform and educate readers, who are often captivated, at the same time, by the author’s artistry. Chaim Potok was born Herman Harold Potok on February 17, 1929, to Benjamin Max Potok, a businessman, and Mollie Friedman Potok. (His parents also gave him the name Chaim Tvzi, meaning “life.”) He was educated at Yeshiva University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in 1950. At the Jewish Theological seminary, he received a master’s in Hebrew literature (1954), and at the University of Pennsylvania he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1965. He served as a chaplain with the U.S. Army in Korea from 1956 to 1957, and married Adena Sarah Mosevitzky in 1958. Potok’s first novel, The Chosen, is about two boys: Danny Saunders, a Hasidic rabbi’s son, and Reuven Malter, whose Orthodox family takes a more rational, less mystical approach to religious issues and exhibits a more loving bond between father and son. Potok’s second novel, The Promise (1969), follows Danny and Reuven into maturity. Potok approaches the conflict directly in My Name Is

Asher Lev (1972); Lev is a gifted youth who wishes to become an artist, but his Hasidic family objects to such a self-indulgent calling and associates it with both Christianity and unrestrained modern impulses. Lev reappears 20 years later in The Gift of Asher Lev (1990) as a successful artist living in the South of France. When a death in the family calls him back to the United States, he becomes embroiled again in the old conflicts between the worldly and the religious and must again make a choice—and a sacrifice. Narrated by the young David Lurie, In the Beginning (1975), Potok’s fourth novel, extends outward from the Jewish community into the gentile and depicts the conflicts between the two religions as well as between the sacred and the secular, conflicts composed of the intensely complex issues of a post-Holocaust world. In The Book of Lights (1981), Potok creates two young men, Arthur Leiden and Gershon Loran. Leiden has withdrawn from his university-level study of physics after learning of his father’s participation in the production of the atom bomb. Gershon Loran is a rabbinical student who is questioning his religious path. The two travel together to Japan; when Arthur dies, Gershon, despite and because of the uncertainty of modern life, chooses the life of a Jewish scholar. Davita’s Harp (1985) uses by now typical Potok concerns and themes, this time through the half-Jewish, half-Christian Lisa Schwarzbaum, Potok’s first major female character. She chooses to live as a Jew but sees the conflict with her desires as a modern woman. Potok’s final novel, I Am the Clay (1992), changes locales. Set during the Korean War, Potok introduces an elderly Korean couple who brave enemy fire in order to protect the orphan they have adopted. In 1982, The Chosen was produced as a featurelength film starring Robbie Benson, Maximilian Schell, Rod Steiger, and Barry Miller. It was also adapted as a musical for the stage that opened in New York City, December 17, 1987. Chaim Potok died of brain cancer on July 23, 2002, in Merion, Pennsylvania.

NOVELS The Book of Lights. New York: Knopf, 1981. The Chosen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. Davita’s Harp. New York: Knopf, 1985.

1068 POWELL, DAWN

The Gift of Asher Lev. New York: Knopf, 1990. I Am the Clay. New York: Knopf, 1992. In the Beginning. New York: Knopf, 1975. My Name Is Asher Lev. New York: Knopf, 1972. The Promise. New York: Knopf, 1969.

Walden, Daniel. “Chaim Potok: A Zwischenmensch (‘Between-Person’) Adrift in the Cultures,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 19–25. Wisse, Ruth. “Jewish Dreams,” Commentary 73 (March 1982): 45–48.

SOURCES

OTHER

Abramson, Edward A. Chaim Potok. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Bluefarb, Sam. “The Head, the Heart, and the Conflict of Generations in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen,” College Language Association Journal 14 (June 1971): 402–409. Bookspan, Martin. “A Conversation with Chaim Potok,” in The Eternal Light, no. 1453, transcript of NBC Radio Network broadcast. November 22, 1981. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1981. Fagerheim, Cynthia. “A Bibliographic Essay,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 107–120. Field, Leslie. “Chaim Potok and the Critics: Sampler From a Consistent Spectrum,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 3–12. Herstein, Wendy. “An Interview with Chaim Potok,” The World & I (August 1992): 309–313. Kauvar, Elaine. “An Interview with Chaim Potok,” Contemporary Literature 27 (Fall 1986): 291–317. Kipen, Aviva. “The Odyssey of Asher Lev,” Jewish Quarterly (Spring 1993): 1–5. Kremer, S. Lillian. “Interview With Chaim Potok, July 21, 1981,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1984): 84–99. ———. “Encountering the Other,” The World & I (August 1992): 315–325. Margolies, Edward. “Chaim Potok’s Book of Lights and the Jewish American Novel,” Yiddish 6, no. 4 (1987): 93–98. Marovitz, Sanford. “The Book of Lights: Jewish Mysticism in the Shadow of the Bomb,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 62–83. ———. “Freedom, Faith, and Fanaticism: Cultural Conflict in the Novels of Chaim Potok,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 129–140. Pinsker, Sanford. “The Crucifixion of Chaim Potok/The Excommunication of Asher Lev: Art and the Hasidic World,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4 (1985): 39–51. Purcell, William F. “Potok’s Fathers and Sons,” Studies in American Literature 26 (1989): 75–92. Ribalow, Harold. “Chaim Potok.” In The Tie That Binds: Conversations with Jewish Writers. New York: Barnes, 1980. Uffen, Ellen. “My Name Is Asher Lev: Chaim Potok’s Portrait of the Young Hasid as Artist,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (1982): 174–180.

Chaim Potok. Available online. URL: http://www.lasierra.edu/~ ballen/potok/Potok.menu.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Silver, Elizabeth. “Silent Territory: Author Chaim Potok Maps His Past through His Writing.” Jvibe. Available online. URL: http://www.jvibe.com/popculture/Potok.shtml. Accessed September 25, 2005.

POWELL, DAWN (1896–1965) Dawn Powell wrote more than 100 stories and 16 novels that were set in either small Ohio towns or in New York City. Her New York novels include A TIME TO BE BORN (1942) and The Locusts Have No King (1948), which one reviewer believes “deserve to be on a short list of the best comic novels in American literature” (Weiner, 23). Although Powell never gained the recognition many of her admirers feel she deserved, all her works were reprinted in a two-volume Library of America edition in the 1990s, placing Powell, in the view of a Library Journal reviewer, “among the gods” (Rogers, 160). Powell excelled at combining humor with observations about the subtle influence of social class. Dawn Powell was born on August 24, 1896, in Mount Gilead, Ohio, to Roy K. Powell, a traveling salesman, and Hattie B. Sherman Powell, who died when Powell was very young. After her father married a harsh and cruel woman, Powell ran away to live with her mother’s sister. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Lake Erie College in 1918 and that same year served in New York with the United States Naval Reserve Communications Service. She lived in Greenwich Village, married advertising executive Joseph Gousha, and published her first novel, Whither, in 1925. It is set in her native Ohio, as is the better known The Bride’s House (1929), which takes place on the Midwest farm of the Truelove family. Here Sophie Truelove experiences marriage and adultery. Her sister, Mary Cecily, is the artist figure. The other Ohio novels include She Walks in Beauty (1928), Dance Night (1930), The Tenth

POWER, SUSAN 1069

Moon (1932), Jig Saw, a Comedy (1934), and The Story of a Country Boy (1934). Her New York novels begin with Turn, Magic Wheel (1936). The Happy Island (1938), one of Powell’s memorable works, depicts the lives of Prudence Bly, a nightclub performer, and James Pinckney, one of Greenwich Village’s gay and artistic residents. The follies of show business and literary types are viewed through Powell’s satiric lens. Angels on Toast (1940), probably Powell’s best-known novel, features New Yorker Ebie Vane, who is uncertain about love and marriage. Through her, Powell presents New Yorkers in the mood for extramarital dalliances. The Wicked Pavilion (1954), set mainly in the fictional Café Julien, depicts a New York café crowd. The Golden Spur (1962) describes Ohioan Jonathan Jaimison’s odyssey through the 1950s Greenwich Village world of abstract-expressionist artists. Her last novel, A Cage for Lovers, appeared in 1957. She died on November 15, 1965, in New York City.

NOVELS Angels on Toast. New York: Scribner, 1940. Revised version published as A Man’s Affair. New York: Fawcett, 1956. The Bride’s House. New York: Brentano, 1929. A Cage for Lovers. Boston: Houghton, 1957. Dance Night. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930. The Golden Spur. New York: Viking, 1962. The Happy Island. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. Jig Saw, a Comedy. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. The Locusts Have No King. New York: Scribner, 1948. My Home Is Far Away. New York: Scribner, 1944. She Walks in Beauty. New York: Brentano’s, 1928. The Story of a Country Boy. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. The Tenth Moon. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932. A Time to Be Born. New York: Scribner, 1942. Turn, Magic Wheel. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. The Wicked Pavilion. Boston: Houghton, 1954. Whither. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1925.

SOURCES Josephson, Matthew. “Dawn Powell: A Woman of Esprit,” Southern Review (Winter 1973): 18–52. Page, Tim. Dawn Powell: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1998. Powell, Dawn. The Diaries of Dawn Powell, 1931–1965. Edited by Tim Page. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1995.

———. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965. Edited by Tim Page. New York: Holt, 1999. Rogers, Michael. Review of The Novels of Dawn Powell, Library Journal 127, no. 1 (January 2002), 160. Van Gelder, Robert. Writers and Writing. New York: Scribner, 1946. Weiner, Lauren, “Dawn Powell: the Fruits of Revival,” New Criterion 17, no. 10 (June 1999), 23.

OTHER Brownrigg, Sylvia. Review of Dawn Powell: A Biography. Salon. com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/books/ sneaks/1998/11/13sneaks.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

POWER, SUSAN (1961– ) Although she is often compared to Louise ERDRICH, Susan Power has a unique and graceful vision. She won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation award for The GRASS DANCER (1994), the story of the South Dakota Sioux from the 1860s to the 1980s. Her characters—old and young, living and dead, male and female—move back and forth through time; as numerous critics have noted, most of her self-reliant and capable characters are women. She has been especially praised for her creation of such memorable, original characters as Pumpkin, the grass dancer; Red Dress and Ghost Horse, the ancestors whose ghosts haunt the contemporary characters; and the magic-practicing Mercury Thunder and her daughter Anna Thunder. A member of the Sioux nation, Susan Power was born on October 12, 1961, in Chicago to Carleton Gilmore Power, a grandson of the Civil War–era New Hampshire governor, and Susan Kelly Power (a.k.a. Gathering of Storm Clouds Woman), descendant of the Sioux Chief Mata Nupa (Two Bears). She earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard/Radcliffe, a law degree from Harvard University Law School, and a master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa. The ghostfilled novel The Grass Dancer, published to excellent critical responses, tells the tales of the Sioux people, alternating among the present, the Civil War, and essential moments in between. Power is reportedly working on a novel called The Strong Heart Society. Set in Chicago, it was to be about three Native Americans—a South Dakota Sioux, a

1070 POWER OF SYMPATHY, THE

Vietnam veteran, and a powwow princess. The novel has not yet been published.

NOVEL The Grass Dancer. New York: Putnam, 1994.

SOURCES Botrhner, Amy Bunting. “Changeable Pasts: Re-Inventing History,” DAIA 5149, vol. 57, no. 12, Sec. A. (1997) (Pittsburgh University). Shapiro, Dani. “Spirit in the Sky: Talking with Susan Power,” People Weekly 42, no. 6 (August 8, 1994): 21–22. Walter, Roland. “Pan-American (Re) Visions: Magical Realism and Amerindian Cultures in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer, Gioconda Belli’s La Mujer Habitada, Linda Hogan’s Power, and Mario Varas Llosa’s El Hablador,” American Studies International (AsInt) 37, no. 3 (1999): 63–80. Wright, Neil H. “Visitors from the Spirit Path: Tribal Magic in Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer,” Kentucky Philological Review 10 (1995): 39–43.

OTHER Power, Susan. Interview by Shari Oslos. Voices From the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn. edu/newsite/authors/POWERsusan.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

POWER OF SYMPATHY, THE WILLIAM HILL BROWN (1789) The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown is considered the first novel by an American-born writer in the United States. First published anonymously, The Power of Sympathy is an example of sentimental romance written in epistolary form. The letters illustrate a dialogue between Harrington and Worthy, two young men who both have a love interest; Harrington has fallen in love with Harriot, who is beautiful and virtuous, but poor and beneath Harrington’s station in life, and Worthy is engaged to Harrington’s sister, Myra. Myra and Harriot are also friends, and their exchange of letters communicates Harriot’s dilemma of maintaining her virtue, even though her poverty makes the prospect of marriage to Harrington unlikely. A family friend of the Harrington’s, Mrs. Holmes, functions as a fifth correspondent who imparts wisdom on moral matters as well as providing the information for the story’s surprising twist. The novel reflects early American interest in the role of women as both the representatives and the safe-

keepers of the country’s moral health. It illustrates sexual temptation, portrays the disastrous effects of succumbing to seduction, and discusses ways for the young girl to avoid such a fate. While highly didactic, warning against sexual profligacy in both men and women, the novel also takes on a sympathetic tone toward the seducer and the fallen woman, and like similar novels of the day in America (The Coquette, Charlotte Temple), it urges the community to view the repentant sinner with compassion. Harrington’s original attempt to seduce Harriot and set her up as his mistress is first admonished by Worthy, who vehemently condemns Harrington’s plan as childish (lacking contemplation and reason) and ignoble. Harrington first resists his friend’s “dull sermons,” arguing that Harriot is an orphan with no money or social status, and Harrington himself is “not so much a republican as formally to wed any person of this class” (11). But Harrington recants when confronted with Harriot’s unwavering virtue. Like Pamela in the novel of that name by English author Samuel Richardson, Harriot is able to convince Harrington of her inestimable value through her unwavering good conduct and virtue. Eventually, Harrington is convinced she should be his wife, and they are engaged. Harrington’s change of heart illustrates the novel’s concern with republican values structured upon a meritocracy. As seen in Harriot’s case, a young woman can rise socially through marriage if she embodies those qualities prized in a wife and mother: virtue, beauty (a reflection of her virtue), and education. Yet the major theme of the novel considers the fate of men and women who fall in seduction’s grip. This can further be seen in several additional subplots told within the framing of letters. The first describes the fate of Ophelia, who is seduced by her sister’s husband and, when the affair is discovered, commits suicide. The second involves the story of a young man who also ends his life after learning that his fiancée has been captured by ruffians and assuming that she is dead. When she is found and returned unharmed, her betrothed is already dead. The third minor story presented narrates the fate of Miss Whitman, a young woman whose reading of romance leads her to reject several reasonable offers of marriage because no suitor

PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, A 1071

could live up to her romantic ideal. When faced with becoming an old maid, she becomes more susceptible to seduction, has an affair, and becomes pregnant. Her fate is tragic. In the advanced stages of pregnancy she takes residence at an inn, and dies there shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. We know that two of the stories, Ophelia and of Miss Whitman, are based on fact—the latter is told without the use of pseudonym and provides the framework for Hannah FOSTER’s novel The Coquette. The inclusion of these stories, especially that of Miss Whitman, a young lady whose head was turned by reading too many romances, illustrates the great effort made in The Power of Sympathy, a novel about romance and sexuality itself, to recoup a place for reading fiction by using the genre as a method for exploring the moral and social problems of the day. The novel reflects upon ways to instill virtue through reading, while addressing the culturally perceived dangers of reading fiction. Miss Whitman’s story is told for the very purpose of warning against the dangers of reading when Mrs. Bourne asks others to what books should she direct her 14-year-old daughter. Mrs. Holmes, the narrator of this discussion, finds Mrs. Bourne tiresome and overly obsequious. Her daughter reflects the character weaknesses of her mother. Miss Bourn is tolerably beautiful but not striking, well dressed but not to her best advantage, and she lacks the polished manner of a truly virtuous lady. Better guidance from her mother— or perhaps, reading the right books—would correct these faults in the daughter. The plot of Brown’s novel takes an interesting twist when Harrington and Harriot do avoid the pitfalls of seduction, yet are not rewarded for their virtue. Through Mrs. Holmes another minor but crucial story is conveyed that implicates Harrington’s father and Maria Fawcet, Harriot’s mother. Just days before they plan to marry, Mrs. Holmes reveals to the young couple that they are in fact brother and sister. Harriot is the bastard child of Mr. Harrington. Both Harriot and Harrington are devastated by the knowledge that, because they are siblings, they cannot marry. The father, Mr. Harrington, shows true penitence for his sins of youth but cannot relieve the suffering of his son or newly acknowledged daughter. The son falls into a

deep depression and the daughter’s health fails quickly. Harrington’s and Harriot’s last letters convey a psychological complexity that illustrates the emotional crisis caused by a romantic love that has suddenly been rendered incestuous. The closing message of the novel is a clear one: Not only does seduction destroy those involved, but in its aftermath—children with nameless fathers—incest becomes a greater possibility. The cultural preoccupations of The Power of Sympathy, the significance of chastity, education, and name for the future wives and mothers of the new nation were of central importance at the end of the 18th century. Brown’s novel brings into focus that this is especially true in a society that allows freer marriage between the social classes, where the orphaned girl can marry a man of station.

SOURCES Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1949. Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Mulford, Carla. Introduction to The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. Rebecca C. Potter

PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, A JOHN IRVING (1989) A Prayer for Owen Meany, John IRVING’s seventh novel, was published in 1989. Unlike his other novels, it does not contain Vienna, Bears, or rapes. However, like many of his other novels, the narrator and main character’s name is Johnny. Johnny Wheelwright is plagued throughout his childhood and adolescence by not knowing who his biological father is. He is raised, for the most part, by his mother, Tabitha Wheelwright, and his grandmother. Owen Meany, a little person with an unusual voice (his dialogue is written in all capital letters), accidentally kills Johnny’s mother when he hits a foul ball that strikes her head. Despite this tragedy, Owen and Johnny are best friends. Owen helps Johnny discover who his real father is, and Johnny helps Owen fulfill his destiny as “the instrument of God” he believes he is. Throughout the novel, there are a number of “signs” that the boys must interpret. In several of Irving’s novels,

1072 PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, A

there are phrases repeated throughout; however, in A Prayer for Owen Meany images are repeated. When Owen accidentally kills Johnny’s mom, Dan Needham, Johnny’s stepfather, helps Johnny remember that Owen loved Tabitha as a surrogate mother, since his own mother is emotionally distant. Johnny gives Owen his stuffed armadillo, and Owen returns it with no arms, showing his helplessness and regret for having hit the ball, as Dan explains. The armless figure is repeated throughout the novel, although its significance changes. The first armless figure is actually the totem of the Indian tribe that sells Johnny’s ancestors the land on which Gravesend, the town in which they live, is eventually built. The figure appears again after Tabitha’s death in her dressmaker’s dummy, which Owen mistakes for the ghost of Tabitha. Upon being expelled from the Gravesend Academy as a teenager, Owen places the school’s statue of Mary Magdalene minus her arms on the auditorium’s stage; however, this time the figure symbolizes hypocrisy more than it symbolizes helplessness. The final armless figure is Owen himself, who loses his arms in fulfilling his duty as an instrument of God. Owen sees his destiny and death in a vision he has while playing the Ghost of Christmas Future in A Christmas Carol. In the scene where he is supposed to show Ebenezer Scrooge his grave, Owen sees his own name and date of death on the tombstone instead of Ebenezer Scrooge’s. Owen envisions himself saving Vietnamese children and sees Johnny there as well. Thus, Owen trains to be able to join the service to fulfill his destiny and cuts off Johnny’s index finger to protect him from serving. Owen also prepares for being God’s instrument by practicing “the shot” with Johnny for years. Owen runs up to Johnny with a basketball, and Johnny lifts him to the hoop, so Owen can slam dunk the ball. When a militant teenager attempts to blow up the children in a Phoenix airport restroom, Johnny and Owen are able to save them by using “the shot.” Johnny lifts Owen up with the grenade thrown into the restroom; Owen holds the grenade on a high windowsill, protecting the children but blowing Owen’s arms off and eventually causing him to bleed to death. Some critics have suggested that Irving’s novel is too Calvinistic for modern readers and that religion is too

cutely portrayed (Pritchard, 37). Religion is an important part of this novel. Johnny states at the beginning that Owen Meany is his reason for believing in God, and Johnny also helps his biological father, Reverend Merrill, restore his faith. Merrill wallows in guilt from his affair with Tabitha and from his failure to acknowledge his illegitimate son until Johnny forces him to confront these issues. Moreover, Owen is presented as a Christ figure throughout the novel. He gives his life to save others, and he even plays the baby Jesus in the church’s Christmas drama. John Sykes argues that the novel “demands theological assessment” (Sykes, 58). Irving would argue that it also demands political assessment and that the Vietnam War is an equally important part of the novel as religion. When Disney made the novel into a film, Irving refused to allow the movie to be titled the same as the novel because the screenplay had edited out all references to the Vietnam War (Keil, 10). Edward Reilly contends that the novel “symboliz[es] the Vietnam War’s far-reaching effects” (Reilly, 138). All the characters alive during the conflict are strongly affected by it. John moves to Canada because of his disillusionment with American politics. Owen joins the service and is never sent to Vietnam, but he works as casualty assistance officer. He is killed when the brother of a dead soldier attempts to kill Vietnamese orphans at the airport where the soldier’s body will arrive. Hester, Johnny’s cousin and Owen’s girlfriend, reacts against the war and Owen’s death. She becomes a rock star called “Hester the Molester” who has affairs with barely legal young men and sings songs that refer to Owen’s life and death. She never has another serious relationship after Owen, and she portrays the carnage of the Vietnam War by using documentary footage of the war in her music videos. A Prayer for Owen Meany shows that Irving has been strongly influenced by the American literary tradition. Philip Page has noted the similarities between this novel and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s The Scarlet Letter. “The most significant [similarities are] the proliferation of signs and attempted explanations” (Page, 112). Page also recognizes John’s similarities to F. Scott FITZGERALD’s Nick Carraway. When John discusses The Great Gatsby in a literature course he is teaching, he ques-

PRICE, REYNOLDS 1073

tions Nick’s reliability. Page points out several instances that illustrate John’s own questionable reliability as a narrator. Like Hawthorne, Irving attempts to shows the power of faith and the fallibility of individuals’ faith at the same time. Like Fitzgerald, Irving learns to portray powerfully life’s tragedies and disappointments.

SOURCES Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Keil, Beth Landman. “Irving: Flick Hasn’t Got a Prayer,” New York, 4 April 1998, p. 10. Page, Philip. “Hero Worship and Hermeneutic Dialects: John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.” In John Irving, edited by Harold Bloom, 105–120. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2001. Pritchard, William. “Small Town Saint,” New Republic, 22 May 1989, p. 37. Reilly, Edward C. Understanding John Irving. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Sykes, John. “Christian Apologetic Uses of the Grotesque in John Irving and Flannery O’Connor,” Literature & Theology 10 (1996): 58–67. Jill Ann Channing

PRICE, (EDWARD) REYNOLDS (1933– ) Reynolds Price, author of KATE VAIDEN, the novel that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best work of fiction in 1984, is a much-admired writer who has written 15 novels to date, usually set in his native eastern North Carolina. Although comparisons to William FAULKNER have become more or less obligatory for Southern authors, in Price’s case, the comparison seems apt. Like Faulkner, Price, using a complex, intricate structure and style, creates fictional families (the Mustians and the Mayfields) living in a fictional Southern place, and, like Faulkner’s, his characters wrestle with ancestral guilt, family legacies, and determinism; many of them, through the exercise of free will, transcend the expectations of the past. Compared as well to Ernest HEMINGWAY and to Leo Tolstoy, Price also writes poetry, drama, memoir, and short fiction; his Collected Stories (1993) was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Reynolds Price was born on February 1, 1933, in Macon, North Carolina, to William Solomon Price, a traveling salesman, and Elizabeth Rodwell Price.

Despite Depression-era poverty and his father’s alcoholism and death from cancer, Price earned a bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) at Duke University in 1955, and a B. Litt. degree at Oxford University in 1958, where he was a Rhodes Scholar from 1955–58. He published his first novel, A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE, in 1962; it won the Faulkner Foundation award for a first novel. Its pregnant protagonist, Rosacoke Mustian, eventually resigns herself to marrying the baby’s father, Wesley Beavers. In an ironic interpretation of the title, neither seems happy about the prospect of a long life together, but, typically, Price leaves room for guarded optimism. The next novel about the Mustian family, A Generous Man, this time focusing on Rosacoke’s 15-year-old brother Milo, appeared in 1966, again to general acclaim. The two novels, along with the short story “A Chain of Love,” have been reissued as a trilogy under the title Mustian (1983). In the more experimental Love and Work (1968), Price leaves his Southern setting. Thomas Eborn, an unlikable, egotistic college professor, who learns some—but perhaps not enough—lessons about putting love of fellow humans ahead of his novel writing. The Surface of Earth (1975) is the first in the Mayfield trilogy, followed by The Source of Light (1981) and The Promise of Rest (1995), published together as A Great Circle: The Mayfield Trilogy (2001). The Mustian trilogy covers only one generation of a working-class family, but the Mayfield trilogy spans six generations— nearly a century—of a well-educated middle-class family. The trilogy, particularly The Surface of Earth, is considered ambitious and complex, following suffering individuals, notably sons in quest of their fathers, spouses disillusioned with marriage, and, as scholar David Marion Holman notes, Mayfield males linked in misfortune through “the circulation of a gold wedding band” returned by a wife who walked out on her husband (Holman, 287). Homosexuality becomes a major focus in both The Source of Light and The Promise of Rest as Hutch, the hero-artist, copes with the loss of his father to cancer and then, years later, the loss of his own son to AIDS. In 1984, while working on a novel based on his mother, Price contracted cancer of the spine, an illness that confines him to a wheelchair. He has refused to allow his physical condition to interfere

1074 PRICE, RICHARD

with his work schedule, however, and published Kate Vaiden in 1987, his most widely praised novel since A Long and Happy Life. Kate Vaiden’s father kills her mother and then commits suicide when she is 11 years old; these acts become Kate’s justification for her abandonment of her own son. She believes that no one is reliable, not even her first love, Gaston, or Daniel, the father of her son, both of whom also commit suicide. In the late 1980s Price wrote Good Hearts (1988), completing the story of Rosacoke, now called Rosa, whose husband Wesley deserts her for a much younger woman named Wilson. Rosa, left unprotected, is raped, which leads Wesley to return to Rosa; they agree to spend the rest of their ordinary lives together. The Tongues of Angels (1990) is a short novel in which the narrator-protagonist, Bridge Boatner, recalls the death of Raphael Nauren, a boy at a summer camp 20 years earlier. Like The Tongues of Angels and Kate Vaiden, Blue Calhoun (1992) uses a first-person narrator. Sixty-fiveyear-old Bluford Calhoun tells his granddaughter about his adulterous love for Luna Absher, a 16-yearold girl, when he was in his mid–30s. In Roxanna Slade (1998), Price uses the first female voice since Kate Vaiden; nearly 100 years old, Roxanna feels glad to be alive despite all the losses and betrayals she has suffered. She is speaking, metaphorically, as the voice of 20th-century America. Noble Norfleet (2002) examines the results of a mother’s murder of two of her three children: The surviving child, Noble, who volunteers as a medic during the Vietnam War, is trying to help others since he could not help his brother and sister. At the end of the novel, he must confront his responsibility to his mother, just released from a hospital for the criminally insane. Price’s novel The Good Priest’s Son was published in 2005. Reynolds Price lives in North Carolina, where he has retired after a long career teaching creative writing at Duke University. Praised by academics, critics, and general readers alike, Price continues to write in all genres. His papers are collected at the Perkins Library at Duke University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Blue Calhoun. New York: Atheneum, 1992. A Generous Man. New York: Atheneum, 1966. Good Hearts. New York: Atheneum; Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike, 1988.

The Good Priest’s Son. New York: Scribner, 2005. Kate Vaiden. New York: Atheneum, 1986; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. A Long and Happy Life. New York: Atheneum, 1962. Love and Work. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Michael Egerton. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1993. Mustian: Two Novels and a Story. New York: Atheneum, 1983. Noble Norfleet. New York: Scribner, 2002. Permanent Errors. New York: Atheneum, 1970. The Promise of Rest. New York: Scribner, 1995. Roxanna Slade. New York: Scribner; Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike, 1998. A Singular Family. New York: Scribner, 1999. The Source of Light. New York: Atheneum, 1981, Scribner, 1995. The Surface of Earth. New York: Atheneum, 1975; New York: Scribner, 1995. The Tongues of Angels. New York: Atheneum; Thorndike, Maine: Thorndike, 1990.

SOURCES Holman, David Marion. “Reynolds Price.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora, 382–390. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Humphries, Jefferson, ed. Conversations with Reynolds Price. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Kimball, Sue Leslie, and Lynn Veach Sadler, eds. Reynolds Price: From “A Long and Happy Life” to “Good Hearts.” Fayetteville, N.C.: Methodist College Press, 1989. Ray, William. Conversations: Reynolds Price & William Ray. Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University, 1976. Rooke, Constance. Reynolds Price. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Schiff, James A. Understanding Reynolds Price. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Schiff, James A., ed. Critical Essays on Reynolds Price. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998.

PRICE, RICHARD (1949– ) Often compared with James T. FARRELL and Hubert SELBY, Jr., his literary godfathers, Richard Price writes frequently about adolescents in city street gangs; as many critics and readers note, Price deals with the seamy, often desperate, street life of the Bronx and his fictional Dempsy, New Jersey. His novels are in the end moral, even, to some critics, didactic. Richard Price was born on October 12, 1949, in New York City. He was educated at Cornell University (B.S.,

PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, THE 1075

1971) and Columbia University (M.F.A., 1976). His first novels, The Wanderers (1974) and Bloodbrothers (1976), were written and published before he finished graduate school. As New York Review of Books reviewer Roger Sales notes, The Wanderers, divided into interconnecting stories, each focusing on one Bronx gang member, is about “loneliness and brutality and bigotry and squalor” (Sale, 26). Bloodbrothers, another Bronx tale, depicts 18-year-old Stony De Coco’s coming of age amid family feuds that are as powerful and binding as family ties. In Ladies’ Man (1978), Kenny Baker breaks up with his significant other and journeys through the dark underbelly of Greenwich Village’s “backroom sex bars.” New Republic reviewer Martin Duberman notes that Price comprehends and depicts the “world of live sex shows, porno shops, singles’ bars” and alternate lifestyles to which Kenny’s gay friend guides him. Clockers (1992), set in Dempsy, New Jersey, contains an almost painfully realistic depiction of crack dens, dealers, and police, and introduces Strike Dunham, the 19year-old ailing black dealer, and Rocco Klein, the suspicious and wily policeman who comes to his aid. Freedomland (1998), loosely based on the real-life story of Susan Smith, who drove her two toddlers into a river but accused a black man of kidnapping them, features the white Brenda Martin whose son Cody has apparently been kidnapped by a tall black male. The parallels, however, notes reviewer Jonathan Levi, end here. Price’s most recent novel, Samaritan, another thriller, features Ray Mitchell, a television scriptwriter who leaves his career for a newer, more rewarding one as a teacher and mentor. As the novel opens, Mitchell is lying in a hospital bed, with terrible head injuries; old school friend and detective Nerese Ammons puts off her retirement to solve the mystery of this Samaritan. Richard Price lives in New York, where he writes both novels and screenplays. Clockers was adapted for the screen by director Spike Lee and released in 1995. In 2006, Columbia Tristar Pictures released Price’s film adaptation of Freedomland, directed by Joe Roth and starring Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson.

NOVELS Bloodbrothers. Boston: Houghton, 1976. The Break. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Clockers. Boston: Houghton, 1992. Freedomland. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Ladies’ Man. Boston: Houghton, 1978. Samaritan. New York: Knopf, 2003. The Wanderers. Boston: Houghton, 1974.

SOURCES Barnes, Julian. Review of Bloodbrothers, New Statesman 93, no. 2409 (May 20, 1977): 681. Duberman, Martin. Review of Ladies’ Man, The New Republic, 6 January 1979, pp. 30–32. Levi, Jonathan. “Star-Spangled Tragedy,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 31 May 1998, p. 10. Sale, Roger. “The Dangers of Nostalgia,” The New York Review of Books, 27 June 1974, pp. 24–26. West, Paul. “America Narcotica,” National Review 44, no. 15 (August 3, 1992): 42.

OTHER Epstein, Daniel Robert. “Interview with Richard Price for UGO.” Ugo.com. Available online. URL: http://www.ugo. com/channels/freestyle/features/richardpricedeFault.asp. Accessed September 23, 2005. Mattingly, Dan. “The Vanity of Human Kindness. A Case Study in Philanthropic Narcissism,” The Yale Review of Books, no. 6 (Summer 2003). Available online. URL: http:// www.yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/summer03/review06. shtml.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, THE MARK TWAIN (1881) Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark TWAIN) entered a major phase of his career in the mid–1870s starting with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and with his writing of the early chapters of its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As he worked on Huck, Clemens found himself struggling. His strategy was to set aside a book that was stalled to begin another. When he felt he had written himself out after the first 18 chapters of Huck Finn, Clemens turned to the story of the childhood adventures of Edward VI of England and his “twin,” the pauper Tom Canty. That book became The Prince and the Pauper. The idea for the tale took root during 1877 while the Clemenses were spending the summer in Elmira, New York, at the home of Olivia Clemens’s sister Susan Crane. Clemens had read Charlotte Young’s Little Duke in the Crane’s library: The basic plot of that book is that lessons learned by Richard, duke of Normandy, during his childhood instill in him the humility that

1076 PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, THE

later marks his compassionate leadership. Clemens eventually transferred the scene to Tudor England (an earlier version set the story in Victorian England) and created fiction to explain the brief yet relatively compassionate rule of Edward VI. Edward’s lessons are made possible when he and a “twin” switch identities, which puts a young pauper in the palace to learn the strains of royalty, and the prince out on the road and open to the harsh realities of common life. The plot device allowed Clemens to offer commentary on both the seemingly empty rituals of monarchy and the dire implications of royal law for commoners. Clemens dedicated the novel “to those good-mannered and agreeable children, Susie and Clara Clemens.” The Prince and the Pauper was the Clemens daughters’ favorite of their father’s books. The family often used the story as the basis for homemade theatrical productions in Hartford; the book was also adapted as a very successful stage play. This has fueled the idea that the book is a children’s fable; however, Clemens took care to present a story with profoundly adult themes: It questions a father’s influence on a son, what makes a “good” king, how life experience ultimately influences the moral development of a child. It also explores how environment and human compassion combine to shape character as both Tom and Edward run headlong into situations with a cast of characters positioned to affect their lives. It is a child’s fantasy fueled by a critique of social and political practice. The action of the novel is divided between Tom and Edward. The dual perspectives allow Clemens to explore the experiences of each child as he faces new circumstances. Tom, who suddenly finds himself a prince just as he has dreamed, struggles to conform to the expectations of the nobility that surround him. He is naive and finds his one lasting ally in the person of the prince’s whipping boy, who helps school him in palace intrigue. When he finds himself about to be made king, he is mortified when he denies his own mother who calls to him from the crowd. Tom finds that there is a high price to be paid for power and comfort as he separates himself from maternal love and affection. Edward’s adventures are, in fact, more troubling. The young prince finds himself at the mercy of John Canty,

Tom’s scheming and violent father, and is forced to become a beggar to meet Canty’s demands. When Edward manages to escape from Canty, he flees into the clutches of a band of robbers and thieves. While the dehumanizing treatment of the gang is a burden, Edward is more shocked as his travels through the kingdom highlight the injustice that wracks the common folk. He witnesses state-sanctioned executions and torture; he is placed in jeopardy because the letter and spirit of laws are enforced to maintain the status of the powerful. He is saved by the intervention of Miles Hendon, a displaced noble who takes pity on the boy, who seems insane. Hendon is the prince’s savior and protector, and it is the compassion he shows Edward that helps the prince understand the value of humility and patience. Ultimately, Edward makes his way back to the palace just in time to halt Tom’s ascending to the throne, and the boys are able to return to their proper lives, which gives Edward the chance to demonstrate his newly acquired compassion by rewarding both Tom and Miles for their good service and by acting to change oppressive laws. Standing alone, The Prince and the Pauper offers sharp criticisms of a monarchy that is out of touch with the needs of the common man. It also argues that a king is best trained by traveling and experiencing life throughout the kingdom. The conflict between the dream of power and the responsibilities that come with that power is also prominent. Yet it is also important to see the novel in the context of Clemens’s creative struggle in 1877 as he attempts to restart the stalled Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Edward’s experience as the pauper seems tied to the dilemma of Huck Finn. Like Huck, Edward must run from a violent “father” (John Canty) and travels the countryside wary of his safety. The lessons for Huck and Edward are similar, too: Each boy learns to watch for and appreciate the compassion of strangers and survives under the watchful eye of an adult who ties his own fortunes to the boy (Miles Hendon and Jim have a good deal in common in how they care for their traveling companions). In the end, however, Edward’s fortunes offer a good deal more hope than Huck’s difficult passage. That optimism may be why the Clemens daughters were so fond of the tale of the prince and the pauper. It may also be one reason readers are so fond of the novel today.

PROMISED LAND, THE 1077

SOURCES Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Gerber, John C. Mark Twain. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. Rasmussen, R. Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1995. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, vol. II 1877–1883). Edited by Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Berhard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. ———. The Prince and the Pauper. Edited by Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Michael J. Kiskis

PROMISED

LAND, THE MARY ANTIN (1912) Mary Antin’s novel-like autobiography, The Promised Land, first appeared in serialized format in The Atlantic Monthly in 1911. This story of a young Jewish girl’s emigration from Russia and her adolescence in Boston was a best seller that fictionalized both the protagonist, clearly based on Antin herself, and some of her experiences. Antin also employed novelistic techniques that resulted in a spellbinding tale: Libraries reported it as the most requested book of the year, and special teacher manuals on the text were distributed for use in schools (Sollors, xxxii). The Promised Land remained one of the most popular and influential immigrant narratives for the first half of the 20th century. The Promised Land hit a cultural nerve; it was considered the best-selling autobiography ever published and spawned the publication of other immigrant novels and autobiographies. The resulting interest catapulted Antin to public stardom, and she used her fame to lecture around the country for education and open immigration policies. Antin’s work even caught the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who considered Antin a Progressive reformer as important as Jane Addams and Jacob Riis (Salz, 69). The autobiography describes the process of transformation from “medieval” life in Eastern Europe to the bustling world of the modern American city. The Promised Land begins with Antin’s early childhood in a Jewish shtetl in the Russian Pale of Settlement, and describes the political and economic persecution of

Jews. The autobiography moves on to the traumatic emigration from Russia, which is told mostly through extended excerpted passages from her earlier book From Plotzk to Boston (1899) (the title was a misspelling of Polotzk). However, the bulk of the narrative is devoted to her adolescence in Boston. The autobiography emphasizes cheerful moments of adaptation and assimilation. As the title indicates, America is represented as a golden land of opportunity for impoverished and persecuted immigrants. In America, Antin claims, everyone is free to try for a better life, and anyone can become a citizen and, more powerfully, an American. Especially important for Antin is the fact that America provides compulsory education for girls, something not guaranteed in the religiously and politically circumscribed world of Russian Jewish life. In the America of The Promised Land, Antin can—and does—live up to her own “promise,” becoming a star pupil, winning a scholarship to a private high school, and going to college. Throughout the autobiography, Antin self-consciously sees her story as representative of millions of fellow immigrants. Her autobiography is thus an attempt to turn personal experience into national narrative, to make individual achievement into universal experience. This tension between singularity and representativeness can also be seen in the way that Antin claims authorship. While the title page identifies Mary Antin as the author, the text refers to the narrator as the fictional Esther Altmann. The Promised Land is thus both the story of the exceptional author Mary Antin and the tale of immigrant everyman Esther Altmann. This authorial confusion highlights the novelistic techniques that Antin consistently employs in writing her autobiography. While ostensibly a memoir of her own experiences, The Promised Land is also a document of literary ambition, a love letter to the English language. As a result, the autobiography is extremely self-conscious in its use of language. The Promised Land was one of the first Jewish immigration narratives in English, and it established Antin as a major literary figure, alongside fellow Jewish writers Abraham CAHAN and Anzia YEZIERSKA. Like those novelists, Antin sought to reach a wider audience of Jews and gentiles alike, and asked them to redefine American citizenship in more inclusive terms. Toward this

1078 PROSE, FRANCINE

end, Antin uses many Yiddish words in her text (which are left undefined save for a glossary at the end), in effect demanding that her audience adapt to her language, much as she has learned to write in English. Throughout the autobiography, Antin pays special attention to community space, describing in detail each of the neighborhoods she has called home: first the Jewish Section of Polotzk, and then Union Place, Crescent Beach, Arlington Street, Wheeler and Dover Streets, and Harrison Avenue in Boston. The autobiography also features photographs of communal sites of markets, school, and streets. Betty Berglund argues that the photographs reveal a contradictory narrative to the story of easy assimilation; the close-knit community of her childhood village is pictured through scenes of social life, while the urban photographs of Boston are notable for lonely scenes of empty streets (Berglund, 56). Indeed, there is ample evidence that life in America was not as happy as Antin would have the reader believe. Despite their hard work, her family struggles to find work opportunities and improved living conditions. Similarly, Antin’s relatively privileged education comes at the expense of her older sister, who is sent to work in sweatshops from the age of 14. The Promised Land shows Antin continually transforming her experiences into the form of an immigrant success story, whereby the immigrant truly does rise to the heights of American achievement. Some of this narrative resolution is achieved through editing and fictionalizing aspects of her life. This is especially noticeable at the end of The Promised Land, where Antin celebrates her educational success: graduating from high school and matriculating at Barnard College. In fact, Antin’s marriage to an older man prevented her from finishing high school, which, in turn, prevented her from earning a college degree from Barnard. The Promised Land can thus be read as an attempt to rewrite history as one wishes it had occurred. Nearly a century after its publication, The Promised Land remains a document of the hopes of millions of Americans seeking new lives in America, and a lesson in the difficulty of achieving those dreams.

SOURCES Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Introduction by Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin, 1997.

———. From Plotzk to Boston. 1899. Introduction by Pamela S. Nadell. Reprint, New York: Markus Wiener, 1985. Bergland, Betty. “Photographs and Narratives in Ethnic Autobiography: Memory and Subjectivity in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land.” In Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, 45–88. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made There. New York: Galahad Books, 1976. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. 1890. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. Salz, Evelyn, ed. Selected Letters of Mary Antin. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Sollors, Werner. Introduction to The Promised Land, p. xi–l. New York: Penguin, 1997. Julie A. Sheffer

PROSE, FRANCINE (1947– ) An accomplished novelist, poet, short story writer, and essayist who has won four Pushcart Prizes and whose recent young adult novel, After (2003), was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award, Francine Prose is the author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which, The Blue Angel (2000), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Francine Prose was born on April 1, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, to Philip Prose and Jessie Rubin Prose, both physicians. She was educated at Radcliffe College, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1968, and at Harvard University, earning her master’s degree in 1969. In 1973 she published her first novel, Judah the Pious, a long story in the manner of old European folktales; set in Poland, it follows Rabbi Eliezer and his meeting with the Polish king. The following year she published The Glorious Ones, in which the 16th-century traveling players are involved in the creation and the telling of their own stories, an idea that has become familiar in Prose’s fiction. After marrying Howard Michels, an artist, on September 24, 1976, Prose wrote Marie Laveau (1977), her first novel set in the United States; the title character, a 19th-century New Orleans mulatta, exhibits strong psychic powers. Animal Magnetism (1978), a medical fantasy, was followed by Household Saints (1981), a mixture of legend

PROSE, FRANCINE 1079

and reality that Prose blended to tell the tale of a butcher and his family, and Hungry Hearts (1983), about a Yiddish theater star who becomes so obsessed with her role that it engulfs her personality. In Bigfoot Dreams (1986), the writer is horrified to know that the tabloid stories she has been inventing are actually happening. Primitive People (1992) is a disturbing presentation—through the eyes of Simone, a middle-class Haitian au pair—of the frequently rude and sometimes violent well-to-do dwellers of Hudson’s Landing, an upscale community within commuting distance of New York City; they are not so different from the socalled primitive people in Simone’s own country. A Peaceable Kingdom (1993) and Guided Tours of Hell (1997) are two darkly comic novellas that, according to reviewer Rod Kessler, should be added to the classic books that trace “the moral adventures of Americans in Europe” (Kessler, 232). In the first, Guided Tours of Hell, Landau, an American playwright, wrestles with his envy of successful, pompous, and possibly deceptive writer Jiri Krakauer as the satirically portrayed group of academics tours the Terrezenstadt Nazi concentration camp. Three Pigs in Five Days depicts a lonely American travel writer, Nina, as she tours a metaphorically dark hell-like Paris, where her lover has abandoned her. Hunters and Gatherers (1995) features a factchecker at a magazine similar to Vogue and a goddessworshipping group who persuades her to accompany them to Arizona to learn Native American wisdom. As reviewer Carol LeMasters notes, however, once they reach “the Four Feathers Institute, the women find a derelict motel, the wrong shaman, suffocating sweat lodges, drumming at dawn and—when they aren’t fasting—a diet of roadkill and Gatorade.” Blue Angel: a Novel (2000), a parody about academia, depicts Ted Swenson, a 47-year-old married novelist and writing instructor at a Vermont college that has just instituted a sweeping sexual-harassment policy. Like the pathetic professor in the Marlene Dietrich movie of the same name, he cannot see that his talented writing student Angela Argo is interested only in aggressive promotion of herself, to the destruction of Ted’s marriage and career. After (2003), her most recent novel, straddles the adult and young-adult

line; it involves a violent shooting similar to the one that occurred at Columbine High School and focuses on the questions of security and authority. Francine Prose lives with her husband in Manhattan, where she continues to write.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS After. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Animal Magnetism. New York: Putnam, 1978. Bigfoot Dreams. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Blue Angel. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. The Glorious Ones. New York: Atheneum, 1974. Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas (includes Guided Tours of Hell and Three Pigs in Five Days). New York: Metropolitan/ Holt, 1997. Household Saints. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Hungry Hearts. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Hunters and Gatherers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995. Judah the Pious. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Marie Laveau. New York: Berkley, 1977. Primitive People. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

SOURCES Eisenberg, Deborah. “Francine Prose,” Bomb 45 (Fall 1993). Hooper, Brad. Review of Blue Angel, Booklist, 15 April 2000, p. 1,525. Interview with Francine Prose. By John E. Baker. Publishers Weekly, 13 April 1992, p. 38. Kessler, Rod. Review of Guided Tours of Hell, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 232. Leiding, Reba. Review of Blue Angel, Library Journal, 1 February 2000, p. 118. LeMasters, Carol. Review of Hunters and Gatherers, The Women’s Review of Books 13, no. 3 (December 1995): 23–24. O’Laughlin, Jim. Review of Guided Tours of Hell, Booklist, 15 December 1996, p. 709. Pearlman, Mickey. “Francine Prose.” In Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women, edited by Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990. Peretz, Evgenia. Review of Hunters and Gatherers, The New Republic, 13 November 1995, pp. 47–49. Potok, Rena. “Francine Prose.” In Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook, edited by Sara R. Horowitz, 302–313. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Prose, Francine. Interview. Publishers Weekly, 24 February 2003, p. 72.

1080 PROULX, E. ANNIE

Rosser, Claire. Review of After, Kliatt 38, no. i4 (July 2004): 23. Schiff, Stacy. “Terpsichore, Thalia and Yoko: Francine Prose on the (Mostly) Unsung Lives of Nine Women Who Inspired Well-Known Male Artists,” The New York Times Book Review, 22 September 2002, p. 9. St. Andrews, B.A. Review of Guided Tours of Hell, World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (Autumn 1997): 788.

OTHER Salij, Marta. “Francine Prose Is Sensitive to What It Means to Be Underestimated.” Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Highbeam Resources. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:73103642. Accessed September 26, 2005. Ydstie, John, and Jackie Lyden. Interview: Francine Prose Discusses Her Book “The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired.” All Things Considered (NPR). Highbeam Resources. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:92649240. Accessed September 26, 2005.

PROULX, E. ANNIE (1935– )

Seldom has an author received so much attention for one novel. Annie Proulx’s The SHIPPING NEWS (1993), internationally acclaimed for its powerful evocation of place and for Proulx’s mesmerizing blending of tragedy and poignancy, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. In 2001 the novel was adapted to a feature-length film starring Kevin Spacey. Her other novels include Postcards (1992), winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes (1996). Annie Proulx was born on August 22, 1935, in Norwich, Connecticut, to George Napolean Proulx and Lois Nelly Gill Proulx, an artist. Reared in New England, Proulx was educated at the University of Vermont, where she graduated cum laude (1969), and Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University), where she earned a master’s degree (1973). She has been married and divorced three times. Proulx’s first book of fiction, Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), is a collection of tales set in rural New England. Four years later she published Postcards, tracing the Blood family of Vermont from the turn of the century to the aftermath of World War II. Loyal Blood, who has killed his girlfriend, flees to the West; he

sends postcards periodically from various destinations over a period of 40 years. Unbeknownst to Loyal, the rest of the family, unable to adapt to the changing forces of modern America, meets a disastrous end. The bleak and desolate atmosphere of Proulx’s novels extends to her landscapes, which, as every critic has noted, mark her novels and stories. The Shipping News, for instance, resonates with Proulx’s evocation of the spare, brutal terrain of Newfoundland. Quoyle, a newspaperman, returns to his old family home to begin anew after the failure of his marriage and his wife’s accidental death. Accordion Crimes is a collection of linked stories about a green accordion that passes from immigrant to immigrant for more than a hundred years. For all the immigrants—German, Polish, Sicilian, Mexican, French Canadian, black Cajun, Mexican, and Basque—the accordion brings bad luck, and the novel ends with the abandoned instrument on the side of a highway, its hidden treasure, $14,000 in cash, undiscovered. Annie Proulx currently lives and writes in Wyoming. Her recent books include an acclaimed short fiction collection, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), which included the story “Brokeback Mountain,” made into a motion picture in 2005, and That Old Ace in the Hole: A Novel (2002). The latter features recent college graduate Bob Dollar as he moves to the Texas Panhandle, purchases former cattle land to be used for hog farms, and meets a rich array of local characters. Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 was published in 2004.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Accordion Crimes. New York: Scribner, 1996. Brokeback Mountain. New York: Scribner, 2005. Postcards. New York: Scribner, 1992. The Shipping News. New York: Scribner, 1993. That Old Ace in the Hole: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2002.

SOURCES Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle,” Partisan Review 64, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 37–49. Bemrose, John. “The Incredible Journey,” Maclean’s, 29 July 1996, p. 45. Birkerts, Sven. “Fiction in Review,” Yale Review 85, no. 1 (January 1997): 144–155.

PURDY, JAMES 1081

Hospital, Janette Turner. “How to Make Seal-Flipper Pie,” London Review of Books, 10 February 1994, p. 17.

PURDY, JAMES (1923– ) James Purdy is the author of more than 40 books, including novels, plays, poetry, and essays. He remains, however, outside the mainstream of contemporary American fiction, and critics have speculated on the reasons for his relative obscurity. Chief among them is his treatment of nontraditional sexuality and perversity, which he feels are ever present in the American psyche. His technique, often experimental, is characterized by irony and complex narrative structure and point of view, combined with a vivid re-creation of his native midwestern colloquialisms. Although he rejects the term “gay male writer,” he has benefited from the upsurge of interest in gay studies and literature and the ensuing publication of gay writers. His best known works include 63: Dream Palace (1956); Malcolm (1959), adapted as a play by Edward Albee in 1966; Cabot Wright Begins (1964); Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967); and On Glory’s Course (1984), nominated for a PEN/Faulkner prize. In a Shallow Grave (1975) was adapted and filmed by Kenneth Bowser in 1988. Purdy was born in rural Ohio on July 17, 1923, but few details about his personal life are known. He has taught occasionally at universities both here and abroad and moved to Brooklyn, New York, more than 20 years ago. His literary preoccupations were established early in his career: spiritually bereft characters seeking wholeness; violence, including torture, rape, and murder; and the death of the American Dream. In Malcolm, the 15-year-old protagonist has been abandoned by his father and is lost, both literally and figuratively; he is an easy target for adult predators. Like many later Purdy characters, Malcolm dies. The central figure—Cliff, another orphan—of The Nephew (1960) is literally missing from the novel. His aunt, Alma Mason, tries to persuade the townspeople to write a tribute to him, but instead exposes smalltown meanness and hypocrisy. Two novels from the 1960s caused a great deal of controversy: Cabot Wright Begins (1964) is the memoir of a rapist and a satirical expose of the New York literati; Eustace Chisholm and the Works, set in Chicago during the

Great Depression, follows the exploits of the doomed Daniel Hawes and his murder by the homosexual and sadistic Captain Stadger. In the 1970s Purdy produced works best described as allegory, fairy tale, fable, and biblical parable. I Am Elijah Thrush (1972) describes the title character’s unsuccessful attempts to avoid the evil Millicent De Fayne, who eventually captures his spirit. The uplifting power of love is evident in this novel and in Jeremy’s Vision (1970) and The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974), both of which portray desperate figures in decaying communities. Gruesome acts are performed in their homes. In his novel, In a Shallow Grave, a disfigured Vietnam veteran named Gernet Montrose is transformed by the love of a young drifter. Purdy wrote his most experimental novel, On Glory’s Course (1984), in the 1980s. Nominated for a PEN/Faulkner award, the novel epitomizes the dichotomy between those who admire Purdy’s outré subject matter and style, and those who find him almost impossible to read. He continues to write; NARROW ROOMS (1978) and Out With the Stars (1992) deal with homosexuality, In the Hollow of his Hand (1986) is about a part–Native American illegitimate child, Garments the Living Wear (1989) about a plague in New York City, and Gertrude of Stony Island (1998) about a mother mourning her daughter.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Cabot Wright Begins. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. The Candles of Your Eyes. New York: Nadja, 1985. Color of Darkness: 11 Stories and a Novella. New York: New Directions, 1957. Eustace Chisholm and the Works. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Garments the Living Wear. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989. Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue. New York: Morrow, 1998. The House of the Solitary Maggot. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974. I Am Elijah Thrush. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. In a Shallow Grave. New York: Arbor House, 1975. In the Hollow of His Hand. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986. Jeremy’s Version. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.

1082 PUSHING THE BEAR

Malcolm. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1959. Mourners Below. New York: Viking/London: Owen, 1984. Narrow Rooms. New York: Arbor House, 1978. The Nephew. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960. On Glory’s Course. New York: Viking, 1984. Out with the Stars: A Novel. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992. 63: Dream Palace. New York: William-Frederick, 1956.

SOURCES Adams, Stephen D. James Purdy. New York: Barnes Noble, 1976. The American Novel: Two Studies. Emporia: Kansas State Teachers College of Emporia, Graduate Division, 1965. Chupack, Henry. James Purdy. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Contemporary American Novelists. Edited by Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. Essays in Modern American Literature. Edited by Richard E. Langford. De Land, Fla.: Stetson University Press, 1963. The Fifties: Fiction, Poetry, Drama. Edited by Warren French. DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1971. French, Warren. Season of Promise. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Standards: A Chronicle of Books for Our Time. Dedham, Mass.: Horizon Press, 1966. Kennard, Jean E. Number and Nightmare: Forms of Fantasy in Contemporary Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975. Kumar, Anil. Alienation in the Fiction of Carson McCullers, J. D. Salinger, and James Purdy. Amritsar, India: Guru Nanak Dev University, 1991. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962. On Contemporary Literature. Edited by Richard Kostelanetz. New York: Avon, 1964. Recent American Fiction: Some Critical Views. Edited by Joseph S. Waldmeir. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1963. Schwarzschild, Bettina. The Not-Right House: Essays on James Purdy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969. Solotaroff, Theodore. The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970. New York: Harper, 1971. Weales, Gerald. The Jumping-off Place: American Drama in the 1960’s. New York: Macmillan, 1969.

PUSHING THE BEAR DIANE GLANCY (1996) Diane GLANCY is a writer of Cherokee and German/

English ancestry who is celebrated for the stylistic experiments of her prose and poetry. Writing poetry that reads like prose and prose that is pure drama, she mixes written and oral culture so that her texts move somewhere “between petroglyth and written language” (Claiming, 20). Glancy’s award-winning books include her collections of poetry, Claiming Breath (1992) and The Relief of America (2000); drama, War Cries (1996) and American Gypsy (2002); and essays, West Pole (1997). These books are woven out of fragments of the past, collective and individual memories that often address a sense of loss and alienation. Her first novel, Pushing the Bear, is no different. Using writing as a path to healing and wholeness, Glancy offers her readers inspiration, an aid to survival, and a bridge across the divided worlds in which we live. Pushing the Bear is a gripping historical account of the Cherokee removal that begins with a stark statement of facts: From October 1938 through February 1839 some 11,000 to 13,000 Cherokee walked 900 miles in bitter cold from the southeast to Indian Territory. One-fourth died or disappeared along the way. The horrific experiences of the Trail of Tears are told by a multitude of characters whose individual voices recreate this tragic chapter of forced migration and dislocation in American history. These voices belong to Cherokee men and women of all ages and all clans. Joining them are the voices of soldiers, ministers, politicians, leaders, rebels, physicians, sympathizers, and oppressors who witness the Cherokees’ journey from Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee to Indian Territory. Glancy’s idea for the novel’s multiple narrators and the ensuing narrative fragmentation was prompted by seeing a “[Cherokee] pottery bowl, broken and glued together with some parts missing and the cracks still showing” (“Author’s Note,” 236). Shattered into a multitude of different perspectives and parts, her novel, like the pottery bowl, seeks to re-create Cherokee history and culture literally from the fragments that are left. Some of those fragments are historical texts and inventories; others are songs, prayers, and stories written in the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoia in 1821. Glancy’s use of the Cherokee language—strategically inserted into the English text as words, formulas, and

PUSHING THE BEAR 1083

phrases—creates holes in the text so the original can show through. These windows into the Cherokee language provide a glimpse into the larger problems of cultural translation and loss. The Cherokee words in the novel fragment the colonizer’s English and ask the reader to learn a new language—to fill in what is missing—by consulting the Cherokee alphabet attached and/or making sense of the phrases in the context provided. In this sense the reader is not just a passive listener to the stories of the Cherokee, but an active participant in the meaning-making process and a translator of the novel’s oral poetics. Barbara Duncan explains that the oral poetics method transcribes stories word for word “directly as spoken by the storytellers” (23). Glancy often imitates this method when she inserts direct Cherokee translations into her text. Instead of moving back and forth between oral culture and written history, the novel’s voices envelop Cherokee history by referring casually to many historical persons; such as Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Removal; Chief Justice John Marshall; the Cherokee leaders John Ross, Elias Boudinot, John Ridge; and advocates for the Cherokee such as Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and others. History—such as the events and the legislation that led to the Removal—is embedded in the fictional voices and is fiercely debated by the characters throughout the novel. In this debate, Glancy focuses on the plurality and diversity of opinions among the Cherokee and on their confusion and sense of betrayal not only by whites but by Cherokee leaders who agreed to the “exchange of lands.” These political betrayals provide the simmering background ache to the physical hardships of the characters in the novel’s foreground. The Cherokee must not only suffer hunger, cold, illness, confusion, and sure death, but they must overcome many emotional and spiritual challenges that accompany their ordeal. Glancy’s narrative centers on a young fictional woman named Maritole and her husband Knowbowtee and their families who experience starvation, exhaustion, pain, and the psychological trauma caused by the loss of family, home, and land. Maritole fights hard against the heavy grief that sits like a bear on her chest and threatens to consume her. How each character deals with such grief, loss, and humiliation is an important

theme of the novel expressed in the central metaphor of the bear who threatens to crush those who give in to despair and forget their humanity, community, and culture. Maritole, for instance, loses not only her baby, her brother, and both of her parents to illness and death but also her husband, who turns away from her in his own bitterness, grief, and powerlessness. This causes Maritole to rely on the protection and affection of a white soldier, Sergeant Williams, who is temporarily assigned to their removal unit. The rift in Maritole’s marriage and the divisions and tensions within the community at large caused by the hardships of the Removal make this novel much more than “a good Indian/bad white man story” (237). It is a powerful, poetic narrative that sketches the complexity of the experience and the diversity of responses to such human tragedy. But ultimately, the novel is not primarily about the blood and tears of the Cherokee; it is about their incredible spiritual and cultural resilience. The Cherokee take their stories and myths with them on the Trail of Tears, and it is through stories— ancient and new—that they make sense of their experiences. For instance, they tell the stories of Selu, the woman who gave her life so that the Cherokee would have corn, and of the monster Uk-ten, who was conquered with the help of a courageous boy. These traditional tales of sacrifice and courage lift the spirits of the people and remind them of who they are. They also listen to the voices of the ancestors, the Great Spirit, and the biblical stories of the Exodus. Like the Israelites, the Cherokee were led to a new land, says Reverend Bushyhead, and he asks his fellow travelers: “Did not the children of Israel also grumble?” All these stories, Cherokee and Christian, merge with the voices of the characters that tell of the confusion and hardships of the removal so that this experience, too, may become part of a collective story, a memory not only of pain but communal healing and survival. Like the basket maker who weaves different strands of river cane into a basket, Glancy weaves the different responses of the Cherokee to the Trail of Tears into a collective narrative that creates meaning out of confusion and healing out of pain. Many Cherokee storytellers believe that stories help individuals and communities to “stay in balance” and that “placing

1084 PUZO, MARIO

importance on the good of the whole more than the individual” is crucial to the traditional Cherokee way of living (Duncan, 25). By narrating the story of the Removal as a collection of voices, and by weaving Cherokee language, songs, history, medicine, and crafts into the stories, Glancy celebrates the Native American oral tradition and in the process becomes an important Cherokee storyteller in her own right.

SOURCES Duncan, Barbara R. Living Stories of the Cherokee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Glancy, Diane. Pushing the Bear. New York: Harvest, 1996. ———. Claiming Breath. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. ———, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: St. Martin’s 2005. Annette Trefzer

PUZO, MARIO (1920–1999) “For the average reader, the Italian-American novel arrived with Mario Puzo,” says critic Rose Basile Green. Author of the phenomenal best-seller The GODFATHER (1969), Mario Puzo made publishing history by plugging into the reading public’s inexhaustible curiosity about the Mafia. The novel, a chronicle of the lives and fortunes of the fictional Corleones, who emigrated from Sicily to the United States and became one of the most powerful Mafia families in the country, remained on the New York Times best-seller list—and on equivalent lists in England, France, and Germany—for well over a year. Puzo went on to collaborate with Francis Ford Coppola to write the Academy Award–winning screenplays The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974); additionally, both The Godfather and The Godfather: Part III (1990) won the Golden Globe Award for best screenplay. Puzo has been repeatedly praised for his skillful use of irony, realism, characterization, and for his exploration of human nature and the American Dream. As recently as 2003, the British reading public voted The Godfather as “one of the nation’s 100 best-loved novels.” The public’s interest in La Cosa Nostra continues into the 21st century with the five-year-long awardwinning television series The Sopranos, which, like The

Godfather, exposes the brutality of the Mafia while generating sympathy for many of its members and their families. Mario Puzo was born on October 15, 1920, in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, to Antonio Puzo, a railroad trackman, and Maria Le Conti Puzo, both Italian immigrants. Puzo’s father deserted his wife and seven children when Puzo was 12 years old. After serving in Germany with the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II as a corporal, Puzo married Erika Lina Broske in 1946 and enrolled in writing courses at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University. He published his first novel, The Dark Arena, in 1955, a tale of Walter Mosca, an ItalianAmerican soldier who returns to occupied Germany after World War II to exact revenge. In The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) Lucia Santa, a courageous ItalianAmerican woman, struggles to raise her family out of poverty in a crime-ridden area of New York. Both novels are now considered minor classics. Puzo became famous with his third novel, The Godfather, a pageturning account of Don Vito Corleone and his sons: Sonny, Freddie, and Michael. Here he explores the parallels between organized crime and mainstream American corporations. Fools Die (1978), Puzo’s personal favorite and another best-seller, uses the backdrop of Las Vegas to examine the world of gambling, debauchery, and corruption. Numerous readers have seen in the character of Osano a caricature of Norman MAILER. In The Sicilian (1984), set in the 1950s, Michael Corleone prepares to leave Sicily after a two-year stay and becomes embroiled with Salvatore Giuliano, a Sicilian outlaw. The Fourth K (1991) is a political thriller set in the first decade of the 21st century: It seems eerily prescient with its Mid-Eastern terrorists and its depiction of both right-wing and left-wing extremists. It includes a fictitious American president, Francis Xavier Kennedy, who is distantly related to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy. The Last Don: A Novel (1996) focuses on the Clericuzio family and Don Cross DeLena’s efforts to move the family from crime to respectability. Set in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Long Island, Puzo’s novel was a critical success, principally for its realistic characters. Omerta (meaning silence), completed by Carol

PYNCHON, THOMAS 1085

Gino, Puzo’s long-term companion after his wife’s death, was published after Puzo’s death in 2000; it explores the Sicilian code of silence and its gradual disintegration as new generations rise to power. Mario Puzo died from heart failure in July 1999 on Long Island. His manuscripts are housed at Boston University. In addition to the Godfather films, other films based on Puzo’s work include A Time to Die, adapted by John Goff, Matt Cimbert, and William Russel, and released by Almi in 1983; The Cotton Club, based on a story by Puzo, Coppola, and William KENNEDY, adapted for the screen by Kennedy, and directed by Coppola for Orion Pictures in 1984; The Fortunate Pilgrim, adapted for television and broadcast as Mario Puzo’s The Fortunate Pilgrim by NBC in April 1988; The Sicilian, adapted by Steve Shagan and directed by Michael Cimino for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1989; and The Last Don, adapted for television and broadcast by CBS in May 1997 and May 1998.

NOVELS The Dark Arena. New York: Random House, 1955. Fools Die. New York: Putnam, 1978. The Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Atheneum, 1964. The Fourth K. New York: Random House, 1991. The Godfather. New York: Putnam, 1969. The Last Don: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1996. Omerta. New York: Random House, 2000. The Sicilian. New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984.

SOURCES Green, Rose B. The Italian-American Novel. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974, pp. 336–368. Madden, David, ed. Rediscoveries. New York: Crown, 1972. Puzo, Mario. “The Godfather Papers” and Other Confessions. New York: Putnam, 1972. Wheeler, Thomas C., ed. The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming an American. New York: Dial, 1971.

PYNCHON, THOMAS (THOMAS RUGGLES PYNCHON, JR.) (1937– ) According to Joel Stein in a Time magazine review, Thomas Pynchon “created epic modernism” (Stein). In Stein’s opinion, Pynchon’s work goes beyond the “detail-saturated realism” of early modernists to create “Greek-size tales.” By 1975 Pynchon had won the Howells Medal

from the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters for the entire body of his work. His three highly experimental postmodern novels at that time included V. (1963), winner of the William Faulkner award; The CRYING OF LOT 49 (1966); and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (1973), winner of the National Book Award. (Pynchon refused to accept that award.) Renowned for the dexterity and denseness of his prose, his wit, and his extraordinary demands on his readers, Pynchon is concerned with the unsettling effects of technology on contemporary life; he frequently features characters beset by paranoia. Along with William S. BURROUGHS he anticipated chaos theory and was a grandfather of the cyberpunk use of the literary chaos that emanates from information overload (Schroeder), Pynchon is also linked with Joseph HELLER, Kurt VONNEGUT, and John BARTH, all employers of black humor and experimental forms and subject matter. Pynchon continues to attract followers, particularly literary scholars and young readers. Thomas Pynchon grants no interviews and reveals little about his personal life. He was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, an industrial surveyor, and Katherine Frances Bennett Pynchon and was educated at Cornell University. He graduated with a B.A. (1958) and served two years in the navy. His writing career began with the publication of short stories, followed by the novel V. There Herbert Stencil embarks on a quest to discover the identity of a person noted in his father’s diary and known only by that initial. Stencil’s energy and sense of purpose is illuminated by his difference from the “Whole Sick Crew,” an aimless and amoral group that represents the current state of society. Pynchon then published The Crying of Lot 49. It features Oedipa Maas, who, as executrix of the will of her former lover, discovers—or, as a Pynchon paranoiac thinks she discovers—a plot to topple the United States Post Office. Generally considered Pynchon’s most important work, Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s longest and most complex novel, consists of an ingenious blending of fantasy and reality, humor and violence, parody and satire, and multiple suggestions that Western civilization has declined into decadence in proportion to the invention and deployment of its technologically perfect instruments of death. Set in London

1086 PYNCHON, THOMAS

during World War II bombing raids and in postwar Germany, the novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. After a lengthy hiatus, in 1990 Pynchon published Vineland, named for a fictitious Northern California wilderness area that has become a 1980s refuge for aging hippies and counterculture folk. At the center is Prairie Wheeler, a young woman in search of her mother, Frenesi Gates, who has transformed from 1960s anti-Nixon radical to government informer, emblem of social and moral disintegration. His most recent novel is Mason and Dixon (1997), a satiric work written in 18thcentury English and featuring such early Americans as George Washington and Ben Franklin.

NOVELS The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1966. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. Mason and Dixon. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. V. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1963. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

SOURCES Arlett, Robert. Epic Voices: Inner and Global Impulse in the Contemporary American and British Novel. Selingsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1996. Chambers, Judith. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Twayne, 1992. Chatman, Seymour, ed. Approaches to Poetics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1973. Clerc, Charles, ed. Approaches to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983. Colvile, Georgiana M. M. Beyond and Beneath the Mantle: On Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” Edited by C. C. Barfoot, Hans Bertens, and Theo D’haen. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi, 1988. Cooper, Peter L. Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Grant, J. Kerry. A Companion to “The Crying of Lot 49.” Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Green, Geoffrey. The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983.

Hurm, Gerd. Fragmented Urban Images: The American City in Modern Fiction from Stephen Crane to Thomas Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Madsen, Deborah L. The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Mendelson, Edward, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1978. Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Nadeau, Robert. Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. Newman, Robert D. Understanding Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1986. Plater, William M. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978. Sakrajda, Mira. Postmodern Discourses of Love: Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Gass, and Barthelme. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Scotto, Robert M. Three Contemporary Novelists: An Annotated Bibliography of Novels: An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about John Hawkes, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Siegel, Mark R. Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1978. Stark, John O. Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1980. Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. London: Methuen, 1982. Weisenburger, Steven. A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1988.

OTHER Lots of Thomas Pynchon Links. Available online. URL: http:// www.acmeme.org/pynchon. Accessed September 26, 2005. Schroeder, Randy. “Inheriting Chaos: Burroughs, Pynchon, Sterling, Rucker.” Extrapolation. (March 22, 2002). Highbeam Resources. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:87128338. Accessed September 26, 2005. Stein, Joel. “Thomas Pynchon: America’s Best Novelist.” Time. Highbeam Resources. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:76163933. Accessed September 26, 2005.

C

QD

QUICKSAND NELLA LARSEN (1928) Nella LARSEN’s largely autobiographical novel Quicksand, for which she won a Bronze medal as second prize in literature from the Harmon Foundation in 1928, is considered one of the finest novels of the Harlem Renaissance. Through the inability of its biracial heroine to find her identity in either African- or European-American communities, Quicksand depicts cultural dualism from both sociological and psychological perspectives. The third-person narration of the novel’s plot is filtered through the consciousness of its 22-year-old heroine Helga Crane, daughter of a Danish mother and an African-American father. The novel opens with Helga on the verge of leaving her position as teacher at Naxos, an institution near Alabama dedicated to the education of African-American children. In Naxos the Victorian code of repression, propriety, and sanctimony rules the behavior of teachers and students. Helga Crane’s determination to leave the stifling and pretentious environment of the school and her fiancé, James Vayle, a well-established member of both the school and the African-American middle class, is shaken but not altered by her encounter with the effective school principal Dr. Robert Anderson toward whom she has mixed feelings of repulsion and attraction. Helga goes to Chicago where she experiences financial anxieties because she is rebuffed by the new wife of her Danish-American uncle Peter Nilssen, who previously financed Helga’s education. She finally secures

employment as speech-editor and companion to Mrs. Jeanette Hayes-Rore, a racial uplift speaker, who takes her to the Harlem residence of Anne Grey, the AfricanAmerican widow of her late husband’s nephew. Helga feels comfortable working and residing with Anne Grey in the cosmopolitan ambiance of Harlem until her racial and cultural unease catches up with her. Anne’s inconsistencies in racial equality activities and Harlem’s hypocrisy in racial uplift campaigns, in which Robert Anderson is also involved, disturb Helga’s sense of belonging. She turns Robert Anderson’s attention from herself to Anne Grey and, taking advantage of a convenient sum that comes to her from her uncle Peter Nilssen, relocates to Copenhagen to stay with her mother’s sister Katrina and her husband Poul Dahl. In the warmth of her relatives’ welcome, Helga feels released from the racial prison of Harlem, but soon she discovers that Copenhagen accepts her only in terms of her being different, exotic, savage, and primitive. During her two-year stay in Denmark, a prominent Danish painter, Axel Olsen, paints her portrait and first asks her to become his mistress and then his wife. Smothered by Axel’s artistic presence, social superiority, and sexual advances, she rejects both the proposition and the proposal. Unable to meet her Danish relatives’ expectations for her to become a middle-class wife by accepting this socially profitable marriage, and feeling homesick for her AfricanAmerican roots, she returns to New York to find Robert Anderson married to Anne Grey.

1087

1088 QUICKSAND

At a party in Harlem, Helga meets James Vayle and discourages him from proposing marriage to her again. In the same evening, she responds to the passionate kiss of a heavily intoxicated Robert Anderson and finally faces her strong sexual desire for him. Later, however, Anderson regrets his conduct and apologizes for it. Dejected by the denial of his feelings for her, Helga wanders about the streets of Harlem and has a conversion experience in a church where she meets Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. She marries this country preacher and returns with him to Alabama, where she finds her superficial faith vanished and herself in the “quicksand” of domesticity and motherhood, giving birth to three children in 20 months. Hardly recovered from the death of her fourth baby, she finds herself expecting her fifth child. The protagonist’s tragic end yields to analysis of the psychological and social forces that effect her life. As well as displaying Helga Crane’s counteraction to being rejected by Robert Anderson, her inadvertent marriage to a Southern preacher portrays the resolution of her doubtful origin, as marriage to a preacher doubly legitimizes her existence as a child out of wedlock. Her impetuous marriage also enacts the impingement of the social pressures on the sexuality of African-American women. Prevented from acknowledging and expressing her sexual passion freely by the racist social construct, which deems African-American women’s sexuality savage and primitive, Helga assents to a marriage in which she pays for sexual pleasure by rural domesticity and cruel childbearing. Helga’s undeserved destiny also results from her desperate desire to belong. Unable to find a partner to match her mixed racial identity in the pretentious environment of oppressive Naxos, exemplified by James Vayle; the hypocritical climate of bourgeois Harlem, represented by Robert Anderson; and the overbearing milieu of middle-class Copenhagen, symbolized by Axel Olsen, she expects to find refuge in a marriage

with a man who epitomizes a space, unrestricted by racial and social definitions, that she has entered through a sudden spiritual rebirth. The circumstances that thrust this final choice upon her seem more powerful than this protagonist, thus rendering a naturalistic component to the social and psychological realism of the plot. Nella Larsen’s probe into African-American female sexuality, exploration of the social forces on the psyche of a woman of mixed ancestry, criticism of African-American middle-class values, and skepticism about the existence of God set her novel apart from the classical “racial uplift” and “tragic mulatto” novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

SOURCES Brickhouse, Anna. “Nella Larsen and the Intertextual Geography of Quicksand,” African American Review 35, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 533–551. Davis, Thadious. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1996. Goldsmith, Meredith. “Shopping to Pass, Passing to Shop: Bodily Self-Fashioning in the Fiction of Nella Larsen.” In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women, edited by Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, 97–120. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. Edited by Deborah E. McDowell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Miller, Erica M. The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Wells-Barnett, Grimké, and Larsen. New York: Garland, 2000. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Ferdâ Asya

C

RD

RABBIT REDUX JOHN UPDIKE (1971) John UPDIKE’s Rabbit Redux, published in 1971, is a sequel to his 1960 novel RABBIT, RUN. The novel is set in a middle-class community in east Pennsylvania in 1969, a year highlighting quintessential events in the United States: the moon exploration, the Vietnam War, feminist movements, sexual and black revolutions, drug addiction, hippie lifestyles, and middle-American anger and frustration. The narrative successfully integrates the important social and political issues addressed by different characters in its representation of the arid urban life of the 1960s. The novel is divided into four sections named after the central figures thematizing certain concerns. Section One, “Pop/Mom/Moon,” introduces the middleaged, sexually diminished Harry Angstrom, who has become a burnt-out cynic—a washed-out, dissipated American man in need of “stability.” This section opens with Harry discovering that his once mousy wife, Janice, is having a love affair with Charlie Stavros, a car salesman in her father’s agency. Harry finds his dreary life shattered by the infidelity of his wife, who leaves him and abandons their 13-year-old son, Nelson. The section ends with the Apollo moon mission on TV as Harry and Nelson visit Harry’s dying mother. In Section Two, “Jill,” Harry meets Jill, a teenage runaway girl, at a bar. Jill goes home with Harry and they make love. Jill’s lack of self-concern makes Harry sexually passive; the “spaced-out” girl is described as an “angry mechanic,” working to arouse Harry, who

only manages to complete the sexual act by imagining a machine on Jill’s belly. Eroticism fails both Harry and Jill. The next morning Nelson meets Jill and they immediately develop a close relationship as siblings. Jill attempts to change Harry’s conservative attitudes toward Vietnam, blacks, and sex. Section Three, “Skeeter,” centers on the character Skeeter, Jill’s friend, a young Afro-American militant and Vietnam veteran, now a revolutionary. Skeeter has jumped bail for drug possession and wants a few days’ asylum. Skeeter ends Harry’s passivity, challenging him to fight, both psychologically and physically, and provoking verbal confrontations. Skeeter’s “seminars” every night educate Harry out of the worst of his racism and free him to confront both his own exploited status and his class hatred. The section ends with a fiasco: Harry’s house is firebombed, Jill burns to death, and Skeeter goes on the run. The final section, “Mim,” introduces Harry’s younger sister Mim, a would-be actress who is now a Las Vegas call girl. Mim tells Harry that she has learned to manipulate people, and in order to expedite Harry’s reunion with Janice, Mim sleeps with Stavros. When Stavros suffers a heart attack, Janice brings him back to life. Janice and Harry are reunited at the close of the novel, but the symbolic terms leave the final position unresolved. John Updike’s fiction participates in the contemporary debate over sexual identity and difference. Much criticism and reception of the tetralogy (RABBIT, RUN, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit at Rest) has overemphasized

1089

1090 RABBIT, RUN

the loss of Christian ideal or the absence of any transcendent mythos that Rabbit represents in contemporary middle-American society. However, throughout the Rabbit quartet, Updike’s ostensible theme is a chronicle of the evolution of middle-class American manhood since the 1950s. For the author, the chief malady afflicting modern American man is “masculinity” itself. (Carnes, 448) Another critic, Peter K. Powers, also argues that “for Updike particularly, an acute sense of a diminished masculinity, both in aesthetics and religion, motivates his work as he alternately embraces and rejects the ‘feminized male’ who has developed as an ideal for twentiethcentury middle-class masculinity” (Powers, 330). Labeling Rabbit as a chauvinist, racist, or misogynist could oversimplify Updike’s creation of this well-known character, since the intertwined issues of gender, theology, and aesthetics have made Rabbit “far more unstable and contradictory than [the writer’s] overt sexism might first lead us to assume” (Powers, 330). Through the protagonist Harry Angstrom in the four novels, Updike has produced the longest and most comprehensive representation of masculinity in American literature. In these books the author reevaluates gender issues, particularly masculinity, under the incessant stimulus of historical events and social changes. The events and forces shape Rabbit’s masculinity as well as the ways his gender identity affects his personal and spiritual development, his relationships, and ultimately, his society. The interplay of the failure of erotic questioning and the constant quest for a redefined masculinity as a series of paradoxes and struggles bulk large in Rabbit Redux. Rabbit’s relationships with different characters reveal his own gender/sexuality anxiety from his encounters with the marginalized groups: Jill (teenage runaway), Skeeter (militant minority), Mim (prostitute). The very existence of this interracial, intergenerational community emphasizes how Harry’s WASP masculinity has been undermined and reconstructed by differences of class, age, and ethnicity. The complications in Rabbit’s erotic relationships show how Updike challenges stereotypical masculinity and reveals its limitations as the source of Rabbit’s confusion and anxiety in the man/woman, man/man, and woman/woman entanglements that the protagonist seeks to cut through. Rabbit Redux invites readers to

question archetypal masculinity and see how its limitation has created anxieties and contradictions of a cultural phenomenon.

SOURCES Carnes, Mark C. “Fictions and Fantasies of Early TwentiethCentury Manhood,” Reviews in American History 24, no. 3 (1996): 448–453. Hunt, George W. John Updike and the Three Greatest Things: Sex, Religion, and Art. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1996. O’Connell, Mary. Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma: Masculinity in the Rabbit Novels. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996. Powers, Peter Kerry. “Scribbling for a Life: Masculinity, Doctrine, and Style in the Work of John Updike,” Christianity and Literature 43, nos. 3–4 (1994): 329–346. Slethaug, Gordon E. “Rabbit Redux: ‘Freedom Is Made of Brambles.’ ” In Critical Essays on John Updike, edited by William R. Macnaughton, 237–253. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982. Updike, John. Rabbit Redux. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1971. Uphaus, Suzanne Henning. John Updike. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. Inc., 1980. Wilson, Matthew. “The Rabbit Tetralogy: From Solitude to Society to Solitude Again,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 5–24. Bennett Fu

RABBIT, RUN JOHN UPDIKE (1960) In John UPDIKE’s Rabbit, Run (1960), the protagonist runs, but not too far. Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a character Updike revisits in three subsequent novels, RABBIT REDUX (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990), and one novella, Rabbit Remembered (2000), is a 26-year-old married salesman and former star highschool athlete who literally runs out on Janice, his pregnant, alcoholic wife, and on Nelson, his two-yearold son. On his initial “flight from domesticity” (Kakutani, 1), Rabbit only travels as far as West Virginia before quickly returning to his hometown of Brewer, Pennsylvania. His freedom from entangled relationships is also short-lived. Soon thereafter, in Brewer, he creates a new domestic arrangement and another rote lifestyle. Rabbit, now no longer employed, spends his

RABBIT, RUN 1091

days playing house with a prostitute named Ruth, and playing golf with Reverend Eccles. Rabbit’s chats with Eccles are the reverend’s futile attempts to rectify Rabbit’s plight. Throughout the novel, Rabbit, much like a runner doing continuous laps around a track, is caught in a loop. Eventually leaving Ruth, now pregnant, and returning to Janice, whose abandonment by Rabbit fuels her drinking, he then leaves Janice and returns to Ruth. By the novel’s end, he is running again, this time after Janice accidentally drowns their infant daughter. Given how Rabbit first takes flight to restore the vitality drained by his “second-rate” marriage and job, this graphic and heart-wrenching conclusion underscores the tragic and ironic consequences of Rabbit’s selfish decisions and indulged delusions. Rabbit’s circular journey, his flight from home that takes him back home, presents an archetypical male conflict: the competing drives to escape the domestic life and to settle down. Indeed, this struggle is a recurring theme for Updike and a traditionally American one. Some other famous male “runners” in American literature include Huck Finn in Mark TWAIN’s The ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN (1884), the nameless protagonist in Ralph ELLISON’s The INVISIBLE MAN (1952), and Sal in Jack KEROUAC’s ON THE ROAD (1957). Updike’s 1988 novel, S, a humorous update of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s The SCARLET LETTER as told from Hester Prynne’s perspective, attempts to upend this theme somewhat and to challenge his reputation for portraying women “as being merely ‘wives, sex objects, and purely domestic creatures’ ” (Kakutani, 1). Moreover, Rabbit, Run and S both punctuate how his fiction generally reworks America’s “novel of manners.” Traditionally about the lives of the upper class in New England and the Northeast, these novels were written by, among others, Henry JAMES, Edith WHARTON, John O’HARA, and John CHEEVER. Updike’s concerns with middle-class living, sexual intercourse, dysfunctional families, and thankless jobs brilliantly infuse this tradition with a poignant realism (Dickstein, 26). When introduced in 1960, Rabbit, now famous as the impulsively mobile and perpetually immature male protagonist, seemed a fitting reactionary figure to the previous decade. With 1950s America preaching moral conformity, family values, and hard work, by the decade’s

end, this atmosphere left many feeling constrained, frustrated, and disappointed. A “national malaise” became more widespread. In reaction to this ethos, many writers such as Jack Kerouac and J. D. SALINGER composed works that emphasized seeking personal happiness, expressing individuality, and experiencing freedom. John Updike credits Salinger and Kerouac’s thematic concerns and lyric style for shaping his own focus and narrative voice. Rabbit, Run, written when he was a 20something married father of four, scrutinizes the dire moral consequences, especially for relationships, when a married American male embraces this beatnik spirit (Dickstein, 103–111). Updike grounds this countercultural movement in the inescapable entanglements and practicalities of everyday life. (Even when on the run, Rabbit must return home for more clothing.) More poignantly, though, Rabbit’s longing to break free from familial constraints, his constant drive for sensual pleasure, and his wish to recapture his former youthful glory, all create turmoil for those around him. His repeated offenses make the reader recoil at this character’s apparent “hardness of heart” (vii). Critics have long debated the level of Rabbit’s self-awareness. Morris Dickstein credits Rabbit with an occasional epiphany about “life’s limits” because of his time spent with his “goad and confidant,” Reverend Eccles (Dickstein, 108–111). Frederick Karl is less hopeful; although he finds the character “not a bad man,” he’s even more “hollow” than Updike perceives. As readers, we are left to wonder if Rabbit is a prototype of the American male (Karl, 348)—one who rebuffs maturity and resists domestication. In 1970, Rabbit, Run was made into a film, with James Caan playing the role of Rabbit Angstrom. The Rabbit tetralogy has garnered critical accolades: Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes, in 1982 and 1991, respectively.

SOURCES Dickstein, Morris. Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Kakutani, Michiko. “Critics Notebook; Updike’s Long Struggle to Portray Women,” New York Times, 5 May 1988, C29.

1092 RAGTIME

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions, 1940/1980: A Comprehensive Edition and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Updike, John. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. Ilse Schrynemakers

RAGTIME E. L. DOCTOROW (1975) Ragtime is a historical novel that mingles fact and fiction, while interweaving the stories of three different families. The title hints at the raggedy coexistence of different narratives within the novel: DOCTOROW wrote his novel like a ragtime, as though a syncopated melody line, one strand of history, is played against a straight or routine accompaniment, another strand. He plays history like a tune on a player piano. He has emphasized the importance of understanding history as a kind of ragtime throughout his career. He believes that fiction understands history’s sources to be more various than the historian might suppose, and Ragtime illustrates his belief, as expressed in an interview, that history becomes mythology unless composed of many perspectives: “If you don’t constantly recompose and reinterpret history, then it begins to tighten its grip on your throat as myth and you find yourself in some kind of totalitarian society. . . . [T]he test of any society is its resistance to the subjective.” He is suspicious of the process of writing history: “The history of . . . the murder of six million Jews, if Hitler had won the Second World War [would perhaps have been represented] in contemporary history as not having happened.” Doctorow’s ideal artist should therefore demonstrate the elusiveness of historical truth and can be central to the production of history, functioning as “a Distant Early Warning System in the defense of reality,” as he explained. Ragtime confirms the importance of multiple perspectives to defend reality: At one point the character Dreiser turns his chair in circles, unable to find a “proper alignment,” and there are apparently many centers to the ice-cap that the character Father explores. The novel mocks any single approach, whether romantic, scientific, or universal. In condemning absolutist and deterministic history, Ragtime explores the dangers of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, what Morgan calls the “universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning

to the activity of this planet,” and even includes Jung as a character. When history seems to move in cycles, it does so in ominously military terms: The novel opens with Father making a living from patriotism, and closes with Thaw marching annually in a military parade. A repeating image of immersion conveys the stifling qualities of repetition: a baby in the earth, Houdini in coffins, Morgan in a tomb. The theme of silhouettes symbolizes history as a rigid outline, without detail or nuance: The explorers are silhouetted in a photograph, the characters are silhouettes on the beach, the pyramids are silhouetted. One of the novel’s major characters, Tateh, even creates silhouettes. But they eventually lead him to a career in filmmaking: He turns them into “movie-books,” separate images that flick past as one long sequence to the eye. These detached moments become a continuous shaped history only because of the ability of the human mind to create order. Tateh learns that “everything in the world could as easily be something else” and reinvents himself so he is almost reminiscent of a film actor who has escaped the attention of the continuitychecker: He is dark-haired, then white-haired, then dark again. Doctorow thereby uses Tateh and his movie-books to explore vision and understanding as subjective, history as discontinuous, and fact as fiction. Like Tateh, the character called The Boy seems eventually to understand the difference between truth and “images of truth,” and to embrace the fragmentary, raggedy aspect of time and reality. He feels that the shape of history is crooked, and so is fascinated by his distorted appearance in a headlamp and a story in the paper about a curveball. Like Tateh, he knows that the past is not history, and material is not valuable evidence, unless the historian makes it so: He notices “traces quickly erased of moments passed” and treasures “anything discarded,” investing it with value, just as imagination and film invest Tateh’s silhouettes with detail and sequence, and fiction fleshes out the bare bones of history. Tateh and The Boy realize the truth of Nietzsche’s statement, which Doctorow quoted in an interview in 1988: “You need meaning before you know what a fact is.” Ragtime perhaps also echoes Nietzsche’s famous essay, “The Use and Abuse of History,” which proposes

RAND, AYN 1093

“a kind of historical writing that had no drop of common fact in it,” which could yet “claim to be called in the highest degree objective.” Nietzsche wanted historians to learn to “think one thing with another, and weave the elements into a single whole” for history’s “real value lies in inventing ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme.” Doctorow does just this: His novel weaves elements and variations together, into a ragtime of history.

SOURCES Budick, Emily Miller. Fiction and Historical Consciousness: The American Romance Tradition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989. Doctorow, E. L. Conversations with E. L. Doctorow. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. ———. Essays and Conversations. Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1983. ———. Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution. New York: Random House, 1993. ———. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975. Hellman, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Zoe Trodd

RAND, AYN (1905–1982) The late Ayn Rand— novelist, essayist, playwright, and philosopher—has become a cult figure. Although she published only four novels, they all illustrate her philosophy of rational egoism, called “objectivism.” After her emigration in 1926 from Russia to the United States, she became an exemplar of Cold War anticommunism; her novels were an expression of her loathing for totalitarianism and her advocacy of capitalism. Her emphasis on the dignity and worth of the individual and her rejection of an allpowerful state still resonate with the large number of readers who continue to buy her books. (It remains a rite of passage for college freshmen to debate her ideas.) As numerous critics have noted, her stunning success as a novelist in English aligns Rand with other foreign-born writers such as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir NABOKOV. Ayn Rand was born Alice Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Fronz Rosenbaum, a chemist, and Anna Rosenbaum. She was educated at the University of Petrograd, from which she graduated with highest honors in 1924, emigrated to

the United States in 1926, married Charles Francis “Frank” O’Connor, an artist, in 1929, and became a naturalized citizen in 1931. She invented the name Ayn, pronounced like “ein,” German for the number one, and took the name Rand from her RemingtonRand typewriter. Her first novel, We The Living (1936), tells the truth as Rand saw it, about life in communist Russia; in fact, she saw the book as a universal parable for people and all times and as a warning about the destructive effects of totalitarianism. It sold more than 2 million copies. She followed with the dystopian novella Anthem (1938), which illustrated the harsh physical and mental suppression of the individual in a society that has eliminated the word for “I.” The FOUNTAINHEAD (1943) tells the tale of Howard Roark, a young architect who struggles to maintain his integrity in the face of “an intelligentsia that despises individual excellence and independence of thoughts” (Machan, 3). She uses herself as a model for the heroine, Dominique Francon. Other major characters: Wynand, for instance, seems a composite of William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, and Joseph Pulitzer; Ellworth Toohey is modeled on British socialist Harold Laski. The protagonist, Howard Roark, although Rand denied the similarity, is considered by many readers to be a fictional version of America’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright. Despite the usual nervousness with which any Ayn Rand novel was received, it sold extremely well: more than 5 million copies by the end of the 20th century. Her magnum opus and major achievement was ATLAS SHRUGGED (1957), a 1,000-page novel again touting objectivism as the guiding principle of a successful state. A large cast of characters peoples a United States that hovers on the brink of disaster because of its collectivist government; the hero, John Galt, who realizes that to save the country, individuals who can think clearly, intelligently, and rationally are needed. After this novel was published, Rand became a public figure—a campus teacher and lecturer—and was interviewed frequently on television. She died on March 6, 1982, in New York City and is buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. In addition to her success as a novelist, Rand published four plays, two of which were produced on Broadway. Her play Night of

1094 RAWLINGS, MARJORIE KINNAN

January 16th was released by Paramount in 1941, and her novel We the Living was filmed in Italy in 1942. She also edited The Objectivist, a newsletter dedicated to explaining and furthering her philosophy, and wrote numerous nonfiction essays and books on the subject of the superiority of capitalism to communism.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Anthem. London: Cassell, 1938; revised edition, Los Angeles, Calif.: Pamphleteers, Inc., 1946; 50th anniversary edition, with new introduction by Leonard Peikoff. New York: Dutton, 1995. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis, Ind. & New York: BobbsMerrill, 1943; reprinted with special introduction by Rand, 1968; reprinted, New York: Plume, 1994. We the Living. New York: Macmillan, 1936; reprinted, New York: Random House, 1959; 60th anniversary edition, New York: Dutton, 1995.

Peary, Gerald, and Roget Shatzkin, eds. The Modern American Novel and the Movies. New York: Ungar, 1978. Schwartz, Peter, ed. The Battle for Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Charlottesville, Va.: Intellectual Activist, 1983. Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Slusser, George E., Eric S. Rabkin, and Robert Scholes, eds. Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy, Alternative Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Tuccille, Jerome. It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. New York: Stein & Day, 1972.

OTHER Wired for Books: Audio Interview with Leonard Peikoff and Barbara Bramdem on Ayn Rand. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/aynrand. Accessed September 25, 2005.

RAWLINGS,

MARJORIE

KINNAN

SOURCES

(1896–1953) Since the publication of The YEARLING

Baker, James T. Ayn Rand. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Barnes, Hazel Estella. An Existential Ethics. New York: Knopf, 1967. Branden, Barbara. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1986. Branden, Nathaniel. Who Is Ayn Rand?: An Analysis of the Novels of Ayn Rand, with biographical essay by Barbara Branden. New York: Random House, 1977. ———. My Years with Ayn Rand. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. Cerf, Bennett. At Random. New York: Random House, 1977. Den Uyl, Douglas, and Douglas Rasmussen, eds. The Philosophical Thought of Ayn Rand. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Ellis, Albert. Is Objectivism a Religion? New York: Lyle Stuart, 1968. Erickson, Peter F. The Stance of Atlas: An Examination of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand. Portland, Ore.: Herakles Press, 1997. Gladstein, Mimi Reisel. The Ayn Rand Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984. Haydn, Hiram. Words and Faces. New York: Harcourt, 1974. Machan, Tibor R. Ayn Rand. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. O’Neill, William. With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971. Paxton, Michael. Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life; The Companion Book. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1998.

(1938), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings has been associated with north-central Florida, which she first visited on a 1928 fishing trip. She later purchased a citrus farm in the tiny rural community of Cross Creek. In addition to The Yearling and another Book-of-the-Month Club selection, South Moon Under (1933), she wrote the novels Golden Apples (1935); The Sojourner (1953), and The Secret River (1955); the novella Jacob’s Ladder (1931); a number of short stories collected in When the Whippoorwill (1940); and the autobiographical Cross Creek (1942). Other stories and poems were published posthumously. Her literary reputation was secured when she won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling. MGM bought the rights to The Yearling, and the film, released in 1946, starred Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman as Jody Baxter’s parents, and Claude Jarman, Jr., as Jody. Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, D.C., to Arthur F. Kinnan, a U.S. Patent Office attorney, and Ida May Traphagen Kinnan. Her love of nature developed during her early years on the family’s Maryland farm. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1918 from the University of Wisconsin, married Charles Rawlings in 1919, and became a journalist in Rochester, New York. After the visit to north-central Florida, Rawlings published Jacob’s Ladder, a modern-

RECTOR OF JUSTIN, THE 1095

day version of the biblical story of Job. To write South Moon Under, Rawlings lived with an old woman and her moonshiner son, who became Piety Lantry and Lent Jacklin in the novel. In Golden Apples, an Englishman in Florida misunderstands the rural inhabitants, whose customs and speech he finds strange. Similarly, they misunderstand him. Her continuing fascination with the region surfaces in her depiction of Jody Baxter and his parents in The Yearling; the novel contains rich and descriptive language evoking the land and the growth of the characters in this coming-of-age novel. The Sojourner, set in upstate New York, chronicles three generations of the Linden family and their relationship to their farm. Ase Linden learns to accept his position in the family, after realizing that his mother prefers his older brother, Ben. Rawlings, divorced from her first husband in 1933 and married to Norton Sanford Baskin in 1941, was planning to write a biography of her friend Ellen GLASGOW when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage on December 14, 1953. The bulk of her papers are located at the University of Florida Libraries’ rare-book section.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Golden Apples. New York: Scribner, 1935. Jacob’s Ladder. (First published in Scribner’s 89 [April 1931], 351–366, 446–464.) Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1950. The Sojourner. New York: Scribner, 1953. South Moon Under. New York: Scribner, 1933. The Yearling. New York: Scribner, 1938.

SOURCES Acton, Patricia Nassif. Invasion of Privacy: The Cross Creek Trial of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988. Bellman, Samuel I. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Bigelow, Gordon E. Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Miami: University of Florida Press, 1966. Gilman, Owen. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 401–410. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Sammons, Sandra Wallus, and Nina McGuire. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Florida Crackers. Lake Buena Vista, Fla.: Tailored Tours Publications, 1995.

Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Edited by Gordon E. Bigelow and Laura V. Monti. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1983. Silverthorne, Elizabeth. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 1988. Turk, Janet K. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: a Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 287–294. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

RECTOR OF JUSTIN, THE LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS (1964) Considered one of AUCHINCLOSS’s finest works, The Rector of Justin purports to tell the life story of Francis Prescott, recently deceased headmaster of Justin Martyr Academy, a New England boarding school modeled on Groton, Auchincloss’s alma mater in Massachusetts. On one level the novel may be viewed as an examination of the institution of the American private school. In the words of scholar David B. Parsell, as Justin Martyr Academy moves to center stage, the school becomes more than merely the setting of the novel: “Through the life, ambitions, and accomplishments of the fictional Frank Prescott, Auchincloss focuses directly upon the private boys’ school as a sort of American hybrid, somewhat anomalous, illegitimately born into American democracy by deliberate contact with the British aristocracy” (Parsell, 48). Auchincloss is also examining the multifaceted human character epitomized by the school. Prescott, too, is a hybrid, and despite the best storytelling efforts of the many who knew him, in the end he remains an enigma. With this character Auchincloss makes clear that human personality is impressively complicated, and that our complexities are only selectively revealed to various friends and relatives. He uses several different first-person narrators to illustrate this idea. Of these, Brian Aspinwall is the one who unifies the narrative threads, his account interspersed with other voices in the form of taped interviews, written accounts, and conversations. Arriving at Justin when Prescott is 80 years old, Aspinwall—now a teacher who has failed the army physical and feels uncertain of himself and his identity—is not going off to fight in World War II. Given his lack of self-confidence, Aspinwall initially feels drawn to Prescott because the rector

1096 RED BADGE OF COURAGE, THE

seems his exact opposite—a strong-willed, successful man who can retire with pride in his accomplishments. Although he does not know at first that others have tried to write Prescott’s biography and failed, Aspinwall decides that to write about the rector’s life will be his most important task. As he becomes better acquainted with Prescott, however, Aspinwall perceives that Prescott feels he has failed, since his graduates, like those at similar elite schools, choose Wall Street positions over careers in the liberal arts, and at the cost of closer ties with family and friends. Numerous critics have pointed out that the reader sees (even though the characters do not) the fundamental inconsistency between instilling democratic and humane values in a school for the wealthy and the privileged. The implied question that follows is, Of what value is such an institution if it swallows up the individual? One of the ironic sidelights in this character’s feelings of failure is that Prescott often shunted his family off to one side in order to spend more hours with Justin. Through his boyhood friend, Horace Havistock, we learn that Prescott always had a vision of a model school and that he spent his entire life trying to create it. At an early age, Prescott lost his father in the Civil War Battle of Chancellorsville. His mother died soon afterward, and the prep school that he and Havistock attended became his substitute family. This belief, and his desire to form the perfect school for boys, became a religious mission. Despite his early success with the New York Central Railroad, where he impressed friends and colleagues with his extraordinary talents for leadership, for politics, perhaps even for future diplomatic negotiations, and despite his promising engagement to Eliza Dean, a spirited young California woman who might have brought to the marriage both happiness and originality, Prescott let both slip through his fingers: He gave up Eliza for the Harvard divinity degree essential to his educational vision, and in some sense sealed his own fate by marrying Harriet Winslow, a woman less vivacious than Eliza but well suited to the insularities of private-school life. The dichotomy between the attractive ivory tower existence and the cloistered, close-minded, faintly homosexual experience of the boys prep school is elucidated by David Griscam, still another of Prescott’s old

friends, who mistakenly thought he could write the headmaster’s biography. Griscam, a Wall Street lawyer whom Prescott himself dissuaded from a teaching career, attended Justin just as his father did, and therefore blames both the school and his father for his personal weaknesses and for the suicide of his son Jules, another Justin alumnus. A longtime member of the Justin board of trustees, a man who protects the rather naive Prescott from harsh worldly realities, Griscam emblematizes those who both understand and resent schools like Justin, yet also feel compelled to defend and preserve them. Still another narrator is Cordelia, Prescott’s third daughter, ironically named after Shakespeare’s Cordelia, loving daughter to King Lear. Unlike Shakespeare’s character, however, Auchincloss’s Cordelia insists on telling the truth (as her mother would never do) about the ways her father destroyed her one idyllic romance and ruined her two marriages to Justin alumnae and supporters. After years of psychotherapy, Cordelia— unlike her two sisters, who are less articulate but equally wounded—has not only learned to speak out but insists upon doing so. When Aspinwall interviews her in her New York apartment, she exposes the darker, controlling side of her father, always a headmaster, even to his wife or daughters. Like the young Jules Griscam, Cordelia is a casualty of Prescott’s naive, idealistic vision and his allegiance to an institution of questionable value. The ambiguity—the possibilities as well as the weaknesses—of both the institution and its headmaster mean that no single narrator can fully comprehend or define Frank Prescott. The reader is left at the end slightly anxious about Aspinwall’s decision—despite his failure to complete the Prescott biography—to follow in the footsteps of the rector of Justin.

SOURCES Auchincloss, Louis. The Rector of Justin. Boston: Houghton, 1964. Parsell, David B. Louis Auchincloss. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

RED BADGE OF COURAGE, THE STEPHEN CRANE (1895) With its ironic and scornful tone, Stephen CRANE’s The Red Badge of Courage marked a significant departure from the heavily idealized Civil War fiction that appeared in the decades preceding its publi-

RED BADGE OF COURAGE, THE 1097

cation. The novel’s unique tone and vivid imagery propelled its author to overnight success. Rather than portraying a larger historical view of the Civil War composed of epic battles that are fueled by a clash of ideals, Crane’s focus is much narrower, in that he concentrates on the individual psychology of Private Henry Fleming. The novel impressionistically records Henry’s shifting psychological state as he is transformed from a naive, vainglorious youth to an experienced soldier who possesses a deeper understanding of the nature of courage and self-preservation. At the beginning of the novel, “the youth,” as Henry is often referred to, possesses very romanticized notions about war and courage. As he waits encamped with his regiment, Henry frets not about death or being maimed but about whether or not he will run from battle and prove himself a coward in the eyes of his fellow soldiers. Henry’s early preoccupation with “proving himself” in battle represents the naive and egoistic notions of courage and bravery that he holds early on in the story. When Henry’s regiment is finally ordered to move, the youth experiences a significant change in attitude as they approach the actual battle. With the thundering of canons on the horizon, Henry begins to feel that perhaps he has been duped by his romanticized notions of war and now begins to suspect, a bit closer to the truth, that “they were taking him out to be slaughtered” (21). He believes he is about to be sacrificed to war, “the blood-swollen god” (28). Though his fear continues to mount, Henry does not run from his first skirmish. In fact, he could not have run even if he felt the desire to do so. Henry becomes boxed in by his fellow soldiers and, like a frightened animal, fights fiercely and unthinkingly to preserve his own life. Henry is relieved that he made it through his first conflict without displaying cowardice. He does, however, succumb to his instinct for self-preservation and runs “like a rabbit” when he comes under heavy fire during his second engagement (39). After fleeing, the youth embarks on a psychological journey that moves from justification and guilt to acceptance and mature understanding at the end of the fierce battle. Afraid that other soldiers may have witnessed his act of cowardice, Henry attempts to justify his behavior to himself by adopting a self-righteous attitude. He

believes he did the right thing, the natural thing, by running to preserve his life. He thinks of the other soldiers who stay to fight as “methodical idiots” and “machine like fools” (41). His resolve is weakened, however, and he begins to feel a supreme sense of guilt after he comes across the “tattered man” in a column of retreating soldiers. The mortally wounded soldier badgers the youth, repeatedly asking Henry about his own wounds. Consumed with guilt, Henry leaves the tattered man to die and rejoins the war effort, eventually earning a superficial wound, his own “red badge of courage,” from a blow with a rifle butt to the head by a retreating solder (52). Once Henry rejoins the battle, he fights bravely and fiercely, even capturing the enemy flag. His own ideas about bravery and courage, however, have undergone a significant shift. He is no longer concerned about earning the accolades of bravery that he once associated with proving himself in battle. In fact, he has learned that it is not about proving himself at all. Henry has adopted a sense of detachment and is no longer concerned with becoming a hero. Rather, he fights bravely as one soldier among many who fight together like some mindless machine in order to defeat the common enemy. Henry also comes to realize the significance, or rather the insignificance, of each battle. Once a soldier reveals that this bloody fight is just a distraction for a more important maneuver, the youth understands that this battle is just one among many. Likewise, his experience, which he had viewed egotistically as unique, is quite similar to that of thousands of other men. Many argue that the most memorable aspect of The Red Badge of Courage is the clarity and insightfulness with which Crane records Henry’s transformation. Having never been in battle himself, Crane demonstrates his own instincts for recording the horrors of war and the experience of individual soldiers with great accuracy. Several Civil War veterans in his own time were convinced that Crane must have been in the war. Considered his best and most powerful work, Crane proved himself to be a great talent at a very young age with his war novel, which has never been out of print. Unfortunately, he never had much of a chance to outdo himself, since he died at the age of 29.

1098 RED DRAGON

The Red Badge of Courage, however, continues to stand as a testament to his outstanding abilities as a writer.

SOURCE Crane, Stephen. 1895. The Red Badge of Courage. Reprint, New York: Bantam, 1983. Kathleen M. Hicks

RED DRAGON THOMAS HARRIS (1981)

The objective of a detective thriller, and much of so-called “true crime” journalism for that matter, is to enchant the reader. The criminal and/or the detective, and certainly the blood that is shed, must be imbued with something akin to magic, but magic within the terms of everyday life and without recourse to the otherworldliness that characterizes fantasy. Retired F.B.I. agent Will Graham’s capacity to “reconstruct” a murderer’s thinking by tracing back from mere traces left at the scene of the crime is a magical capacity to the degree that his intuitive mind’s eye renders those traces a scene of the crime: “Graham wondered if he [the murderer] had lit a candle. The flickering light would simulate expression on their faces. . . . Maybe he would think to do that next time” (23). From Balzac and Conrad to MAILER and Ellroy, it has become a truism of cultural psychology that the detective’s capacity to think like the criminal serves to reveal a shared proclivity that ideology would deny. Graham’s capacity for vivid “[i]magination, projection” is a kind of curse, a compulsion not unlike, Harris induces the reader to believe, the overly intense imagination of the psychopath. Thus, the “first small bond” that an act of engaged imagination establishes between Graham and his unknown quarry is said to sting him “like a leech” (23). The relation of the serial killer, Dolarhyde, to the exlawman Graham is that of a vague, but not indiscernible, alter ego—a shadow, a double, on the model of Jekyll and Hyde. Both Dolarhyde and Graham are trapped inside their solitude, inside their minds, inside their skins, which as the killer’s name suggests is a skin (hide) of sadness and pain (dolor). Both are loners who do not fit in. Indeed, the institutionally unaffiliated Graham is an object of suspicion for the bureaucratized investigators at the F.B.I. because his unorthodox skills and techniques violate and expose the limitations

of the categorical thinking that produces their psychological profiles. Graham and Dolarhyde are alike in other ways. In keeping with postmodern sentimentality, both are characterized as the walking wounded: Graham because his empathic capacities for the morbid and sordid suggests something psychologically perverse about himself, Dolarhyde because he was abandoned and abused as a child (in accord with another sentimental truism). Whereas Dolarhyde is partially absolved by this absence of family as the narrative takes up his pitiable point of view, Graham’s striving to save American domesticity from further assault (two families and their pets have been murdered already) ironically results in his wife and children abandoning him. This shared morbidity and trauma allows the detective to inhabit the murderer’s point of view and associative thinking, even though the murders appear random and without motivation. For all its gore and lacerated flesh—in fact, on the evidence of its contribution to contemporary “wound culture” (Seltzer, 225)—Red Dragon is a novel about perception and sensibility. Dolarhyde might be termed an aesthete maudit, an accursed quasi-artist type who experiences life and (especially) death in terms of monstrously deformed aesthetic criteria: “Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone” (112). (This trope is refined in Harris’s subsequent books about Hannibal Lecter’s exquisite tastes and subtle savorings.) Although Dolarhyde’s aesthetic predispositions are incapable of sublimating his murderous compulsions, those predispositions nevertheless provide a second perspective from which to register an implicit displacement, and metaphoric critique, of more mundane propositions about existence. This also seems to be one of the functions of the intertextual dialogue the book conducts with the visionary poetry and art of William Blake. The novel’s contrasting epigraphs from “The Divine Image” and “A Divine Image” (one a “song of innocence,” the other a “song of experience”) indicate Blake’s desire to expose the simultaneously terrible and sublime energies in the human soul that bourgeois rationality could not or would not acknowledge. In this regard, Lecter, who makes his first appearance in this novel, seems born of the poet Baudelaire’s contemptuous address to the

RED DRAGON 1099

bourgeois readers of Flowers of Evil: “Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere—Hypocrite reader, my likeness, my brother.” Like most crime detection novels, Red Dragon is also about semiology, the art of discerning signs and reading them for their significations. Dolarhyde may be an author whose texts are his corpses and a dramatist with a flare for staging (note the way his murder and torture scenes turn the dead and will-be-dead into their own audience). But Graham and Lecter are masterful readers; they read the signs of death and interpret them as manifestations of unacknowledged desire. Harris’s books about serial killers play off a version of the criminal genius type against another type of crime narrative, the police procedural. In this instance, the police procedural takes the form of FBI psychological profiling techniques, which are imbued with their own mystique, the mystique of scientific systematicity. Harris’s books have helped to make the purported observational precision and deductive reasoning of forensic scientists and psychological profilers the stuff of folklore, the signifiers of ready-made meanings available for slotting into all kinds of pop narratives. Harris’s work has also been influential in establishing the cultural truism that the serial killer’s tortures and dismemberments constitute an acting-out of fantasies that most people repress and that, therefore, these crimes are best understood as attempts to actualize heretofore thwarted or aborted individuality over and against social norms. Dolarhyde enigmatically refers to this process as “The Becoming,” in the quasimythopoeic manner that the cultural imaginary grants, with Harris’s encouragement, to the psychopath. That this diagnostic conception has been so widely disseminated and so readily received provides a salient lesson in the contemporary formation of folklore since it so obviously accords with and relies upon the American ideological conception of the individual’s rightful claim to autonomy. This conviction runs so deep it can withstand being pathologized. Harris and the reader can have it both ways: “At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde’s became understandable to him: he was alone because he was Unique. With the fervour of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept

down for so long—cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were—he could Become” (264). The cruel vengeance that Dolarhyde wreaks on the “true-crime” writer for his distorted tabloid accounts might be seen as a sardonic example of this idea. The journalist deserves his fate because he writes without the requisite transcendental inspiration: “I, who see more than you . . . I who pushed the world so much further than you” (204). Comparability between murderer and detective is further established by the fact that Graham, despising the journalist for his own reasons, wonders whether he has unconsciously ordained his murder by laying his hand on him as they were being photographed. It is fitting that Red Dragon has been filmed twice (Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann, 1986; Red Dragon, directed by Brett Ratner, 2002), since filming and the general making and viewing of images play central roles in the action and characterization. This ultimately serves to raise the question of the relationship between criminality, psychopathology, and scopophilia, the desire and pleasure in gazing. This is one of the more morbid implications of the “wideeyed dead” (19) that Dolarhyde stages and Graham must witness. Insofar as the term “wide-eyed” is usually applied to children, who in this case have been murdered, it serves as a reminder that Graham has long ago had his innocence violated by the murderers he has had to become in his imagination in order to apprehend them. Graham not only undertakes to understand the victims by watching their home movies, he also films the murders in his mind’s eye as he imagines the scene from the perspective of the murderer. But the risk of witnessing and taking up the Other’s point of view also applies to Dolarhyde, since his projected awareness of how his facial disfigurement looks to others dictates that he can only tolerate a dead and sightless audience (thus the only woman he might love is blind). That Dolarhyde and his victims share taking pleasure in making and watching home movies is meant to be sardonic. Dolarhyde’s voyeuristic viewing of their movies in the photo lab where he works violates the private domain prior to the home invasion and murders, thereby implicating the reader’s vulnerability insofar as

1100 REED, ISHMAEL

taking home movies is such a common practice. What is more, the law’s use of pictures for purposes of documentation is, ironically, an aspect of the motivation that compels Dolarhyde: to freeze the flux of life to advance the process of his own becoming (compare Roland Barthes on photography and a cinematic prototype of the serialkiller narrative Peeping Tom).

SOURCES Haltunen, Karen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon. London: Arrow Books, 1993. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 1998. Simpson, Philip. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Tithecott, Richard. Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. David Brottman

REED, ISHMAEL (1938– )

Novelist, essayist, and poet, Ishmael Reed is also the cofounder of the Before Columbus Foundation that honors talented young writers of color. He is the author of nine novels, many of which are racial-protest novels; indeed, a major precept for Reed is justice for ethnic and multicultural writers who, he says, neither inherit nor write within the Western classical tradition. In his own work, Reed employs a good number of Vodun (Hoodoo or Voodoo) rituals, folklores, and beliefs and creates an African American cowboy, who also appears in his poem, “I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra.” He frequently alludes to rhythm and blues music and to black sports icons. As a postmodernist he deconstructs traditional form and parodies various genres from the dime novel to the western. Reed acknowledges the influence of earlier black writers, including Langston HUGHES and Zora Neale HURSTON. He is probably best known for his novel MUMBO JUMBO (1972), a wideranging examination of the American black aesthetic. Ishmael Reed was born on February 22, 1938, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and was reared in Buffalo, New York, where he attended the University of Buffalo until,

unhappy with the lack of African Americans and other minorities on the reading lists, he left without taking a degree. While teaching at universities from Yale and Harvard to the University of Washington, Reed steadily published his work. His first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers (1967), satirizes both white leaders—whom he calls Harry Sam—and black, suggesting that all of them, from the fictional Black Muslim Elijah Raven to the novel’s Baptist minister, Eclair Porkchop, are driven by a desire for power. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Reed’s second novel, in a parody of the western novel tradition, introduces Hoodoo to the town, along with Loop Caroo, the African-American cowboy. The solution to fixing what has “broke-down” lies in accepting various cultural, spiritual, and ethnic traditions. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed employs the Hoodoo detective Papa LaBas to present his theories of AfricanAmerican art and aesthetics against a backdrop of 1920s New Orleans. The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974) continues with the detective Papa LaBas; his job is to solve the murder of Louisiana Red, the Hoodoo name for evil. The Terrible Twos (1982), set during the era of President Ronald Reagan, features Santa Claus, who points out the problem affecting contemporary America. By worshipping capitalism, Americans are, he says, no better than spoiled two-year-old toddlers. Reckless Eyeballing (1986) features Ian Ball, a black male writer, and Tremonisha Smarts, a black female writer, involved in a battle for the aesthetic hearts of the American people: Who will win, the black or the white writers? The term “reckless eyeballing” refers to the charges against Emmett Till, lynched in 1955 for supposedly looking at a white woman. For more than two decades, Ishmael Reed has been a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives and writes in Oakland, California. His most recent novel, Japanese Spring, appeared in 1993.

NOVELS Flight to Canada. New York: Random House, 1976. The Free-Lance Pallbearers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967. Japanese by Spring. New York: Atheneum, 1993. The Last Days of Louisiana Red. New York: Random House, 1974.

REEF, THE 1101

Mumbo Jumbo. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Reckless Eyeballing. New York: St. Martin’s, 1986. The Terrible Threes. New York: Atheneum, 1989. The Terrible Twos. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1982. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.

SOURCES Boyer, Jay. Ishmael Reed. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1993. Dick, Bruce, and Amritjit Singh, eds. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Fox, Robert Eliot. Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Joyce, Joyce Ann. Warriors, Conjurers and Priests: Defining African-Centered Literary Criticism. Chicago: Third World Press, 1994. Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Ludwig, Sami. Concrete Language: Intercultural Communication in Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior” and Ishmael Reed’s “Mumbo Jumbo.” New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic. London: Macmillan, 1987. McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Nazareth, Peter. In the Trickster Tradition: the Novels of Andrew Salkey, Frances Ebejar, and Ishmael Reed. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Press, 1994. O’Donnell, Patrick, and Robert Con Davis, eds. Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Ostendorf, Berndt. Black Literature in White America. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982.

REEF, THE EDITH WHARTON (1912)

Identified by many critics as the most autobiographical novel that Edith WHARTON wrote, The Reef was praised by Henry JAMES for its densely knit structure resembling classical drama. Narrated through the perspectives of its two characters, George Darrow and Anna Leath, the novel depicts Anna Leath’s wavering emotions between accepting and refusing George Darrow’s marriage proposal after discovering his brief affair with Sophy Viner.

Darrow, an American diplomat in London, meets Sophy at Dover before crossing the English Channel. Darrow’s pride is hurt by the curt and detached tone of the telegram he has received from Anna before he takes the train at Charing Cross. Anna is postponing, for the second time, their meeting in Givré, where she lives with her late husband Frazer Leath’s mother, Madame de Chantelle; her stepson, Owen; and her daughter, Effie. Sophy’s future is indefinite. She has just left her position as companion to Mrs. Murrett and she is going to Paris with the hope of seeking the assistance of her friends, the Farlows, to obtain employment and study for the stage. Orphaned at a young age and left to her resources to earn her living, Sophy lacks Anna’s conventional upbringing. The impulsive, natural, and unreserved characteristics that mark her personality contrast with the repressions, reticence, and evasions that shape Anna’s. As Sophy’s desire to attend plays in the Parisian theaters and her curiosity about the life in this city prove stronger than her prudence, Darrow purposely neglects to mail her letter informing the Farlows of her arrival and easily convinces her to spend a week with him in Paris. Darrow’s intention, however, is neither to make a sexual conquest nor to show Sophy the city. He selfishly wants the young woman to stay with him, as her naive and inexperienced dependence on his knowledge about the city increases his selfimportance and mends his bruised ego. After almost a year, Anna invites Darrow to Givré with the intention of preparing for their marriage. To Darrow’s horror, Sophy has taken her place in the château not only as Effie’s governess but also Owen’s fiancée. Having claimed his past acquaintance with Sophy merely as a casual meeting in a house where he used to dine, Darrow finds himself in a position both to testify for the uprightness of Sophy’s character and to help Anna obtain Owen’s aristocratic grandmother’s approval of his marriage to someone below his class. Struggling with feelings of guilt for betraying Anna’s trust in him and ignoring Sophy’s emotions for him, Darrow endeavors to conceal his affair with Sophy from Anna and dissuade Sophy from marrying Owen. While Adelaide Painter, a compatriot who has a considerable influence on the family’s important decisions, convinces Madame de Chantelle of the suitability of

1102 RICE, ANNE

Sophy for Owen in marriage, Darrow, during concealed meetings with Sophy, manages to convince her that she will be unhappy if she marries a man with whom she is not in love. Sophy breaks off her engagement, and her affair with Darrow is exposed when Owen reveals to Anna, who has chanced upon Darrow’s secret meetings with Sophy in Givré. Unable to understand Sophy, console Owen, and forgive Darrow, Anna vacillates between accepting and refusing Darrow’s marriage proposal. She sends Darrow away from Givré to London twice without a definite answer to his proposal. After Owen leaves for Spain, Anna goes to Paris in search of Sophy. From her sister, Mrs. McTarvie-Birch, she learns that Sophy has left for India with her previous employer, Mrs. Murrett. The story in The Reef closely parallels both the psychological states of Edith Wharton during her affair with the American journalist William Morton Fullerton from 1908 to 1910 and the circumstances in which their relationship progressed. The writer’s intention for writing this novel at the end of an affair with a predictably disloyal partner was to explore her true feelings about her lover and their relationship. Wharton herself considered The Reef a character rather than a novel. When one reads the novel with the writer’s purpose in mind, one transfers one’s analytic efforts from unfolding plot to penetrating character. Wharton projects her internal guilt feelings, anxieties, doubts, and hesitations in her love affair on Anna Leath and, indirectly, on Owen Leath. She re-creates the part of her self which was the rational and practical lover in the character of Sophy Viner. Through George Darrow she represents both her ability to understand human weaknesses and the newly found maturity and experience of a skillful lover. Through the internalization of the feeling of guilt and its influence on the moral development and actions of Anna Leath, this fiction enacts the devastating impact of the strict conventions of upbringing on the emotional and sexual development and behavior of women in the 1890s, and questions the reliability of these conventions as standard of virtue for women. Anna’s indecisions between accepting and rejecting Darrow as a marriage partner result from the discrepancy between the ideal image of the self that her rigid

familial upbringing and conventional environment have instilled in her and the self that she naturally inhabits, thus trapping her into the vicious circle of guilt feelings either for betraying her natural desires or for transgressing the dictates of social conventions. As well as representing the affinity between the old American moral and social conventions and the traditional values of European aristocracy with Madame de Chantelle’s conservative demeanor, The Reef conveys, through the contrast between the moral perspectives of Anna Leath and Sophy Viner, the liberating direction that these paralyzing conventions have taken at the turn of the 20th century. Like two other novels by Wharton, Madame de Treymes and The Custom of the Country, The Reef portrays the lives of Americans in France.

SOURCES Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner, 1994. Faery, Rebecca Blevins. “Wharton’s Reef: The Inscription of Female Sexuality.” In Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, edited by Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit, 79–96. New York and London: Garland, 1992. Hutchinson, Stuart. “ ‘Beyond’ George Eliot? Reconsidering Edith Wharton,” Modern Language Review 95, no. 4 (October 2000): 942–950. Killoran, Helen. Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. Tuscaloosa, Ala., and London: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York: Fromm International, 1985. Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Wharton, Edith. “The Reef.” In Novels, edited by R. W. B. Lewis, 349–619. New York: The Library of America, 1985. Ferdâ Asya

RICE, ANNE (HOWARD ALLEN O’BRIEN, A. N. ROQUELAURE, ANNE RAMPLING) (1941– ) Anne Rice, author of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1976), has been a household name for three decades. The critic Jennifer Smith notes that Rice’s concern with “evil and power and the lure of immortality” is a part of her “genius as a novelist: she can combine mainstream moral philosophy and flesh-creeping horror in the same novel

RICE, ANNE 1103

and make the reader enjoy both” (Smith). Rice continues to write critically acclaimed novels about vampires, the vampire Lestat in particular, but also novels written under the pseudonyms A. N. Roquelaure and Anne Rampling. Her sympathetic treatment of the vampires as lonely, brooding creatures trapped in an immortal state has captured the imagination of the reading public and made all these books best-sellers. Rice blends the gothic romance traditions of British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and those of the Americans Edgar Allan POE and H. P. LOVECRAFT. Her identification with Mary Shelley is clear, says Smith, not only in their personal lives—both married poets and suffered the loss of young children—but also in their depiction of monsters with a sense of humanity and morality (Smith). In Interview particularly, she recreates the six-year-old daughter she lost to a rare form of leukemia and gives her eternal life in the fictional person of the six-year-old Claudia. Anne Rice was born Howard Allen O’Brien on October 4, 1941, to Howard O’Brien, a postal worker, novelist, and sculptor, and Katherine Allen O’Brien. Her name was changed to Anne in 1947. After marrying Stan Rice, a poet and painter, in 1961, she earned her bachelor’s (1964) and master’s (1971) degrees from San Francisco State College. Interview with the Vampire features Louis, who is initiated into vampirism after the death of his brother by the vampire Lestat; his feelings of guilt lead to his “interview” in which he recounts his life story along with vampire secrets. In later novels Lestat takes center stage; in The Vampire Lestat (1985), sequel to Interview, Lestat becomes a rock star; in Queen of the Damned (1988), Lestat’s lineage is traced; in The Tale of the Body Thief (1993), Lestat trades his body with that of a mortal; and in Memnoch the Devil (1995), the devil tries to recruit Lestat. Other tales in the Vampire Chronicles series include Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires (1998) and Vittorio the Vampire (1999). The most recent is Blood Canticle (2003). In another vampire series, Rice traces the history of the witches of Mayfair from medieval Europe to 18thcentury Louisiana, to contemporary New Orleans and San Francisco; The Witching Hour (1990) introduces the family headed by the feminist neurosurgeon

Rowan Mayfair, and is followed by Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1995), in which Lasher impregnates Rowan with an incubus that becomes a curse to the family. Anne Rice has also published the non-vampire historical novels The Feast of All Saints (1980), set in New Orleans and focusing on les gens de coleur libres, or mixed-race people, represented by a brother and sister, Marcel and Marie, who are shunned by both their black and their white families. Cry to Heaven (1982), set in 18th-century Italy, portrays the castrati, male singers castrated to preserve their high voices. After her husband’s death, Anne Rice moved from the lilac antebellum house they shared in the Garden District of New Orleans to a gated community in Jefferson Parish and then to California. A number of her works have been adapted to the screen. Exit to Eden, directed by Garry Marshall, starred Dana Delaney and Dan Ackroyd in 1994; Interview with the Vampire, directed by Neil Jordan, starred Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in 1994; and Queen of the Damned, directed by Michael Rymer, starred Stuart Townsend in 2001. Feast of All Saints was adapted as a television miniseries by Showtime and ABC in 2001. Rice’s most recent novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is a striking departure, a portrait of the young Jesus Christ.

NOVELS Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. New York: Knopf, 2005. Cry to Heaven. New York: Knopf, 1982. The Feast of All Saints. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. The Mummy: or, Ramses the Damned. New York: Ballantine, 1989. Servant of the Bones. New York: Knopf, 1996. Violin. New York: Knopf, 1997.

“VAMPIRE CHRONICLES” SERIES Blackwood Farm. New York: Knopf, 2002. Blood Canticle. New York: Knopf, 2003. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Knopf, 1976. Memnoch the Devil. New York: Knopf, 1995. Merrick. New York: Knopf, 2000. Pandora: New Tales of the Vampires. New York: Random House, 1998. The Queen of the Damned. New York: Knopf, 1988. The Tale of the Body Thief. New York: Knopf, 1993. The Vampire Armand. New York: Knopf, 1998.

1104 RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY, THE

Vampire Chronicles (contains Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, and The Queen of the Damned). New York: Random House, 1990. The Vampire Lestat. New York: Ballantine, 1985. Vittorio the Vampire. New York: Knopf, 1999.

“LIVES OF THE MAYFAIR WITCHES” SERIES Lasher. New York: Knopf, 1993. Taltos. New York: Knopf, 1994. The Witching Hour. New York: Knopf, 1990.

EROTIC NOVELS, UNDER PSEUDONYM A. N. ROQUELAURE Beauty’s Punishment. New York: Dutton, 1984. Beauty’s Release: The Continued Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty. New York: Dutton, 1985. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty. New York: Dutton, 1983. The Sleeping Beauty Novels (contains The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release: The Continued Erotic Adventures of Sleeping Beauty). New York: New American Library, 1991.

NOVELS, UNDER PSEUDONYM ANNE RAMPLING Belinda. New York: Arbor House, 1986. Exit to Eden. New York: Arbor House, 1985.

SOURCES Badley, Linda. Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Beahm, George, ed. The Unauthorized Anne Rice Companion. Kansas City, Mo.: Andrews and McMeel, 1996. Hoppenstand, Gary, and Ray B. Browne, eds. The Gothic World of Anne Rice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1996. Marcus, Jana. In the Shadow of the Vampire: Reflections from the World of Anne Rice. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1997. Ramsland, Katherine M. Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. New York: Dutton, 1991. ———. The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice’s Erotica. New York: Plume, 1996. ———. The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles. New York: Ballantine, 1993. ———. The Witches’ Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice’s Lives of the Mayfair Witches. New York: Ballantine, 1994. ———, ed. The Anne Rice Reader: Writers Explore the Universe of Anne Rice. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

———. The Anne Rice Trivia Book. New York: Ballantine, 1994. Riley, Michael. Conversations with Anne Rice. New York: Ballantine, 1996. Roberts, Bette B. Anne Rice. New York: Twayne, 1994. Smith, Jennifer. Anne Rice: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

OTHER Official Anne Rice Web site. Available online. URL: http:// www.annerice.com. Accessed September 25, 2005. Anne Rice Page. Available online. URL: http://www. randomhouse.com/features/annerice/quizlist.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Wired for Books: Audio Interviews with Anne Rice. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/annerice. Accessed September 25, 2005.

RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY, THE ABRAHAM CAHAN (1917) The novels of Abraham CAHAN, particularly his classic The Rise of David Levinsky, are foundation works in the emergence and development of Jewish-American literature. Indeed, The Rise of David Levinsky stands as one of the most important novels of immigrant experience in all American literature. In his examination of the immigrant experience in the new world of America, especially the pressures of assimilation and acculturation, Cahan highlights major themes that are returned to again and again in much JewishAmerican literature of the 20th century. The Rise of David Levinsky is a multifaceted work as reflected in its literary history as a realist novel written by a trade union organizer and socialist, but has come to be regarded as a primary example of a business novel. The contradictory history of the novel’s reception shadows the complex personal history of its author. At the time of his writing The Rise of David Levinsky, Cahan was a committed proponent of international socialism and an active trade union supporter. His key position as editor of the Forward placed Cahan at the intersection of various social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. His political beliefs made him acutely aware of the dangers of Americanization. At the same time, his literature and his journalism offered perspectives of a cautious assimilationism. More than any of his literary predecessors, Cahan was able to move with

RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM, THE 1105

great fluency between Yiddish, Russian, and American cultures. His unique skills give him a central place in the culture and literature of Jewish-American communities. This diversity of experience is drawn upon and reflected in Cahan’s novel. The Rise of David Levinsky tells the story of a young Hasidic Jew who turns away from his religious studies to pursue material success as a businessman among the growing manufacturing enterprises of the Lower East Side. Pursuing his economic goals with all the energy and attention he had previously devoted to his religious work, Levinsky becomes extremely successful financially but is increasingly separated from the culture and tradition that had sustained him psychologically. His is a tale of the pressures of assimilation facing immigrants in America and the deep personal costs extracted from those who become detached from the cultural roots of community. This intensely felt separation is rendered by Cahan in sad and moving passages as a successful, but isolated, Levinsky reflects on the course of his life. Near the novel’s end, Levinsky concludes regretfully: “I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher’s Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak manufacturer” (530). Cahan offers a poignant analysis of the tensions and anxieties experienced by immigrants caught up in pursuit of the American dream. Cahan perceptively portrays the loss of deep personal and communal relationships that is a result of pursuing the dream. In this, the novel’s title is shown to convey a deep irony. This simple reflection on the division between Levinsky’s inner identity and his present self speaks to a variety of contradictions and discontinuities experienced by immigrants in early 20th-century America. Levinsky’s identity is caught between the competing trajectories of his life: between religion and business, poverty and wealth, idealism and regret. At the same time, Cahan’s work speaks to the complex and evolving relationships connecting Jewish Europe and Jewish America. In The Rise of David Levinsky, Cahan depicts the creeping but steady processes of assimilation most

effectively through his innovative use of language. The author gives his characters voices in unpolished hybrid dialects taken from the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Through his striking expression of the transformation and loss of language in the novel, Cahan examines shifting perceptions of culture and community among Jewish immigrants in America. Influenced by the literary social realism of its day, The Rise of David Levinsky is a work revered by literary critics, historians, and sociologists alike. The novel’s skillful melding of literary proficiency and social and historical documentation reflect Abraham Cahan’s talents as a journalist and writer and mark The Rise of David Levinsky as a work of lasting significance. It can even be argued that The Rise of David Levinsky represents a paradigmatic moment in the emergence of Jewish-American literature and the translation of Yiddish heritage into both the language and culture of early 20th-century America and the simultaneous reenvisioning of America through the experiences of Jewish immigrants. It is a work that prefigures, by a generation, themes and concerns that would become prominent in the writings of better-known authors such as Henry ROTH, Saul BELLOW, and Bernard MALAMUD.

SOURCE Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Modern Library, 2001. J. A. Shantz

RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM, THE WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1885) Of the nearly three dozen novels written by W. D. HOWELLS, The Rise of Silas Lapham has proved the most enduring. From its opening in 1875, a revealing interview of the 55-year-old Lapham in Boston provides information on his life to date: his background on a Vermont farm, his family, his crucial experience as an officer in the Civil War, his boorishness and lack of taste, his fortunate discovery of a mineral paint lode on his farm, and his rise to wealth manufacturing, obtrusively advertising, and selling the paint. The interview also exposes a point of vulnerability in that rise when Lapham self-consciously minimizes the role in it of his former partner, Milton K. Rogers; the interviewer—Bartley Hubbard of A Modern

1106 RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM, THE

Instance (1882), early in his doomed career as a reporter in Boston—perceives Lapham’s momentary reticence but cautiously avoids noting it down for publication. Lapham’s self-portrait establishes a foundation for the mutually supportive plots that thread through the novel and illustrate the main themes: the duty to act responsibly as conscience dictates and the nobility or folly of self-sacrifice, determined by the extent of benefit or pain it would cause. The major plot directly concerns Lapham’s economic fall and consequent moral rise after he knowingly and willingly sacrifices his fortune rather than securing part of it with a legal but unethical act. The primary subplot chiefly concerns the love triangle of Lapham’s two daughters, Penelope, the elder intellectual brunette, and Irene, her younger, prettier, more practical redheaded sister, for Tom Corey, son of a patrician Brahmin couple. These two plots intertwine when Lapham’s wealth motivates him and his wife, Persis, to climb socially for the girls’ benefit by building an expensive home on Boston’s Back Bay so they can move from their workingclass neighborhood on the South End of the city. Simultaneously, both daughters succumb to Tom Corey’s charm, Pen silently and Irene overtly, neither knowing until after a crisis occurs that he favors Pen rather than her sister. By then, Lapham has hired him as an office worker, and Tom’s parents have hosted a dinner to meet the Laphams formally and begin introducing them into polite society. The Laphams’ preparations to attend the dinner expose their unfamiliarity with the social graces, and their attempts to acquire them quickly are at times pure comedy. The conversation during and after dinner, to which chapter 14 is devoted, is a thematic nexus for the novel because the principal topics discussed relate to conscience, duty, and self-sacrifice. Silas does not speak when the others deride or condemn foolish self-sacrifice as a subject of popular fiction, but he impresses them when he tells of a soldier, Jim Millon, who died protecting him from a sniper’s ball during the war; Millon’s sacrifice is the basis for a secondary subplot that unfolds late in the novel. That Lapham, unaccustomed to alcohol, becomes loud and boastful from overindulgence in wine is notable, but

the incident has no enduring effect because it is quickly dismissed by the hosts and guests, who understand that it resulted only from inexperience, not decadence. The dinner, however, is a major turning point in the novel. Shortly afterward, Silas tells Persis that his finances are being drained through bad investments with his former partner, whom he had pushed out of the business when outside capital was no longer needed. Since then, Lapham had ignored him despite his wife’s insistence that Rogers had been wronged. Persis is the voice of Lapham’s conscience, and Rogers embodies it as a shadow-figure. Because she presses her husband to finance Rogers and correct the wrong, Silas gives him money for railroad stock that has lost nearly all its value, an exchange that further undermines his fortune. Lapham’s position grows still worse when his uninsured home under construction burns to the ground as a result of his own carelessness as the finishing touches are being added. With his financial future at stake, Lapham can avoid a total collapse only by collaborating with Rogers in a legal but unethical scheme to cheat a group of wealthy British speculators out of their money by selling to them at full value the nearly worthless collateral he received from his ex-partner. After symbolically wrestling with the angel, Lapham refuses to cooperate, sells his paint manufactory to eager young competitors, and returns with Persis and Irene to their farm in Vermont, having ascended morally from his economic fall. He has paid all his debts, he says, and “come out with clean hands” by following his conscience and making the sacrifice (510). Meanwhile Tom Corey has declared himself to Penelope, shocking her and sending her into paroxysms of dismay as she apprehends how his choosing her so unexpectedly over Irene will distress her lovesick sister. After she refuses him and begs him to leave, the bewildered suitor pleads at length for her hand, but despite her love for him, Pen adamantly refuses, willing to sacrifice herself in a foolish attempt to mollify Irene. Ultimately, she succumbs to the Rev. Sewell’s “economy-of-pain” resolution that advocates the least pain for the fewest people, and Tom’s pleas are successful (338).

RIVERA, TOMÁS 1107

Lapham is probably Howells’s most thoughtfully constructed novel. The opening interview provides a foundation, the Corey dinner at midpoint marks a critical turn, and most of the early chapters between deal with the Lapham-Corey subplot. After the dinner, more attention is given to the rapid financial decline that leads to Lapham’s dutiful self-sacrifice. Complementing it are Penelope’s ludicrous readiness to sacrifice herself also but to no one’s benefit, as well as the minor subplot stitched in near the end of the novel— which traces the responsibility Lapham has quietly assumed for the wife and daughter of Jim Millon, who had sacrificed his life for him. Millon’s daughter, Zerilla, has married an alcoholic like her mother, and Lapham has employed the young woman as his secretary, unknown to Persis, who becomes jealous over the attractive typist in his office. This short naturalistic segment of the novel exposes first, the seedy side of Boston to Howells’s realism; second, the dark consequences that in the real world may follow attempting to repay a mortal debt for which no compensation is possible; and third, the limitations of Persis, who has heretofore been portrayed as a stabilizing moral force on Lapham’s life and career. The house being constructed on Beacon Street is another complement, one symbolizing the building and rapid destruction of Lapham’s career. During the early stages, Lapham’s dialogues with the architect reveal the glaring difference between his conventional taste and the architect’s fashionable ideas. Lapham’s preference for a long, straight stairway from the front hall, for example, contrasts with the architect’s recommendation that the stairs ascend in stages along three sides of it. In literary terms, the distinctively different types of staircases suggest the greater value of multiple plots over a single straight one, a structural device that proves particularly effective in this novel. When Howells serialized The Rise of Silas Lapham in the Century Magazine from November 1884 through August 1885, readers eagerly awaited each new section. However, the complete novel with a few small but significant changes had a mixed reception when published by Harper & Brothers in 1885 because some critics questioned the value of fiction written about everyday life. Realism was still seeking its audience in

the United States, and Howells was bringing out his most admirable novels in the 1880s to gain one. The Rise of Silas Lapham marks a high point in his ultimately successful efforts.

SOURCES Bennett, George N. William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957. Cady, Edwin H. The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837–1885 of William Dean Howells. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1956. Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954. Eble, Kenneth E. William Dean Howells. 2nd ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885. Pease, Donald E., ed. New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Vanderbilt, Kermit. The Achievement of William Dean Howells. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Sanford E. Marovitz

RIVERA, TOMÁS (1935–1984) Tomás Rivera, a pioneer in the development of modern Latino literature, burst onto the literary consciousness in 1971 with his novel, . . . Y NO SE LO TRAGO LA TIERRA/ . . . AND THE EARTH DID NOT DEVOUR HIM, which received the first Quinto Sol National Literary Award. The novel describes the traditions and customs of individual Chicanos in the United States, whether migrant farm laborers or urban barrio dwellers. These impoverished working-class characters live on the margins of a more prosperous and privileged Anglo-American society. However, Rivera did not aim for a niche in the annals of American proletarian fiction. Instead, he portrayed the lives of ordinary Mexican Americans, drawn simultaneously to the ways of Old Mexico and those of the United States. Through an intriguing blend of 14 stories and 13 vignettes, says author Maria Herrera-Sobek, the novel’s “apparently disjoined structure reflects the protagonist’s chaotic disorientation in the first story” (Herrera-Sobek). Tomás Rivera was born on December 22, 1935, in Crystal City, Texas, to Florencio M. Rivera, a migrant

1108 RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, A

worker and cook, and Josefa Hernandez Rivera. He married Concepcion Garza in 1958, the same year he earned his bachelor’s degree from Southwest Texas State University, where he also was awarded a master’s degree in education in 1964. He earned a master of arts and doctoral degree at the University of Oklahoma, both in 1969. Just two years later, he published And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, nothing short of groundbreaking both in terms of Latino bildungsroman and the boy-narrator’s search for identity in an uncertain new world. His work was translated and edited by his friend and colleague, Rolando HINOJOSASMITH and others. Rivera’s work is frequently compared with Rudolfo ANAYA’s (BLESS ME, ULTIMA [1972]) and HinojosaSmith’s (Estampas del Valle [1973]), both of whom address the survival of the community. Together, these three writers initiated the Chicano Renaissance. Tomás Rivera was chancellor of the University of California at Riverside from 1973 until his death in 1984, in Fontana, California. His papers are held in the Rivera Archives at the University of California at Riverside. In 2001 Hinojosa-Smith wrote an essay commemorating the 30th anniversary of Rivera’s novel.

NOVEL . . . y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971. English-language edition published as . . . And The Earth Did Not Devour Him. Berkeley, Calif.: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971.

SOURCES Bruce-Novoa, Juan. Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. Davila, Luis, ed. Chicano Literature and Tomás Rivera. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1974. Gonzalez-Berry, Erlinda, and Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “Growing Up Chicano: Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros,” Revista Chicano-Riquena 13, nos. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 1985): 109–119. Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando, Gary Keller, and Vernon E. Lattin. Tomás Rivera, 1935–1984: The Man and His Work. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual/Editorial Bilingüe, 1988. Sommers, Joseph, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1979.

OTHER Herrera-Sobek, Maria. “A Spanish Novelist’s Perspective on Chicano/a Literature,” Journal of Modern Literature. Highbeam Resources. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:92805771. Accessed April 12, 2006. Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando. “On The 30th Anniversary Of Tomás Rivera’s . . . Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra,” World Literature Today (January 1, 2001). HighBeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3-asp?DOCID=1G1:76628983. Accessed September 26, 2005.

RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, A NORMAN MACLEAN (1976) “In the half century I taught literature, I was largely given the freedom to teach the literature of my choice, so naturally I chose literature that I felt was beautiful” (Maclean 1988, 69). Norman Maclean (1902–90) wrote the novella/memoir A River Runs Through It (1976) after retiring from the English faculty at the University of Chicago in 1973. It has become the best-known portion of his relatively small corpus of fiction and was made into a successful movie in 1992, directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt as Norman’s brother, Paul Maclean. While the movie alters the plot romantically to feature Norman’s courting of Jessie, his wife-to-be, they are already married in the novella. The text alternates passages of narration, reflection, and lyrical evocations of natural scenes that suggest a Thomistic approach to natural law. The arrangement suggests a narrative apologia for the argument from design that deduces a benevolent creator from the observation of an ordered, beautiful universe despite plenty of evidence of tragedy both in life and in the novella’s plot. Because of the novella’s structure, a narrative summary will be less successful than an account of how the differing passages evoke its central ideas, among which the celebration of beauty is key. The now-famous opening sentence, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” encapsulates some of the major themes propelling the narrative. The philosophical underpinnings of the story include the Scottish Presbyterianism practiced in Montana by the narrator’s father, the Reverend Maclean, and the neo-Aristotelian structure of opposites that Norman Maclean used as his critical toolbox when teaching at the University of Chicago.

RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT, A 1109

Presbyterianism provides the ground on which to discuss the need to help one’s neighbor. As Mark Browning has noticed (Browning, 680), the notion of helping unifies the otherwise often discontinuous narrative: The brothers help each other recite the catechism, shoot the rapids together (in the movie), and are asked by Norman’s wife, Jessie, to help her brother. Fly-fishing is connected humorously, though inaccurately, to Jesus and his disciples, and important conversations between Norman and his father center on the notion of selfless love and on the meaning of the Johannine gospel, especially the logos passage in chapter 1. The Neo-Aristotelian categories of either/or structure the oppositions in the text: those between the West and other American regions; those between men and women, whether real or symbolic; and finally those between women who are figured reductively either as healers or as temptresses, with Norman’s mother and Jessie in the first category, and Paul’s Native American girlfriend and the town prostitute, Old Rawhide, in the second. When, in young adulthood, the brothers take radically different paths, Norman as graduate student and professor in Chicago, Paul as newspaperman in Montana, Norman is finally unable to help Paul. The Christian command to love, the Presbyterian acknowledgment of a fallen world, and the neo-Aristotelian tendency toward dualism come together in the novella’s exploration of obstacles to perfection. In episodes distributed over the text, Jessie’s brother Neal has a sexual misadventure with Old Rawhide while on a fishing trip with the brothers. Later, Paul increasingly succumbs to his addictions to alcohol and gambling and is finally killed in a barroom fight. The elder Macleans then recede into old age, and the final textual passage takes us into the present of circa 1975, in which the narrator Norman has become a lonely old man who still fly-fishes. The novella’s most characteristic feature is the interpolation of lyrical passages. Maclean’s debt to Wordsworth—“Poets talk about ‘spots of time,’ but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment” (44)—emerges when he lovingly describes the tying of flies; Paul’s rhythmical casting of the rod; the immanence of water, trout, and fisherman; and the sheer beauty of watching Paul fish.

The novella celebrates masculine western outdoor activities, male friendships, and a paternalistic Christianity while offering largely schematic portrayals of its women characters. J. Gerard Dollar sees a misogynistic literary inheritance running from Mark TWAIN through Willa CATHER and Edward Abbey to Maclean. Mary Clearman Blew, however, successfully connects Paul’s Northern Cheyenne girlfriend with other “dark women” in the American literary tradition. Gordon Slethaug interprets the text using stochastics and chaos theory; Teresa Ferreira offers an intertextual reading within American river literature. Like the sunrise it describes as “luminous but not clear” (28), the text proffers multiple spiritual suggestions in lieu of one theological argument. In the end, Maclean pays homage to his brother’s life within the categories that lend it meaning, blending the mythoi of fishing, self-determination, Christianity, a fallen world, and the great western outdoors. Norman and his father agree that Paul, in an apotheosis of fishing, is “beautiful” (100), an appellation that allows both theological and—more recently—ecocritical appreciation (see Grattan).

SOURCES Blew, Mary Clearman. “Mo-nah-se-tah, the Whore, and the Three Scottish Women.” In Norman Maclean, edited by McFarland and Nichols, 190–200. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1988. Browning, Mark. “ ‘Some of the Words Are Theirs’: The Elusive Logos in A River Runs through It.” Christianity and Literature 50, no. 4 (2001): 679–688. Dollar, J. Gerard. “Misogyny in the American Eden: Abbey, Cather, and Maclean.” In Reading the Earth: New Directions in the Study of Literature and Environment, edited by Michael P. Branch et al., 97–106. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998. Ferreira de Almeida Alves, Teresa. “Gazing at the River, Throwing the Line, Daring the Waters.” In Rivers and the American Experience, edited by Jerzy Durczak, 13–33. Lublin, Poland: Maria Curie-Bodowska University Press, 2000. Grattan, George F. “Climbing Back into the Tree: Art, Nature and Theology in A River Runs Through It.” In Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism, edited by John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington, 231–243. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000.

1110 ROBBER BRIDEGROOM, THE

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. ———. “Montana Memory.” In Norman Maclean, edited by McFarland and Nichols, 68–74. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1988. McFarland, Ron, and Hugh Nichols, eds. Norman Maclean. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1988. Slethaug, Gordon E. “The Buried Stream: Stochastic Narration and ‘A River Runs Through It,’ ” English Studies in Canada 23, no. 3 (1997): 315–329. Thomas Austenfeld

ROBBER BRIDEGROOM, THE EUDORA WELTY (1942) The Robber Bridegroom, Eudora WELTY’s first piece of long fiction, is set in the frontier days of Mississippi’s Natchez Trace. We overhear the beginning of the tale as it is told by Clement Musgrove to the mysterious stranger, Jamie Lockhart, who has just saved his life and who later kidnaps and seduces his daughter, Rosamond. Though much of Welty’s later work makes use of myth, this novella teems with mythic, historical, and literary allusions. Sharing its title with a Grimm Brothers’ story, The Robber Bridegroom’s fairy tale quality is enhanced by the character Salome, who is in part the classic wicked stepmother and in part the evil seductress whose name she bears. The biblical Salome dances for the delight of the lustful King Herod and so enchants him that he grants her any favor she might request of him. Prompted by her mother, she requests and is given John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Unlike her namesake, however, Welty’s Salome is not physically alluring. In fact, she is so ugly that the Indians who capture and kill her first husband before the novel begins are frightened of her and set her free. After the Indian attack, Welty tells us, she has nothing “left but ambition in her destroyed heart” (24). And so she convinces Clement Musgrove, who along with his young daughter also survived the attack, to marry her. Welty suggests that Salome’s power stems from a supernatural source when, based on no clear evidence, she is able to instruct her husband to buy and sell at exactly the right times so they soon become wealthy landowners. Salome also uses her powers against her stepdaughter, Rosamond. Like the wicked stepmother in the “Snow White” fairy tale, Salome envies the girl who is

her opposite in almost every way: “Rosamond was as beautiful as the day, Salome was as ugly as the night” (33). She sends her stepdaughter into the dangerous woods, as does the queen in “Snow White,” hoping she will be killed. The Grimm Brothers’ “The Robber Bridegroom” features good and evil male characters, but Welty gives us these opposites as women. Like fairy tales, Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom invokes the opposites of light and dark to designate good and evil. But she also reminds us that dark and light, good and evil, are just parts of one complete whole. This suspicion prompts Clement Musgrove’s musings on the contrast between his beautiful first wife and Salome: “All things are divided in half—night and day, the soul and body, and sorrow and joy and youth and age, and sometimes I wonder if even my own wife has not been the one person all the time, and I loved her beauty so well at the beginning that it is only now that the ugliness has struck through to beset me like a madness” (126). Like Salome, young Rosamond is a powerful, creative woman. But whereas Salome directs her creative energies to the acquisition of wealth, Rosamond is an artist figure who sings beautiful songs and creates fantastic stories. After being sent by her stepmother on a dangerous errand in the woods, Rosamond returns safely with a tale of a giant mother panther who carried her home in its mouth. “[S]he did not mean to tell anything but the truth, but when she opened her mouth in answer to a question, the lies would simply fall out like diamonds and pearls” (38). Welty shows us that, in their strong, independent natures, Salome and Rosamond have much in common. To Musgrove’s threat of a tutor, Rosamond responds, “Never! I will learn it all for myself” (39). Similarly, Salome, who has directed her husband’s life throughout their married years, defies the first person to try to control her, her Indian captor. “ ‘No one is to have power over me!’ Salome cried, shaking both her fists in the smoky air. ‘No man, and none of the elements! I am by myself in the world’ ” (160–161). And Welty shows the pair growing close as mother and daughter when, in desperation to see the face of Jamie, her mysterious bandit lover, Rosamond takes the advice of her evil stepmother: In a variation of the Psyche and Eros myth, Salome gives Rosamond a potion to remove the berry stains from

ROBBINS, TOM 1111

Jamie’s face, and, as in the myth, he deserts his lover for her betrayal, jumping out the window. As her beloved disappears, Rosamond realizes the mistake of following her evil stepmother’s advice. Finding herself on her own after a second Indian attack takes her family, Rosamond seeks Jamie, to whom, instead of her beautiful lies, she speaks only the truth. A feminist interpretation laments Rosamond’s surrender of her artistic independence. Already visibly pregnant, Rosamond abandons her creative voice to create babies. Upon seeing her father after many years, she happily describes her new middle-class life that is almost comically commonplace in this tale of magic and fantasy. No longer the daring bandit and his stolen bride, Jamie and Rosamond are a settled married couple who now, like the rest of us, imagine the bold exploits of real pirates from the comfort and safety of conventional lives. But though she restores Rosamond to patriarchal control, Welty does not silence her voice entirely. For when her father questions the truth of her tale, she takes him “to see for himself, and it was all true but the blue canopy” (184). Her creative voice adds the one dash of color to her ordinary life. This early tale by Welty ends conventionally, with a happy marriage. And as patriarchal authority is restored, the evil female is destroyed. The biblical Salome’s power lay in her seductive dance, and in her final act of defiance Welty’s Salome also dances. But hers more closely resembles the self-destructive, mad dance of the Queen in the “Snow White” tale. Salome’s rebellion reaches Luciferian proportions as she boasts to her Indian captors that even the sun obeys her command to stand still, and she proceeds to dance until it does so. Of course, the sun continues to rise despite her frenzied movements. On the surface, good triumphs over evil at the tale’s conclusion. Another interpretation suggests that Salome’s dance is a futile defiance of ultimate male authority that finally ends in her own undoing. She dances herself to death.

SOURCES Entzminger, Betina. The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and The Dark Seductress. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. French, Warren. “ ‘All Things Are Double’: Eudora Welty as a Civilized Writer.” In Eudora Welty: Critical Essays, edited

by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 179–188. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. Graulich, Melody. “Pioneering the Imagination: Eudora Welty’s The Robber Bridegroom.” In Women and Western American Literature, edited by Helen Winter Stauffer and Susan Rosowski, 283–296. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Co., 1982. Kreyling, Michael. “The Robber Bridegroom and the Pastoral Dream.” In Eudora Welty, edited by Harold Bloom, 135–148. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Welty, Eudora. The Robber Bridegroom. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1942. Betina Entzminger

ROBBINS, TOM (THOMAS EUGENE) (1936– ) Eccentric is the word that recurs repeatedly to describe not just Tom Robbins himself but also his fiction. A 1960s cult figure, Robbins—who is largely ignored by mainstream critics—still draws college and high school readers to his popular novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). They identify with his rejection of state, social, and religious institutions, his adoption of Eastern religions and philosophies, and the characters who transcend establishment restrictions. Robbins, a master of creative plots and characters, an exaggerated use of metaphor, and an absurdist sense of humor, was named by Writer’s Digest in 1997 as one of “The 100 Best Writers of the Twentieth Century.” Tom Robbins was born on July 22, 1936, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to George T. Robbins and Katherine Robinson Robbins. He served in the U.S. Air Force in Korea. After graduating from Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) in 1960, he moved to the West Coast, “tuned in and dropped out,” and became a novelist. In an interview with Tracy Johnson, he says that it was at a 1967 Doors concert in Seattle that he found his “voice”: in his review of the concert, he described the style of the Doors as “early cunnilingual, late patricidal, lunchtime in the Everglades” (Johnson). Another Roadside Attraction (1971) is narrated by Marx Marvelous. Plucky Purcell discovers the mummified corpse of Jesus Christ and brings it to an enormous hot dog stand run by John Paul Ziller and Amanda, an earth-mother type. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976),

1112 ROBERTS, ELIZABETH MADOX

narrated by a psychiatrist named Robbins, features Sissy Hankshaw (of the nine-inch thumb), who hitchhikes her way to the Rubber Rose Ranch in South Dakota. In this commune a Native American group dedicated to Eastern spirituality joins forces with the cowgirls and fights the government in the Whooping Crane War; Sissy finds salvation through Chink, the Japanese-American wise man. Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) tells the tale of Princess Leigh-Chen, heiress of the Pacific, and Bernard Micky Wrangler, a.k.a. Woodpecker, who search for the ultimate perfume. In Jitterbug Perfume (1984), King Alobar and his lover, Kudra; the psychedelic Wiggs Dannyboy; and his protagonist-lover, Seattle waitress Priscilla all attain a state similar to that called nirvana. Skinny Legs and All (1990) is about Ellen Cherry Charles and her husband, Boomer, as they seek success in the New York art world. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994), about escaping the mundane world through the aid of frog aliens, is followed by Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000), in which the book’s protagonist, Switters, a CIA operative, takes the reader from Peru to Syria. Robbins’s most recent novel is Via Incognito (2003). Married three times, Robbins lives in LaConner, Washington, with his wife, Alexa D’Avalon. In 1994, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted for film by Gus Van Sant and released by Fine Line Features.

NOVELS Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Doubleday, 1971. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. New York: Bantam, 2000. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. New York: Bantam, 1994. Jitterbug Perfume. New York: Bantam, 1984. Skinny Legs and All. New York: Bantam, 1990. Still Life with Woodpecker. New York: Bantam, 1980. Via Incognito. New York: Bantam, 2003.

SOURCES Hoyser, Catherine Elizabeth. Tom Robbins: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980.

Siegel, Mark. Tom Robbins. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1980. The Writers Directory 2000. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 2000.

OTHER Johnson, Tracy. “Tom Robbins.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/people/feature/2000/03/09/ robbins. Accessed September 25, 2005. Sims, Michael. “Tom Robbins: An Outrageous Writer in a Politically Correct Era.” Bookpage.com. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/005bp/tom_robbins. html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Tom Robbins. Levity.com. Available online. URL: http:// www.levity.com/corduroy/robbins.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

ROBERTS, ELIZABETH MADOX (1886– 1941) A novelist, poet, and short story writer, Elizabeth Madox Roberts is known primarily for her first novel, The Time of Man (1926), published to critical acclaim in the United States and abroad, and The GREAT MEADOW (1930), a critical success and a Book-of-theMonth Club selection. In both novels, Roberts portrays pioneer women on mythic journeys to selfhood and uses the modernist techniques of myth, symbol, and allusion, particularly to The Odyssey. A significant member of the Southern Renaissance, Roberts has been compared to Thomas WOLFE and Robert Penn WARREN. Roberts was born on October 30, 1881, in Perryville, Kentucky, to Simpson Roberts and Mary Brent Roberts. Reared in Springfield, Kentucky, she contracted tuberculosis and moved to Colorado to live for five years with her brother Charles before she was finally well enough to attend the University of Chicago, from which she graduated with honors in 1921. The Time of Man, published five years later, tells the story of Ellen Chesser, daughter of a poor and illiterate itinerant Kentucky farmer whose introspection leads to an understanding of her personal relationship to the world around her. My Heart and My Flesh (1927), a much darker tale about Theodosia Bell, an artist, that elicited comparisons with Faulkner and Melville, involves incest and a mixed-race family. In The Great Meadow, Diony Jarvis, an 18th-century Kentucky pioneer con-

ROBERTS, KENNETH 1113

fronting the hostility and loneliness of the physical environment, is part of the American westward movement. She finds her own strength and identity. In A Buried Treasure (1931), Andy and Philly Blair discover their love for each other and for the rest of their rural community. He Sent Forth a Raven (1935), set during World War I, emphasizes again a world marked by violence, rape, and rootlessness. The mythic story of humankind continues in Black Is My True Love’s Hair (1938), in which the Everyman figure is a woman, Dena, who must escape her relationship with the rootless Will Langtry, a familiar figure in modernist fiction. Never in the best of health, Roberts died in 1941 of Hodgkin’s disease, in Orlando, Florida. Renewed interest in her work began with the 1984 Elizabeth Madox Roberts issue of the Southern Review. Many reappraisals of her fiction appear in book chapters published in the 1990s. Some of her papers are found at the Library of Congress.

NOVELS Black Is My True Love’s Hair. New York: Viking, 1938. A Buried Treasure. New York: Viking, 1931. The Great Meadow. New York: Viking, 1930. He Sent forth a Raven. New York: Viking, 1935. Jingling in the Wind. New York: Viking, 1928. My Heart and My Flesh. New York: Viking, 1927. The Time of Man. New York: Viking, 1926.

SOURCES Adams, James Donald. Elizabeth Madox Roberts. New York: Viking, 1938. Auchincloss, Louis. Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Bryant, J. A., Jr. Twentieth Century Southern Literature. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Campbell, Harry Modean, and Rule E. Foster. Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956. Donaldson, Susan V. “Gender, Race, and Allen Tate’s Profession of Letters in the South.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, 492–518. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Harrison, Elizabeth Jane. Female Pastoral: Women Writers ReVisioning the American South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Joyner, Nancy Carol. “The Poetics of the House in Appalachian Fiction.” In The Poetics of Appalachian Space, edited by Parks Lanier, Jr., 10–27. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. McDowell, Frederick P. W. Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Rovit, Earl H. Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1960. Special Elizabeth Madox Roberts Issue. Southern Review 20 (1984). Tate, Linda. “Elizabeth Madox Roberts: A Bibliographical Essay,” Resources for American Literary Study 18 (1992): 22–43.

ROBERTS, KENNETH (LEWIS) (1885– 1957) Kenneth Roberts published numerous historical novels in the 1920s and 1930s. Critics generally agree that his three most successful novels are Arundel (1930), about General Benedict Arnold’s ill-fated march from Maine to take Quebec; its sequel, Rabble in Arms (1933), where Arnold and his troops leave their defeat at Quebec in 1776 to the second Battle of Saratoga in 1777; and Northwest Passage (1937), where Major Robert Rogers commands the colonial soldiers—known as Rogers’s Rangers—during the French and Indian War. Other significant novels include Oliver Wiswell (1940), The Lively Lady (1931), and Lydia Bailey (1947). Kenneth Lewis Roberts was born on December 8, 1885, in Kennebunk, Maine, to Frank Lewis Roberts and Grace Tibbets Roberts. He earned a bachelor’s degree at Cornell University in 1908, married Anna Seiberling Mosser in 1911, and served as a captain in the U.S. Army from 1918 to 1919. His novels followed a stint at the Saturday Evening Post, for which he wrote hundreds of articles and stories and with which he held numerous positions, including editor of the Sunday humor page. In fact, many of his early novels, including Arundel, were first serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. Arundel is actually the story of Steven Nason, Kenneth Roberts’s great-great-grandfather, who accompanied Benedict Arnold from Arundel, the Maine province where Nason lived, to Quebec. Rabble in Arms depicts a Congress hostile to Benedict Arnold after his defeat of General Burgoyne. In The Lively Lady, sequel to Rabble in Arms, Roberts’s great-grandfather,

1114 ROBINSON, MARILYNNE

Richard, captains the Lively Lady and is taken prisoner in England. The sequel to The Lively Lady is Captain Caution (1934), involving a sea battle with Olive Branch, a merchant ship. Major Robert Rogers of Northwest Passage seeks an overland route to the Pacific Ocean, and a young Maine artist hopes to follow him and paint the likenesses of Indians. Roberts dedicated this novel to his frequent collaborator, Booth TARKINGTON. Oliver Wiswell (1940) depicts the American Revolution from the perspective of Oliver Wiswell, a university student who is also a loyal British subject. In Lydia Bailey (1947), set in Haiti during Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave revolt and Napoleon’s attempts to take over the government, Albion Hamlin, a Maine lawyer, rescues and falls in love with Lydia Bailey, the daughter of one of his clients. Kenneth Lewis Roberts was awarded the Special Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to early American history in 1957; he died one month later at Rocky Pasture, his Kennebunk estate, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Northwest Passage was twice made into a feature-length film: in 1940 and, under the title Mission of Danger, in 1959. Although many of his novels had gone out of print by the late 20th century, a number of them have now been republished and are routinely recommended to readers of history. The most extensive collection of Roberts’s papers is held by the Library of Congress.

NOVELS Antiquamania. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Arundel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930. The Battle of Cowpens: The Great Morale Builder. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. Black Magic. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924. Boon Island. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. The Brotherhood of Man: A Drama in One Act. (With Robert Garland). New York: French, 1934. Captain Caution. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1934. The Collector’s Whatnot. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923. Concentrated New England: A Sketch of Calvin Coolidge. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1924. Don’t Say That about Maine! Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. Europe’s Morning After. New York: Harper, 1921. Florida. New York: Harper, 1926.

Florida Loafing. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925. For Authors Only, and Other Gloomy Essays. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. It Must Be Your Tonsils. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1936. I Wanted to Write. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1949. The Lively Lady. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1931. Lydia Bailey. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1947. Northwest Passage. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. Oliver Wiswell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1940. Rabble in Arms, A Chronicle of Arundel and the Burgoyne Invasion. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1933. The Seventh Sense. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Sun Hunting: Adventures and Observations among the Native and Migratory Tribes of Florida, Including the Stoical TimeKillers of Palm Beach, the Gentle and Gregarious Tin-Canners of the Remote Interior, and the Vivacious and Semi-Violent Peoples of Miami and Its Pulieus. Indianapolis, Ind.: BobbsMerrill, 1922. Water Unlimited. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957.

SOURCES Bales, Jack. Kenneth Roberts: The Man and His Works. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1989. Harris, Janet. A Century of American History In Fiction: Kenneth Roberts’ Novels. New York: Gordon Press, 1976. Special Roberts issue, Colby Library Quarterly 6, no. 3 (September 1962). West, Herbert Faulkner. “The Works of Kenneth Roberts,” Colby Library Quarterly (September 1962): 89–99.

ROBINSON, MARILYNNE (1944– )

Novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Marilynne Robinson wrote HOUSEKEEPING (1981), which has become an American classic. It earned her the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award and nominations for a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize. It is the story of an orphaned adolescent but also of self-reliant, eclectic women, told with poetic lyricism and power. Robinson’s prose, rich in image and metaphor, highlights the tension between nature and humankind, society and the individual, illusion and reality, dependence and self-sufficiency. The novel continues to defy precise interpretation and to earn praise from new readers. Her long-awaited second novel, Gilead, appeared in 2004.

ROIPHE, ANNE 1115

Marilynne Robinson was born on November 26, 1944, in Sand Point, Idaho, to John J. Summers, a lumber company employee, and Ellen Harris Summers. Reared in Idaho, Robinson was educated at Brown University, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1966, and at the University of Washington, earning her doctoral degree in 1977. While in graduate school she married; she and her husband separated in 1989. Housekeeping takes place in mid-20th-century Idaho and is narrated by Ruth Stone. The novel features Ruth and her sister Lucille, whose grandfather died in an accident in Fingerbone Lake; their father deserted the family, and their mother, Helen, committed suicide by driving into that same lake. The sisters are raised by their grandmother, several great aunts, and finally Aunt Sylvie Fisher, whose unconventional approach to life results in Lucille’s decision to live with a home economics teacher; Sylvie and Ruth burn down the house and, like Huck Finn, head for the open spaces of America. Indeed, scholar Jacqui Smyth, who sees Sylvie as an early rendition of a female “drifter” or vagrant, suggests that “despite the novel’s insights into “the homeless condition, it is also about coming to a new understanding of shelter and the ideology of home” (Smyth, 281). The novel continues to inspire various readings and interpretations, ranging from the feminist and postmodern to the Emersonian, from the classical and biblical to the Freudian. Gilead, set during the abolition years leading up to the Civil War, is a novel about fathers and sons. In 2005, Gilead won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pen/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in literature. In 1987, Bill Forsyth adapted Housekeeping into a film released by Columbia. Since 1991, Marilynne Robinson has been on the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshops.

NOVELS Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2004. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1981.

SOURCES Bonetti, Kay. “Interview with Marilynne Robinson,” audio recording, Columbia, Mo., American Audio Prose Library, 1989. Booth, Alison. “To Caption Absent Bodies: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Essays in Literature 19 (Fall 1992): 279–290.

Burke, William, “Border Crossings in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Modern Fiction Studies 37 (Winter 1991): 716–724. Caver, Christine. “Nothing Left to Lose: Housekeeping’s Strange Freedoms,” American Literature 68 (March 1996): 111–137. Hedrick, Tace, Eileen Bartos, Carolyn Jacobson, and Ann E. Voss. “Interviews with Marilynne Robinson,” Iowa Review, 22 (Winter 1992): 1–28. Kaivola, Karen. “The Pleasures and Perils of Merging Female Subjectivity in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Contemporary Literature 34 (Winter 1993): 670–690. King, Kristin. “Resurfacings of ‘The Deeps’: Semiotic Balance in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 565–581. Lassner, Phyllis. “Escaping the Mirror of Sameness: Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” In Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman. 49–58. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. O’Brien, Sheila Ruzycki. “Housekeeping: New West Novel, Old West Film.” In Old West-New West: Centennial Essays, edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum, 173–183. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press. 1993. ———. “Housekeeping in the Western Tradition: Remodeling Tales of Western Travelers.” In Women and the Journey: The Female Travel Experience, edited by Bonnie Frederick, 217–234. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1993. O’Connell, Nicholas. “Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” In At the Field’s End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers, 220–230. Seattle, Wash.: Madrona Publishers, 1987. Schaub, Thomas. “An Interview with Marilynne Robinson,” Contemporary Literature 35, no. 2 (1994): 231–251. Smyth, Jacqui. “Sheltered Vagrancy in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping,” Critique 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 281–291. Vorda, Allan. “A Life of Perished Things: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” In Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, edited by Allan Vorda, 153–184. Houston, Texas: Rice University Press, 1993.

ROIPHE, ANNE (1935– )

According to feminist critics (Roberta Rubenstein, for example), Anne Roiphe is a postfeminist writer of fiction and nonfiction, most of which depict women’s issues, contemporary Jewish family life, parent-child relations, religion, aging, and identity. Hers is always an

1116 ROLEY, BRIAN ASCALON

original viewpoint, however, for Roiphe is “extremely uninterested, in what is—or is not—politically correct” (Sherman). Roiphe is best known for her novels Up the Sandbox! and LOVINGKINDNESS. Anne Roiphe was born on Christmas Day 1935, in New York City, to Eugene Roth, a lawyer, and Blanch Phillips Roth. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Sara Lawrence College in 1957, married Jack Richardson in 1958, divorced him in 1963, and married Herman Roiphe, a psychoanalyst, in 1967, the same year she published her first novel, Digging Out. This novel depicts the struggles of Laura Smith who “digs out” the secrets of her own identity while caring for her dying mother. Up the Sandbox! (1970) was universally praised for its insight into Margaret Reynolds, the intelligent, feminist wife and mother of two. Margaret feels torn between caring for her children and leading an activist life. (One of her fantasies involves blowing up the George Washington Bridge.) Alternately disturbing, moving, and funny, the novel captures the spirit of its era. Roiphe followed with Lovingkindness (1987), a depiction of the feminist political scientist Annie Johnson as she meets the challenges posed by her 22-year-old punk daughter Andrea, who has elected to live in Jerusalem and allow the yeshiva to select her husband. The Pursuit of Happiness (1991) also depicts family relationships. This multigenerational tale moves back and forth as the Gruenbaum family emigrates in 1892 from a small Polish shtetl to the Lower East Side of New York; successive generations live in mid-Manhattan, successful in their pursuit of the American Dream, many choosing to have second homes in Israel. In If You Knew Me (1993), middle-aged biologist Leah Rose, on a seaside sabbatical on Long Island, rescues the retarded Sally Masters from drowning; she meets Sally’s brother Ollie and the two embark on a poignantly rendered, sometimes awkward, sometimes amusing, love affair. Roiphe’s novel Secrets of the City (2003) represents a departure from her usual content. Written from the point of view of a male protagonist and serialized for 15 months in the Forward, the novel takes place amid a city-wide epidemic, as Mayor Mel Rosenberg, son of a Jewish immigrant, attempts to use various folk cures to cope with the inevitable crises of his city. Roiphe’s

historical novel An Imperfect Lens was published in 2006. Anne Roiphe lives with her husband, Dr. Herman Roiphe, in New York City. Her daughter, Katie Roiphe, is a writer and novelist well-known for her controversial views on feminism.

NOVELS Digging Out. (Under name Anne Richardson). New York: McGraw Hill, 1967. If You Knew Me. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. An Imperfect Lens. New York: Shaye Areheart Books, 2006. Long Division. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972. Lovingkindness. New York: Summit Books, 1987. The Pursuit of Happiness. New York: Summit Books, 1991. Secrets of the City. New York: Shaye Areheart Books, 2003. To Rabbit, With Love and Squalor: An American Read. New York: Free Press, 2000. Torch Song. (Under name Anne Richardson). New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977. Up the Sandbox! New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970.

SOURCES Brosnahan, John. Review of The Pursuit of Happiness, Booklist, 15 April 1991. Burstein, Janet Handler. Writing Mothers, Writing Daughters: Tracing the Maternal in Stories by American Jewish Women. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Gendler, Anne. Review of If You Knew Me, Booklist, July 1993. Leber, Michele. Review of Lovingkindness. Library Journal Review. Neville, Maureen. Review of Secrets of the City, Library Journal 128, no. 19 (November 15, 2003): 99. Rubenstein, Roberta. “Feminism, Eros and Coming of Age,” Frontiers 22, no. 2 (June 2001): 1–19.

OTHER Sherman, Suzan. “Secrets of the Scribbler: An Interview with Anne Roiphe.” Forward.com. Available online. URL: http://www.forward.com/issues/2004/04.01.09/arts3.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

ROLEY, BRIAN ASCALON (1966– )

Hailed as a new young voice in Asian-American fiction, Brian Ascalon Roley first attracted attention in 2001 with the publication of AMERICAN SON, a bildungsroman of powerful originality. The novel, set in California as the 21st century begins, follows two brothers, Tomas and his younger brother Gabe, the story’s narrator. Together, the brothers represent the Filipino and “Hapa” communities

ROSE OF DUTCHER’S COOLLY 1117

in California, “Hapa” being a term derived from a Hawaiian phrase meaning “Half white/half foreigner.” The boys’ mother, having immigrated to the United States to escape the caste system in the Philippines, has little better luck in the United States: Divorced from the boys’ American father, she works two low-paying jobs to provide opportunities for her sons. Her son Gabe attempts to protect her from learning about Tomas’s gangster-style life, but as Gabe himself draws closer to that existence, he runs away, brings shame on the family, and returns home to face ruined expectations and a life of violence. Roley was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1966, to Thomas Lee, an accountant, and Azucena Laurel Ascalon Roley, a social worker. He earned his master of fine arts degree from Cornell University in 1998, and his J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994. In 1999 he married Gwen Smith. American Son was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001, and a Piper’s Alley/Faulkner Novella Award finalist. Roley’s prose has been compared to that of Cormac MCCARTHY, while his tale of the dark side of immigrant life has been praised for its unflinching look at the anger and alienation that can result from cultural estrangement.

NOVEL American Son. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

SOURCES Brian Ascalom Roley-Biography. Available online. URL: http://www.brianroley.com/bio.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Dowling, Brendan. Review of American Son. Booklist 97, no. 17 (May 1, 2001): 1,669. Hemon, Aleksandar. “No surfer dudes: This debut novel examines racism through the story of Filipino-Americans in California,” The New York Times Book Review, 12 August 2001, p. 20. Ty, Eleanor. “Abjection, Masculinity, and Violence in Brian Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao,” MELUS 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 119–137.

ROSE OF DUTCHER’S COOLLY HAMLIN GARLAND (1895)

“Rose was an unaccountable child from the start.” With the first sentence of his novel, GARLAND forecasts Rose’s eventual rebellion and escape from the limitations of western farm life, espe-

cially as those limitations affected women. In the following sentences and chapters, Garland constructs, with unparalleled skill and care, the lineaments of the “unaccountable” Rose Dutcher; she becomes the most physically and intellectually vibrant female character in his work, if not in all American fiction up to that time. (Eric Sundquist writes that it is only in the writings of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence that one can find an equal for Garland’s “revelation of Rose’s burgeoning natural desires” [Eliot, 519]). Sinclair LEWIS, whose Carol Kennicot of his 1920 novel MAIN STREET is a direct descendent of Rose, proclaimed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that Rose was a “valiant and revelatory” work of realism that “made it possible for me to write of America as I see it” (Lewis, 308). Rose—without a mother to coach her into regularized feminine behavior (she died when Rose was five) and with an indulgent father, living on an isolated farm among the “coollies” (valleys) of western Wisconsin—is able to develop herself and her ideas without reference to social or sexual norms. She evades these norms by, in part, doing everything “like the boys”: She snares gophers, goes barefooted and bareheaded, isn’t afraid of bugs and beetles, plays all the boys’ games, performs the hard and dirty farm work, and, among other things, drinks from rivers “like the boys [do], that is, by lying down on their breasts and drinking as the hunter drinks” (29). This action is repeated throughout the novel, symbolizing her unconventional girl- and womanhood. “She saw no reason,” the narrator remarks, “why boys should have all the fun” (17). Rose is also sexually unconventional. Growing up on a farm, she is “exposed to sights and sounds which the city girl knows nothing of. Mysterious processes of generation and birth go on before [her] eyes”; “the apparently shameful fact of sex faced her everywhere” (22, 23). Freed from taboos, Rose is fascinated with “all the things girls are supposed not to think of” (127). She gets sensual pleasure from sleeping naked in bed, longs to strip and skinny-dip with the boys, and sometimes even slips off her clothes and runs “amid the tall corn-stalks like a wild thing.” Rose, in her questioning and challenging of prescribed behavior, is a sort of female Huck Finn of the

1118 ROSSNER, JUDITH

western prairie; Huck, equally free of the socializing forces of a normal Southern family and school system, is able to construct his own behavior and moral code. Both Huck and Rose are determined to test things, not content to accept ideas until they have been personally verified. One day at school, for example, Rose is told that if she shakes her fist at the sky and swears at God, she will drop dead. Upon hearing this, “she calmly stepped forward and shook her little fist up at the sun and swore, while the awe-stricken children cowered like a covey of partridges.” She says to them, “There! you see that’s a lie.” From that point, the narrator remarks, “she went on exploding these strange superstitious fancies” (8)—a sentence that could serve as a summary of her life, as she tests and rejects other givens of her environment, such as how and where she should live (she escapes to Chicago to establish an independent life), the state of marriage (she contracts a “companionate” marriage with a Chicago journalist), and how she should write (a poet, she rejects British and East Coast models for western local color). Rose’s leaving of her Wisconsin farm and moving to Chicago, which occurs nearly halfway through the novel, mirrors a massive ongoing historical phenomenon, namely the titanic migration from the farm to the city. If America was born in the country and moved to the city, as historian Richard Hofstadter writes (Hofstadter, 23), then Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly constitutes one of the first and most important renderings of that epochal move. The narrator of Rose exclaims that “This was the age of cities. The world’s thought went on in the great cities” (172). And Garland’s description of the way Chicago lures Rose anticipates DREISER: Rose was “a fresh, young and powerful soul rushing to a great city, a shining atom of steel obeying the magnet” (181). In Chicago, Rose not only becomes a part of the great urban migration, she also becomes linked to another massive shift in American culture, namely the New Woman movement. Some of the leading features of that movement—a loosening of legal and social restrictions, an opening up of educational and career opportunities—were instinctively practiced by Rose in her Wisconsin girlhood. But in Chicago, especially through her friend and mentor Dr. Isabel Herrick, she

encounters the New Woman movement in full consciousness. Dr. Herrick, an alienist (psychiatrist), is wholly “man-like” in her intellectual and professional achievements, completely unhindered socially, and on the verge of forming a companionate marriage herself with another doctor. Meeting Dr. Herrick for the first time at her office, “this small, resolute brusque woman was a world’s wonder to her” (209). Dr. Herrick, a purposeful feminist who has consciously broken through previous restrictions, provides Rose’s next step to being fully “unaccountable.” But if the Chicago section serves to develop and culminate many of the leading themes of the novel, it also serves to weaken it. Much of the freshness and depth of the first half of the novel is lost, as most critics (such as William Dean HOWELLS, Donald Pizer, and Eric Sundquist) have pointed out. The novel’s themes, instead of being dramatized, are merely enunciated in a series of stiff set speeches. But in the brilliant first half of Rose, it is clear that Garland had, in 1895, reached an artistic height. He had gathered all the elements of his immense gallery of suffering women from his earlier short fiction, as well as all his critiques of the social and cultural limitations of the West, and put them together to create a character and story that, in the Wisconsin section at least, no Western writer has ever surpassed. That Garland’s achievement—which influenced and inspired writers such as Dreiser and Lewis, among others—is largely forgotten constitutes a major blemish in American studies.

SOURCES Eliot, Emory, ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Garland, Hamlin. Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly. 1895. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Vintage-Random, 1955. Lewis, Sinclair. “Nobel Prize Address.” In The Theory of the American Novel, edited by George Perkins, 301–309. New York: Holt, 1970. Quentin Martin

ROSSNER, JUDITH (1935–2005) Novelist, short story writer, and poet, Judith Rossner published for nearly four decades. It was her 1975 novel, LOOKING

ROSSNER, JUDITH 1119

FOR MR. GOODBAR, that first brought her national attention and critical acclaim. It was released as a Paramount film in 1977. This chilling tale of 1970s New York City singles bars, although inspired by a West Side murder case, was not written as “new journalism” (Mitgang): Transformed by Rossner into fiction, it captured the imagination of the American reading public because of its portrait of a popular urban ritual and its implications about the shifting roles and attitudes of single women. In subsequent novels, Rossner created plots from reallife cases, as in Emmeline (1980), based on an actual Maine tragedy. Other Rossner best-sellers treat the pitfalls of materialism, the tension between selflessness and self-absorption, the effect of divorce on children, and the 1970s-era state of the women’s movement. Rossner was adept at re-creating believable scenes and atmospheres, as in August (1983), with its portrait of East Hampton, Long Island, in late summer, just as she realistically explored the interior workings of women’s hearts and minds. Judith Rossner was born on March 1, 1935, in New York City, to Joseph George Perelman and Dorothy Shapiro Perelman. She dropped out of the City College of New York to marry Robert Rossner in 1954; after they divorced, she married again, to Mort Persky, in 1979. Her first novel, To the Precipice (1966), is a coming-ofage story, set in the 1940s and 1950s, about the marriage between a young Jewish woman, Ruth Kossoff, and a gentile. Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (1969), her second novel, evokes the awakening of mentally unstable Elizabeth, who, save for family exigencies, would have contentedly lived with her sister and brother-in-law for the remainder of her life. Any Minute I Can Split (1972), set in a 1960s commune, follows the pregnant Margaret Adams. She has run away from her husband but discovers that life with him in the city is preferable to the hypocritical commune, where the friendships and motivations are superficial. When Esquire asked her to write the account of Roseann Quinn, a schoolteacher who had been murdered by a man she had picked up in a singles bar, Rossner refused to write a factual account; instead she used her imagination and the creative process to transform the tragic but riveting story into Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Theresa Dunn, overweight and a polio sur-

vivor, has been rejected by her lover, an English professor, and has started to frequent singles bars. She is murdered in one of these bars by a drifter. Following this success, Rossner published Attachments (1977), the story of Nadine Tumulty and her friend Diane, whose manipulative friendship is as much the subject of the novel as is their marriage to Siamese twins. In Emmeline, the 13-year-old title character works in the cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, and is seduced by an overseer; she secretly gives away the baby. Years later, she marries a younger man who, it turns out, is that baby. August focuses on the world of psychoanalysis as Dawn Henley, a student at Barnard College, grows close to Dr. Lulu Shinefeld, her recently divorced psychiatrist; Rossner shifts back and forth between the complex stories of the two women. Rossner changed her focus in His Little Women (1990) to the relationship between father and movie mogul Sam Pearlstein and his children, the products of his three previous marriages. These four daughters—Nell, an attorney; Louisa, a novelist; and two other daughters nearly invisible in the shadowy drug world they inhabit—compete for his attention. Olivia, or, The Weight of the Past (1994) features Caroline Ferrante, whose daughter Olivia eloped with an aggressive, controlling Italian and decides to return to live with her mother in New York. The mother-daughter relationship recurs in Perfidia (1997), which draws its title from the Spanish word for betrayal. The novel depicts an intense rivalry between divorced mother Anita Stern and her daughter, Madeleine (Maddy); it is Anita, not Maddy, who eagerly enters the 1970s free-love and drugs era, but it is Maddy who murders her mother and changes her plans to attend Harvard University. Judith Rossner died of unknown causes on August 9, 2005, at New York University Medical Center. Emmeline was aired on PBS on April 2, 1997, and subsequently performed as an opera.

NOVELS Any Minute I Can Split. New York: McGraw, 1972. Attachments. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. August. Boston: Houghton, 1983. Emmeline. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980. His Little Women. New York: Summit Books, 1990. Looking for Mr. Goodbar. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975.

1120 ROTH, HENRY

Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid. New York: Dial, 1969. Olivia, or, The Weight of the Past. New York: Crown, 1994. Perfidia: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese, 1997. To the Precipice. New York: Morrow, 1966.

SOURCES Potoker, E. M. “Judith Rossner: Daughter of Lovers,” Nation, 29 May 1976, pp. 661–664. Rinzler, C. E. Review of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, New York Times Book Review, 8 June 1975, pp. 25–26.

OTHER Audio Interview with Judith Rossner. Wiredforbooks.org. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ judithrossner. Accessed September 25, 2005. Behrens, Steve. “Tragic Legend Returns to Public TV,” Current (July 22, 1996). Available online. URL: http://www. current.org/prog613.html. Accessed September 26, 2005. Hickman, Lisa C. Review of Perfidia. Endpapers. Weeklywire.com. Available online. URL: http://weeklywire.com/ ww/11-17-97/memphis_book.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Hooper, Brad. Review of Perfidia. Booklist Review. Available online. URL: http://www.NoveList.com. Accessed September 25, 2005. Mitgang, Herbert. “Behind the Best Sellers.” New York Times on the Web. Available online. URL: http://www. nytimes.com/books/97/10/19/home/rossner-profile.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

ROTH, HENRY (1906–1995)

Henry Roth is internationally known for one novel: CALL IT SLEEP (1934), largely unknown until its publication in paperback in 1964 but now translated into dozens of languages and considered one of the classics of 20th-century American literature. The novel depicts David Schearl’s coming of age in Jewish-immigrant Harlem in New York City, and his efforts amid the bigotry, class conflicts, and assimilation struggles of the early 20th century to find his place within and without this America. Roth is lauded repeatedly for the eloquent lyricism of his prose, which evokes the spirituality and metaphysical levels to which some of his characters aspire. The New York Review of Books critic Robert Towers believes that the novel is “now generally

recognized as the most moving and lyrical novel to come out of Jewish immigration to America before and after the turn of the century” (Towers, 24). Call It Sleep reflects Roth’s commitment to the proletarian ideals of the Communist Party, of which he was a member, and the feelings of alienation and isolation that Roth, like his major influences, Franz Kafka and James Joyce, experienced. For six decades afterward, Roth wrote short fiction and essays but no novels until, in the early 1990s, three volumes of his six-volume fictional autobiography, Mercy of a Rude Stream, appeared. Volume 3, entitled From Bondage, written in the last years of Roth’s life, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 1997. Henry Roth was born in Tysmenica, Galicia, in Austria-Hungary, on February 8, 1906, to Herman Roth, a waiter, and Leah Farb Roth; when he was 18 months old, he and his mother joined Herman Roth, who had gone to New York City to find work. Reared in New York, Roth was educated at City College of New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1928. He lived for a time with Eda Lou Walton, a poet. Walton had an affair with and later married David Mandel, who helped Roth publish his manuscript. Roth married Muriel Parker, a musician, composer, and elementary school principal and, like many American writers of his era, worked for the Works Progress Administration. A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994), volume 1 of Mercy of a Rude Stream, covers the pre–World War I youth of Ira Stigman, a marginalized, shy, intellectual boy who tries to deny his Jewishness. Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995) depicts the slightly older Ira’s expulsion from high school and his emerging from confusion to his identity as a writer. From Bondage takes Ira through his college years, the influence of James Joyce on his writing, and his complicated affair with Edith Welles, an English professor also involved with her former student, Larry Gordon. Henry Roth died on October 13, 1995, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Three of the four volumes of Mercy of a Rude Stream, including Requiem for Harlem (1998), were published posthumously. Roth’s manuscripts are housed at Boston University and the New York Public Library.

ROTH, PHILIP 1121

NOVELS Call It Sleep. New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1934, 2nd edition with a history by Harold U. Ribalow, a critical introduction by Maxwell Geismar, and a personal appreciation by Meyer Levin. Paterson, N.J.: Pageant, 1960. Reprint, with a foreword by Walter Allen, London: M. Joseph, 1963. Mercy of a Rude Stream. New York: St. Martin’s, Volume 1: A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, 1994, Volume 2: A Diving Rock on the Hudson, 1995, Volume 3: From Bondage, 1996, Volume 4: Requiem for Harlem, 1998.

SOURCES Adams, Stephen J. “ ‘The Noisiest Novel Ever Written’: The Soundscape of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Twentieth Century Literature 35, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 43–64. Alter, Robert. “The Desolate Breach Between Himself and Himself,” The New York Times Book Review, 16 January 1994, pp. 3, 29. ———. Review of Shifting Landscape and Call It Sleep, New Republic, 25 January 1988, pp. 33–37. Berman, Marshall. “The Bonds of Love,” Nation, 23 September 1996, pp. 25–30. Dickstein, Morris. “Call It an Awakening,” The New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1987, pp. 1, 33, 35–36. Fein, Richard J. “Fear, Fatherhood, and Desire in Call It Sleep,” Yiddish 5, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 49–54. Gordon, Mary. “Confession, Terminable and Interminable,” The New York Times Book Review, 26 February 1995, p. 5. Harris, Lis. “A Critic at Large: In the Shadow of the Golden Mountains,” New Yorker, 27 June 1988, pp. 84–92. Howe, Irving. “Life Never Let Up,” The New York Times Book Review, 25 October 1964, pp. 1, 60. Kazin, Alfred. “The Art of Call It Sleep,” The New York Review of Books, 10 October 1991, p. 15. Kermode, Frank. “ ‘Holistic Rendering of My Lamentable Past,’ ” The New York Times Book Review, 14 July 1996, p. 6. Leader, Zachary. “An East-Side Kid,” Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1994, p. 20. Ledbetter, Kenneth. “Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep: The Revival of a Proletarian Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 12, no. 3 (October 1966): 123–130. Pinsker, Sanford. “The Re-Awakening of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Jewish Social Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1966): 148–158. Roth, Henry, with David Bronsen. “A Conversation with Henry Roth,” Partisan Review 36, no. 2 (1969): 265–280. ———, with William Freedman. “Henry Roth in Jerusalem: An Interview,” The Literary Review 23, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 5–23. Towers, Robert. “Look Homeward, Ira,” The New York Review of Books, 3 March 1994, pp. 24–25.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana, ed. New Essays on “Call It Sleep.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

OTHER Books and Writers: Henry Roth. Available online. URL: http:// www.kirjasto.sci.fi/henryr.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

ROTH, PHILIP (MILTON) (1933– )

Philip Roth, along with Saul BELLOW and Bernard MALAMUD, is part of the triumvirate of writers who introduced Jewish-American literature to the general reading public. Roth, for one, earned his first National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories (1959) and in the subsequent four decades responded to the reality of postwar urban America and to many of his own characters in modes ranging from realism to comedy, and then from surealism to tragicomedy. He explored then, as he does today, the boundaries between life and fiction and morality and creativity. Because Roth so openly draws on his own history, critical response has been divided between those who see him as self-indulgent, self-hating, bitter, or perverse, and admirers who laud his exuberance and use of comedy and satire. Nevertheless, he continues to produce incisive portrayals of Americans who struggle to realize themselves but seem blocked by their own absurdities and vulgarities. Indeed, few of his contemporaries have created such complex yet sympathetic and hilarious characters. They live in Roth’s imagination and in ours. Most notable are Neil Klugman, Alexander Portnoy, Peter Tarnopol, Nathan Zuckerman, and Mickey Sabbath, and many who emerge in Roth’s finely realized short stories. These characters expose the foibles of American life. The GHOST WRITER (1979) earned an American Book Award nomination, as did The Anatomy Lesson (1983), which was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. From the 1980s onward, honors have come swiftly to Roth: The Counterlife (1986) won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award; Patrimony (1991), a memoir about Roth’s father, won a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Operation Shylock (1992) won a PEN/Faulkner Award. Both SABBATH’S THEATER (1995) and AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997) were awarded the National Book Award, and the latter also received the 1998 Pulitzer

1122 ROTH, PHILIP

Prize. The Human Stain (2000) garnered the PEN/Faulkner and National Jewish Book Awards. In 2002, the National Book Foundation celebrated Roth’s achievements with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American letters. Philip Roth was born on March 19, 1933, in Newark, New Jersey, to which he often returns in his fiction. His parents were Herman Roth, an insurance manager, and Bess Finkel Roth. He was educated at Bucknell University, earning a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in 1954 and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1955). He spent 1955 to 1956 in the U.S. Army. From February 22, 1959, until her death in 1968, Roth was married to Margaret Martinson; and from April 29, 1990, until their divorce in 1994, he was married to the actress Claire Bloom. Both of them have written books about this relationship. Roth’s novella, Goodbye Columbus (1959), introduced Neil Klugman, a struggling working-class Jew who briefly loves but ultimately rejects both Radcliffeeducated Brenda Patimkin, his wealthy upper-class lover, and the life she represents. Letting Go (1962) is a novel whose value has risen over the decades: Set in the 1950s, the novel features young graduate-school students, their anxieties, and their responses to the pressures of human commitment. Gabe Wallach, the well-to-do, successful protagonist, has relationships with three women, to none of whom is he ever totally committed. He is incapable of commitment but is drawn to his foil, the overworked and penurious Paul Herz, who also has a fear of close relationships. Roth’s next novel, When She Was Good (1967), is uncharacteristic of Roth: It follows Lucy Nelson, a midwestern Protestant housewife whose portrait lacks any of the satiric insight that most readers have come to expect. As her marriage collapses, she is ill-equipped to face the crisis, and walks into the snow where she dies of exposure. PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT (1969), however, is a satiric masterpiece. Here Roth returns to a mixture of Jewishness and sex. The novel, which propelled Roth into the limelight of American popular culture, is the story of Alex Portnoy, a guilt-ridden young man trying to escape his repressive mother through psychoanalytical sessions with Dr. Spielvogel. Both characters are now staples in the American canon. The novel also

made Roth fair game for critics, some of whom considered him an anti-Semite who demeaned his own people. Others acknowledged him as an insightful, creative writer who used humor to illuminate feelings of doubt and inadequacy. Jewish and otherwise. For the next several years, Roth experimented with contemporary, sometimes outlandish subjects. Our Gang (1971) is a satiric treatment of President Nixon and his administration, while The Breast (1972) treats with seriousness and some restraint the Kafka-esque central image of David Kepesh, a professor who has been transformed into a giant mammary gland. In The Great American Novel (1973), Roth uses baseball to comment on American culture, much of which is the object of Roth’s biting satire. With My Life as a Man (1974), Roth examines the inner life of Peter Tarnopol, a novelist writing about another novelist named Nathan Zuckerman. Roth uses the techniques of metafiction to examine the ways teaching and writing literature can heal a broken marriage and, in a more general sense, can illuminate the ways life is transformed into fiction. Both Tarnopol and Zuckerman have troubled relationships with women, Tarnopol with his wife and, later, Susan McCall. Zuckerman, on the other hand, marries Lydia Ketterer for the wrong reasons, and she commits suicide. The Professor of Desire (1977) follows the early life of David Kepesh, a character from The Breast. In this novel he wrestles with both the demands of academia and his own lustful behavior with a number of women. Zuckerman reappears in three novels and a novella, all collected in 1985 under the title Zuckerman Bound (alluding to the process of binding all the novels into one volume and to Zuckerman’s general predicament). In The Ghost Writer (1979), young Zuckerman scandalizes his readers with a novel that his father deems to be anti-Semitic (obviously this scene echoes Roth’s own experience). Zuckerman apprentices himself to a reclusive Jewish-American writer, E. I. Lonoff, in order to understand the creative process and his own Jewishness. ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND (1981) likewise explores issues concerning fiction writing, and the artist’s connection to home, family, and community. Set 13 years later, Zuckerman by this time has had three failed marriages, written four novels, and is currently being

ROTH, PHILIP 1123

denounced for writing an explicitly sexual novel (see the criticism of Roth for writing Portnoy’s Complaint). At the end of the novel, after his father’s death, a solitary Nathan wanders through the now ghettoized Newark of his childhood. In The Anatomy Lesson, Zuckerman realizes that he has chosen to understand fiction instead of the ramifications of his own life and, because of this self-absorption, he can no longer write well. At the novel’s end, he falls and breaks his jaw on a tombstone in a Jewish cemetery, an accident that renders him speechless. By the time we reencounter him in The Prague Orgy (1985), Zuckerman has regenerated himself: He now acknowledges the value and significance of his Jewish heritage and is internationally successful. He even attempts to help a writer in Kafka-like Czechoslovakia. One could say that Zuckerman has reconnected to history. In fact, he travels to Jerusalem in The Counterlife (1987), another rapprochement with heritage and, in Roth’s version of postmodern self-reflexiveness, lives out several possible destinies along with his brother, Henry. Now married to an Englishwoman named Maria, Zuckerman dies, but Maria takes center stage and urges Nathan to rebel against his creator. After a tetralogy based on his own life (The Facts [1988], Deception [1990], Patrimony [1991], and Operation Shylock [1993]) Roth wrote Sabbath’s Theater (1995), which prepared the way for his AMERICAN TRILOGY (American Pastoral [1997], I Married a Communist [1998], and The Human Stain [2000]). Here Roth turns his attention to American history and its effect on the national character. His more recent books include The Dying Animal (2001), the much-acclaimed The Plot against America (2004), and Everyman (2006). Philip Roth lives and writes in Connecticut. In 2004 Roth chose as his biographer University of Connecticut professor Ross Miller, who is also editor of the eightvolume Library of America edition of Roth’s works, beginning with Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint, to be published by The Library of America in 2005. Subsequent volumes will be published between 2006 and 2013. To date, three of Roth’s novels have been filmed: Goodbye, Columbus was written by Arnold Schulman and directed by Larry Peerce for Paramount in 1969; Portnoy’s Complaint was written and directed

by Ernest Lehman for Warner Bros. in 1972; The Ghost Writer was adapted for television and aired on the Public Broadcasting System in 1984. Most of Roth’s papers are housed at the Library of Congress.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS American Pastoral. Boston: Houghton, 1997. The Anatomy Lesson. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1983. The Breast. New York: Holt, 1972. The Counterlife. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986. Deception. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. The Dying Animal. Boston: Houghton, 2001. Everyman. Boston: Houghton, 2006. The Ghost Writer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979. Goodbye, Columbus, and Five Short Stories. Boston, Mass.: Houghton 1959; published as Goodbye, Columbus. New York: Houghton, 1989. The Great American Novel. New York: Holt, 1973. The Human Stain. Boston: Houghton, 2000. I Married a Communist. Boston: Houghton, 1998. Letting Go. New York: Random House, 1962. My Life as a Man. New York: Holt, 1974. Our Gang. New York: Random House, 1971. The Plot against America. Boston: Houghton, 2004. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. The Professor of Desire. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1977. Sabbath’s Theater. Boston: Houghton, 1995. When She Was Good. New York: Random House, 1967. Zuckerman Unbound. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1981.

SOURCES Appelfeld, Aron. Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth. New York: Fromm International, 1994. Berman, Jeffrey. The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis. New York: New York University Press, 1985. Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Cooper, Alan. Philip Roth and the Jews. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Gindin, James. Harvest of a Quiet Eye: The Novel of Compassion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Guttman, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Harrison, Gilbert A., ed. The Critic as Artist: Essays on Books, 1920–1970. New York: Liveright, 1972.

1124 ROWSON, SUSANNA HASWELL

Howe, Irving. The Critical Point. New York: Horizon, 1973. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Critic’s Credentials: Essays and Reviews by Stanley Edgar Hyman. Edited by Phoebe Pettingell. New York: Atheneum, 1978. Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. McDaniel, John. The Fiction of Philip Roth. Haddonfield, N.J.: Haddonfield House, 1974. Milbauer, Asher Z., and Donald G. Watson, eds. Reading Philip Roth. London: Macmillan, 1988. Pinsher, Sanford. The Comedy That “Hoits”: An Essay on the Fiction of Philip Roth. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1975. Podhoretz, Norman. Doings and Undoings. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964. Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, and Philip Roth. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser Verlag, 1994. Rogers, Bernard F., Jr. Philip Roth: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974. ———. Philip Roth. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Roth, Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Solotaroff, Theodore. The Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writings of the Sixties. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Walden, Daniel, ed. The Changing Mosaic: From Cahan to Malamud, Roth, and Ozick. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Wisse, Ruth. The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

ROWSON,

SUSANNA

HASWELL

(1762–1824) Novelist, actress, poet, and educator, Susanna Rowson wrote Charlotte: A Tale of Truth (1791) (later retitled CHARLOTTE TEMPLE), the first best-selling novel in America and the book on which her reputation rests today. The novel tells the story of a young girl whose worldly French teacher coerces her pupil into a relationship with an army officer. Recent scholarship applauds Rowson’s skill at using the techniques of sentimentalism in her work while at the same time undermining it. She emphasized that sentimentalism proves dangerous to young women. Indeed, her career, dedicated to teaching girls to become educated and independent, culminated in the establishment of the Young

Girl’s Academy in Boston, where she remained director for 25 years. Susanna Rowson was born on February 5, 1762, in Portsmouth, England, to William Haswell, a revenue collector in the Royal Navy, and Susanna Musgrave Haswell, who died giving birth to Susanna. Her father remarried, emigrated to Massachusetts, sent for Susanna, and was deported to England in 1778 for supporting the British during the American Revolution, taking his by then 18-year-old daughter with him. At age 24, still in England, Rowson published Victoria (1786), her first novel, partly to help her impoverished family. Victoria Baldwin, orphaned daughter of a naval officer, is seduced, becomes pregnant, and is predictably abandoned. In that same year the author married William Rowson; the two joined actors’ troupes but, still needing to earn money, Rowson published The Inquisitor (1788), a domestic novel, and a third, The Test of Honour (1789). Published anonymously, this novel was about the spirited young Mary Newton, determined to marry her aristocratic suitor, but only after she has earned enough money to become his financial equal. Charlotte centers on the 15-year-old boarding-school student who elopes with Lieutenant Montraville to New York, where he reneges on his promise of marriage. With no help from her socalled friends, including the French teacher Miss LaRue, Charlotte falls ill, gives birth to a healthy baby, and dies. Her father, who has traveled across the Atlantic, takes home Lucy, Charlotte’s baby. The advice-filled novel has gone through more than 150 editions. Rowson’s next novel, The Fille de Chambre, A Novel (1792), based partly on Rowson’s own experiences, depicts Rebecca’s stormy Atlantic crossing to America during the Revolutionary War. Other novels include Trials of the Human Heart, A Novel (1795); Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times. A Novel (1798); Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife (1813), a heavily autobiographical novel that reflects Rowson’s own unhappy marriage; and Charlotte’s Daughter: or, The Three Orphans. A Sequel to Charlotte Temple (1828), in which Charlotte’s daughter Lucy, warned just in time of the perfidy of men, remains single and opens a school for girls.

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE 1125

Susanna Rowson died on March 2, 1824, in Boston. The largest collection of Rowson material is housed at the American Antiquarian Society. A copy of the first edition of Charlotte: A Tale of Truth is in the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia.

NOVELS Charlotte: A Tale of Truth. 2 volumes. London: Printed for William Lane at the Minerva, 1791; Philadelphia: Printed by D. Humphreys for Mathew Carey, 1794. Charlotte’s Daughter: or, The Three Orphans. A Sequel to Charlotte Temple. Boston: Printed by J. H. A. Frost & published by Richardson & Lord, 1828. The Fille de Chambre, A Novel. 3 volumes. London: Printed for William Lane at the Minerva, 1792; Philadelphia: Printed for H. & P. Rice and J. Rice & Co., 1794. Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times. A Novel. Boston: Printed by Manning & Loring for David West, 1798; London: William Lane, Minerva, 1799. Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife. Boston: Printed by Watson & Bangs & published by Charles Williams, 1813. The Test of Honour. A Novel by a Young Lady. 2 volumes. London: Printed by & for John Abraham, 1789. Trials of the Human Heart, A Novel. 4 volumes. Philadelphia: Printed for the author by Wrigley & Berriman, 1795. Victoria. A Novel. In Two Volumes. The Characters Taken from Real Life, and Calculated to Improve the Morals of the Female Sex, by Impressing Them with a Just Sense of The Merits of Filial Piety. London: Printed by J. P. Cooke for the author & sold by J. Bew & T. Hookham, 1786.

SOURCES Brandt, Ellen B. Susanna Haswell Rowson, America’s First BestSelling Novelist. Chicago: Serbra Press, 1975. Cobbett, William. A Kick for a Bite; or, Review upon Review; with a Critical Essay, on the Works of Mrs. S. Rowson, in a Letter to the Editor, or Editors, of the American Monthly Review. 2nd edition. By Peter Porcupine. Philadelphia: Printed by Thomas Bradford, 1796. Davidson, Cathy N. “The Life and Times of Charlotte Temple: The Biography of a Book.” In Reading in America: Literature and Social History, edited by Davidson, 157–179. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. New York: Stein & Day, 1966, pp. 93–98. Forcey, Blythe. “Charlotte Temple and the End of Epistolarity,” American Literature 63 (1991): 225–241.

Greenfield, Susan. “Charlotte Temple and Charlotte’s Daughter: The Reproduction of Woman’s Word,” Women’s Studies 18 (1990): 269–286. Martin, Wendy. “Profile: Susanna Rowson, Early American Novelist,” Women’s Studies 2 (1974): 1–8. Parker, Patricia L. Susanna Rowson. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Rourke, Constance. The Roots of American Culture and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942, pp. 75–87. Stern, Julia. “Working Through the Frame: Charlotte Temple and the Poetics of Maternal Melancholia,” Arizona Quarterly 49 (Winter 1993): 1–21. Vail, R. W. G. “Susanna Haswell Rowson, The Author of Charlotte Temple: A Bibliographical Study,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 42 (April 1932): 47–160. Weil, Dorothy. In Defense of Women: Susanna Rowson (1762–1824). University Park, Pa., & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976.

OTHER San Antonio College LitWeb The Susannah Rowson Page. Available online. URL: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/ bailey/rowson.htm. Accessed September 26, 2005. University Library of Virginia. Early American Fiction. EAF Author: Susannah Haswell Rowson. Available online. URL: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/authors/shr.htm. Accessed September 26, 2005.

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE RITA MAE BROWN (1976) One of Rita Mae BROWN’s first attempts to have Rubyfruit Jungle published resulted, as she recalls in her memoirs, with a shocked editor throwing the manuscript at her: “You would have thought I’d tossed a canister of mustard gas into her office. She called me a pervert, telling me to get out of her office.” After several more tries, a small feminist press finally took Brown’s novel. The cause for such controversy was, undoubtedly, its open portrayal of lesbianism, and its protagonist’s sincere and direct approach toward her own sexuality and her place in society. Molly’s determination to define who she is and what she will become is at the heart of Rubyfruit Jungle. Although for a long time she remains ignorant of the circumstances of her birth, Molly was an “illegitimate” child adopted by Carrie and Carl Bolt, Molly feels early on that she is different from her poor but loving family. As her childhood years go by, this distance becomes increasingly obvious to all. And while Carl encourages

1126 RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE

the rebellious girl who taught herself to read while still almost an infant, Carrie feels threatened by Molly’s intelligent, inquisitive nature. Bound by her—and her community’s—idea of a woman’s role in life, Carrie sees Molly as a disrupting force: brash, unladylike, and too direct for her own good. While young Molly’s attitudes cause frequent clashes with both her mother and the conservative rural community where they live, even more detrimental to her at this time—although it will later prove a powerful weapon—is her stubborn refusal to feel ashamed of herself. After an early incident where Molly and her cousin Leroy collect money from their curious classmates for a view of Leroy’s uncircumcised penis, Carrie launches a tirade against Molly that reveals the truth about Molly’s real mother. Molly, however, seems unaffected by being called a bastard: “It makes no difference where I came from. I’m here, ain’t I?” (7). Molly’s unwillingness to classify people in terms of race, class, or gender seems impossible in a society that retains segregation between whites and “coloreds” and expects men and women to conform to specific roles. But then, this is the real proof of Molly’s status as outsider. Although Rubyfruit Jungle appears to be a novel about a girl/woman’s sexual awakening as a lesbian, it is actually more about the often rude awakening of all who cross Molly’s path. Molly realizes her love of women early on, and simply accepts it: She is never unsure or ashamed of her orientation. It is up to everyone else to adjust. In earlier lesbian literature, such as Radclyffe Hall’s classic The Well of Loneliness, gay women were doomed to failed romances and an often suicidal fatalism surrounding their “condition”: an acceptable fate for women seen as confused and mentally deranged. Brown, on the other hand, seems to create Molly as a wake-up call to the gay community, as a vehicle for a change in attitude, both in literature and in real life. Molly’s sexuality, in the end, matters more to us than it does to her. From her sixth-grade romance with her friend Leota through her high school conquest of a popular cheerleader, Molly’s tastes are free and diverse, and her goal is to enjoy her experiences: After all, “why would people get so upset about something that feels so good?” (70). In a broader sense, Rubyfruit Jungle is about survival: Molly’s being a lesbian seems the least of her worries

once she leaves her small Florida high school and heads for university, determined to become a film director. Expelled from the University of Florida for becoming intimately involved with her female roommate, and consequently repudiated by Carrie and Aunt Florence, Molly hitchhikes to New York City with less than $20 to her name. There she must overcome two more pressing obstacles to her career than her homosexuality: her poverty and her gender. Here, too, Molly’s tough willpower eventually sees her through; in the end, however, we are left wondering whether she has achieved total victory or simply won a series of small battles. Molly’s life in New York begins in absolute poverty: Her home during the first nights is an abandoned car. Soon she has a job as a waitress, where she meets a young woman “kept” by an aging actress. Holly introduces her to the upscale lesbian crowd, and Molly finds herself fighting off a renowned archaeologist’s advances. Even in her precarious situation, though, Molly refuses to trade her integrity for financial security and academic support. Once she has secured a scholarship at New York University, she discovers that life as a woman director is going to be very difficult. Her (male) professors scorn her, her classmates will not sign up to work on projects with her, and the film equipment always seems to have been checked out when she needs it. At the same time, Molly is working full-time at a publishing company, where her speed and talent only earn her suspicion and jealousy from the head receptionist, who can think only that something suspicious must have occurred between Molly and her supervisor, or the young college student would never have been promoted so quickly. Thus, both her financial situation and her femaleness seem to force Molly into a corner for some time. She works and studies without rest but also without recognition. By the time she is ready to show her final project at film school, she has earned top grades but sees little hope for her career. Here, as always, her resiliency comes through, and a crewless Molly steals the film equipment and returns to Carrie, hoping to turn her final project into a memorable one. While her male classmates are busy shooting the hip “pornovio-

RUSS, JOANNA 1127

lence” in fashion at the time, Molly does the only thing she can: tell the truth. Molly knows that no matter how good she is, those around her will try to bring her down because she is a woman, and because she is poor. In a sense, Carrie had feared this outcome as she saw her adopted daughter grow into an ambitious, independent woman. Maybe she was not so worried about being pushed aside once Molly became rich, famous, and contemptuous of her childhood poverty; perhaps she simply sensed the difficulties Molly would have to endure to reach that level in the first place. After all, it was relatively easy for Carl to show his support for Molly, since even in his financial situation he had enjoyed certain privileges as a man. During the week spent filming her ailing mother for her senior film project, Molly had come to know Carrie and the reasons behind her often fierce criticism of Molly. In what she assumes is the end of her life, Carrie reveals much about herself, her husband, and Molly’s biological parents. From these stories, Molly understands that her artistic vein, her desire to travel, and even her openness toward sexuality must have come from Ruby and her French lover. She must also acknowledge, however, that her own strong will and desire for an honest life are Carrie’s. Molly’s senior film project represents her reaction against her pretentious classmates, snobbish professors, and the hypocrisy she perceives in the film industry. In a 20-minute monologue, a terminally ill Carrie speaks her mind, “speeding away in her rocking chair; No quick cuts to steals from Kenneth Anger, no tinfoil balls dropping out of the sky to represent nuclear hail—just Carrie talking about her life, the world today, and the price of meat” (244). At the end, her classmates and instructor leave silently, embarrassed for themselves or for Molly, because no matter how brilliant her short slice of life might have been, it is the classmate who had drawn applause for a Martian rape film who gets the job in a children’s program at CBS. Molly’s hopes are momentarily grounded, eliciting her sole observation about what a greater triumph would have meant to her: “I kept hoping against hope I’d be the bright exception, the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers— I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for anything?” (245).

While Rubyfruit Jungle could have ended with Molly’s successful start as a film director, the author chooses to leave the young woman meditating about not only her future but that of her whole generation. It is a time when young people are “raging down the streets in protest” (246), expressing anger about various racial and gender issues, and yet keeping Molly’s fellow gays and lesbians out of their movements. Resigning herself to remaining an outsider for the time being, Molly nevertheless promises to fight, however long it takes, until she can make her films and become “the hottest 50-year-old this side of the Mississippi” (246).

SOURCES Abelove, Henry, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Boston: Routledge, 1993. Brown, Rita Mae. Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary RabbleRouser. New York: Bantam, 1997. ———. Rubyfruit Jungle. London: Penguin, 1994. Lilly, Mark, ed. Lesbian and Gay Writing: an Anthology of Critical Essays. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images. London: Pluto Press, 1989. Zimmerman, Bonnie. The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969–1989. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990. Maria Luisa Antonaya

RUSS, JOANNA (1937– ) Joanna Russ, literary critic and essayist, is a contemporary, award-winning writer of science fiction. Along with Ursula LEGUIN, Samuel R. DELANY, Marion Zimmer BRADLEY, and others, Russ brought a new sort of sexual awareness to this genre in the 1960s. Except for On Strike Against God, a “coming out” novel, she does not write specifically about lesbian issues, yet all her novels and stories are political and feminist, as well as literary in intent and tone. Her best-known novel, The FEMALE MAN (1975), has elicited both admiration and anger from critics: Some praise its irony and humor; others criticize its bitter depictions of female violence against men. As Robert Scholes and Eric Rabkin point out, however, with this novel and others, Joanna Russ has helped move the content of science fiction from “space opera and bug-eyed monsters to increasingly

1128 RUSS, JOANNA

sophisticated psychological themes” (Scholes and Rabkin, ix). Joanna Russ was born on February 22, 1937, in the Bronx in New York, to Evarett I. Russ and Bertha Zinner Russ, both teachers. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University in 1957, and her master of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1960. Although she married in 1963, she knew from childhood that she was lesbian, and she obtained a divorce in 1967. For more than 20 years she taught at various colleges and universities while publishing stories and novels that concentrated on the disjunctions of contemporary society. Her first novel, Picnic on Paradise (1968), was nominated for a Nebula Award; it features Alyx, the hero who appears in several Russ stories that precede the novel. Here she is responsible for leading a group of future-tourists across the ice that covers a planet called Paradise, and must cope with crises among the tourists as well as the rivalry between two men: the macho Gunther and the coldly analytical Machine, both of whom are attracted to her. And Chaos Died (1970) introduces Jai Vedh, a homosexual—and therefore doubly different—whose ship crashes on a planet whose inhabitants are psychic. He returns to Earth briefly but is more fully accepted in the space colony, where he eventually lives as a god. In The Female Man, Russ’s most complex work, four women—Janet, Jeannine, Joanna, and Jael—are genetically identical. They live in four different eras: a future egalitarian world called Whileaway, contemporary (1960s) society, during the Great Depression era but without the occurrence of World War II, and in a world where men and women live separately and exist in a perpetual state of war. We Who Are About To . . . (1977) involves another shipwreck, this time on an undiscovered, uninhabited planet where the protagonist, who wishes to die with dignity, is opposed by six people who wish to fashion a new colony. Rather than be enslaved and raped, she murders the others one by one. In The Two of Them (1978), Irene Waskiewicz and her mentor and lover Ernst Neuman are sent on a work assignment to a planet whose patriarchal culture replicates that of Levittown; once acclimated, Irene realizes that the subservient, objectified, bored women are actually echoes of herself. As she rescues the young girl

Zubedah, Irene realizes that their escape depends on her murdering Ernst, and she kills him. Clearly, in Russ’s work, the murder of patriarchal representatives is a rite of passage to independence for women. Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978) centers on a young girl who, secure in her own sense of power and self, can kill dragons and rescue princesses. On Strike Against God (1980) is the coming out story of Esther, an English professor who falls in love with Jean, her student. Russ was awarded a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in 1983, both for the novella Souls. Recently, Russ has written and edited essay collections on feminism and science fiction: To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995) and What Are We Fighting for?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997).

NOVELS And Chaos Died. New York: Ace, 1970. The Female Man. Toronto, New York and London: Bantam, 1975. Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic. New York: Daughters Publishing, 1978. On Strike Against God: A Lesbian Love Story. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Out & Out Books, 1980. Picnic on Paradise. New York: Ace, 1968. The Two of Them. New York: Berkley, 1978. We Who Are About To . . . New York: Dell, 1977.

SOURCES Delany, Samuel R. “Orders of Chaos: The Science Fiction Writer Joanna Russ.” In Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jane B. Weedman, 95–123. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1985. Garber, Eric, and Lyn Paleo. Uranian Worlds: A Reader’s Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983, pp. 115–119. Huckle, Patricia. “Women in Utopias.” In The Utopian Vision: Seven Essays on the Quincentennial of Sir Thomas More, edited by E. D. S. Sullivan, 115–136. San Diego, Calif.: San Diego State University Press, 1983. Johnson, Charles. “A Dialogue: Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ on Science Fiction,” Callalloo 7 (Fall 1984): 27–35. Scholes, Robert, and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Spencer, Kathleen L. “Rescuing the Female Child: The Fiction of Joanna Russ,” Science Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 167–187.

RYDER 1129

Walker, Nancy A. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. ———. Feminist Alternatives. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Walker, Paul. Speaking of Science Fiction: The Paul Walker Interviews. Oradell, N.J.: Luna Press, 1978.

OTHER Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. Joanna Russ. Available online. URL: http://www.catch22.com/~espana/SFAuthors/SFR/ Russ,Joanna.php3. Accessed September 25, 2005.

RYDER DJUNA BARNES (1928) Djuna BARNES’s first novel, Ryder, is unconventional in all the traditional aspects of fiction: plot, character, setting, narration. In fact, in her essay “A Reader’s Ryder,” Marie Ponsot observes that Ryder “is not a book that yields much to those who begin with a linear examination” (94); consequently, it is not an easy read for a person who sits down and anticipates the soothing and predictable structure of a bildungsroman. Contemporary readers are best advised to drop their expectations and simply enjoy the tour de force that Djuna Barnes has created. Evidently, readers needed no such instruction in 1928, when Ryder was first published; indeed, the novel enjoyed a “brief best-seller status” (Broe, 6). This status may have been produced, albeit unwittingly, by those intending to repress Ryder, for, as Paul West notes, the novel was “censored by the New York Post Office” (West, 243) and then expurgated before it was published by Horace Liveright. The fact that Liveright published Ryder is significant in that it puts Barnes in interesting literary company. In 1922, Boni and Liveright published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste-Land, and in 1925, Boni and Liveright published Ernest HEMINGWAY’s In Our Time. Barnes and Hemingway knew each other in Paris in the 1920s, and many critics and readers have noted the link in last names between Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, and Djuna Barnes. Moreover, Barnes and T. S. Eliot had a long professional relationship: He edited and wrote an introduction to Barnes’s best-known novel, NIGHTWOOD, and he also edited (or meddled with, depending on one’s perspective) her play The Antiphon. Barnes was also well acquainted with James Joyce, and Marie Pon-

sot notes an intertextual relationship between Stephen Daedalus in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Julie in Barnes’s Ryder (Broe, 112). Another intertextual note worth considering is that a character in F. Scott FITZGERALD’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1919), is named Dawson Ryder. Summarizing Djuna Barnes’s Ryder seems antithetical to the author’s project. In brief, Ryder documents the life of the Ryder family. The novel begins with a biblical overture and then two chapters on Sophia Grieve Ryder. Wendell Ryder, whom many have taken to be the novel’s central character and the Ryder to whom the title refers, does first appear in chapter 4, “Wendell Is Born.” Moreover, the narrator notes parenthetically that Sophia Grieve Ryder named her son Wendell Ryder and “gave him no father’s name” (17); hence, the Ryder family is matriarchal. The novel then devotes chapters to Ryder family members Amelia, Sophia, Kate-Careless, Timothy, Elisha, and Julie, as well as The Beast Thingumbob and Matthew O’Connor, the doctor who also appears in Barnes’s novel Nightwood. The novel is a family portrait, crossing generations and continents. The Ryder family is unusual in its configuration: Wendell grows up and establishes a household with his wife, Amelia, and their children and also his consort or second wife, Kate-Careless, and their children. Ryder ends with Wendell out of doors, convening with farm animals who seem to share his worldview and kinship practices, wondering, “whom should he disappoint?” Perhaps because of its reputed difficulty or the fact that Ryder has been in and out of print, Barnes’s novel Nightwood has garnered more critical attention than Ryder has. Nevertheless, a body of critical work on Ryder continues to grow. Mary Lynn Broe’s important collection Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (Broe, 1991) brings together essays on Barnes’s life and works by some of the most influential feminist scholars of 20th-century literature as well as top Barnes scholars, among them Broe herself, Louise de Salvo, Karla Jay, and Jane Marcus. Recent publications on Ryder include two essays that further investigate the novel’s inscriptions of sexual abuse: Anne B. Dalton’s essay “Escaping from Eden: Djuna Barnes’s Revision of Psychoanalytic Theory and

1130 RYDER

Her Treatment of Father-Daughter Incest in Ryder” and Susan Edmunds’s “Narratives of a Virgin’s Violation: The Critique of Middle-Class Reformism in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder.” Sheryl Stevenson, a contributor to Broe’s eminent anthology, continues her work on Barnes and Ryder in her essay “Ryder as Contraception: Barnes v. the Reproduction of Mothering.” Stevenson’s essay historicizes and contextualizes Ryder and relates it “to the writing of Barnes’s contemporaries” (Stevenson, 102). In doing so, Stevenson opens up the text to new readings and new relevance for 21st-century readers for whom contraception, reproduction, pregnancy, and motherhood remain important issues. Stevenson suggests that “study of the novel’s historical content can lend further support to a female-centered reading, focusing on Ryder as a text about mothering that reflects a crucial, transitional period in women’s struggle for physical and social self-determination” (Stevenson, 97). She reads Ryder as “Djuna Barnes’s strongest statement against women’s enslavement to reproduction” (Stevenson, 104)—an approach that redirects the reader’s focus from Wendell Ryder’s insane promiscuity as the novel’s central focus and aims it in other directions. Edmunds’s essay takes a similar critical/theoretical avenue while maintaining the autobiographical or personal approach to Ryder. She claims that “the author’s explicit goal in writing Ryder was to question the whole project of middle-class reformism even as the novel’s autobiographical basis was also a significant factor in its reading.” Finally, in her essay “Doing Djuna Justice: The Challenges of the Barnes Biography,” Margot Norris makes this observation: “Djuna Barnes’s life yields marvelous materials for the biographer to work with: outlandish

figures, bizarre relationships, scalding feelings, uncommon situations” (Norris, 581). One might use the same sets of modifiers and nouns to describe Ryder.

SOURCES Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. Edited by Cheryl Plumb. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. ———. Ryder. 1928. Reprint, Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Broe, Mary Lynn. “Introduction.” Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes. Edited by Mary Lynn Broe 3–23. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Dalton, Anne. B. “Escaping from Eden: Djuna Barnes’s Revision of Psychoanalytic Theory and her Treatment of Father-Daughter Incest in Ryder,” Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (March 1993). Edmunds, Susan. “Narratives of a Virgin’s Violation: The Critique of Middle-class Reformism in Djuna Barnes’s Ryder,” Novel 30, no. 2 (Winter 1997). Norris, Margot. “Doing Djuna Justice: The Challenges of the Barnes Biography,” Studies in the Novel 28, no. 4 (Winter 1996). EBSCO. Inver Hills Community College Library. Inver Grove Heights. Available online. URL: http://www.pals.msus.edu. Accessed September 25, 2005. Ponsot, Marie. “A Reader’s Ryder.” In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe, 94–112. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Stevenson, Sheryl. “Ryder as Contraception: Barnes v. The Reproduction of Mothering,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 97–106. West, Paul. “Afterword: ‘The Havoc of this Nicety.’ ” In Ryder by Djuna Barnes. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archives Press, 1995, pp. 243–250. Ellen Lansky

C

SD

SABBATH’S THEATER PHILIP ROTH (1995) Looking back over Philip ROTH’s prodigious output— 27 books over a 45-year career—one can see noticeable shifts in narrative trajectory, or put another way, turning points in his novelistic focus. There is the comedic, and at times manic, flair of PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, which marked a radical departure from the more subdued realism found in earlier works such as “Goodbye, Columbus” and Letting Go. In The GHOST WRITER, Roth begins his exploration of the artist figure and the ways in which art can determine destiny. And with The Counterlife, his postmodern tour de force, Philip Roth inaugurates a series of works that highlights the constructedness of identity as well as the inextricable links between the written and nonwritten worlds. Sabbath’s Theater, winner of the National Book Award and considered by critics such as Mark Shechner and Mark Krupnick to be Roth’s masterpiece, is likewise a significant turning point in that the narrative—at times frantic, but never out of control—displays a revitalization of novelistic energy, and one that helped pave the way for the much-praised American Trilogy (AMERICAN PASTORAL, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain) that followed. Philip Roth told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in a 2000 interview that the happiest time he had ever had with his work occurred during the writing of Sabbath’s Theater. When asked why he felt that way, Roth responded, “Because I felt free. I feel like I am in charge now” (Remnick, 88). In light of the American Trilogy’s

reevaluation of late-20th-century American history, this response resonates. Several times throughout the novel, its protagonist, the puppeteer pornographer Mickey Sabbath, is directly associated with America in both its ideal as well as repellent qualities. His Croatianborn lover, Drenka Balich, longs to go “dancing with America,” and having stated this says to him subsequently, “You are America. Yes, you are, my wicked boy” (419). In a 2003 interview that aired on BBC4, Roth elaborated further on how his 1995 novel served as a “springboard” to the novels that would follow. With Sabbath he wanted to “create someone who is deep in the disorder [. . .] someone who is not fearful of the repellent, who says I am repellent, I am disorder. Someone who wants to be dead, but he can’t die. He has the opportunity finally to kill himself, and he can’t leave, everything he hated was here” (“Roth at 70”). Given Roth’s own comments, it is easy to see how Roth’s exploration of postwar social breakdown, the thematic bedrock of the American Trilogy, has its roots in Sabbath’s Theater. In ways that evoke the wild tones of earlier works such as Portnoy’s Complaint, The Great American Novel, and the outrageous short story “On the Air,” Sabbath’s Theater is perhaps best defined as a narrative of excess, one in which the author apparently revels in his protagonist’s offensiveness and cynicism. Morris “Mickey” Sabbath, a 64-year-old ex-puppeteer whose arthritis will no longer allow him to perform, has apparently reached an impasse in his life, one that turns into an

1131

1132 SABBATH’S THEATER

existential crisis as the book begins. He had once taught drama at a local college in Madamaska Falls, but was forced to resign over a scandal involving phone sex with one of his students. His wife, whom he can no longer tolerate, is a recovering alcoholic filled with politically correct observations and 12-step aphorisms. And, most significant to the plot of the novel, he has just lost his Croatian-born mistress, Drenka Balich, to ovarian cancer. She, like Mickey, is highly sexed and a notorious seducer, yet the two of them share a relationship, albeit one filled with unconventional sexual exploits, that approximates the solidity of marriage. Not long after Drenka’s death, Mickey gets word that Lincoln Gelman, an old partner from the days of his Indecent Theater—risque street performances where Mickey used his fingers as puppets to seduce unsuspecting college women—has just committed suicide. The two deaths plunge Sabbath into a deep malaise, and he plans a final trip to New York, where he will attend the funeral of Gelman and then commit suicide. It is this journey that structures most of the novel and makes of it an aborted quest narrative. His journey is a circular one, taking him first to the New York home of his and Gelman’s mutual friend, Norman Cowan, whose wife and illiterate Mexican housemaid he attempts to seduce; then to the graveyard where his parents and older brother are buried, and where he buys a small plot for himself; then on to the Jersey Shore where he used to live as a boy and where, he is surprised to learn, his 100-year-old second cousin Fish is still living; and then finally back to Madamaska Falls, where he “reaches out” to the dead Drenka by urinating on her grave, an act reminiscent of the kinky sexual games they used to play together. Throughout his brief travels, Sabbath seems almost always on the verge of a mental breakdown. And although he never completely disintegrates, is never committed, and never completely loses his senses, throughout the novel he nonetheless remains on the edge of an emotional precipice. What keeps him on that edge is an obsession with death. The many references to Drenka’s cancer, graveyards, expired relationships, dead colleagues, his aviator brother shot down during World War II, and the “ghost” of his mother that follows him wherever he

goes all underscore the overriding presence of death as a signifying force in Mickey Sabbath’s life. In fact, the thanatotic (life-denying) impulse, especially as it is related to and counterbalanced by the erotic (lifesustaining), is perhaps the thematic driving force behind Sabbath’s Theater. Having lost his art, his marriage, his mistress, his youth, and his ability to seduce, Mickey longs to end his life, yet he cannot bring himself ultimately to deny the very thing that defines him best: carnal pleasure. He is an irresolute presence with an ambiguous future, a representative of late-20thcentury America—a nation that has had its own share of identity crises, and a country that Mickey, in many ways, has come to embody. If Sabbath is representative of America, he stands as a highly precarious figure, one prone to the many uncertainties and ambiguities that underlie the national character. In a 2000 interview with Charles McGrath, Philip Roth acknowledges this connection between Mickey Sabbath and the ongoing American project. Reflecting on his attempts to “rediscover” his home country after living abroad for much of the 1970s and 1980s, the author states, “When I look back now, I see that Sabbath’s Theater is the real turning back to American stuff. Mickey Sabbath’s is such an American voice. And after him, if not out of him, came the American trilogy” (McGrath, 8). By the author’s own admission, then, Sabbath’s miasmic disorder heralded the ever-elusive American ideal defining much of Roth’s fiction that follows.

SOURCES Cooper, Alan. “Master Baiter: Sabbath’s Theater.” In Philip Roth and the Jews, 281–290. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996. Mellard, James M. “Death, Mourning, and Besse’s Ghost: From Philip Roth’s The Facts to Sabbath’s Theater,” Shofar 19 (2000): 66–73. Omer-Sherman, Ranen. “ ‘A Stranger in the House’: Assimilation, Madness, and Passing in Roth’s Figure of the Pariah Jew in Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), and The Human Stain (2000).” In Diaspora Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, and Roth, 234–266. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press, 2002. Remnick, David. “Into the Clear: Philip Roth Puts Turbulence in Its Place,” New Yorker, 8 May 2000, pp. 84–89.

SALINGER, J. D. 1133

Roth, Philip. “Zuckerman’s Alter Brain.” Interview with Charles McGrath. New York Times Book Review, 7 May 2000, p. 8. ———. “Philip Roth at 70.” Interview with David Remnick. BBC4, London. March 19, 2003. ———. Sabbath’s Theater. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. Royal, Derek Parker, ed. Philip Roth’s America: The Later Novels. Spec. issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature 23 (2004): 1–181. Safer, Elaine B. “The Tragicomic in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.” In American Literary Dimensions: Poems and Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, 168–179. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. Shechner, Mark. Up Society’s Ass, Copper: Rereading Philip Roth. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Shostak, Debra. “Roth/Counter Roth: Postmodernism, the Masculine Subject, and Sabbath’s Theater,” Arizona Quarterly 54 (1998): 119–142. Zucker, David J. “Philip Roth: Desire and Death,” Studies in American Jewish Fiction 23 (2004): 135–144. Derek P. Royal

SALINGER, J(EROME) D(AVID) (1919– ) Along with some frequently anthologized short stories, J. D. Salinger’s fame rests on one novel, The CATCHER IN THE RYE, a tale of adolescent initiation. The novel is a classic in the American canon, conveying the adolescent angst of young Holden Caulfield and his youthful idealism and rebellion against adult hypocrisy and phoniness. Indeed, it has become a commonplace to list Holden Caulfield alongside Mark TWAIN’s Huckleberry Finn and F. Scott FITZGERALD’s Jay Gatsby as exemplars of disaffected boys and men in various eras in American history. Salinger, a master of colloquial language, tells a complex and patterned story that still intrigues readers and critics alike. No one better depicts the themes of childhood innocence corrupted by the insensitive world of adults, the need for love as a ballast against an alien and absurd society, and the search for spiritual solace in a materialistic modern world. Salinger’s stories in the New Yorker about the now iconic Seymour, Franny, Zooey, and other members of the Glass family captured the attention of the American reading public and were collected in Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the

Roof Beams, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). In 1997, Hapworth 16, 1924, the final installment of the Glass family saga initially published in the New Yorker (June 1965), was published as a novel. It is Salinger’s only other known novel to date. J. D. Salinger was born on January 1, 1919, in New York City, to Sol Salinger, an importer, and Miriam Jillich Salinger, of Scotch-Irish ancestry. He was reared in Manhattan and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. He become a staff sergeant and received five battle stars. He attended New York University, Ursinus College, and Columbia University without taking a degree; was married briefly to Sylvia (surname unknown), a French physician, from September 1945 to July 1946; and published The Catcher in the Rye in 1951. The novel opens as Holden, an upper-middleclass teenager enrolled at Pencey Prep, sits on a hilltop overlooking a school football game. He revolts against the world of his teacher Mr. Antolini, who makes homosexual advances, and his classmate Stradlater, who brags about his seduction of Holden’s friend Jane Gallagher, and from other adult hypocrisies from which Holden hopes to save both himself and his friends. His preoccupation with saving the ducks in New York’s Central Park by skillful use of his catcher’s mitt reflects his wish to protect others, particularly his precocious younger sister Phoebe. This need to protect is exacerbated by the death of his younger brother Allie, over whose fate Holden had no control. Critics continue to analyze and reevaluate his work, and the revival of interest in Salinger during the past two decades demonstrates the continuing importance of his contributions to American fiction. J. D. Salinger, who was married to Claire Douglas from February 1955 to October 1967, lives in a reclusive fashion in Cornish, New Hampshire. He has pointedly avoided all contact with the public since the appearance of The Catcher in the Rye. After a 1992 fire at his home, the New York Times revealed that Salinger had a third wife, Colleen O’Neill, but no further information seems forthcoming.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Hapworth 16, 1924. Washington, D.C.: Orchises Press, 1997.

1134 SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS

SOURCES Alsen, Eberhard. Salinger’s Glass Stories as a Composite Novel. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1983. Bloom Harold. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. ———, ed. J. D. Salinger: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Engel, Steven. Readings on The Catcher in the Rye. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1998. French, Warren. J. D. Salinger. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Reprinted, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976. ———. J. D. Salinger, Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Hamilton, Ian. In Search of J. D. Salinger. New York: Random House, 1988. Holzman, Robert S., and Gary L. Perkins. J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Piscataway, N.J.: Research & Education Association, 1995. Kotzen, Kip, ed. With Love and Squalor: Fourteen Writers Respond to the Work of J. D. Salinger. New York: Broadway Books, 2001. Lundquist, James. J. D. Salinger. New York: Ungar, 1979. Madinaveitia, Catherine. Brodie’s Notes on J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” London: Pan, 1987. Maynard, Joyce. At Home in the World: A Memoir. New York: Picador USA, 1998. Pinsker, Sanford. The Catcher in the Rye: Innocence under Pressure. New York: Twayne, 1993. Rosen, Gerald. Zen in the Art of J. D. Salinger. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1977. Salinger, Margaret A. Dream Catcher: A Memoir. New York: Washington Square Press, 2000. Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on “The Catcher in the Rye.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Simonson, Harold P., and E. P. Hager, eds. “Catcher in the Rye”: Clamor vs. Criticism. Boston: Heath, 1963. Wenke, John. J. D. Salinger: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

means that his model tenement house and its support organizations will allow her to help her fellow Jewish immigrants to overcome their poverty. Sonya has her own ideas for helping the people in her community, but she believes that Manning’s money and his method of teaching immigrants “skills” (including hygiene and elocution) will help them to advance themselves. But Sonya is attracted to the man himself, or so she thinks: Head swung back, Sonya looked up in admiration at Manning, her heart pierced by the cultural elegance of his attire. Not a detail of his well-dressed figure escaped her. His finished grooming stood out all the more vividly in this background of horrid poverty. A master tailor had cut his loose Scotch tweeds. His pale brown pongee shirt was lighter and finer than a woman’s waist. The rich hidden quietness of his silk tie, even his shoes had a handmade quality to them, she thought. (2)

SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS ANZIA

In this passage it sounds as if Sonya is lusting after Manning’s clothes more than the man himself. It is more accurate to say that Sonya is falling for Manning’s class. She attributes to his dress and grooming qualities of culture, dignity, quietness, and control. His clothes signal effortless power: He does not have to work. He does not have to struggle or make an effort in his life. He can wear clothes that are delicate, won’t last, and represent painstaking labor in the hands of invisible others. In just standing before her, Manning displays to Sonya all the promises of the American Dream: He stands defined against the “background of horrid poverty.” What does the upper-class character in a cross-class romance seek from romance with a working-class character? All the things he or she feels his/her class denies: sex, freedom from social obligation, passion, physicality, simplicity. In their initial meeting, John Manning falls in love with Sonya Vrunsky’s class as surely (and superficially) as she does with his:

YEZIERSKA (1923) Sonya Vrunsky, in Salome of the Tenements, sees millionaire philanthropist John Manning as literally her savior: “But only let me work for you and you will save my soul” (2) she tells him. She

Less definitely, but with equal interest, the man’s glance took in the girl. Of severe blue serge, shiny from wear, there was about her dress the

OTHER Bohemian Ink. Available online. URL: http://www.levity.com/ corduroy/salinger.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SALT EATERS, THE 1135

nun-like austerity of the intellectual of the East Side. But personality, femininity, flamed through the unrevealing uniform. . . . You have the burning fire of the Russian Jew in you, while I am motivated by a sickly conscience, trying to heal itself by the application of cold logic and cold cash. The real liberation of your people must come from within from such as you. (2–3) Manning projects onto Sonya Vrunsky warmth, passion, personality, and freedom from responsibility. He feels bent down and numbed by the noblesse oblige of his wealth and old-family status. He sees her as an opportunity for his liberation, not just her people’s. While Sonya and John are attracted to each other for their other class stereotypes, their respective social groups are appalled by the prospect of their union. Sonya’s friends disdain her scheming and selfreinvention as “vamping” (94), a word used in the early 20th century to denote a cross between sexual baiting and vampirism, luring someone so that you can suck him/her dry. They see Sonya as a mercenary, willing to use her body and forsake her religion for economic advantages. They are not impressed with Manning or his class, either, seeing him as effeminate and sickly. They scoff at his philosophical talk of class equality as crazy and hypocritical. Mrs. Peltz tells him: “Even downtown we got differences. Let me and the lord’s wife go to the butcher store for meat? For me, who bargains herself for every penny, or the landlord’s wife what pays him over any price he asks?” (126). Moreover, Sonya’s social climbing through marriage is taken as a sign to her friends that she is as selfish and inured to the needs of others as the class she has married into. Mrs. Peltz exclaims at Sonya’s wedding reception: “The price of this one carpet would be enough to feed the whole block for a year. Only a little from that silver on her side-board would free me from the worries for rent for the rest of my days. If she’d have a heart, she’d divide with us a little of her good luck” (124). When Sonya hears this, she is sickened with shame, but she does not share her wealth. Manning’s friends are even more scathing in their assessment of Sonya and her wedding guests. They see

her friends as coarse and animal-like, and refer to his ascetic habits and charitable antics on the East Side as: John’s melodramatic vaudeville of social equality. . . . Indeed! One could consider it as the latest amusement. You remember the Newport monkey dinner that was given to a pet monkey? I would better be able to find it amusing if it were not that I’m fond of Manning. . . . Giving a dinner for a pet monkey is one thing and marrying one is quite another thing. . . . (127) It is not enough for Manning’s friend to declare Sonya and the people of the East Side lower on the evolutionary scale; they summarize her allure and her feelings for Manning as purely sexual, which, for them, is another form of bestiality: “ ‘They say,’ broke in another voice, ‘Russian Jewesses are always fascinating to men. The reason, my dear, is because they have neither breeding, culture nor tradition. . . . With all to gain and nothing to lose . . . They are mere creatures of sex. . . . And much as we may dislike to admit it, men uptown and downtown are the same’ ” (128). The ironic tragedy of Sonya Vrunsky and John Manning’s relationship in Salome of the Tenements is that what they love or desire about each other’s class is the same thing, phrased only less generously, that their respective social groups each hate about the other class. Manning sees Sonya as passionate and unbridled, and his friends term her animal, uncultured, and sexual. Sonya loves Manning’s calm and refinement; her friends find him cold and hording. In a cross-class romance, it seems that the two involved can never got beyond the issues of class to appreciate the beloved for him/herself.

SOURCE Yezierska, Anzia. Salome of the Tenements. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Carolyn Whitsun

SALT EATERS, THE TONI CADE BAMBARA (1980) African-American author Toni Cade BAMBARA is perhaps best known for her short stories such as “Raymond’s Run” and “The Lesson.” After publishing two collections of short stories, Gorilla, My Love (1972)

1136 SALT EATERS, THE

and The Seabirds Are Still Alive (1977), she turned to writing The Salt Eaters. An accomplished short story writer and novelist, her first love was film (Bambara, Deep Sightings, x). After making several films and documentaries, Bambara died in 1995. However, Bambara’s estate published two posthumous works: a second novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child (1999), about the Atlanta child murders, and Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (1996), a collection introduced by Bambara’s friend and editor Toni MORRISON. Bambara often wrote from self-assigned topics and explained that The Salt Eaters came from a desire to bridge the spiritual and the political, “to investigate possible ways to bring our technicians of the sacred and our guerillas together” (Bambara “Interview,” 31). New readers might usefully follow Bambara’s connective suggestion and approach this complex novel with a willingness to think and read by association, rather than by strictly linear development. Though Bambara divides the novel into 12 chapters that occur over the same “real time” day, many chapters contain the viewpoints of multiple characters. Moreover, these multiple viewpoints flash back to several time periods, including the future conditional, or “what might have been.” As literary critic Eleanor Traynor accurately describes it, time in The Salt Eaters is “convergent” (Traynor, 65). The symbolism of the novel’s title insists on the need for balance: Salt can be an antidote for a snake bite, but in excess quantities it can often kill. Because the novel focuses on a tightly knit community, many characters have relatives and past experiences in common. Velma, one of the novel’s main characters, is wife to James “Obie” Henry, head of the Academy of 7 Arts and sister to Palma, one of the “Seven Sisters” performing arts troupe who is traveling by bus to Claybourne; she is also friends with Jan and Ruby, who share lunchtime insights about Velma’s life over the course of several chapters. The “present” of The Salt Eaters takes place in the fictional town of Claybourne, Georgia, in the late 1970s. As the novel opens, two events bring the predominantly African-American community together: the failed suicide attempt of Velma Henry, community activist, and the Spring Festival, an event designed by

Claybourne’s Academy of the 7 Arts as a reenactment of a Mardi Gras slave insurrection and “a holding action . . . to encourage everyone to work together” (92). Velma’s healing involves diverse individuals from the Claybourne Infirmary, including the wise-woman healer Minnie Ransom, the older doctor Doc Serge, the younger doctor Julius Meadows, and the 12-member “Master’s Mind.” Other communities include the multicultural, multiracial Seven Sisters, a troupe of performance artists; the Academy of the 7 Arts, Claybourne’s once-vibrant community center; and the community between Jan and Ruby, two friends having lunch. Gloria (Akasha) Hull’s essay usefully explicates the names and natures of the novel’s interconnected characters. Early scholarship on The Salt Eaters involves an explication of characters (Hull) and the jazz intricacies (Traynor). More recent scholarship emphasizes the novel’s multiple viewpoints and experimental structure and novel’s “postmodern” aesthetic: the efficacy of language in political change (Burks), agency, or one’s ability to act (Alwes), and “schizophrenic” structures (Butler-Evans). However, other critics have chosen to focus on the novel’s holistic urges toward reconciliation, redemption, and multiracial coalition (Willis, Nimura). The entire first chapter, approximately 40 pages, exemplifies the novel’s associative chronological thinking. Though this chapter occurs over an hour of “real time,” it moves between the “present” of the Infirmary and several associative flashbacks from Velma’s point of view. The healer Minnie asks Velma, “Are you sure . . . that you want to be well?” (1). In silent response to Minnie’s question, Velma begins a series of reminiscences that travel between the “present” of the Infirmary back to the beginnings of her failing relationship with her husband, James “Obie” Henry, her frustrations with the chauvinism of the Civil Rights movement, and her childhood memories. While Velma’s mind “goes traveling,” Minnie consults her spirit guide, “Old Wife,” for advice, since Velma’s healing appears to be a special case. What “ails” Velma goes deeper than overwork and exhaustion, just as what “ails” the community goes deeper than the poison of the encroaching nuclear power plant. However, as one of Velma’s friends insists later in the novel, “They’re

SANCTUARY 1137

connected” (242). Thus the chapter establishes several important themes in the novel: the “wasteful and dangerous split” between community activists and spiritual healers; the costs and benefits of working in coalitions; the urgent need to recognize the interdependence of past, present, and future; and the function of agency in health and wholeness.

SOURCES Alwes, Derek. “The Burden of Liberty: Choice in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” African American Review 30, no. 3 (1996): 353–365. Bambara, Toni Cade. “Interview.” In Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, 12–38. New York: Continuum, 1983. Burks, Ruth Elizabeth. “From Baptism to Resurrection: Toni Cade Bambara and the Incongruity of Language.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, 48–58. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1984. Butler-Evans, Elliott. “Rewriting and Revising in the 1980s: Tar Baby, The Color Purple, and The Salt Eaters.” In Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989, pp. 151–187. Byerman, Keith. “Healing Arts: Folklore and the Female Self in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters,” Postscript 5 (1988): 37–43. Hull, Gloria. “What It Is I Think She’s Doing Anyhow: A Reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, 124–142. Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983. Nimura, Tamiko. “In a Coalitional Mode: African American Literatures, Asian American Literatures, and the Politics of Comparison,” Dissertation. University of Washington, Seattle, Wash., 2004. Traynor, Eleanor W. “Music as Theme: The Jazz Mode in the Works of Toni Cade Bambara.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980), edited by Mari Evans, 58–70. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Willis, Susan. “Problematizing the Individual: Toni Cade Bambara’s Stories for the Revolution.” In Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. 129–158. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Tamiko Nimura

SANCTUARY WILLIAM FAULKNER (1931)

William FAULKNER said he wrote Sanctuary as a “potboiler” in

order to make money. He then revised the novel before publication so it would not shame his earlier works. Sanctuary is still strikingly different from his other novels, in its relatively short sentences and fast pace, in its grotesque characterization of Popeye, and in its bizarre details of sexual perversity. Perhaps one reason this book receives considerable critical attention is its enigmatic quality. Faulkner’s tone throughout is detached, and he seldom reveals the thoughts of characters as they make important decisions. Key events, such as Red’s murder or the presentation of the corncob at trial, are downplayed or occur completely offstage, leaving the reader uncertain of the novel’s true subject. One major theme, however, is the discovery of evil, from which there is no redemption at the end. The novel opens as lawyer Horace Benbow, pausing in a walk from his home in Kinston to his former home in Jefferson, drinks from a spring and is held there by the gangster Popeye who thinks he is trying to expose his bootlegging operation. The men stare at each other across the spring for two hours. The gangster has skin with a “dead, dark pallor” and “the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten” (5). Although he is a white man, Faulkner frequently uses the adjective “black” to describe Popeye. He wears a “tight black suit,” and to Horace “he smells black” (7). Horace is described in opposition to Popeye: He wears a lightcolored suit; he is tall and Popeye is short; he carries a book and Popeye carries a gun; he drinks from the spring and Popeye spits in it. With this opening, Faulkner appears to establish a dichotomy of good and evil using traditional symbols of light and dark, but the reader soon learns that good is not so easy to find. At dusk, Popeye takes Horace to his hideout, the Old Frenchman place, and has Ruby, the girlfriend of the head bootlegger, Lee Goodwin, feed him dinner. After Horace has too much to drink, he tells his host/captor that he has had incestuous feelings for his stepdaughter and left his wife. He thanks Ruby for dinner and suggests she leave the bootleggers, for she is young, Horace tells her, and unlike himself, she has the courage to act. Horace is soon dropped off in Jefferson, where he visits his genteel sister, Narcissa, but the reader returns to the Old Frenchman place, this time with Temple Drake, a pretty, rich college student and coquette, and

1138 SANCTUARY

her boyfriend Gowan Stevens. Slipping away from school, Temple and Gowan intend to buy moonshine from Lee Goodwin, but their plans go awry when Gowan, already drunk, wrecks the car. Temple is described as a tease, but because her father is a judge and she has only associated with young gentlemen, she has never had to deal with the consequences of her actions. When she tries coy smiles and flirtation on the gangsters in order to get a ride to town, she is met with cold stares rather than acquiescence. Becoming frightened, Temple begins to dart hysterically from one hiding place to the next, but her frantic movements only excite the interest of Popeye. Ruby warns her to leave, accusing her of “playing at it,” and then tries to hide her from the men. But Popeye soon catches up with Temple. After casually shooting Tommy, a feebleminded young bootlegger who tries to protect Temple, Popeye traps her in the corncrib and rapes her. The reader learns only later that Popeye is impotent and had used a corncob to violate this virgin. Faulkner suggests Popeye’s impotence as a cause of his cruelty, both the gun with which he shoots Tommy and the corncob serving as surrogate outlets for his frustrated masculinity. Popeye then drives Temple to a Memphis brothel where he imprisons her, forcing her to have sex with the handsome and virile Red while Popeye watches. The name Temple is an ironic comment on the sacred purity of Southern womanhood. Popeye violates the sanctuary of her body, but the reader has already seen that Temple is not so pure in mind, and we soon wonder if she was only waiting for an initiation to transform the thoughts into deeds. Temple begins to desire Red of her own accord and starts meeting him secretly. Is Temple’s nymphomania the result of her natural inclinations finally being given free reign, or a captive’s attempt to survive in the environment of her captors? Having discovered Temple’s attraction, Popeye obliquely warns Temple that Red is in danger. When she doesn’t stop seeing Red, Popeye shoots him. Red’s wake is one of the comic scenes Faulkner offers to relieve the general depravity and despair of Sanctuary. The wake is held at a roadhouse casino with the body laid out on the craps table. When a woman demands the corpse be removed so she can play, a fight

erupts and the table is overturned. The body, of course, tumbles from the casket to the floor, and the mortician’s wax plug pops out of the bullet hole in Red’s skull. The mourners quickly end their disagreement and restore the body. Shortly after Temple and Popeye’s departure from the Old Frenchman place, Lee Goodwin has been arrested for the murder of Tommy, and Ruby solicits Horace Benbow to defend him. Although Goodwin is a bootlegger and Ruby is his moll, compared to the novel’s other characters they are basically good people. They are the only characters who feel genuine love, each being concerned primarily about the other’s future throughout the trial. Horace’s sister, Narcissa, fails to see their basic morality. Because she doesn’t want her brother to tarnish his career or the family’s name by taking on such lowlife clientele, she rallies the “good” women of Jefferson to turn Ruby out from the hotel and undermines Horace’s case. The situation appears hopeless until, with the help of Senator Clarence Snopes, a frequent visitor of the brothel, Horace finds Temple. She tells him of her rape at the hands of Popeye and subsequent kidnapping, and Horace persuades her to testify on Lee Goodwin’s behalf. During her testimony, the bloody corncob is presented as evidence, shocking all in attendance. Temple, however, inexplicably perjures herself, accusing Lee of both the rape and murder and sealing his fate. Unwilling to wait for his sentence to be carried out, an angry mob takes Lee from the courthouse and lynches him in the street. Horrified, Horace Benbow looks on but is unable to act. Throughout the book, Horace has been portrayed as an effete intellectual and idealist, and part of the evil he discovers through the trial is his own moral torpor. The novel ends with an overwhelming tone of despair. Horace returns to his wife, Belle, with whom he is morbidly unhappy. Popeye, accused of another murder he could not have possibly committed because he was murdering someone else at the same hour in another town, is executed. His trial parallels Lee Goodwin’s. In both cases, “the jury was out eight minutes” (306, 327) and, though both men are innocent of the crimes of which they have been convicted, they both seem resigned to their fates. Temple’s fate is less tragic

SAROYAN, WILLIAM 1139

but still pessimistic. Trying to help her forget her terrible ordeal, her father, the judge, takes her to Europe, where she sits yawning in the Luxembourg Gardens in the “season of rain and death” (333). Nature, which was present but failed to sympathize throughout Temple’s nightmare at the Old Frenchman place, now seems to offer the appropriate emotional response that Temple is unable to feel.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Faulkner, William. Sanctuary. 1931. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Werlock, Abby H. P. “Victims Unvanquished: Temple Drake and the Women in William Faulkner’s Novels.” In Women and Violence in Literature, edited by Kathy Acker, 3–49. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989. Betina Entzminger

SAROYAN, WILLIAM (1908–1981)

William Saroyan wrote more than 40 books during his lifetime. He won awards for his work in three genres, and gained fame for his novel The HUMAN COMEDY (1943) and for a series of autobiographical novels centering on the role of the father. In the middle of the Great Depression, Saroyan wrote with optimism and humor about the American Dream. Despite his acknowledgment of their human weaknesses, Saroyan’s belief in ordinary people and in immigrants trying to make a living in unfamiliar and often incomprehensible environments is pronounced. Critics repeatedly use words like charm, simplicity, honesty, clarity, and spontaneity to describe his fiction. When interviewer Garig Basmadjian asked Saroyan about his love of humanity, Saroyan said that readers should not be “deceived” by the warmheartedness: He was aware, he said, of the baser side of human nature, but “I am not going to become estranged from the human race. This is my family, these lunatics, and I love them” (Basmadjian, 133). “I will not cry. I will not moan and groan about the hideous predicament of man, the impossible hell of man’s soul, the imprisonment of man’s destiny” (Basmadjian, 136).

William Saroyan was born on August 31, 1908, in Fresno, California, to Armenak Saroyan, a Presbyterian preacher and writer, and Takoohi Saroyan, both immigrants from Armenia who escaped the Turkish massacres of Armenians that began in 1896. Because his father died when Saroyan was six, he and his brothers and sisters were placed in an orphanage until his mother, who found work in a cannery, was able to reunite the family. Saroyan left school at age 15, served in the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, married (1943) Carol Marcus, divorced (1949), remarried her (1951), and divorced again in 1951. After earning his reputation as a perceptive short story writer, he published his first novel. The Human Comedy depicts 14-year-old Homer Macauley of Ithaca, California, his widowed mother, his sister, and two brothers, one of whom, Marcus, is serving overseas during World War II. He called this novel his “most affirmative piece of writing” (Basmadjian). Here Saroyan emphasizes the strength of love, particularly in the face of alcoholism and the finality of death. In the same year, MGM bought the novel and adapted it as a feature-length film with a screenplay by Saroyan—who won an Academy Award—and starring Mickey Rooney as Homer. In 1946, Saroyan wrote The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, an antiwar novel. Rock Wagram (1951) was Saroyan’s favorite of his “large novels” (Basmadjian, 156). Tracy’s Tiger (1951) tells the obsessive tale of a man who longs for the past; it was Saroyan’s favorite of his short novels (Basmadjian, 156). The Laughing Matter (1953) was, Saroyan said later, too grim a novel; “it doesn’t have any laughter” (Basmadjian, 157). Saroyan impressed Beat writers William S. BURROUGHS and Jack KEROUAC with his depiction of marginalized people who find alternative ways to be happy and hopeful. Other novels include Mama I Love You (1956), Papa You’re Crazy (1957), Boys and Girls Together (1963), and One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964). Saroyan also wrote the 1951 song “Come On-A My House,” made into a hit by singer Rosemary Clooney. William Saroyan died of cancer in 1981 in Fresno; after his cremation, half his ashes were interred in Fresno and the other half near Yerevan, Armenia. Most of his manuscripts are housed at the John M. Olin Library at Cornell University; a sizable collection of

1140 SARTON, MAY

letters is at the University of California Research Library, Los Angeles. In 2002 the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing was established by Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation.

edited by Leo Hamalian, 132–157. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987. Whitmore, John. William Saroyan: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994.

NOVELS

Books and Writers. “William Saroyan.” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/saroyan.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Kalinian Saroyan Homepage. “Remembering William Saroyan.” Available online. URL: http://www.kalinian-saroyan.com. Accessed September 25, 2005. William Saroyan. Cilicia.com. Available online. URL: http:// www.cilicia.com/armo22_william_saroyan.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

The Adventures of Wesley Jackson. New York: Harcourt, 1946. Boys and Girls Together. New York: Harcourt, 1963. Reprint, New York: Barricade, 1995. The Human Comedy. New York: Harcourt, 1943. Revised edition, 1966. The Laughing Matter. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Mama I Love You. Boston and Toronto: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1956; New York: Dell, 1986. One Day in the Afternoon of the World. New York: Harcourt, 1964. Papa You’re Crazy. Boston and Toronto: Atlantic–Little, Brown, 1957. Rock Wagram. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. Tracy’s Tiger. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. Revised edition, New York: Ballantine, 1967. The Twin Adventures: The Adventures of William Saroyan, A Diary; The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, A Novel. New York: Harcourt, 1950.

SOURCES Balakian, Nona. The World of William Saroyan: A Literary Interpretation. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Calonne, David Stephen. William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Floan, Howard. William Saroyan. Boston: Twayne, 1966. Gifford, Barry, and Lawrence Lee. Saroyan: A Biography. New York: Harper, 1984. Keyishian, Harry. Critical Essays on William Saroyan. Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1995. Lee, Lawrence, and Barry Gifford. Saroyan: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Leggett, John (Ward). A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan. New York: Knopf, 2002. Saroyan, Aram. William Saroyan. New York: Harcourt, 1983. ———. Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan. New York: Harcourt, 1983. Saroyan, William. Not Dying. New York: Barricade Books, 1997. ———, and Garig Basmadjian. “Candid Conversation.” In William Saroyan: The Man and the Writer Remembered,

OTHER

SARTON, MAY (ELEANOR MARIE SARTON) (1912–1995) May Sarton thought of herself primarily as a poet, yet she wrote nearly 50 books, 19 of them novels. (Some were written for younger readers.) She is most well known for the groundbreaking Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), the novel in which Sarton addressed the complex interplay of artistry and lesbianism in an era when homosexuality was largely unnoted and suspect. Her major subjects include solitary women, women’s relationships with family and lovers, and the reality and art of aging. Although after the 1930s, when she had been part of the circle that included Virginia Woolf, Julius Huxley, and Conrad Aiken, Sarton’s poetry and fiction passed from favor, her autobiographical publications from the 1960s to the 1980s brought her renewed popular and critical attention. May Sarton was born Eleanor Marie Sarton on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium, to George Alfred Leon, a science historian, and Eleanor Mabel Elwes Leon, an artist and designer. In autumn 1914, her family left Belgium for England and, in 1916, they immigrated to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rather than attend college, she chose to become a writer, publishing her first novel, The Single Hound, a story of two poets, in 1938. It was well received, as were The Bridge of Years (1946), about a Belgian family resisting fascism, and Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), about an American professor who commits suicide during the McCarthy era. Mrs. Stevens

SAVE ME THE WALTZ 1141

Hears Mermaids Singing (1965) is a fictionalized account of Sarton’s long-term relationship with her partner, known only as Judy. Anger (1982) focuses on the marriage of a passionate woman to an impersonal, cold man, and The Magnificent Spinster (1985) treats the lifelong relationship between two women who must cope with the prejudices of their community. Sarton purchased an old farmhouse in New Hampshire and wrote a book, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), about the importance of her home and its stability to her ability to write. The recipient of numerous awards and honorary doctorates, May Sarton died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995. Before her death, film rights to four of her novels—A Reckoning, Mrs. Stevens Hears Mermaids Singing, Kinds of Love, and AS WE ARE NOW—were optioned. There is an increasing awareness of her contributions to 20thcentury American literature.

NOVELS Anger. New York: Norton, 1982. As We Are Now. New York: Norton, 1973. The Birth of a Grandfather. New York: Rinehart, 1957. The Bridge of Years. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946. Crucial Conversations. New York: Norton, 1975. The Education of Harriet Hatfield. New York: Norton, 1989. Faithful Are the Wounds. New York: Rinehart, 1955. Joanna and Ulysses. New York: Norton, 1963. Kinds of Love. New York: Norton, 1970. The Magnificent Spinster. New York: Norton, 1985. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965. A Reckoning. New York: Norton, 1978. Shadow of a Man. New York: Rinehart, 1950. A Shower of Summer Days. New York & Toronto: Rinehart, 1952. The Single Hound. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938. The Small Room. New York: Norton, 1961.

SOURCES Blotner, Joseph. The Modern American Political Novel: 1900–1960. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Blouin, Lenora. May Sarton: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1968. Evans, Elizabeth. May Sarton Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1989.

Hunting, Constance, ed. May Sarton: Woman and Poet. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1982. Peters, Margot. May Sarton: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1997. Rule, Jane. Lesbian Images. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Sherman, Susan, ed. May Sarton: Selected Letters. 2 volumes. 1916–1954. New York: Norton, 1997; 1955–1995. New York: Norton, 2002. Silbey, Agnes. May Sarton. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Swartzlander, Susan, and Marilyn Mumford, eds. That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

OTHER Blouin, Lenora P. “May Sarton: A Poet’s Life.” Available online. URL: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sarton/ blouin-biography.html. Accessed January 12, 2006.

SAVE ME THE WALTZ ZELDA FITZGERALD (1932) Zelda FITZGERALD named her novel Save Me the Waltz from a title found in a Victor record catalog, according to Nancy Milford, in her biography of the author and famous wife of F. Scott FITZGERALD, Zelda: A Biography. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote her novel in 1932, during a span of “no more than three months,” while receiving psychiatric care at John Hopkins University Hospital. The writing served as part of her treatment. Fitzgerald sent a manuscript of the project to her husband’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, at Scribner, before allowing her husband to read her work—an act that created much suspicion and resentment. At the time, Scott Fitzgerald had been long at work on his novel Tender Is the Night, which addressed his wife’s mental instability and drew upon the couple’s experiences in Switzerland, where Zelda visited Prangins Hospital for care, from 1930–31. Though Zelda Fitzgerald had heard 40,000 words of her husband’s novel, and his writing clearly influenced her work, the author, in her own right, reclaimed her life through the writing of the novel, which was a therapeutic act. Distinguishing her literary work from that of her husband, in Save Me the Waltz, Zelda presents her own story, or herstory, of her poignant struggle in facing the challenges of having to grow up very quickly. The novel itself focuses on the appropriately named heroine Alabama and her entrance into womanhood as

1142 SAVE ME THE WALTZ

marked by her relationship with the artist David Knight, a lieutenant stationed in the South during the Great War. The plot of the novel largely follows the chronology of Zelda’s relationship with Scott, whom she first met when he was a soldier stationed near Montgomery, Alabama, her hometown. Alabama leaves with Knight to New York, where they marry. David meets with immediate success and the couple welcomes the birth of their daughter, Bonnie. The story shifts to the French Riviera, where Alabama struggles with the mundane aspects of marriage—keeping track of expenditures, managing the household affairs, and so on—which acutely chafe when she meets the French aviator Jacques Chevre-Feuille, with whom a flirtation escalates. After a confrontation and the removal of Jacques from their lives, the couple meets Gabrielle Gibbs at a party, who serves as a temptation for David. When David sees Gabrielle to her hotel, after a party, only to return the morning after, Alabama, frustrated and deeply saddened, tries to shrug off the situation until she revealingly screams: “I can’t stand this any longer. . . . I don’t want to sleep with the men or imitate the women, and I can’t stand it” (111). Citing David’s infatuation with Gabrielle, Alabama promises to become “as famous a dancer as there are blue veins over the white marble of Miss Gibbs” (112) and looks to dance as a means of coping with life. Milford emphasizes Alabama’s need for dance as an outlet, as a “defense against the collapse of her marriage” (227), with an ever-increasing fervor that causes her to spend less time with her family. Fighting opinions that she is too old to become a ballet dancer, Alabama studies dance diligently, countering those who question her motives; ultimately, she makes the decision not to return to America with her family, but instead chooses to go to Naples to perform a solo part in Faust, with the San Carlos Opera. Alabama meets with success during her time in Naples, separated from David and Bonnie, who remain in Switzerland. Two traumatic events then occur—the severing of the tendons of Alabama’s foot and the death of Alabama’s father, Judge Beggs—that dramatically change the heroine’s life. Alabama and her family return to America for the funeral of her father. By the end of the novel, the reader observes how much Alabama has had to

change since she first met David, which led to Alabama’s removal from the care of her father. Now, with her father dead, Alabama is left with many unanswered questions and the task of having to redefine herself without his presence in her life anymore. Disoriented, Alabama acknowledges the difficulty in trying to maintain a sense of self and of values now that her father’s strong influence has been removed. Milford points out that the characterization of Judge Beggs is the “heart of the novel,” as the novel both begins and ends with his appearance (228). Certainly, given Scott Fitzgerald’s version of Zelda’s attachment to her father in Tender Is the Night, in which Scott imaginatively changes Zelda’s mental illness into that of his character Nicole Diver, whose psychological troubles result from the consummation of an incestuous relationship with her father, the reader notes that Judge Sayre figured largely in the minds of both the Fitzgeralds. Interestingly, Milford notes: “It was not until the death of Judge Sayre that Zelda began to form her book and it would seem that his death provided a kind of psychological freeing for her that stimulated her into reviewing her life up until his death” (228). Clearly, the novel is a coming-of-age story that maps out Alabama Beggs’s growth and development in the absence of her father—first through her marriage and leaving home and, second, with her father’s death, which becomes a permanent separation—and investigates her artistic maturity. Zelda Fitzgerald wrote her novel with a rhythm and an interesting use of language that marked her writing as very different from that of her husband, as the work of an artist. Fitzgerald’s artistic expression in performance, such as in ballet, as well as in her painting, remarkably shown by her design of the cover art used on the novel’s dust jacket, reveal the author’s importance as an artist in her own right, apart from her husband’s achievement. The vivid imagery and curious turn of phrase the reader meets when reading the pages of the novel give insight into a brilliant, if troubled mind. Certainly, Save Me the Waltz provides a fascinating examination of a young woman growing up in the 1920s, refreshingly written by an author whose husband’s celebrity overshadowed her own ability and production.

SCARLET LETTER, THE 1143

SOURCES Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald. Introduction by Mary Gordon. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. Milford, Nancy. Zelda: A Biography. New York: Perennial, 1970. Taylor, Kendall. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, a Marriage. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001. Sharon Kehl Califano

SCARLET LETTER, THE

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1850) The Scarlet Letter is a historical novel of Puritan New England in which the story of the central character, Hester Prynne, is introduced with images of prison. At the beginning of the novel, we encounter a jail door with decorative red ironwork that anticipates the flourishes of Hester Prynne’s scarlet badge. This theme of entrapment is prevalent throughout the novel. Later, Hester’s husband Chillingworth observes that their marriage was one of youth and decay, an “unnatural relation,” but Hester’s unnatural relation with decay extends beyond her marriage: She is painfully aware that she can no longer see or draw sustenance from her future. All tomorrows will be the “very same . . . with the same burden,” she thinks at the beginning of the novel. Hester is trapped by her own past. The narrative itself begins after the major events in Hester’s life have already occurred. By the time we meet Hester, she has already been married to the old man Roger Chillingworth, had an affair with the young minister Arthur Dimmesdale, and given birth to Dimmesdale’s daughter, Pearl, whose visible presence constitutes a perpetual reminder of Hester’s “sin,” another link in the chain that imprisons Hester in the past. Initially Hester’s memory of her early life provides a blessed escape from the present moment, as she stands upon the scaffold in the novel’s opening, but her compulsive remembering eventually torments her. Later, in an important scene with Dimmesdale in the woods, she feels for a brief moment that she is free from history. But the “the irrevocable past” returns. Like the river that runs through the woods, choked by branches and leaves, the onward movement of time for Hester is stopped by the heavy presence of the past,

which blocks its free flow. The symbolism of the tree on which Hester and her past lover Dimmesdale sit in the woods is unmistakable: It was uprooted by a blast long ago and is covered in moss. They, ruined by the blast of their sin and Hester’s punishment, have “earth’s heaviest burden on them,” “earth” here meaning both the world and soil. Hester’s attempt to leave the past behind has come too late. She chose not to make a new life in another town or country, instead remaining to haunt the place where, as the narrator explains, a “great and marked event has given color to [her] lifetime.” The words “marked” and color” remind us of the scarlet letter: Hester’s marked color has ironically made her a colorless ghost among the living. Some writers mourn the disconnect between the past and the present, the separation of history from contemporary culture, but Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, in contrast, was hostile to the idea of bringing the past into the present. His introduction to the novel is an essay called “The Custom-House” and seems initially to be an entrance to the past: “Custom” means “habit” as well as “trade,” and thus the habits of another age might be accessible through the Custom-House doors. The essay’s more likely function, however, is as a bridge between fiction and autobiography or romance and reality, for Hawthorne did not believe in fluid, safe movement between past and present. The narrator of “The Custom-House” insists that human nature does not “flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations in the same worn-out soil,” and observes that the men in the Custom-House “ought to have given place to younger men” who wouldn’t tell the “several thousandth repetition of old sea-stories.” He even wishes he had written about the present instead of the past: “leaf after leaf” in the real world was presenting itself to him, and he senses that if he could write down “the reality of the flitting hour” then the “letters would turn to gold upon the page.” These gold letters of the present hour contrast with the scarlet letter presented in the novel proper, which represents the unhealthy, frozen past. The leaves turn gold when Hester and Dimmesdale meet in the wood and Hester, momentarily believing herself to be free of the past, throws away the scarlet letter.

1144 SEAL WIFE, THE

Hester’s punishment, however, is permanent, and she cannot abandon for more than a few moments the scarlet letter that ties her to her past with threads as strong as chains. The scarlet letter not only imposes the past on the present but also fails even to represent the past accurately. In “The Custom House,” the narrator describes his discovery of the embroidered red badge in later years: “My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside,” he remembers. “Certainly there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind.” Thus distracted, he ignores the papers that would solve this mystery: “In the absorbing contemplation of the scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small roll of dingy paper, around which it had been twisted.” Here is a neglected but legible text, a hidden usable past. The scarlet letter dominates everything. At another point in the novel, Hester sees herself in a mirror, and her image is distorted, with the scarlet badge disproportionately huge upon her breast. Similarly, the opening of the narrative proper describes the scarlet letter immediately. Distracted, the gaze of the reader moves away from the baby, which is the real evidence of sin but has been mentioned only briefly. And with eyes glued to the scarlet letter, the crowd in the opening scene misses the glance that passes between Hester and Dimmesdale and also Dimmesdale’s gesture when Hester refuses to name the baby’s father: Both glance and gesture would have revealed the secret behind the scarlet letter, but the crowd misses them, just as the narrator nearly misses the small roll of dingy paper in the Custom-House. The scarlet letter is thus also a red herring. Hawthorne rejects the kind of forcible remembering caused by the scarlet letter’s distracting presence. Instead he imagines in “The Custom-House” a place where the two worlds of past and present might come together as “somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” He adds, “Ghosts may enter here, without affrighting us.” Ghosts become fairies, and the past and present coexist harmoniously in a place where reality and fiction merge. The

novel’s conclusion, then, offers a new style of history, composed of many perspectives: “more than one account,” “various explanations,” “the reader may choose among these theories.” As readers we can write our own histories, breaking with determinism and the providential style of history that was popular in Hawthorne’s day. We have been warned about the dangers of lingering too long in any one place. Like the fatherless Pearl, Hester’s child, who finally leaves Massachusetts to live elsewhere, we put down roots in fresh soil. Although Hester is doomed to remain imprisoned in her past, Hawthorne suggests that we can learn from her lesson and avoid her Puritan fate.

SOURCES Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of the Scarlet Letter. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Brodhead, Richard. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Budick, Emily. Engendering the Romance: Women Writers and the Hawthorne Tradition, 1850–1990. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1850. James, Henry. Hawthorne. London: MacMillan, 1879. Mathiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941. Mizruchi, Susan. The Power of Historical Knowledge: Narrating the Past in Hawthorne, James, and Dreiser. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Zoe Trodd

SEAL WIFE, THE KATHRYN HARRISON (2002) With another fictional exploration of female sexuality and the power and pain it weaves, The Seal Wife, Kathryn HARRISON’s fifth novel, brings forth characters from another time, place, and culture while focusing on the psychological and sexual issues of solitude and obsession still palpable today. With prose as pure as the ice-covered Alaskan territory she re-creates, Harrison opens the door for not only her written work but also the controversy and resonance that often accompanies it. While Harrison’s writing has consisted primarily of novels, among them Thicker Than Water, Exposure, Poison, and The Binding Chair or, a Visit from the Foot Eman-

SEAL WIFE, THE 1145

cipation Society, it is her 1997 memoir The Kiss that most people remember and judge her worth as a writer and, unfairly, a person. In The Kiss Harrison recounts the incestuous affair she and her father briefly conducted during her young adulthood. While some critics, most notably other literary writers, hailed The Kiss as an exceptional work of literary art, others believed Harrison had passed the portal of decency by revealing an area of her life that not didn’t just touch the incest taboo but gratuitously stroked it. Yet those same critics and readers (and even nonreaders) who were repelled by The Kiss missed the memoir’s central focus: that of isolation, loneliness, misused power and sexuality, and the means a person without love and affection will go to attain them. What Harrison addressed in The Kiss is nothing new to readers of her work. She gracefully explores these themes as well in The Seal Wife. Her past two fictional works have used the realm of historical fiction, respectively setting those stories in Europe and China, but The Seal Wife brings the reader to a piece of America before it became part of America. In 1915, Bigelow, a 26-year-old observer from the U.S. Weather Bureau, is stationed in Anchorage, Alaska. There he is assigned to construct an observatory within a land as cold and harsh as his interaction with the few women who reside there. Men outnumber the women, and not only is the Arctic environment cold but daylight and night are realms of normalcy that do not exist outside the continental United States. With sleep disruption, lack of human interaction and food, and the region’s constant cold, Bigelow spends his time not only on the task at hand but within his own thoughts. The unbearable isolation leads Bigelow and the reader to learn that while this environment and land are new to him, loneliness and lack of love are not. From its very start, silence remains one of The Seal Wife’s dominant themes and is a way for the people in Bigelow’s world to hold the most power over him. The novel opens with Bigelow and the Aleut woman, the only name Harrison gives her, revealing the seclusion Bigelow must endure and the infatuation he feels throughout the novel toward this silent, unnamed female. No words are spoken, thoughts shared, or past events revealed, nothing to seal their consummation. But Bigelow wants her and even begs her “ ‘Promise me

there’s no one else’ ” (7). Still, she doesn’t answer. By demonstrating Bigelow’s continual need to talk and share himself with the Aleut woman, Harrison shows that the power roles have shifted, leaving it resting with this woman who, with her silence, does not reflect the ways some Americans think are the means to gain and sustain power: advanced education, family background, and money. By remaining mute, the Aleut woman brings Bigelow to near madness and, even though she disappears for several pages into the novel, remains its dominant character. Even in Bigelow’s past, he lived without a sense of substantial closeness to those around him. The passing of his father when Bigelow was a child failed to produce tears. Harrison foreshadows the silence that will plague Bigelow with a brief scene recalling his father’s death: “Say good-bye,” his mother told him, and he followed her into the bedroom. The shades were drawn, but the sun found its way through the cracks. “Why is that there?” he asked, pointing to the white cloth tied under his father’s jaw and over the top of his head. “To keep his mouth from . . .” She didn’t finish. “From what?” he asked. “Opening.” (62) Bigelow futilely tries to achieve control. Not only does he encounter silence with the Aleut woman but also the shopkeeper’s daughter Miriam. Silence consistently follows and nearly destroys him. There is no guarantee of fulfillment toward his predictions and wants. As much as the silence frustrates him, it is what truly excites him. Though the prostitute he procures talks, he gags her. Maria Russo in her New York Times book review of The Seal Wife points out that “Harrison wants to show silence as a symbol of oppression that can be twisted into a sources of power,” also noting “[a]s the deprivations and forbidding terrain of the Fair North take their toll, the novel’s awareness of the natural world gives it a sturdier, more philosophical underpinning, a more considered, less sensationalistic stance toward the inevitability of human suffering” (Russo, 12).

1146 SEA-WOLF, THE

The Aleut woman eventually returns and Bigelow wonders “[h]ow [he] could have imagined her as a bird,” finally recognizing that she mirrors the seal his presence frightens: “the animal hurries toward the water, throwing her head out before her, her sleek body following” (210). The novel ends on the start of summer solstice, with the Aleut woman and Bigelow traveling a hill and Bigelow contemplating how the images of their relationship form him and her, ultimately offering closure to his ravaged emotions and life. Russo questions why Harrison chooses to end her novel without offering concrete answers, yet in the same paragraph she offers an answer. Not only in The Seal Wife but in all her work, Harrison shows that love’s nature remains unknown. Why people choose the paths they do to attain it cannot be answered objectively.

SOURCES Harrison, Kathryn. The Seal Wife. 2002. Reprint, New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003. Russo, Maria. “Which Way the Wind Blows.” Review of The Seal Wife, New York Times, 5 May 2002, late ed., sec. 7, p. 12. Laura Durnell

SEA-WOLF, THE JACK LONDON (1904)

Published only a year after The CALL OF THE WILD, The SeaWolf became Jack LONDON’s second best-selling novel. While the novel exhibits the fiercely naturalistic tendencies of his earlier fiction, it primarily represents the ongoing conflict between materialism and idealism in London’s own philosophy. He personifies this philosophical conflict in his protagonist, Humphrey Van Weyden, an effete idealist who is impressed onto a pelagic sealing voyage and must fend for himself and adapt to the ship’s brutal, masculine environment. Throughout the novel, Van Weyden clashes with the novel’s antagonist, Wolf Larsen, a tyrannical sea captain who repeatedly asserts his materialist philosophy in his conversations with Van Weyden and in the cruel treatment of his crew. Larsen, one of London’s most enduring individualists, is a man of unparalleled physical strength and beauty, whose mental powers are no less prodigious, and like his literary predecessors before him, characters such as Milton’s Satan and Melville’s Captain Ahab, his innate will to overcome any chal-

lenge to his authority only augments his rebellious nature and preserves his limitless pride. In contrast to many of his other rugged and selfsufficient narrators, London chooses the prestigious literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden to narrate the novel. Van Weyden opens his tale onboard the ferry steamer Martinez, where he must soon jump overboard into the frigid water as the steamer sinks off the coast after being rammed by another vessel. Unable to help the women to safety, he is powerless to save even his own life, as the current takes him out to sea. His ineptitude, here at the beginning of the novel, is an ideal counterpoint to his physical and philosophical transformation at the end, where he has survived the onslaughts of Wolf Larsen and nature, and stands on the decks of the once shipwrecked Ghost, now refitted with masts raised almost single-handedly by him, a captain on the same ocean where he was once only a passenger. But all this is to come, for Van Weyden must first be pulled from the ocean, literally ripped, as he tells us, from “the suffocating blankness and darkness” of the sea (9). Rescued from certain death, Van Weyden is now reborn on the Ghost, a sealing schooner bound for the northern Pacific. Christened “Hump” by his captain and new father, Wolf Larsen, he first witnesses a funeral at sea after being impressed into the service as cabin boy. And through that funeral’s lack of ceremony and the subsequent brutality of life aboard the Ghost, he begins to see that death no longer holds the same signification it once did, just as life has now “become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of ooze and slime” (31). No matter how primitive the crew’s behavior on the ship seems to Van Weyden throughout his voyage, London never lets us forget that the civilizing forces that label the conduct on the ship “brutal” and “primitive” are the same forces that make such conduct possible. Ironically, Wolf Larsen’s bloodthirsty treatment of his crew and the seal-hunter’s violence during the hunt are products of an economic system that foster the desire for sealskins to “adorn the fair shoulders of the women of the cities” (140). The violence of the first half of the novel, then, aptly frames a portrait of those same civilizing forces that have had such debilitating effects on Van Weyden. Interestingly enough, London

SEA-WOLF, THE 1147

reveals, whether the turn-of-the-century reader realized it or not, that bloodshed upon the ocean is always a staple ingredient of the finery worn in the streets. Through his association with Wolf Larsen, Van Weyden discovers this fact and more about the world of his former life. During one of their early conversations, Larsen fleshes out for Van Weyden his radical materialism. Ultimately, life for Larsen represents the ongoing struggle between the weak and the strong, where “the big eat the little that they may continue to move, the strong eat the weak that they may retain their strength. The lucky eat the most and move the longest, that is all. . . . Might is right, and that is all there is to it. Weakness is wrong” (46, 72). In light of the new environment Van Weyden finds himself in, this claim proves quite persuasive, but throughout the novel, he attempts to maintain his optimism and preserve his faith in something more than the material, something ineffable that “transcend[s] utterance” (45). Thus begins their ongoing conflict of ideas, with the actions of the crew, and even those of Van Weyden himself, providing the evidence for Larsen to prove his materialist philosophy. The ship, then, a microcosm for all of life, becomes the perfect vehicle for Larsen to show Van Weyden the inherent weakness of his idealistic belief in conventional morality and the existence of the soul. In analyzing his own behavior on the ship, Van Weyden begins to observe that Larsen’s ideas have begun to alter his point of view. Just as Van Weyden begins to understand the latent strength within him, he also begins to note the destructive nature of Larsen’s philosophy. He continually observes how Larsen’s behavior destroys any sense of comradeship among the crew, which inevitably results in the mutiny that Larsen barely escapes with his life. Likewise, his mysterious headaches tell of some deep-seated psychological conflict within him. Unlike Larsen, Van Weyden possesses the ability to change, and throughout his narration he marvels at his growing physical strength and capacity to endure. Despite his initial physical and philosophical attraction to Larsen, Van Weyden clings to his inherent faith in the soul and, more important, his belief in the power of comradeship, as we witness when Maud Brewster

enters the scene. But his true strength rests in his ability to merge all that he has learned from Larsen with the stronger elements of his former philosophy. And it is this fact alone that baffles and thwarts Larsen throughout the second half of the novel. With the entrance of Maud Brewster, a successful poet, we witness the degree of Van Weyden’s transformation. Rescued mid-ocean, as well as mid-novel, Brewster is the physical as well as philosophical antithesis of Larsen, and just as Van Weyden was inexplicably drawn to Larsen’s physicality, he now begins to gravitate toward Brewster’s “kindred intellect and spirit” (193). Despite the pull of Brewster’s character on him, Van Weyden brings to their relationship the lessons learned from his experience on the Ghost. Larsen’s brute strength becomes the last line of defense for his philosophy, and he once again asserts his physical prowess when he attempts to rape Maud Brewster. In order to defend her, Van Weyden, for the first time in the novel, physically challenges Larsen and with that act successfully defends his growing love for her, a connection that he believes is both physical and spiritual. During the struggle, Larsen suffers from a headache that will eventually blind him, and Brewster preserves his life in spite of Van Weyden’s desire to take it. In the end, Van Weyden has sacrificed his physical body for Brewster, a sacrifice that represents the first physical victory in his philosophical conflict with Larsen. This act alone elicits the headache that blinds Larsen, which symbolically portrays his blindness to the strength of Van Weyden’s idealism throughout the novel. Soon after this incident, the lovers escape from the Ghost to their idyllic retreat on Endeavor Island, where they survive the elements through their symbiotic relationship. Bereft of his crew and slowly succumbing to his disease, Larsen is eventually shipwrecked on the island, where he must witness the strength of “the truest comradeship that may fall to man and woman” (327). As the couple restore the Ghost by themselves and eventually sail from the island to freedom, one cannot help but recognize what their connection to each other allows them to overcome, as Larsen, at one time the paragon of the physical, lays paralytic in his bunk unable to destroy the one connection that has outdone him.

1148 SEBOLD, ALICE

The enduring power of the novel rests in its ability to depict the philosophical dilemma London struggled with throughout his life. In a sense, Larsen’s alienation and suffering represents the despair that accompanied London’s creed of individualism, a creed that plays out in much of his fiction (Kazin, 115). In creating the dynamic conflict between Larsen and Van Weyden, perhaps he recognized that the individualism of his most enduring characters was not enough. At one time or another, we must all, London seems to suggest, forge a connection with others, gather a mate-comrade to our sides, and discover what we might accomplish together.

SOURCES Baskett, Sam S. “Sea Change in The Sea-Wolf,” American Literary Realism 24, no. 2 (1992): 5–22. Ellis, James. “A New Reading of The Sea-Wolf.” In Jack London: Essays in Criticism, edited by Ray Wilson Ownbey, 92–99. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1978. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. New York: Reynall & Hitchcock, 1942. Labor, Earle, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Jack London. Twayne’s United States Authors Ser., 230. New York: Twayne, 1994. London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. Edited by John Sutherland. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Mitchell, Lee Clark. “ ‘And Rescue Us from Ourselves’: Becoming Someone in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf,” American Literature 70, no. 2 (1998): 317–335. Robinson, Forrest G. “The Eyes Have It: An Essay on Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf,” American Literary Realism 18 (1985): 178–195. Watson, Charles N.J. The Novels of Jack London: a Reappraisal. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Timothy Adrian Lewis

SEBOLD, ALICE (1963– )

Alice Sebold, author of The LOVELY BONES (2002), won a Bram Stoker Award for the best first novel, and was nominated for the Horror Writers Association best novel in 2002. Perhaps this is because the novel is narrated by the spirit of a 14-year-old girl who has been raped and murdered and now tells her story from heaven. The New York Times reviewer Katherine Bouton seems more on target: Sebold, she says, “takes the stuff of neighborhood tragedy—the unexplained disappearance of a child, the

shattered family alone with its grief—and turns it into literature” (Bouton, 14). In either case, with nearly 3 million hardcover copies and 65 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, The Lovely Bones became the bestselling paperback novel of 2003 (The Bookseller). Alice Sebold was born in 1963 in California and was educated at Syracuse University, the University of Houston, and at the University of California at Irvine, where she earned her master of fine arts degree in 1998. Her first book, Lucky (1999), is a memoir that graphically describes her rape in 1981, during her first year of college. Because another young woman had been raped and murdered on the same spot, the police called Sebold “lucky.” The Lovely Bones, Sebold says, was partly written in tribute to the murdered woman (Levy, 36). Susie Salmon narrates the story of her rape and the details of her mother’s affair with a policeman, her desertion of the family, and her father’s obsession with finding the murderer. Susie’s teenage sister, Lindsay, through whom Susie lives vicariously, also becomes endangered in her attempt to punish the killer. In 2001, while enrolled in the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine, Sebold met and married Glen David Gold, author of Carter Beats the Devil. They live in Long Beach, California, where Sebold is working on a new novel.

NOVEL The Lovely Bones: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.

SOURCES Abbott, Charlotte. “How About Them Bones?” Publishers Weekly, 29 July 2002, pp. 22–24. Barta-Moran, Ellie. Review of Lucky, Booklist, July 1999, p. 1,903. Bouton, Katherine. “What Remains: A Debut Novel Chronicles the Aftermath of a Girl’s Abduction and Murder,” The New York Times Book Review, 14 July 2002, p. 14. Continelli, Louise. “Victims’ Advocate and Author Is Doomed to Live with the Nightmare of Being Raped,” Buffalo News, 15 August 1999, p. C-2. Crittenden, Yvonne. “Not So Lucky,” Toronto Sun [Toronto, Canada], October 23, 1999. Darby, Ann. “PW Talks with Alice Sebold,” Publishers Weekly, 17 June 2002, p. 41. Dunham, Janice. Review of Lucky, Library Journal, 15 June 1999, p. 92.

SEDGWICK, CATHARINE MARIA 1149

Dworkin, Andrea. “A Good Rape,” New Statesman, 30 June 2003, pp. 51–52. “Hollywood Break for Lynne’s Lovely Bones,” Sunday Herald [Glasgow, Scotland], 10 February 2002. p. 11. Kakutani, Michiko. “The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death,” New York Times, 18 June 2002, p. E-1. Levy, Lisa. “Newcomer of the Year: Alice Sebold,” Book, January–February 2003, pp. 36–37. Maryles, Daisy. “Lucky for Sebold,” Publishers Weekly, 30 September 2002, p. 18. McLellan, Dennis. “Memoir Frees Writer from Dark Days of Her Past,” Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1999, p. 2. Review of The Lovely Bones: A Novel, Kirkus Review, 1 May 2002, p. 608. Sebold, Alice. Lucky. New York: Scribner, 1999.

OTHER Baltasar, Michaela. “UCI MFA Graduate Says She Is Lucky.” New University. Available online. URL: http://newu.uci.edu/ archive/1999-2000/fall/991025/q-991025-lucky.htm. Accessed February 12, 2006. A Conversation with Aimee Bendor and Alice Sebold. Boldtype. Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.com. Accessed January 12, 2006. Cue, Ehzra. “Award-Winning UCI Author Discusses Works.” New University.” Available online. URL: http://www.newu. uci.edu/archive2000-2001/spring/010430/f-010430alice.htm. Accessed January 12, 2005.

SEDGWICK,

CATHARINE

MARIA

(1789–1867) Once considered the equal of James Fenimore COOPER, William Bryant, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Catharine Maria Sedgwick was the author of the best-selling historical romance HOPE LESLIE; OR, EARLY TIMES IN THE MASSACHUSETTS (1827) and five other novels for adults. The success of Hope Leslie, as well as that of Redwood (1824), Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times (1830), and The Linwoods; or, “Sixty Years Since” in America (1835) catapulted Sedgwick to early 19th-century literary stardom. Not until Harriet Beecher STOWE would the United States be home to such a popular author. In fact, she is credited with laying the groundwork for the sentimental tradition later made popular by Stowe, Maria Susana CUMMINS, and Susan WARNER. Although she dropped into obscurity during much of the 20th century, she has received renewed attention by feminist scholars and has been restored to her position as a significant founder of American literature.

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was born on December 28, 1789, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, of a cultured and politically influential family, and Theodore Sedgwick, who became a member of the Continental Congress and Speaker of the newly formed House of Representatives. Sedgwick was educated at private schools and in the wellstocked library of her parents’ home. Like her father and brothers, Sedgwick espoused what were then unorthodox religious views, joining the Unitarian Church and advocating Jacksonian democracy. One of the few women of her day who chose not to marry, Sedgwick began her distinguished literary career with A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, published anonymously in 1822. An instant best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, the novel explores the life of the orphaned Jane Elton, mistreated by her Calvinist aunt and saved by her marriage to Mr. Lloyd, a Quaker. With the success of Redwood, her second novel, Sedgwick joined Cooper and Irving as arbiters of the national literature. This realistic novel explores societal hypocrisy; the hero, Ellen Bruce, whose parentage is questionable but whose moral and intellectual strengths are not, eventually wins over the Southerner, Mr. Redwood, who is actually her father. She meets and marries Charles Westall, Redwood’s neighbor, who also doubts her. Hope Leslie, published under her own name and today considered her masterpiece, solidified Sedgwick’s reputation as an internationally acclaimed author. The novel centers on Hope Leslie and her sister Faith, who has been captured by Pequot Indians. Like Cooper in The LAST OF THE MOHICANS, Sedgwick introduces the subject of miscegenation; Hope must accept Faith’s love for, and marriage to, Oneco, brother of the princess Magawisca. Sedgwick also wrote didactic domestic novels like Home (1835). Although not an activist, she founded the Society for the Aid and Relief of Poor Women and organized the first free school in New York, supported women’s charities, and agreed with the abolitionists. In her final novel, MARRIED OR SINGLE? (1857), Sedgwick makes it clear that women need not depend on marriage for fulfillment. She died on July 31, 1867, in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

1150 SEIZE THE DAY

NOVELS Clarence; or, A Tale of Our Own Times. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1830. Home. Boston and Cambridge, Mass.: Monroe, 1835. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. 2 vols. New York: White, Gallagher & White, 1827. The Linwoods; or, “Sixty Years Since” in America. 2 vols. New York: Harper, 1835. Live and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated. New York: Harper, 1837. Married or Single? 2 vols, New York: Harper, 1857. Mary Hollis: An Original Tale. (Anonymous). New York: New York Unitarian Book Society, 1822. Means and Ends, or Self-Training. Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon & Webb, 1839. A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners. (Anonymous). New York: Bliss & White, 1822. The Poor Rich Man and The Rich Poor Man. New York: Harper, 1836. Redwood, A Tale. (Anonymous). 2 vols. New York: Bliss & White, 1824.

SOURCES Baym, Nina. Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–1870. Second edition. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Brooks, Gladys. Three Wise Virgins. New York: Dutton, 1957, pp. 53–63. Castiglia, Christopher. “In Praise of Extra-Vagrant Women: Hope Leslie and the Captivity Romance,” Legacy 6 (Fall 1989): 3–16. Dewey, Mary E., ed. Life and Letters of Miss Sedgwick. New York: Harper, 1871. Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Holly, Carol. “Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies of Affiliation: The Case of Catharine Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, 216–234. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Kalayjian, Patricia. “Revisioning America’s Literary Past: Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” NWSA Journal 8 (Fall 1996): 63–78. Kelley, Mary. Private Woman, Public Stage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. “Profile: Catharine Maria Sedgwick 1789–1867,” Legacy 6 (Fall 1989): 43–50.

Nelson, Dana. “Sympathy as Strategy in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie.” In The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Shirley Samuels, 191–202. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Singley, Carol J. “Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance.” In Desert, Garden, Margin, Range, edited by Eric Heyne, 110–122. New York: Twayne, 1992. Zagarell, Sandra A. “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney’s Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6 (Fall 1987): 225–245. Republished in Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers, 1797–1901, edited by Sharon M. Harris, 43–65. Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

SEIZE THE DAY SAUL BELLOW (1956)

BELnovel (or more properly novella) Seize the Day may, at first glance, appear rather a slight tale. It is an account of just one day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, 40-something and down on his luck, living at the Hotel Gloriana in New York’s Upper West Side. However, this is a day of reckoning for Wilhelm in which, at the instigation of his friend, the enigmatic Dr. Tamkin, he takes a gamble in speculating in the commodities market and ends up losing all. And this is just one more failure in a catalogue of failures in his life, all mercilessly exposed in the course of the narrative. We see, for instance, his wholly unsatisfying relationship with his father—a retired doctor whose material success he has never had any hope of emulating—as they meet and talk at the breakfast table in the hotel; and the even more acerbic relationship with his estranged wife Margaret, in a later phone conversation. On top of his family troubles, we learn that he has also signally failed at the business of making a career (having once pursued a futile dream of making it big in Hollywood). And as well as giving a picture of his unsympathetic environment, the novel also reveals, through Wilhelm’s interior monologues, the full extent of his confusions, frustrations, and disappointments. In his depiction of a character succumbing to all manner of inimical social and economic pressures, and further tormented by his own inadequacies and unfulfilled longings, Bellow is undoubtedly influenced

LOW’s

SEIZE THE DAY 1151

by his studies in anthropology and sociology, and is also, of course, engaging with a familiar theme of modern literature: the alienation of the individual, particularly in the modern urban jungle amid the wilderness of streets and the indifference of crowds. Wilhelm, although he entertains vague notions of starting anew elsewhere with his girlfriend Olive, is trapped in the city and indeed literally suffocating in its noxious air. Dealing with such concerns as these, Seize the Day may appear to be in the mold of Bellow’s first two novels with such self-consciously grim titles as Dangling Man and The Victim (and unlike, for example, the later 1950s novel Henderson the Rain King, with its colorful locations and exotic peregrinations of the hero). However, it is sharply distinguished by its extraordinary tone. It eschews the somber approach of the earlier works and although in the main it employs lucid naturalistic prose, it also retains some of the exuberance of Bellow’s third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), and adds further distinctive and memorable touches. These range from the grotesque (the physical descriptions of Tamkin and the decrepits Mr. Perls and Mr. Rappaport) and the surreal (the food served in the Hotel Gloriana, where salads appear like Mexican architecture) to the poetic (Wilhelm’s apocalyptic vision of his own state as “the ruins of life [. . .] chaos, and old night” [93]). All these elements combine to produce a brilliantly sustained and incisive commentary on Wilhelm’s condition. The use of such different modes is perhaps symptomatic of the essential duality that lies at the heart of the narrative, the pervasive sense of what Tamkin calls “the human tragedy-comedy” (72). The comic elements are rife in the portrayal of Wilhelm, in the way other people (especially his disapproving father) perceive him and also in the comic view he has of himself as a kind of lumbering hippopotamus. Moreover, his whole life appears to be an ongoing farce; he continually does things he would rather not do, or knows to be unwise— like getting involved with Tamkin’s moneymaking schemes. This aspect of his life is neatly encapsulated in the image of him as a golden haired, “impressively handsome” warrior-type figure who picks up a weapon only to strike himself with it (17). Thus the heroic strain here changes, abruptly, into pure slapstick.

But there is also another side. Wilhelm may be ungainly and awkward but he is still a charmer; he may be heedless, lacking in diligence and direction, but he is also good-natured, affectionate, and not altogether stupid. And his pleas for help and understanding go ignored by his father, his wife, and the world at large. This is part of what Tamkin identifies as the overriding tragedy of human life: the subjugation of the individual by others, by society, the stifling of the true soul by the “pretender” soul that acts in accordance with “the society mechanism” (70). It is, in fact, an intolerable situation for which there can perhaps be only one solution: the cessation of life itself. Wilhelm’s final release in a flood of tears takes place, we recall, in the presence of death (although some critics, in view of the associated water imagery, have chosen to interpret this as a symbolic rebirth). However, Tamkin’s sobering vision of human social life as tragic repression does not prevail for long: In fact, even as he’s speaking, he begins to look “untrustworthy” to Wilhelm (72), and the reader is similarly thrown into doubt as to the validity of Tamkin’s observations. This kind of sliding perspective is a recurrent feature of the text, producing a certain destabilizing effect that continually unsettles the reader. This is in spite of the fact that it does ostensibly appear to be quite a conventional type of novel, which has little in common with self-avowed modernist and “difficult” works (such as those of the early FAULKNER). It may be informed by a modernist sensibility that life is fragmentary, chaotic, and perhaps ultimately meaningless, so that in the absence of coherence, of a greater plan, of any long-term worthwhile purpose, one might as well take Tamkin’s advice and live for the moment, “seize the day.” However, although dealing with such a disorderly subject as modern urban life—and Wilhelm’s life in particular—it imposes a certain shape on that disorder by establishing a clear setting and time structure (the course of a single day) and tending inexorably toward a definite end (the close of that one day). Seize the Day is, on the face of it, a relatively straightforward novel. Taking a closer look, however, one is struck by its elusive nature. It resists easy definitions, refuses to pass judgments, and provides no answers. In the end, we are left with some intriguing questions. Is Wilhelm a pathetic Everyman for his times, or a

1152 SELBY, HUBERT, JR.

hapless individual inviting ridicule? Are people (especially those in the big, modern cities) a set of selfish, grabbing mercenary caricatures, or is there, as Wilhelm suspects in a moment of fellow-feeling, some nobler “Truth” (85) to be glimpsed about the human race? Is life, finally, a comedy or a tragedy? Perhaps the most one can say is that it is both, and the tightly woven intricacies of Bellow’s narrative would appear to suggest that it is inadvisable to try and extricate one from the other, to separate what is, in fact, inseparable.

SOURCES Atlas, James. Bellow: A Biography. New York: Random House, 2000. Bach, Gerhard, and Gloria L. Cronin, eds. Small Planets: Saul Bellow and the Art of Short Fiction. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2000. Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York: Viking, 1956. Reprint, New York: Viking Penguin, 1996. Kramer, Michael P., ed. New Essays on Seize the Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rovit Earl, ed. Saul Bellow: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1975. Gurdip Kaur Panesar

SELBY, HUBERT, JR. (1928–2004) Hubert Selby wrote Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a novel composed of linked stories that include, in graphic detail, a world of pimps, prostitutes, drag queens, rapists, drug dealers and users, and thugs. When the novel appeared, reviewers in the United States, while finding it shocking, also found more to praise than did the critics in England, where it was the subject of an obscenity trial, or Italy, where it was banned. He is frequently compared with James T. FARRELL, who wrote about Chicago, and reminds contemporary readers of Richard PRICE, who writes now about the slums of New Jersey. Reviewers of his work use adjectives like monstrous, grotesque, and horrific, but they also note that his work is powerful, realistic, and plausible. Selby wrote four additional novels, two screenplays, and numerous uncollected short stories. Hubert Selby, Jr., was born on July 23, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York, to Hubert Selby, an engineer and apartment building manager, and Adalin Layne Selby. After one year at Peter Stuyvesant High School, Selby

joined the Merchant Marine but was discharged with a severe case of tuberculosis. At various points in his life, Selby was addicted to alcohol and heroin, but he overcame both. He married three times: to Inez Taylor, from 1953 to 1960; to Judith Lumino in 1964; and Suzanne Shaw in 1969. Last Exit is most frequently described as an unrelenting and compelling journey into hell; the novel describes the mindless, vicious, lustful behavior of its violent, often drug-crazed streetgang characters. Frequently cited as a metaphor for the entire novel—and for contemporary society—is the gang rape of the character Tralala. The novel filmed by Bernd Eichinger and Uli Edel in 1988. Selby’s second novel, The Room (1971), received very good reviews: Every act of its unnamed protagonist is described in sickening detail. As he sits in a jail cell for an unspecified crime, seeking vengeance against the police and reform of the judicial system, he is torn between guilt and denial of his crimes. In The Demon (1976), Harry White, a business executive consumed by his sexuality and his obsessive urge to steal and kill, murders a Roman Catholic cardinal and then commits suicide. Often compared with Nelson ALGREN’s The MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, Selby’s Requiem for a Dream (1978) has four protagonists—Harry Goldfarb, his girlfriend Marion, Tyrone C. Love, and Harry’s mother Sara Goldfarb—three of whom are heroin addicts; Sara is addicted to television and diet pills. Drugs also have a permanent place in organized crime and in the police force. (It was made into a film by Darren Aronofsky and Selby in 1998.) In 1998, Selby published The Willow Tree about Moishe, a Nazi death camp survivor; Bobby, an African-American teenager; and his Chicana girlfriend, Maria. She is disfigured by a gang, and Bobby wreaks vengeance against individual gang members. Selby’s last novel, Waiting Period, appeared in 2002; the nameless protagonist is saved from suicide by the Internet and its lure of cybercrime. There he finds instructions on making the E. coli virus and bombs. Hubert Selby, Jr., who since the 1990s has increasingly been seen as one of the century’s most original writers, died on April 16, 2004, of chronic pulmonary disease.

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY 1153

NOVELS

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY JOHN EDGAR

The Demon. New York: Playboy Press, 1976; London: Marion Boyars, 1977. Last Exit to Brooklyn. New York: Grove, 1964; London: Calder & Boyars, 1966. Requiem for a Dream. New York: Playboy Press, 1978; London: Marion Boyars, 1979. The Room. New York: Grove, 1971; London: Calder & Boyars, 1972. Waiting Period. New York: Marion Boyars, 2002. The Willow Tree: A Novel. New York and London: Marion Boyars, 1998.

WIDEMAN (1983) The black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, form the backdrop for many of John Edgar WIDEMAN’s novels as well as much of the author’s life. Wideman was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in Pittsburgh, and then earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of philosophy degree at Oxford University. He has written numerous essays, short stories, and novels. Sent for You Yesterday, the third novel of the Homewood trilogy, won the P.E.N./Faulkner Award in 1984 as the best work of fiction published the previous year. Sent for You Yesterday opens with a nightmare about being trapped in a boxcar with other people who disappear if they scream. This dream sets the stage for a silence that speaks volumes throughout the rest of the novel. Only well into the story does the reader discover that Doot, who is not even born for much of the action, narrates the novel. Doot describes three generations of his family: the generation of his grandparents, Freeda and John French, and Albert Wilkes; the generation of his uncle, Carl, Lucy, and Brother Tate; and his own generation. Doot’s storytelling begins with the reappearance of Albert Wilkes, John’s good friend. Renowned for his ability to play the piano, Wilkes barely escapes the law after officers discover a murdered white man and make him the prime suspect. His return means that trouble has also returned to Cassina Way and the black neighborhood of Homewood, for Wilkes had never been cleared of the crime. When he stops by late one night to see John, Freeda becomes fearful and sends Carl to find his father the next morning. Freeda is not happy that John vows to help his longtime friend even if he faces sure annihilation. No sooner than Wilkes arrives in Homewood does an anonymous tip lead the police to Wilkes. He dies in a shootout. Doot then switches gears and sketches the adolescent and adult exploits of Carl French and Lucy and Brother Tate, Carl’s best friend, who is distinguished by his albinism and refusal to talk. Although Lucy and Brother Tate are not blood relatives, they act as brother and sister after Mrs. Tate takes him into her family. Doot chronicles the growing romance between Carl and Lucy and the friendship between Carl and

SOURCES Atchity, Kenneth John. “Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream: A Primer,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 399–405. Buckeye, Robert. “Some Preliminary Notes Towards a Study of Selby,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 374–375. Byrne, Jack. “Selby’s Yahoos: The Brooklyn Breed, A Dialogue of the Mind with Itself,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 349–353. Gehr, Richard. “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” American Film 15 (May 1990): 34–39, 48. Giles, James R. Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Kermode, Frank. “ ‘Obscenity’ and the ‘Public Interest,’ ” New American Review 3 (April 1968): 229–244. King, John. “Human Punk,” New Statesman 131, no. 4589 (May 27, 2002): 51–52. Metcalf, Paul. “Herman and Hubert: The Odd Couple,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 364–369. Mottram, Eric. “Free Like the Rest of Us: Violation and Despair in Hubert Selby’s Novels,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 353–363. O’Brien, John. “The Materials of Art in Hubert Selby,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 376–379. Stephen, Michael. “Hubert Selby, Jr.: The Poet of Prose Masters,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 389–397. Tanner, Tony. “On the Parapet.” In his City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–1970, 344–371. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Tindall, Kenneth. “The Fishing at Coney Island: Hubert Selby, Jr. and the Cult of Authenticity,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 370–373. Wertime, Richard A. “On the Question of Style in Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 1 (1981): 406–413. ———. “Psychic Vengeance in Last Exit to Brooklyn,” Literature and Psychology 24 (November 4, 1974): 153–166.

1154

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY

Brother Tate. He also tells the story of Brother Tate and Samantha, the mother of Junebug, his only child. Known for having a multitude of children, Samantha goes insane as a result of Junebug’s death, which may have been caused by her other children, frightened by the albinism he inherits from his father. Doot ends his recitation by focusing on Brother Tate, his reactions to the return of Albert Wilkes, his relationship with Samantha and the subsequent death of Junebug, and Carl’s return from the war and his mysterious death on the railroad tracks. The novel ends with Doot, Carl, and Lucy back in the Tate’s house reminiscing about Doot’s first dance to the song “Sent for You Yesterday.” In this novel, Wideman uses a black postmodernist voice, which creates fictions about the past that retain a loyalty to the black tradition. The fragmented plotline deviates from standard literary convention. Doot narrates events that take place before he is born, and the reader hears about events out of order. Doot’s voice is sometimes rendered in the first person, other times as the omniscient narrator. Because of the disjointed storyline, the stories that Doot tells become the organizing principle of the novel. Rather than cause and effect, it is Doot’s associations in his memory that drive the narrative. He sees the characters in relation to each other, so that no one person has his or her own story. All stories are bound up in the stories of others. Instead of experience and blood to link the generations, oral forms like stories and music act as a bridge between generations. Carl tells Doot stories, and Wideman notes in the novel that stories are timeless in the neighborhood of Homewood and Cassina Way. Unlike single stories that focus on one person, the stories surrounding Cassina Way make sense only when put in dialogue with the experiences of other individuals. For this reason, Lucy cannot tell Junebug’s story without telling Samantha’s. Likewise, Carl needs Lucy to affirm his own story. Doot’s stories reveal erosion from one generation to the next, an erosion that parallels the debilitating standard of life enjoyed by African Americans. John and Freeda are trailblazers with a purposeful belief in themselves that allows them to forge a life for their children. Albert Wilkes represents danger, but it is a

danger that Freeda attempts to divert from her family. In contrast, Carl fails to believe in himself and his ability to endure the life presented to him. Carl and Lucy fail to have children, and they engage in selfdestructive behavior. They all suffer the ravages of drug addiction. They miss opportunities to improve their lives. Carl has some artistic talent but allows racially motivated negative criticism to discourage him. Wideman suggests that they have a responsibility to endure for the sake of the next generation, just as the generation before them had done. Death is a motif that weaves its way throughout the novel, and its effect increases for members of successive generations who fail to cope with life’s struggle. Albert Wilkes, whose piano playing is marveled at by all, meets a violent end at the hands of the police. Samantha is driven insane when her other children quite possibly kill their brother, Junebug, because he was born an albino. But death can also been seen as a precursor to rebirth. While the death of Junebug affects Brother profoundly because it represents interracial violence, he transforms the experience by linking it to a version of the middle passage that connects two continents rather than epitomizes the violent separation of the diaspora. He sings to Junebug to save his own life. Both Brother’s reinterpretation of past events, and Doot’s stories, demonstrate the fluid nature of the past. As the narrator, Doot acts as a creator of a usable past employing material that has been handed down to him. This past is not a static entity. It changes based on the individual’s point of view. The multiple versions of past events problematize the past, bringing to our attention the ways in which memory depends on perspective. In this way, the past fails to be an objective accounting. Dreams also undermine reality and the notion of a stable past. Wideman suggests that at times, dreams are indistinguishable from reality. They allow others to experience the lives of other characters. Brother dreams he is Albert Wilkes. Samantha dreams she is Junebug. Both come away with a sense of the perspective of the person of whom they dream. Dreams can also be the manifestation of unconscious fears. Doot’s narrative begins not with his birth but with a dream that Brother has about himself after he has died.

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY 1155

In addition to stories, music plays a significant role in the novel. It figures into all the major events. Music may very well be necessary to tell the stories of Cassina Way. It functions as a metaphor for life in Homewood, for everyone has some kind of relationship with it. Music also functions as a unifying motif in the novel, for through music, characters make sense of their lives. They use music to grapple with events so traumatic that they cannot articulate their feelings. When Albert returns to town, Freeda turns to music to express her fear. In addition to the stories and music, Brother Tate also forms a connective thread throughout the novel. Brother provides a sustained interrogation of the concept of color, a concept that profoundly affects the lives of the black characters. Brother is an albino, an individual without pigment. This lack of color throws into chaos the preconceptions about the value of skin color. African Americans have historically been classified and have classified themselves by color. Color has served as a divisive entity as well as one that forms the basis of community, for segregation by color forged close-knit black communities. Brother is culturally black, but visually he is ambiguous. Doot often describes Brother as the shadow of Carl: always with him, yet not completely solid. Freeda describes Brother as a ghost. This description signifies a paradox: Because one can see it, a ghost implies presence and absence as a reminder of a departed individual. Brother’s ambiguity also translates into the ways that others see Brother. Wideman suggests that he acts as a mirror and that people project onto Brother their own notions of what he should be. Further underscoring this ambiguity is Brother’s refusal to speak after the death of his son. While he communicates using sounds that approximate music, Brother’s silence also speaks volumes because, like language, it too can be interpreted. Brother’s lack of color also imbues him with a degree of agency, the ability to act independently, for he is not constrained by expectations based on his color. He can be who he wants to be and becomes a multitalented person as a result of that kind of freedom. Before Albert Wilkes dies, he dreams he is Wilkes and receives his music, and apparently musical talent, after he dies.

While Brother evokes ambiguity around the idea of color, Freeda French, Doot’s mother, has attitudes toward color that are unmistakable. Wideman describes Freeda as color struck because she assigns negative characteristics to the black migrant workers based solely on their color. As a light-skinned woman, she may have internalized the color prejudice of whites that can be traced back to slavery. While she prefers her own light hue, she is taken aback by Brother’s lack of color because she organizes her world according to color. She cannot place him and is unnerved by the ambiguity he represents. The novel complicates the notion of family as well as color. Wideman challenges the notion of nuclear families by creating strong extended families in the form of the relationships among Carl, Brother Tate, and Lucy. None of them is related, but both Brother and Lucy and Carl and Brother function as siblings. Wideman raises the bonds between men to the level of family in the loyalty that John has for Albert Wilkes, even when his life is in imminent danger. The relationship between John French and Albert Wilkes parallels that of Carl and Brother, in that they are friends to the end. Wideman, moreover, revises the negative interpretation of single black women with large families. Rather than failing to care about the ramifications of having so many children, Samantha, a woman who attended some college, has children to strengthen the black race. He transforms the medical description of color and melanin into a story about the ancestral and noble purpose of black people. Choosing only the darkest men to father her children, she envisions her home as an ark that serves as a bulwark against the extinction of African Americans. Although a complex novel, Sent for You Yesterday represents transformative ways of constructing fictions of the past. It is perhaps the best postmodern fictional depiction of the meaning of the past, along with suggestions for creating an optimistic future.

SOURCES Bennion, John. “The Shape of Memory in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent For You Yesterday,” Black American Literature Forum 20, nos. 1&2 (1986): 143–150. Coleman, James W. “Sent for You Yesterday: The Intellectual Voice and the Movement toward Postmodernism.” In

1156 SEPARATE PEACE, A

Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1989, pp. 97–114. Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. “Brother Figures: The Rift and Riff in John E. Wideman’s Fiction,” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (1999): 615–622. Wideman, John Edgar. Sent for You Yesterday. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. Crystal Anderson

SEPARATE PEACE, A JOHN KNOWLES (1960) An immediate critical and financial success after its publication (in London, 1959, and New York, 1960) and winner of the William Faulkner Foundation Award, A Separate Peace continues to mesmerize readers as the timeless tale of a boy’s initiation into the hostile, often ugly, world of adult reality. This enduring bildungsroman has been compared to such classics as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mark TWAIN’s The ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, and J. D. SALINGER’s The CATCHER IN THE RYE. Through an artistic manipulation of character, setting, and both mythic and Christian symbol, John KNOWLES moves his novel’s young characters from the tranquil summer of adolescence at the Devon School into the violent winter of maturity and World War II. The loss of innocence experienced by Eugene (Gene) Forrester, the central character and narrator, so preoccupies him that he revisits the school 15 years after graduating to confront his memories of Phineas (“Finny”), the innocent friend who dies as an indirect result of Gene’s envy, love, and betrayal. A majority of critics agree that, by facing the darkness of the human heart, Gene increases his understanding of his own moral complexity and of the greater love and purity that Finny embodied. Readers need to be wary, however, of oversimplifying the battle of good and evil: As critic Paul Witherington notes, “The world of A Separate Peace is not the world of Hawthorne but the inverted, shifting mythos of Kafka” with its “ambiguous moral atmosphere” (796). The novel—expanded from “Phineas,” Knowles’s short story published in Cosmopolitan in May 1956— opens as Gene returns to New England and narrates the events that took place during the summer of 1942,

when he and Finny, his roommate and best friend, along with Brinker Hadley, Elwin “Leper” Lepellier, and other boys, attended Devon, a private New Hampshire boarding school under the looming shadow of World War II. The narrator describes the school in Edenic terms, calling it “the tame fringe of the last and greatest wilderness” (23), that is, adulthood. Somewhat as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and other boys’ school novels, the school functions as a microcosm of the real world and immerses the students in situations that force confrontation with relationships, jealousies, hostilities, politics, and discipline. Most critics, though, view Knowles’s presentation of the school world as an idyllic summer session that cools and hardens into the winter of the boys’ final year as they approach the exigencies of a world at war. One of the most intellectual students and a candidate for valedictorian of his class, Gene struggles with his feelings for Finny, an outstanding athlete, whom he both adores and envies. Finny is a vibrant, honest, likable boy who easily attracts friends and demonstrates repeatedly his philosophy of noncompetitiveness. Just as Finny advocates sports in which people play their best without winning, losing, or keeping score, he ascribes kindly attitudes and motives to all with whom he interacts. Finny, however, is no angel. He consciously flaunts the rules of the school, urging Gene and others to do likewise. He plays poker, wears the school tie as a belt, and skips classes. Finny is natural and uncompetitive and benevolent; he is also naive and irresponsible, and he denies that the war exists. Finny’s view of history is singular: He views the roaring 1920s as a time “when they all drank bathtub gin and everybody who was young did just what they wanted,” until they were stopped by “the preachers and the old ladies and all the stuffed shirts.” According to Finny, when Prohibition failed, those same stuffed shirts invented the Depression for “the people who were young in the thirties,” and when they found “they couldn't use that trick forever,” they “cooked up this war fake” for the 1940s (100–101). Gene has trouble believing that Finny is as good as he appears, and, as his jealousy and doubt evolve, he decides that Finny is trying to prevent him from excelling in his studies. During the summer session,

SEPARATE PEACE, A 1157

one of the pivotal scenes in the novel occurs when Gene and Finny form the Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session. The society requires that each boy drop into the water from the branches of a tree that overhangs the Devon River. They do so successfully a number of times, but then, in a dark moment, Gene bounces the tree limb (whether consciously or unconsciously is never clear) and causes Finny to fall from the tree and break his leg, thereby crippling him and rendering him unfit for the athletics that he loved. Too late, Gene realizes that Finny was proud of Gene’s academic accomplishments and that the resentment Gene sensed in Finny was utterly within his own heart. Nonetheless, when the boys return to school for their senior year, Gene devotes himself to Finny and, at Finny’s suggestion, begins athletic training for the 1944 Olympics. As many critics note, at some level Gene wants to become Finny, not just with regard to sports, but with regard to his very identity. In a muchdiscussed scene, Gene dons Finny’s clothing and stands before a mirror feeling an odd peace descend upon him. Finny, repeatedly described in terms of Greek gods and heroes, has become an object of devotion for Gene. Gene, who plans to enlist but then changes his mind after Finny recovers and returns to school, understands that his friend could never be a soldier. Indeed, the boys’ differing attitudes to the war may be viewed as measuring sticks of their personal philosophies: Finny, the talented athlete, sees the war as artificial and irrelevant; for him, real life occurs on the playing fields. Ironically, he thumbs his nose at the British notion—supposedly derived from a comment by the Duke of Wellington—that the battle of Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eton.” To Finny, the whole world is on the playing fields of Devon, but as Gene points out to him, Finny would make a very poor soldier because he lacks understanding of even the most basic concept of human hostility. “They’d get you some place at the front and there’d be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you’d be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they’d like to field a baseball team against our side. . . . You’d make a mess, a terrible mess Finny, out of the war (173). Unlike Finny, Gene realizes that “wars were not

made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart” (193). Because he is less good and also less naive than his friend, Gene is able to appreciate “this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace” (128). That peace must come to an end. Leper, the only student to enlist, goes mad during boot camp, when, in critic Ian Kennedy’s words, he “meets the inverted disorder that is war” (357). Brinker, the conservative foil to Finny, insists on holding a kangaroo court— with Leper as his chief witness—to determine Gene’s role in Finny’s fall from the tree. Finny, who characteristically wanted no part of this inquisition, becomes so upset that he rushes from the mock trial room and falls once again, this time on the school stairs. He lingers a little while before dying of complications from this final fall. No wonder that the mature Gene sees that the war for him was a personal, private, internal one: “my war ended before I ever put on a uniform; I was on active duty all my time at school; I killed my enemy there” (196). Although a majority of critics and readers agree with Ronald Weber that, at novel’s end, “Gene’s is a voice looking back on adolescence after the hard passage to maturity has been won” (Weber 70), some argue that Gene’s is the voice of an unreliable narrator and so his information, even his presentation of Finny, is suspect. Kennedy suggests that Gene has two voices: that of the immature, unreliable Devon student, and that of the reliable man who has attained a hard-won maturity (352, 359). Additionally, although most critics find Finny an embodiment of goodness and innocence (“When you really love something, then it loves you back,” he tells Gene [136]), others find character flaws in him as well as in Gene. Witherington, for example, sees “Finny's effort to entice Gene from his studies” to be just “as conscious as Gene’s movement of the tree limb causing Finny’s fall” (797). And for some, Finny’s death suggests that his carefree and self-absorbed attitude, while charming, is not enough to weather the sometimes sinister realities of adulthood, so he dies before being plunged into adult reality.

1158 SETTLE, MARY LEE

The novel continues to be reissued and studied by new generations of readers and critics. A Separate Peace was issued as a feature length film in 1972.

SOURCES Bryant, Hallman Bell. A Separate Peace: The War Within. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Ellis, James. “A Separate Peace: The Fall from Innocence,” English Journal 53 (May 1964): 313–318. Halio, Jay L. “John Knowles’s Short Novels,” Studies in Short Fiction 1 (Winter 1964): 107–112. Holborn, David G. “A Rationale for Reading John Knowles’ A Separate Peace.” In Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints, edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean, 456–463. Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1993. Karson, Jill, ed. Readings on A Separate Peace. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Kennedy, Ian. “Dual Perspective Narrative and the Character of Phineas in A Separate Peace,” Studies in Short Fiction 11, no. 4 (Fall 1974): 353–359. Knowles, John. A Separate Peace. New York: Dell Publishing Company, Inc., 1961. ———. A Separate Peace. Edited by Harold Bloom. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chelsea House, 1999. Slethang, Gordon E. “The Play of the Double in A Separate Peace,” Canadian Review of American Studies 15 (1984): 259–270. Weber, Ronald. “Narrative Method in A Separate Peace,” Studies in Short Fiction 3, no. 1 (Fall 1965): 63–72. Witherington, Paul. “A Separate Peace: A Study in Structural Ambiguity,” English Journal 54, no. 9 (December 1965): 795–800.

SETTLE, MARY LEE (1918–2005) Mary Lee Settle won the National Book Award for Blood Tie (1977), set on the Turkish island of Caramos, and wrote 15 additional novels; six books of nonfiction; several short stories, essays, reviews; and 10 unpublished plays and film scripts. She also invented the town of Canona (the fictional equivalent of Charleston, West Virginia), but her major achievement remains the five-novel sequence known as the Beulah Quintet: O Beulah Land (1956), Know Nothing (1960), Prisons (1973), The Scapegoat (1980), and The Killing Ground (1982). This 28-year project produced serious historical fiction that traced three families from the 1660s English Civil War to West Virginia in the 1960s. Although her settings and themes

are varied, the “prevailing theme,” according to scholar Nancy Carol Joyner, is “the struggle for freedom,” whether for the individual, the family, or the larger social unit (Joyner 1993, 395). Mary Lee Settle was born on July 29, 1918, in Charleston to Joseph Edward Settle, a civil engineer and owner of coal mines, and Rachel Tompkins Settle. The family moved to Kentucky, then to Florida, before returning to West Virginia. After spending two years at Sweet Briar College, Settle moved in 1938 to New York City, where the following year she married Rodney Weathersbee, an Englishman and the first of three husbands. In 1946 Settle divorced Weathersbee and married Douglas Newton, whom she divorced in 1956; 22 years later she married William Littleton Tazewell, a columnist and historian. When her husband enlisted in the Canadian army during World War II, Settle joined the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the subject of her 1966 autobiography, All the Brave Promises: Memoirs of Aircraft Woman 2nd Class 2146391. In 1954 she published The Love Eaters and The Kiss of Kin (1955) to very positive reviews; both novels are set in West Virginia. The Love Eaters, intended as a contemporary Phaedra, features Hamilton Sacks, a crippled director of the play at the center of the novel, and ends tragically, with the death of the decadent young Selby. The Kiss of Kin tells the tale of the deceased matriarch Aunt Mary Passmore. The family gathers to hear the reading of her last testament. In 1954 Settle began work on the Beulah Quintet. Although not published in this order, Prisons is the first chronologically, introducing young Johnnie Church, executed as a traitor by General Oliver Cromwell’s troops; his illegitimate child Lacy, along with other characters in the novel, will reach the Virginia Territory; their descendants will migrate to Canona to form the nucleus of the remaining four novels. The fictional families—the Catletts, Laceys, Kreggs, McKarkles, and Crawfords—are juxtaposed against historical figures like Cromwell, General Braddock, and Mother Jones. O Beulah Land, set during the Indian Wars until the beginning of the American Revolution, continues as the characters move into the West Virginia mountains. Hannah, a pickpocket and prostitute who is the ancestor of the Catletts, is a victim of an Indian attack; Sally

SETTLE, MARY LEE 1159

attempts to maintain a semblance of Virginia gentility. Know Nothing traces 30 years of history ending on the eve of the Civil War. Here Settle uses characters to exemplify attitudes about slavery; Jonathan Catlett becomes a Confederate Army captain, while his brother Lewis is an abolitionist. Settle introduces black characters who share some ancestors with the white Catletts. In Settle’s suspenseful novel The Scapegoat, all strands of the plot are aimed toward the 1912 coal strike as the mine is sold to an eastern corporation; Mother Jones appears and gives support to the miners. The “old” Canona families remain prejudiced against the newly arrived Italians. Finally, in The Killing Ground, the violence of World War I eclipses any of the violence experienced in earlier novels; Lily Lacey, for instance, goes to France as a nurse and witnesses the horror of the 1915 Battle of the Somme. Settle also attempted to encompass the events of Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday, an earlier novel that her publishers cut drastically; there, Hannah McKarkle, namesake of the ancestor in O Beulah Land, returns to West Virginia from New York in time to witness her brother Johnnie’s murder in a brawl and to discover ironic connections between white Catletts and black Laceys. The Clam Shell (1971) is based on Settle’s two years at Sweetbriar College. Blood Tie focuses on seven expatriates in Turkey whose efforts to rebuild their lives are frustrated by the repressive political events they experience; Settle’s technique of multiple narration gives scope and voice to a wide spectrum of characters. Charley Bland (1989), whose protagonist commits suicide in The Killing Ground, is revealed through the perspective of a woman with whom he had an unhappy love affair. Settle’s most recent novels include Choices (1995), about Melinda Kregg Dunstan of Kentucky and the Spanish Civil War, England during Hitler’s World War II blitzkrieg, and Mississippi during the 1960s Civil Rights movement. I, Roger Williams (2001) re-creates Roger Williams’s youth in England, his voyage from London to Massachusetts, his friendship with the Indians, and his founding of Rhode Island. Mary Lee Settle’s last work was a nonfiction travel book, Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present (2004). Only in the last decade and a half, beginning

with the Mary Lee Settle conference in 1990, did she start to receive the attention that her considerable talents and achievements deserved. Just before her death from lung cancer on September 27, 2005, at a hospice in Charlottesville, Virginia, Mary Lee Settle had been working on a fictionalized account of Thomas Jefferson’s youth.

NOVELS Addie: A Memoir. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Blood Tie. Boston: Houghton, 1977. Celebration. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1986. Charley Bland. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1989. Choices. Rockland, Mass.: Wheeler Publishing, 1995. The Clam Shell. New York: Delacorte, 1971. Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday. New York: Viking, 1964. I, Roger Williams: A Fragment Autobiography. New York: Norton, 2001. The Killing Ground. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. The Kiss of Kin. New York: Harper, 1955. Know Nothing. New York: Viking, 1960. The Love Eaters. New York: Harper, 1954. O Beulah Land. New York: Viking, 1956. Prisons. New York: Putnam, 1973; published in England as The Long Road to Paradise. London: Constable, 1974. The Scapegoat. New York: Random House, 1980. The Search for Beulah Land. New York: Scribner, 1988.

SOURCES Brown, Laurie L. “Interviews with Seven Contemporary Writers.” In Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 3–22. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984. Garrett, George. Understanding Mary Lee Settle. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. Gates, Anita. “Mary Lee Settle, 87, Author of ‘Beulah’ Novels, Is Dead.” New York Times, 29 September 2005, Section B, p. 9. Hooper, Brad. Review of Choices, Booklist 91, no. 16 (April 15, 1995): 1,481. Joyner, Nancy Carol. “The Beulah Quintet: The Feral Edge of What Has Made Us,” Now and Then 4 (1987): 44. ———. “Mary Lee Settle.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. ———. “Mary Lee Settle’s Connections: Class and Clothes in the Beulah Quintet.” In Women Writers of the Contempo-

1160 SHAARA, JEFF

rary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, 165–178. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984. Quinn, Mary Ellen. Review of I, Roger Williams, Booklist 97, no. 15 (April 1, 2001): 1,454. Review of Addie: A Memoir, Publishers Weekly 245, no. 36 (September 7, 1998): 74. Rosenberg, Brian. Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: The Price of Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991. ———. “The Price of Freedom: An Interview with Mary Lee Settle,” Southern Review 25 (1989): 351–365. Schafer, William J. “Mary Lee Settle’s Beulah Quintet: History Darkly, through a Single Lens Reflex,” Appalachian Journal 10 (1982): 77–86. Vance, Jane Gentry. “Historical Voices in Mary Lee Settle’s Prisons,” Mississippi Quarterly 38 (1985): 391–413. ———. “Mary Lee Settle: Ambiguity of Steel.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 213–229. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989. ———. “Mary Lee Settle’s The Beulah Quintet: History Inherited: History Created,” Southern Literary Journal 17 (1984): 40–53.

OTHER Harris, Gale. Review of Choices, Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 11, no. 1 (January 1996): 8. Hogbin, Brian O. “Mary Lee Settle.” Available online. URL: http://athena.english.vt.edu/~appalach/writersS/settle.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SHAARA, JEFF (1952– )

Jeff Shaara, author of five historical novels, including the best-selling Gods and Generals (1996), did not intend to become a writer like his Pulitzer Prize–winning father, Michael SHAARA. As the son remarked to interviewer Patricia Kelly O’Meara, his father led an unhappy life, and, “having seen how he suffered, writing was the last thing I wanted to do” (O’Meara). His father’s death changed Jeff Shaara’s career direction, however, and he wrote both the prequel and the sequel, The Last Full Measure (1998), to Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels. Like his father, Shaara combines historical figures and factual information with his own imagined, fictive interpretations of thoughts and motivations. Although his three Civil War novels have been his most successful, his Rise to Rebellion (2001), about the American Revolution, and Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War (2000) have been well reviewed.

Jeff Shaara was born on February 21, 1952, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Michael Shaara, a writer and educator, and Helen Krumwiede Shaara, a social worker. He earned a bachelor’s degree in criminology at Florida State University and spent two decades as a rare-coin dealer in Tampa, Florida, before marrying Lynne Loveless in 1992. Gods and Generals follows four individual soldiers from 1858 through the Civil War battles leading up to the battle of Gettysburg; the last is depicted in The Killer Angels. Shaara uses Southerners Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Northerners Winfield Scott Hancock and Joshua Chamberlain to express different reasons for fighting the war. Shaara’s second novel, The Last Full Measure, begins as, the last shots at Gettysburg having been fired, General Lee retreats from Pennsylvania to Appomattox. The novel follows Lee, Jackson, Hancock, and Chamberlain, with particular attention to the relations between Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant as the novel focuses on the Appomattox courthouse. Gone for Soldiers (2000), inspired by Shaara’s research into the backgrounds of the same men, demonstrates the way friendships and experiences were forged before the Civil War, in “that war with Mexico,” the “story we didn’t learn in school” (O’Meara); it includes all major characters from the Civil War novels except Jeb Stewart and Joshua Chamberlain, who were too young to have fought in Mexico. Rise to Rebellion (2001) depicts the seeds of the American Revolution, beginning with the Boston Massacre in 1770 and featuring such historical giants as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson; in 1776 Shaara dramatizes the Fourth of July in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as the impact of the Declaration of Independence begins to be felt. Shaara’s most recent novel, Glorious Cause (2002), continues to tell America’s story from the perspective not only of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, for instance, but also of the British general Lord Cornwallis. Jeff Shaara and his wife divide their time between New York’s Greenwich Village and Missoula, Montana. Gods and Generals was released as a film by Warner Bros. in 2003.

NOVELS Glorious Cause. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002. Gods and Generals. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

SHAARA, MICHAEL 1161

Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000. The Last Full Measure. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Rise to Rebellion. New York: Ballantine Books, 2001.

SOURCES Kilpatrick, Thomas L. Review of Gods and Generals, Library Journal 121, no. 8 (May 1, 1996): 134. Taylor, Gilbert. Review of The Last Full Measure, Booklist 94, no. 17 (May 1, 1998): 1,478. Unsigned Review of Gods and Generals, Kirkus Reviews (May 1, 1996): 633. Unsigned Review of Gods and Generals, Publishers Weekly 243, no. 20 (May 13, 1996): 55. Unsigned Review of The Last Full Measure, Publishers Weekly 245, no. 16 (April 20, 1998): 44.

OTHER Adams, Noah. Interview: “Jeff Shaara.” NPR Weekly Edition. National Public Radio. (July 7, 2001). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:45613154. Accessed September 25, 2005. Hansen, Liane. Interview: “Jeff Shaara Discusses Writing Gods and Generals.” NPR Weekend Edition. National Public Radio. (June 30, 1996). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1P1:28477354. Accessed September 25, 2005. O’Meara, Kelly Patricia. Interview: “Shaara Makes Good on His Literary Legacy.” Insight on the News (September 11, 2000). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http:// www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:6513 3115. Accessed September 25, 2005. Oxfeld, Jesse. “Shaara’s March: Gods and Generals.” Book (January 1, 2003). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1: 96554761. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SHAARA, MICHAEL (JOSEPH, JR.) (1929–1988) Before his death at age 59, Michael Shaara wrote science fiction novels and sports literature, but it was The Killer Angels (1974) that won the Pulitzer Prize. It created a new standard for Civil War novels and was the source for the highly successful film Gettysburg. Michael Shaara was born on June 23, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Michael Joseph Shaara, Sr., a union organizer, and Alleene Maxwell Shaara. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University in 1951 and was married to Helen Krumwide from 1950

until 1980. After serving as a paratrooper with the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne Division (1946–49), a merchant seaman, and a police officer, Shaara published more than 70 short stories, many of which were collected in Soldier Boy (1982). While teaching at Florida State University (1961–73), Shaara produced his first novel, The Broken Place (1968), about a soldier-boxer named Tom McClain who kills a man in the ring; the reviews noted Shaara’s debt to Hemingway (Rhodes, 36), particularly regarding the central role of physical fitness and the outdoors. The Killer Angels looks at the battle of Gettysburg from both Confederate and Union viewpoints, allowing the readers to feel the smoke and taste the gunpowder on their tongues. As Shaara says in the preface, quoted repeatedly by critics, his purpose was to convey “what it was like to be there, what the weather was like, what men’s faces looked like.” Twenty years later, when Ron Maxwell’s Gettysburg reached movie theaters, The Killer Angels shot to the top of the best-seller lists, although it had failed to do so when it won the Pulitzer Prize. Then the nation’s attention was focused on the Vietnam War. The critically acclaimed Gettysburg, the second-longest film in history (after Erich von Stoheim’s 1924 silent film Greed), contained 125 speaking roles, 7,500 reenactors as extras, and veteran actors Martin Sheen as General Lee, Tom Berenger as General Longstreet, Sam Elliott as General Buford, and Jeff Daniels as Colonel Chamberlain (Oxfeld). In 1981 The Herald, a science fiction novel, followed the pilot Nick Tesla as he confronted a Nazi-like scientist who wanted to create a master race. The manuscript of For Love of the Game, found by Shaara’s son Jeff after the death of his father, was published posthumously in 1991. It is a baseball novel about an aging player who can still pitch a perfect game. Michael Shaara, who had a history of heart trouble, died from a heart attack in 1989, in Tallahassee, Florida. He had suffered for many years from brain damage, the result of a 1972 motorcycle accident in Italy (Pierce). His son, Jeffrey SHAARA, organized his father’s literary estate and wrote both the prequel and the sequel to The Killer Angels. It is now known as the “father-son trilogy”: Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure.

1162 SHAW, IRWIN

NOVELS The Broken Place. New York: New American Library, 1968. For Love of the Game. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991. The Herald. New York: McGraw, 1981. The Killer Angels. New York: McKay, 1974.

SOURCES Leak, Thomas. “High Tide of the Confederacy,” New York Times, 10 May 1975, p. 27. Rhodes, Richard. “Boxer Gone Beserk,” New York Times, 7 April 1968, Section VII, p. 36.

OTHER Oxfeld, Jesse. “Shaara’s march: Gods and Generals,” Book (January 7, 2003). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID= 1G1:96554761. Accessed September 25, 2005. Pierce, Greg. “Gods’ Writer, Preceding his Father’s Footsteps,” The Washington Times (June 22, 1996) Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam.com/library/ doc3.asp?DOCID=1G1:58419613. Accessed September 25, 2005. Sherwin, Elisabeth. “Father/son Trilogy Didn’t Come Easily.” Available online. URL: http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/~gizmo/ 1998/shaara.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SHAW, IRWIN (1913–1984)

One of the most popular writers of the post–World War II era, Irwin Shaw came to public attention at age 23 with Bury the Dead (1936), a pacifist drama that became a Broadway hit. His novel The YOUNG LIONS (1948) is considered one of the major World War II novels. Only James JONES’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY and Norman MAILER’s The NAKED AND THE DEAD rival it. His prolific oeuvre includes 12 novels, 14 plays, 13 volumes of short fiction, and three works of nonfiction. He also wrote 13 screenplays. His work, often given short shrift by critics and academics, is currently undergoing a reevaluation; some scholars, including James R. Giles, argue that critics have overlooked Shaw as “a writer of rigorous moral fables” (Giles, 176). Critic Ross Wetzsteon says that his novels are actually about struggles with “moral choice” (quoted in Giles 1983, 176). Irwin Shaw was born on February 27, 1913, in the Bronx, New York, to William Shamforoff, a hat-trimming salesman, and Rose Tompkins Shamforoff. They later changed the family’s name to Shaw and moved to Brooklyn, where the young Shaw was reared. He was

educated at Brooklyn College, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1934. After working as a scriptwriter for the 1930s radio shows Dick Tracy and Andy Gump, he married Marian Edwards, an actress, in 1939, served with the U.S. Army from 1942 to 1945, and published The Young Lions three years later. Shaw received excellent reviews for this novel about three young soldiers— Michael Whitacre and Noah Ackerman, both Americans, and Christian Diestl, a German—whose stories are told as they come together in Germany, with flashbacks to such major events as the Normandy invasion. They are linked as well through their individual relationships with Margaret Freemantle, a young American. The Troubled Air (1951) concerns Clement Archer, a radio station director during the hysteria over communism during the McCarthy era. Thereafter Shaw moved to Europe, spending the next 25 years between Paris and Klosters, Switzerland, where he used his expatriate status for insights into his American characters. In Shaw’s third novel, Lucy Crown (1956), protagonist Tony Crown witnesses his mother Lucy’s seduction of his school friend. Two Weeks in Another Town (1960) features Jack Andrus, an alcoholic Hollywood star who travels to Rome, where he encounters his former wife Carlotta and his young and beautiful mistress Veronica. Voices of a Summer Day (1965), uncharacteristically romantic and lyrical, features the 50-year-old Benjamin Federov watching his 13-year-old son Michael playing in a Long Island baseball game and reminiscing about past relationships, disillusion, and adulteries. Rich Man, Poor Man (1970), a modern Cain and Abel story, follows the Jordaches, an upstate New York German-American family from the post–World War II years, through the McCarthy era, to the Vietnam War and the corruption of the Nixon presidency. Axel Jordach, a baker, has three children: the industrious, intelligent Rudolph; the aggressive, ruthless Thomas; and the confused, promiscuous Gretchen. Generally credited as the first of many American made-forTV miniseries, it was enormously successful. The story continues in Beggarman, Thief (1977), seen mainly through the eyes of Billy Abbott (married to Gretchen) and of Wesley Jordach, Thomas’s son. In Evening in Byzantium (1973), Jesse Craig attends the 1970 Cannes Film Festival seeking both a resurrection of his talent as a formerly successful film pro-

SHAWL, THE 1163

ducer and his lost identity. (“I am in Cannes,” he says, “to save my life” [106–107].) Women—journalist Gail McKinnon, estranged wife Penelope, lover Constance, daughter Anne—play significant roles in his reassessment of his life. Nightwork (1975) features a night clerk in a rundown New York hotel who discovers a corpse and $100,000; the money enables him to move to Europe. In The Top of the Hill (1979), a young man turns his back on his successful life in the city and moves to the mountains to engage in dangerous outdoor sports and to evaluate his past life. Bread Upon the Waters (1981) reveals the consequences of wealth, prestige, and money in the life of history teacher Allen Strand. Russell Hazen, millionaire philanthropist, takes charge of the entire family through gifts of travel, education, and jobs. Acceptable Losses (1982) begins as protagonist Roger Damon, a literary agent, receives a phone call that causes him to reexamine his earlier life. Irwin Shaw’s alcoholism led to his divorce from Marion Shaw in 1970, but they reconciled and remarried in 1982. His popular work was adapted into both feature-length films and television miniseries. The Young Lions, directed by Edward Dmytryk, starred Montgomery Clift as Noah, Dean Martin as Michael, and Marlon Brando as Christien. Rich Man, Poor Man, starring Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss as the two brothers and William Smith as Falconetti, won three Emmy Awards for director David Greene and actors Ed Asner and Fionnula Flanagan. Two Weeks in Another Town, adapted for the screen in 1962, was directed by Vincente Minnelli and starred Kirk Douglas, Cyd Charisse, and Edward G. Robinson. Shaw died on May 16, 1984, of prostate cancer, in Davos, Switzerland.

NOVELS Acceptable Losses. New York: Arbor House, 1982. Beggarman, Thief. New York: Delacorte, 1977. Bread upon the Waters. New York: Delacorte, 1981. The City Was in Total Darkness. Tokyo, Japan: Kodansha, 1990. Evening in Byzantium. New York: Delacorte, 1973. Lucy Crown. New York: Random House, 1956. Nightwork. New York: Delacorte, 1975. Rich Man, Poor Man. New York: Delacorte, 1970. The Top of the Hill. New York: Delacorte, 1979. The Troubled Air. New York: Random House, 1951. Two Weeks in Another Town. New York: Random House, 1960.

Voices of a Summer Day. New York: Delacorte, 1965. The Young Lions. New York: Random House, 1948.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. After the Lost Generation. New York: Noonday, 1951, pp. 146–156. Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Evans, Bergen. “Irwin Shaw,” English Journal 40 (November 1951): 485–491. Fiedler, Leslie. “Irwin Shaw: Adultery, The Last Politics,“ Commentary 22 (July 1956): 71–74. Giles, James Richard. Irwin Shaw. Boston: Twayne, 1983. ———. Irwin Shaw: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ———. “Irwin Shaw’s Original Prologue to The Young Lions,” Resources for American Literary Study 11 (Spring 1981): 115–119. Milic, Louis T. “Naming in Shaw’s The Young Lions,” Style 23, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 113–123. Newquist, Roy. Counterpoint. New York: Rand McNally, 1964. Peden, William. “Best of Irwin Shaw,” Saturday Review of Literature 33 (November 19, 1950): 27–28. Saal, Hubert. “Disenchanted Men,” Saturday Review of Literature 40 (August 3, 1957): 12–13. Shnayerson, Michael. Irwin Shaw: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1989. Startt, William. “Irwin Shaw: An Extended Talent,” Midwest Quarterly 2 (Summer 1961): 325–337. Trilling, Lionel. “Some Are Gentle, Some Are Not,” Saturday Review of Literature 34 (July 9, 1951): 8–9. Wetzsteon, Ross. “Irwin Shaw: The Conflict Between Big Bucks and Good Books,” Saturday Review 8 (August 1981): 12–17.

OTHER Books and Writers. “Irwin Shaw,” (1913–1984). Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ishaw.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SHAWL, THE CYNTHIA OZICK (1989) Cynthia OZICK’s novella The Shawl provides a powerful commentary on the nature of trauma and its aftermath, the balance between memory and forgetting, and the limitations and possibilities of language. Taking the reader to hell (the Holocaust) and back again (Miami), The Shawl culminates in a vision of reintegration and hope. A prominent Jewish-American writer of novels, essays,

1164 SHAWL, THE

poems, and short stories, Ozick is not herself a Holocaust survivor: “I did it because I couldn’t help it. It wanted to be done. . . . I wasn’t there, and I pretended through imagination that I was” (“Imagination”). This ambivalence manifests in an ongoing tension between speech and silence. The two sections that comprise the text, while individually effective and acclaimed (each was published separately and selected for the annual Best American Short Stories volume), come together to form a greater whole: “The Shawl,” an eight-page concentration camp narrative, and “Rosa,” set over 30 years later in Miami (and approximately six times as long), offer an imaginative re-creation of a traumatic moment and its much more complicated aftermath. They exist within a “synchronous” rather than a “diachronous” relationship; each shapes the reader’s view of the other (Lowin, 121, 112). Reminiscent of William Blake’s coupling of “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience,” Ozick’s structuring suggests that the issues surrounding trauma, survival, memory, and time all function in contrary though not contradictory ways. In “The Shawl,” Ozick paradoxically employs a detached third-person limited omniscient narrator to provide an unmediated experience, pared down to the agony of one mother’s loss. Reminiscent of imagist poetry, densely symbolic in style, and structured through psychic associations (Kauvar, 184), “The Shawl” uses a single synecdochic episode to represent the entire Holocaust: the murder of Rosa Lublin’s toddler by a Nazi concentration camp guard who throws the child against an electrified fence. “The Shawl” begins with Rosa, an assimilated Polish Jew, and her teenage niece, Stella, on a death march. Rosa concerns herself with her infant daughter, Magda, whom she carries wrapped in “a magic shawl [which] could nourish an infant for three days and three nights” while “ravenous” Stella looks only to her own self-preservation (5). In the concentration camp, Magda remains safely silent and invisible until “Stella, cold, cold, the coldness of hell” (3) takes Magda’s shawl for warmth, prompting once-mute Magda to toddle wailing into the roll-call arena, where her mother, ironically relieved by Magda’s newfound voice, observes her child’s imminent death and proceeds to stuff the shawl down her

own throat, stifling her desire to cry out and thereby preserving her life. From the perspectives of feminism and of witnessing, Magda’s finding her voice is redemptive, even as it brings about her death. When “Rosa” begins, the muteness and passivity that characterize Rosa at the end of “The Shawl” have given way to excessive speech and wildly destructive acts: “a madwoman and a scavenger” (14), Rosa “murder[s]” her antiques business, “part with a big hammer . . . [and] part with a piece of construction metal” (46, 26) because “whoever came, they were like deaf people” (27). Rosa speaks, but her audience cannot comprehend the enormity of the Holocaust. Having destroyed the business that she and Stella ran in New York, Rosa relocates to a retirement hotel in Miami, putting herself in a “hell” (14), which uncannily replicates nearly every aspect of the concentration camp setting of “The Shawl” (Kauvar, 179): “everything is on fire,” “the sand [is] littered with bodies,” and Rosa finds herself “locked behind barbed wire” (39, 47, 49). Both settings are characterized by a fundamental disconnect between words and their meanings, suggesting the limitations of language. In the camps, Rosa and the other prisoners describe their conditions with euphemisms (8), while the Miami hotels are populated by “ ‘guests’—some [of whom] had been residents for a dozen years” (28). Whereas words fail her at Magda’s death, Rosa now composes elaborate letters (“in the most excellent literary Polish” [14]) to her daughter (“a beautiful young woman of thirty, thirty-one: a doctor married to a doctor [35]), abandoning her refugee English in favor of her beloved mother tongue, which she uses “to make a history, to tell, to explain. To retrieve, to reprieve. To lie” (45). This propensity isolates Rosa, and her text dramatizes William FAULKNER’s truism that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” In Rosa’s case, it is her daughter Magda who is not dead, and the experience of the concentration camps that is not past. When Simon Persky, a well-meaning fellow Warsaw refugee, confronts Rosa about her poor quality of life, she explains: “Before [the Holocaust] is a dream. After is a joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie” (59). Hence Rosa has few social interactions: She dislikes Stella (though she remains Stella’s dependent), distrusts Persky (because he escaped from

SHELTERING SKY, THE 1165

Warsaw before the Holocaust), and despises Dr. Tree (an academic who wishes “to observe survivor syndroming within the natural setting” [38]). If Stella’s theft of Magda’s shawl brings about the central crisis of “The Shawl,” then Stella’s complying with Rosa’s request to send the shawl to Miami should be the climax of “Rosa.” Instead, the shawl becomes symbolically conflated with a manuscript from the hated Dr. Tree (a package Rosa mistakes for the one Stella sends) and with a pair of underwear that Rosa loses track of when she meets Persky at the laundromat. She destroys the manuscript and the underwear she concludes must have been stolen (Persky is the prime suspect) and buried in the sand. At this point, the traumatic repetition is interrupted. Rosa discovers that, unlike her stolen pre-Holocaust life, her underwear is only temporarily misplaced. Meanwhile, when the shawl itself arrives, an anticlimax that leaves Rosa “indifferent” (62), she places it over the telephone she has recently decided to reconnect. The phone rings, “a dead thing com[ing] to life” (62), and Rosa analogously unlocks the possibility of meaningful communication by inviting Persky up. Accepting a friendly overture from Persky (a married man without a wife) will allow Rosa (a mother without a daughter) to escape traumatic repetition and constraining labels to embrace a more promising, and even playful, future.

SOURCES Kauvar, Elaine M. Cynthia Ozick’s Fiction: Tradition and Invention. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Lowin, Joseph. Cynthia Ozick. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Matterasi, Mario. “Imagination Unbound: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick,” Salmagundi (Spring/Summer 1992): 94–95. Ozick, Cynthia. The Shawl. 1980, 1983. Reprint, New York: Vintage International, 1990. Jessica Rabin

SHELTERING SKY, THE PAUL BOWLES (1949) The Sheltering Sky by Paul BOWLES mainly concerns itself with an American couple, Kit and Port, and their travels in Morocco. This first novel has a fairly straightforward plot but touches on the metaphysical in the style of writing and themes presented, representing the mysteriousness of the desert and the desert’s similarities to the mysteries of the mind.

In the beginning of the novel, Kit and Port are traveling with their friend Tunner. Since relations between Kit and Port have been a little rocky, Tunner tries to insinuate himself into a relationship with Kit. Port and Kit move to a different town without Tunner, and Port falls ill with typhoid. Before he dies, he plunges into a delirium that introduces some of the surreal points in the novel. Kit is left mourning and goes slightly mad, walking out into the desert where she must be “saved” by traveling Bedouins, who essentially enslave her. She escapes eventually, but she is forever lost—mentally. That’s where the metaphysical part comes in. In Paul Bowles’s world, being lost in the desert equals being lost within your head. The otherworldly qualities of the Arab world—the strong teas and drugs and even the stories and myths that are told by the natives—create a haziness that is slightly incomprehensible to the Westerner. Port dies for this in his quest to go ever farther into the desert. Kit also loses her mind after going much deeper into the desert than Port ever does— which is ironic because Port was the more fanatical traveler in the first place. The divide is present even among other Europeans in Morocco: “The Spanish maid at the hotel had said to him that noon: ‘La vida es pena.’ ‘Of course,’ he had replied, feeling false even as he spoke, asking himself if any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with suffering” (15). The only characters that are far removed, like Kit and Port, are two British travelers who are perhaps even more separated from native Arab life (the woman writes guidebooks). And as Kit, Port, and Tunner eat in a cafe, Kit remarks, “Thank heavens they’re Arabs, and not French. Otherwise it would have been against the rules to eat out here” (117). Kit and Port are attracted to the otherworldly culture without boundaries, ruled by the desert. As Bowles said in a 1971 interview, “[W]hat I wanted to tell was the story of what the desert can do to us. That was all. The desert is the protagonist.” “Us” here means, presumably, Americans, although there is a story that gives the first part of the novel its name, “Tea in the Sahara,” which is about natives going out into the desert, getting lost, and ultimately dying. So it’s not just Americans who are subject to the negative mystique of the desert.

1166 SHIP OF FOOLS

The desert is also presented as alluring, and Bowles manages to portray its beauty masterfully: “It was perfectly quiet. The sky was white. Occasionally he stood up carefully and peered out. And so it was that when the sun came up he looked between two oleanders and saw it reflected red across the miles of flittering salt sebkha that lay between him and the mountains” (36). That beauty turns out to be a trap of sorts, but for Bowles, an aesthete, the beauty is also an end in itself.

SOURCES Bowles, Paul. This Sheltering Sky. Conversations with Paul Bowles. Edited by Gena Dagel Caponi. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Sawyer-Laucanno, Christopher. An Invisible Spectator. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Allie M. D’Augustine

SHIP OF FOOLS KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1962) Katherine Anne PORTER’s Ship of Fools was published to elaborate fanfare on April 1, 1962, more than a quarter of a century after she had begun writing it. The initial reviews were almost unanimously laudatory, and Mark Schorer’s analysis in the New York Times Book Review set the tone. Calling Porter’s novel a “masterpiece” that would take its place among the best books of the century, he compared it with George Eliot’s Middlemarch and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Ship of Fools was an immediate best-seller, and film rights were quickly sold. Porter became a wealthy woman, and it looked as if her only long novel was going to enhance her already stellar reputation founded on her highly acclaimed short stories and short novels. In the fall, however, tepid and negative reviews appeared, and what had seemed like an unblemished success became tainted with controversy. German reviews were the most censorious, one headline labeling Ship of Fools a “document of hatred,” but several British reviews were cool, and a review in the American journal Commentary was particularly shrill and condemning. Contrary to Schorer’s location of humor, pathos, and enlightenment in the novel, some reviewers now raised questions about Porter’s “dark view of humanity.” Ship of Fools details a five-week voyage of the North German Lloyd steamship Vera from Veracruz, Mexico,

to Bremerhaven, Germany, from August 22 to September 17, 1931, based on Porter’s own 1931 voyage from Mexico to Germany on the North German Lloyd ship Werra with Eugene Pressly, whom she would marry in Paris in 1933 and divorce five years later. The ship is carrying 932 passengers and one dog. In a string of episodes divided among three parts and encapsulated within the frame of embarkation and disembarkation scenes, characters are presented in their interactions with one another during the voyage, and histories and relationships of several dozen are explored intensely. The most significant characters are the Americans Jenny Brown and David Scott, both artists (based on Porter and Pressly); Mary Treadwell, a 45-year-old divorcée and another autobiographical character; William Denny, a bigoted and lecherous engineer from Texas based on Porter’s first husband, J. H. Koontz; Dr. Schumann, the ship’s physician, who suffers from a heart ailment; and the madwoman, La Condesa, who is also a drug addict. Incidents that are highlighted in the novel include the passengers’ appraisal of one another at the getacquainted party; Mary Treadwell’s painting her face in a primitive mask and beating the lecherous Denny with the heel of her shoe; Dr. Schumann’s and La Condesa’s disclosing their irrational love for one another; Jenny and David’s arguments and reconciliations; the medical students’ mocking La Condesa; Johann’s defying his uncle to make a sexual bargain with one of the dancers; the twins Ric and Rac’s throwing the dog Bèbè overboard; and the artist Etchegaray’s sacrificing his life to save Bèbè. Porter remarked that not one reviewer really understood what she was doing in the novel, and indeed the novel seemed to run afoul of post-1950s expectations of the novel genre, because of its shifting viewpoint, episodic structure, and absence of a sustained plot. Had it been published in the 1920s or 1930s, closer to its inception and closer to the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses or Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, perhaps it would have been seen for the modernist work it was, and Porter’s purpose and treatment would have been more readily understood and appreciated. On one level the novel is a moral allegory; on another it is a string of realistic scenes acted out by characters who

SHIPPING NEWS, THE 1167

with the aid of an authoritative narrative voice illustrate Porter’s controlling themes: chauvinism at the root of Nazism, human isolation, love in all its manifestations and perversions, apathy’s collusion with evil, religious intolerance, and the meaning of both art and home. On yet another level the novel is an oldfashioned, classic satire, crafted with caricature and laced with irony, in the spirit of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. “I am a passenger on that ship,” Porter wrote, pointing out the universality of the voyage, the critic Mark Schorer concurred: “It will be a reader myopic to the point of blindness,” he wrote, “who does not find his name on her passenger list.”

SOURCES Hendrick, George, and Willene Hendrick, “Ship of Fools.” In Katherine Anne Porter. Twayne’s United States Authors Series. Revised edition. Boston: G. K. Hall/Twayne, 1988. Libermann, M. M. “The Responsibility of the Novelist and the Critical Reception of Ship of Fools,” Criticism 8 (1966): 377–388. Schorer, Mark. “We’re All on the Passenger List,” New York Times Book Review, 1 April 1962, 1, 5. Wescott, Glenway. “The Making of a Novel,” Atlantic Monthly (April 1962): 43–49. Darlene Unrue

SHIPPING NEWS, THE ANNIE PROULX (1993) In The Shipping News, the protagonist, Quoyle, an awkward, unsuccessful, but tender-hearted man is described by the narrator as having “a great damp loaf of a body, [a] Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, [and a] monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face” (2). When Quoyle’s parents die, he loses his job, and his unfaithful wife, Petal Bear, is killed in a car crash after selling their daughters to a child abuser, from whom they are rescued physically untouched. His stouthearted aunt convinces him to make a fresh start by moving from Upstate New York to his ancestral home in a remote coastal village in Newfoundland. In the rustic atmosphere of KillickClaw, Quoyle runs not away but toward his past. Therefore, Quoyle, unlike other characters in PROULX’s novels, stops running, and he faces the consequences by, stoically, facing all challenges. In The Shipping News, Proulx focuses almost completely on Quoyle, and his furious protest against pain

as he searches for a better life. Gradually, Quoyle feels he belongs among his neighbors and his coworkers at the weekly newspaper, The Gammy Bird. Here Quoyle acquires self-respect by hard work at a job he learns to love. For the first time in his life, Quoyle does something right, and he becomes managing editor. Although Quoyle wholeheartedly joins the community and gives unconditionally, at the same time he uncovers many painful family secrets and the land that carries its curse. As Quoyle slowly overcomes his futile longing for Petal, he wins the love of Wavey Prowse, a “Tall and Quiet Woman.” However, this happy ending is ironic, as Proulx skillfully suggests when she writes on the last line of the novel that, “love sometimes occurs without pain or misery” (336). But since Quoyle is aware that “There are still old knots unrecorded, [and] new knots to discover” (324), he succeeds because he now looks life in the face and no longer considers himself a failure. The Shipping News consists of 39 short chapters, most with pictorial headings, tropes for chapter titles, and epigraphs. Since knots are tools for fisherman and other boaters, they are indispensable on the shores of Newfoundland. For Proulx, Newfoundland is an island of invention where Quoyle can unravel the tangle of old familial wounds: incest, petty hatreds, and longstanding feuds. Therefore, Proulx’s imagery has much to do with knots both of the literal and figurative kind. Quoyle’s name is an antiquated spelling of coil, and his fear of the ocean provides much of the novel’s literal and metaphorical tension. Quoyle could not swim, and his father’s continual attempt to force him to do so constitutes his failure in everything. Quoyle’s chief failure was that of normal appearance, and even those close to him believed that “the part of Quoyle that was wonderful was, unfortunately, attached to the rest of him” (14). Is Proulx knowingly exploring what Nietzsche describes, in a maxim in Beyond Good and Evil, as the brutal recognition that “terrible experiences make one wonder whether he who experiences them is not something terrible.” But, as Quoyle grows into responsibility, the old familial wounds begin to heal. In chapter 20, “Gaze Island,” Quoyle learns that his ancestors were a clan of half-wit “wrackers,” or pirates, who lured unsuspecting ships onto rocky shallows and then

1168 SHOW BOAT

murdered the shipwrecked sailors. Although these savage people may seem quite foreign and removed from Quoyle, he must deal with his own tragic, more immediate past: Petal’s betrayal, and the fact that his father raped his Aunt Agnis at the age of 12. Quoyle succeeds because he not only faces the grotesque sins of his ancestors but also breaks the cycle. In The Shipping News, Proulx clearly demonstrates the notion of hard work and great strength necessary for survival, a common theme in Newfoundland literature. Jack Buggit combines the views of Bill Pretty and Tert Cart in his characterization of the old ways of inland fishing. “It was a hard life but it had the satisfaction. Terrible hard in them old days” (64). Although there is no secret that the life of a Newfoundland fisherman was not an easy one, the day there was no more fishing done was a day of great sadness and grief. Newfoundlanders knew no other life, but they were being forced to change. As Jack Buggit narrates Newfoundland’s difficult shift away from fishing: “When the damn place give up on hard times and swapped ’em in for confederation with Canada what did we get? Slow and sure we got government. Sure I wanted health care, mail service, good education for me kids. Some of it come in. But not the jobs” (65). Proulx appears preoccupied with the tragedies so many Newfoundlanders faced at sea rather than their success at overcoming the odds. There are numerous storms at sea, murders, and rescues. Quoyle nearly drowns at one point, Jack loses his eldest boy at sea, and Quoyle’s house is blown out to sea. Near the novel’s end, Jack Buggit sits up in his own coffin, spouting water, having both drowned and not drowned. But, as Roz Kavenay in New Statesman & Society suggests, “Proulx’s triumph is that she makes us swallow all of this. Her work looks us forthright in the eye and challenges disbelief” (39). Thus, in this artful novel, Proulx transports us to the foggy, storm-battered coast of Newfoundland, a land of myth, so that Quoyle’s story, like billions of other people in the world, will not shrink in magnitude.

SOURCE Kaveney, Roz. “Local Hero,” New Statesman & Society 6, no. 281 (December 3, 1993): 39. Harriet Gold

SHOW BOAT EDNA FERBER (1926)

Near the end of Show Boat, heroine Magnolia Hawks Ravenal summarizes her life as well as the novel’s plot: “ ‘What if I were to (say) that I used to be a show-boat actress, and that my father was drowned in the Mississippi, and my mother, at sixty, runs a show boat all alone, and that my husband is a gambler and we have no money, and that I have just come from the most notorious brothel in Chicago, where I returned a thousand dollars my husband had got there, and that I’m on my way to try to get work in a variety theatre?’ She was smiling a little at a this absurd thought.” Edna FERBER probably smiled too at the thought that Show Boat would make her rich and help make her name immortal, if only in small print. As Ferber’s biographer and grand-niece Julie Goldsmith Gilbert explains, “It’s surprising—shocking, really—how many people think (Show Boat) was born a musical, not having a clue that it was a 1926 best seller born out of the head of Edna Ferber. Of course, every Show Boat marquee reads: ‘Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat,’ and then underneath, in much smaller print, ‘Based on the Novel by Edna Ferber.’ The public’s eye doesn’t readily go to a . . . based on.’ ” Show Boat was Ferber’s fifth novel (she ultimately wrote 12) and was her second of seven best-sellers. Two years earlier, So Big had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. That the name Show Boat is well known today is due primarily to the musical, the Jerome Kern score (who can’t hum a few bars of “Ol’ Man River”?) and several film versions based on Ferber’s novel. According to Ferber, Show Boat was her only novel that “never was intended to be more than an authentic and romantic novel of Americana.” As a result, unlike most Ferber novels, there is no real opponent or villain in Show Boat. In most other ways, however, Show Boat is a typical Ferber novel: a generational saga portraying social decline with at least the potential of restoration and, most notably, strong women overcoming obstacles (generally men) to become successful. Show Boat suggests that women could enrich themselves through wider exposure to life and that some longstanding frustrations may be rooted in their dependence. America’s 50-year showboat era was almost over when Ferber first caught wind of it in the mid-1920s.

SHOW BOAT 1169

She spent the next year tracking down information, interviewing people who could tell her about “floating theatres,” reading everything she could find on the subject, and spending several days on a North Carolina showboat. Finally, she retreated to St. Jean-de-Luz in southwestern France to write. Show Boat was published serially in Woman’s Home Companion and in book form by Doubleday in 1926. Ferber’s generational theme focuses on Magnolia (Nola), growing up on a Mississippi River showboat. Other characters include Nola’s parents, henpecked Captain Andy and domineering Parthenia (Parthy). Readers are introduced to the entire showboat “cast,” including dashing juvenile lead, Gaylord Ravenal, destined to marry Nola, and, in later chapters, to their daughter Kim, a Ferber-created name based on the girl’s birthplace at the convergence of three states, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Throughout the novel, Ferber also emphasizes the key role played by two nonhuman characters: the boat, named the “Cotton Blossom,” and the river itself (a female persona in the book, masculine in Hammerstein’s lyrics). To the extent that Show Boat wrestles with an issue, it is miscegenation. In a dramatic episode, Ferber retells a showboat legend involving two performers, a white man married to a black woman passing for white. When facing arrest, he pricks her finger and sucks a drop of her blood, thereby giving himself mixed blood. That interracial marriage was illegal in the post–Civil War South is not surprising; however, when this scene was brought to the stage, it helped establish Show Boat’s reputation as a new theatrical art form: a three-dimensional musical play as distinguished from light musical comedy. Ferber’s presentday readers may find her authenticity jarring, including casual references to “coons,” “niggers,” and “darkies.” Acknowledging her considerable talent conveying the panorama of bygone eras, Rudyard Kipling and William Allen White regard Ferber as much an historian as a novelist. The setting changes in the novel’s second half as Gay and Nola flee river life and move to Chicago, partly to escape overbearing Parthy. This change enables Ferber to write the book she originally envisioned—life in gangster-infested Chicago in the 1890s. Here, Gay

gambles away his days as well as the couple’s limited resources. Broke and defeated, he abandons Nola and Kim, prompting Nola to buy a secondhand banjo and take to the stage once again. Gay’s fall and Nola’s eventual rise are similar to Hurstwood and Carrie’s experience in DREISER’s Sister Carrie. Parthy and Nola’s unsatisfying marriages resemble the union that Ferber, who never married, observed most closely. As Gilbert observes, her parents’ marriage “provided the original for all the ‘ill-assorted’ matches that Ferber was later to write about.” Ferber admitted that her “parthyesque” mother Julia, “often to my surprise and sometimes annoyance, flung open the door and marched lifesize into many novels as I wrote them.” Ferber counted Show Boat among her novels where this happened. Parthy and daughter Nola are patterned after Julia Ferber and daughter Edna. And, like the Ferber women, the Hawks women gain strength and success over time. As one of George S. Kaufman’s biographers observed (Ferber and Kaufman collaborated on six plays), “Edna was, in fact, one of those strong, courageous, dynamic women about whom she wrote in her own novels.” In typical Ferber style, her leading women (Parthy, Nola, and Kim) all prove stronger and more successful than her male characters (Captain Andy, Gay, and Kim’s husband Ken). When Ferber died in 1968, her obituary in The New York Times noted that “her novels became minor classics and earned her a fortune. Her books were not profound, but they were vivid and had a sound sociological basis. Critics of the nineteen-twenties and thirties did not hesitate to call her the greatest American woman novelist of her day.” Although Edna Ferber wrote about American life for four decades, her reputation today rests in large measure—and often in fine print—as the author of Show Boat.

SOURCES Dickinson, Rogers. Edna Ferber. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925. Ferber, Edna. A Kind of Magic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1963. ———. A Peculiar Treasure. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1939.

1170 SIDHWA, BAPSI

———. Show Boat. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber, A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1978. Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon Press, 1977. Teichmann, Howard. George S. Kaufman, An Intimate Portrait. New York: Atheneum, 1972. Kurtis L. Meyer

SIDHWA, BAPSI (1938– )

Bapsi Sidhwa, who has been called the most accomplished Pakistani novelist writing in English is less well known in the United States and England than she is in South Asian countries. Her lack of widespread recognition in the United States is probably because American readers and reviewers know little about South Asian history and politics, particularly the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, her central subject. Sidhwa’s other major themes include the evils of patriarchy and the survival of the Parsi (Zoroastrian) religious minority, of which she is a member. Her four novels to date include The Crow Eaters (1978), The Bride (1983), Cracking India (1991) [published as The Candy Man in London, 1988]), and An AMERICAN BRAT (1993). Of these novels, South Asian history emerges most obviously in Cracking India. Sidhwa often employs farce and is known for her humorous treatment of political issues when the subject is not deadly serious, as it is in Cracking India, where she describes the atrocities committed by various community members. Born in Karachi, then part of India, on August 11, 1938, Sidhwa earned her bachelor’s degree from Kinnaird College for Women in Karachi in 1956. Sidhwa married Gustad Kermani in 1957 and, after Kermani’s death, Noshir R. Sidhwa in 1962. When she immigrated to the United States in 1983, she had already written two novels, The Crow Eaters an often humorous account of the Parsi community, and The Bride, a serious sequel to The Crow Eaters. There a young girl who runs away from an arranged marriage is brutally hunted and killed. Gender and politics converge in Cracking India through her descriptions of the mass rapes and murders committed in the Punjab. An American Brat, a bildungsro-

man, centers on Feroza, a young Parsi girl who visits the United States, enrolls in college, and horrifies her mother by becoming engaged to a Jewish classmate, David Press. Sidhwa has been praised for her vivid characterizations and the woman’s perspective she brings to her fiction. Her novels are included in numerous college and university courses on Asian-American fiction.

NOVELS An American Brat. New Delhi: Penguin India, 1993. The Bride. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. Cracking India. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 1991; published as Ice-Candy Man. London: Heinemann, 1988. The Crow Eaters. Lahore, Pakistan: Ilmi Printing Press, 1978.

SOURCES Afzal-Khan, Fawzia. “Bapsi Sidhwa,” In International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. Edited by Robert L. Ross. 271–281. New York: Garland, 1991. Baumgartner, Robert J., ed. Creative Processes in Pakistani Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996, pp. 231–240. Mehta, Nina. “From the Personal to the Political: An Interview with Pakistani Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa,” Bloomsbury Review (June 1992): 3. Montenegro, David. “Bapsi Sidhwa: An Interview.” Massachusetts Review 31, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 513–533. Powers, Janet M. “Bapsi Sidhwa,” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 350–356. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2000.

OTHER Malmberg, Jacob Lee. “Bapsi Sidhwa.” Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ VG/Bios/entries/sidhwa.bapsi.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SILKO, LESLIE (MARMON) (1948– ) Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the finest writers associated with the Native American literary renaissance. A short story writer and poet whose first novel, CEREMONY (1977), is considered a classic of contemporary American literature, Silko uses the novel form to depict the affinity her characters have with the land, with their Pueblo Laguna customs, with the blending of Catholicism and Native rituals, and with the need for healing.

SILKO, LESLIE 1171

Silko incorporates strands of Native American and white culture and values. Leslie Silko was born on March 5, 1948, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Leland (Lee) Marmon and Mary Virginia Lee Leslie, and was reared on Old Laguna, a Pueblo Indian reservation west of Albuquerque. She is herself of mixed white, Laguna, and Mexican heritage, and many of her poems and stories feature mixed-blood protagonists. In 1969 she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of New Mexico with a bachelor’s degree. Ceremony features Tayo, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who returns to his Laguna reservation, where he suffers recurring nightmares about his cousin’s death on the Bataan Death March. After a downward spiral into alcohol and self-pity, old Betonie and other mentors and healers guide him through the ceremonies that help to heal him. Silko’s semiautobiographical Storyteller (1981) (critical opinion is divided as to its status as novel or, rather, a collection of stories and poems) appeared to critical acclaim. Using poems, stories, and photos, Silko interweaves these into the story of an orphaned Alaskan Inuit girl who uses her psychic powers to avenge the deaths of her parents. Here Silko powerfully evokes an Arctic winter and describes a polar bear stalking the girl’s foster-father figure. In Almanac of the Dead (1991), Silko continues to experiment with form. The novel has complex interwoven threads or plotlines, one of which focuses on the notebooks bequeathed to a Yaqui named Yoeme and her granddaughter Lecha’s determination to decipher their meaning. Lecha is also much in demand for her psychic powers. The other main strand of the plot involves a massing of a Mexican revolutionary army planning to reclaim tribal lands to the North. An overarching theme involves the Native determination to reestablish tribal and family values. Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel (1999) is set in the late 19th century as the struggle between the Native and white worlds is intensifying. The whites continue to plunder natural resources in their move west; the Indians futilely attempt to live off and maintain the sacred nature of the land and its decreasing bounty. The protagonist, Indigo, one of the last of the Sand

Lizard people, travels through Europe and South America with the wealthy white woman Hattie, but eventually rejects wealth and luxury to return home to the gardens in the dunes. Silko, who lives and writes in Tucson, Arizona, and was recently named a Living Cultural Treasure by the New Mexico Humanities Council, is the recipient of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award.

NOVELS Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. Ceremony. New York: Viking, 1977. Gardens in Dunes: A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Storyteller. New York: Seaver Books, 1981.

SOURCES Barnes, Kim. Interview in The Journal of Ethnic Studies 13, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 83–105. Blumenthal, Susan. “Spotted Cattle and Deer: Spirit Guides and Symbols of Endurance and Healing in Ceremony,” American Indian Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 367–377. ———. “Spotted Cattle and Deer: Spirit Guides and Symbols of Endurance and Healing in Ceremony,” American Indian Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Fall 1990): 367–377. Brown, Alanna Kathleen. “Pulling Silko’s Threads through Time: An Exploration of Storytelling,” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 171–180. Clair, Janet St. “Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 141–156. Danielson, Linda. “The Storytellers in Storyteller,” Studies in American Indian Literatures Series 2, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 21–31. Evasdaughter, Elizabeth N. “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: Healing Ethnic Hatred by Mixed-Breed Laughter,“ MELUS 15, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 83–94. Grobman, Laurie. “(Re)Interpreting Storyteller in the Classroom: Teaching at the Crossroads,” College Literature 27, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 88–110. Hirsch, Bernard A. “ ‘The Telling Which Continues’: Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller,” American Indian Quarterly 12, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 1–28. Jaskoski, Helen. “Words Like Bones,” CEA Critic 55, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 70–84. ———. Leslie Marmon Silko: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998, pp. 13–22.

1172 SINCLAIR, UPTON

Jones, Patricia. “The Web of Meaning: Naming the Absent Mother, in Storyteller.” In “Yellow Woman”: Leslie Marmon Silko, edited by Melody Graulich, 213–232. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Karno, Valerie. “Legal Hunger, Law, Narrative, and Orality in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller and Almanac of the Dead,” College Literature 28, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 29–45. Krumholz, Linda J. “ ‘To Understand This World Differently’: Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller,” Ariel 25, no. 1 (January 1994): 89–113. Krupat, Arnold. “The Dialogic of Silko’s Storyteller.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 55–68. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Nelson, Robert M. “He Said/She Said: Writing Oral Tradition in John Gunn’s ‘Ko-pot Ka-nat’ and Leslie Silko’s Storyteller,” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 5, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 31–50. Ruppert, James. “Dialogism and Mediation in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony,” The Explicator 51, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 129–134. ———. “The Reader’s Lessons in ‘Ceremony,’” Arizona Quarterly 44, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 78–85. ———. “Story Telling: The Fiction of Leslie Silko,” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 53–58. Salyer, Gregory. “Storyteller: Spider-Woman’s Web.” In Leslie Marmon Silko, 58–84. New York: Twayne, 1997. Schweninger, Lee. “Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers,” MELUS 18, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 47–60. St. Clair, Janet. “Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” MELUS 21, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 141–156. Truesdale, C. W. “Tradition and Ceremony: Leslie Marmon Silko as an American Novelist,” North Dakota Quarterly 59, no. 4 (Fall 1991): 200–228. Vangen, Kate Shanley. “The Devil’s Domain: Leslie Silko’s ‘Storyteller.’ ” In Coyote Was Here: Essays on Contemporary Native American Literary and Political Mobilization, edited by Bo Schöler, 116–123. Aarhus, Denmark: Sedkos, 1984. Wallace, Karen L. “Liminality and Myth in Native American Fiction: Ceremony and The Ancient Child,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20, no. 4 (1996): 91–119.

OTHER Native American Authors Project. “Leslie Marmon Silko, 1948–.” Available online. URL: http://www.ipl.org/div/ natam/bin/browse.pl/A75. Accessed September 25, 2005. Leslie Marmon Silko. The Creative Web. Available online. URL: http://www.blitz21.com/creativeweb/silko.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

Voices from the Gaps [VG]. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/VG/Bios/entries/ leslie_marmon.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SINCLAIR, UPTON (UPTON BEALL SINCLAIR) (1878–1968) Upton Sinclair, a prolific novelist and playwright of the “muckraking” school of naturalism, remains best known for “having turned the stomach of a nation” (Bloodworth, 9) with his novel The JUNGLE (1906), an expose of the horrendous working conditions of the contemporary Chicago meat-packing industry. Politically a socialist who would run unsuccessfully in congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial campaigns between 1906 and 1934, Sinclair devoted his novelistic talent to illuminating the evils of capitalism and its effects on the major components of American life. He was nominated for a Nobel Prize for literature in 1932, and was awarded the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon’s Teeth (1942), third in his 11-novel LANNY BUDD series, which relates the world’s history from 1913 through World War II. Upton Sinclair was born on September 20, 1878, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Upton Beall Sinclair, of an impoverished Virginia aristocratic family forced to become a traveling salesman—and, subsequently, an alcoholic—and Priscilla Harden Sinclair, a literate woman from a wealthy Baltimore family. Reared in Baltimore and New York City, Sinclair earned a bachelor’s degree from City College (now City College of the City University of New York) in 1897 and became a fulltime writer for the rest of his life, supporting himself during his graduate studies at Columbia University by pseudonymously writing more than 100 dime novels along with journalistic pieces for radical publications. In 1900 he married Meta H. Fuller and lived in New Jersey; after their divorce in 1912, he married Mary Craig Kimbaugh and moved to Southern California. His early novels—Springtime and Harvest (1901), Prince Hagen (1903), The Journal of Arthur Stirling (1903), and A Captain of Industry (1906), The Overman (1907, written in 1902–03)—were idealistic romances; even while writing these novels, however, his move toward socialistic ideals was evident in Manassas (1904), an abolitionist novel featuring Alan Montague, a plantation owner’s son who abhors the “peculiar institution” of slavery. While many critics consider

SINCLAIR, UPTON 1173

Manassas the best of his early novels, The Jungle made him one of the most prominent of the “muckrakers,” an early-20th-century group whose aim was social reform through public exposure of social and political abuses. It features Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, who, with his entire family, falls victim to the Chicago packing houses and the grim dwelling place of Packingtown until he sees the hope in socialism. The impact of the novel caused President Theodore Roosevelt to invite Sinclair to the White House and Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Sinclair continued to write his muckraking novels until the eve of World War II. Generally considered among his best are King Coal (1917), about conditions in the coal fields of Colorado; Oil: A Novel (1927), a fictional treatment of the Southern California oil fields during the Harding administration; and Boston (1928), a fictional account of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which the two Italian immigrants accused of murder, robbery, and anarchy were summarily hanged. Other novels include The Flivver King (1937), about the auto industry, and Little Steel (1938), about the steel industry. Sinclair also wrote numerous nonfiction books about the excesses of capitalism and its effects on institutionalized religion, education, journalism, and art. Between 1940 and 1953 he completed the ambitious Lanny Budd books, a historical series depicting the Western world from 1913 until 1946 and featuring the protagonist, Lanny Budd, age 13 in World’s End (1940), the first novel in the series, and, like his creator, an enlightened and changed man who has become anticommunist in The Return of Lanny Budd (1953). The much admired Dragon’s Teeth relates the effects of the Nazis on European countries. In 1967 President Lyndon Johnson invited Upton Sinclair to witness the signing of the Wholesome Meat Act, legislation that would complete the work initiated by the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drugs Act many years earlier. On November 25, 1968, Sinclair died in Bound Brook, New Jersey, remembered today, in the words of scholar William Bloodworth, as a writer “who broke new literary ground” (Bloodworth, 64). His papers are housed in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Several films have been based on books by Sinclair, including The Adventurer, produced in 1917 by

U.S. Amusement Corp.; The Money Changers, produced in 1920 by Pathé Exchange; Marriage Forbidden, produced in 1938 by Criterion; and The Gnome-Mobile, produced in 1967 by Walt Disney Productions.

NOVELS Affectionately Eve. New York: Twayne, 1961. Another Pamela; or, Virtue Still Rewarded. New York: Viking, 1950. Boston: A Documentary Novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case. New York: A. C. Boni, 1928; published in England as Boston: A Novel. London: Laurie, 1929. A Captain of Industry. Being the Story of a Civilized Man. Girard, Kans.: Appeal to Reason, 1906. Cicero: A Tragedy of Ancient Rome. privately printed, 1960. The Coal War: A Sequel to King Coal. Edited by John Graham. Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1976. Co-op: A Novel of Living Together. New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. Damaged Goods (novelization of play “Les Avaries” by Eugene Brieux). Philadelphia: Winston, 1913; published as Damaged Goods: A Novel about the Victims of Syphilis. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1948. The Flivver King. Detroit, United Auto Workers, 1937. The Gnomobile: A Gnice Gnew Gnarrative with Gnonsense. but Gnothing Gnaughty (juvenile). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936. Jimmie Higgins. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919. The Journal of Arthur Stirling: “The Valley of the Shadow.” New York: Appleton, 1903. The Jungle. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906. King Coal. New York: Macmillan, 1917. Limbo on the Loose: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1948. Little Steel. New York and Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. Love’s Pilgrimage. New York and London: M. Kennerley, 1911. Manassas: A Novel of the War. New York and London: Macmillan, 1904. Revised edition published as Theirs Be the Guilt: A Novel of the War between the States. New York: Twayne, 1959. The Metropolis. New York: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1908. The Millennium: A Comedy of the Year 2000. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1924. The Moneychangers. New York: B. W. Dodge and Co., 1908. Mountain City. New York: A. C. Boni, 1930. No Pasarán! (They Shall Not Pass): A Story of the Battle of Madrid. Pasadena, Calif.: Author, 1937. Oil! New York: A. C. Boni, 1927.

1174 SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS

100%: The Story of a Patriot. Pasadena, Calif., Author, 1920; published in England as The Spy. London: Laurie, 1921. Our Lady. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1938. The Overman. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1907. Prince Hagen: A Phantasy. Boston: L. C. Page and Co., 1903. Roman Holiday. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931. Samuel the Seeker. New York: B. W. Dodge and Co., 1910. Springtime and Harvest: A Romance. New York: Sinclair Press, 1901. Republished as King Midas, A Romance. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901. Sylvia. Philadelphia and Chicago: Winston, 1913. Sylvia’s Marriage. Philadelphia and Chicago: Winston, 1914. They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922. The Wet Parade. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1931. What Didymus Did. London: Wingate, 1954; published as It Happened to Didymus. New York: Sagamore Press, 1958.

“LANNY BUDD” SERIES: NOVELS Between Two Worlds. New York: Viking, 1941. Dragon Harvest. New York: Viking, 1945. Dragon’s Teeth. New York: Viking, 1942. One Clear Call. New York: Viking, 1948. O Shepherd, Speak. New York: Viking, 1949. Presidential Agent. New York: Viking, 1944. Presidential Mission. New York: Viking, 1947. The Return of Lanny Budd. New York: Viking, 1953. Wide Is the Gate. New York: Viking, 1943. World’s End. New York: Viking, 1940. A World to Win, 1940–1942. New York: Viking, 1946.

SOURCES Blinderman, Abraham, ed. Critics on Upton Sinclair. Miami, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1975. Bloodworth, William A., Jr. Upton Sinclair. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Evans, I. O., ed. An Upton Sinclair Anthology. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. Grenier, Judson A. “Muckraking the Muckrakers: Upton Sinclair and His Peers.” In Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era, edited by David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, 71–92. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Harris, Leon. Upton Sinclair: American Rebel. Boston: Crowell, 1975. Harte, James Lambert. This Is Upton Sinclair. Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1938. Schreiber, Georges, ed. Portraits and Self-Portraits. Boston: Houghton, 1936.

Scott, Ivan. Upton Sinclair: The Forgotten Socialist. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. Sinclair, Upton. American Outpost (autobiography). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. ———. The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair. New York: Harcourt, 1962. Wilson, Christopher. “The Making of a Best Seller, 1906,” The New York Times Book Review, 22 December 1985, pp. 1, 25, 27. Yoder, John A., Upton Sinclair. New York: Ungar, 1975. Youdelman, Jeffrey. “In Search of Lanny Budd,” San Jose Studies 6, no. 1 (February 1980): 87–94.

OTHER Social Security Online History Pages. “Upton Sinclair.” Available online. URL: http://www.ssa.gov/history/sinclair.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Wilson, James C., ed. “Upton Sinclair (1878–1968).” Houghton Mifflin. Available online. URL: http://college. hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/sinclair.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS (1904–1991) Winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature, Polishborn Isaac Bashevis Singer is remarkable for the way he revitalized the Yiddish language through his awardwinning fiction; but he also closely supervised the translations of his work into English. Most of his fiction concerns the disappearance of the European Jewish communities that were held together by faith and culture until the Holocaust destroyed them. Woven into his tales are issues of cultural marginalization and assimilation, as well as individual quests for both romantic love and spiritual fulfillment. Unlike Saul BELLOW, Chaim POTOK, or Philip ROTH, Singer’s work is rooted in the shtetls (Jewish villages of Europe); moreover, he thought of himself as a storyteller first and foremost, and, as a result, much of his fiction resonates with reminders of folklore, fable, and allegory. Although he is best known and won most of his awards as a short story writer, Singer wrote 15 novels, many of them originally published in the Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper. All of them were eventually translated into English. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born on July 14, 1904, in Leoncin, Poland, to author and rabbi Pichose Menachem and Bathsheba Zylberman Singer, the daughter

SINGER, ISAAC BASHEVIS 1175

of a rabbi. From 1920 to 1923, he attended Tachkemoni Rabbinical Seminary in Warsaw. After divorcing his first wife, he immigrated to the United States in 1935, became an editor for the Jewish Daily Forward, and married Alma Haimann on February 14, 1940. His first novella, Satan in Goray (1955), is set in 17th-century Poland and recounts the civil unrest and ensuing war between the Poles and the Ukranians; the book explores conflicts within the Jewish community, some of whom considered Sabbatai Zevi their Messiah. As Singer watched the fall of Warsaw during World War II, he wrote The Family Moskat, an enthusiastically received tribute to an (unnamed) Polish city. Narrated by Asa Heshel, it describes three generations of the Moskat family and their place in the changing Polish Jewish community, overshadowed in the end by the increasing power of Hitler. The novel ends just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. The Manor (1967) and The Estate (1969) are epics that take place in the years of czarist domination. The Magician of Lublin (1960) tells the story of acrobat and magician Yasha Mazur. A troubled individual haunted by the past, Yasha becomes a prototype for later Singer characters: He engages in affairs with five different women. When he realizes he can no longer deceive them, he isolates himself in a tiny cell. The SLAVE (1962), set in the 17th century, describes the life of a fictional Sarah, Joseph’s wife, who converts to Judaism and is ostracized by the entire community. The King of the Fields (1988) reaches back to Poland. Enemies: A Love Story (1972) focuses on a man who seeks to escape horrific memories of the Holocaust by engaging in multiple affairs: Herman Broder is a bigamist who engages in a passionate relationship with another Holocaust survivor. Shosha (1978) features an innocent young woman with a powerful effect on the rabbi’s son: Despite a long period of philandering, he returns to her. For Singer, womanizing seemed to be a panacea of sorts, at least as it interrelates with spiritual issues in some of Singer’s later fiction. Scum (1991) features Max Barabander, who, like Yasha Mazur, finds that his sexual relationships with five different women obviously causes spiritual decline. In The Certificate (1992), Singer features three women—who represent Zionists, communists, and the Jewish community—all engaged in affairs with David

Bendinger, another rabbi’s son who is a writer. In Meshugah (1994), Aaron Greidinger, a Polish Jew, lives in New York, Paris, and Israel, has an affair with a Holocaust survivor, and generally lives a life described in the book’s title: one that’s crazy. Shadows on the Hudson (1998) is set in Manhattan. Polish-born Hertz David Grein attempts to choose among the three women with whom he is passionately involved as he struggles with the interweavings of intellect, politics, and spirituality. After several strokes, Isaac Bashevis Singer died on July 24, 1991, in Florida. He was buried at Beth-El Cemetery in New York City. Along with many of his stories, two of Singer’s novels have been adapted for the screen: The Magician of Lublin, starring Alan Arkin in 1978, and Enemies: A Love Story in 1989. In 2003, playwright Emily Mann adapted Meshugah for the stage.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Certificate. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992. Enemies: A Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. The Estate. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. The Family Moskat. New York: Knopf, 1950. The King of the Fields. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988. The Magician of Lublin. New York: Noonday, 1960. The Manor. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. Meshugah. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. The Penitent. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Reaches of Heaven: A Story of the Baal Shem Tov. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980. Satan in Goray. New York: Noonday, 1955. Scum. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. Shadows on the Hudson. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998. Shosha. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. The Slave. New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1962.

SOURCES Alexander, Edward. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Allentuck, Marcia, ed. The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. Allison, Alida. Isaac Bashevis Singer: Children’s Stories and Memoirs. New York: Twayne, 1996.

1176 SISTER CARRIE

Biletzky, Israel Ch. God, Jew, Satan in the Works of Isaac Bashevis-Singer. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995. Buchen, Irving H. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Farrell, Grace, ed. Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1996. Farrell Lee, Grace. From Exile to Redemption: The Fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987. Gibbons, Frances Vargas. Transgression and Self-Punishment in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Searches. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Goran, Lester. The Bright Streets of Surfside: The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kresh, Paul. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Magician of West 86th Street. New York: Dial, 1979. Madison, Charles A. Yiddish Literature: Its Scope and Major Writers. New York: Ungar, 1968. Malin, Irving, ed. Critical Views of Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: New York University Press, 1969. ———. Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Ungar, 1972. Pearl, Lila. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Life of a Storyteller. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. Pinsker, Sanford. The Schlemiel as Metaphor: Studies in the Yiddish and American Jewish Novel. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Siegel, Ben. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Singer, Isaac Bashevis. Nobel Lecture. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979. Telushkin, Dvorah. Master of Dreams: A Memoir of Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Morrow, 1997. Tuszyanska, Agata. Lost Landscapes: In Search of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Jews of Poland. Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine. New York: Morrow, 1998. Zamir, Israel, and Barbara Harshav. Journey to My Father, Isaac Bashevis Singer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

OTHER Books and Writers. “Isaac Bashevis Singer.” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi.libsinger.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Isaac Bashevis Singer (cassette). Tapes for Readers, 1978. Meet the Newbery Author: Isaac Bashevis Singer (filmstrip with cassette). Miller-Brody Productions, 1976.

SISTER CARRIE THEODORE DREISER (1900) When Sister Carrie was first published in 1900, it was criticized and ultimately suppressed due to its “immoral” content. Today it is hailed by critics as an exemplar of American literary naturalism and a chronicle of turn-of-the-century capitalism and progress. As a journalist turned author, Theodore DREISER’s writing was strongly influenced by the French literary mode of naturalism that sought to make literature an objective and scientific study of human beings, exploring through characters how experience is shaped by a combination of heredity, environment, and chance. Dreiser translated these ideas into an American context, using the rapid growth of cities and consumerism as his naturalistic setting. The eponymous protagonist of Sister Carrie is Carrie Meeber, and the novel opens with her speeding on the train toward Chicago and “the gleam of a thousand lights” (4). She epitomizes the “American Dream,” leaving her small-town life to seek adventure and new experience in unchartered territory. Robert Butler describes this phenomenon in his essay “Movement in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie”: “One of the central and most distinctive values in American culture is a desire for pure motion, movement for its own sake. A relatively new and chronically footless society, America has always placed an unusually high premium on mobility, rather than security and stability” (1). Carrie sets out upon her adventure unsure of her goals, and she continues to drift toward an undefined goal throughout the novel. She travels from Chicago to Montreal, to New York and then from theater to theater. The desire for motion is a desire for change, for progress and selfbetterment, and this is Carrie’s dream and, behind her, the dream of Dreiser and all Americans. From page one of the story, Dreiser emphasizes Carrie’s unformed, malleable nature that is ready to be influenced by her new environment. She is “bright, timid and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth” and her future lies in the hands of the “cunning wiles” of the city (3,4). Dreiser already warns us that it is the influence of others that will determine how she matures: “[e]ither she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an inter-

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE; OR, THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH 1177

mediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.” Only a few paragraphs later, Carrie meets the first person who will steer her path: a salesman, Charles Drouet, who impresses her with his charm and good clothes. With Dreiser’s caution in mind, we follow Carrie through her first experiences of the city. The lure of the big city for job seekers in the late 1800s was its growing industry and rapidly developing consumer section. Carrie is seduced by the city and its endless opportunities, and her desire is stimulated and shaped by the department stores (Gammel, 68). There is little that seems to rouse Carrie’s emotions more than clothes and material possession. Clothes serve as Carrie’s temporary value system, her way of evaluating her new environment. She is immersed within culture, and so her desires become linked to her environment, the city. In Sister Carrie, certain ideas and values espoused by culture are assigned a natural origin to explain their existence. Thus it is “natural” for a woman to act coquettish, to like clothes and ornamentation, and to succumb to emotion. But in Carrie these qualities are, as yet, only partially formed, and as Dreiser will show, it is the battle of supremacy between multiple variables—“instinct and reason, nature and culture, woman and man”—that becomes the pivotal issue of the novel. Carrie’s tale is often described as that of a “fallen woman” as she gives up trying to work for a living early in the novel and moves in with Drouet for the material comfort he offers. Later in the novel, Carrie leaves Drouet for his more sophisticated friend, Hurstwood, whom she later marries (although the marriage is a sham). Until she becomes a successful actress, Carrie relies on men to provide for her, trading her sexuality for material goods in a manner that many critics have described as prostitution. However, despite her traditional denomination as a “fallen woman,” Carrie’s fall seems relatively painless— indeed she lands on her feet. Carrie’s economic and personal success, coupled with an unusual absence of societal punishment for her sexual transgressions, points to a new creed of naturalism. For Dreiser mankind is evolving, climbing upward on a spiritual, intellectual ladder, in search of the inherent truth in morality and wisdom. It is Carrie

who rises above all this, but after satiating her desire for clothes and luxury, Carrie is left “disillusioned . . . still waiting for the halcyon day when she should be led forth among dreams become real” (487). Unable to achieve her dreams, she only rocks restlessly, weary of striving. And she moves even when she sits, back and forward in her rocking chair, “all the while the siren voice of the unrestful was whispering in her ear” (116). In 1981 the University of Pennsylvania Press breathed new life into Sister Carrie by releasing a “complete” and annotated version of the text, restoring previously deleted material and giving the reader three possible endings. Now critics are left to debate both versions of Sister Carrie, guaranteeing its enduring place in contemporary literary discussions.

SOURCES Butler, Robert James. “Movement in Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie,’ ” Dreiser Newsletter 11, no. 1 (1980): 1–12. Cassuto, Leonard, and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. Gammel, Irene. Sexualizing Power in Naturalism: Theodore Dreiser and Frederick Philip Grove. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1994. Pizer, Donald, ed. New Essays on Sister Carrie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Sloane, David E. E. Sister Carrie: Theodore Dreiser’s Sociological Tragedy. New York: Twayne, 1992. Kathryn E. Crowther

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE; OR, THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH KURT VONNEGUT, JR. (1969) It is a mixed blessing that Slaughterhouse-Five, the bestknown of Kurt VONNEGUT, Jr.’s 14 novels, owes at least some of its notoriety to George Roy Hill’s 1972 film adaptation. Although it cannot reproduce the novel’s complex layers of fact and fiction, the film at least expanded the novel’s potential audience beyond Vietnam-era college students and literary intellectuals. Right away the New York Times called the book “tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful,” but at the same time it had been banned or even burned in North Dakota, Michigan, and

1178 SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE; OR, THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH

Kentucky. Three decades later it came in at number 18 on the Modern Library’s list of the 20th century’s top 100 novels. Published almost a decade after CATCH-22, Joseph HELLER’s 1961 absurdist look at World War II, Slaughterhouse-Five takes its predecessor’s deconstruction of calendar time to a new extreme. In his first chapter, Vonnegut offers a rationale for the scrambled chronology as he narrates his preparations for writing a book about the 1945 firebombing of Dresden. He tries to research still-classified government records, tracks down an old war buddy, travels to East Germany on a Guggenheim, ponders possible outlines, and desperately maps subplots in colored crayon on a roll of wallpaper. When he finally proclaims the completion of his “lousy little book” (2) and begins chapter 2, the authorial persona steps aside and we meet alter-ego Billy Pilgrim, a raw American recruit stumbling through the snow as his unit is slaughtered around him in the Battle of the Bulge. His grueling experiences as a POW are based on Vonnegut’s own wartime odyssey, with one significant exception, which amounts to the novel’s central conceit: “Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time. . . . He says” (23). The remainder of the novel tracks Billy’s consciousness as it skips back and forth between his wartime captivity in Germany, his postwar life as a successful but depressed optometrist, and yet another kind of imprisonment in an extraterrestrial zoo, equipped with Sears & Roebuck furniture and household appliances. One night, in the aftermath of his daughter’s wedding reception, he is watching a war movie that, as he drifts unstuck in time, makes more sense seen backward than forward, as “German fighters . . . made everything and everybody as good as new” (74). At this point he is, or imagines himself being, kidnapped by aliens called Trafalmadoreans, who sequester him beneath a transparent dome alongside a pornographic film star, Montana Wildhack. The Trafalmadoreans teach Billy a rigidly deterministic worldview in which past, present, and future coexist, free will does not exist, and humans are sealed in their fate “like bugs trapped in amber” (77). Billy learns to “ignore the awful times and concentrate on the good ones” (117), as marriage and a career are thrust upon him after the war, and posttraumatic

stress causes him to quietly but frequently weep. The Trafalmadoreans’ philosophy comforts and reassures him, and most early readers, including Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and Tony Tanner, assumed that Vonnegut himself recommended passive acceptance as the only possible response to 20th-century horror and dehumanizing materialism. But far from endorsing fatalism, Vonnegut slyly undercuts it by making fatalism’s chief proponent an inarticulate antihero, while damning his passivity with inane dialogue and sarcastic observations like “Everything was pretty much all right with Billy” (157). As Robert Merrill and Peter A. Scholl argue in “Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: The Requirements of Chaos,” and as numerous textual clues and public statements suggest, Vonnegut’s view of human nature is a less cynical one. He attacks the triumphalist conventions of war narratives by juxtaposing Billy’s compensatory fantasy with the realistic horror of the WW II scenes, but also shows moments of unassuming individual heroism and compassion that affirm what he told the 1970 graduating class at Bennington graduates: “I beg you to deny [the contemptibility of man]” (65). If the deliberate silliness of the space-opera clichés (“flying saucers,” “zap guns,” and aliens shaped like plumber’s plungers) were not enough to indicate that Trafalmadore and its frame of reference were not to be taken on the same levels of reality as the POW camp and the autobiographical first chapter, scattered scenes in the novel show Billy assembling this subnarrative from the pulp science fiction of the hack writer Kilgore Trout, one of several Vonnegut characters visiting from his other novels, and a glimpse of Montana Wildhack in a porn-store peep show. Vonnegut’s narrator points out that “They [war veterans] were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe, and science fiction was a big help” (101) and elsewhere satirizes the escapist materialism of suburban life: “Like so many Americans, she [Billy’s mother] was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops” (39). Similarly, Vonnegut transcends traditional metanarratives by abandoning linear chronology and embracing multiple levels of reality while unifying them through a richly interwoven fabric of fragmen-

SLAVE, THE 1179

tary motifs, from images of glowing watch dials, frostbitten feet, and open-mouthed barbershop singers to the smell of “mustard gas and roses,” persistent refrains like a bird calling “poo-tee-weet” and the narrator intoning “so it goes” after every mention of death in the book. Although the immediate aftermath of the Dresden firebombing, in which more civilians died than at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, serves as the novel’s conclusion, bits of Billy Pilgrim’s postbellum life are scrambled into his progress from battlefield to POW camp to Dresden bunker, with the occasional connection of Billy’s experiences to Vonnegut’s by authorial intrusions such as “that was me. That was the author of this book” (125). Instead of using character development, rising conflict, and climax, the novel takes its shape from the sum total of these bits, voiced in Vonnegut’s patient, ironic, and deadpan humorous tone. In refusing to subscribe to any notion of meaning or redemption in warfare, or portray any soldier on either side as a hero or villain, by comparing military recruits to children coerced into a medieval crusade and religious conversion to UFO abduction, Vonnegut creates a faux-naive narrator closer to Billy than to his own war-weary persona, and through the resultant dramatic irony deconstructs all the little fictions that compensate for our modernist angst. Vonnegut’s existential vision owes not a little to Beckett’s, in the relentless scraping away of surfaces to reveal what compassion and agony lie at the heart of the human condition, and the sometimes bitter, sometimes lighthearted humor that makes this process bearable and even entertaining.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Kurt Vonnegut. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000. Bly, William. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron’s Educational Series, 1985. Boon, Kevin A., ed. At Millennium’s End: New Essays on the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Broer, Lawrence R. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. 2nd ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Slaughterhouse-Five”: Reforming the Novel and the World. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Marvin, Thomas F. Kurt Vonnegut: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Merrill, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. ———, and Peter A. Scholl. “Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive: The Requirements of Chaos,” Studies in American Fiction 6 (1978): 65–76. Morse, Donald E. Novels of Kurt Vonnegut: Imagining Being an American. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003. Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughterhouse-Five; or, the Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. 1969. New York: Dell, 1971. ———. “Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970.” In Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. New York: Delacorte Press, 1974.

OTHER “At Last, Kurt Vonnegut’s Famous Dresden Book.” Unsigned review, New York Times Book Review. Available online. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/lifetimes/ vonnegut-slaughterhouse.html. Accessed September 26, 2005. David Fenimore

SLAVE, THE ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER (1962) Isaac Bashevis SINGER once remarked that he would only write a story if he had “the conviction or at least the illusion that I am the only one who could write [it]. If I suspect some of the other writers would be able to do it, this would mean that this is not really my story, it is not any more personal and I would not write it” (BBC interview, 1975). This insistence on the personal connection between author and story provides an excellent starting place for a consideration of The Slave, believed by many critics to be Singer’s finest novel. Singer, who was born in Poland and lived his adult life as an American citizen, wrote not in Polish or English, but in Yiddish. There is therefore an a priori personal relationship between author and work, emanating from his (and our) consciousness of his Jewish authorial identity. Singer worked closely with his English translator, Cecil Hemley, but the fact remains that his American identity was mediated through the language of his Jewish, Eastern European forefathers. The slave of the title is a man named Jacob, whose righteousness and fortitude recalls his biblical namesake. Singer takes 17th-century Poland as his

1180 SLAVE, THE

setting, but the period resonates on several different levels: It can be read an a biblical allegory as well as a representation of Singer’s day, not quite 20 years after the Holocaust. The Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 have destroyed a great deal of Poland’s Jewry, wiping out Jacob’s village, including his wife and children. Jacob himself was taken prisoner and enslaved by a Polish gentile living in the mountains of the surrounding area. Kept there for five years, Jacob is aghast at the behavior and living conditions of the mountain village. Its idol-worshipping inhabitants are little better than animals, who, in stark contrast to Jacob, have no moral code to speak of and no respect for the laws of the land or of any faith. A devout, learned Jew, Jacob retains the observances of his faith, keeping the Sabbath, adhering to the laws of kashrut [kosher dietary laws], ritually washing his hands before meals, and praying frequently. Unable to eat the gentiles’ meat because the animals were not slaughtered according to kosher prescription, Jacob subsists on a vegetarian diet. He is ridiculed by the villagers for this but refuses to assimilate to their lifestyle by eating their food, drinking their wine, or taking a wife from among them. Still, they recognize that there is something to be respected in Jacob, and in spite of their threats, they leave him alone. No matter how strong Jacob’s faith, he cannot prevent himself from falling in love with his master’s daughter, Wanda. Their union is forbidden in both of their communities—it is punishable by death under Polish law of the period for a Jew to marry a Christian, and the penalty in the Jewish community for a Jew to marry a gentile only moderately less harsh: excommunication. Jacob finds himself faced with the destabilizing realization that he is committing a sin by loving Wanda but cannot prevent himself from loving her. He becomes, as Singer writes, “a man at war with himself” (33), and begins an interrogation of his faith that, rather than eroding his commitment, deepens and sustains it while inspiring Wanda to worship the Jewish god as well. When Jacob is suddenly released from bondage, he is forced to leave Wanda behind and return to his community, where because of his years in slavery he is the object of the village’s wonder and affection. He has changed irrevocably: although he held fast to his Ortho-

dox beliefs in the mountains, once he rejoins his community he finds he cannot renounce some of his mountain ways—his vegetarianism, for example, and his newfound appreciation for the countryside. Furthermore, he is haunted by visions of Wanda. Unable to live without her, he returns to the mountains and the two elope together. The conflict experienced by Jacob becomes, as Irving Buchen puts it, “the central issue of the novel”; that is, “whether man can love both God and man” (158). Part 2 of the novel finds the lovers newly married and installed in the village of Pilitz, which is overseen by Lord Adam Pilitzsky, a megalomaniac pedophile (whose daughter killed herself after her father forced himself upon her). Wanda is reborn as Sarah, the name given to all female converts to Judaism, and, posing as a Jewish matron, she pretends to be mute so as not to betray her gentile roots with her elementary Yiddish. Jacob commands the same respect in this community as he has elsewhere, which intensifies the village’s surveillance of his wife. They mock her, calling her “Dumb Sarah,” and wonder how “so handsome a man” could have married such a “nanny goat” (118–19, 124). Sarah lives but for her husband’s company and teaching, and her dedication to her new religion testifies to her own saintliness. The relationship between Jacob and Sarah internally withstands the pressure of their situation, but proves impossible to sustain within the context of the community. Sarah cannot pretend to be mute forever, and she is impelled to speak on several occasions, until finally, in the throes of childbirth, egged on by the cruelty of the community, she betrays her identity. Some critics have found the role of women in Singer’s work to be a particularly vexing subject, and the silence enforced on Wanda/Sarah and her subservience before God and Jacob throughout the novel, until her final rebellion, is worth further interrogation. In spite of its allegorical applications, Singer’s novel is firmly rooted in its historical time and place, particularly through the depiction of the landscape, the reconstruction of the sounds and smells of the communities, and the gentile and Jewish myths and superstitions lacing the narrative. Doubtless this is the mark of Singer’s personal relationship to his story; it is a testament to his power as a writer

SMEDLEY, AGNES 1181

that he captures thus his native land from the exile of his Upper West Side Manhattan apartment.

SOURCES Allentuck, Marcia, ed. The Achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Bailey, Paul. BBC interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer, June 27, 2004. Buchen, Irving. Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Eternal Past. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Farrell, Grace, ed. Critical Essays on Isaac Bashevis Singer. New York: Hall, 1996. Hadda, Janet. Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Halio, Jay L. “The Individual Struggle for Faith in the Novels of I. B. Singer,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 10, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 35–43. Singer, Isaac Balshevis. The Slave. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996. Lauren Elkin

SMEDLEY, AGNES (1892–1950)

Noting that the 1973 reissue of Agnes Smedley’s brilliant autobiographical novel, DAUGHTER OF EARTH, energized renewed interest in the author in the late 20th century, reviewer Deirdre English suggests that Smedley is one of America’s most impressive radicals, that rare breed of activist who moved to the heart of the revolutionary struggle without allowing her judgment to get swept away (English). In another view of Smedley, the NOVA online reviewer notes that Smedley’s ashes were scattered over the Beijing cemetery for revolutionaries, and characterizes her as a triple agent working for the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and the Indian nationalists—and “one of the most prolific female spies of the 20th century” (NOVA). Both these views, incorporated with the status of “feminist heroine,” are true for Ruth Price, who, in her critically acclaimed 2004 biography, says Smedley was a political activist, journalist, and champion of the poor, female, and the oppressed. Agnes Smedley was born on on February 23, 1892, on an Osgood, Missouri, tenant farm, to Charles and Sarah Ralls Smedley, who raised her in Colorado coalmining towns and camps. Her mother was overworked and her father deserted the family when

Smedley was 14 years old. She had little formal education and later, during her ceaseless travels, attended university classes as often as possible. As a journalist, she traveled in the United States, Germany, Russia, and China, campaigning with Margaret Sanger on behalf of birth control for women and advocating the cause of the downtrodden in both China and India. She married once, in 1912, to Ernest Brudin, an engineer, and, after their divorce, had numerous longterm relationships with men who were involved in revolutionary causes and espionage. In 1929, Smedley published her first book and only novel—she would go on to write numerous works of nonfiction—Daughter of Earth. The hero is Marie Rogers, a poverty-stricken rural schoolteacher who, like Smedley, becomes an internationally known journalist and revolutionary. Along the way, Marie examines issues like the double standard for women and the near enslavement that sometimes grows from physical intimacy: She concludes that “Freedom is higher than love. At least today. Perhaps one day the two will be one” (13). During the McCarthy era, Smedley was accused of being a Soviet spy (true) and of being a member of the Communist Party (false—she was openly critical of Joseph Stalin). She moved to England and died of acute circulatory failure in May 1950. Her manuscripts are housed at the Hayden Library of Arizona State University at Tempe.

NOVEL Daughter of Earth. New York: Coward-McCann, 1929; revised edition, 1935; published with a foreword by Alice Walker. New York: Feminist Press, 1987.

SOURCES Guttman, Sondra. “Working Toward ‘Unity in Diversity’: Rape and the Reconciliation of Color and Comrade in Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth,” Studies in the Novel 32, no. 14 (Winter 2000): 488. Price, Ruth. The Lives of Agnes Smedley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

OTHER Anonymous NOVA reviewer. “Agnes Smedley. Secrets, Lies, and Atomic Spies.” Available online. URL: http://www. pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_smedley.html. Accessed September 26, 2005.

1182 SMILEY, JANE

Casey, Dennis. “Triple Agent Agnes Smedley,” Heritage. Air Intelligence Agency, Lackland Air Force Base, February 2004. Available online. URL: http://aia/lackland.af.mil/ homepages/pa/spokesman/feb04/heritage.cfm. Accessed September 26, 2005. English, Deirdre. “Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical,” Washington Monthly (October 1988) Available online. URL: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/ mi_m1316/is_n9_v20/ai_6760766. Accessed September 26, 2005.

SMILEY, JANE (JANE GRAVES SMILEY) (1949– ) “To live in the quotidian world of Jane Smiley is to exercise will and to make decisions and choices, and to watch their implications play out over time,” observes scholar Neil Nakadate. Because she lacks allegiance to “uncertainty” and “indeterminacy,” suggests Nakadate, Smiley is distinctly at odds with postmodernism and poststructuralism (Nakadate, 24). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991 for A THOUSAND ACRES (1991), a novel that focuses on Midwestern families, their problems, and their land. She has been especially praised for her detailed evocations of women, usually stouthearted and strong wives and mothers whose decisions have enormous impact on their familys’ lives. Jane Smiley was born on September 26, 1949, in Los Angeles, California, to James Laverne Smiley, an army officer and aeronautical engineer, and Frances Nuelle Graves Smiley, a journalist. Educated at Vassar College, where she earned her bachelor’s degree (1971), and at the University of Iowa, where she earned her master of arts (1975), master of fine arts (1976), and doctoral degrees (1978), Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980. Set on an Illinois horse farm, it tells the tale of Kate Karlson, mother of four teenagers, who so blindly pursues her desire to produce a champion horse and rider that she cannot see that her ambitions will result in family disaster. At Paradise Gate (1981) features the elderly and contemplative Anna Robinson, who played the matriarch despite having married the coldly abusive Ike; she realizes, late in life, that she stayed married at the expense of her emotional life. Duplicate Keys (1984), Smiley’s third novel, is a suspense story set in New York City.

The romance of librarian Alice Ellis disintegrates when two Minnesota friends are murdered and Ellis meets a police detective and reunites with an old friend. The Greenlanders (1988), an epic novel that reflects Smiley’s academic specialization in medieval literature, is set in 14th-century Greenland and features several generations of the Viking Gunnarsson family. Smiley traces the day-to-day relationships that result in family tragedy and the ultimately doomed Greenland colonies. Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989) features Rachel Kinsella, a 52-year-old wife and mother who is extraordinary, not in that she followed her passions into an extramarital affair, resulting in her husband’s abandonment of her and his forbidding her to see the children, but in her acknowledgment of responsibility for her choices that elevated her passions as a woman over the joys of motherhood. Whereas Ordinary Love is narrated from Rachel’s perspective, Good Will, the companion novella, uses a male perspective and constitutes a sharp critique of Western patriarchy. A Thousand Acres (1991), a feminist recasting of Shakespeare’s King Lear, has at its center Larry Cook, the father, and his decision to leave his multimillion-dollar farm to his three daughters, Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. To the epic sweep of this novel of the Midwest, Smiley adds the dark secret of incest and these central issues: the absence of the mother, the father’s abuse of his daughters, and the resulting impact on the daughters’ lives, marriages, and relationships to each other as sisters. The darkly comic MOO (1995), a satire of academic life at Smiley’s agricultural college, Moo U., makes clear that the lust, avarice, and puffed-up egotism of the professoriat lie beneath layer upon layer of hypocrisy. According to Nakadate, Moo completed the third of the four genres of novels that Smiley had long planned to write: epic, tragedy, comedy, and romance. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998) is a mid19th-century Midwestern story of one woman’s romance. Lida Harkness marries Thomas Newton, a Massachusetts abolitionist, and faces with him the difficulties of an emerging nation and the privations of pioneer life. Smiley’s most recent novel is Horse Heaven (2000), a sprawling and insightful look into the world of the American racetrack through the eyes of the horses.

SMITH, LEE 1183

Smiley has been married three times: to John Whiston from 1970 to 1975; to William Silag, an editor, from 1978 to 1986; and to Stephen M. Mortensen, a screenwriter, from 1987 to 1997. She lives and writes in Carmel, California. In 1997, A Thousand Acres was adapted for film by Laura Jones and released by Touchstone Pictures in 1997, and the novella The Age of Grief was adapted by Craig Lucas as The Secret Lives of Dentists, directed by Alan Rudolph and starring Hope Davis and Campbell Scott.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Age of Grief. New York: Knopf, 1987. The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. New York: Knopf, 1998. At Paradise Gate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981. Barn Blind. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Duplicate Keys. New York: Knopf, 1984. The Greenlanders. New York: Knopf, 1988. Horse Heaven. New York: Knopf, 2000. Moo. New York: Knopf, 1995. Ordinary Love and Good Will. New York: Knopf, 1989. A Thousand Acres. New York: Knopf, 1991.

SOURCES Nakadate, Neil. Understanding Jane Smiley. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Sheldon, Barbara H. Daughters and Fathers in Feminist Novels. New York: Peter Lang, 1997.

OTHER Audio Interview with Jane Smiley. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/janesmiley. Accessed September 26, 2005. Author Spotlight: Jane Smiley. Random House Web site. Available online. URL: http://www.randomhouse.ea/catalog/ author.pperl?authorid=28760. Accessed September 26, 2005. Review of House Heaven. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com.books/review/2000/04/17/smiley. Accessed September 26, 2005. Smiley, Jane. “Take a Wild Ride with Jane Smiley’s Spirited New Heroine. By Ellen Kanner. BookPage. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9804bp/ jane_smiley.html. Accessed September 26, 2005.

SMITH, LEE (1944– ) A novelist and short story writer who writes about the mountains of Appalachia where she was reared, Lee Smith has emerged as a significant force in contemporary Amer-

ican literature. In a recent interview, she stressed the importance of recording regional distinctions “because of the homogenization that is going on in American culture. One place is becoming much like every other place. I am proud of my work in recording these regional distinctions and in creating a record of the values, mores, and manners of the Appalachian South” (Reading Group Guides). In addition, Smith experiments frequently with technique, particularly with point of view. She creates ordinary characters with singular voices who come vividly alive on the pages of her nine novels, often through the use of humor. Although critics continue to debate the ranking of her works, most agree that Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) and Oral History (1983) top the list. Smith was born on November 1, 1944, in Grundy, Virginia, to Ernest Lee Smith, a successful entrepreneur, and Virginia Marshall Smith, a schoolteacher. She was educated at Hollins College, where she wrote her first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed (1968), published the year after she received her bachelor of arts degree and married poet James E. Seay. The novel examines the impact of her parents’ divorce on a nineyear-old girl, Susan Tobey, who learns about life partly through her encounter with a disturbed city boy. Her next novel, Something in the Wind (1971), again depicts the initiation of a young girl, Brooke Kincaid, and the third, Fancy Strut (1973) (a term used by cheerleaders to describe a goose step), examines the novel’s central event, a sesquicentennial, from multiple perspectives. In Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), Crystal Spangler—in addition to enduring rape—must choose between the social world of beauty contests and politics, and the world of her sometimes suicidal lover. After her marriage dissolved in 1981, Smith began to write the Appalachian novels, emphasizing both the importance of language and the inescapability of the past. Oral History (1983) depicts four generations of the Cantrell family through the point of view of Granny, and Family Linen (1985)—dedicated to her second husband, journalist Hal Crowther, whom Smith married in 1985—unites the characters through a wedding and a funeral, both of which initiate change. Fair and Tender Ladies (1988) uses letters to reveal Ivy

1184 SNOW WHITE

Rowe’s quest for meaning and identity. These last two novels also reveal Smith’s increasing use of subversive language, particularly with regard to the artistic process. The Devil’s Dream (1992) follows a musical family who sing country music; gradually they migrate from the Virginia mountains to Nashville. Smith’s most recent work, The Last Girls (2003), inspired by her memories of a rafting trip down the Mississippi River during her years at Hollins College (Author interview), explores the differences between expectations and reality in the lives of women who have a reunion many years after their college river trip. Lee Smith was honored by Emory and Henry College on October 11, 1985, the date of their Lee Smith Literary Festival. Smith continues to write and teach at North Carolina State University.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Black Mountain Breakdown. New York: Putnam’s, 1980. The Christmas Letters: A Novella. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1996. The Devil’s Dream. New York: Putnam’s, 1992. Fair and Tender Ladies. New York: Putnam’s, 1988. Family Linen. New York: Putnam’s, 1985. Fancy Strut. New York: Harper, 1973. The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed. New York: Harper, 1968. The Last Girls. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2003. Oral History. New York: Putnam’s, 1983. Saving Grace. New York: Putnam’s, 1995. Something in the Wind. New York: Harper, 1971. We Don’t Love with Our Teeth. Portland, Ore.: Chinook Press, 1994.

SOURCES Hill, Dorothy Combs. Lee Smith. New York: Twayne, 1992. Hobson, Fred. “A Question of Culture—and History: Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, and Barry Hannah.” In The Southern Writer in the Postmodern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Jones, Anne Goodwyn. “The World of Lee Smith,” Southern Quarterly 22 (Fall 1983): 115–139. Reprinted in Women Writers of the Contemporary South, edited by Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Parrish, Nancy C. Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Smith, Rebecca. Gender Dynamics in the Fiction of Lee Smith: Examining Language and Narrative Strategies. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1997.

OTHER Random House. Reading Group Guides. Author Interview. Available online. URL: http://www.readinggroupguides. com/guides/news_of_the_spirit-author.asp#bio. Accessed September 26, 2005.

SNOW WHITE DONALD BARTHELME (1967) Postmodern in its sensibility, Donald BARTHELME’s prose has been noted for its “nonlinear narration, sportive form and cohabitation of radical fantasy with quotidian detail” (Barth, 3). His first of four novels, Snow White is an experimental work that utilizes subversive literary strategies to critique contemporary America. In his text, Barthelme parodies the fairy tale to such an extent that the familiar Grimm tale and its characters are barely recognizable. No longer is the title protagonist characterized by innocence, purity, and her desire to subscribe to fixed roles relegated to females in children’s fables. The Snow White of Barthelme’s story is creatively adventurous, sexually promiscuous, and seeks alternatives to her mundane existence. Finding herself in a contemporary world marked by the homogenization of culture, a weakening of moral values, and the breakdown of meaningful communication and connection, Barthelme’s protagonist yearns for new modes of expression and a language that is motivated by a fluid, innovative spirit. Voicing her regret that her imagination is stirring amidst stale forms of articulation, Barthelme’s Snow White states, “Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (12). In like fashion, Snow White desires a different world than the one in which she lives. While penning a pornographic poem whose theme is loss, Snow White tells the seven men with whom she resides that the privation about which she writes “must be laid . . . to a failure of the imagination. [She has] not been able to imagine anything better” (65). Snow White’s frustration stems from the prevailing contradiction inherent in the ideology of the day. That is, contemporary America promises greater possibilities than it can realistically bestow, and this creates perpetual disappointment and insatiability. “I have conflicting ideas,” admits a rueful Snow White. “But the main theme that runs through my brain is that what is, is insufficient” (141). In addition to the said

SNOW WHITE 1185

creative paucity that torments her, the grounding values that were prevalent in fairy tale, are lost to Barthelme’s contemporary Snow White. These values have been buried by the “mindless consumption of ideas,” material goods, and information that has resulted in an equanimity of all perspectives, interpretations, ideologies, and moral posturing (Morace, 167). Barthelme’s characters lament the “unbearable consensus” (72) that they deem a consequence of this espoused relativity, and heed that one “should bear in mind multiplicity, and forget about uniqueness” (81) in the contemporary world. Contributing to the theme of cultural deficiency in the novel are the substitution of the seven dwarfs’ befitting Disney appellations for otherwise common names (Trachtenberg, 171) and the fact that they work to perpetuate the marketing schemes that exploit consumers’ desires. In the context of Barthelme’s novel, the seven dwarfs embody what critic Robert A. Morace calls a “dwarf culture” (Morace, 171). Bill, Clem, Dan, Edward, Henry, Hubert, and Kevin wash buildings and cook Chinese food in vats to sell as baby food. Demonstrating a deleterious marketing savvy that values attractivelooking merchandise above quality wares, one of the seven dwarfs tells the reader: “It is amazing how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow” (24). Further satirizing consumer culture, Edward focuses on its veneration of mass consumption when he ironically declares later in the novel that “[w]ere it not for [one’s] enormous purchasing power and the heedless gaiety with which it is exercised, we would still be going around dressed in skins probably, with no big-ticket items to fill the empty voids, in our homes and in our hearts” (105). Underlying Edward’s playful tone is the grave, fundamental paradox associated with the amassment of material goods: The more one accumulates, the greater the void generated by the emotional dissatisfaction that ensues. This paradox informs the metafictional strategy of the novel. As the novel progresses, the reader becomes increasingly aware of its lack of a conventional plot, and that many of the characters’ anxieties emanate from the author’s search

for a new form of literature that can adequately depict the uncertainties prevalent in the contemporary world. In its search for a new language to delineate the incertitude that pervades contemporary America, Barthelme’s Snow White spawns far more questions than it answers. For example, it questions the extent to which a prince can exist within a literature that observes America’s long-standing “democratic tradition which is anti-aristocratic” (147). “Egalitarianism precludes princeliness,” asserts Clem. “And yet our people are not equal in any sense” (147). Satirizing America’s exchange of one form of social stratification for another, Barthelme portrays Paul, Snow White’s would-be prince, as an easily distracted welfare recipient. “Probably I should go out and effect a liaison with some beauty who needs me, and save her, and ride away with her flung over the pommel of my palfrey, I believe I have that right. But on the other hand, this duck-with-blue-cheese sandwich that I am eating is mighty attractive and absorbing, too” (33–34). Role reversal, uncertainty, and contradiction lead to anxieties associated with self-doubt, identity, and the nature of reality. “Paul?” Snow White asks herself. “Is there a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain?” (108). Given that subjectivity, relativity, and the notion of endless possibility rule the contemporary environment, perhaps the only way to a purer form of innovation is to “retract everything” (19), to start fresh, so as to find a new form that allows for possibility, but also does not compromise uniqueness. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White is an experiment in doing just that.

SOURCES Barth, John. “Thinking Man’s Minimalist: Honoring Barthelme.” In Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme, edited by Richard F. Patterson, 1–4. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Barthelme, Donald. Snow White. 1967. Reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Morace, Robert A. “Donald Barthelme’s Snow White: The Novel, the Critics, and the Culture.” In Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme, edited by Richard F. Patterson, 164–172. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992. Trachtenberg, Stanley. Understanding Donald Barthelme. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Alex Ambrozic

1186 SO BIG

SO BIG EDNA FERBER (1924)

So Big is the first in a series of regional novels for which Edna FERBER is well known, among them Showboat (1926), Cimarron (1930), Saratoga Trunk (1941), Come and Get It (1944), Giant (1952), and Ice Palace (1958). So Big won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925, the highest level of critical acclaim that Ferber would receive in her career. So Big prefigures Ferber’s later work in its regional subject matter, its themes of idealism and adversity, and its storyline of the indomitable woman who must face her future with no help from the men in her life. The novel is set in the fictional community of High Prairie, a fertile farmland community south of Chicago where first-generation Dutch truck farmers cultivate vegetables for the city’s great markets. The book spans the years from the 1880s through the early 1920s during Chicago’s transformation from a frontier town to what the poet Carl Sandburg called the “Hog Butcher for the World” in his 1916 poem, “Chicago.” The title So Big comes from the nickname its heroine, Selina Peake DeJong, gives to her son, Dirk, from the familiar game that mothers play with their children, asking “How big is my baby?” to which the child answers “Soooo big!” with outstretched arms. Selina is the only child of a widower gambler, Simeon Peake, whom she adores despite his unreliable ways. When Simeon dies, he leaves her a small sum of money and two diamonds, but her intangible inheritance is already worth far more to her. She shares Simeon’s imagination, his zest for living, and his understanding that “there are only two kinds of people in the world that really count. One kind’s wheat and the other kind’s emerald” (11). She carries this knowledge with her all her life, but imagination is a scarce and undervalued commodity in a community consumed with the brutal farm work that demands all its inhabitants’ time and energy. For example, when early in her career as a prairie schoolteacher, Selina comments that the fields of cabbages are beautiful, Klaas Poole, the farmer with whom she boards, laughs at her. Only Roelf, the sensitive 12-year-old son of Klaas and his wife, Martje, finds encouragement in Selina’s ideas. Ferber’s purpose is to show the vitality of the imagination and the life-enhancing force of a love of beauty. Selina’s life is uneventful by most measures, but her quiet crusade to keep beauty alive in her own life and

in that of her son animates the book. Like Ferber’s other works, which frequently portray absent or undependable men and stalwart women, So Big includes a bittersweet love story. Selina falls in love with a handsome young farmer, Pervus DeJong, and marries him, but she does not live happily ever after, for her life becomes one of ceaseless toil, just like that of the women around her. Her work is even harder to bear because Pervus, like Klaas, laughs off her ideas for draining land and making the farm more productive. When Pervus dies, leaving Selina and Dirk near poverty on their unprofitable land, Selina takes on the man’s job of farming and taking the produce to market. Although Selina cheerfully sacrifices her own life for Dirk’s, saying that hers does not count, the book contains strong feminist themes, especially in this section. To the minister’s pious platitudes about God providing for the weak and watching over the fallen sparrows, Selina replies, “I don’t see . . . what good that does the sparrow, once it’s fallen” (161). To a farmer who suggests that she should stay in her kitchen, where women belong, she snaps, “Don’t talk to me like that, you great stupid! What good does it do a woman to stay home in her kitchen if she’s going to starve there, and her boy with her?” (178). Selina vows to make a success of the farm and her life, and she does so with some help from August Hempel, the king of the meatpacking industry and the father of her school friend Julie. The second half of the book follows Dirk’s experiences as a student at Midwest University, as a struggling architect, and, after World War I, as a bond salesman. He soon rises to the top with the help of Paula, Julie’s wealthy and unhappily married daughter. With the introduction of Paula, Ferber begins to use the symbol of hands to indicate character in this work: For example, Dirk is attracted to Paula, but he hesitates at first after observing that her hands are not large and generous like his mother’s but small and grasping. He uneasily acknowledges that “her lean, dark, eager fingers had manipulated the mechanism that ordered his career” (299), but he continues to permit her to do so, becoming rich in worldly goods but abandoning his love of architecture. When Selina playfully challenges him about his profession, asking “How big is my son?” Dirk answers, “ ‘So big!’ ” and “measured a very tiny

SO FAR FROM GOD 1187

space between thumb and forefinger” (298). Outwardly successful, Dirk is miserable when he falls in love with an artist, Dallas O’Mara, who tells him that she can love only someone whose scarred and calloused hands reveal his struggle toward his dream. In short, Dirk does not qualify, for as Dallas tells him, “you haven’t a mark on you” (348). He recognizes the depth of his failure at a gathering at Selina’s farm, where Selina and Roelf Poole, now a famous artist, meet again. Recalling what Selina had told him about her father long ago, Roelf, Selina’s spiritual son, tells her, “You’re wheat, Selina,” to which she replies, “And you’re emerald,” thus cementing the unspoken connection between them (357). Hearing this and seeing Dallas drawn to Roelf rather than himself, Dirk reflects, “You’re nothing but a rubber stamp, Dirk DeJong” (358). Recognizing that he is neither wheat nor emerald, Dirk sees that he has squandered his own store of the creative force that Selina has put into her life, and that Roelf and Dallas have put into their art. As he prepares to meet Paula that evening, he sees himself trapped, for he understands that the rest of his life will center on the meaningless repetition of inconsequential acts. Despite its initial positive reception, So Big has inspired almost no critical commentary over the past several decades. Much of the recent work on Ferber has focused on her earlier work, the Emma McChesney stories, which featured a traveling saleswoman, or the recent rediscovery of Ferber as a Jewish-American writer. Ferber’s other novels have also received little critical attention, a trend that has shifted somewhat with recent essays on Ferber’s treatment of race and ethnicity in Showboat.

SOURCES Batker, Carol. “Literary Reformers: Crossing Class and Ethnic Boundaries in Jewish Women’s Fiction of the 1920s,” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 81–104. Berlant, Lauren. “Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat.” In Cultural Institutions of the Novel, edited by Deidre Warner and William B. Lynch, 399–422. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Ferber, Edna. A Peculiar Treasure. New York: Doubleday Doran & Company Inc., 1939.

———. So Big. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1924. Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith. Ferber: A Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Horowitz, Steven P., and Miriam J. Landsman. “The Americanization of Edna: A Study of Ms Ferber’s Jewish American Identity,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1982): 69–80. Shapiro, Ann R. “Edna Ferber, Jewish American Feminist,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 20, no. 2 (2001): 52–60. Shaughnessy, Mary Rose. Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber. New York: Gordon, 1976. Donna Campbell

SO FAR FROM GOD ANA CASTILLO (1998) At the beginning of the novel, Sofia, the main character, embodies the figure of the surrogate mother and satisfying wife; she lives an uneventful family life until her youngest daughter dies. Surprisingly, the threeyear-old girl, later referred to as “La Loca,” wakes up in her coffin in the middle of her funeral, provoking a fright among the church congregation. From that moment on, Sofi changes her priorities in life, especially after her husband, Domingo, abandons her. Then she decides to take the reins not only of her house but of her business, the “Carne Buena Carnecería” (Good Meat Butchers). Her ambition later leads her to political power, becoming mayor of the village of Tomé. Not satisfied with her political success, she rises still higher after the second death of La Loca, founding a religious association, Mothers of Martyrs and Saints (M.O.M.A.S), which places her at the pinnacle of religious authority. She even defies the traditional beliefs of the Catholic Church: She has founded a true matriarchy at the top of which, as a pope herself, Sofi sits as “la first presidenta” (the first president). Following the same religious symbolism, the names of the characters are allegorical: Domingo stands for the laziness of Sunday, Sofia means “wisdom,” and the three eldest daughters bear the names of the three theological virtues in Spanish: Esperanza (Hope), Caridad (Charity) and Fe (Faith). Esperanza, the eldest, is a civil rights activist, the rebel woman involved in Chicano movements and demonstrations together with her boyfriend,

1188 SO FAR FROM GOD

Rubén, who betrays her and their free-love agreement by marrying a rich woman. She dies in Saudi Arabia, where she is sent as a correspondent during the Gulf War. Caridad, divorced from her high school sweetheart, Memo, loves partying and having different lovers until she suffers a sexual attack, and miraculously her disfigured body is completely healed. From then on, Caridad learns, through Doña Felicia, the work of the curandera (healer) and she reveals to be a good “channeler,” or medium. Finally, she finds real love in a woman called Esmeralda, whom she meets during a pilgrimage to Chimayó on Good Friday. However, Franciso El Penitente had also fallen in love with her during that pilgrimage and starts stalking her. Both women, tired of fighting for their love, end their lives by jumping off the mesa and disappearing into thin air, apparently supported by the hands of the goddess Tsichtinako. The life Fe dreams of has nothing to do with her sister. She aims to marry her boyfriend, Tom, keep her job in a bank, and have children. However, Tom breaks their engagement and she has a nervous breakdown, screaming nonstop for days and damaging her vocal cords irreversibly. “La Gritona” (the Yeller) as people call her during the period, loses her job, although she finds a better paying one with ACME and marries her cousin Casimiro. La Loca, the resurrected child, receives this nickname from the other villagers because she grows up to become a weird person who avoids contact with other human beings, although, paradoxically, she dies of AIDS. The reader never learns her real name and, to suggest her mythic status, Castillo makes her acquainted with La Llorona, a mythical figure of Chicano folklore, a woman who appears close to water, crying for her drowned children. La Llorona functions as a link with the supernatural in the novel, for she tells La Loca about the death of Esperanza; moreover it is after her visits that Sofi’s family sees the lost daughter who returns in “ectoplasmic” form. The presence of La Llorona, far from being casual, contains Castillo’s attempt to rescue female figures from the negative meanings of Chicano tradition. When Doña Felicia, the bonesetter, teaches Caridad to become a good curandera, she, too, acts according to the tradition of recovery. Common healing remedies from Doña Felicia

are provided in the narrative. New Mexico, where the novel is set, has traditionally been considered a land of enchantment and fantasy, and so Castillo states when she calls Santa Fe, the capital city of the state, “Fanta Se” because its inhabitants readily accept the supernatural as part of their lives. So Far from God constitutes a protest against the injustices of the world; therefore, all Castillo’s protagonists—except for Sofia, who has been called to make the change in the world—die tragically. Fe’s death is condemnation of the environmental racism of the ACME company, which makes its employees use toxic components that damage their health and drive them to a sure death. Castillo draws attention to abuses of the female body by means of the strange circumstances of the sisters’ deaths: Caridad’s body vanishes in the air, Esperanza’s is missing, and Fe’s is destroyed by chemicals. Together with La Loca, whose ill body has shrunk so much that there is not much left to bury after her death, they become martyrs of a society that dehumanized them when they were alive. The echo of old-fashioned novels of romance and chivalry appears in the titles of the chapters which also remind us of Latin American telenovelas (soap operas). This technique has also been used by postmodern authors. The most instructive way to view this novel is as parody: of institutions, of medicine, of religion, of patriarchy. However, Castillo’s humor pales in the failure to change a world where women receive the worst part, even though some, like Sofi, become empowered and successfully challenge the established rules.

SOURCES Maciel, David R., Isidro D. Ortiz, María Herrera-Sobek, eds. Chicano Renaissance: Contemporary Cultural Trends. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Madsen, Deborah L. Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995. Zinn, Maxine Baca. “Political Familism: Toward Sex Role Equality in Chicano Families.” In Latina Issues: fragments of historia (ella) (herstory), edited by Antoinette Sedillo López, 237–251. New York: Garland Publications, 1999. Imelda Martín Junquera

SON AT THE FRONT, A 1189

SON AT THE FRONT, A EDITH WHARTON (1923) A Son at the Front is a political novel with a specific propagandist purpose. In 1907, Edith WHARmoved to France. During World War I, she visited the French front “from end to end” (Wharton 1915, 216), established three major charities (Price, 40, 48), and experienced bombardment personally at home in Paris (Wharton 1934, 357). It was a visit to a hospital at Chalons-sur-Marne for the French Red Cross that made her “feel the urgency of telling my rich and generous compatriots something of the desperate needs of hospitals in the war-zone” (Wharton 1934, 352). Her particular propagandist task was to engender knowledge of, and sympathy for, the Allies’ cause among her fellow countrymen, in order to persuade them to fight for it. Politically, this matched her friend, Theodore Roosevelt’s, policy of “preparedness,” expounded in America and the World War (1915) and America and Preparedness (campaign speeches of 1916 collected in 1917), his platform for the 1916 presidential election. (Wharton makes explicit reference to Roosevelt’s “preparedness” in A Son at the Front [176].) To garner support for France, Wharton sent dispatches to Scribner’s Magazine during the war (collected as Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort [1915]), wrote essays on the French way of life (collected as French Ways and Their Meaning [1919]), and compiled a “gift-book,” The Book of the Homeless (1916), soliciting contributions from distinguished writers and artists. In addition to A Son at the Front, she wrote a novella (The Marne [1918]) and several short stories (notably “How to Write a War Story” [1919]) about the conflict. A Son at the Front not only bridges the gap between conditions in France and Wharton’s American readership’s knowledge of them, but also reveals another array of gaps. There is the obvious gap between the front, known only, as Shari Benstock points out, through rumour, speculation and clairvoyance (Benstock, xiv), and the rear. There is the time lapse between the end of the war and the novel’s publication. (“Where in the world has Mrs. Wharton been all this time?” asked one reviewer in 1923 [Rascoe 17].) There is the “unbridgeable abyss” (212) between the artist, John Campton, and his son George, whose true intentions elude Campton for most of the novel, although TON

the reader long guesses them. The gulf is complicated, but never eradicated, by Campton’s growing feeling (intended as a parallel to American public opinion with regard to the country’s involvement as a whole?) that George ought to fight, and to want to fight. There is another disparity, economic this time, between Campton and the Brants. There is the experiential difference between the combatants and those who view the war as “unwarrantable interference” with their private plans and to whom, in any event, approaches to the front are “sternly forbidden” (11, 71). There is the generational divide. Campton remarks: “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy. . . . As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning with the women” (103). Finally, there is the particularly blatant difference between fighting Europe and pre-Lusitania, noninterventionist Wilsonian United States: “cant and cowardice had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too proud to fight for others” (135). But perhaps the most significant gap in A Son at the Front is the age-old one between art and life. Shari Benstock makes the intriguing point that, in the novel, the “front” is hidden from view even though Wharton, with her firsthand Fighting France experiences, could have described it in detail had she chosen to (Benstock, xiii). Campton, in the early months of the conflict, feels that “if ever there came a time for art to interpret the war . . . the day was not yet” (71). There is a need for distance— for a gap—before art can engage with experience. Before Wharton could write A Son at the Front or “deal objectively with the stored-up emotions of those years,” she had “to get away from the present altogether” (Wharton 1934, 369). It took her five years to look back.

SOURCES Benstock, Shari. “Introduction.” A Son at the Front by Edith Wharton. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995, pp. vii–xvi. Price, Alan. The End of the Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton and the First World War. London: Robert Hale, 1996. Rascoe, Burton. “A Son at the Front,” New York Tribune 9 September 1923, 17–18.

1190 SONE, MONICA

Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York and London: D. Appleton, 1934. ———. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort. London: Macmillan, 1915. ———. A Son at the Front. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995.

SONG OF SOLOMON TONI MORRISON

Kate McLoughlin

SONE,

MONICA

Lagonoy, Geoff. “Putting Asian Americans on the Bookshelf,” International Examiner (September 4, 1994). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www.highbeam. com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:2279167. Accessed September 26, 2005.

(1977) Toni MORRISON elevates storytelling to literary

(KAZUKO

ITOI)

(1919– ) Monica Sone wrote NISEI DAUGHTER, a novel-like memoir about the Japanese internment experience during World War II. The book is often compared with John OKADA’s NO-NO BOY, a story about Ichiro, a young Japanese American imprisoned during World War II, and his return to his former home in Seattle, Washington, or Julia Otsuka’s much more recent When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel based on Otsuka’s mother’s experience in an internment camp during World War II. Monica Sone was born Kazuko Itoi in 1919 in Seattle to Japanese immigrant parents who owned and operated a hotel on Seattle’s Skid Road. As a child of first-generation Japanese Americans, she realized that she was both Japanese and American. She uses the image of “two heads” to describe this phenomenon. She was interned with her family at the Minidoka Camp in Topaz, Idaho, but, as a Nisei, was allowed to move outside the camp and find work. After the war, Sone received a bachelor’s degree from Hanover College and a master’s degree in clinical psychology in 1949 from Case Western Reserve University. She stayed in Ohio and married Geary Sone. Nisei Daughter, published four years later, is significant as both a historical account of the internment and a vivid and literary portrayal of key moments in the life of a bicultural American woman. Nisei Daughter is used in both literature and history courses along with such novels as Ralph ELLISON’s INVISIBLE MAN, or Anzia YEZIERSKA’s The BREAD GIVERS. NOVEL/MEMOIR Nisei Daughter. New York: Little, Brown, 1953.

SOURCES Jacobs, Matthew. “Monica Sone: Nisei Daughter.” Available online. URL: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/ lavender/389/noframes/jacobs.html. Accessed September 26, 2005.

art—weaving poetry, myth, song and folklore together to preserve black culture and history. In 1993 she earned international recognition for her body of work when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her third novel, Song of Solomon, Morrison creates evocative images of urban northern life contrasted against rural Southern life for four generations of an African-American family. Deeply layered with folklore that keeps African and Southern culture alive even among the city dwellers, the novel delivers a poignant and intimate exploration of the family of Macon Dead—the name given to the patriarch by a federal agent and imparted to the next two generations. The novel opens as a man “flies” to his death from the cupola of Mercy Hospital in 1931—an event that induces the third Macon Dead’s birth in the same hospital. Later dubbed “Milkman” because his lonely mother, Ruth, in naive perversity, nursed him until he was four years old, Milkman is connected to the theme of “flight” throughout the novel. Milkman’s inauspicious birth testifies to the magic that enabled his conception and to his ability to survive despite the death that haunts him. He is threatened in utero by a father who tries to abort him, stalked by Hagar, the lover/cousin he casts aside, and avenged by his best and only friend, Guitar. Milkman’s father, Macon Dead the second, attains worldly success as a businessman but suffers personal and social alienation. He despises his wife, disdains the black tenants who live in his tenements, is estranged from his sister, Pilate—and has but one piece of advice for his son, Milkman, “the one important thing you’ll ever need to know: own things.” Milkman belongs to a new class in American urban life—the bourgeois black. He is wealthy because his father, Macon, is a slumlord, the new urban black version of the Southern whites who murdered Macon’s father to steal his land.

SONG OF THE LARK, THE 1191

Surrounded by richly complicated characters whose complexity eludes him, the shallow Milkman lives on the fringe of his culture, oblivious to those who help and hinder him, resent and worship him. He is unconscious of his ancestry, untouched by his family, and cavalier in his treatment of others. He lives selfishly among the strangers who are his family—his father, whom he fears, his mother whom he cannot forgive or understand, and his sisters—First Corinthians and Magdalene, to whom he barely speaks. “From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea” (335). Although the women enjoy the privileges of their men’s wealth, they are not yet able to transcend their slavery—Ruth cannot rise above the nearly incestuous relationship she had with her deceased father and is treated as a slave by her son and with total disregard by her husband; Milkman’s sisters, despite the college education of First Corinthians, have no place in either black or white society. His cousin and then lover Hagar is caught up in the materialism of urban life and is a slave to her passion for Milkman, whose rejection leads to her death. Despite his self-centeredness, Milkman is a sympathetic character whose life, imperiled from the beginning, touches the reader. We root for this rootless young man on a quest to discover who he is, where he came from, and where he is going. Morrison describes Song of Solomon and Milkman’s odyssey as “a journey from stupidity to epiphany, of a man, a complete man.” In a culture where naming identifies individuality, Song of Solomon bursts with felicitous names. Mains Avenue is called Doctor Street by the blacks who are proud that Ruth’s father, the black physician in this community, lives on Mains. The white town fathers, abashed by such brazen disregard for things official, command that the street be called Mains, not Doctor Street, and in an ironic adherence to the new dictate, the blacks rename it Not Doctor Street. Mercy Hospital, where Milkman is born—the first black birth allowed in that institution—earns the appropriate epithet, No Mercy Hospital. Characters derive their names from “yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses” (333)— Macon Dead, Sing Byrd, Guitar, Railroad Tommy,

Hospital Tommy, Empire State (“he just stood around and swayed” [333]), the Seven Days. The Dead women’s names are plucked blindly from the Bible. Pilate, christened by the word her illiterate father methodically copied from the New Testament, wears the piece of paper that bears her name in a brass box suspended from her ear. Song plays an integral role in the storytelling. Pilate sings for Milkman at his birth, Milkman sings for Pilate at her death, children sing the songs of African childhood, and throughout, like a Shakespearean chorus, the plaintive, true voices of Pilate, Reba, and Hagar recall the voices of their ancestors. Song of Solomon takes Milkman on a quest for his family’s lost fortune, but he discovers instead his family history, his true heritage. He reconnects with his past, finds himself, and unveils the human truths that forge African-American, and indeed all, human history.

SOURCES Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction. Troy, N.Y.: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1993. Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Mason, Theodore O., Jr. “The Novelist as Conservator: Stories and Comprehension in Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon.’ ” In Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, 171–188. New York, Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991. Jan Schubert Norris

SONG OF THE LARK, THE WILLA CATHER (1915) Based in part on the life of the great Metropolitan Opera diva Olive Fremstad as well as on the author’s recollections of growing up in Nebraska, Willa CATHER’s The Song of the Lark tells the story of Thea Kronberg, descendant of Swedish immigrants, who leaves her family in Moonstone, Colorado, to study music in Chicago and who eventually achieves a career as a world-famous Wagnerian singer. She accomplishes this with the encouragement, artistic vision, and financial support of five men: Dr. Howard Archie, the local Moonstone physician who regards her as a daughter; Professor Wunsch, her first music teacher; Ray Kennedy,

1192 SONG OF THE LARK, THE

a railroad brakeman who leaves her a legacy that enables her to leave Moonstone; Andor Harsanyi, her Chicago piano teacher, who discovers that her voice is her true instrument; and Fred Ottenburg, a wealthy young businessman and patron of the arts. Each man recognizes that Thea is destined for greatness—“She will do nothing common. She is uncommon in a common, common world,” Harsanyi says (193), for example—and each one wants to be a fairy godfather or knight errant to her. As Kennedy explains, “there are a lot of halfway people in this world who help the winners win . . . they can’t dodge it. It’s a natural law” (112). In the preface to the 1932 edition of the novel in her collected works, Cather wrote: “The story set out to tell of an artist’s awakening and struggle; her floundering escape from a smug, domestic, self-satisfied provincial world of utter ignorance. . . . What I cared about, and what I still care about was the girl’s escape” (xxxii). Each of the six parts of the novel marks a step forward in Thea’s hard-won progress toward complete realization of her art, which occurs at the end of part VI, during her Met debut as Sieglinde, a triumph witnessed by her three surviving benefactors as well as other wellwishing friends. The need for escape, which is a result of artistic awakening, takes several forms in the novel. Most obvious is Thea’s escape from Moonstone and its stifling conventionality. Essentially, Thea must escape from everyone except herself: She is constantly refining and redefining herself. As Harsanyi tells her, “Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time and longer” (160). Being alone is a necessary part of the process: Thea gains her greatest insight and confidence when she is by herself, as in her attic room in Moonstone or camping in the ruins of the Anasazi cliff dwellings. As an artist, her joy lies in spiritual self-sufficiency: “It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own” (284). Cather said that “personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer” (xxxii), and in the novel this becomes apparent as Thea becomes increasingly isolated from others, intent on perfecting her art. She rejects Ottenburg’s love in order to study in Germany; she delays going to her dying mother so as to

fulfill an important contract in Europe. Years later she tells Ottenburg that she has very few friends and that she could lose all of them if necessary; to Dr. Archie she explains, “Your work becomes your personal life. You are not much good until it does” (392). Life is more real for Thea when she is onstage and in character. That is when the tired, fretful woman who looks old beyond her years fills with “energy and fire. . . . She felt like a tree bursting into bloom” (410). Struggle also takes various forms. Thea is well-served by a dogged if initially uninformed ambition to succeed as a musician, as well as by a habit of rigorous training, for she must constantly contend with her own limitations and with those who would oppose her progress. She must struggle to achieve technical facility first on the piano and then on the voice; she has to struggle to catch up and learn about the musical repertory about which she knows nothing when she arrives in Chicago at age 17. She struggles both personally and professionally against those who are jealous of her gift and the attention that it brings her. Most of all she must struggle to maintain her artistic purity in the face of a society that would rather rave over a “common” singer with a showy voice and stage mannerisms rather than recognize a real artist. The Grieg song that Ottenburg has her sing over and over is a kind of theme for her constant struggle: “Thanks for your advice! But I prefer to steer my boat into the din of roaring breakers. Even if the journey is my last, I may find what I have never found before” (243). Unlike the pioneers and immigrants who figure in so many of Cather’s novels, Thea moves eastward to achieve her American dream: from Moonstone to Chicago to New York and then to Germany. Yet the American West—especially the Arizona canyonlands that figure in part IV—remains her touchstone. Returning to Moonstone after her first year in Chicago, she “felt that she was coming back to her own land” (199). Her coming of age occurs after listening to a performance of Dvorak’s New World Symphony: “She pressed her hands upon her heaving bosom, that was a little girl’s no longer” (183). Even the despised Moonstone provides her with the scale of values she uses in adult life, a scale her friends recognize keeps her “from getting off the track” (327). In the character of Thea Kronberg, Cather not only celebrated the larger-than-life art of the operatic diva,

SOUND AND THE FURY, THE 1193

but also the energy and imagination of the successful woman artist in general. It has been suggested that Kronberg the successful singer is a stand-in for Cather the successful writer, as certain details of Thea’s life and character parallel those in Cather’s own. Moreover, much of Cather’s discussion of the nature of Thea’s art is applicable to any art form. As Harsanyi says, “Her secret? It is every artist’s secret . . . passion. That is all. It is an open secret and perfectly safe” (409).

SOURCES Ahearn, Amy. “Full-Blooded Writing and Journalistic Fictions: Naturalism, the Female Artist and Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark,” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 33 (2001): 143–156. Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. 1915. Foreword by Doris Grumbach. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, Mariner Books, 1965; Foreword, 1988. Fetterley, Judith. “Willa Cather and the Fiction of Female Development.” In Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, edited by Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, 221–234. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Hallgarth, Susan A. “The Woman Who Would Be an Artist in The Song of the Lark and Lucy Gayheart.” In Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History, edited by John J. Murphy, Linda Hunter, and Paul Rawlins, 169–173. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Humanities Publishing Center, 1990. Harvey, Sally Peltier. Redefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Nona C. Flores

SOUND AND THE FURY, THE WILLIAM FAULKNER (1929) In an interview, William FAULKNER once said The Sound and the Fury was his favorite book, and many believe it is his best. This modernist novel details the disintegration of the Compsons, a once well-to-do southern family. The characters include Jason Compson, Sr., a philosophically cynical and complacent alcoholic; Caroline Compson, a querulous and overbearing hypochondriac; and their children: Quentin, sensitive, intelligent, and doomed; Caddy, promiscuous, rebellious, and strong; Jason, weak, whining, and acquisitive; and Benjy, severely mentally handicapped. Other major characters are Caddy’s

daughter, also named Quentin, who takes after her mother, and Dilsey, the long-time family servant and moral center of the book. The inspiration for The Sound and the Fury began for Faulkner with an image of Caddy’s muddy drawers in the pear tree as she looked into her dying grandmother’s window and her brothers, frightened, watched below. Like Eve, she gained forbidden knowledge of life and death as she gazed through the window, and the mud marks her sin and her fall. Each of the novel’s four sections has a different narrator and a different style corresponding to the narrator’s thoughts. Although Caddy is at the center of each section, Faulkner does not allow her to narrate, to tell her own story. We see Caddy only as what she represents to her three brothers—a mother to Benjy, a lover to Quentin, and a daughter to Jason. Through the brothers’ preoccupation with their sister, Faulkner portrays the southern male’s obsession with white female purity. The novel’s title is from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “[Life] is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” Appropriately, the first section is told by Benjy, an idiot, a term that describes a person with a mental age of no more than three. Because Benjy understands little, the reader must piece together information and delay closure. The stream of consciousness style follows Benjy’s confused thoughts, jumping in time to his childhood, when his favorite sister Caddy cared for him, to his youth, when the family begins to fall apart and the already-pregnant Caddy endures an arranged marriage: “I couldn’t tell if I was crying or not, and T. P. fell down on top of me, laughing, and it kept on making the sound and Quentin kicked T. P. and Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry” (40). In the present, April 7, 1928, when the family’s pasture, sold to pay for brother Quentin’s year at Harvard, has been made into a golf course, Benjy spends his days listening to golfers call “caddy.” The novel’s second section, narrated by brother Quentin, leaps back in time to June 2, 1910, as Quentin finishes his year at Harvard and prepares for his suicide. Though this section is more accessible than the first, Quentin’s thoughts are also fragmented due to

1194 SOUND AND THE FURY, THE

his inability to accept his sister Caddy’s promiscuity and his own failure to protect her. Quentin’s conflict arises when he tries to live by the codes of chivalry in a world where they no longer apply, a conflict we learn more about in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which is a prequel to The Sound and the Fury and features many of the same characters. In The Sound and the Fury, conversations and scenes from the past in Mississippi intermingle with conversations and scenes from Boston without marker or transition. One of Quentin’s recurring memories is an encounter with Dalton Ames, his sister’s lover. Standing on the bridge in Mississippi, a shadow of the bridge from which he commits suicide in Boston, Quentin had uttered an absurd ultimatum, “I’ll give you till sundown” (159), and then, with little provocation, he had fainted “like a girl” (162). A year later he is haunted by his own humiliating weakness and Ames’s contrasting masculinity. A similar episode occurs as Quentin walks through the outskirts of Boston after being arrested for “stealing” the sister of an Italian immigrant. Quentin’s inability to protect the little girl reinforces his sense of guilt for not protecting Caddy. He agonizes over Caddy’s loss of virginity, a loss that he has never experienced. At times he imagines himself in Dalton Ames’s role as sexual aggressor, claiming to have committed incest with Caddy so as to implicate himself in a “terrible crime” and become a part of the “something terrible” in his sister. As he emerges from this obsessive memory, he again lashes out in a dramatic and inappropriate way, punching Gerald, a fellow student, for no apparent reason. Quentin is unable to see the boundaries between his thoughts and reality because in his reveries he is not Quentin, but a powerful man who did protect his sister from her defiler. Quentin’s identity dissolves even further by the end of his section. Dressing meticulously in his room, he prepares to go to the bridge for the last time: “then I saw that I’d forgotten my hat. I’d have to go by the post office and I’d be sure to meet some of them, and they’d think I was a Harvard Square student making like he was a senior” (179). Nearing his own death, he never thinks of the act he will commit, only of how he will appear to observers. At this point, seeing himself only as the object of censure, he commits suicide.

The novel’s third section, narrated by brother Jason and set on April 6, 1928, is more linear and accessible, partly because Jason’s mind is less complex. Like his brothers, however, he dwells on his sister Caddy and on his own inadequacies. Jason feels that Caddy has wronged him because Herbert Head, the husband from her arranged marriage, had promised him a job at his bank. Head divorced Caddy when he learned that she had been pregnant when he married her, and Jason’s chances at the job are ruined. Now Jason clerks in a store, lives with his sickly mother after their father’s death, and tries to control Caddy’s rebellious daughter Quentin, now a teenager, who lives with the Compsons. Jason does not seem to distinguish between Caddy and her daughter. The words with which he begins the section, “Once a bitch, always a bitch” (180), seem directed at both. As the narrative progresses we learn that Jason lies to his mother that he is part owner in the store, steals the money that Caddy sends to her daughter, and revels in his victim status. Though he is his mother’s favorite child, the only one who did not disgrace her, his bullying and inflated estimation of his own importance make him despised by everyone else. The novel’s fourth section takes place on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928. Unlike the others, this section employs a third-person narrator and begins from the perspective of Dilsey as she cares for the remaining Compsons and attends church service. Dilsey’s genuine spirituality, her compassion for Benjy and the young Quentin, and her forthright reproach of Jason make her the most morally sound character in the book. Instead of spending Easter morning in church, the Compsons spend it in pursuit of money and each other. Young Quentin steals back from Jason the money Caddy had sent her and runs away. Jason chases after Quentin, alienating the authorities and everyone else he comes in contact with, gets a migraine from gas fumes, and has to be driven home. At home, Benjy somehow senses that Quentin is gone like her mother and begins to moan and whine. In order to calm him, Luster, Dilsey’s grandson, drives Benjy through town, but when he veers to a course slightly different from Benjy’s normal route, Benjy begins bellowing: “It was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongue-

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT 1195

less; just sound” (320). As the noise increases, Jason, having just arrived back in Jefferson, leaps onto the wagon, beats Luster, and turns the wagon around. The novel ends with Benjy serene in the wagon as “cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right . . . each in its ordered place” (321). One cannot help but notice the Christian references in this novel, with three out of four chapters set around Easter weekend. Is Benjy, aged 33 and pure of heart, though empty of mind, a Christ figure? Is brother Quentin, who dies for a cause, however meaningless, and is resurrected in the form of Caddy’s daughter, Quentin? Or is Jason, who, at least in his own eyes, suffers for others? Or is it, as the title suggests, all just sound and fury signifying nothing? Dilsey cries tears of genuine sorrow and empathy at the Easter service in the black church. But perhaps Faulkner suggests that, at least for the white characters, religion is, like Benjy’s drive through town, simply a matter of comforting routine.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Butery, Karen Ann. “From Conflict to Suicide: The Inner Turmoil of Quentin Compson,” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 49, no. 3 (1989): 211–224. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Longley, John L., Jr. “ ‘Who Never Had a Sister’: A Reading of The Sound and the Fury.” In The Novels of William Faulkner, edited by R. G. Collins and Kenneth McRobbie. Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 1973. Weinstein, Philip M. Faulkner’s Subject, a Cosmos No One Owns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Betina Entzminger

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT RITA MAE BROWN (1988) While the theme of hypocrisy among the upper classes is certainly not new to works of literature, the way it is developed by the author determines whether it will become another cliched account of a society gone awry or a a more refreshing view on the injustices we sometimes unknowingly perpetrate on ourselves and each other.

Rita Mae BROWN’s Southern Discomfort chronicles two parallel societies over a period of 10 years in Montgomery, Alabama. The first, what we could call the “visible” society, is composed of the upper classes and the religious authority represented by moral crusader Reverend Linton Ray. In general, the visible society caters to the male, white population. Running beneath this world of strict etiquette and taboo is an underworld composed of the Water Street prostitutes, the black community, a developing but still despised middle class, and “show people,” artists who although fascinating and entertaining seem to have fallen out of favor with the “nobility” because of their calling. In short, Montgomery is a superficially stable town, rocked by a strong undercurrent of chaos. The story of Southern Discomfort could stop there, at a description of these two parallel worlds. But the strength behind this novel is the point at which these two paths cross. The intersection occurs between Hortensia Banastre and Hercules Jinks: a wealthy but unhappily married white woman and an educated black teenage boxer. The novel does not explain their attraction for each other or how quickly it develops; therefore, it may be as startling for the reader as it is unacceptable for the Montgomery community. The apparent irrationality of the relationship that blossoms between Hortensia and Hercules seems, in fact, to clean a slate soiled by the town’s unwavering prejudice against its non-white, non-“respectable” population. As Hortensia’s rebellious aunt Narcissa proclaims: “Great love always works at cross-purposes with society. . . . Either you live your life, or you let other people live it for you” (98–99). The tragic death of Hercules—abandoned by a white ambulance driver who would not carry him to the hospital—drives Hortensia to Chicago, from where she returns almost a year later, with her trusted maid Amelie and a newborn girl. The girl is raised as Amelie’s, but Catherine’s green eyes and reddish hair immediately set her apart, and the young girl always suspects that she is not truly the daughter of her “aunt Hortensia’s” black maid and her missing companion. The other key players in uniting the town’s two worlds are, ironically, the prostitutes of Water Street. Honest and daring, they are the only ones to

1196 SPECTATOR BIRD, THE

acknowledge that passion is common to all men and women. Set against Reverend Linton Ray’s moral crusade against drinking and debauchery, the women of Water Street eventually unite and manage to win over the tight-collared minister’s supporters, even as they protect their own business activities, centered on their upper-crust customers. In these outcast women Hortensia and other restless souls find a sincere if awkward alliance. Two of these women help Hortensia and Hercules rent a small cottage for their encounters. After Hercules’s death, they comfort Hortensia. A third union of the surface world and undercurrent of Montgomery occurs between the races: black and white. Beyond Hortensia’s own affair, the harsh life of segregation and prejudice that dictates life for the black population contrasts with their reality as a complex community. At the center of this community we find Hercules’s family, the Jinkses. Led by the matriarch, Ada, the Jinks family has the education and sensibility that is shockingly lacking in the so-called “upper” (white) class. The children are named Hercules, Athena, and Apollo; they have superb knowledge of Latin and other academic disciplines; and they are determined to forge the best path they can through life. Athena, following her mythological namesake, uses her wisdom to study law. Apollo selflessly enlists in the army of a country that does not respect his rights and loses his life in battle. Hercules makes use of his strength as a prizefighter, only to have his own existence cut tragically short. The Jinkses also become an important part of the bond that keeps young Catherine with one foot planted in each world. She is of their blood (though Ada does not at first realize that Catherine is her granddaughter) and is in part educated by them, learning Latin from Ada. She also attends a segregated school. Yet Catherine knows she does not entirely belong in the black community, as much as she will never be accepted by white Montgomery; her classmates shun her because her skin is lighter than theirs, and yet she is barred from participation in the Halloween festivities planned for the white children. Catherine’s anger and confusion mirrors the uneasy balance of the races in Montgomery, and the irrational regulations that keep

them separate and trapped in assumptions of what each side is and is not. That the Jinks family is highly cultivated and literate does not matter: only their skin color does. Neither does it matter that Montgomery’s “finest” men spend their nights in the brothels of Water Street: As white males, it is their prerogative, and their activities will not be publicized or reprimanded. The story ends in 1928 and leaves the reader to wonder how World War II and, in time, the Civil Rights movement will further transform the inhabitants of Montgomery. Brown suggests that change depends on the hybrid nature of those who will resist the social hierarchy—people like Catherine, who feel so entitled to both worlds that they will eventually unite both threads to create history of another kind.

SOURCES Levine, Daniel B. “Uses of Classical Mythology in Rita Mae Brown’s Southern Discomfort,” Classical and Modern Literature 10, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 63–70. Ward, Carol M. Rita Mae Brown. New York: Twayne, 1993. Marisa Antonaya

SPECTATOR BIRD, THE WALLACE STEGNER (1976) Seventy years old, crotchety, and suffering from arthritis, retired literary agent Joe Allston receives a postcard from Astrid Wredel-Krarup, the impoverished countess with whom he and his wife, Ruth, shared an apartment in Denmark 20 years earlier. Her message prompts him to dig out the journals he kept during their three-month stay, and when Ruth learns of their existence, she insists that he read them aloud to her. Their bedtime readings frame a gothic tale of political, social, and moral exile, Faustian genetic experiments, and incest. The tale unfolds over several winter evenings and is punctuated by daytime visits from a flamboyant Italian novelist, Allston’s retired octogenarian doctor, and neighbors, all of whom provoke Allston’s signature sour observations on aging—for example, “I am just killing time till time gets around to killing me—nothing is building, everything is running down, there are no more chances for improvement” (89). STEGNER writes Allston’s first-person narrative with wry humor, relentless insight, honesty, and precision.

SPECTATOR BIRD, THE 1197

Although replete with historical, mythic, and literary allusions that at times daunt, the novel’s crisp metaphors, characterizations, and observations create its emotional cutting edge. Allston uses acerbic wit to avoid intimacy and keep his fears at bay. Reflecting on his habitual detachment from difficult personal issues, he observes, “Crucifixion can be discussed philosophically until they start driving in the nails” (23). Unflappable Ruth probes and pushes him toward intimacy and resolution of unfinished emotional business, including his estrangement from their only child, Curtis, “an over-age beach bum” (25), who died in a surfing accident, and the conflict between Allston’s unfulfilled love for the countess and his commitment to Ruth. “Ah, me,” he observes, “the complexity of being married to a woman you dearly love and automatically resist” (96). The title refers to the combination of Allston’s deliberately abrasive and detached manner that collapses over time and his frequent observations and characterizations of birds. As the book opens, he watches the birds outside his study and likens himself to the wrens, “surly and aggressive,” although he admits he would prefer to be like the bush tits, “paying no attention to time or duty—generally enjoying themselves” (6). Later, when he reads his journals to Ruth, he comments, “I sometimes get the feeling my whole life happened to someone else” (81), although a few paragraphs later, he admits to himself that, while in Denmark and involved with the countess, “I wasn’t quite spectator enough” (82). Finally, after admitting his love for the countess to Ruth and fleeing their bedroom in the book’s most emotional display, he retreats into the third person and describes himself as “the spectator bird, having the feathers beaten off him in a game from which he had thought he was protected” (196). Stegner introduced Joe Allston in 1967 in All the Little Live Things. Both novels are set in the hills above Stanford University, and in both, a beloved neighbor succumbs to cancer—a young mother in All the Little Live Things and a contemporary in The Spectator Bird. In both, Allston rails against the hippie culture and changing sexual mores of the late 1960s and 1970s and against the indifference of youth in general: “they just don’t see you—. They don’t seem offended that you

exist, only surprised” (117). By the end of The Spectator Bird, however, an older Allston rails less and understands more. The book shares dominant themes— aging and death, commitment and fidelity, and emotional safety—with Stegner’s other novels, particularly All the Little Live Things, ANGLE OF REPOSE, Remembering Laughter, and CROSSING TO SAFETY. He treats aging and death with dark humor: “Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window” (171). Commitment and fidelity are bluntly treated: “It has seemed to me that my commitments are often more important than my impulses or my pleasures, and that even when my pleasures or desires are the principal issue, there are choices to be made between better and worse, bad and better, good and good” (209). Allston and his friends seek physical and emotional safety, but safety eludes them, as it ultimately eludes all living things. As Karen Blixen (a.k.a. Isak Dineson, author of Out of Africa) tells Allston during a visit to her farm, Denmark is “very safe—full of retired sea captains growing roses” (104). Yet even “safe” Denmark can be dangerous, and Allston observes, “the hope of safety, not any lust for freedom” (110) brought his Danish mother and others to the New World. Ultimately, Allston concludes (213), “It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you cannot handle.”

SOURCES Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Stegner, Wallace. The Spectator Bird. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Stegner, Wallace, and Richard W. Etulain. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983. Walters, Thomas N. “The Spectator Bird.” In Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, edited by Anthony Arthur, 37–43. Boston: G. K. Hall & Company, 1982. Suzanne Carey

1198 SPENCER, ELIZABETH

SPENCER, ELIZABETH (1921– )

During Mississippi-born Elizabeth Spencer’s long career, she has produced a remarkably distinguished corpus of long and short fiction. Her early novels, Fire in the Morning (1948) and The VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR (1956), exemplify the haunting but realistically drawn rural South, and the tension between the Old South and the New. Since the publication of The LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA (1960), Spencer’s fiction contains an increasing number of female protagonists, Southern women who must deal with crises whether at home or abroad. Marilee, published in 1981, is the first example. A decade later, in The NIGHT TRAVELLERS (1991), a Vietnam-era novel set in both North Carolina and Canada, Spencer creates another strong Southern woman, Mary Kerr. Elizabeth Spencer was born on July 19, 1921, in Carrollton, Mississippi, to James Luther Spencer, a businessman, and Mary James McCain Spencer, a piano teacher and lover of books. Spencer was educated at Belhaven College, where she received her bachelor’s degree, cum laude, in 1942, and at Vanderbilt University, where she received her master’s degree in English in 1943. Although critics repeatedly compared her early novels to those of William FAULKNER (Spencer was reared only 60 miles from Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, Mississippi), they also celebrated her ability to create strong original plots peopled with vivid, believable characters. While teaching at the University of Mississippi and working as a reporter for the Nashville Tenneseean, Spencer completed Fire in the Morning, the tale of Kinloch Armstrong and his involvement in a two-generation property feud in a rural Mississippi town. Her second novel, This Crooked Way (1952), again set in the rural South, features Amos Dudley, a rigidly religious man in pursuit of the wealth and success that he believes God has given him; only when he relinquishes this idea can Amos begin to love his family and enjoy the life of an ordinary individual. Spencer then moved to Italy for five years, writing the novellas The Light in the Piazza (1960), often compared to Henry JAMES’s DAISY MILLER, and Knights and Dragons (1965). The former was a popular and critical success: Margaret Johnson, a Southern woman in Italy, defies her husband in order to ensure a happy future for her mentally dis-

abled daughter, Clara. Like James’s Daisy Miller, Clara falls in love with an Italian, here named Fabrizio. Unlike Daisy, Clara has a mother who negotiates her dowry and marries her to Fabrizio. Originally published in the New Yorker, the novella was subsequently made into a feature-length film by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Knights and Dragons focuses on Martha Ingram, who is breaking free of her former husband’s emotional domination. Similarly, No Place for an Angel features a timid girl, Catherine Sasser, who learns to be strong and even noble. In her later fiction, Spencer explores her views on individualism. In her detailed presentation of modernist society, the author warns against obsession with one’s self and demonstrates the superior choice of communal responsibility. In The Snare (1972), Julia Garrett leaves the comfortable but superficial existence in her parents’ home in the Garden District of New Orleans. She realizes her independence and accepts responsibility for her own child. Similarly, in The Salt Line (1984), Arnie Carrington eventually rejects his corrupted society and chooses to provide for the happiness of others. Elizabeth Spencer married the British John Arthur Blackwood Rusher in 1956 and lived with him in Montreal, Canada, for 25 years. In 1985 she was elected to the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, and in 1986 she and her husband moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Spencer accepted a teaching appointment at the University of North Carolina.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Fire in the Morning. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1948. Knights and Dragons. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. The Light in the Piazza. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960. Marilee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981. The Night Travellers. New York: Viking, 1991. No Place for an Angel. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. The Salt Line. New York: Doubleday, 1984. The Snare. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. This Crooked Way. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952. The Voice at the Back Door. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956.

SOURCES Broadwell, Elizabeth Pell, and Ronald Wesley Hoag. “A Conversation with Elizabeth Spencer,” Southern Review 18 (Winter 1982): 111–130.

SPIEGELMAN, ART 1199

Jones, John Griffin. “Elizabeth Spencer.” In Mississippi Writers Talking, 95–129. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Elizabeth Spencer. Boston: Twayne, 1985. ———, ed. Conversations with Elizabeth Spencer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. Roberts, Terry. Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Spencer, Elizabeth. Landscapes of the Heart. New York: Random House, 1998.

SPIEGELMAN, ART (1948– ) Although Art Spiegelman is not a novelist in the conventional sense, his work provides an intriguing example of the innovative lengths to which postmodern artists, particularly in a post–World War II and post-Holocaust world, will search for forms appropriate to describe the horrors of the 20th century. Spiegelman wrote a comic book called MAUS: A SURVIVORS TALE, MY FATHER BLEEDS HISTORY (1986) that depicted his parents’ arrest by the Nazis and their imprisonment at the concentration camp called Auschwitz. Maus was nominated by the National Book Critics Circle for an award in biography. It could be argued that Art Spiegelman’s subject called for an extension of fictional, traditionally novelistic techniques, in the form of a comic book using animal characters. The sequel, MAUS: A SURVIVORS TALE II, and HERE MY TROUBLES BEGAN appeared in 1992, and Spiegelman received a Special Pulitzer Prize for both works. Maus II received a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Los Angeles Times Award, and an American Book Award. As more than one critic has pointed out, they are novels in pictures. Art Spiegelman was born on February 15, 1948, in Stockholm, Sweden, to Vladek Spiegelman, a salesman, and Anja Zylberberg Spiegelman; Spiegelman immigrated to the United States, became a naturalized citizen, and attended Harpur College, now the State University of New York at Binghamton. He was an instructor in history and the aesthetics of comic books at the New York School of Visual Arts from 1979 to 1987 and a staff artist, during which time he published both Maus and Maus II, and he worked at the New Yorker from 1991 to 2003. The voices of Artie, the son, and Vladek, the

father, tell the story in multiple time frames, with flashbacks to the pasts of both. Maus II continues the narrative as Vladek recalls Auschwitz, Birkenau, gas chambers, ovens, and graves; Artie speaks to a psychiatrist about his ambivalent feelings toward his own father. Opening with the premise used by Hitler, “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human,” Spiegelman depicts the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Poles as pigs, the British as fish, the French as frogs, the Americans as dogs, the Swedes as reindeer, the gypsies as moths. All drawings are in black and white. The work is based on meticulous research and accurate use of detail. In a New York Times Book Review article, Lawrence L. Langer notes, “Perhaps no Holocaust narrative will ever contain the whole experience. But Art Spiegelman has found an original and authentic form to draw us closer to its bleak heart” (Langer, 36). Art Spiegelman lives in Irvington, New York.

NOVELS In the Shadow of No Towers. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Maus: A Survivors Tale, My Father Bleeds History, Vol I. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Maus: A Survivors Tale, and Here My Troubles Began, Vol II. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

SOURCES Charlson, Joshua L. “Framing the Past: Postmodernism and the Making of Reflective Memory in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 91–120. Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno,” New German Critique 81 (Fall 2000): 65–82. Laga, Barry. “Maus, Holocaust, and History: Redrawing the Frame,” Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 61–90. Landsberg, Alison. “America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy,” New German Critique 71 (Spring–Summer 1997): 63–86. Lehmann, Sophia. “ ‘And Here [Their] Troubles Began’: The Legacy of the Holocaust in the Writing of Cynthia Ozick, Art Spiegelman, and Philip Roth,” Clio 28, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 29–52. Ma, Sheng-Mei. “Mourning with the (as a) Jew: Metaphor, Ethnicity, and the Holocaust in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 16 (1997): 115–129.

1200 SPOFFORD, HARRIET ELIZABETH PRESCOTT

Staub, Michael E. “The Shoah Goes On and On: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” MELUS 20, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 33–46. Wilner, Arlene Fish. “ ‘Happy, Happy Ever After’: Story and History in Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Journal of Narrative Technique 27, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 171–189. Witek, Joseph. Comic Book as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Young, James E. “The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the Afterimages of History,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 666–699.

OTHER Art Spiegelman. Steven Barclay Agency. Available online. URL: http://www.barclayagency.com/spiegelman.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Audio interview with Art Spiegelman. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/artspiegelman. Accessed September 25, 2005. “Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits. By Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd.” DC Comics. Available online. URL: http://www.dccomics.com/features/plas. Accessed January 13, 2006. Spiegelman, Art. Interview with Art Spiegelman from Corriere della Sera (February 13, 2003). Electronic Iraq. Available online. URL: http://electroniciraq.net/cgibim/artman/exec/view.cgi/6/109printer. Accessed January 13, 2006. ———. Interview with Art Spiegelman. By Christopher Monte Smith. Booksense. Available online. URL: http:// www.booksense.com/people/archive/spiegelmanart.jsp. Accessed January 13, 2006.

SPOFFORD, HARRIET ELIZABETH PRESCOTT (1835–1921) Author of novels, short stories, and poetry, Harriet Prescott Spofford— like many other 19th-century women writers—was well known and well regarded in her time, but fell into obscurity until the late 20th century, when feminist scholarship began to examine her work. Spofford was a regularly published writer in Harper’s Bazar and a contributor to such monthly magazines as the Atlantic, the Knickerbocker, and Lippincott’s. Although today’s critics suggest that her talents lay more in the short story than in the novel, she wrote 10 novels and novellas and reached a wide audience. Like Nathaniel HAWTHORNE and Edgar Allan POE, she was intrigued

with the dark, mysterious aspects of the human psyche and frequently wrote about madness, monomania, crime, and the supernatural. In the most general terms, her interests lay in the nature of power used and abused by both men and women, but with particular attention to the silencing of women’s voices. (Bendixen, 381). Harriet Elizabeth Prescott was born on April 3, 1835, in Calais, Maine, to Sarah Bridges Prescott and Joseph Newmarch Prescott, at various times a merchant, lawyer, and politician who was ultimately unable to provide for his large family. Luckily, Prescott, who had been educated at the Putnam Free School and the Pinkerton Academy, wrote an essay that attracted the attention of Thomas Wentworth Higginson; he had also advised Emily Dickinson and encouraged Spofford to pursue a writing career. Her first Atlantic story, “In a Cellar,” was published in 1859, drawing critical and popular attention to the young author. In 1860 Spofford published her first novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost, a ghost story about an artist who eventually discovers that he has fallen in love with his own daughter. This gothic romance drew praise from critics like James Russell Lowell, who pointed to Spofford’s “genuine poetic power” and proclaimed her a writer “destined for great things” (St. Armand, 253, 254). Henry JAMES, on the other hand, thought that Spofford needed to relinquish her imagistic descriptions. He recommended, in a review of Azarian: An Episode (1864), Spofford’s second novel (in which the hero cannot see that she is in love with a vain and self-centered man), that the author learn from the new realist school (St. Armand, 269). After marrying Richard S. Spofford, Jr., a lawyer, on December 19, 1865, Spofford wrote other romantic works, including the novels The Thief in the Night (1872) and The Marquis of Carabas (1882), and the novella A Master Spirit (1896). Probably best known in the early 21st century for her story collection The Amber Gods and Other Stories (1863), Spofford continues to attract the attention of scholars to the haunting quality of her work, particularly her portraits of women who want respect and equal treatment from men. A member of the group of literary women that included Annie Fields, Rose Terry Cooke, Sarah Orne JEWETT, and others, Spofford wrote a tribute to these women in

SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE, A 1201

A Little Book of Friends (1916). She died on August 14, 1921, at her home in Deer Island, Massachusetts.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS An Inheritance. New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1897. Azarian: An Episode. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864. The Maid He Married. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1899. The Making of a Fortune. A Romance. New York: Harper Brothers, 1894. The Marquis of Carabas. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882. A Master Spirit. New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1896. Priscilla’s Love-Story. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone, 1898. Sir Rohan’s Ghost. A Romance. Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1860. That Betty. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1903. The Thief in the Night. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872.

SOURCES Bendixen, Alfred. “Harriet Prescott Spofford.” In NineteenthCentury American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Denise Knight, 377–384. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. ———. Introduction to “The Amber Gods” and Other Stories. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. ix–xxxix. St. Armand, Barton Levi. Emily Dickinson and Her Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Shinn, Thelma J. “Harriet Prescott Spofford: A Reconsideration,” Turn-of-the-Century Women 1, no. 1 (1984): 36–45.

SPY IN THE HOUSE OF LOVE, A ANAÏS NIN (1954) A Spy in the House of Love (1954) is one of five volumes in Anaïs NIN’s continuous novel series. This group of novelettes includes Ladders to the Fire (1946), Children of the Albatross (1947), The FourChambered Heart (1950), Cities of the Interior (1959), and Seduction of the Minotaur (1961). The concept behind Nin’s continuous novel is to show the complexity of simultaneous female experiences; together, the works trace the multiple aspects of sexual (and other) relationships encountered by Lillian, Djuna, and Sabina, portraying “women in a continuous symphony of experience” (Ladders, ix). This “experience” is related to the metaphor of the four disconnected chambers in the female heart, which can accommodate different and separate loyalties (Nalbantian, 3). Though each book in the series is written in a unique style, each new retelling of the same three women’s lives “invites readers to know them in their

inconsistencies and to participate in their unpredictable rhythms of growth” (Spenser). The characters’ multi-faceted and confused identities in this series are often associated with Nin’s own life. She managed several intimate relationships at one time, such as those with Hugh P. Guiler (Hugo), Otto Rank, and Henry MILLER in the 1930s, and then later, she alternated between Hugo and Rupert Pole (Spenser). The content of A Spy focuses on Sabina’s fragmented and divided female identity; her character oscillates between stereotypical female roles of child, seductress, actress, lover, and mother as she attempts to satiate her sexual and emotional desires without being a “bad woman” (85). At one point, however, she is free from these roles as she achieves the ability to have sex “like a man” for sexual pleasure without love (49). Similar to Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer, Sabina wanders from one lover to another, including Philip, Mambo, John, Donald, and Jay, while maintaining a relationship with her husband, Alan. Through her encounters with men, Sabina comes to the conclusion that she is an international spy in the house of love as she maintains a secret identity with each lover (72). Her lifestyle choice requires careful planning: Behaving like a spy, she puts her clothes all on one chair at night so that she may dress quickly, leaving no traces of her comings or goings; once seated at the movie theater, she leaves only to reenter a second time from the back in order to choose a “safe” seat (51). Her spying activities cease as a result of her motherlike relationship with Donald (perhaps a homosexual), which kills her sexual desire (97). Despite the sexual power gained by Sabina earlier in the story, the conclusion of A Spy leaves the heroine in a defeated state. Like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Djuna BARNES’s NIGHTWOOD (1936), the female character expressing sexuality in her own terms collides with an inability to live her sexuality out in reality. In her case, Sabina metaphorically melts onto the floor, and readers are left wondering how or if she will recollect her multiple selves, if she will continue the odyssey for sexual satisfaction, or if the pulsatile remedy suggested by the lie detector will “cure” her. Nin’s poetic style and nonlinear chronology emphasize that A Spy is much more about Sabina’s emotions

1202 STAFFORD, JEAN

and thoughts than a straightforward plotline. The story is almost completely circular: The book begins with the lie detector’s pursuit of Sabina (perhaps one of a spy’s greatest fears) and returns to his investigation of her near the end of the book. Words that seem to be the lie detector’s own description of her, “Dressed in red and silver, she evoked the sounds and imagery of fire engines as they tore through the streets of New York,” are later repeated as Jay’s internal description of Sabina (7, 118). The lie detector overhears Sabina’s Moroccan story, and readers later read the same story in Sabina’s direct italicized discourse, suggesting that time and chronology have been displaced across the length of the novel (8, 120). Nin produces an intertextually rich work that reflects her own interests in music, art, dance, theater, and other women’s writings. Readers unfamiliar with Nin’s admiration for Djuna Barnes may miss references to her and her works that create a bond between both authors and their attempts to write women’s experiences. These references include the very obvious character named after Barnes and Nin’s choice of Patchen Place (actually spelled Patchin Place), Barnes’s home for over 40 years, as the location of Mambo’s “trap” of a studio (Benstock, 429). A less-obvious example comes from Sabina, who asks Donald: “ ‘Where did you find all these repulsive women?’ ”—an intertextual reference to Barnes’s 1915 chapbook The Book of Repulsive Women 8 Rhythms and 5 Drawings, a work which celebrates female sexuality (95). Aside from intertextual references, other structural elements include occasional passages in italics that indicate that the reader has access to an interior monologue; there are also frequent tense shifts from perfect to present tenses, giving a sense of immediacy or continuity. The erotic tone of A Spy reinforces Sabina’s quest for sexual satisfaction, while poetic sensual imagery equates abstract, corporal, sexual experiences to earthly elements of sand, sea, and air, creating an eroticized body topography.

SOURCES ANAIS: An International Journal [last published 2001]. Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Jason, Philip K., ed. The Critical Response to Anais Nin. Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, No 23. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Nalbantian, Suzanne, ed. Anaïs Nin: Literary Perspectives. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Nin, Anaïs. Ladders to the Fire. 1946. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1995. Oliveira, Ubiratan Paiva de. “A Spy in the House of Love: An Introduction to Anaïs Nin,” Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of Language and Literature 14, no. 2 (1985): 71–81. Richard-Allerdyce, Diane. Anaïs Nin and the Remaking of Self: Gender, Modernism, and Narrative Identity. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997. Stuhlmann, Gunther, ed. The Diary of Anaïs Nin Volume One: 1931–34. New York: Swallow Press, Harcourt, Brace. 1966. ———. ed. Ladders to the Fire. New York: Dutton, 1946. Reprint, Chicago: Swallow Press, 1995. Zaller, Robert. A Casebook on Anaïs Nin. New York: New American Library, 1974.

OTHER Spenser, Sharon. “Forever Anaïs.” Anaïs Nin. Available online. URL: http://www.anaïsnin.com/scholarship/forever/index. html. Accessed January 13, 2006. Amy D. Lynn

STAFFORD, JEAN (1915–1979) Known chiefly for her 1970 Pulitzer Prize–winning short fiction in Collected Stories, many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker, Jean Stafford also earned a reputation as a writer of three first-rate novels. Boston Adventure (1944), The MOUNTAIN LION (1947), and The Catherine Wheel (1952), which focus on class difference, lost love, and alienation. With her focus on the loss of innocence and the high cost of self-realization, the situation for women in Stafford’s novels is bleak. Largely neglected for several decades, recent scholarship has reaffirmed both her stylistic ingenuity and her keen, if disturbing, insights into the social and psychological pressures on women. Jean Stafford was born on July 1, 1915, in Covina, California, to John Richard Stafford, who used the pseudonym Jack Wonder to write western fiction, and Mary McKillop Stafford. She was educated at the University of Colorado, where she earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in 1936. Stafford married three times, to the poet Robert Lowell from 1940 to 1948; the writer Oliver Jensen from 1950 to 1953; and the New Yorker columnist A. J. Liebling, from 1959 until his death in 1963. Her first novel, the best-seller Boston

STAGGERFORD 1203

Adventure, a bildungsroman, is often compared to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Sonie Marburg, an impoverished daughter of Russian and German New England immigrants, seeks but fails to find a better life with the wealthy Miss Pride of Boston. She has witnessed her mother’s madness and her friend Hope’s destructive sexuality and suicide, but ends up entrapped in the social sterility and hypocrisy of Boston society. Stafford’s second novel, the somewhat autobiographical The Mountain Lion, depicts the brother and sister Ralph and Molly Fawcett as they come of age on their grandfather’s ranch. Ralph opts for the self-reliance associated with the West and with his grandfather Kenyon, a friend to Jesse James; the intellectual, increasingly isolated Molly falls victim to a hunting accident involving a mountain lion. The lion symbolizes Molly’s potential and marginality. In The Catherine Wheel, Katherine Congreve, a lonely middle-aged New England woman, cannot forget that John Shipley loved and married her cousin Maeve, not her. Twenty years later, spiritually dead and still fixated on her love for John, she fails his 12-year-old son Andrew who needs adult assistance with the despair he feels over the loss of his only friend. Jean Stafford endured a number of major traumas in her life, including seeing her best friend shoot herself in the head. She suffered serious facial injuries and disfigurement in an automobile accident. The driver was Robert Lowell. Recent biographers trace these themes, along with her periodic alcoholism and depression, in her fiction. Suffering a stroke in 1976, Stafford died on March 26, 1979, in White Plains, New York, and is buried in Greenriver Cemetery in East Hampton, New York. Except for her letters to Lowell, now at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, most of Stafford’s papers are located in the Jean Stafford Collection of the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

NOVELS Boston Adventure. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. The Catherine Wheel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. The Mountain Lion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.

SOURCES Gelfant, Blanche H. “Reconsideration: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford,” New Republic, May 10, 1975, pp. 22–25.

———. “Revolutionary Turnings: The Mountain Lion Reread,” Massachusetts Review 20 (Spring 1979): 117–125. Goodman, Charlotte M. Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Hulbert, A. The Interior Castle: The Art & Life of Jean Stafford. New York: Knopf, 1992. Leary, W. “Jean Stafford, Katherine White, and the New Yorker,” Sewanee Review 93, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 584–596. ———. “Jean Stafford: The Wound and the Bow,” Sewanee Review 98, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 333–349. Mann, Jeanette W. “Toward New Archetypal Forms: Boston Adventure,” Studies in the Novel 8 (Fall 1976): 291–303. ———. “Toward New Archetypal Forms: Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel,” Critique 17 (December 1975): 77–92. Roberts, David. “Jean and Joe: the Stafford-Liebling Marriage,” American Scholar 57, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 373–391. ———. Jean Stafford: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1988. Steinhagen, Carol. “Stalking the Feline Female: The Significance of Hunting in The Cub of the Panther and The Mountain Lion.” In Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay Collection, edited by Katherine Anne Ackley, 207–220. New York: Garland, 1990. Walsh, Mary-Ellen W. Jean Stafford. New York: Macmillan, 1985. White, Barbara. “Initiation, the West, and the Hunt in Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion,” Essays in Literature 9 (Fall 1982): 194–210. Wilson, Mary Ann. “In Another Country: Jean Stafford’s Literary Apprenticeship in Baton Rouge,” Southern Review 29 (Winter 1993): 58–66.

OTHER Jean Stafford. Available online. URL: http://www.jscheuer. com/stafford.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005.

STAGGERFORD JON HASSLER (1977)

Who better to write a novel about an English teacher than one who has been involved in that career for most of his adult life? Jon HASSLER makes clear that he fashioned some of Staggerford from his own life experience. “. . . my fiction is 37 percent autobiographical. I think Miles is 37 percent me, that is, about one third of him is like me and about one-third of his experience is mine” (Plut). It is precisely this willingness to look at his life and the lives of those around him as “story” that makes Hassler’s fiction unforgettable. Readers know

1204 STAGGERFORD

these people in their own lives. While some critics have argued that Miles Pruitt, Agnes McGee, and Beverly Bingham, the three central characters in Staggerford, are two-dimensional and static, others argue with equal fervor that Hassler is a character genius and his are some of the best in contemporary literature, particularly Agnes McGee. Both groups of critics agree that the plot, satire, and themes of Staggerford carry the novel and make it an overall success. In his writing career, which spans nearly 30 years, Hassler has been compared to the likes of Flannery O’CONNOR and John CHEEVER. His first adult novel (published simultaneously, by chance, with his first young adult novel, Four Miles to Pinecone), Staggerford began as 7,500 hardcover copies and has transformed into “a cult book among English teachers” (Plut). Its effectiveness is based primarily on strong, vivid characters and an effortless, elegant plotline, derived from Hassler’s choice to structure the novel over the course of nine consecutive days. Staggerford recounts nine days in the lives of several residents of Staggerford, Minnesota, most specifically 35-year-old Miles Pruitt. He has lived in Staggerford all his life and is well known among the residents of this small town. The novel opens with Miles contemplating his daily life and existence through grading a class assignment: the “What I Wish” essays. He is respected by his students but continually questioned by the faculty and administration about his teaching methods and beliefs. Agnes McGee, his landlady and friend, supports him professionally, but she admonishes him personally for lapsing in his practice of Catholicism. The driving event of the novel is a conflict between Staggerford student Jeff Norquist and a Native American student who lives on the neighboring reservation but attends Staggerford High School, Hank Bird. The clash between Staggerford and the Sandhill reservation goes back further than either of these students have been alive, but Jeff hitting Hank during Miles’s study hall proves to be the catalyst to instigate a face-to-face conflict involving residents of both areas as well as the governor and the National Guard, which will be “armed to the teeth” (Hassler, 252). As both sides work together and separately to reconcile, a secondary storyline involving Beverly Bingham, a student who has

fallen in love with Miles, comes to fruition and finishes out the novel. Beverly’s mother, known to Staggerford residents as “The Bonewoman,” is clinically insane. The residents believe she is harmless, but Beverly knows otherwise. Her public admission of a crime her mother has committed, plus the choice of the National Guard to use the Bingham property as their station, leads to the climax of the novel, an unforeseen and tragic loss to the Staggerford community. The structure Hassler chose of dividing the novel into nine-day-long sections was instrumental in character establishment. By slowing down and focusing on each specific day, a mixture of the mundane, the extraordinary, and the tragic, Hassler proves his notion that stories are all around us. They need not be imagined; they already exist. To that end, by the conclusion of the nine-day time period, readers feel as if they have just spent a week with old friends. While the events are told primarily from Miles’s perspective, Hassler doesn’t limit any other characters. His description of Agnes McGee presents a physical, mental, and spiritual profile in a few brief sentences: “Slight and splay-footed and quick as a bird . . . this was her forty-first year in the same classroom. . . . In the minds of her former students, many of whom were grandparents, she occupied a place somewhere between Moses and Emily Post and when they met her on the street they guarded not only their speech but also their thoughts” (Hassler, 17). In contrast, but equally effective, is a purely physical description of Beverly Bingham, his student. “Since their visit in the Hub, she had applied something chartreuse and oily to her eyelids. He wanted to tell her to leave her eyes alone. They were large and blue and couldn’t be improved upon. Keeping her hair from falling in front of them was the only attention they needed” (Hassler, 69). The majority of Miles’s observations of Beverly are physical, alluding to the idea that he holds a slightly inappropriate affection for her. Eventually he admits to having feelings for her, but only to the privacy of his journal. Miles himself is described physically only once, and briefly at that (“Miles was tall, heavy, square-jawed and red-haired” [Hassler 26]); Hassler chose instead to present him through narration and through Miles’s own journal,

STEGNER, WALLACE 1205

which records some of his most intimate thoughts. Through the structure, Hassler affords himself the opportunity to pause and describe without disturbing the action. At the conclusion of the novel, readers know Hassler’s characters arguably better than they know some of their own neighbors. Hassler used the nine-day structure to enhance the plot as well as the characterization. He described the whole day virtually from sunrise to sunset in detail rather than selecting singular elements of each to run the story. It is precisely because of this daily life, the pattern and safety it establishes, that the novel’s final climactic action is such a shock. Extensive and rather obvious, foreshadowing still does not prepare readers for the final five pages when one of the lifelong residents suddenly leaves Staggerford forever. In fact, outside this climax, there are few major events in the novel overall. Besides the Staggerford-Sandhill conflict, the majority of the novel consists of day-to-day events: teaching, of course, visiting friends, a Halloween party, and Miles getting his wisdom teeth removed. Hassler presents Staggerford without apology and without grandeur: He doesn’t force plot where it isn’t necessary. The result is a novel that flows smoothly along, with the bumps of daily life, to a conclusion that shakes readers on a fundamental level simply because they don’t see it coming. In an interview with former colleague Joseph Plut, Hassler says about the ending, “Yes, a lot of people say they had to read that paragraph over several times . . . because they didn’t believe it. I’m surprised, of course, but I’m sort of pleased, too, that the novel had that much impact on the reader.” No one is more surprised than Jon Hassler himself about not only readers’ reactions to his novels but to their success as a whole. However, with a structure that allows characters to become real flesh and blood people, and a plotline that resembles daily life on a frightening level, success is inevitable. Readers can rest assured that when they pick up Staggerford, they will be meeting new friends they will not be able to leave by simply closing the book. Agnes, Miles, Beverly, and “The Bonewoman” remain far after the sun has set on the final day in Staggerford.

SOURCES Hassler, Jon. Staggerford. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. Plut, Joseph. “Conversations with Jon Hassler: About Staggerford,” South Dakota Review, (Spring 2001). Available online: URL: http://www.usd.edu/sdreview/39-1%20(interview). htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Kelly Flanagan

STEGNER, WALLACE (WALLACE EARLE STEGNER) (1909–1993) Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for ANGLE OF REPOSE, the National Book Award for The SPECTATOR BIRD, and three O. Henry Awards for short stories, Wallace Stegner is forever associated with the American West. “It is a peculiarity and a strength of Stegner’s vision that in looking east across America, he finds everywhere the same rootlessness he feels in himself,” notes critic Verlyn Klikenborg, who also says that Stegner’s voice is one of “reassurance, a voice of acceptance, not resignation” (Klinkenborg, 39, 40). During a five-decade-long career, Stegner—novelist, conservationist, historian— established the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, one of the most respected in the United States, and worked strenuously to preserve the land he cherished and extolled in his writing. Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, to George A. H. Stegner and Hilda Paulson Stegner. Raised there and in several western states, he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Utah in 1930 and his master’s (1932) and doctoral (1935) degrees at the University of Iowa. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934. His first novella, Remembering Laughter (1937), depicts the love triangle among Alec Stuart, a farmer; his wife, Margaret; and his sisterin-law Elspeth. Stegner uses memory here in ways that anticipate his more complex use of the past in later novels. Two other novellas of this period include The Potter’s House (1938) and Fire and Ice (1941). On a Darkling Plain (1940) is a novella about Edwin Vickers, a disillusioned war veteran who rejoins the Saskatchewan farming community from which he has isolated himself; Stegner debunks the romantic western myth of the self-reliant individual. Fame came to Stegner with the publication of The Big Rock Candy Mountain in 1943. The novel ranges

1206 STEGNER, WALLACE

over vast western spaces, and features Bo Mason, an ambitious man based on Stegner’s father, and his strong and determined wife, Elsa, based on Stegner’s mother, their two sons, and the exorbitant price they pay for Bo’s failure. Second Growth (1947) is the only Stegner novel set in the East, in a town modeled on Greensboro, Vermont; here the young people are stultified by social restrictions. The Preacher and the Slave 1950, published as Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel in 1969, is Stegner’s fictional account of the labor radical who was arrested and executed in Salt Lake City during World War I. In A Shooting Star (1961), a popular success, Sabrina Castro is a passionate, rebellious woman determined to change her reliance on wealth and leisure. Instead, she and her mother lay plans to preserve the land from commercialization. All the Little Live Things (1967) is narrated by retired literary editor Joe Allston, who reappears in The Spectator Bird (1976). Considered by most critics to be Stegner’s most didactic work, it contains numerous discussions on ethical and environmental issues. Angle of Repose, a 20th-century classic, follows the unhappily married and retired Berkeley history professor Lyman Ward, who studies the careers of his writerartist pioneer grandparents in order to understand his own life: He has lost a leg, his wife has deserted him, and his sociologist son, Rodman, rejects him. The Spectator Bird reintroduces Joe Allston, the cantankerous 70year-old seeking answers to life beyond his contempt for contemporary culture. He is helped by a number of people when he returns to Europe to trace his Danish ancestry, including the novelist Karen Blixen. In Recapitulation (1979), Bruce Mason (son of Bo Mason in The Big Rock Candy Mountain), now a retired diplomat, confronts the ghosts of his past. CROSSING TO SAFETY (1987), Stegner’s last novel, tells two Depressionera stories: the Langs, an eastern couple modeled on close friends of Wallace and Mary Stegner, meet the Morgans, a western couple modeled on the Stegners. Both of the young men are first-year English professors at a Wisconsin university. The friendship between the couples survives class and monetary differences. After being injured in a car accident on March 28, 1993, Wallace Stegner died on April 13, 1993, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Angle of Repose was performed as an

opera by Andrew Imbrie and Oakley Hall and the San Francisco Opera Company in 1976. Wallace Stegner’s papers are housed in the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University and at the University of Utah in the J. Willard Marriot Library.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking, 1967. Angle of Repose. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, 1943. Crossing to Safety. New York: Random House, 1987. Fire and Ice. New York: Duell, 1941. On a Darkling Plain. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. The Potter’s House. Muscatine, Iowa: Prairie Press, 1938. The Preacher and the Slave. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950, published as Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969. Recapitulation. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Remembering Laughter. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. Second Growth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947. A Shooting Star. New York: Viking, 1961. The Spectator Bird. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

SOURCES Arthur, Anthony, ed. Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Benson, Jackson J. Down by the Lemonade Springs: Essays on Wallace Stegner. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001. ———. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking, 1996. ———. Wallace Stegner: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Dourgarian, James M., ed. Wallace Earle Stegner, 1909–1993. Walnut Creek, Calif.: J. M. Dourgarian, 1994. Hepworth, James R., and Nancy Colberg. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence, 1990. ———, ed. Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Writing the Land,” New Republic, 20 & 27 August 1990, pp. 38–40. Lewis, Merrill, and Lorene Lewis. Wallace Stegner. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1972. Meine, Curt. Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Critical Essays and Commentary. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997.

STEIN, GERTRUDE 1207

Rankin, Charles E., ed. Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret C. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. Boston: Twayne, 1977. South Dakota Review, special Stegner issue, 23 (Winter 1985). Stegner, Page, ed. The Geography of Hope: A Tribute to Wallace Stegner. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1996. ———, ed. Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West. New York: Holt, 1998. Thomas, John L. A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land. New York: Routledge, 2000.

OTHER The Stegner Collection. Available online. URL: http://www. lib.utah.edu/spc/photo/p561/p561.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

STEIN, GERTRUDE (1874–1946) Gertrude Stein will be forever associated with the phrases “rose is a rose is a rose,” the “lost generation” of the 1920s, and her perhaps apocryphal description of California, “There is no there there.” An American writer in Paris during the early decades of the 20th century, Stein was a novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet essayist, biographer, and librettist. In the last few decades, however, scholars have been seriously reconsidering her highly experimental writing, resulting in a large number of articles and books on this writer. She is now associated with 20th-century modernism and increasingly viewed as a pioneer of postmodernism. Difficult to read because of her unorthodox use of language, Stein wrote several novels and novellas, the longest of which, The MAKING OF AMERICANS (1925), was 1,000 pages; Stein believed it to be her greatest work. Three Lives (1909), written in what Stein termed a realistic style, remains the easiest to read. Ida: A Novel is based loosely on the life of the duchess of Windsor. Gertrude Stein remains best known for The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS, her account of social and artistic circles in early 20thcentury Paris. Gertrude Stein was born on February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to Daniel Stein and Amelia Keyser Stein. The family moved to Austria, and then to Oakland, California, where Stein was reared until 1892, when she decided to attend Radcliffe College

while her brother Leo, to whom she was very close, went to Harvard University. She studied with the philosopher and psychologist William James, who would later remember Stein as one of the most brilliant students he had ever taught. After her graduation (magna cum laude), she and Leo both attended Johns Hopkins University Medical School, then moved in 1902 to Paris, France. They lived together until Alice B. Toklas moved in at Stein’s invitation; Stein and Toklas lived together from 1910 until Stein’s death. In Paris, Stein began to write and to collect the paintings of Cezanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso. In fact, Picasso began painting his famous portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1905, the same year that Stein wrote her first published work, Three Lives, a collection of two stories, “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena,” along with the novella Melanctha. All three tales present women whose powerlessness is represented by their submission to a world they cannot control; Melanctha, one of the few instances where a white author attempts to portray a black woman’s consciousness, earned praise from such Harlem Renaissance writers as Nella LARSEN and Richard WRIGHT. Stein’s first novella, Q.E.D., written in 1903, remained unpublished until 1950, when it was released as Things as They Are. It is the story of a love triangle and, unlike most of her other writing, follows a fairly linear narrative about three women involved in a lesbian relationship; the character representing Stein is rejected and shunned. Fernhurst, a novella also written in 1905 but published posthumously, is about gender issues and differences among the students at a women’s college. The Making of Americans, referred to as Stein’s “magnum opus,” tells the tale of two immigrant families, the Dehnings and Herslands; based on Stein’s own family history, it was intended to make the two families metaphors for the immigrant experience in America. In fact, the novel is very loosely held together by episodes and vignettes and there is so much repetition that all but the most diligent readers have difficulty finishing it. Stein was experimenting here with the temporary abandonment of syntax and punctuation; she tried to replicate through language the jumbled and disjointed state of the human mind: To use language in an ordered way, she believed, presented an unreal picture of human experience. Although scholars continue to

1208 STEIN, GERTRUDE

argue about the extent of her influence on the modernist writers Ernest HEMINGWAY, F. Scott FITZGERALD, Sherwood ANDERSON, and others, Stein’s own writings are clearly in the avant-garde of the modernists and precursors of contemporary postmodernism. Her intellect never waned, as the well-known anecdote about her final days in a Paris hospital attests: She reportedly asked, “What is the answer?” and, when no answer was forthcoming, she asked, “In that case, what is the question?” Gertrude Stein died on July 27, 1946, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. The world that had known her as the “Sibyl of Montparnesse” had lost its modernist icon.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, 1933. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor. Pawlet, Vt.: Banyan Press, 1948. Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings. New York: Liveright, 1971. Ida, a Novel. New York: Random House, 1941. The Making of Americans. Paris: Contact Editions, 1925; New York: A. &. C. Boni, 1926; London: Owen, 1968. A Novel of Thank You. (Originally published in 1958 by Yale University Press as volume 8 of “The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein.” Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1994. Q.E.D. 1903. Published as Things as They Are. Pawlet, Vt.: Banyan Press, 1950. Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena. New York: Grafton Press, 1909.

SOURCES Burns, Edward M., Ulla Dydo, and William Rice, eds. Mirrors of Friendship: The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996. Caramallo, Charles. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and the Biographical Act. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Carson, Luke. Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and Ezra Pound. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Peace. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Galvin, Mary E. Queer Poetics: Five Modernist Women Writers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Gygax, Franziska. Gender and Genre in Gertrude Stein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Harrison, Gilbert A. Gertrude Stein’s America. New York: R. B. Luce, 1965. Kaufmann, Michael. Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1994. Moore, George B. Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans: and the Emergence of Modernism. New York: Peter Lang, 1997. ———. The Unfinished Aesthetic: Gertrude Stein and “The Making of Americans.” New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Perelman, Bob. The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Riddel, Joseph N. The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory. Edited by Mark Bauerlein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Rogers, W. G. When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948. Simon, Linda. Gertrude Stein Remembered. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Stein, Gertrude. Everybody’s Autobiography. New York: Random House, 1937. Stendhal, Renate, ed. Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures: A Photobiography. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1994. Wagner-Martin, Linda. Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Watson, Steven. Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism. New York: Random House, 1998. Watts, Linda S. Rapture Untold: Gender, Mysticism, and the “Moment of Recognition” in Novels: Gertrude Stein. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Weiss, M. Lynn. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Welch, Lew, and Eric Paul Shaffer. How I Read Gertrude Stein. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1994. Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930. New York: Scribner, 1931. Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. New York: Putnam, 1996.

STEINBECK, JOHN 1209

OTHER Gertrude Stein Online. Available online. URL: http://www. tenderbuttons.com. Accessed September 25, 2005. Readings: Gertrude Stein. Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. Available online. URL: http://www.english.upenn. edu/~afilreis/88/stein-bio.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. The World of Gertrude Stein. Available online. URL: http:// www.ellensplace.net/gstein2.html. Accessed January 13, 2006.

STEINBECK, JOHN (JOHN ERNST STEINBECK) (1902–1968) John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1962, has earned a significant place in American literary history. His deceptively simple writing style appeals to younger as well as to more sophisticated readers. Because Steinbeck popularized and immortalized his native region of central California, it is frequently referred to as Steinbeck Country, a place that represents both the positive and the nightmarish aspects of the American Dream. Many of his now mythic characters have become part of the American literary landscape: his “paisanos” in TORTILLA FLAT (1935) and CANNERY ROW (1945), George and Lennie in OF MICE AND MEN (1937), the Joad family—particularly the larger-than-life Ma Joad—of The GRAPES OF WRATH, the young Jody of The Red Pony (1937), the depraved Cathy of EAST OF EDEN (1952). Steinbeck was also concerned with the evils perpetrated on the land, and contemporary environmentalists celebrate his prescience about these matters. Above all, Steinbeck honored life and the human ability to survive various setbacks. John Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, to John Ernest Steinbeck, a county treasurer, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a schoolteacher. He was educated at Stanford University, which he attended from 1919 to 1925 without taking a degree. In 1930, Steinbeck married Carol Henning, the year after publishing his first novel, Cup of Gold: A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer. It relates the life of a 17thcentury Caribbean pirate, Sir Henry Morgan, who attacks Panama City in Panama, the “cup of gold,” in order to win a woman whom he then ransoms to her husband. The PASTURES OF HEAVEN (1932), often com-

pared to Sherwood ANDERSON’s Winesburg, Ohio, is a short story cycle set between Monterey and Salinas in Corral de Tierra—called the Pastures of Heaven—that focuses on the myth of the rural American West and on two families in particular: Munroes, former city dwellers, who have chosen the pastoral life, and the Whitesides, a traditional farming family. The novel exposes the self-deceptions and delusions of ordinary folk who fail to achieve happiness in their Edenic locale. To a God Unknown (1933), set in the mystical town of Jolon at the southern end of the Salinas Valley, follows the western odyssey of New Englander Joseph Wayne. His obsession with the land and his establishment of a dynasty turns to dust as one of California’s periodic droughts wreaks destruction and leads to Wayne’s mystical death. Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck’s first best-seller, features the various stories of Monterey’s Mexican Americans and compares them to the knights of King Arthur’s round table. At the end of the novel, their communal housing stands empty and the landlord who held them all together falls to his death. The formerly close friends disband. In Dubious Battle (1936) illustrates Steinbeck’s theory of “group man,” his belief that the individual is revealed by his relationship to the group rather than in isolation. It is also his first novel to explore seriously the lives of hardscrabble working-class people, in this case California apple pickers who go on strike against their employers. The central character, Doc Burton, can work no miracles in this grim tale. Of Mice and Men (1937), Steinbeck’s first major success, harshly evokes reality at the same time it celebrates friendship between George Milton and Lennie Small, two itinerant farm laborers who define Steinbeck’s version of the American Dream: finding security through a house and land of one’s own. After Lennie inadvertently kills the wife of the ranch owner’s son, George feels he will do Lennie a favor by shooting him before the mob reaches him. The Red Pony (1937) is a clearly unified story sequence comprising “The Gift,” “The Great Mountains,” “The Promise”—published in North American Review and Harpers between 1933 and 1937—and “The Leader of the People,” which appeared in a story collection, The Long Valley. One of Steinbeck’s finest works, frequently compared with FAULKNER’s The Bear

1210 STEINBECK, JOHN

or HEMINGWAY’s Nick Adams stories, it tells the comingof-age story of Jody Tiflin as he grows from boyhood to manhood on a Salinas Valley ranch. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is easily the best-known protest novel in American fiction; it had both admirers and detractors but it seems that everyone has read the book. Based on Steinbeck’s own investigations and experiences as an agricultural worker, about which he had already published a number of newspaper articles, it features the impoverished and exploited Joads who, driven from their home in Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl, seek the paradise promised by California. Their tale, as they join migrant grape pickers who endure hunger and shantytowns, is interspersed with more general commentary on the era. The Joads become symbols of an entire nation. The Moon Is Down (1942), set in a mythical European village, is based on the Nazi occupation of Norway. In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck turns his attention once again to those living on the margins of society; the main character, based on Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts, is Doc, a selfless and good man who refuses to succumb to the materialism around him. The Wayward Bus (1947) follows Juan Chicoy on his bus named Sweetheart as he drives his varied passengers from Rebel Corners to San Juan de la Cruz; when the bus gets stuck in the mud, the behavior of the characters illustrates Steinbeck’s point, that modern American life has corrupted values and sexual attitudes. THE PEARL (1947), a mythic parable of a Mexican fisherman that Steinbeck based on a folktale heard during a trip in the Gulf of Mexico with Ricketts, features Kino, a poor villager from La Paz, Mexico. Kino, like the other pearl divers in the village, seeks the fabulous wealth promised by finding the perfect pearl. He finds that pearl but ends up throwing it back in the Gulf after realizing it has brought him nothing but sin and grief. East of Eden (1952) was Steinbeck’s study of the nature of good and evil as one Salinas Valley family falls from its Edenic state. Based on the story of Cain and Abel, the long and complex novel traces the history of Adam Trask and the Hamiltons, his maternal ancestors, and of Adam’s twin sons, Aron and Caleb (who may be his brother’s). In Sweet Thursday (1954), Cannery Row’s Doc tries and fails to live in a society that

has renounced communal connections. The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (1957) is a parody of French politics under Charles De Gaulle. In The WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT (1961), set on Long Island, the protagonist, Ethan Allen Hawley, cannot prosper in the materialistic world in which he finds himself, and the once ethical businessman suffers a moral collapse. John Steinbeck was married three times: after divorcing Carol Henning in 1943, he married Gwyn Conger 1943. They divorced in 1948, and he was married to Elaine Scott from 1950 until his death from heart disease in 1968, in New York City. He was buried in Salinas, California. Elaine Steinbeck’s death in 2003 resulted in a lawsuit filed by Steinbeck’s son and granddaughter, who believe that Steinbeck’s widow cheated them out of copyright control and royalties from his literary estate. Steinbeck’s novels have inspired numerous films, many of them now considered classics: Of Mice and Men, starring Burgess Meredith and Lon Cheney, was produced by United Artists in 1939, directed by Reza Badiyi for a teleplay in 1981; and, most recently, as a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich in 1992. The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda, was directed by John Ford at Twentieth Century-Fox in 1940. Tortilla Flat, starring Spencer Tracy, was filmed by MGM in 1942. The Moon Is Down, produced by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1943, starred Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Lee J. Cobb. In 1954, Warner Brothers filmed East of Eden, with James Dean and Jo Van Fleet, who won an Oscar for her performance; in the 1960s, it was made into a television miniseries and a musical that opened in New York in 1968. In 1947 a Mexican film rendition of The Pearl appeared, and, in 1948, RKO issued the film for which Steinbeck wrote the screenplay. He also wrote the screenplay for The Red Pony (1949), starring Robert Mitchum. The Wayward Bus was produced by Twentieth Century–Fox in 1957. MGM’s Cannery Row starred Nick Nolte and Debra Winger in 1982. John Steinbeck’s papers, correspondence, and manuscripts are in the following libraries: Stanford University, the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, Ball State University, the Preston Beyer Collection at Princeton University, the University of Texas

STEINBECK, JOHN 1211

at Austin, the University of Virginia, the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University, and the Salinas Public Library in Salinas, California. Steinbeck’s numerous honors include a 1940 Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1938 for the theatrical version of Of Mice and Men.

NOVELS Burning Bright: A Play in Story Form. New York: Viking, 1950. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945. Cup of Gold: A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer. New York: Robert McBride, 1929. East of Eden. New York: Viking, 1952. The Forgotten Village. New York: Viking, 1941. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939. In Dubious Battle. New York: Viking, 1936. The Moon Is Down. New York: Viking, 1942. Of Mice and Men. New York: Viking, 1937. The Pastures of Heaven. New York: Viking, 1932. The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947. The Red Pony. New York: Covici, Friede, 1937. The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication. New York: Viking, 1957. Sweet Thursday. New York: Viking, 1954. To a God Unknown. New York: Viking, 1933. Tortilla Flat. New York: Viking, 1935. The Wayward Bus. New York: Viking, 1947. The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking, 1961.

SOURCES Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. ———, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Beegel, Susan F., et al., eds. Steinbeck and the Environment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. Benson, Jackson J. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Viking, 1984. ———, ed. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck: Critical Essays with a Checklist to Steinbeck Criticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Bloom, Harold, ed. John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” New York: Chelsea House, 1996. ———, ed. John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” New York: Chelsea House, 1996.

Coers, Donald V., ed. After the Grapes of Wrath: Essays on John Steinbeck in Honor of Tetsumaro Hayashi. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Cusick, Lee. John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Piscataway, N.J.: Research & Education Association, 1994. Davis, Robert Conn, ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of “The Grapes of Wrath”: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1982. Ditsky, John, ed. Critical Essays on “The Grapes of Wrath.” Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Ferrell, Keith. John Steinbeck: The Voice of the Land. New York: Evans, 1986. Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963. French, Warren. A Filmguide to “The Grapes of Wrath.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. ———, ed. A Companion to “The Grapes of Wrath.” New York: Viking, 1963. ———. John Steinbeck. Boston: Twayne, 1961, revised, 1975. ———. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Geismar, Maxwell. Writers in Crisis. Boston: Houghton, 1942. Hadella, Charlotte. “Of Mice and Men”: A Kinship of Powerlessness. New York: Twayne, 1995. Harmon, Robert B. Steinbeck Bibliographies: An Annotated Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1987. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. Steinbeck’s Literary Dimension. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1973. ———, ed. John Steinbeck: A Dictionary of His Fictional Characters. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976. ———. Steinbeck’s Women: Essays in Criticism. Muncie, Ind.: Ball State University, 1979. ———, ed. A Study Guide to Steinbeck: A Handbook to His Major Works. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974; Part II, Scarecrow, 1979. ———, and Beverly K. Simpson. John Steinbeck: Dissertation Abstracts and Research Opportunities. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1994. Hedgpeth, Joel W., ed. The Outer Shores. Eureka, Calif.: Mad River Press, 1978. Hughes, R. S. John Steinbeck: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Ito, Tom. John Steinbeck. San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 1994. Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding “Of Mice and Men,” “The Red Pony,” and “The Pearl”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

1212 STEPS

Karson, Jill. Reading on “Of Mice and Men.” San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1997. Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958. ———. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. ———. John Steinbeck: Nature and Myth. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978. ———. “The Grapes of Wrath”: Text and Criticism. 2nd edition. New York: Penguin, 1996. Loewen, Nancy. John Steinbeck. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1997. McElrath, Joseph R., et al., eds. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Millichap, Joseph R. Steinbeck and Film. New York: Ungar, 1983. Moore, Harry Thornton. The Novels of John Steinbeck: A First Critical Study. Chicago: Normandie House, 1939. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. ———. “The Grapes of Wrath”: Trouble in the Promised Land. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Reef, Catherine. John Steinbeck. New York: Clarion Books, 1996. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Swisher, Clarice, ed. Readings on John Steinbeck. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Timmerman, John H. John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986.

OTHER Audio interview with Elaine Steinbeck about John Steinbeck. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/ elainesteinbeck. Accessed September 25, 2005. John Steinbeck—Biography. Nobelprize.org. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1962/ Steinbeck-bio.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Martin Heasley Cox. Center for Steinbeck Studies. San José State University. Available online. URL: http://www.Steinbeck. sjsu.edu/home/index.jsp. Accessed January 13, 2006. Steinbeck: The California Novels. Available online. URL: http:// www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/Steinbeck. Accessed September 25, 2005.

STEPS JERZY KOSINSKI (1969)

The subject of Steps undergoes a continual metamorphosis throughout its pages. At the beginning of each of the 46

episodes into which the book is divided, an “older” self is negated (not canceled out entirely, but preserved in the memory of the work), and a “new” one forms and takes its place. Each self belongs to a “present” instant that is disconnected from the preceding series of instants, each of which is itself displaced from history. If a unified authorial consciousness embraces each transformation, holding together the death and reformation of the subject in each instance, this can only be discerned in the articulation of the individual episodes. And if a link binds the episodes together (the “steps” of the title), it is the guiding thread of submission and domination, the only two forms of relationship of which the subject is capable. The author, Jerzy KOSINSKI, was surely disingenuous and willfully misleading when he claimed in an interview that the book progresses from “the formed mind of the protagonist (in the beginning of the novel) when he sees himself as a unique manipulator of others, to the stage (at the novel’s end) when he realizes that he is nothing but a composite of various steps of culture.” To speak of a “progression” in any strict sense would be inaccurate. It is the case that the narrator manipulates a young girl who is dazzled by the narrator’s credit cards at the very beginning, but there are no traces of a gradual progression from the mind of a sovereign subject who exploits a dominant culture for his own purposes to one who recognizes his subjection to that culture. On many occasions throughout the work, long before its denouement, he is a plaything given over to powers that infinitely surpass his own, exposed to the whims of the uncontrollable, without a barrier to shield him from the forces that invade him. The seductiveness of Steps resides in its power to lead the reader astray, away from the world to which s/he has grown accustomed and into a fictional space from which there is no easy escape. However oppressive its horror becomes, it is difficult to tear one’s eyes from this book. Literary analysis may engage with the book’s meaning but will necessarily fail to adequately explain the spell it casts over the reader. Each “step” is macabre and unsettling in its violence. In one episode, the subject is a farmhand at the mercy of peasants who spit on him for their amusement [II, 2]. He seeks revenge by inserting discarded fishhooks into morsels

STEPS 1213

of bread, which he feeds to the children of those who torture him. The only way to invert the existing hierarchy, he seems to feel, is to become an oppressor oneself: Oppression generates oppression in the way that fire generates fire. A group of peasants, in another “step,” gapes at a performance in which a young girl is violated by an animal [I, 4]. It is uncertain, the narrator tells us dryly, whether her screams indicate that she is actually suffering or whether she is merely playing to the audience. The extent to which the girl is a victim or a manipulator remains undetermined. In another episode, a nurse passively endures the amorous advances of the narrator, now a photographer, who longs for sexual contact with her in order to distinguish himself as much as possible from the seemingly nonhuman inmates of a senior citizen’s home whom he has been photographing [III, 1]. When the narrator enters uninvited into the nurse’s apartment, he finds her coupling with a simian creature who, ambiguously, is later described as “human.” The narrator, in another episode, is an office worker whose lover is unaware that she is his lover [V, 5]. The narrator plots with a friend to take possession of her. The woman submits entirely to the friend’s will and agrees to allow herself to be possessed by a stranger while blindfolded. Now the narrator can dispose of her sightless body as he wishes: a relationship that is emblematic of all of the relationships portrayed in Steps. Despite her complete availability, his desire remains frustrated. Nothing about her is concealed, but her nudity is itself a form of concealment. At another moment, the narrator is on a jury [V, 3]. The defendant explains his deed in the most ordinary terms without ever attempting to justify his behavior. A fictive identification is afforded between the members of the jury and the “executioner”: They visualize themselves in the act of killing, but cannot project themselves into the mind of the victim who is in the act of being killed. The agony of the victim is lost to vision altogether. The narrator, in another episode, becomes the powerless spectator of his girlfriend’s rape [III, 3]. Afterward, their relationship changes. He can now only represent her to himself as one who has been violated and who is worthy of violation: Her rape comes to define her. He visualizes her as a kind of crustacean

or mollusk emerging from her shell. The conclusion of the episode follows an implacable logic: Under false pretenses, the narrator offers his girlfriend to the rowdy guests at a party, who proceed to have their way with her. Her pearl necklace, a gift from the narrator, scatters to the floor like so many iridescent seeds (a somberly beautiful passage that gives the lie to Kosinski’s own self-interpretive remark that Steps eschews figurative language). The architect of an orchestrated violation, the narrator departs without witnessing the inescapable result of his designs. Such a summary can only imperfectly approximate the grotesque horror of this book. One may wonder whether there is a point to such an uninterrupted current of phantasmagoric images. The reader may be invited to take delight in the extremity of its descriptions: Such would nurture one’s suspicion that Steps is a purely nihilistic work. What we find in each instance is a relationship between one who terrorizes and oppresses or who sympathizes with terror and oppression (this is often, but not always, the narrator) and one who surrenders, voluntarily or otherwise, to the will of the oppressor. By describing such scenes of exploitation and persecution in a neutral manner, the book seems to offer no moral transcendence. Such an interpretation, however, would ignore the book’s moral center. The book’s ethical dimension first becomes apparent in an italicized transitional episode in which the protagonist tells his lover of an architect who designed plans for a concentration camp, the main purpose of which, the narrator explains, was “hygiene” [IV, 1]. Genocide was for those responsible indistinguishable from the extermination of vermin: “Rats have to be removed. We exterminate them, but this has nothing to do with our attitudes toward cats, dogs, or any other animal. Rats aren’t murdered—we get rid of them; or, to use a better word, they are eliminated; this act of elimination is empty of all meaning.” This passage in particular casts light on the “theme” of dehumanization that runs pervasively throughout the book. In Steps, the other person is reduced to the status of a thing. To make of the other human being a thing: Such is sadism. Only by representing those to be murdered as vermin (as things to be exterminated) is mass

1214 STODDARD, ELIZABETH DREW BARSTOW

murder possible. It is no accident, from this perspective, that the narrator imagines himself felling trees when he obeys an order to slit his victim’s throat toward the end of the book: It is the only way that he can suppress the nausea that wells up within him [VIII, 3]. Each human being is irreplaceable, and the death of a person is, therefore, an irrecoverable loss. By forgetting this, by turning the other human being into a mere object, one is able to dutifully “obey orders” to kill without the intrusion of moral consciousness. Steps aims at disgusting the reader by showing him/her the obscene consequences of objectification. From this perspective, is profoundly moral. The center of Steps may serve as a counterbalance to the parade of scenes of horror and degradation that constitute it. However, this center does not govern the totality of its operations. A tonality of evil informs these poisonous pages; in terms of its sheer cruelty, the work could only be compared to the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Although one can point to its moral character from the passages cited above, the book could also be determined as a willfully perverse affirmation of simulation, falsehood, and metamorphosis that suspends the dimension of the ethical altogether. The subject ceaselessly yearns to exteriorize himself, to become part of an exterior space in which he would become entirely other-than-himself. It is a space in which he would be unencumbered by all forms of ethical responsibility: “If I could become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings” [VII, 1].

SOURCES Boyers, Robert. “Language and Reality in Kosinski’s Steps,” Centennial Review 16 (Winter 1972): 41–61. Daler, John Kent von. “An Introduction to Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps,” Language and Literature 1 (January 1971): 43–49. Kenner, Hugh. “Keys on a Ring.” In Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupach, 57–58. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998. Kosinski, Jerzy. The Art of the Self: Essays apropos Steps. New York: Scientia-Factum, 1968. ———. Steps. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Petrakis, Byron. “Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps and the Cinematic Novel,” Comparatist (February 1978): 16–22. Tartikoff, Brandon. “Interview with Jerzy Kosinski,” Metropolitan Review 8 (October 1971): 104. Reprinted in Con-

versations with Jerzy Kosinski, edited Tom Teicholz, 13–14. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Teicholz, Tom. Conservations with Jerzy Kosinski Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Tucker, Martin. “A Moralist’s Journey into the Heart of Darkness,” Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski, edited by Barbara Tepa Lupace, 63–65. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998. Joseph Suglia

STODDARD, ELIZABETH DREW BARSTOW (1823–1902) Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard was praised by her contemporaries, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE and William Dean HOWELLS, but she failed to achieve popularity in her own day. Lawrence Buell and Sandra A. Zagarell, who edited the 1984 critical edition of Stoddard’s writings, believe that her talent places her on the same level with Hawthorne and Herman MELVILLE, and that her voice is “the most strikingly original” of her day (Buell and Zagarell, xi). This 19thcentury novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, and journalist insisted on writing realistic prose when most of her contemporaries were capitulating to the public craving for sentimental fiction. Indeed, today’s readers are much more likely to appreciate Stoddard’s straightforward treatment of women’s erotic nature. As scholars have noted, Stoddard achieved her greatest fame near the end of the 20th century, and it continues into the 21st. Of her three novels—The MORGESONS (1862, 1901), Two Men (1865), and Temple House (1867)—The Morgesons continues to attract most attention. The scholar and critic Susan K. Harris, for instance, suggests that it may be “the most radical women’s novel of the 19th-century” (Harris 1992, 152). Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard was born on May 6, 1823, to Betsy Drew Barstow and Wilson Barstow, a shipbuilder, whose financial difficulties reappear in The Morgesons. Stoddard was educated briefly at the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, but left school after the deaths of her mother and her sister Jane. She married Richard Henry Stoddard, a poet, on December 6, 1852, and moved permanently to New York. She wrote prolifically during the next half century, including 75 newspaper columns for the Daily Alta California and more than 80 short stories and essays. When The Morgesons appeared, the tale of Cas-

STONE, ROBERT 1215

sandra Morgeson (who distinctly resembled Stoddard) and her passion for her married cousin sold poorly. But Stoddard believed that woman’s sexual nature must be acknowledged and addressed, and Two Men and Temple House likewise feature daring women. Two Men, moreover, is the story of a love affair between a privileged white man, Parke Auster, and a passionate and beautiful black woman, Charlotte Lang. The novel, one of the first to address mixed race relationships, ends tragically. Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard suffered repeated losses and disappointments in her life, including the deaths of two of her children at young ages and the death of a third child, a playwright, at the age of 37. The reawakened interest in her work, particularly her novels, shows no signs of abating.

NOVELS The Morgesons. New York: Carleton and Co., 1862. Temple House. New York: Carleton and Co., 1867. Two Men. New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865.

SOURCES Aldrich, Mrs. Thomas Bailey. Crowding Memories. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. Buell, Lawrence, and Sandra A. Zagarell, eds. “Biographical and Critical Introduction.” In “The Morgesons” and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished by Elizabeth Stoddard, edited by Lawrence Buell & Sandra A. Zagarell, xi–xxix. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984. Harris, Susan K. “Projecting the ‘I’/Conoclast: First-Person Narration in The Morgesons.” In 19th-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies, 152–170. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. “Stoddard’s The Morgesons: A Contextual Evaluation,” English Studies Quarterly 31 (1st quarter 1985): 11–23. Matlack, James Hendrickson. “Hawthorne and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard,” New England Quarterly 50 (June 1977): 278–302. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988. Zagarell, Sandra A. “Legacy Profile: Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard (1823–1902),” Legacy 8 (Spring 1984): 73–91.

STONE, ROBERT (ROBERT ANTHONY STONE) (1937– ) Robert Stone is a novelist whose prizewinning fiction typically features Vietnam veterans, gunrunners, drug pushers, psychotics, and

spies in a bleak and evil world. Nonetheless, he holds on to hope for those lost in a universe that nearly always seems hostile. His first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), won the Faulkner award for Notable First Novel. DOG SOLDIERS (1974) won the National Book Award. Both novels were made into feature-length movies, with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward starring in WUSA, Stone’s adaptation of A Hall of Mirrors, and Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld in Who’ll Stop the Rain, the film title for Dog Soldiers. A Flag for Sunrise received an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award and John Dos Passos Prize, as well as nominations for the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Outerbridge Reach (1992) won for Stone a second National Book Award. Robert Stone was born on August 21, 1937, in New York City, to C. Homer Stone and Gladys Catherine Grant Stone, a former teacher. His father deserted his mother while she was pregnant with him. Raised in Brooklyn and a product of Catholic schools, Stone married Janice G. Burr on December 11, 1959. They traveled around the United States until Stone published A Hall of Mirrors, set in New Orleans during the era of the Civil Rights movement. The protagonist, Morgan Ranie, learns that unscrupulous whites are using the census far a scam designed to remove lowerincome blacks from the welfare rolls. After a race riot, again engineered by whites, Ranie is killed and his friend Geraldine Crosby commits suicide. This pessimistic view of contemporary society continues in Dog Soldiers, in which former Marine and Vietnam veteran Raymond Hicks brings several million dollars worth of heroin from Vietnam to Berkeley, California, for the journalist John Converse. The plan goes awry and Hicks goes off with Converse’s wife, Marge, to a commune, clearly illustrating Stone’s view of the contemporary loss of any moral center. A Flag for Sunrise explores this loss in terms of gnosticism, an ancient belief in the dark forces behind the creation, juxtaposed against the Catholicism of the alcoholic Father Egan and the idealistic Sister Justin. The novel takes place in the fictional central American country of Tecan during a revolution. They are visited by Frank Holliwell, a professor of anthropology and Vietnam

1216 STORY OF AVIS, THE

veteran, and Pablo Tabor, a murderer and deserter from the Coast Guard. One of the most fascinating subplots involves Gordon Walker, an aging screenwriter with a midlife crisis, and Lu Anne Bourgeois, an actor who is about to act out, literally, Walker’s screenplay of Kate Chopin’s The AWAKENING, in which the protagonist drowns herself. At the end of this complex novel, Sister Justin is murdered for her part in the revolution. The Christianity of the dying Sister Justin seems stronger, and therefore more hopeful, than the gnosticism to which Holliwell retreats. Outerbridge Reach (1992) features another filmmaker, Ronald Strickland, who is filming the journey of a Vietnam veteran, Owen Brown. Brown, a former naval officer, is disturbed by his Vietnam memories and leaves his wife Anne to embark on a round-the-world cruise on his yacht. Tragically, Brown’s madness overtakes him, and Anne succumbs to Strickland’s seductive advances. In Damascus Gate (1998), writer Christopher Lucas travels to Jerusalem to research the religious cults, only to fall in love with Sonia Barnes, a half-Jewish, half–African American Sufi jazz singer. She is a follower of Adam de Kuff, who believes he is the messiah. Stone’s most recent novel, Bay of Souls, focuses on Michael Ahearn, a Minnesota English professor suffering from a midlife crisis. Despite his wife’s injury, incurred while rescuing their son from nearly freezing, Ahearn leaves her to follow Lara Purcell, a female colleague, to a Caribbean island where he becomes involved in voodoo and a war. Stone remains consistent in his careful craftsmanship, realistic dialogue, persuasively realized characters, and explorations of religious beliefs, perhaps suggesting an alternative to his often delineated existentialist world.

NOVELS Bay of Souls. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. Children of Light. New York: Knopf, 1986. Damascus Gate. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Dog Soldiers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. A Flag for Sunrise. New York: Knopf, 1981. A Hall of Mirrors. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967. Outerbridge Reach. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992.

SOURCES Bloom, James D. “Cultural Capital and Contrarian Investing: Stone, Thom Jones, and Others,” Contemporary Literature 36, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 490–507.

Bull, Jeoffrey S. “ ‘What about a Problem That Doesn’t Have a Solution?’ Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, DeLillo’s Mao II, and the Politics of Political Fiction,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 215–229. Finn, James. “The Moral Vision of Robert Stone: The Transcendent in the Muck of History,” Commonweal 120, no. 19 (November 5, 1993): 9–14. Fredrickson, Robert S. “Robert Stone’s Decadent Leftists.” Papers on Language and Literature 32, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 315–334. ———. “Robert Stone’s Opium of the People: Religious Ambivalence in Damascus Gate,” Papers on Language and Literature 36, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 42–57. Hower, Edward. “A Parable for the Millennium,” World and I 13, no. 9 (September 1998): 255–262. Karagueuzian, Maureen. “Irony in Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 65–73. McGraw, Erin. “Larger Concerns,” Georgia Review 51, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 782–792. Pritchard, William H. “Actual Fiction,” Hudson Review 50, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 656–664. Schroeder, Eric James. “Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone,” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (Spring 1984): 135–164. Shelton, Frank W. “Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers: Vietnam Comes Home to America,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 24, no. 2 (Winter 1983): 74–81. Solotaroff, Robert. Robert Stone. New York: Twayne, 1994. Stone, Robert, David Pink, and Chuck Lewis. “An Interview with Robert Stone,” Salmagundi 108 (Fall 1995): 117–139.

STORY OF AVIS, THE ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS (WARD) (1877) Elizabeth Stuart PHELPS’s The Story of Avis depicts the plight of 19th-century women torn between personal self-fulfillment and marriage and suggests that overwhelming domestic duties ultimately destroy creativity. Although some early reviewers described the novel as having “a dangerous lesson to preach, and no less dangerous than untrue” and not “altogether a wholesome story,” both a moral and a realistic dimension appear throughout. Avis Dobell, Phelps’s favorite female character, is at least partially autobiographical. The numerous parallels between Avis and Phelps include an epiphanic reading of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

STORY OF AVIS, THE 1217

and a dislike of domestic tasks—Avis describes sewing as making “a crawling down my back.” Phelps’s mother, herself the victim of domestic overwork while struggling to write, is another source. Other characters, including Avis’s father may well have their genesis in Phelp’s own family. After studying in Europe for several years, Avis returns to her native New England to make her reputation. Carol Kessler notes that Avis’s potential greatness perhaps represents “human creative potential in general,” but, as for most artistic women of her time, Avis finds work difficult. She is often deterred by what Kessler identifies as “incapacitating expectations of family, friends, and society” (xiii). At a meeting of the Spenser Club, Avis encounters Philip Ostrander, a young professor at the local college and a protégé of her father. In a sexually charged exchange, Philip forces Avis to admit that she recalls their encounter in Paris, but Avis rejects their physical attraction, instinctively sensing it endangers her creativity. After a symbolic rescue scene full of deterministic imagery—Philip retrieves Avis from the lighthouse jetties where she is attempting to save a bird subsequently smothered in his coat pocket—Avis’s fate seems sealed. Although forewarned by her European master to avoid portrait painting, she yields to Philip’s pressure to paint his portrait. The months of creating the portrait pass sometimes idyllically, but contentious scenes in natural settings such as the apple orchard punctuate them, and Avis’s distrust of marriage consistently frames them. Phelps phrases their actions in martial terms to indicate their power struggle. When Philip proposes, Avis rejects him, citing her God-given power to paint and insisting that she “must not think of love” because she “cannot accept the consequences of love as other women do.” Philip promises that, if they are married, she “would paint,” but Avis remains steadfast. Stunned, Philip joins the Union army. Avis’s creativity is already damaged. Unable to paint, she seeks imaginative inspiration in an alcoholic hallucination, visualizes a sphinx, and can again work. Wounded, Philip returns to Harmouth to recuperate. Again, Avis’s work is interrupted, this time when she bruises her hand rowing. In another emotionally charged scene, Avis, overcome by Philip’s “physical

ruin and helplessness,” admits her love and later, although she describes love as “like death,” agrees to marriage. Philip promises that he wants her love, not her “individuality,” and that she will not be his “housekeeper.” These vows prove empty. After the betrothal, Phelps introduces a telling discussion between Aunt Chloe and Avis, highlighting the unacknowledged repression wrought by traditional 19th-century attitudes prescribing woman’s role. Initially, Aunt Chloe maintains that, for a wife, “her husband’s interests in life are enough,” but reluctantly she admits that, if she could “choose for her selfish pleasure,” she would devote herself to studying plants, as a florist or a botanist. This scene parallels earlier descriptions of Avis’s mother forsaking her stage ambitions to marry and a later moment when Coy, Avis’s best friend who is happy in her role as wife and mother, admits her reluctance to ask her husband for money. Married life soon disappoints both Avis and Philip. As the promised studio never materializes, Avis’s masterpiece, The Sphinx, remains unfinished; to ease their financial burdens, she paints portraits in their attic. When they are called to Philip’s mother’s deathbed, Avis, sensing that Philip has somehow “neglected” his mother, questions Philip’s character. A moment of sisterhood transpires, with Avis accepting Philip’s mother as a surrogate. Beyond giving another example of the uncomplaining woman whose interests have always been inferior to the male’s, this scene highlights one of the reasons Avis has been unable to work since her marriage: She lacks the emotional support of another woman—a mother, a sister, a friend. Van, Avis’s sickly first-born, allows Phelps to question maternal instinct. The burden of child care falls to Avis, who must cope with the colicky, crying child. She feels “ashamed . . . for being the mother of so cross a baby” and finds a child “a great deal of trouble.” And Philip’s character is again questioned when Susan Wanamaker, Philip’s rejected lover, visits Avis. Susan’s contrast of Philip as “a handsome boy” with her own alcoholic husband, a “brute,” allows Phelps to stress a social problem and ironically foreshadows Philip’s betrayal of Avis. Financial troubles increase when Philip loses his job; physical woes compound these problems. With everyone in the house ill, Avis’s friend Barbara, who

1218 STOUT, REX

nursed Philip when he had been wounded, arrives to help. Discovering Barbara and Philip in a compromising situation destroys Avis’s faith in her husband. To improve his health, Philip travels to Europe, leaving Avis to cope with all domestic and financial worries. Van sickens and dies. Philip returns, more ill than before, and Avis, overcome by pity, adopts a maternal manner with Philip. Leaving their daughter with Avis’s father and Aunt Chloe, Avis and Philip travel to Florida, where Philip’s health improves, but, in another naturalistic scene, he dies in the swampy forest of the St. Johns River. Avis returns to New England, but the emotional stresses of her marriage have “stiffened” her hand, and she can no longer paint. Recognizing that her creative time is past, Avis resigns herself to teaching painting, but, as she reads the story of Lancelot and Sir Galahad, she passes the grail to her daughter. Like many 19th-century women’s novels, Avis has been criticized for “artistic weaknesses” and “an anxious but failed search for . . . the graceful phrase,” (Kelly, 210; Kessler, xxviii); however, its story resonates with women even today, and contemporary readings of the novel view it as stylistically complex. Ronna Privett had identified numerous layers of meaning involving “literary, cultural, and historical references ranging from Greek mythology to current scientific theories,” but especially focusing on the Victorians’ language of flowers (Privett, 10). Indeed, as Privett maintains, Avis was “stylistically in tune with (perhaps even ahead of) most of the writing” of Phelps’s time (Privett, 10). With the exception of free love, all the elements of the 19th-century “anarchist critique of heterosexual marriage appear in Avis. However, Phelps is unwilling to condemn marriage as an institution (Kessler, xvi). She presents Avis as questioning what might have been, yet accepting her fate as “what god meant for her.” Avis’s hope lies in the future of her daughter Wait, whom she determines will not “repeat her blunders.” In what Susan K. Harris describes as “a biological as well as a spiritual inheritance,” Phelps suggests that changing society’s vision of woman’s role requires more than one generation (Harris, 202). Perhaps Wait will be the “true woman” Phelps described in an article in The Independent in 1872, one she maintains “the earth has never seen,”

one who will have equal opportunities for education and equal rights. Yet, as Susan Coultrap McQuin explains, Phelps’s “views fall on the conservative side of New Womanhood because, while she wished to expand women’s rights and social opportunities, she only ambivalently rejected the ideas of the True Woman” (McQuin, 181). Perhaps, like Avis, she leaves that to Wait’s generation.

SOURCES Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Harris, Susan K. 19th-Century American Women’s Novels, Interpretative Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Kelly, Lori Duin. The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1983. Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Story of Avis. Edited by Carol Farley Kessler. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985. Privett, Ronna Coffey. A Comprehensive Study of American Writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 1844–1911: Art for Truth’s Sake. Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Gloria Shearin

STOUT, REX (REX TODHUNTER STOUT) (1886–1975) Known as the creator of Nero Wolfe, the private investigator often compared to Earle Stanley GARDNER’s well-known protagonist Perry Mason, Rex Stout was by all accounts a brilliant, witty, and eccentric writer who contributed a thoroughly original character to 20th-century American detective fiction. Nero Wolfe, a man of capacious size and gourmet tastes, was soon joined by detective Archie Goodwin, who assumed the role of the narrator. Stout has been repeatedly praised for his witty dialogue and ability to build a suspenseful tale. Rex Stout was born on December 1, 1886, in Noblesville, Indiana, to John Wallace Stout and Lucetta Todhunter Stout, who shortly afterward moved to a farm in Wakarusa, Kansas, where Rex was reared. Enlisting in the navy in 1908 after one year at the University of Kansas, Stout served aboard the Mayflower, President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht. After military service, he moved to New York City and began to pub-

STOUT, REX 1219

lish prolifically in the pulp magazines until his marriage in 1915 to Fay Kennedy of Topeka. Then he and his brother, Bob, opened a savings bank. Stout made enough money to become a full-time writer, publishing several romance and adventure novels and stories before settling in 1937 on the detective genre. In 1931 he and his first wife divorced, and Stout moved to High Meadow, an 18-acre estate built by him in Brewster, New York; in 1932 he married Pola Weinbach and published his first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer-de-Lance, in 1934. For the rest of his life—with ample time out, particularly during World War II, for political activism—Stout devoted his novelistic energies to the 286-pound Nero Wolfe, who lives in a brownstone on New York’s West 35th Street. One of Archie Goodwin’s main charges is to entice Wolfe from his apartment once in awhile. Wolfe loves beer, yellow silk pajamas, and orchids, and readers loved him from the inception. The month of his death, Stout published his 72nd novel (his 46th featuring Nero Wolfe). A 73rd novel was published posthumously in 1985 after the discovery of the manuscript. As scholar David R. Anderson writes, “[T]he world that he imagined and brought into being has won its place in our literature for its witty, engaging, and ultimately moving treatment of crime fiction’s great theme: the struggle between order and disorder” (Anderson, 1). In 2001, television’s Arts and Entertainment channel aired a series of novels and novellas, encouraging a new generation to experience Nero Wolfe.

NOVELS And Be a Villain. New York: Viking, 1948; published in England as More Deaths Than One. London: Collins, 1949. Before Midnight. New York: Viking, 1955. The Black Mountain. New York: Viking, 1954. Black Orchids. (Two novellas: Black Orchids and Cordially Invited to Meet Death; Invited to Meet Death, later published under title Invitation to Murder). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. Death of a Doxy. New York: Viking, 1966. The Doorbell Rang. New York: Viking, 1965. A Family Affair. New York: Viking, 1975. Fer-de-Lance. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. Forest Fire. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1933. The Hand in the Glove: A Dol Bonner Mystery. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937; published in England as Crime on Her Hands. London: Collins, 1939.

How Like a God. New York: Vanguard, 1929. If Death Ever Slept. New York: Viking, 1957. In the Best Families. New York: Viking, 1950; published in England as Even in the Best Families. London: Collins, 1951. The League of Frightened Men. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. Murder by the Book. New York: Viking, 1951. Curtains for Three. (Three novellas: The Gun with Wings, Bullet for One, and Disguise for Murder). New York: Viking, 1951. Not Quite Dead Enough. (Two novellas: Not Quite Dead Enough and Booby Trap). New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944. The Red Box. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937. The Rubber Band. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936, published as To Kill Again. New York: Curl, 1960. The Second Confession. New York: Viking, 1949. Seed on the Wind. New York: Vanguard, 1930. The Silent Speaker. New York: Viking, 1946. Some Buried Caesar. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939; condensed edition published as The Red Bull. New York: Dell, 1945. Three Doors to Death. (Three novellas: Man Alive, Omit Flowers, and Door to Death). New York: Viking, 1950. Three Men Out. (Three novellas; Invitation to Murder, The Zero Clue, and This Won’t Kill You). New York: Viking, 1954. Too Many Cooks. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1938. Too Many Women. New York: Viking, 1947. Where There’s a Will. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1940.

SOURCES Anderson, David R. Rex Stout. New York: Ungar, 1984. Baring-Gould, William S. Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fourth Street: The Life and Times of America’s Largest Private Detective. New York: Viking, 1969. Darby, Ken. The Brownstone House of Nero Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. McAleer, John. Rex Stout: A Biography. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1994. Townsend, Guy M., and John McAleer. The Work of Rex Stout: An Annotated Biography and Guide. Edited by Boden Clarke. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1995. Van Dover, J. Kenneth. At Wolfe’s Door: The Nero Wolfe Novels of Rex Stout. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991.

OTHER Books and Writers. Rex Stout (1886–1975). Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rexstout.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Merely a Genius . . . [Rex Stout fan site]. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8907/nero.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

1220 STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER

STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER (HARRIET ELIZABETH BEECHER STOWE) (1811–1896) Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote what some scholars agree was the most important American novel ever written: UNCLE TOM’S CABIN; OR, LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY (1852). Published in protest of the Compromise of 1850 that kept all African Americans at risk, Uncle Tom’s Cabin made every reader aware of the evils of slavery, the societal blight that culminated in the Civil War. According to President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, Harriet Beecher Stowe was, “the little lady who started this great war.” Her second novel, The Minister’s Wooing (1859), a courtship tale, was also popular but much less important. Many of Stowe’s other novels were rediscovered during the latter decades of the 20th century and are undergoing reevaluation. Chief among these are Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1866), an antislavery novel set in North Carolina, and The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (1862), the psychological examination of a talented young woman who chafes at society’s barriers. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, in Litchfield, Connecticut, to Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote Beecher, who died of tuberculosis when Harriet was five years old. Reared primarily by her older sister Catharine—who was to become a renowned educator and writer— Stowe attended and later taught at Hartfield Female Seminary, a school run by her sister. When the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, Stowe again taught at her sister’s school, this time the Western Female Seminary, until her marriage to Calvin Stowe in January 1836. It was her desire to add to her husband’s modest professorial salary that led to Stowe’s writing. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel set on plantations in Kentucky and Louisiana, features the escaped slave Eliza Harris, who refuses to see her son sold; eventually they reach freedom in the North. Uncle Tom, however, is sold “down the river” to the plantation of the evil Simon Legree, where he eventually dies. Stowe wrote another antislavery novel, Dred (1866), about the need for vengeance in Dred, an enraged and bitter black man. The Minister’s Wooing (1859) on the other hand, is a story that borrows from the Beecher family history and follows the elderly Reverend Samuel Hopkins as he

courts Mary Scudder, who firmly rejects the rigid tenets of Calvinism. Old-Town Folks (1869), set in Natick, Massachusetts likewise excoriates the religion of an angry God. While it is based on Calvin Stowe’s youth, Poganuc People: Their Lives and Loves (1878) draws on recollections from Harriet Beecher’s own childhood. The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), apparently autobiographical in many respects, examines the different philosophies of two young girls, one of whom accepts conventional religion; the other is drawn to more secular pursuits. In the second part of the novel, the adventurous and talented Mara Lincoln, frustrated by the lack of opportunities for women like herself, loves a Spanish youth, Moses; Mara dies and Moses marries her friend Sally. The novel has attracted much attention from feminist critics. Stowe also draws attention to the role of women in her so-called “society novels”: Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel (1871), My Wife and I; or, Harry Henderson’s History (1871), and We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street (1875). A talented and conscientious writer who interwove didactic messages into her realistic presentations of people, places, and issues, Stowe’s reputation in American letters seems secure. She died at Nook Farm, her home in Hartford, in 1896, and is buried at the Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts.

NOVELS Agnes of Sorrento. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1862. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856, republished as Nina Gordon: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1866. The Minister’s Wooing. New York: Derby & Jackson, 1859. My Wife and I; or, Harry Henderson’s History. New York: Ford, 1871. Old-Town Folks. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869. The Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine. Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1862. Pink and White Tyranny: A Society Novel. Boston: Roberts, 1871. Poganuc People: Their Lives and Loves. New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1878. Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other: An Every Day Novel (with Edward Everett Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, et al.). Boston: Roberts, 1872.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND 1221

Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 2 vols. Boston: Jewett; Cleveland, Ohio: Jewett, Proctor & Worthington, 1852. We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street. New York: Ford, 1875.

SOURCES Adams, John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Ammons, Elizabeth, ed. Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Crozier, Alice C. The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Foster, Charles. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954. Gerson, Noel B. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Praeger, 1976. Gossett, Thomas F. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Kimball, Gayle. The Religious Ideas of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Her Gospel of Womanhood. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1982. ———. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Edited by Annie E. Fields. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897. Moers, Ellen. Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature. Hartford, Conn.: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1978. Sundquist, Eric J. New Essays on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Tompkins, Jane P. “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History.” In The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, edited by Elaine Showalter, 81–104. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Wagenknecht, Edward Charles. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1961) Stranger in a Strange Land, first published in 1961, is Robert HEINLEIN’s bestknown novel, rivaled only by Starship Troopers (1959) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). The novel earned him his third Hugo Award for science fiction achievement and was the first science fiction novel to appear in the best-seller list of The New York Times Book

Review. As with Heinlein’s other well-known works, Stranger explores Heinlein’s concerns with libertarian politics, mystical religious belief, and the relationship of individuals to society. Where Starship Troopers is sometimes interpreted as an endorsement of an authoritarian social order and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress seems to advocate a radical libertarianism indifferent to the needs of community, Stranger in a Strange Land is generally read as a manifesto for a progressive, free-spirited utopian vision for humanity. As such, Stranger stands alone among Heinlein’s novels in its importance to 1960s counterculture movements, including neo-paganism and “sexual liberation,” and is sometimes referred to as “The Hippie Bible.” Indeed, among works of speculative fiction, only Frank Herbert’s Dune and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings were of comparable influence to a wider society beyond genrefiction fans. Heinlein set down the first notes for what would become Stranger in a Strange Land in 1948, when he was brainstorming ideas for the November issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The magazine asked readers for titles that would be transformed into stories to later be written by established science fiction writers. Editor John W. Campbell assigned the title “Gulf” to Heinlein, and Virginia Heinlein suggested Robert write “a story about a human infant, raised by an alien race.” Heinlein decided the idea was too complex for a short story and so set it aside, leaving more than a decade between the original idea and the first publication of the novel. Ideas that were radical in the early 1960s might be seen as revolutionary in the late 1940s, and this may have played a part in Heinlein’s decision to forestall work on the novel. Even at the time of the 1961 Putnam edition, only part of the novel saw print. Virginia Heinlein’s introduction to the 1991 Ace Trade edition cites the earlier edition as running to 160,000 words, while the uncut “original” version has around 220,000. Readers will most likely still encounter the earlier version that, having become a staple of counterculture thought, might also be considered the “original,” leaving Heinlein’s unedited first manuscript to offer much greater explication on points of plot and philosophy. The book’s protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, often referred to by his everyman name “Smith” or

1222 STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

Heinlein-favorite “Mike,” is a Martian. Or rather, Smith is a human raised as a Martian who, upon returning to Earth, experiences culture shock and ultimately brings about social transformation by introducing humanity to Martian culture and particularly Martian philosophy. Stranger’s opening line—“Once upon a time there was a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith”— serves to underline the importance of culture and context to identity as distinct from a biological humanity. It also lends a fairy-tale air that suggests the allegorical quality of the story. The name Michael, to take one example, is from a Hebrew name meaning “who is like God” and is the name of an Archangel. Heinlein’s Martians certainly evoke angels as sources of literally otherworldly wisdom and grace while Smith’s gnostic claim “Thou art God” makes a literal comparison between the character and divinity. Stranger addresses several philosophical issues that Heinlein presents as mutually supporting ideas but that may usefully be distinguished from one another. First, a libertine social and sexual morality. Second, a mystical rather than doctrinal engagement with religion and faith. Finally, a thoroughgoing cultural determinism. It is the first of these storylines that attracts many readers to the book and has also attracted much of the criticism directed toward it. It becomes clear that Smith was born to parents from a lost expedition to Mars but, while the expedition was made up of married couples, Smith’s parents were not married. The Ark metaphor combines with adultery and a child born out of wedlock, hardly shocking themes now but controversial and thought provoking in the context of the early 1960s. Smith’s parentage is transposed onto a succession of sexual relationships that violate period conventions of monogamy, possessiveness, and ownership and public/private intimacy. Stranger was a model for hippie ideals of “free love” and the refusal to be tied to particular bonded relationships or show deference to social authority. Ironically, contemporary readings of Stranger find little offense in sex outside marriage but take exception to a notion of “sexual liberation” that shows little respect and concern for the rights or desires of women while advocating a hedonistic free-for-all where men with psychic powers use them to make women’s clothes disappear. This last example speaks more to a particular construc-

tion of adolescent heterosexual male fantasy than to a model for utopian egalitarianism, and it is in Heinlein’s gendered utopia that the work is most dated. Stranger retains its power to speak to other issues, however, and especially in a dissenting vision of spirituality. The same refusal of ownership in matters of love and sexuality is transposed onto an individual’s relationship to divine love. Smith establishes a “Church of All Worlds,” advocating a somewhat nebulous yet all-encompassing ecumenicism grounded in communities of loving friendship and based empirically in psychic training that reveals humanity’s latent abilities. Given the influence of Stranger on the ’60s counterculture, it is not surprising that a New Age group took on the name of the “Church of All Worlds” and attempted to live by the philosophy articulated by Heinlein’s characters. Martian spirituality expresses a sense of the interconnectedness of all living things and the immanence of the divine in them, and as such has a strong affinity for mystical, nontheistic and nonWestern sources of religious inspiration in the mid to late 1960s. While the sexual content of the book was the most obvious lightning rod for criticism, Smith’s declaration of himself and his followers to be God has also attracted charges of blasphemy from Christians who find a debased Christianity in Stranger offensive, especially in so far as the Smith Christ-figure is advocating and enacting an explicitly sexual religious philosophy. As such, the enduring legacy of Stranger may lie more in the controversy, or inspiration, some have read into the novel than in its formal content. A critical element of initiation into the Church of All Worlds is training in Martian language. It is in this aspect of Stranger that Heinlein works out in detail the cultural determinism hinted at in the opening sentence of the novel. Smith is a Martian, and not human, precisely in so far as he was raised by Martians and in this way has been acculturated through his knowledge of Martian culture and especially in Martian language. Heinlein was a devotee of the work of Polish-American linguist Alfred Korzybski through the 1930s and 1940s. Korzybski’s model of general semantics argues that language structures thought in ways that both constrain and enable our perceptions of social and physical worlds. Korzybski’s famous dictum that “the map is not the territory” is a

STREET, THE 1223

reminder of what he argues to be the common error of mistaking our conceptions of the world for the world itself and consequently finding ourselves frustrated as reality fails to meet our expectations of it. General semantics influenced a variety of schools of social construction in psychology and anthropology, including neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), cybernetics, and the work of Gregory Bateson, as well as the thought of counterculture idols such as Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary. Heinlein’s Martian language is an idealized style of communication that seeks an immediacy between experience and representation free from false constructions such as authority, guilt, or inhibition. Learning Martian is held not only to free an individual from errors in cognition but also to serve as the basis of a speech-community whose morality would transparently express authentic desires rather than an insidious false consciousness. Again, while Heinlein’s particular gendered articulation of an idealized community is subject to criticism, his advocacy of the importance of language to social construction, and the emancipatory possibility of language, remains topical and an important point of debate for students of his work. The best-known and loved term of Heinlein’s Martian language is the word grok. Grok has joined hobbit (Tolkien 1937) and vril (Edward Bulwer-Lytton 1871) as invented words from speculative fiction that have been canonized by their inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary. Grok literally means “to drink” and absorb but clearly has a much broader and deeper implication for the philosophy Smith advocates. The centerpiece of Martian ritual is the Water Ceremony, a simple sharing of a glass of water that nevertheless evokes a shared substance, shared life, and eucharistic participatory embodiment of the divine. Heinlein runs the risk of reproducing Martian folkways through the lens of the noble savage, with all the problematical aspects of that particular romanticism. At the same time, the water ritual reflects an earnest attempt to reenchant the world and reengage with issues of ecology so important to social movements of the 1960s and today. It is almost impossible to come away from a reading of Stranger without grok creeping into a reader’s vocabulary and bringing about the subsequent irritation of the reader’s friends as they fail to grok the term.

SOURCES Heinlein, Robert. Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Ace Trade Edition, 1991. Heinlein, Virginia. “Preface” to Stranger in a Strange Land. New York: Ace Trade Edition, 1991. A. Nicholas Packwood

STREET,

THE ANN LANE PETRY (1946)

Unlike other naturalistic novels of this era, PETRY’s portrait of Lutie Johnson, a young African-American woman who moves to Harlem in 1944 in order to provide a better life for herself and her son, does not constitute a one-sided piece of social criticism but a finely crafted work of art that depicts the entire range of possible responses to the realities of life in the streets of Harlem, a life between desire and despair. Lutie Johnson’s hopes spring from her first contact with Ben Franklin’s philosophy when she works as a maid for white employers in Lyme, Connecticut. Petry describes how creature comforts and consumer goods create artificial desires in Lutie Johnson, who naively believes she will be able to escape the restriction of class, race, and gender by taking night classes and carefully planning her daily activities and budget. Petry models Lutie’s behavior upon Franklin’s only to reveal that Lutie is mistaken in her belief that, to a poor, black woman, the American Dream is accessible. When the walls of her apartment and the uncertainty of her future stifle her, she escapes to the Junto, a bar and grill whose intriguing name is modeled on that of Ben Franklin’s philanthropic club in Philadelphia. While Lutie’s hopes for success stem from her need for economic security and physical and spiritual wellbeing, other characters in the novel experience sexual desires. Jones, the super, lusts after Lutie. Petry cleverly depicts him close to a furnace he must feed regularly with coal and whose heat nearly suffocates him. He suffers from nearly unbearable thirst while the dog at his side looks half-starved. Jones’s repressed sexual desires constitute a factor that can lead to despair, aggression, and violence. When Jones cannot have Lutie, he takes his anger out on his girlfriend, Min. When she resists him as well, he funnels all his energy into devising a plot whereby he might destroy Lutie by corrupting her son.

1224 STUDS LONIGAN

Petry introduces various other forces of despair. On the first page of the novel, the wind that whips Lutie around the street, blinding her so that she can barely make out the street signs, heaps up the garbage and nearly freezes the blood in her veins; it is merciless in the pursuit of those it can hurt. It is an elemental force, not romantic in nature, but uncaring and brutal and symbolic of all that continually threatens to take hold of Lutie, attacks her physically, and dampens her spirits. Thwarted dreams also brutalize people, like Lutie’s husband. Out of work for a long time and frustrated by his inability to locate new employment, he eventually turns mean and beats and cheats on his wife. Lutie does not even blame him because she saw these changes coming but could do nothing to prevent them. Lutie herself can take only so many blows. Each disappointment makes her a little angrier. After the singing job offered by Boots Smith falls through and the super instigates Bub’s arrest for stealing mail from the other tenants, her anger turns to rage and then violence and hatred so strong that she commits a murder: She beats Boots Smith to death with a candlestick. The worst thing that happens to Lutie, however, is the onslaught of resignation. Lutie saw it before in so many faces that she swore she would never succumb to lost hope and the lack of any expectations. At the end of the novel, while sitting on the train that is to take her away from the scene of the crime, she draws intersecting circles on the window pane. They seem to represent the vicious circles from which she could not free herself. Remembering her schoolteacher’s derogatory remarks, she begins to wonder why, indeed, she was ever taught to write when she was not given the chance to put her talents to good use. Resignation has caught up with her, too. Petry suggests alternatives to this rather glum picture: In Lutie’s memory, her grandmother speaks of a time long lost, when families were intact and children could be kept safe. Occasionally, a voice of reason speaks to Lutie, a voice that mediates between her desires and her despair. At times this voice just sounds like Granny, but then it also speaks in the manner of a social scientist who criticizes the conditions in which Lutie and Bub live. Most of Lutie’s basic values were

imbued by her grandmother, and it may be a grave mistake that she dismisses them so easily. Whenever her ambitions lure her into danger, her intuitions inspired by Granny warn her not to proceed, but she chooses to ignore these warnings.

SOURCES Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. Revised edition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965. Clark, Keith. “A Distaff Dream Deferred? Ann Petry and the Art of Subversion,” African American Review 26, no. 3 (1992): 495–505. Ervin, Hazel Arnett. Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography. New York: G. K. Hall, 1993. Holloday, Hilary. Ann Petry. New York: Twayne, 1996. Petry, Ann. The Street. 1946. Reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1974. Pryse, Marjorie. “ ‘Pattern against the Sky’: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry’s The Street.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense Spillers, 116–131. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960. New York: Doubleday, 1987.

OTHER “Ann Petry.” Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/PETRYann.html. Accessed April 19, 2006. Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

STUDS

LONIGAN JAMES T. FARRELL (1932–1935) The Studs Lonigan Trilogy occupies a bizarre place in modern literary opinion; some readily assign it a place among the American masterpieces of the 20th century (number 29 on the Modern Library’s list of the century’s greatest English-language novels), some see it primarily as fodder for critical attack, while few others in the general population and academic circles alike have even heard of the book or its author. The work was the prolific FARRELL’s first, in three volumes: Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935), the last published when he was only 31, chronicling the life of a lower-middle-class South

STUDS LONIGAN 1225

Chicago male from his grammar school graduation in 1916 to his ignominious death in the depths of the Great Depression. Among the mixed reviews were the best Farrell would ever receive, and his popularity and critical esteem steadily dwindled until his death in 1979. Farrell published more than 50 works but is usually considered to have peaked early with Studs Lonigan, admirers of which have included the more recognizable Theodore DREISER, Richard WRIGHT, Norman MAILER, and Studs Terkel (who took his name from the book). Any history of or essay on Studs Lonigan, then, is necessarily in part a defense of it, and an examination of questions such as, What stumbling blocks in its history have kept it from being more widely acclaimed? Which are failings of the work itself, and which of its audience? Historically, a disproportionate amount of critical attention has been focused on Farrell’s intentions (What is he attacking and what is he defending?) and his technique (Is it mammoth in scope or merely insufficiently edited?). While the novel has been most frequently at odds with the Catholic Church for its (now commonplace) negative portrayal of that institution, the greatest dissonance for the contemporary reader will likely come as a result of the principal characters’ unenlightened ideas about and, occasionally, actions toward minorities and women. While none but the most misguided or uncharitable readers would mistake Farrell’s sociohistorical accuracy for maleficence, these issues still provide fodder as good as any for debate, and will undoubtedly constitute the major focus of classroom discussion wherever Studs Lonigan is still being taught. Farrell himself conceived William “Studs” Lonigan as “a normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction.” The concept of normalcy, apparently, was in many ways as problematic then as now, and Farrell was many times compelled to deny his affiliation with the “naturalism” of Zola (the suggestion often being a backhanded critical manner of suggesting lack of purpose or imagination). Others emphasize Farrell’s Marxist leanings and view Studs Lonigan primarily as political invective; a presentation of the human spirit polluted by capitalism. This is the easiest method of viewing the novel, to be sure, since it excuses, even

prefers, a wholesale condemnation of its inhabitants, but it is also the most boring; someone who begins Studs Lonigan thinking its animus to be exhortatory Marxist shock value will either change his mind at some point or not finish it. Yes, Farrell admitted that the “spiritual poverty” (though not necessarily economic poverty) enveloping his characters—a helpful parallel might be Joyce’s Dubliners—is a very real force, but he manifests its baleful presence and deleterious effects not primarily to assign blame for it, and even less to suggest sociopolitical solutions. Ann Douglas wrote that “Farrell’s great subject, from first to last, was failure,” and Studs Lonigan is essentially the story of either a failure or a tragedy, depending largely not on one’s interpretation of events, but of Studs himself. In the four months in 1916 chronicled in Young Lonigan, we see what Studs himself forever sees as the crowning achievements, or, at least, purest moments, of his life: He shares a summer afternoon of kisses (literally sitting in a tree) with his first love, the idealized Lucy Scanlan, in a gorgeously written section made all the more poignant by the fact that Studs is never that happy again; and he defeats the neighborhood bully, the execrable Weary Reilley, in an epic fistfight witnessed by very nearly everyone he knows and is never that proud again. Robert Butler has observed (while advancing a much-needed theory of Farrell’s structural meticulousness) that the events of The Young Manhood, which sporadically cover the years 1917–1929, mockingly invert those of the first book. Studs, now drunk a good part of the time on questionable Prohibition-era liquor, engages in joyless relations with prostitutes and “liberated” young girls, one of them on the ground near his and Lucy’s tree; at the New Year’s Eve, 1929, party that closes the volume, he is effortlessly thrashed by Weary in front of the same crowd, and those events of Judgment Day recombine the same themes and symbolisms into new complexities. The third volume opens with most of the old gang dead of hard living and Studs himself in perilous health, having lain all night unconscious in the street after being beaten by Weary. Studs is engaged to Catherine, who is more or less responsible for the positive changes and new maturity that come over him (and, in turn, the book), but usually loses out in his

1226 STUDS LONIGAN

mind when Studs privately compares her to Lucy, a foregone conclusion, one might say, since Catherine is far more human than we, or Studs, ever got the chance to see Lucy be. The problematic question of how we are to view Studs is largely attributable to Farrell’s admirable capacity for that with which he is rarely credited, restraint. We see and think as Studs, and Farrell never has things occur to him which could not believably occur to a person of his intelligence, in his place and time. Though Farrell admired and owed a technical debt to Joyce, he does not ask us to believe, as Joyce does, that average people think the way very smart people write. The fusion of the third-person (firstperson would be wholly unbelievable) with Studs himself is so masterful that it has been mistaken for literary aimlessness where Studs is aimless and, more tragically, literary cruelty where Studs is cruel. It is the intellectual Danny O’Neill (a minor character in Studs, but the focus of Farrell’s next cycle of novels) who is Farrell’s surrogate and not Studs, but Farrell does not give Danny the opportunity to speak for him about Studs, who speaks for himself and more than himself (the unification of turning points in Studs’s life with major events in American history is not accidental), despite being described by Farrell as “all I decided I would not be and did not want to be.” Though Studs is both “tough” and “natural,” his lack of determined resourcefulness or unfailing moral compass remind us that he is neither Nick Adams nor Huck Finn. Studs is creative, but he is not original. After Studs, the most important presence in the novels is the South Side neighborhood itself, though it should be noted that Farrell is not attempting a celebratory cartographical thoroughness, a la Ulysses (among the Joyce books, Dubliners and Ulysses are thematically relevant to Studs Lonigan, whereas Portrait of the Artist is not), but rather filters the city’s identity through Studs’s mind, the few times it does intrude as a presence unto itself, the effect is ominous. The other major distinction to be made with Ulysses here is that Studs Lonigan incorporates historical elements of flux rather than stasis; its 15 years coincide with great ethnic migrations in South Chicago, whereas Ulysses gives us a city with a fixed ethnic identity on one given day.

It is this theme (mainly through the musings of Studs’s father, Paddy, a landlord) that brings in the aspects of the work most jarring to a modern audience; the attitudes toward one another of South Chicago ethnic groups; most problematically, that of the Irish-Catholic primary characters toward blacks and Jews. Virtually all the characters we meet come from families new to America, living at a time and in a social stratus when ethnic identity and, as a direct result, ethnic prejudice was the primary, often only, mode of self-actualization. There is so much ethnic stereotyping flying around from character to character that at times it nearly cancels itself out, though, for obvious reasons, a slur against a Jew stands out to the modern eye more than one against, say, a Hungarian or a Swede. One is also tempted to make a key distinction between the ethnic prejudice directed by EuropeanAmericans at one another and the racial prejudice directed at blacks, though at the time, the definition of white was up for debate in a very real sense, and in many circles did not include the Irish themselves (though, since the novels never substantially deviate from Studs’s point of view, we observe this only glancingly: brief monologues from Davey Cohen; want ads specifying Protestant only). The Irish in the novels do have the luxury of referring to themselves as either Irish or Americans whenever it suits them, typically using the former (since it implies Catholic) in the face of religious alterity (for example, Jews) and the latter in the face of political alterity (for example, Communists), but the fluidity between those self-definitions is hardly established opinion and reflects two deepseated paranoias: first, that Catholics are still not true Americans in the eyes of most people, and second, that many of the other American ethnic groups, most notably blacks, have, in fact, been here longer. And in many cases, as Daniel Shiffman has observed, ethnic distinctions in Studs Lonigan are very often only a means to insult rather than a motivation for insulting, for example, the football game where the best player on the opposing team is referred to as Jewboy Schwartz by the 58th St. gang despite the fact that their own center, Nate Klein, is also Jewish. In any case, Studs Lonigan’s historically accurate depictions of racial and ethnic tension provide an important reminder that

STUDS LONIGAN 1227

contemporary academic notions of what has been called “happy family multiculturalism” are largely revisionist and illusory, and that very often, as Shiffman puts it, “ethnic experiences are not simply waiting for us to ‘celebrate’ them.” The notions of gender espoused by the characters— both male and female—are likewise principally guided by historical accuracy, and certainly neither celebrated nor excused. Our sympathy for Studs can cut through his sexism and virgin-whore complex because, as in other matters, his dealings with women are still more fundamentally decent than those of his peers, who have all grown up being told and shown the same things. Grabarek points out that Catholicism for the work’s Irish is “an affair of nothing but negations,” providing much threatening rhetoric about sex but no reinforcement about love. As a result, Studs’s romantic aimlessness (the core of his general aimlessness) is brought about by his never realizing that his active self, his individualism and free will, is supposed to provide the other half of a dialectic with his (consistently lacking attempts at) self-denial: “Maybe you couldn’t help yourself about it when the right broad came along. That was what love was,” he passively muses [Young Manhood, 159]. The anti-individualist ideology to which Studs is exposed brings about a mindset in him that allows the occasional trip to a brothel with his friends (since it is public) but, ironically, not true romantic love (since it is private). Douglas remarks that Studs sees “Catherine as nothing but one specimen of a totalized category: ‘women’ do this, ‘women’ do that.” To the extent that this is true, it is just as true of the way Catherine sees Studs. Nearly her every teasing or angry rebuke to him, ironically, since this is her method of initiating intimacy, begins with “you men” this or “you men” that. Granted, this is primarily a coy verbal mannerism on Catherine’s part, whereas it is serious would-be philosophizing on Studs’s, but both traits are equally the products of an unstable socioreligious environment that turns its piercing gaze on the individual while despising individuality. Even the parish’s star priest, Father Shannon, denounces notions of personalitybased marital “compatibility” (because the notion has the potential to lead to divorce) as decadent: Studs and

Catherine are more encouraged on all sides to see themselves—and each other—as Man and Woman than as Studs and Catherine. In what is nearly a parody of Ulysses’s “Penelope” chapter, the novel’s subsumed feminine voice rises wild at the end—neither in triumph nor transcendence, but in rage. Mary Lonigan’s unendurable torture of Catherine, blaming her for Studs’s condition after extracting the secret of Catherine’s pregnancy through feigned sympathy, is feminine anger at feminine powerlessness, but instead of turning itself on the masculine in defiance or righteousness, it turns on itself in bitterness and jealousy. There are certainly those who would condemn the scene as antifeminist (when, to be fair, it is only prefeminist), though after all, we detest Mary on behalf of Catherine, whom we desire to help, for her own sake as much as Studs’s, and this impulse is not protectionist, it is human. It is this power on our part to observe and judge that could have saved Studs from all for which we might judge him, if only he could have somehow known that he was in a book. As Douglas puts it, he “knows no way to live but before an audience,” and this is less an indication of vanity on Studs’s part than his best personal reconfiguration of what is put before him: his church’s emphasis on being watched by God, and his appearance-obsessed mother and sisters’ emphasis on being watched by “the neighbors” and so forth. How can anything of real importance be achieved unless it is externally observed and, in turn, judged? Studs’s much-maligned aimlessness is brought about partly because he and his peers have inherited the barely bourgeois social standing their parents had to work for, and thus, like many American generations since, feel they are owed something (so the disparity in work ethic between Paddy and Studs, unlike that between, say, Hamlets Sr. and Jr., is here more for historical accuracy than dramatic effect); and partly by his instinctual waiting for an audience that will never come. Studs cannot make it materialize, nor can he bravely shift his need for validation to a different ideal. Huck Finn’s famous “Alright then, I’ll go to Hell” has no analogue in Studs Lonigan, because although religious rhetoric is flawed here as well, the only ones capable of seeing so are the

1228 STYRON, WILLIAM

audience and Danny O’Neill. Studs is not. Morality, for Studs, has nothing to do with amending his viewpoints, only with refraining from indulging his impulses. His cruel paradox is that, while full participation in the workings of the world as he sees it means certain damnation, so does developing a new way of seeing that world. Communists and “godless” professors, for example, are counted among the damned for Studs, a viewpoint aggressively reinforced by his priests and his mother, who, in remarking that “some books [are] like bad companions” [Young Manhood, 342] sounds like a PC sophomore attacking Studs Lonigan for presenting the worldview Mrs. Lonigan means to protect. When Studs thinks about people—O’Neill, for example—who “went crazy from reading too many books” [Judgement Day, 12] at the University of Chicago, it is not sour-grapes anti-nerdism—he really believes it. Near the end of the trilogy, in what is perhaps its finest symbolic turn, Studs and Catherine, at a South Shore beach, overhear a group of swingers make casual jokes about spouse-swapping, and react with rote Catholic disgust. After overhearing these people, bound by nothing yet seemingly none the worse for it, Studs passes a few stunned moments staring out at Lake Michigan (the closest thing to a symbol of infinitude that the novel’s geography allows) before blacking out in it and nearly drowning: The idea that barriers are subjective and may simply be disregarded is too much for Studs to hold in his mind and remain conscious. (Butler’s suggestion of a “subconscious desire to commit suicide” in this scene seems inconsistent with Studs’s thoughts and actions elsewhere.) The challenge that must be issued to those who would condemn Studs is, What would you have him do that it is possible for him to do? In the end it is this question, rather than any dirty word or outdated idea, that is most problematic about Studs Lonigan, and, needless to say, about the condition of being alive.

SOURCES Butler, Robert. “Farrell’s Ethnic Neighborhood and Wright’s Urban Ghetto: Two Visions of Chicago’s South Side,” MELUS 18, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 103–111. ———. “Scenic Structure in Farrell’s Studs Lonigan,” Essays in Literature 14, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 93–103.

———. “Urban Frontiers, Neighborhoods and Traps: The City in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, and Wright’s Native Son.” In Theodore Dreiser and American Culture, edited Yoshinobu Hakutani, 274–290. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Fanning, Charles, and Ellen Skerrett. “James T. Farrell and Washington Park: The Novel as Social History.” In A Wild Kind of Boldness: The Chicago History Reader, edited Rosemary K. Adams, 338–348. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co., 1998. Farrell, James T. Studs Lonigan. Modern Library Edition. Introduction by John Chamberlain. New York: Random House, Inc., 1938. ———. Studs Lonigan. Prairie State Books Edition. Introduction by Charles Fanning. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. ———. Studs Lonigan. Penguin Classics. Introduction by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin Books, Ltd., 2001. Giles, Paul. American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Grabarek, Stanislaus. “Failures of the Spirit: The Institutional Church in the Fiction of James T. Farrell, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy.” Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1978. Halperin, Irving. “Studs Lonigan Revisited,” American Book Collector 19, no. 4 (1968): 10–12. Shiffman, Daniel. “Ethnic Competitors in Studs Lonigan,” MELUS 24, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 67–79. Wald, Alan M. “Revolutionary Novelist in Crisis.” In The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the AntiStalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, 249–263. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

OTHER Shafer, Ingrid H. “Family, Sex, and Church in the Novels of James T. Farrell and Andrew M. Greeley.” Available online. URL: http://www.usao.edu/~facshaferi/greeleyfarrell2.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Chris O. Cook

STYRON, WILLIAM (1925– ) William Styron’s place in American literary history is secure: He is the author of the powerful Lie Down in Darkness (1951), winner of the 1952 American Academy of Arts Prix de Rome; Set This House on Fire (1960), (acclaimed more highly in France than in the United States); The CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER (1967), winner of the

STYRON, WILLIAM 1229

Pulitzer Prize; and Sophie’s Choice (1979), recipient of an American Book Award and adapted for the screen in a popular movie starring Meryl Streep. He has also written In the Clap Shack (1973), a play performed by the Yale Repertory Theater in December 1973, as well as a volume of selected short writings and his wellreceived Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), an account of his struggle with depression, and A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993). Because of his powerful writing and the risks he takes in choosing his subject matter—the South and slavery, Nazism and the Holocaust—Styron will likely remain a controversial writer for a number of readers and critics. William Styron was born on June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia, to William Clark Styron, a shipyard engineer, and Pauline Abraham Styron, a Pennsylvanian whose father had served as an officer in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Styron joined the Marine Corps in 1943 (serving in the Pacific Theater and becoming a first lieutenant before his discharge at the end of World War II), was educated at Duke University, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1947, and worked briefly for the New York publisher McGraw-Hill. He had just finished Lie Down in Darkness when he was briefly recalled to serve in the Marine Corps during the Korean War. His military experiences led him to write The Long March (1953, serial). Set in the Virginia Tidewater, Lie Down in Darkness opens as Milton Loftis awaits the body of his deceased daughter, Peyton. A succession of narrators tells the story in flashbacks of Peyton Loftis, a young woman who threw herself from the roof of a Harlem tenement building. Through these several points of view, the reader gradually learns the reasons—these include incest, alcoholism, and infidelity—for her descent into madness and suicide. Moreover, her suicide occurs at the exact moment of the explosion of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The novella, The Long March, is based on an actual incident at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in which eight young men died during a forced march. Much of the story, which illustrates Styron’s antimilitary stance, is told from the point of view of Lieutenant Culver, a reservist who speaks for Styron. Set This House on Fire, in the tradition of Mark TWAIN, Henry JAMES, and F. Scott FITZGERALD, explores the myth of the

American in Europe. Set primarily in Sambuca, Italy, it concerns Cass Kinsolving, a Virginia writer who suffers writer’s block and shares the narration with his old friend, Virginia lawyer Peter Leverett. They meet in Charleston, South Carolina, to discuss the apparent suicide of their mutual friend Mason Flagg when all three men were in Sambuca. The truth gradually emerges: Cass, enraged at Mason’s rape of Francesca, Cass’s lover, murdered the man who for him personified pure evil. The Confessions of Nat Turner earned for Styron a Pulitzer Prize. There were accolades on one hand and angry accusations of insensitivity and racism on the other. The novel was set during the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, a black slave and preacher, during which 55 whites and 200 blacks were murdered. After this novel appeared, writer and critic John E. Clark edited an essay collection, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), in which Styron is accused of appropriating black experience and contributing to notions of black stereotypes. Styron’s response was that he intended to make Nat Turner into a complex and fallible human being, not a hero. Black novelist Sherley Anne WILLIAMS wrote DESSA ROSE in response to Confessions. In Styron’s next novel, Sophie’s Choice, a Virginian named Stingo narrates events in post–World War II Brooklyn that he witnessed during the war: The Polish Catholic Sophie, a survivor of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, is consumed with guilt; when the Nazis forced her to choose between her son and her daughter, she complied and ended up losing both children. Her recollections are juxtaposed to her love affair with Nathan, a Brooklyn Jew so consumed with guilt about avoiding the Nazi atrocities that he forces Sophie to join him in a double suicide. Stingo, at work on his first novel, loses all his WASP naiveté as he tells their story. Recently William Styron received both the National Medal of Arts and the Commonwealth Award. With the poet Rose Burgunder, his wife since May 4, 1953, he divides his time between their farmhouse in Roxbury, Connecticut, and their house on Martha’s Vineyard.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.

1230 SUCKOW, RUTH

Lie Down in Darkness. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951. The Long March. New York: Vintage, 1956. Set This House on Fire. New York: Random House, 1960. Sophie’s Choice. New York: Random House, 1979. A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth. New York: Random House, 1993.

William Styron. Available online. URL: http://www.virginia. edu/~history/courses/courses.old/hius323/styron.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Wired for Books: Audio Interviews with William Styron. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/williamstyron. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SOURCES Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary B. Hatem. William Styron: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Casciato, Arthur D., and James L. W. West III, eds. Critical Essays on William Styron. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Coale, Samuel. William Styron Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1995. Crane, John K. The Root of All Evil: The Thematic Unity of William Styron’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. Creyling, Michael. “Speakable and Unspeakable in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice,” Southern Review 20 (Summer 1984): 546–561. Friedman, Melvin J. William Styron. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University, 1974. Hadaller, David. Gynicide: Women in the Novels of William Styron. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Lupack, Barbara T. “The Politics of Gender: William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice,” Connecticut Review 14 (Fall 1992): 1–8. Morris, Robert K., and Irving Malin, eds. The Achievement of William Styron. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. Ratner, Marc L. William Styron. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Ross, Daniel William. The Critical Response to William Styron. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Ruderman, Judith. William Styron. New York: Ungar, 1989. Sirlin, Rhoda. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: Crime and SelfPunishment. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1990. Stone, Albert E. The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. West, James L. W., III, ed. Conversations with William Styron. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. ———. William Styron: A Descriptive Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. ———. William Styron: A Life. New York: Random House, 1998.

OTHER American Masters: William Styron. RBS. Available online. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/ styron_w.html. Accessed January 13, 2006.

SUCKOW, RUTH (1892–1960)

After decades of critical neglect and dismissal as a regionalist who was overly concerned with women’s issues, Ruth Suckow is receiving critical and scholarly attention as both a novelist and short story writer. In her own era she was well known not only for her descriptions of the Midwest but also for her realistic portraits of lonely, isolated characters. She is compared often to Willa CATHER and Sinclair LEWIS. Her fictional women, according to scholar Abigail Ann Hamblen, nearly always sacrifice themselves to husbands, children, and lovers, and have difficulty communicating with men. Most important, according to Hamblen, they relinquish “everything for romantic or sexual love” (Hamblen, 1978, 20). Should they refuse the sacrifices expected of them, the consequences are unsettling at best, emotionally and socially ruinous at worst. Ruth Suckow was born on August 6, 1892, in Hawarden, Iowa, to William Suckow, a minister, and Anna Kluckhohn Suckow, the daughter of a methodist minister. She graduated from the University of Denver, with a bachelor’s degree in 1917 and a master’s in 1918. Suckow became a pacifist during World War I and, to support herself, worked as a beekeeper while she wrote stories. Her first novel, Country People, serialized in Century Magazine in 1924, featured the Kaetterhenrys, a German family and their Iowa descendants. Her second novel, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl (1925), is about Marjorie Schoessel, a young midwestern farm girl who seeks a better life. She followed with The Bonney Family (1928), a study of the lonely and, in her view, essentially dead life of a small-town midwesterner. Suckow married Ferner Nuhn, a writer, in 1929. Cora, published that year, depicts 14-year-old Cora Schwieterts, the daughter of German immigrants who sees that her father cannot provide for the family and instead moves them from town to town; she energizes the family to put down roots and find jobs. She

SUI SIN FAR 1231

becomes a career woman who must never allow men or marriage to sway her from her course; she is profoundly lonely. Cora, notes Hamblen, “deserves to be numbered among the notable women in American fiction” (Hamblen, 1978, 24). The Kramer Girls (1930) demonstrates Suckow’s similar concerns with feminine psychology and the lack of opportunity for women in Iowa. For most readers, Suckow’s most complex and ambitious novel is The Folks (1934). Iowans Fred and Annie Ferguson produce four children, two of whom, Dorothy and Margaret, agonize about the difficulties encountered by vital women in an unsympathetic environment. Suckow’s penchant for using autobiographical details has been noted by most critics: New Hope (1942) is set in a town similar to Suckow’s own birthplace, and its central character, young William Greenwood, resembles Suckow’s father. Numerous critics have noted that Suckow introduces into this unusually optimistic novel a HAWTHORNE-like character, the allegorical Delight, whose childhood is happy. The John Wood Case, her last novel, features a crisis that is based on her father’s pastoral experiences when one of his parishioners embezzled some funds. Ruth Suckow died on January 23, 1960, in Claremont, California. The majority of her papers and manuscripts are housed at the University of Iowa Library in Iowa City.

NOVELS The Bonney Family. New York: Knopf, 1928. Cora. New York: Knopf, 1929. Country People. Knopf, New York: 1924. The Folks. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934. The John Wood Case. New York: Viking, 1959. The Kramer Girls. New York: Knopf, 1930. New Hope. New York & Toronto, Canada: Farrar & Rinehart, 1942. The Odyssey of a Nice Girl. New York: Knopf, 1925.

SOURCES Andrews, Clarence A. Introduction to A Ruth Suckow Omnibus. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. ———. A Literary History of Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972, pp. 79–101. Baker, Joseph. “Regionalism in the Middle West,” American Review 4 (November 1934–March 1935): 603–614.

Buchanan, Aimée. “A Walk in the Mountains,” Southwest Review, 46 (Summer 1961): 231–243. De Marr, Mary Jean. “Ruth Suckow’s Iowa ‘Nice Girls,’ ” Midamerica 8 (1986): 69–83. Frederick, John T. “Ruth Suckow and the Middle Western Literary Movement,” English Journal 20 (January 1931): 1–8. Hamblen, Abigail Ann. Ruth Suckow. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1978. ———. “Ruth Suckow and Thomas Wolfe: A Study in Similarity,” Forum (Houston), 3 (Winter 1962): 27–31. Kiesel, Margaret Matlack. “Iowans in the Arts: Ruth Suckow in the Twenties,” Annals of Iowa (Spring 1980): 259–287. ———. “Ruth Suckow’s Grinnell,” Grinnell Magazine 8 (November–December 1975): 7–10. Kissane, Leedice McAnelly. “D. H. Lawrence, Ruth Suckow, and ‘Modern Marriage,’ ” Rendezvous 4 (1969): 39–45. ———. Ruth Suckow. Boston: Twayne, 1969. Martin, Abigail Ann. “The Folks: Anatomy of Rural Life and Shifting Values,” North Dakota Quarterly 53 (Fall 1985): 173–179. Muehl, Lois B. “Ruth Suckow’s Art of Fiction,” Books at Iowa 13 (November 1970): 3–12. Nuhn, Ferner. “The Orchard Apiary: Ruth Suckow in Earlville,” Iowan 20 (Summer 1972): 21–24, 54. Oehlschlaeger, Fritz. “The Art of Ruth Suckow’s ‘A Start in Life,’ ” Western American Literature 15 (Fall 1980): 177–186. ———. “A Book of Resolutions: Ruth Suckow’s Some Others and Myself,” Western American Literature 21 (Summer 1986): 111–121. Omrcanin, Margaret Stewart. Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1972. Paluka, Frank. “Ruth Suckow: A Calendar of Letters,” Books at Iowa 1 (October 1964): 34–40; 2 (April 1965): 31–40. White, Barbara A. “Nice Girls and Their Folks: The Adolescent and the Family in Ruth Suckow’s Fiction,” In Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction, 65–88. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985.

SUI SIN FAR (EDITH MAUDE EATON) (1865–1914) Edith Maude Eaton (also known as Sui Sin Far) and her sister, the novelist Winifred Eaton (also known as Onoto Watanna), are the first Chinese-American writers on the North American continent. The study of all Asian-American fiction begins with them. Although some scholars consider Sui Sin Far to be a Canadian, rather than an American, she spent most of her adult life in Seattle, San

1232 SUI SIN FAR

Francisco, Los Angeles, and Boston, with frequent return trips to Montreal, Canada. As scholar Carman C. Curton points out, recent research on Sui Sin Far credits her as “the first American writer, of any race, to present fully rounded portrayals of Chinese people” (Curton 335). Although technically a short story writer, some readers have argued that her story collection MRS. SPRING FRAGRANCE (1912), although difficult to classify, has the overall effect of a novel. Her characters endure the difficulties shared by AsianAmerican immigrants, but they contribution substantially to American society. Sui Sin Far writes about immigration and gender; of particular note are her mixed-race characters and their difficulties in connecting East and West. Edith Eaton, or Sui Sin Far (Chinese for “narcissus” or “water lily”), was born on March 15, 1865, in Macclesfield, England, to Edward Eaton, an Englishman, and Lotus Blossom Trufusis, a Chinese woman. The family immigrated to Canada in 1872, when the future Sui Sin Far was seven years old. Although she worked as a secretary and stenographer, Sui Sin Far began publishing stories and nonfiction essays in American newspapers in the 1880s. In her essays, she implies that she never married because of her racial heritage: To marry a white man would mean denying her Chinese heritage, and so on. Near the end of her life, she published “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909), an autobiographical sketch, and collected other stories and sketches into the single volume entitled Mrs. Spring Fragrance. The manuscript of her one novel was, according to her own account, lost during one of her many trips. New scholarship on Sui Sin Far suggests that she was even more subtle than originally thought, using irony to undercut some of her own commentary on racist portrayals of the Chinese, and endowing her characters with disguises to mask either gender or ethnicity or both. The work of Sui Sin Far continues to be a touchstone for the study of Asian-American literature.

NOVELS (SHORT STORY CYCLES) Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1912. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

SOURCES Ammons, Elizabeth. “Audacious Words: Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance.” In Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century, edited by Elizabeth Ammons, 105–120. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Curton, Carman C. “Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton). “In American Women Writers, 1900–1945. A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 333. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Doyle, James. “Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna: Two Early Chinese-Canadian Authors,” Canadian Literature 140 (Spring 1994): 50–58. Levesque, Andree. “Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton,” Canadian Historical Review (June 1997): 280–283. Ling, Amy. “Creating One’s Self: The Eaton Sisters.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Ling and Shirley Geok-lin Lim, 305–318. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. ———. “Edith Eaton: Pioneer Chinamerican Writer and Feminist,” American Literary Realism 16 (Autumn 1983): 287–298. ———. “Pioneers and Paradigms: The Eaton Sisters.” In Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, edited by Amy Ling, 21–55. New York: Pergamon, 1990. ———. “Revelation and Mask: Autobiographies of the Eaton Sisters,” a/b: Auto-Biography Studies 3 (Summer 1987): 49. ———. “Writers with a Cause: Sui Sin Far and Han Suyin,” Women’s Studies International Forum 9 (1986): 411–419. Roth-Spaulding, Carol. “‘Wavering Images’: Mixed-Race Identity in the Stories of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far.” In Ethnicity and the American Short Story, edited by Julie Brown, 155–176. New York: Garland, 1997. Solberg, S. E. “Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton: First Chinese American Fictionist,” MELUS 8 (Spring 1981): 27–39. Sui Sin Far. “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” Independent 66 (January 21, 1909): 125–132. Tonkovich, Nicole. “Genealogy, Genre, Gender: Sui Sin Far’s ‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian.’ ” In Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, edited by Timothy B. Powell, 236–260. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. White-Parks, Annette. “A Reversal of American Concepts of ‘Other-ness’ in the Fiction of Sui Sin Far,” MELUS 20 (1995): 17–34. ———. Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

SULA 1233

Yin, Xiao-Huang. “Between the East and West: Sui Sin Far— the First Chinese-American Woman Writer,” Arizona Quarterly 47 (Winter 1991): 49–83. Yu, Ning. “Fanny Fern and Sui Sin Far: The Beginning of an Asian American Voice,” Women and Language 19, no. 2 (1996): 44–47.

OTHER Edith Eaton. Voice from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/eaton_edith_sui_ Far.html. Accessed September 26, 2005. Review of Ammette White Parks, Edith Maude Eaton. A Literary Biography. University of Illinois Press. Available online. URL: http://www.press.uillinois.edu/s95/white_pr.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

SULA TONI MORRISON (1973)

Toni MORRISON’s 1973 novel Sula is the story of a community, “a neighborhood, really,” called the Bottom, and the struggles of its residents to survive in an environment where they’ve been (literally) “set up” to fail. Although the chronological action takes place in the Ohio town of Medallion, between the years of 1919 and 1965, the novel is prefaced by a few brief pages that both provide a “pre-history” of the Bottom and inform the reader of it’s post-1965 destiny. We learn that the Bottom got it’s name as early as the post–Civil War era because of a “nigger joke,” whereby the “good” farmer of Medallion had promised “freedom and a piece of bottom land” to his slave in exchange for labor. Reluctant to part with the fertile valley soil, the farmer tricks the slave into believing that “bottom” refers to the rocky hilltop area of Medallion, so named because of it’s proximity to heaven (“when God looks down, it’s the bottom”). Thus from the outset the reader has an indication that ensuing generations of the Bottom community, engendered through false promises and built essentially on unstable ground, are not likely to prosper. Within the framework of the ironically named hilltop world and the valley town that lies below, Sula depicts relationships that should be connective—family, marriage, friendship—but which eventually fail, speeding the figurative and literal destruction of the Bottom. The novel’s main storyline centers around two families—the Wright’s and the Peace’s. Both clans are essentially matriarchal; the men have either left, died,

or, in the case of Wiley Wright, taken a job that requires months of travel at a time. Helene Wright runs her home and her daughter Nel with the manner and bearing of a society matriarch. Seeking to erase the “less dignified” aspect of her lineage, Helene forges a small, safe world bounded by a kind of self-righteous respectability. She establishes herself as the arbiter of good taste among the black community in Medallion, but in the process of narrowly defining her own existence, she squelches her daughter’s imagination, leaving 10-year-old Nel with the burning desire to define herself. The novel devotes considerably more attention to the world of Eva Peace, her daughter Hannah, and Hannah’s daughter Sula. Like Helene Wright, the Peace women are self-sustaining, but they derive their strength not by adhering to conventional social order but by flaunting those rules. Eva inspires considerable awe in the Bottom community, mostly because of the rumor that her financial stability was achieved by putting her leg under the wheels of a train in order to collect the insurance money. Having the strength to make this sacrifice for the good of the family foreshadows the moment when Eva lights a fire in her son Plum’s bedroom, where he lies in a cocaine-induced stupor. (When Hannah later confronts her mother about Plum’s death, Eva describes a baby who tries to return to the womb in full adulthood, a metaphor which implies that Plum’s regressive state had gotten to the point where he was not only killing himself but his mother as well.) Hannah, like her mother, is not dependent on a man for her existence. However, neither Hannah nor Eva exist in a world without men. Both women love men simply for their maleness, inviting them into the house to fulfill different needs. Her husband Rekus having died (before the action of the novel begins), Hannah has “a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of her friends and neighbors.” She doesn’t want any kind of depth or commitment from these men, however, just the physical pleasure of human touch. Eva likes engaging men in games of checkers (which she wins) and stimulating conversation and debate. Even with one leg, Eva has sex appeal to the men of the Bottom, who are fascinated by her remaining leg, svelte and alluring in its hosiery and sexy shoe. Because

1234 SULA

Hannah and Eva make the men of the Bottom feel good about themselves, they are able to get what they need from men without alienating them. It is the friendship of Hannah’s daughter Sula and Helene’s daughter Nel that the novel hinges upon. The girls, one from a strict home, the other from a wild one, bond so closely that they become “two eyes and one throat.” Each gets from the other what she is missing, or has not gotten from her own environment. Nel loves the spontaneous and open atmosphere of the Peace house, for example, while Sula soaks up the quiet elegance and decorum Helene Wright has established. Sula, despite what the narrator describes as her inconstant nature, models independent thinking and strength of conviction for Nel. Threatened by four Irish boys, Sula convinces Nel not to avoid the issue, and then vanquishes the threat by performing a violence upon herself. When the girls meet up with Chicken Little, it is Sula who cajoles him into climbing the tree, and it is Sula who is swinging him around when he slips from her grip and drowns in the river. In both of these instances, Nel’s participation takes the form of passive involvement; her watching is a form of silent support for Sula. As the two girls become women, however, the social and cultural expectations by which women are assigned value serve to divide them. Nel gets noticed by Jude Greene, whose gaze serves to select Nel away from Sula. Jude’s individual attention secretly pleases Nel, who has seen herself up to this point as indistinguishable from her friend. Nel fails to recognize, however, that she has exchanged a perceived dependence for a very real one. The closer courtship brings Nel to marriage with Jude, the more she defines herself through his gaze and his expectations. On their wedding day, Nel’s cooption is complete; her veil is so heavy she cannot feel Jude’s kiss upon her head. Sula, having supported Nel throughout the process, leaves Medallion immediately after the wedding, both because there is no place for her in Nel’s newly attained conventional role and because she wants no part of it. Part II of the novel depicts the adult lives of Nel and Sula and shows the continued struggles of the Bottom community to survive. In the intervening 10 years between Sula’s departure and return, Nel has faded in

her marriage to Jude, and the Bottom has also started to fall apart. Sula’s return affects both the community and her friend. Although Nel’s marriage and family life have resulted in her conforming to the Bottom and its values, she comes to life when Sula returns, recovering the joy she’d experienced in their girlhood friendship. However, when she discovers Jude and Sula naked in her bedroom, she can’t comprehend what she sees as a betrayal. Jude leaves town and, now without Sula’s friendship, Nel feels completely empty and purposeless. The people of the Bottom hear of this incident and condemn Sula, seeing a woman who lives alone, who put her own grandmother into a nursing home, and who (the rumor goes) sleeps with white men. Treated as an outsider by the community, Sula now functions as someone they can define themselves in opposition to; their efforts to protect themselves from a perceived evil ironically result in them taking better care of their lives, although the Bottom doesn’t recognize Sula’s role in this change. Sula, whose background had not taught her to appreciate the notion of possession and thus had not understood Nel’s response to her bedding Jude, lives an isolated existence, punctuated by sexual encounters that provide her with the ability to fully experience her own emptiness. It is in this context that Sula meets Ajax and has her first rewarding relationship. When Sula begins to exhibit signs of possession and desire for commitment, Ajax leaves her. Alone, Sula becomes sick (cancer?). After a final confrontation with Nel, who has come, duty-bound, to see if Sula needs anything on her deathbed, Sula dies. In the wake of her death, the community resumes its careless and uncaring ways, and so slides into destructive apathy. It is in this spirit that many of the townspeople join Shadrack in his Suicide Day parade and are led to their death when the New River Road tunnel collapses on them. Nel continues to live as a righteous woman of the community, visiting the sick and aged and volunteering at the church. At the old folk’s home, she visits Eva Peace, who accuses her of being no different than Sula. The shock of Eva’s accusation causes Nel to rethink her relationship with Sula, and she breaks down, mourning the loss. How people forge identity and the importance of selfhood are major themes in Sula. Eva Peace, it is

SUMMER 1235

repeatedly hinted, has sold a piece of herself in exchange for self-reliance. Helene Wright carefully crafts a self she can maintain only in the upside-down world of the Bottom; outside, in the world of “separate but equal,” she is stripped of her humanness and humiliated at every turn. The horrors of war having shattered his identity, Shadrack becomes insane until he is able to confirm his identity by locating his reflection in a toilet bowl. The three Deweys, as they become indistinguishable from each other, become progressively crazy, their communications with each other inscrutable to the outside world. They remain as immature in adulthood as they were the year Eva acquired them. A strong sense of identity, it can be deduced, is necessary for individual and community progress. Moreover, relationships, which usually help people to define themselves, take on a destructive role in Sula. As Nel becomes involved with Jude, and Sula with Ajax, the two women seek to define themselves through the male gaze, gradually failing to perceive themselves as individuals: a kind of symbolic death which leads to their personal destruction in the course of the novel. Lack of personal identity, whether one is prevented from developing it, or is gradually stripped of it in the course of succumbing to powerful cultural conventions, leads one to lose a sense of self. The internal erosion of selfhood in the novel is paralleled by the physical wasting, disappearance, and death of its characters, and by the gradual disintegration of the entire community. From a political perspective, the novel sends a message about the way racial inequality is established and institutionalized. The values of the dominant (white) culture are held up as an exemplar for successful living, but the black community in the novel is first deceived about, then denied, legitimate means of living by those values. The people of the Bottom buy into the lies they are told about the value of the land upon which they build their lives; thus, their physical and metaphorical “grounding” is essentially unstable. The black men of Medallion, eager to apply their energies toward participating in the capitalist economy, can only find useless work, sweeping floors or waiting tables; they are denied the opportunity to work on the New Road, valuable work that would have conferred

upon them a measure of dignity. Unable to feed their families, it is no wonder relationships and families fail. This theme of instability is echoed in the way things in the Bottom fall apart: Chicken Little’s death after he slips from Sula’s grip; the breakdown of Nel’s marriage; Ajax’s impotent dreams of airplanes and his real flight to Dayton; the collapse of self-respect and solidarity among the Bottom women in the wake of Sula’s death; and the landslide that kills many community members in the novel’s final tragedy—these events demonstrate the consequences of living in a world whose guiding principles promote not unity but fragmentation. It is “just as well,” hints Morrison in Sula’s opening pages, that environments like the Bottom are dismantled. Through the demise of the Bottom community and the relationships formed within it, Morrison reveals the consequences for black Americans of unwittingly buying into, and then replicating, a deceptive system of values that will not benefit them. Those who strive honestly to form lasting relationships and find meaningful work in an environment that precludes the attainment of such values are (albeit unfairly) doomed to fail. Perhaps more tragic is the fate of those few, like Nel, who come to understand the value of authentic connection but whose epiphany comes too late. Nel’s sudden recognition of her errors in judgment in the final pages of the novel (“we was girls together”) results in total loss, since she now has neither the false comfort of social norms nor the live presence of her nonconventional friend to bolster her, “just circles and circles of sorrow.”

SOURCE Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973; Reprint, New York: Plume-Penguin, 1982. Catherine Ramsden

SUMMER EDITH WHARTON (1917)

Edith WHARpublished her 10th novel, Summer, in 1917. Like many of Wharton’s other novels, Summer was adapted by Charles Gaines into a television film in 1981, starring Diane Lane as Charity Royall, while John Cullum played Lawyer Royall. As one of Wharton’s New England novels, Summer both takes on and twists the tradition many critics call a seduction-and-abandonment plot. It TON

1236 SUMMER

follows Charity as she seeks independence from her guardian, Mr. Royall, while coming of age in the small town of North Dormer. The story traces the tension created by the young woman’s questionable past linked to the nearby, derelict mountain folk and her increasing interest in the visiting city boy, Lucius Harney. When her friendship with Harney turns romantic, the circumstances for great passion and great tragedy evolve into Charity’s journey of self-discovery. Wharton explores individual power when she sets up Charity’s background. Charity is powerless against the Royalls and the North Dormer community, who tell her who she is. She has no memories of her first years on the nearby mountain, so life seems to begin when she awakens from a fever at the foot of Mrs. Royall’s bed when she is five years old. Her very name, Charity, imposed upon her at her arrival, designates her dependent position in the community. If she disagrees with North Dormer about the kind of person they think she is, she has no rebuttal because she has no memories of her own with which to refute their ideas. As Charity matures, the power relations begin to shift. If Charity is not sure who she is, she certainly has a strong sense of who she is not. Soon after the death of Mrs. Royall, her foster mother, Charity rebukes the now-widowed Mr. Royall’s late-night, lonesome visit to her door. Even though her potential for independence or a life away from her small town seems impossible, she rejects a secure future by refusing the marriage proposal Mr. Royall offers a few days later to legitimize his desire. These events and the town librarian job Mr. Royall arranges for her give her reigning power in the Royall household and the community. Charity’s new relationship with Lucius Harney begins a series of independent experiences that help her figure out who she is away from the community’s influence while tipping the power structure. In charity, Wharton constructs a character who is both convincingly naive enough to be called inexperienced, yet confident enough to retain her dignity. She does not chase after Harney before his departure, reasoning instead that if he wanted to see her, he would come to her. Wharton exposes the power of small-town gossip when an evening Charity spent peeping into Harney’s window is misinterpreted and spreads into a late-night

romantic encounter. Charity keeps secret the rest of her liaisons with Harney, even though she claims indifference to the town’s prejudice. Wharton reveals the couple’s clashing sensibilities from their first moments in the library and continues the trend with their divergent cultural tastes. The author often places Charity amid animal imagery that pairs her with descriptions of sun-warmed animals and dim comprehension, while Harney is surrounded by books and sketches. Unlike the North Dormer community that distrusts Charity’s mountain heritage, Harney finds her background interesting and even valuable for his architectural studies. His own naiveté about the mountain means that he does not place expectations on Charity’s identity and behavior like those from her family and town. The friendship remains respectfully platonic until they orchestrate a Fourth of July trip to the larger town of Nettleton, where their relationship ignites with a kiss. After the fireworks, Mr. Royall discovers her with Harney, while the lawyer’s own compromising position leads to an emotional and awkward scene. Although her bond with Harney seems to bring out a new person in Charity, she only seeks out an existence different from her mundane North Dormer experiences rather than attempting to join higher society with Harney. Their liaisons mostly occur in an abandoned shack located between North Dormer and the mountain, but in sight of both communities. When Mr. Royall tries to force the couple to marry, Charity once again knows exactly who she is not and dismisses her capability to be an appropriate wife for Harney. Wharton first alters the possibility that Harney might desert Charity when instead he agrees to marry her. Discovering she is pregnant while Harney is back in the city, the next twist to the seduction-and-abandonment theme is when Charity tries to escape her circumstances by returning to the mountain. Her experiences there, where Mr. Royall once again rescues her, places her at a critical decision point when she has to stop knowing who she is not and finally figure out who she is. At this point, Charity must choose between several possibilities that diverge from her hopes of independently leaving North Dormer. She has had the opportu-

SUN ALSO RISES, THE 1237

nity to build her own identity by bringing together her experiences with Harney and the mountain, forcing them to coexist with the identity imposed on her by the Royalls and North Dormer. With unsatisfying marriages and abortion among her options, her ultimate decision highlights the ways she remains a powerful person. Combining her new experiences with her known past, she finally chooses who Charity Royall is.

SOURCES Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1994. Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends & Rivals. Hanover, N.H.: The University Press of New England, 1990. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Wharton, Edith. A Backward Glance. New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1933. ———. Summer. Edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff. New York: The Library of America, 1990, pp. 159–311.

OTHER The Edith Wharton Society. Gonzaga University. Available online. URL: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/ index.html. Accessed January 13, 2006. Max Despain

SUN ALSO RISES, THE ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1926) Ernest HEMINGWAY’s first published novel, The Sun Also Rises, is perhaps his finest. The novel takes its title from Ecclesiastes, also quoted in the opening page of the book: “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever ‘The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose.’ ” Above, on the same page, is a brief quotation attributed to Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” The juxtaposition of the two quotations suggests a cyclical dynamic to the post–World War I “lost generation” that is represented in the novel. By repeating the same selfdestructive behavior, the characters perpetuate the sense of alienation and meaninglessness that became widespread following the devastation of the war.

Narrated by its protagonist, Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Europe, The Sun Also Rises conveys a sense of profound loss and disillusionment during the post–World War I era. Jake, whose impotence resulted from a war injury, embodies the pervasive futility within the text. He and his acquaintances inhabit a world where love continually fails and consequently is not regenerative, a definitive modernist trope also reflected in texts such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and F. Scott FITZGERALD’s The Great Gatsby (1925). Specifically in Hemingway’s novel, romantic relationships either cannot be consummated or cannot be sustained, and none of these relationships ever produces any children. Characteristic of the failed relationships depicted in The Sun Also Rises, Jake is in love with Brett Ashley but is unable to be intimate with her. Unwilling to commit to Jake, Brett is the central focus for many of Jake’s expatriate acquaintances, with whom he travels from Paris to Spain and back to Paris. While Brett is engaged to Scottish veteran Michael Campbell, she has an affair with Jake’s friend Robert Cohn, who is the only Jew in the novel and is frequently treated as an outsider. Brett also has a brief affair with a young bullfighter named Romero. As the characters travel in pursuit of amusement, Jake struggles to preserve the relationships among them, despite the divisive jealousy and violence provoked by Brett’s and her lovers’ entanglements. Since Jake and his friends spend most of their time talking and drinking, the plot develops through Hemingway’s “deceptively simple dialogue,” which “managed to capture the dynamics of real-life speech” (Lamb, 455). Typical of Hemingway’s dialogue style, the brief, seemingly empty exchanges between characters express the depths of their disillusionment. Harold Bloom attributes this expression to the author’s “art of evocation” (Bloom, 6), which requires the reader to infer meaning from his prose. Through dialogue, then, the reader can perceive the characters’ devastating pain and desperation. Exemplifying the relentless alienation many of the characters suffer, Robert laments the emptiness he feels: “I can’t stand it to think my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it” (10). Similarly, no one in the novel appears to be “really living,” as they spend most of their time intoxicated, in avoidance of life.

1238 SUNDOWN

Representing epidemic social alienation, many modernist authors dramatized the world as a place where love cannot flourish and relationships fall apart. Yet their texts, as works of art, attempted to convey a sense of order that the early 20th-century world appeared to lack. Likewise, Hemingway manifests the possibility of restoration in a disordered, fragmented world through Jake’s character. Although Jake suffers from feelings of alienation, he makes subtle attempts to recover meaning. A self-identified Catholic, he seems unable to explain what that means when asked by his friend Bill Gorton (124). On different occasions, though, Jake tries to pray. One of these early attempts leads him to reflect: “I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time” (97). Later, when Jake enters a chapel with Brett, he claims: “I’m pretty religious” (209), an assertion that suggests that Jake’s prayers have been answered. Whether his prayers have truly been answered or not is less important than the repetition of Jake’s attempts at “being” Catholic. His suggestion to Brett when they visit the chapel that she “might pray” (208) indicates the implicit hope Jake embodies. In a postwar world seemingly empty of meaning, where human relationships repeatedly fail, Jake recovers at least a semblance of hope. As the sun continues to rise each day, Jake’s continual attempts at a religious faith enact humanity’s refusal to abandon the pursuit of meaningfulness and renew the possibility of progress in a culture where hope was nearly destroyed altogether.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. “Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.” In Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1926. Lamb, Robert Paul. “Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue,” Twentieth Century Literature 42 (1996): 453–480. Heather Ostman

SUNDOWN JOHN JOSEPH MATHEWS (1934) Scholars of Native American literature point to the period beginning in the late 1960s and diminishing somewhat in the 1980s as a time of rising popular and critical attention paid to fiction and poetry written by Native Americans. Kenneth Lincoln, in his groundbreaking book of the same name, dubbed this period the Native American Renaissance, which is generally perceived as beginning with N. Scott MOMADAY’s winning of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Other writers followed, including James WELCH and Leslie Marmon SILKO, both writing about contemporary Native American issues while also turning toward traditional Indian methods of storytelling while forming their written works. But there were Native American writers who came before who laid the groundwork for this “rebirth,” namely D’Arcy MCNICKLE and John Joseph Mathews, author of the 1934 novel Sundown. Both of these writers took on the all-too-unfortunate issues that Native Americans have faced since European settlement began—loss of traditional ways of life and homelands, the idea of mixed blood (Indian and white), the boarding school system begun by the U. S. government in the 19th century, life on and off the reservation, alcoholism, and other dealings with Euro-Americans that rarely work out in the Natives’ favor. Mathews and McNickle took on these highly charged issues when doing so was much more risky than it was in the more liberal 1960s and ’70s, and they both had strong influences on the Indian writing that was to follow. Mathews’s Sundown presents the story of Challenge Windzer (Chal for short), beginning with his birth and childhood, covering his college years off the reservation, and ending with his attempts to find his place in the modern, white world of the 1920s. Like the author himself, Chal is of mixed blood, Osage and white. Chal’s father, who was descended in part from a white artist who visited the Osage, wants his son to pursue the opportunities provided by EuroAmerican culture, while his mother, a full-blood Osage, silently hopes that Chal will follow a more traditional path. These issues concerning mixed/fullblood and Euro-American/Native American traditions and cultures inform the entire novel, thus giving

SUNDOWN 1239

readers the opportunity to discover a very early example of American postcolonial writing (which critiques institutions and effects of colonization, often using the colonizer’s language). It’s worth noting that many would consider this novel years ahead of its time in this regard. Louis Owens, author of Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, perhaps gives this novel its best treatment to date. He argues that the novel begins, as Chal is born, at a “critical point of transition for the Osage Nation between old worlds and new.” The Osage people have been relocated to reservations by the U.S. government, oil leases on their property are an issue of contention, and encroaching white settlement is slowly beginning to absorb traditional Indian lands (Owens, 51). One point of contention lies between the full-blood and the mixed-blood Osage. The full-bloods, whose lives often reflect a more traditional way of thinking, are skeptical of the white influence on Osage culture and are more resistant to the government’s plans for Osage reservation lands. The mixed bloods, on the other hand, linger around the Agency and the store, talking of political issues, the oil leases, the Dawes Act, and the coming allotment of Osage lands. They look at the government influences on their lives as being much more positive. Chal’s father, John Windzer, whose father was a British aristocrat who lived among the Osage, reads Byron’s “Child Harolde” (a Romantic-period British poem), goes on trips to Washington to deal with the government, and generally encourages his son to give up the traditional ways of life and take advantage of the opportunities offered by white culture. Chal takes his father’s advice—studying at the local government grade school, going to the state university, serving as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, and hiding and denouncing his Indian blood—but he is never happy. Thus, blood quantum is an essential thematic element of the novel (readers should note how often Mathews uses the word red in the novel, both to denote blood and “Indianness”). Moving away from the theme of blood quantum, one important early (chapter 4) scene in the novel offers readers a microcosmic example of another theme in the work—the encroachment of white set-

tlers onto Indian lands and the effects of such. Chal and his friends enjoy visiting a swimming hole in the summer when all the Indians come to the Agency to collect their money. During one visit, the fun is interrupted when a group of white kids show up at the swimming hole, strip down, and splash into the water: “The Indian boys went on playing but Chal felt very annoyed with the intrusion, and he told little Running Elk and Sun-on-His-Wing that he was going because the white boys stared so and made so much noise.” Chal even feels that the naked bodies of the white boys “were indecent in some inscrutable way” (36). For a while, the Indian boys “pretended not to see them, but were so fascinated by some of the things they heard that they lost interest in their game” (36). Mathews’s point should be clear enough—as white colonizers make contact with Natives, there is interruption. Values and language change, and it’s no coincidence that the Indian boys lose interest in what they’ve already been doing for years when they hear the talk and feel the presence of the white boys. Mathews has given readers an example of the effects of colonization in miniature. The general white, EuroAmerican influence on Native Americans has been the same since the process of colonization began more than 500 years ago. Chal does eventually return home to his people after his father’s death (murder or suicide), but the white influence on him has been too great. After college, the war, and life in the white world, he takes part in a traditional sweat-lodge ceremony, an unsuccessful attempt to return to the traditional ways of the fullbloods. But after all, Chal is a mixed-blood Osage, and his promise to his mother that he will go to law school at the end of the novel reflects the historical movement of young Indians away from the reservations and traditional values into the white Euro-American world.

SOURCES Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940. Mathews, John Joseph. Sundown. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Owens, Louis. “Maps of the Mind: John Joseph Mathews and D’Arcy McNickle.” In Other Destinies: Understanding

1240 SURI, MANIL

the American Indian Novel, 49–89. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Parker, Robert Dale. “Nothing to Do: John Joseph Mathews’s Sundown and Restless Young Indian Men.” In The Invention of Native American Literature, 19–50. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

working on the next two books in the trilogy: The Life of Shiva and The Birth of Brahma.

James Mayo

Budzynski, Brian. Review of The Death of Vishnu, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 21, no. 12 (Summer 2001): 173. Mathias, Anita. Review of The Death of Vishnu, Commonweal 128, no. 21 (December 7, 2001): 23.

SURI, MANIL (1959– )

Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu (2001), sees the novel as part of a projected trilogy. Although many Asian-American writers use mythical figures to express contrast, contradiction, and biculturalism, Suri uses a homeless man named for the Hindu god Vishnu, the preserver. The novel takes place over a 24-hour period and is set in a Bombay apartment building. The homeless Vishnu lies dying on the steps of the building and, as he loses consciousness, believes he really is the god Vishnu and thus privy to the conversations among the apartment dwellers on all three floors; he feels that he knows what is happening to all of them as well. As the novel unfolds, the reader also gains access to the interior lives of these characters—the Astanis and the Pathaks, warring over their shared kitchen on the first floor; the Jalal family, the only Muslims, on the second; and the reclusive but forever grieving widower, Mr. Taneja, on the third. Perhaps the genius in this novel is in the author’s lack of anger or condescension as he reveals the foibles and petty vanities of his characters. As with many characters in a William FAULKNER novel, the reader can appreciate the essential humanity of each. Suri was born in July 1959, in Bombay to Ram Lal, a film music director, and Prem (Bindra) Suri, a schoolteacher and social worker. He received his bachelor’s of science degree from the University of Bombay in 1979 and both master’s (1980) and doctoral degrees in mathematics (1983) from Carnegie Mellon University. Currently a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland at Baltimore Country, Suri was stunned at the attention and awards his book received. (The Death of Vishnu was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction.) Manil’s storytelling abilities recall those of Bernard MALAMUD and Isaac Bashevis SINGER. He is

NOVEL The Death of Vishnu. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

SOURCES

SUTTREE CORMAC MCCARTHY (1979)

Suttree, published as Cormac MCCARTHY’s fourth novel, is a masterpiece, a book that Hal Crowther says will be regarded in the future as “a benchmark of literacy,” just as The Sound and the Fury is now (37). Suttree combines a picaresque plot and structure with profound social, psychological, and spiritual themes narrated in an extreme style that John Ditsky observes “simply goes beyond FAULKNER” (2). Written in the genre of the Southern grotesque, this novel represents the culmination of McCarthy’s Southern works before he began exploring the western genre in such best-selling novels as All the Pretty Horses. Like McCarthy’s other early works, Suttree shares an Appalachian setting, but atypically it is an urban novel, set primarily in and around Knoxville. The novel’s protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, has rejected his father’s middle-class values and has instead embraced a life of voluntary poverty, choosing to live on a shanty boat on the Tennessee River and choosing to scrape out a bare-subsistence living by fishing. His adventures involve his interaction with scores of impoverished, variously disabled oddballs and misfits inhabiting a Knoxville ghetto known as McAnally Flats. One of these miscreants, the hapless and hilarious Gene Harrogate, is at first the focus of his own plot, making him a kind of secondary protagonist. The novel tracks Suttree’s life from 1950 until 1955 as he seeks to understand himself and his relation to his past. He contemplates vivid memories of his childhood as an altar boy and a parochial school student as well as memories of his relatives and stories about his ancestors. He visits important sites from his childhood and studies an old family photo album for clues to his identity. As an adult he drinks excessively, gets drawn

SUTTREE 1241

into barroom brawls, has repeated run-ins with the police, serves time in a correctional facility, lives for a while with a prostitute, obsesses over the death of his stillborn twin, and at times even considers suicide. He indicates that he is a lapsed Catholic, but he clearly regards a spiritual search as an important part of the business of his life. His religious quest, which ultimately results in three mystical experiences, is illuminated by existential philosophy (Longley, Prather, Shelton), by Native American spiritual beliefs (Spencer 2000, 100–107), by Buddhist philosophy, and by William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Suttree’s mystical experiences help reveal his progress toward psychological health and spiritual enlightenment (Spencer 2000, 87–92). Suttree’s living in voluntary poverty may be viewed as a Thoreauvian attempt to live life fully and authentically—even heroically. Although he has abandoned his wife and son (as did the Buddha), he establishes such caring ties with a number of the needy denizens of McAnally that he functions almost as a volunteer social worker, making sure that his friends have shelter, food, warmth, and other necessities. He expertly adapts his language and his manner to his audience so that he is able to bridge the usual societal barriers (Spencer 2003, 18–24). Ironically, although he himself is a social dropout, he serves to bring others into a community. Much of the novel’s rich humor centers on the absurd schemes of Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree first meets in the workhouse after Harrogate is arrested for practicing perversion in a melon patch. The novel’s outrageous comedy also includes an abundance of scatological and grotesque elements, which situate it in the tradition of Rabelaisian satire (Canfield, 666–667, 686–692). McCarthy takes satiric aim both at the pursuit of money and power and at the failings of the organized church. Suttree resists Harrogate’s doomed enterprises but at times becomes involved in order to rescue his clownish friend from his predicaments. The most persistent, heated critical debate about this novel concerns the issue of Suttree’s development as a character. Some view Suttree as stagnant, as someone who learns little, who fails to mature, and who at the end of the novel is essentially unchanged. These read-

ers often consider Suttree as a less-than-sympathetic character, and they are likely to view his departure from Knoxville at the end of the novel as one more instance of a possible tendency toward escape. Other readers view Suttree’s leaving as one of many signs that he has significantly changed. The end of the novel is in fact filled with symbols of transformation. Suttree takes a decisive step when he commits his most serious act of civil disobedience in protest over the police’s treatment of his black friend Ab Jones. While the police pursue his friend on foot, Suttree steals their cruiser and launches it into the Tennessee River, which functions as a complex symbol of nature, waste, and the passage of time. Suttree’s gesture of rebellion is in vain, however, as he learns later that Ab has died in jail—one of many deaths of family and friends that Suttree must face and cope with. His awareness of death intensifies still further when, soon afterward, he nearly dies of typhoid fever and in his delirium confronts his own mortality. This last mystical experience helps Suttree allay his fear of death and his acute discomfort over feeling a sense of dual identity. After dreading throughout the novel that he is haunted by a host of doppelgangers, Suttree finally concludes “that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (461). McCarthy further emphasizes a death/rebirth motif by depicting Suttree discovering a corpse in his own bed, a kind of pseudo-death. McCarthy’s fisherman also relinquishes the good-luck charms that he has been carrying and decides to trust instead his own heart. As he leaves town and leaves his former life behind, houses are being razed to make way for a new highway through Knoxville—a final exterior symbolization of Suttree’s interior transformation.

SOURCES Canfield, J. Douglas. “The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 4 (2003): 664–696. Crowther, Hal. Cathedrals of Kudzu: A Personal Landscape of the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Ditsky, John. “Further into Darkness: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy,” Hollins Critic 18 (1981): 1–11. Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.

1242 SUNDOWN

Longley, John Lewis, Jr. “Suttree and the Metaphysics of Death,” Southern Literary Journal 17 (1985): 79–90. McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. New York: Random House, 1979. Prather, William. “Absurd Reasoning in an Existential World: A Consideration of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.” In Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, 103–114. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. Spencer, William C. “Altered States of Consciousness in Suttree,” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1997): 87–92.

———. “The Seventh Direction, or Suttree’s Vision Quest.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 100–107. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2000. ———. “Suttree, Linguistic Chameleon,” POMPA (2003): 18–24. William C. Spencer

C

TD

TAN, AMY (RUTH) (1952– ) Amy Tan exploded onto the literary scene with her first novel, The JOY LUCK CLUB (1989). That novel became an instant success with both the critics and the reading public, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for nine months and becoming standard fare in American university literature classes; it was nominated for both Book Critics Circle and Los Angeles Times awards. Tan has become well-known not only for her complex portraits of Chinese and Chinese-American characters but also for her depiction of the relationships between mothers and daughters, especially the generational, cultural, and geographical differences between Chineseimmigrant mothers and American-born daughters. Together with Maxine Hong KINGSTON, Tan opened the way for Asian-American authors, although her work is also in the tradition of such writers as Anzia YEZIERSKA, Edith WHARTON, and Toni MORRISON. Her lyrical, imagistic explorations of emotional conflict, loss and hope, differences and reconciliations, are frequently punctuated by a sense of humor. Amy Tan was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California, to John Yuehan, a Baptist minister and electrical engineer, and Daisy Li Bing Zi Tan, a vocational nurse. She was educated at San Jose State University, earning both a bachelor’s degree (1973) and a master’s (1974). After more than a decade as an educational administrator and freelance writer, Tan began publishing short stories. The Joy Luck Club, too, is a skillfully narrated collection of interwoven stories set

in San Francisco in the post–World War II era that evokes the tensions among four pairs of mothers and daughters: Suyuan and Jing-mei “June” Woo, An-mei and Rose Hsu, Lindo and Waverly Jong, and Ying-ying and Lena St. Clair. At the death of her mother, Suyuan, Jing-Mei takes her place in the Joy Luck Club, a mahjongg club to which her mother had belonged, and the group finances her trip to China to meet her family; Jing-Mei, like the other daughters, gradually acknowledges her mother’s strengths and her own bicultural heritage. Tan’s second novel, The KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE (1991), features Winnie Louie and her American-born daughter Pearl Brandt. Pearl learns to respect her mother when she learns of Winnie Louie’s life in China. There, as Jiang Weili, she survived the painful loss of her own mother, an abusive marriage, and the deaths of three previous children before she escaped to the United States. The Hundred Secret Senses (1995) relates the tales of two sisters, Chinese-American Olivia Yee Bishop, unhappily married to the Caucasian American Simon Bishop, and her Chinese half-sister Kwan, who is endowed with the “hundred secret senses” that enable her to speak with spirits. Together the two sisters travel to China where, Kwan believes, they had lived together in previous lives in the mid-19th century. In Tan’s most recent novel, The Bone Setter’s Daughter (2001), Ruth Young attempts to come to terms with her mother’s mysterious Chinese past. Luling, like Tan’s own mother, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

1243

1244 TAR BABY

Amy Tan lives with her husband, Louis M. DiMattei, a tax attorney, in San Francisco and New York. Her book The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings (2003) contains essays that explore aspects of Tan’s own life. In 2005, Tan published her novel Saving Fish from Drowning.

NOVELS The Bonesetter’s Daughter. New York: Putnam, 2001. The Hundred Secret Senses. New York: Putnam, 1995. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Putnam, 1989. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991. Saving Fish from Drowning. New York: Putnam, 2005. The Year of No Flood. New York: Putnam, 1995.

SOURCES Dooley, Susan. “Mah-Jongg and the Ladies of the Club,” Book World Washington Post, 5 March 1989, p. 7. Dorris, Michael. “Mother and Daughters,” Chicago TribuneBooks, 12 March 1989, pp. 1, 11. Henderson, Katherine Usher. “Interview with Amy Tan.” In Inter/View: Talks With America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson, 15–22. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Heung, Marina. “Daughter-Text/Mother-Text: Matrilineage in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 597–613. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990. Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, 174–210. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sau-ling, Cynthia Wong. Reading Asian American Literatures: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Schell, Orville. “Your Mother Is in Your Bones,” The New York Times Book Review, 19 March 1989, pp. 3, 28. Seaman, Donna. “The Booklist Interview: Amy Tan,” Booklist, 1 October 1990, p. 2,567. See, Carolyn. “Drowning in America, Starving for China,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 12 March 1989, pp. 1, 11. Shear, Walter. “Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club,” Critique 34, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 193–199. Xu, Ben. “Memory and the Ethnic Self: Reading Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club,” MELUS 19, no. 1: 316. Yglesias, Helen. Review of The Kitchen God’s Wife, The Women’s Review of Books, September 1991, pp. 1, 3–4.

OTHER Amy Tan. Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Available online. URL: http://www.voices.cla.umn.edu./vg/Bios/entries/tan_ amy.htlm. Accessed September 26, 2005.

TAR BABY TONI MORRISON (1981) Tar Baby is Toni MORRISON’s fourth novel and perhaps her most anomalous. It differs from her previous and subsequent works in significant ways: Some of its central characters are white; it is set outside the United States, on the fictional French Caribbean island of Isle des Chevaliers; and it takes place in a time contemporary with the book’s publication. Moreover, despite an initially warm reception that thrust the author onto the cover of Newsweek magazine and made the book a best-seller, Tar Baby has since fallen out of critical favor. Although the novel consists of Morrison’s trademark qualities—grand thematic ambitions and a preoccupation with the lives of black women explored in lush, sensuous prose that results in moments of breath-taking lyricism—observers have pointed to its somewhat schematic characterizations; its occasionally intrusive, essayistic narrative voice; and its puzzling conclusion, which leaves the central love story unresolved, as characteristics that make it less successful than Morrison’s other novels. Critic Nancy J. Peterson cites factors such as these when she identifies Tar Baby as the most critically neglected and least taught of the author’s works. In Tar Baby Toni Morrison forgoes the intricate exploration of life in African-American communities characteristic of her other novels. Instead, at the heart of this work is the love story between Jadine Childs, a light-skinned, Sorbonne-educated fashion model, and Son (William Green), a product of the rural South and a fugitive from a murder rap. Their romance takes place amid the fragile interracial and class arrangements at L’Arbe de la Croix, the island home of Valerian Street, a retired white American candy magnate. After Valerian’s wife, Margaret, discovers Son hiding in her closet, Valerian invites the rank and disheveled intruder to sit down to dinner with him, gives him a new set of clothes, and sets him up in the guest room. Valerian’s behavior horrifies his wife and rankles his servants, Sydney and Ondine Childs (Jadine’s aunt and uncle), who view Son as a dangerous “swamp nigger” and resent the highhanded treatment their boss accords to this uncouth stranger. Son’s presence soon begins to disrupt the tenuous harmony of L’Arbe de la Croix’s plantation-

TAR BABY 1245

like domestic order and brings simmering personal, cultural, and class antagonisms to the surface. The narrative hinges largely on the traditional family Christmas dinner Margaret so desperately anticipates. Neither Michael, the Streets’ only child, nor the other guests arrive, and the dinner turns explosive after first Son, then Ondine, questions Valerian’s firing of Gideon and Therese—natives of the island who work at the house and are known by all but Son as simply “Yardman” and one of the “Marys.” After Valerian sacks Ondine for challenging his proprietary rights, she then reveals that she witnessed Margaret abuse Michael when he was a baby. The flare-up sends Son and Jadine into retreat, first to her room and soon to New York. The wake of this domestic storm, however, brings a modest and more equitable recalibration in the power relations between Valerian and his wife, and between the Streets and the Childs. After the Christmas dinner, however, the novel becomes primarily the story of Jadine and Son’s relationship. Through them, Morrison explores the thematic oppositions she has set up between white and black culture, city and country, North and South, and civilization and nature. Initially, their romance assumes fairy tale qualities, but personal and cultural differences quickly complicate the relationship. The more cosmopolitan Jadine feels at home in New York, but Son insists they make an extended visit to Eloe, his allblack hometown in northern Florida, a place he deems the best in the world. Jadine, however, finds Eloe “Paleolithic” and the people “Neanderthal,” and, haunted by disturbing dreams and a sense of feminine inadequacy, cuts short her stay and flies back to New York. When Son returns, he and Jadine fight over Eloe, over their future, over white people, and about what it means to be black. Their relationship reaches what seems to be the breaking point when Son accuses Jadine of being a tar baby—an instrument of Valerian’s making, a traitor to her race, and a trap laid to emasculate authentically black men like him. Perhaps because of Son’s accusation, some readers have interpreted the novel as a virtual allegory in which Jadine, a cultural orphan duped by the lures of Western civilization, must reconnect with her African-American roots, while Son represents the kind of authentic black-

ness missing from Jadine’s experience. The novel does much to encourage such a reading, for in many ways both Son and Jadine are less fully realized characters than vehicles for representing opposite sides of the thematic binaries Morrison has set up. Moreover, in contrast to Jadine’s chic bitchiness, Son’s earthy male sensibility makes him by far the more appealing of the two characters. Yet privileging one character and the values he or she embodies seems to be an interpretive trap Morrison has laid, for doing so in effect reifies the very oppositions the novel consistently seeks to dismantle. Though Jadine’s status as cultural orphan serves as a cautionary tale about the price of assimilating too fully into the white American mainstream, Son himself struggles to overcome the romantic view of rural black life that he personifies. As critic Trudier Harris points out, each character shuttles between the multiples roles of the tar-baby folktale, and the novel persistently raises such question as “who is the tar baby, who is trapped, who needs rescue from whom, and whether or not he (or she) effects an escape.” Frustrating though it may be for many readers, the novel’s open-ended conclusion, which finds Son back on Isle des Chevaliers in pursuit of Jadine, who has just returned to Paris, thus remains faithful to Morrison’s vision throughout the novel. Although the characters have become aware of their need to escape their own ideological traps and cultural deficiencies, it remains unclear whether they will succeed in doing so. Tar Baby concludes then not with the resolution of the central romance but rather with the characters poised to confront the contradictions the romance has laid bare.

SOURCES Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. McKay, Nellie Y., ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

1246 TARKINGTON, BOOTH

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Kevin Quirk

TARKINGTON, BOOTH (BOOTH NEWTON TARKINGTON) (1869–1946) Booth Tarkington, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Magnificent Ambersons in 1919 and for ALICE ADAMS in 1922 (both novels), also distinguished himself for more than 50 years as an essayist and playwright, in addition to his serialized fiction in such mass-circulation periodicals as Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, and Redbook. A large number of Tarkington’s writings were adapted for early motion pictures by Thomas Edison as well as Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Tarkington wrote about middle-class families and the values familiar to his readers, not just in the Midwest where many of novels take place. He wrote about the value of hard work, the power of ambitious women, and of boyhood. Although Tarkington has been dead for more than 50 years, he is still valued for his insights into the sociocultural aspects of American development and for the careful artistry that characterized his fiction. Booth Tarkington was born on July 29, 1869, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to John Stevenson Tarkington, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He attended Purdue University (1890) and Princeton University (1891–93) and graduated from neither, but was awarded honorary degrees in 1939 and 1899, respectively. He moved to New York City in 1895, published The Gentleman From Indiana in 1899, returned to Indiana, and followed immediately with the popular costume drama Monsieur Beaucaire (serialized in McClure’s in 1899 and published in book form in 1900). Although he moved back to New York in 1902, he returned to Indiana and served in the Indiana House of Representatives (1902–03) and, on June 18, 1902, married Laurel Louisa Fletcher. After their divorce in 1911, Tarkington married Susannah Robinson in 1912. Tarkington went on to write more than 40 novels. His Growth Trilogy traces the development of an Indiana town: The Turmoil (1915) is about the upwardly mobile and vulgar Sheridan family; The Magnificent Ambersons uses the decline of the Amberson family as a microcosm of the historical and cultural

development of the nation; and The Midlander (1924) (republished in the trilogy as National Avenue) depicts Dan Oliphant, a visionary who expands the city but dies amid financial ruin and abandonment by his wife and family. Alice Adams, praised by contemporary reviewers as a “book to move the heart and wilt the collar” (Broun, 395), is still admired as a study of a middle-class family and their daughter Alice’s unsuccessful attempts to save herself from—and then finally accept—the life of a working-class woman, a typist and stenographer. Booth Tarkington died on May 19, 1946, in Indianapolis. In addition to his novels and plays, Tarkington published the immensely popular Penrod series, books for children and young adults that chronicled the adventures of a mid-19th-century boy named Penrod Schofield. Begun in 1914, and published collectively in 1931, the books have been ranked with Mark TWAIN’s Tom Sawyer; they sold a half-million copies during Tarkington’s lifetime. The year before his death, Tarkington received the Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he was also the recipient of the 1933 Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the 1942 Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal. Nearly 40 of his novels and stories were adapted for the movies, including The Magnificent Ambersons in 1942, and Alice Adams in 1935, both for RKO Radio Pictures. Many of his papers and manuscripts are housed at Princeton University.

NOVELS Alice Adams. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921. Beasley’s Christmas Party. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909. The Beautiful Lady. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905. Cherry. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903. Claire Ambler. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. The Conquest of Canaan: A Novel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1905. “The Fascinating Stranger,” and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1923. The Fighting Littles. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941. The Flirt. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913. Gentle Julia. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922. The Gentleman from Indiana. New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899. Growth (contains The Turmoil, The Magnificent Ambersons, and National Avenue). New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927.

TARZAN OF THE APES 1247

The Guest of Quesnay. New York: McClure, 1908. “Harlequin and Columbine and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1918. The Heritage of Hatcher Ide (published serially as The Man of the Family). New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941. His Own People. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907. Image of Josephine. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1945. In the Arena: Stories of Political Life. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905. Kate Fennigate. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1943. Little Orvie. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934. Looking Forward, and Others. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1926. The Lorenzo Bunch. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1936. The Magnificent Ambersons. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1918. Mary’s Neck. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. The Midlander. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1924, published as National Avenue in Growth. Mirthful Haven. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1930. Monsieur Beaucaire. (First serialized in McClure’s, 1899.) Illustrated by C. D. Williams. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1900. “Monsieur Beaucaire,” “The Beautiful Lady,” “His Own People,” and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1918. “Mr. White,” “The Red Barn,” “Hell,” and “Bridewater.” New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935. The Plutocrat: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1927. Presenting Lily Mars. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1933. Ramsey Milholland. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1919. Rumbin Galleries. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1937. The Show Piece. New York: Doubleday, 1947. The Spring Concert. New York: The Ridgeway Company, 1910. Three Selected Short Novels (contains Walterson, Uncertain Molly Collicut, and Rennie Peddigoe). New York: Doubleday, 1947. The Two Vanrevels. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1902. The Turmoil: A Novel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1915. Wanton Mally. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932. Women. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1925. Young Mrs. Greeley. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1929.

SOURCES Boynton, Percy H. Some Contemporary Americans: The Personal Equation in Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924, pp. 108–125. Broun, Heywood. “A Group of Books Worth Reading: ‘Alice Adams,’ ” The Bookman LIV, no. 4 (December 1921): 394–395.

Cabell, James Branch. Beyond Life: Dizain des demiurges. New York: R. M. McBride, 1919, pp. 277–322. Clark, Barrett H. A Study of the Modern Drama: A Handbook for the Study and Appreciation of Typical Plays, European, English, and American, of the Last Three-Quarters of a Century. New York: Appleton, 1938, pp. 359–410. Fennimore, Keith J. Booth Tarkington. Boston: Twayne, 1974. Mayberry, Susanah. My Amiable Uncle: Recollections about Booth Tarkington. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1983. Phelps, William Lyon. The Advance of the English Novel. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1916, pp. 267–301. Tarkington, Booth. The World Does Move. New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers. 3rd edition. Detroit, Mich.: St. James Press, 1989, pp. 947–949. Woodress, James Leslie. Booth Tarkington: Gentleman from Indiana. New York: Lippincott, 1955.

TARZAN OF THE APES EDGAR RICE BUR(1914) The first of 26 novels in a series, Tarzan of the Apes was first serialized in All-Story Magazine in 1912. Incorporating BURROUGHS’s own views of heredity and environment, his Tarzan is an orphaned, aristocratic English lord raised by apes who combines the physical strength of his jungle home with the intelligence of his “noble blood.” Tarzan possesses a remarkable physical and intellectual prowess, but exhibits a vulnerability that derives from the tentativeness of his identity. In contrast to the popular image of a grunting apeman, Tarzan can read English and can speak both English and French as well as animal languages. By the end of the series, he has become a true polyglot, speaking German, Swahili, Arabic, in addition to “lost languages.” The novel begins with the English Lord Greystoke, John Clayton, and his pregnant wife, Alice, finding themselves marooned on an isolated portion of the African coast after a ship’s mutiny. The couple survive a year in the wild environment but die after the birth of their child, a son, whom the female ape Kala discovers and exchanges for her own dead baby. She raises him as her own, naming him Tarzan, meaning “white skin.” As Tarzan matures he slowly realizes the differences between himself and the other apes and eventually returns to the small hut his parents had ROUGHS

1248 TAYLOR, PETER

built. From the books that were left, Tarzan teaches himself to read and write English, and a knife he finds gives him an advantage over the larger, stronger animals. With technological tools such as the knife and a lasso, combined with his mental superiority, Tarzan defeats his ape father Turkoz and becomes the ruler of his ape tribe. Tarzan’s emotional development is sparked by the arrival of a group of Americans and English who have also been marooned following a ship’s mutiny. The group includes Jane Porter and William Clayton, who has inherited the Greystoke title. Tarzan saves the group from wild animals and rescues Jane, who had been abducted by Turkoz. The group is eventually rescued by French soldiers, but one soldier is left, presumed dead. Tarzan nurses the soldier, D’Arnot, back to health, in exchange, D’Arnot teaches Tarzan French. Together they return to civilization and follow Jane to America, where once again Tarzan rescues her. In the end, Tarzan renounces his birthright and Jane and returns to the jungle. It was not until the 1960s that serious critical attention was focused on the Tarzan series. In the eighties and nineties, Tarzan became a common topic of study in postcolonial studies as well as gender and masculinity studies. Often criticized for its racist, xenophobic, and imperialist undertones, Tarzan can also be seen as a utopian pastoral escape from the urban growth that marked the beginning of the century. Critic Marianna Torgovnick sees Tarzan as a key figure in the primitive movement, claiming that Tarzan “is an attempt to imagine the primitive as a source of empowerment—as a locus for making things anew, to preserve what is worth preserving and change what deserves to be changed.” This would seem congruent with Burroughs’s aim of creating an ideal masculine figure, one that transcends class, race, and sex. Although there are clear instances of racism in the novel, the only figure who escapes critique is Tarzan himself—the others, including the apes, the African natives, the French soldiers, William Clayton, and even Jane Porter, are subject to Burroughs’s criticism. The success of the novels quickly prompted film versions, the first of which appeared in 1918. The most successful film Tarzan, however, was the 1932 version

with Johnny Weismuller as Tarzan the Apeman. The Weismuller films excised all signs of aristocratic origins and ignored Tarzan’s intellectual and moral development. This Tarzan is childlike, prelinguistic, and unconcerned with most moral issues found in the novel.

SOURCES Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes. New York: Penguin, 1990. Cheyfitz, Eric. The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan. Expanded edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Jurca, Catherine. White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Kasson, John. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. Morton, Walt. “Tracking the Sign of Tarzan: Trans-Media Representations of Pop-Culture Icon.” In You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, edited by Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, 106–125. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Eric Leuschner

TAYLOR, PETER (PETER HILLSMAN TAYLOR) (1917–1994) Although best known for his short fiction, author Peter Taylor received critical acclaim for his novels A Woman of Means (1950), In the Tennessee Country (1994), and the Pulitzer Prize– and PEN/Faulkner Award–winning A Summons to Memphis (1986). Associated with the Southern literary renaissance, Taylor (also a playwright) was concerned with form; he was a meticulous, talented craftsman who wrote tales about family conflict in a changing contemporary South. Although his stories and novels are usually set in Tennessee, and his upper-middle-class characters grapple with the influences of history, ancestry, values, traditions, and the relocation from Southern small towns to cities, Taylor’s work is universal. His treatment of troubled relationships with family members, spouses, and professional acquaintances is exemplified in his ironically titled story collection Happy Families Are All Alike (1959). More optimistically, Taylor’s work is suffused with strong women.

TELL ME A RIDDLE 1249

Peter Taylor was born on January 8, 1917, to Matthew Hillsman Taylor and Katherine Baird Taylor, in Trenton, Tennessee, probably his model for the fictional Thornton, Tennessee. Taylor became friends with John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell at Kenyon College, from which he graduated in 1940. He briefly attended graduate school at Louisiana State University, then dropped out to serve in the U.S. Army from 1941 to 1945. Taylor and the poet Eleanor Ross were married in 1942. His first novel (Taylor called it a novelette), A Woman of Means, concerns Anna Lauterbach, an attractive and wealthy St. Louis widow who marries the widowed father of Quint Dudley. Dudley reflects on his father’s courtship and move from rural Tennessee to St. Louis and there discovers secrets and surprises in the home of his stepmother. She feels attracted to her stepson and is eventually diagnosed as “mad” and institutionalized. In A Summons to Memphis, Phillip Carver, the protagonist, is called home to Memphis from New York by his two sisters. The 80-year-old widower Mr. Carver, who is about to remarry, is undermined by his middleaged children whose romances and marriages he had thwarted through his powerful controlling behavior. Taylor’s last novel, In the Tennessee Country, follows Nathan Longfort, another complex Taylor character, from his protected youth to his life as a historian of the South and the Civil War. Critics have speculated about whether Taylor’s reputation as a short story writer rather than a novelist has denied him his due as one of the premier American writers of the 20th century. He died of pneumonia on November 2, 1994, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

NOVELS In the Tennessee Country. New York: Knopf, 1994. A Summons to Memphis. New York: Knopf, 1986. A Woman of Means. New York: Harcourt, 1950.

SOURCES Graham, Catherine Clark. Southern Accents: The Fiction of Peter Taylor. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Griffith, Albert. Peter Taylor. Boston: Twayne, 1970; revised, 1990. Kramer, Victor A. Andrew Lytle, Walker Percy, Peter Taylor: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983. McAlexander, Hubert H. Conversations with Peter Taylor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.

McAlexander, Hubert H., ed. Critical Essays on Peter Taylor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1993. Robinson, David M. World of Relations: The Achievement of Peter Taylor. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Robinson, James Curry. Peter Taylor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Stephens, Ralph, and Salamon, Linda B., eds. The Craft of Peter Taylor. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Wright, Stuart T. Peter Taylor: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1934–87. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988.

TELL ME A RIDDLE TILLIE OLSEN (1961) Published in 1961, the novella Tell Me a Riddle, the longest story in the collection also called Tell Me a Riddle, recounts a poignant story of an old couple, Eva and David. Married for 47 years, David feels empty inside and tries in vain to persuade Eva to sell their house and join him at a home for old people. Eva finds no other pleasure than staying at her home to do what she has failed to do over the past decades. She is disheartened to realize that their house has been sold and still insists on going home. Neither David nor some of her children understand her until she is diagnosed with cancer. Eva, in her songs about the past, expresses her remembered happiness as well as her regret over not leading a self-fulfilled life. Eva has been living “for people” instead of for herself. The intriguing title may serve as a clue to the novella. While the grandchildren keep asking their grandmother Eva for a riddle, she cannot meet the demand. The reader can easily detect the contrast between the grandfather’s wide knowledge and the grandmother’s poor knowledge. What intensifies the irony is that Eva, who has been taking care of the children, should have no idea how to amuse them. If the title Tell Me a Riddle is considered a boastful remark from David asserted at Eva to parade his capacity for solving the riddle, the reader would find David facing the challenge of demystifying the riddle in his wife. While David assumes that all kinds of difficult problems could be solved by moving to Haven, he is quite unprepared for the most complex problem of Eva’s emotional needs. For 47 years they have been living together as one family, yet it is not until Eva definitely

1250 TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR, THE

departs from the family that her disappointment is voiced and heard (quite reluctantly at first). It might be suggested that the anguish in Eva stems from the social and cultural prescription of gender roles. The cultural restrictions for married workingclass women prevent them from even having a notion of pursuing other goals than domestic work. The traditional beliefs about women’s roles have confined women within a narrow sphere outside which their ideals are hard to reach. Women’s life, it may be considered, revolves in daytime around their children and at nighttime around their husbands. Does this mean that the story is only a woman’s tragedy? Apparently, David suffers from insecurity, too, due to Eva’s worsening condition. Fortunately, David, archetype of the male, is awakened to his responsibility. This indicates that whether a woman obtains fulfillment or not determines her family’s happiness.

SOURCES Nelson, Kay Hoyle, and Nancy Huse, eds. The Critical Response to Tillie Olsen. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle. New York: Delta, 1994. Li Jin

TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR, THE ALICE WALKER (1989) In her novel The Temple of My Familiar, Alice WALKER weaves a remarkable tapestry of the human condition. Her earlier novels deal primarily with the sense of isolation felt by black women who “are trapped by circumstances and this entrapment is the result of their sense of powerlessness against the structure of the dominant society as well as the fact that they have little understanding of that structure” (Parker-Smith, 479). This novel broadens her scope; she sets out to analyze, dismember, rearrange, reassemble, and perhaps even repudiate the human psyche. It is all humanity that is trapped by circumstances; it is all humanity that no longer listens to its “familiar” nature, as it were, leading to a sense of isolation and abandonment; it is all humanity that is imprisoned in the morass of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual one-upmanship. Walker wrote The Temple of My Familiar after purchasing a multicolored Guatamalan shawl with the words “You all remember!” writ-

ten in Spanish on the cloth (Walker 1997, 116). From there, almost unbidden, came the central theme that is, as Alice Walker says, “about our collusion with the forces that suppress and colonize our spirituality” (Walker 1997, 118). Three seemingly disparate vignettes are artfully interwoven into a seamless whole, leaving the reader with no set answer to the questions posed but with at least a starting point from which to begin the journey toward an answer. Walker begins this novel in almost typical fashion, showing the oppression of women. These are Indian women in a fictitious South American country. Zede is a young woman caught in the political infighting of her country. The college at which she hopes to get her teaching degree is closed by the government. Soon thereafter, she is arrested for being a Communist (5). While in prison, she becomes pregnant with her daughter Carlotta. Zede and Carlotta escape the slave conditions of the prison for the slave conditions of life as a domestic servant in a school for troubled rich children. Zede and Carlotta flee from this school with the assistance of one of the children, a white American girl named Mary Ann, whom they had helped at an earlier time. They end up in San Francisco living in abject poverty until Carlotta meets, falls in love with, and marries a famous musician named Arveyda. Suwelo is a young black professional who has come to Baltimore to put his deceased great Uncle Rafe’s affairs in order. Suwelo has just finalized his divorce from his wife Fanny Nzingha, who still loves him and waits for him in San Francisco but who does not want to be married to him anymore. While he is waiting for his uncle’s house to be sold, he begins looking into his uncle’s past and into the history of two of his uncle’s friends, Miss Lissie and Mr. Hal, an elderly couple originally from an island off the coast of one of the Southern states. They each begin telling Suwelo their story, which both complements and supports all of the other stories. Most interesting is the part told by Miss Lissie, whose name means “the one who remembers everything” (52) and who claims to have lived many times before and been witness to the worst of humanity as well as the loss of humanity’s sense of self.

TENDER IS THE NIGHT 1251

The last vignette is supplied by Fanny Nzingha, exwife of Suwelo, eventual colleague of Carlotta, and most interestingly granddaughter of Miss Celie—a character last seen in another of Alice Walker’s novel The COLOR PURPLE. The reader learns more of what happens to Fanny’s mother Olivia, Miss Celie, Shug, and even Miss Celie’s husband, Albert. Fanny is able to see and converse with spirits from the past. She travels to Africa to meet her father, Ola, a successful revolutionary no longer wanted by the government he helped put into power, as well as a sister Fanny she never knew about and her father’s present wife, Mary Ann, the same woman who helped Zede and Carlotta many years before and who married Ola so she could remain in the country and run the art school she had opened. Fanny tries to reconnect to herself, her humanity, and her familiar. The Temple of My Familiar is a novel that spans three continents and a great deal of human history. It gives Ms. Walker’s view of the sexes and the races and the way they must inevitably relate to each other. She shows many characters, of different races and sexes, how to reach understanding and, for want of a better word, salvation. Although it is not as easy a book to read as The Color Purple or The Third Life of Grange Copeland, this book is more thought provoking. There are faint echoes throughout the early portions of the book that become loud roars in the last two parts and reveal how everything is connected. Walker takes on all humanity and tries to show how the dispossessed, the unhappy, and the unfulfilled may regain that portion that has been taken from them. With her words, she has re-created that shawl that was the seed for the story and allows everyone to begin the search for his or her ever-elusive familiar.

SOURCES Parker-Smith, Bettye J. “Alice Walker’s Women: In Search of Some Peace of Mind.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980), edited by Mari Evans, 478–493. New York: Anchor, 1984. Walker, Alice. Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism. New York: Random House, 1997. ———. The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Pocket Books, 1989. Lowell Martin

TENDER IS THE NIGHT F. SCOTT FITZ(1934) In 1962 Andrew Turnbull wrote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “He abused his talent, but he couldn’t suppress it” (204). This terse fragment of the biographer’s sentence neatly summarizes the years of work and revisions Fitzgerald put into the writing and rewriting of Tender Is the Night, a novel that evolved through five titles, nearly 20 drafts, and over 5000 manuscript pages. Fitzgerald’s most acclaimed novel is, and likely always will be, The GREAT GATSBY. While Gatsby is a remarkable story of the Jazz Age and the brashness, ebullience, and eventual moral disintegration of the young Americans who lived it, Tender Is the Night is a thing apart. A number of critics now suggest that Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald’s finest work, and the fact that he spent nine years writing and rewriting the novel testifies to the value the author placed upon the story. Today the book is acclaimed as both a cultural portrait of wealthy expatriate life between the wars and a psychologically detailed, complex, and revealing portrait of the handsome, witty psychiatrist Dick Diver and his beautiful, wealthy wife Nicole Warren Diver. The story is told in three parts. Book One, beginning in medias res, focuses on a group of expatriate Americans who are residents of the French Riviera during the 1920s. Book Two tells of an earlier time period in the lives of the protagonists, and Book Three brings their stories to a close. The novel opens as Rosemary Hoyt, a young American actress, meets the trendsetting Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, formerly his psychiatric patient and now rehabilitated. The Divers are at the nucleus of the expatriate group living in Tarmes, a small town on the French Rivera. Rosemary falls in love with Dick, who is exactly twice her age, but also becomes fond of Nicole and the Divers’ two children, Lanier and Topsy. Because readers view the characters through Rosemary’s perspective, we see not only the wealth and glamor that attracts her but also the gradual dissolution of that image as an ugly reality emerges to strip away the veneer from their friends. Musician Abe North becomes drunk with increasing frequency; becomes involved in a seamy episode in which a black American, Jules Peterson, is murdered; and is himself GERALD

1252 TENDER IS THE NIGHT

eventually killed in a New York City speakeasy. The episode with Jules Peterson, whose body is placed on Rosemary’s bed, triggers Nicole’s second hysterical relapse (the first had occurred during a party at the Diver villa). Albert McKisco, a writer with an inferiority complex, challenges French-American mercenary Tommy Barban to a duel, and we realize that Nicole’s hysteria is linked not only to her past but also to the life she leads with Dick. By the end of Book One, Dick is obsessed with Rosemary, and Nicole is aware of his infatuation. Book Two of the novel flashes back to earlier periods in the lives of Dick and Nicole, detailing Dick’s education, his service during World War I, and the brilliant future that this charismatic doctor and author of medical books expected to enjoy. He meets Nicole while she is being treated at a Zurich psychiatric clinic run by his friends Dr. Dohmler and Dr. Franz Gregorovius. We learn that after her mother’s death, when Nicole was 11 years old, her father, Devereux Warren, began a sexual relationship with Nicole, causing a complete mental breakdown by the time she was 16. After Warren committed her to the Zurich clinic, she met, fell in love with, and eventually married Dick and began to return to normalcy. Her breakdowns, first mentioned in Book One, continue after the couple leaves Tarmes for Zurich, where Dick and Franz codirect a psychiatric clinic. These bouts of hysteria are apparently triggered by Dick’s preoccupations with young women—including Rosemary, a nameless girl in a bar, and a 15-year-old patient. Nicole eventually overcomes her fears and her dependence on Dick and emerges in Book Three as a strong, independent woman who leaves Dick and falls in love with and marries Tommy Barban. Book Three of the novel is presented from Nicole’s viewpoint, and the reader understands that she has come into her own as a full and independent human being. Dick, on the other hand, failing to control his self-indulgent alcoholism and sexual longings, falls into a downward spiral from the peak of his brilliant psychiatric career. It is no accident that his name is Doctor Dick Diver. The name is pretentious in the form of address (“Doctor”), vulgar in the nickname for Richard, and metaphoric of a dive or a fall from a great height (Stern, 309).

Thematically threaded through the novel is the father-daughter relationship; it underscores the incestuous sexual abuse suffered by the young Nicole Warren at the hands of her father. The prurient preoccupation of older men with girls and women young enough to be their daughters reverberates through the story: Rosemary stars in a film called “Daddy’s Girl,” Dick is attracted to Rosemary partly because of her youth, a 15-year-old psychiatric patient accuses Dick of seducing her, and Dick is briefly mistaken for the rapist of a five-year-old girl when he is arrested for drunkenness in Milan. Nicole, according to critic William F. Hall, views Dick “as the ‘evil’ father who seduced her” (621). On a larger scale, the novel presents Fitzgerald’s view of the United States in the years between the two world wars. The possibilities for both success and failure are inherent in the fictional characters: Some, like Nicole and Albert, at first clearly a portrait of the naive and opinionated American, rise to the occasion; others, however, like Abe and Dick, forgo their brilliant potential and step off the stage, Abe dying in a New York City speakeasy and Dick wandering in an alcoholic haze through small towns in upstate New York after a relationship with a 15-year-old girl. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda were revered as symbols of youth in the United States of the Roaring Twenties. That these two were icons of the Jazz Age in the years between the two world wars leads many to believe that the lifestyle constituted the author, and many cannot view his writing as something aside from his life. It is true that Fitzgerald based Dick partly on himself and Gerald Murphy, Nicole on Zelda and Sara Murphy, Rosemary on Hollywood starlet Lois Moran, and Tommy on French aviator Edouard Jozan (Moran and Jozan were romantic interests for Scott and Zelda, respectively); it is also true that readers continue to be fascinated by the parallels between Fitzgerald’s fiction and his life. Yet the novel is greater than the sum of these parallels. The fact that the novel was first published in spring 1934, when the United States was experiencing the depths of the Great Depression, spelled disaster for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. That the novel had taken so long to write and was a tale of a “golden moment” in

TENDER IS THE NIGHT the country’s brief history was not lost on the readers of 1934. Book purchasers were not in a collective mood to read novels dissecting the lives of the idle rich on the French Riviera. F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had embodied “the golden couple” in the America of the 1920s, much as movie star couples do in these times. Fitzgerald’s old friend, Ernest Hemingway, “found the characters in the novel to be beautifully faked case histories rather than people” (Mayfield, 207). Time, however, has been kind to this novel, which deals realistically with the American and universal issues of alcoholism, sex, wealth, frivolity, and hypocrisy. Fitzgerald felt that wealth made people careless with everything they owned, including other people’s affections and admiration for them. In 1934, the American public was perhaps not ready for this message. Part of the American mythology is the belief that if one is good, no matter how one conducts one’s life, everything will be fine, and that peace, prosperity, or love is just around the next corner. The 1920s, the decade that brought America the flapper and swing music, was at a confluence of important events. Americans had grown weary of their President, Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton scholar, who led them into World War I. In the war’s aftermath, the country retreated into a self-induced stupor and went straight to the business of pursuing the good life about which Fitzgerald and his contemporaries wrote. The critic Milton Stern suggests that, when Fitzgerald as writer is separated from the myth of his life, he becomes a prophet of the sort who is always without honor in his own land or in his own time. Tender Is the Night may have been a critical and popular failure because people were uncomfortable with Fitzgerald’s exposure of the underlying sickness of society. Unfortunately for the man, but fortunately for the readers who have savored his writing through the past half century, there was much that was true in what Fitzgerald was saying through his novels. If a microcosm of publishing history can be suggested by one book, Tender Is the Night is the place to begin studying. Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli spent nearly a year at the Princeton University Library, where the documents and letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald are housed. The extraordinary book The Composition of

1253

Tender Is the Night is the end result of Bruccoli’s research and demonstrates how seriously Fitzgerald took his craft as he kept revising and editing his own manuscripts. In The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Milton R. Stern, in a concise summary of the novel’s various avatars, states that Bruccoli found “three major versions of the novel, which underwent a total of seventeen drafts (eighteen if one counts the incompletely revised version of the book, published posthumously) . . . revised in five drafts, with a change in title for almost every change in draft: Our Type, The Boy Who Killed His Mother, The Melarkey Case, and The World’s Fair” (Stern, 293). The title changes show that the concept of the novel was changing as it was being written. World’s Fair, the original title of 1925, was intended to be a lighthearted look at Americans after the war, enjoying Europe. The original title character, Francis Melarkey, was matricidal, and in 1926 the title evolved into The Boy Who Killed His Mother. This title was based on a poem Fitzgerald had written. By the seventh draft, titled The Drunkard’s Holiday, the protagonist’s name had been changed to Dr. Dick Diver, and the book was beginning to resemble more closely the final published version. By 1951, when Fitzgerald’s editor, Malcolm Cowley, published a second edition in which events unfolded in chronological order, Fitzgerald had been dead for five years. Cowley, who rearranged the parts and made over 800 corrections, was certain he had Fitzgerald’s best interests and intentions in mind. Critical reaction was largely unfavorable, and today, it is the first edition that everyone reads. For the film of Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald drastically reworked the novel and gave it a happy ending. After Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected the film, Twentieth Century–Fox Studios hired MGM producer Frank Taylor, who brought the manuscript with him. David O. Selznick was in charge of the studio. Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones were cast as the Dick and Nicole Diver in the movie, and Tender Is the Night was released in 1962, 22 years after Fitzgerald’s death.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Chelsea House, 1985.

1254 TERMS OF ENDEARMENT

Bruccoli, Matthew J. The Composition of Tender Is the Night. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963. Buttitta, Tony. After the Good Gay Times: Asheville Summer of ’35: A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Viking. 1974. Callahan, John F. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Evolving American Dream: The Pursuit of Happiness in Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, and The Last Tycoon,” Twentieth Century Literature (Fall 1996). Chambers, John B. The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. deKoster, Katie, ed. Readings on F. Scott Fitzgerald. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Epstein, Joseph. “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Third Act,” Commentary, November 1994. Evans, Julian. “An American Sublime,” New Statesman, 28 August 2000. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender Is the Night. New York: Scribner, 1934. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1995. Hall, William F. “Dialogue and Theme in Tender Is the Night,” Modern Language Notes 76, no. 7 (November 1961): 616–622. Hicks, John D., ed. A History of American Democracy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 1970. Johns, Adrian.. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Krummel, D. W. Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra: A Celebration of Historical Library Functions. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Mangum, Bryant. A Fortune Yet: Money in the Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Stories. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991. Mayfield, Sara. Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Delacorte Press, 1971. Nowlin, Michael. “The World’s Rarest Work: Modernism and Masculinity in Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night,” College Literature (Spring 1998): 60–77. Phillips, Gene D. Fiction, Film and Fitzgerald. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1968. Shain, Charles E. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961. Stern, Milton R. The Golden Moment: The Novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Turnbull, Andrew. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribner, 1962. Laurie Howell Hime

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT LARRY MCMURTRY (1975) Larry MCMURTRY’s Terms of Endearment (1975) and its sequel, The Evening Star (1992), have been referred to as the “Aurora Greenway novels.” In addition, some critics have referred to Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, and Terms of Endearment as McMurtry’s “urban trilogy,” distinguishing them from his first three novels—Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show—which in retrospect have then been described as his “rural trilogy.” Interestingly, although it does not become the primary setting until The Last Picture Show, the town of Thalia is a secondary setting in the first two novels of the “rural trilogy,” and although Emma Horton does not become a focal character until Terms of Endearment, she does appear in all the novels of the “urban trilogy.” The screen adaptation of Terms of Endearment won five Academy Awards, including the awards for Best Picture, Best Actress (Shirley MacLaine as Aurora Greenway), and Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson as Garrett Breedlove). The film is true to the novel, except for the character played by Nicholson, who doesn’t exist in the novel. At the center of both the novel and the film adaptation is the relationship between Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma. For most of Emma’s life, the relationship is strained by the differences between them. A widow torn between maintaining her autonomy and continually proving her desirability, Aurora is a paradoxical amalgam of propriety and outrageousness, pragmatism and flightiness, haughtiness and awkwardness. In contrast, Emma is perfectly ordinary, unselfconscious, and quite level-headed. It is the novel’s essential irony that this mother should be so perpetually disappointed by this daughter. When Emma marries an aspiring college professor named Flap Horton, Aurora refuses to attend the wedding, predicting that the marriage will turn out disastrously. For a while, she seems to have been proven wrong as Flap and Emma have three children and, as he becomes established in his academic career, settle into a fairly comfortable life. Even Aurora begins to thaw toward Flap. Then Emma discovers that Flap is having an affair with one of his students, and she herself subsequently has a brief affair with a banker.

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD 1255

Aurora is put in what for her is the especially disconcerting position of being disappointed at having been proven right. Then Emma is diagnosed with the cancer that eventually kills her, and all the antagonisms between Aurora and Flap are put on hold as mother and daughter become absorbed in their need to connect with each other or, more precisely, to become finally comfortable with the deep connection that they have always felt with each other.

SOURCES Landess, Thomas. Larry McMurtry. Southwest Writers Series, No. 23. Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1969. Linck, Ernestine Sewell. “Larry McMurtry.” In Updating the Literary West, edited by Max Westbrook, 628–632. Fort Worth, Tex.: Western Literature Association/Texas Christian University Press, 1997. Neinstein, Raymond L. The Ghost Country: A Study of the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Arts, 1976. Nelson, Jane. “Larry McMurtry.” In A Literary History of the American West, edited by Max Westbrook, 612–621. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Peavy, Charles D. Larry McMurtry. Twayne’s United States Authors Series, No. 291. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Reilly, John M. Larry McMurtry: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Reynolds, Clay, ed. Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Schmidt, Dorey, ed. Larry McMurtry: Unredeemed Dreams. Living Author Series, No. 1. Edinburg, Tex.: School of Humanities, Pan American University, 1978, pp. 1–4. Speidel, Constance. “Whose Terms of Endearment?” Literature/Film Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1984): 271–273. Martin Kich

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1937) When Zora Neale HURSTON’s work was revived by authors and critics in the 1970s, her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was recognized as a classic. Not only is the main character, Janie, a strong African-American female protagonist, but she speaks in her own dialect with her own hardwon wisdom. Like many artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston expressed the desire for mobility, freedom, and voice.

The beginning occurs not just at sundown, but after a death; however, this ending provides the protagonist with a new life. Throughout the narrative, Death is personified and brings transformation that is destructive as well as creative. In fact, each death in the novel heralds Janie’s physical journey: Nanny’s death signals Janie’s departure from home as well as her abandonment of Logan Killicks, Joe’s death allows her to leave for the Everglades, and Tea Cake’s death sends her back to Eatonville. Instead of presenting the community as a nurturing environment, Hurston reveals its destructive qualities with which Janie must continually grapple. Janie’s first realization of racial difference begins with a photograph of herself in a group of children, a communal mirror. When she returns to Eatonville at the beginning of the novel, women and men watch her with various feelings of envy, judgment, wonder, lust, dismay, condemnation, and curiosity. They had previously failed to help her when she was abused by Joe Starks and insulted her with warnings about her vulnerability to predatory suitors once he had died. Resembling this community is the worker enclave—extreme in love, hate, music, and violence—in the Everglades. When Tea Cake beats Janie, the men and women admire him, and when Janie kills the rabid man in self-defense, they try to destroy her. The most positive people in Janie’s life are Pheoby and Nanny. Pheoby takes the place of the reader. The tale is told to her, and she listens with awe. At the beginning of the novel Nanny tries to nourish Janie’s self-respect and self-knowledge, but her material values severely limit her choices for Janie. Panicking over Janie’s first kiss, Nanny—with the imagery of the pear tree in a storm—marries her to Brother Logan Killicks. What she wants most for Janie is protection, something that she could not give Janie’s mother, who was raped by a teacher. This distrust causes her to abandon even dreams of Janie continuing her education in favor of marriage. All the husbands fall short of Janie’s dreams: Logan desires a workhorse for his land, Joe wants a silent clerk for his store, and Tea Cake puts Janie to work picking beans in the Everglades. Despite the negative influences of the community, husbands, and a racist America, Janie perseveres and emerges

1256 THEM

more sure of herself than ever. Throughout the narrative, images of rich earth and barren earth, nature, and animals reflect individuals’ situations. Household imagery indicates the difficulty of everyday roles. Despite her husbands’ needs to exploit, silence, and possess her, Janie is the one who survives. She maintains her confidence in herself and resists the temptation to judge. “ ‘You got tuh go there tuh know there,’ ” she asserts (183). At the end of the novel, her solitude is not pitiable but rich with reflection and memory. Through a combination of third-person narrative, firstperson narrative, and dialogue, Janie’s story encompasses all points of view and applies natural images of growth and decay to the cycles and processes of her life.

SOURCES Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bloom, Harold, ed. Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Chelsea, 1986. Carby, Hazel. “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn R. Warhol, and Diane Price Herndl, 746–758. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of AfroAmerican Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hemenway, Robert. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Hill, Lynda. Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zora Neale Hurston. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1996. Howard, Lillie P. Zora Neale Hurston. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Lowe, John. Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. New York: Harcourt, 1983. ———, ed. I Love Myself: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. New York: Feminist Press, 1979. Wall, Cheryl A. “Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960). Introduction.” In The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Bonnie Kime Scott, 170–174. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1987. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Kerri A. Horrine

THEM JOYCE CAROL OATES (1969) When OATES received the National Book Award for this novel, it was the first major acknowledgment of her stature as one of the most significant American novelists and short story writers of her generation. them was Oates’s fourth novel. Unlike the early work of other novelists that has seemed overvalued in retrospect, them has continued to be perceived as a remarkably mature work, exhibiting considerable technical invention and great thematic complexity. Still, it is a tribute to Oates’s continuing development as a novelist that her achievement in them has not overshadowed her later work. In them, Oates synthesizes a variety of novelistic forms. The book is a naturalistic coming-of-age story, depicting the traumas that shaped the life experience of its main character, Maureen Wendall. It is a family saga, chronicling a slice of American social history through the microcosm of the Wendall family. It is an urban novel, presenting the recent history of Detroit and charting its decline from an industrial powerhouse to an urban war zone, a postindustrial wasteland. Lastly, them is a work of documentary realism, in which Oates herself appears as a character, the writing teacher to whom Maureen Wendall confides parts of her life story. The novel covers the events of three decades, from 1937 to 1967. The main characters besides Maureen Wendall are her mother, Loretta, and her brother, Jules. Each of these character’s lives is not so much shaped, as it is punctuated by nightmarish events. While in her midteens, Loretta sleeps with a boy she loves. When she wakes in the morning, he is lying dead beside her. Her brother, Brock, has murdered the boy in his sleep and then run off. Howard Wendall, the policeman who comes to investigate the murder, feels sorry for Loretta and manages to cover up the details of the crime. Later that day she sleeps with him, and shortly afterward, they marry. But the marriage is strained by differences in temperament, by the demands of relatives, and by Howard’s dismissal from the police force for corruption. After a failed retreat to a farm, Loretta leaves Howard for good and returns with their three children to the city. Lost in tawdry romantic dreaming, Loretta remarries, but she is too unstable to be emotionally consistent in her relationships with her new husband or with her children.

THEROUX, PAUL 1257

Television becomes her palliative, but as Detroit is convulsed in violent riots, even television fails her as she recognizes her estranged son Jules among the rioters. Although he can find no work beyond menial jobs, Jules becomes passionately infatuated with a young woman from a “better” family, whose main reason for becoming involved with him seems to be to spite her parents. They run off to Texas, but when Jules becomes very ill, she deserts him at a seedy motel. After she marries someone more acceptable to her parents, she and Jules do, however, resume their relationship. But this time around, it ends even more disastrously than it had in Texas. Overcome by a combination of guilt and self-pity, Jules’s lover shoots him and very nearly kills him. From this point on, Jules’s cynicism overwhelms the last vestiges of the romantic daydreams that had provided a reprieve from the dull routine of his daily existence. He becomes a political radical, an anarchist, but he is clearly driven more by personal rage than by any broader sense of outrage at social inequities or injustices. As the riots consume Detroit, he acts as an informal spokesperson for the rioters, trying to define the rioting as an expression of a political cause. Yet the crimes that he personally commits in the course of the riots seem largely rooted in just plain meanness. Outwardly a demure Catholic schoolgirl, Maureen begins to prostitute herself with businessmen after school. In the process, she not only builds a cache of money that might eventually allow her to escape her family’s impoverishment, she also finds a mode of selfexpression that permits her to feel separate from her family, to feel that there is a part of her that is not “them.” She begins to recognize that the real predators are not the others who live in their tough neighborhood, but the members of her family who, lacking other sustenance, feed on each other’s souls. But, when her stepfather discovers what she has been doing, he beats her terribly. For almost a year, she lies in bed in a catatonic state. When she finally emerges from it, she sets out to construct a life for herself. She begins taking college courses, including a writing course with Oates, and she purposefully seduces another married English teacher, with whom she creates a modestly comfortable home life. It isn’t a perfect situation—he

has three children to support from his first marriage— but it is better than anything else Maureen has known. When Jules suddenly appears at her door, she makes it clear to him that her new life no longer has any room in it—her heart no longer has any room in it—for anyone from her former life.

SOURCES Bevilacqua, Winifred Farrant. “ ‘All of Detroit Is Melodrama’: Joyce Carol Oates’ them.” In La Citta delle Donne: Immaginario Urbana e Letteratura del Novecento, edited by Oriana Palusci, 123–139. Turin: Tirrenia, 1992. DeCurtis, Anthony. “The Process of Fictionalization in Joyce Carol Oates’s them,” International Fiction Review 6 (1979): 121–128. Giles, James R. “Suffering, Transcendence, and Artistic ‘Form’: Joyce Carol Oates’s them,” Arizona Quarterly 32 (1976): 213–226. Keeble, Robert. “Depersonalization in Joyce Carol Oates’s them,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 28 (March 1998): 2–3. Pinsker, Sanford. “The Blue Collar Apocalypse or Detroit Bridge’s Falling Down: Joyce Carol Oates’ them,” Descant: The Texas Christian University Literary Journal 23, no. 4 (1979): 35–47. Martin Kich

THEROUX, PAUL (PAUL EDWARD THEROUX) (1941– ) Paul Theroux, novelist, short story writer, travel writer, and playwright, explores the world of late-20th-century expatriates in a plethora of countries. Continuing in the tradition of Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Henry JAMES, and Edith WHARTON, also expatriates, Theroux recounts the comedy and tragedy of both the expatriates and of the indigenous people with whom they interact. Indeed, his novels are set in various locales: Africa, Asia, England, and the United States. In his review of Theroux’s novel, My Secret History (1989), Gary Krist notes that “Theroux’s life involves plenty of interesting sex in exotic foreign climes, [which] ensures that this novel, like everything he writes, entertains even as it gathers weight” (Krist, 40). In addition, he remains fascinated with the dual personality or secret self that he employs in a number of his more recent novels: My Secret History, Chicago Loop (1990), and My Other Life (1996). Recurrent violence also surfaces in Theroux’s work, in the form of

1258 THEROUX, PAUL

terrorism and physical violence perpetrated by warped, bizarre, or repressed people; these desires often result in guilt or despair on the part of his unhappy protagonists. Much of Theroux’s work can be interpreted as parables or illuminated fictive commentaries on the weaknesses and pitfalls of characters living in the postmodern world. In addition to the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel for Picture Palace (1978) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Best Novel for The MOSQUITO COAST (1982), Theroux has garnered two American Book Award nominations: for The Mosquito Coast and The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (1979). Paul Theroux (rhymes with “skiddoo”) was born on April 10, 1941, in Medford, Massachusetts, to Albert Eugene Theroux and Anne Dittami Theroux, a teacher. He was educated at the University of Massachusetts, earning his B.A. in 1963. He joined the Peace Corps, and lived in Malawi, Uganda, Singapore, and London, where he still lives. After meeting the novelist V. S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and friend, Theroux published his first novel, Waldo, and married Anne Castle, a British journalist, in 1967. In Waldo, as in his two subsequent novels, Fong and the Indians (1968) and Girls at Play (1969), he portrays alien “travelers” seeking their identities in exotic foreign settings. The English Waldo engages in furious activity as he seeks to avoid imprisonment, first in a school for delinquents and later in a glass cage in a night club. The Chinese Catholic Sam Fong, who lives in Africa, finds that he shares with the Indians their status as objects of racial and cultural prejudice. The young American of Girls at Play is so disillusioned with the prejudice she finds in Malawi that she commits suicide. Jungle Lovers (1971), also set in Malawi, features Massachusetts born Calvin Mullet, who attempts with another man to alter the lives of the Malawians, with predictably unsuccessful results. Saint Jack (1973) features Jack Flowers, a pimp and a writer, like Mullet, living in Singapore and frustrated with a meaningless existence that he cannot change. The Black House (1974), partly a ghost story, underscores the universality of haunted locales. Alfred Munday finds that leaving haunted Africa for England leads him to another haunted house, this time in the English countryside. The Family Arsenal (1976), set in London,

features, with almost certain parodic intent, an American family of bombers whose substitution of violence and death mocks the communal comfort and lifesustaining image of the normal family and its relationship to the neighborhood. In Picture Palace (1978), set in Massachusetts, Maude Coffin Pratt, a photographer, reveals her unconsummated incestuous love for her brother, who slept with their sister; Maude’s repression of this verboten love has colored her entire life. The Mosquito Coast (1982) won international acclaim for Theroux’s presentation of his protagonist, obsessive inventor Allie Fox, whose paranoid belief in an American nuclear disaster sends him and his family to a community in a Honduran jungle. Because of individualism and technology, the jungle ceases to be a haven. Half Moon Street contains Doctor Slaughter (published separately first) and Doctor DeMarr, doubles or doppelgangers living in England and the United States, respectively. Frequently compared to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Edgar Allan POE’s “William Wilson,” or Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” the novellas explore the hypocrisy and selfabsorption that can result in a disintegrating personality. O-Zone (1986) is a dystopian novel whose plot springs from another nuclear disaster, this time in New York City; the New Yorker character flees to the American heartland only to discover that it is divided into haves and have-nots. He learns a lesson from “Fizzy” Fisher, a young boy who demonstrate his ability to transcend the old order. My Secret History (1989), although told in the first person and based on Theroux’s life, blends fictional and mythical techniques and themes that transcend autobiography or memoir. Chicago Loop (1990) revisits the theme of sexual obsession that characterizes some of Theroux’s early novels. After picking up and murdering a prostitute, Parker Jagoda punishes himself by walking about in her clothes until he inevitably meets the same fate. Millroy the Magician (1994), like many Theroux characters, mistakenly tries to impose his own version of order and truth on the world. His most recent book is The Stranger at the Palazzo D’Oro and Other Stories (2004). A number of his novels have been adapted to the screen in various formats: Saint Jack was adapted as a motion picture, directed by

THINGS THEY CARRIED, THE 1259

Peter Bogdanovich, in 1979; The Mosquito Coast was adapted as a motion picture, written by Paul Schrader, directed by Peter Weir, starring Harrison Ford, Warner Bros., in 1986; Doctor Slaughter was adapted as the motion picture Half Moon Street, written by Edward Behr and Bob Swain, directed by Swain, starring Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine, RKO/Fox, in 1986; London Embassy was adapted as a television miniseries in the United Kingdom, written by T. R. Bowen and Ian Kennedy Martin, directed by David Giles III and Ronald Wilson, in 1987.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Black House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. Chicago Loop. New York: Random House, 1990. The Collected Short Novels. London: Penguin Books, 1999. Doctor Slaughter. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984. The Family Arsenal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Fong and the Indians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. Girls at Play. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Half Moon Street: Two Short Novels (contains Doctor Slaughter and Doctor DeMarr). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. Hotel Honolulu. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Jungle Lovers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Kowloon Tong. Thorndike, Maine: G. K. Hall, 1997. Millroy the Magician. New York: Random House, 1994. The Mosquito Coast. (With woodcuts by David Frampton.) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. Murder in Mount Holly. London: Alan Ross, 1969. My Other Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. My Secret History. New York: Putnam, 1989. O-Zone. New York: Putnam, 1986. Picture Palace. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. Saint Jack. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Waldo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967.

SOURCES Blank, Jonah. “Feuding Literary Titans,” U.S. News and World Report, 10 August 1998, p. 39. Coale, Samuel. Paul Theroux. Boston: Twayne, 1987. Gray, Rockwell. “The Pungent Smell of a Rancid Friendship.” Christian Science Monitor, 8 October 1998, B-7. Howe, Nicholas. “Booking Passage,” New Republic, 6 August 2001, pp. 34–42. Johnson-Cramer, Sharon. “A British Family Divides as Hong Kong Returns to China,” Christian Science Monitor, 25 June 1997, p. 15.

Krist, Gary. “Me, Myself, and I,” New Republic, 17–24 July 1989, pp. 40–41. Levi, Peter. “Ever So Slightly Interesting,” Spectator, 28 October 1995, p. 36. Lewis, Maggie. “Shallow Voyagers through a Vivid Future Landscape,” Christian Science Monitor, 24 November 1986, p. 30. Read, Piers Paul. “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” Spectator, 6 July 1996, p. 32. Ritts, Morton. “Double Vision,” Maclean’s, 14 August 1989, p. 55. Shapiro, Laura. “A Tale of Two Giant Egos,” Newsweek, 10 August 1998, p. 45. Solomon, Jay. “Observer Status,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 5 September 1996, pp. 46–47. Theroux, Paul, and Julie Baumgold. “Fellow Traveler,” Esquire, September 1996, pp. 184, 182. Updike, John. “The Book as Cook Book,” New Yorker, 15 March 1994, pp. 92–94. Winchester, Simon. “Tonga-Tied,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 3 December 1992, pp. 32–33.

OTHER Audio Interview with Paul Theroux. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/paultheroux. Accessed September 22, 2005. An Interview with Paul Theroux. The Atlantic Online. Available online by subscription. URL: http://www.theatlantic. com/unbound/bookauth/ptint.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005. Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin. Available online. URL: http://www.HoughtonMifflinmifflinbooks.com/catalog/ authordetail.cfm?authorID=1043. Accessed September 22, 2005. Paul Theroux. The Salon Interview, by Dwight Garner. Salon. com. Available online. URL: http://www.salonmagazine. com/weekly/interview960902.html. Accessed September 22, 2005. Worldguide Interview: Paul Theroux. Available online. URL: http://www.worldmind.com/Cannon/Culture/Interviews/ theroux.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

THINGS THEY CARRIED, THE TIM O’BRIEN (1990) Tim O’BRIEN writes articles, short fiction, memoir, and novels. While marketed as a novel by its publisher and called a “composite novel” (O’Gorman) by some critics, The Things They Carried can also be considered a short story cycle or even a fictionalized memoir

1260

THINGS THEY CARRIED, THE

attempting to convey some of the truths of the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam. Tim O’Brien, the author, is himself a Vietnam veteran, and Tim O’Brien is a central character in these stories—or chapters—set, for the most part, in Vietnam during the war. Does that imply that the work is a memoir merely cast as fiction? The stories slip back and forth in time, with characters resurfacing and plots becoming fuller. A soldier may be already dead in one story and his death explained in a later one. Are the book’s units, then, stories or chapters? The book itself defies genre from its initial pages. The first and title story—or chapter—introduces a cast of characters. Here, readers understand that each soldier is defined by what he carries, by letters or a good-luck charm or a souvenir. What they carried was “largely determined by necessity” and varied according to such things as rank and mission; the standard uniform itself had weight, all men carried weapons they were issued, some carried communications equipment, and so on. Also, “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.” The language and structure of this story is especially poetic; the words resist forming a sequential plot in favor of reliance on images, objects, and recurring syntax. The rest of The Things They Carried, through the characters, plots, and images established in this first story, reveals, explores, and explains a great deal of this intangible weight, thereby making it tangible through language for the readers. “On the Rainy River,” the fourth story, looks back from 20 years after its occurrence in 1968, to recount a story “never told before.” Because it gives background on the narrator, it functions as a sort of displaced first chapter. Here, the narrating character Tim O’Brien—who, like the author, grew up in Minnesota and graduated from Macalester College—makes courage tangible and personally specific, something with “finite quantities, like an inheritance.” O’Brien receives his draft notice. His first thoughts are that the country’s leaders—those who decided to go to war and who continue to fuel it— should send their own families instead of him, that he is “too good for this war.” By the end, the narrator admits, “I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die— because I was embarrassed not to.” Is this story true?

O’Brien explores this question more overtly in “How to Tell a True War Story,” which is situated roughly one-third of the way into the book and, thereby, questions the truth of all the stories. This story opens with a claim that it is true; however, by the end, readers recognize that what may be most true may not be exactingly factual: “All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at a real truth.” Perhaps, the whole thing never happened; perhaps, it happened but not there. Repetition seems to be the key to telling a true war story. The war story here, though, is actually a love story or a story of loss, for the real stories are not necessarily about the war per se. This larger, even sweeping, perspective O’Brien continually reveals and builds in The Things We Carry suggests the true scope of O’Brien’s interests: In his work there is an abiding concern with the question of battlefield courage, linking him not only with the best of a tradition of American war writers—James Fenimore COOPER, Stephen CRANE, Ernest HEMINGWAY—but also with the ancients; a more general concern with moral choice and the human capacity for evil that links him to such writers as Joseph Conrad (perhaps his most oft-cited influence); and, finally, an explicit interest in storytelling itself, in narrative forms and the power of the imagination, which might connect him to a number of experimental writers, both modern and postmodern (O’Gorman, 290). This text, then, situates itself in various literary traditions and chronicles an important time in our nation’s history. O’Brien’s work is indeed tied to specific historical—and personal—events but also to human experience and morality in general. The final story, “The Lives of the Dead,” combines a sort of oxymoron or ambiguity in its title and suggests the necessary intermingling of life and death not just in war but in all human experience. The narrator—or is it the author, since both are now writers—claims that “stories can save us” and that stories allow the dead to “return to this world.” In this story he saves—resurrects, revives, preserves—a nine-year-old classmate’s life. The death of his boyhood girlfriend is linked to the death of his soldier buddies in Vietnam; a moral essence, some sort of truth, overrides these experi-

THIN MAN, THE 1261

ences. And the act of telling the stories—like the earlier shaking of a dead man’s hand or soldiers’ joking about death within moments of its occurrence— becomes a way to will people alive, to move beyond the simply intellectual understanding of bodily death. The Things They Carried is a wonderfully complex and accessible insight not only into literary questions of genre but also into the Vietnam War, particularly important as current high school and college readers were born well after direct U.S. involvement in the conflict.

SOURCES Kaplan, Stephen. Understanding Tim O’Brien. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. O’Gorman, Farrell. “The Things They Carried as Composite Novel,” War, Literature, and the Arts 10, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1998): 289–309. “Tim O’Brien Issue.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 4 (Summer 1994). Anna Leahy

THIN MAN, THE DASHIELL HAMMETT (1934) The Thin Man is the last of the five detective novels published by Dashiell HAMMETT between 1929 and 1934. It is the only one not first serialized in Black Mask; begun in 1931 and finished in 1933, its gestation was far longer than that of any of its predecessors; after it, Hammett would publish only a couple of short stories. It is, therefore, the fifth and final act in Hammett’s reinvention of the detective story. The hardboiled qualities that characterized the Hammett version of the detective story are still present: There are gangsters and gunshots, tough cops and speakeasies, wisecracks and beatings, predatory and unreliable women. But there is also a detective’s wife and a detective’s dog. Nora does not actually help Nick Charles (Charlambides) detect, but the banter between her and her husband mark Nick as a quite different man from the Continental Op, Sam Spade, or Ned Beaumont. Beaumont was a complicated figure, groping toward a more intimate relationship; Nick Charles is secure in his marriage, and can be playful and protective. He is, indeed, an ex-detective, having retired from the Trans-

American Detective Agency six year ago, and he is a reluctant inquirer into the matter of the disappearance of the eccentric thin man, Clyde Wynant. Although Nick and Nora are Californians, they are spending Christmas 1932 in New York City; they read headlines and attend Broadway shows that actual New Yorkers read and attended in 1932. Despite Prohibition, they drink a lot (the celebrated series of six Thin Man movies produced between 1934 and 1947 gave the schnauzer, Asta, a rather larger role than Hammett did, but the Charlese’s bibulousness is hardly exaggerated). It is while drinking in a speakeasy that Nick learns from Wynant’s nubile daughter that her father has disappeared. Wynant is a wealthy inventor who is divorced from his wife, Mimi. Mimi now lives with her second husband, Christian Jorgensen, and her two children by Wynant, Dorothy and her younger brother, Gilbert. Wynant’s disappearance becomes more than a troublesome absence when Mimi discovers the corpse of his murdered secretary (and, it is implied, mistress), Julia Wolf. The crime is complicated when it is revealed that Julia Wolf was once linked to an imprisoned Ohio gangster, Face Peppler, and that a low-life snitch named Arthur Nunheim has reported seeing a New York gangster, Shep Morelli, near the scene of the crime. Morelli, offended by the implication, invades the Charles’s Hotel Normandie rooms and fires a bullet that grazes Nick’s side. Morelli’s false impression of Nick’s involvement in the investigation is shared by the newspapers and by the police; finding himself thrust into the case, and encouraged by the Wynant family and Wynant’s lawyer, Herbert Macaulay, Nick begins to detect. The affair is further complicated by the murder of the witness, Nunheim; by the discovery that Jorgensen is, in fact, a rival inventor named Victor Rosewater who once threatened to kill Wynant for stealing his ideas (Rosewater-Jorgensen’s revenge—marrying Wynant’s wife and thus accessing Wynant’s wealth through the divorce settlement—may be neat but is certainly improbable); by Mimi’s inexhaustible inclination to lie; and by messages telegraphed or mailed by Wynant. Lt. Guild, the policeman assigned to the case, is a tough cop who comes to respect, though never entirely to trust, Nick. He is baffled by the

1262 THIS BOY’S LIFE

developments. Mimi, Jorgensen, Morelli, and, of course, Clyde Wynant himself are all viable suspects in the murders of Julia Wolf and Arthur Nunheim. When a dismembered body and a fat man’s clothing with the initials D.W.Q. are discovered interred beneath the floor of Wynant’s old laboratory, the case against Wynant seems overwhelming. This, however, is the moment that Nick Charles announces that the killer— of Wynant as well as of Wolf and Nunheim—is the lawyer, Herbert Macaulay. The novel’s final chapter presents Nick outlining his case against Macauley. It is, as Nora several times interjects, a case full of “loose” inferences and “reasonable doubts” and “theories.” Nick responds with “It doesn’t click any other way.” It must have happened according to the complex scenario that he lays out. Macauley and Wolf must have been embezzling from Wynant’s accounts; Macauley must have murdered Wynant in Scarsdale on October 3, and must have carried the pieces of Wynant’s body to New York City on the sixth to bury them (and the misleading clothes) in the laboratory basement; and so on. The scenario that Nick recounts is certainly satisfyingly complete, but his insistence that the details are justified by “It doesn’t click any other way,” and not by irrefutable evidence or, even better, by confession, gives point to the novel’s last words, Nora’s complaint that “it’s all pretty unsatisfactory.” In a classic mystery story, this sort of mere likelihood would constitute a radical defect. In reality, Nick explains, this is the way murder mysteries end. Hammett’s final detective novel thus subverts the conventions of the genre. It features a reluctant detective drawn into an investigation that he views with a degree of bemused detachment, quite unlike the professional dedication of the Continental Op or Sam Spade. Nora is an ornament, contributing nothing substantial to the solution of the mystery, but much to the nature of the narrative. Her high spirits make her a mate for her husband; she is responsible for transforming the Detective into a Man Detecting.

SOURCES Dooley, Dennis. Dashiell Hammett. New York: Ungar, 1984. Gale, Robert L. A Dashiell Hammett Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Gregory, Sinda. Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Metress, Christopher, ed. The Critical Response to Dashiell Hammett. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994. Nolan, William F. Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook. Santa Barbara, Calif.: McNally & Loftin, 1969. ———. Hammett: A Life on the Edge. New York: Congdon and Weed, 1983. Skinner, Robert E. The Hard-Boiled Explicator: A Guide to the Study of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985. J. K. Van Dover

THIS BOY’S LIFE TOBIAS WOLFF (1989) Many critics have believed that Tobias WOLFF’s memoir of his life from age 10 until age 16 should really be termed a novel, because of its literary qualities. The story begins in 1955, as he and his mother drive from Florida to Utah, fleeing her abusive boyfriend, singing, and dreaming of a better life in the West. When the boyfriend traces them to Salt Lake City, they again flee, arriving in Seattle by luck of the Greyhound schedule. There, Toby falls in with boys who smoke, steal trinkets from the local merchants, and commit minor acts of vandalism. After he is suspended for writing an obscenity on the boys’ bathroom wall, his mother, desperate to prevent further trouble, sends him to live with her suitor and his three children in Chinook, a small company town three hours north of Seattle. The book centers on his years in Chinook and his turbulent relationship with his hard-drinking, domineering, and explosively tempered stepfather, the rowdy, petty-thieving boys he hangs out with, and his effeminate best friend, Arthur. The book ends as he leaves Chinook for an eastern prep school he forged transcripts and recommendations to enter and from which he is eventually expelled. The title refers to Boy’s Life, the official Boy Scout magazine that captures Toby’s imagination and feeds his dreams of self-sufficiency, adventure, and bravery. The dominant theme is Toby’s need to bridge the gap between the life he wants and the one he has, between the boy he wants to be and the boy he is. He dreams of being reunited with his father and older brother, becoming a family once more, rather than a fatherless

THOMAS, JOYCE CAROL 1263

outsider who falls far short of his expectations of changing. In Salt Lake City, he changes his name to Jack, after Jack LONDON, believing “that having his name would charge me with some of the strength and competence inherent in my idea of him” (8). In Chinook, he sees himself, as a straight-A student, star swimmer, and “boy of integrity” (213). In reality, he is bright but lazy, with poor to failing grades, a fair swimmer, and one badge short of Eagle Scout. He dreams of escaping from Chinook’s limited blue-collar world to prep school, harboring never-to-be-realized fantasies of belonging—becoming a top student and swim-team captain and achieving the ease, manners, and material trappings of the boys whose photos he studies in the admissions-office brochures. Painful honesty and well-drawn characters and events yield a memoir with the power of an adventure novel. As Wolff writes in the prologue, “This is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.” His tight focus on a troubled boy’s struggles to become a good man creates dramatic tension, and his well-paced tales of basketball games, schoolyard scraps, domestic confrontations, friendships, and ill-conceived plans of escape, rather than extensive reflection, are more characteristic of a novel than traditional memoir. Wolff writes a boy’s narrative with a man’s insight, without rationalization, apology, or labels—his stepfather drinks heavily and often but is never called an “alcoholic”; his best friend displays many effeminate characteristics, kisses him impulsively, and acquires a girlfriend as “the weakest part of his act,” but he never calls him gay. His straightforward statements, without labeling or whining, keep us on his side, even when the facts support the opposition. When his Scout leader stepfather refuses to submit the paperwork for the final badge he needs to become an Eagle Scout, we sympathize, even though his tales of lying, drinking, and cheating demonstrate that his stepfather is right when he says Toby doesn’t “deserve to be an Eagle” (198). While he gives numerous examples of his stepfather’s cruelty and duplicity (stealing his paper route earnings and his beloved Winchester, beating him, and threatening his mother), he also tells us how Dwight voluntarily took on the job of raising him, months before marrying his mother, and became a Scout leader

and purchased a newspaper route in attempts to keep him productively occupied. By the book’s end, we predict a difficult and unsuccessful future for Toby. Subsequently, Wolff has published In Pharaoh’s Army, Memories of the Lost War (1994), which describes his experiences after he was expelled from prep school, joined the army, and wound up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam. It ends with his enrollment at Oxford University. This Boy’s Life was made into a movie, released in 1993, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby, Robert De Niro as his stepfather, and Ellen Barkin as his mother. The movie’s focus is narrower than that of the book, concentrating on the three characters and their relationships, rather than on Toby’s relationships and adventures with other boys.

SOURCES Penfield, Wilder III. “Writing Wrongs of His Childhood, Tobias Wolff on This Boy’s Life,” Toronto Sun, 23 October 1996. Wolff, Geoffrey. The Duke of Deception, Memories of My Father. New York: Random House, 1979. ———. In Pharaoh’s Army, Memories of the Lost War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. ———. This Boy’s Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

OTHER Smith, Joan. “Speaking into the Unknown, Tobias Wolff.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/ dec96/interview961216.html. Accessed September 27, 2005. Suzanne Carey

THOMAS, JOYCE CAROL (1938– ) Best known for her three interconnected novels Marked by Fire (1982), winner of the American Book Award (now the National Book Award); Bright Shadow (1983), winner of the Coretta Scott King Award; and Water Girl (1986), Joyce Carol Thomas is acclaimed for her poetic, lyrical language. Equally if not more significant, however, is her portrayal of black women characters, depictions that have earned her serious attention and favorable comparisons to Toni MORRISON, Gloria NAYLOR, and Alice WALKER. Thomas’s novels, widely adopted for classroom use in both high

1264 THOMAS, JOYCE CAROL

schools and universities, describe the identity quests of young black women and men; they have been classified as YA (young adult) novels, but are also popular with adults who read novels by Maya ANGELOU and James BALDWIN. Thomas, additionally a prolific writer of poetry, plays, and award-winning books for young children, turned to full-time writing in 1994 after another career as an English professor. Joyce Carol Thomas was born on May 25, 1938, in Ponca City, Oklahoma, to Leona Thompson Haynes, a housekeeper and hair stylist, and Floyd David Haynes, a bricklayer. She moved with her family to Tracy, California, at age 10, and received her bachelor’s degree in French and Spanish from San Jose State University in 1966 and her master’s degree in education at Stanford University in 1967. She married twice: in 1959, to Gettis L. Withers, whom she divorced in 1968; and in 1968, to Roy T. Thomas, Jr., whom she divorced in 1979. The title of her first novel, Marked by Fire, refers to the burn scar borne by Abyssinia Jackson, who survives a brush fire in a cotton field and, at age 10, is raped by a member of her church. This violent and terrifying incident renders her temporarily mute. The novel, set in Ponca City, Oklahoma (along with California, a prominent setting in her novels), follows her movement into adult life, aided by a close-knit community of women. The sequel, Bright Shadow, is similarly horrifying and includes the brutal murder of her favorite Aunt Serena by Serena’s insane husband, a minister. Abyssinia attends college and falls in love with Carl Lee Jefferson, who deserts her; she learns to see life in the “bright shadows” that contain beauty as well as terror. In the next novel, Water Girl, the readers learn that, when she was young, Abyssinia had given up a daughter for adoption. In this novel, Abyssinia’s long-ago adopted daughter, Amber Westbrook, discovers the identity of her birth mother while reading an old letter. Carl Lee reappears in The Golden Pasture, a novel about Lee’s early attachment to his rodeo-riding grandfather. Using his rescue of an injured Appaloosa as a means of drawing Lee closer to his father, Thomas depicts Lee’s lessening fear of and growing love for the man. In Journey, Thomas experiments with the mixed genres of mystery and fantasy, mysticism and folklore. On one level of the novel, the resolute, brave

Maggie Alexander solves a murder, while on another, more complex level, she intuitively learns lessons about “ingrained prejudices, intercultural violence, and the effect of both on children and adults” (Earhart, 451). When the Nightingale Sings experiments with new ways of presenting a coming-of-age tale, blending gospel, folktale, fairy tale. It is the story of a family reunion for young Marigold and her three adult sisters, and was performed as a musical play at the University of Tennessee in 1991. In her most recent novel, House of Light, which received excellent reviews, the middle-aged Dr. Abyssinia Jackson returns to Ponca City, Oklahoma, where she advises, nurtures, and heals the troubled women of the community. One of them, Vennie Walker, was inspired by women in Thomas’s own life. In an interview with Lauretta Pierce, Thomas remarks, “[H]earing of the sacrifices these women made for their families troubled me. I decided to write about a Black woman who gets tired of being insulted, who rises up, and says NO. No more! That’s Vennie Walker.” Joyce Carol Thomas lives and continues to write in Berkeley, California.

NOVELS Abide with Me. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Bright Shadow. New York: Avon, 1983. The Golden Pasture. New York: Scholastic, 1986. House of Light. New York: Hyperion, 2001. Journey. New York: Scholastic, 1988. Marked by Fire. New York: Avon, 1982. Water Girl. New York: Avon, 1986. When the Nightingale Sings. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.

SOURCES Earhart, Amy E. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1999. Henderson, Katherine Usher. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Inter/ View: Talks With America’s Writing Women, edited by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson, 125–131. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. Yalom, Marilyn. “Joyce Carol Thomas.” In Women Writers of the West Coast, edited by Marilyn Yalom, 31–39. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1983.

THOUSAND ACRES, A 1265

OTHER Joyce Carol Thomas. Available online. URL: http://www. joycecarolthomas.com. Accessed September 22, 2005. Thomas, Joyce Carol. Interview by Lauretta Pierce, March, 2002. The Library World. Available online. URL: http:// www.angelfire.com/co4/interviews/thomas.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

THOUSAND ACRES, A JANE SMILEY (1991) Although Jane SMILEY published numerous earlier works, including the novellas Ordinary Love and Good Will (1989) and the well-received novella and story collection The Age of Grief (1987), A Thousand Acres became Smiley’s most acclaimed work, having earned both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1991. The film version, starring Jessica Lange and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in 1997. The novel is a feminist retelling of the King Lear tale set on an Iowa family farm at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, a time of increasing farm foreclosures and economic shifts. The farm’s patriarch, Larry Cook, decides to retire and turn the farm over to his three daughters. Ginny, the oldest and narrator of the story, comes “to see a legacy of exploitation that involves not only abuse of family members but destruction of the land itself” (Weatherford, 149). The other sisters play vital roles in Ginny’s realization. Caroline, the youngest daughter and updated Cordelia, is a lawyer in Des Moines and, having left the family farm both physically and emotionally years earlier, initially opposes her father’s plans. At times she speaks “as a woman rather than a daughter,” something Ginny and Rose are unable to do, though Ginny and Rose raised Caroline after their mother’s death. Rose, on the other hand, feels she’s earned her share of the farm. Through Rose, now a mother herself, readers are able to understand the ambiguities—the multiple, simultaneous factors and possible results—of both inner strength and outward retribution. Ironically, Rose eventually takes her father’s place running the farm. The supporting male characters play important roles in Ginny’s development as well. Ty, Ginny’s husband, proves to be a pivotal character. Early in the novel, readers learn that, after several failed pregnancies, he’s unwilling to have sex with his wife without using birth

control. Much later, Ty articulates some of the attitudes behind the rifts within the family, saying such things as “I think people should keep private things private” and “There was real history here! And of course not everybody got what they wanted, and not everybody acted right all the time, but that’s the way it is. Life is. You got to accept that.” Jess Clark, who returns to Iowa as a vegetarian with an interest in Eastern religion, offers Ginny both an alternative romantic relationship and a different way of looking at the world, a way that challenges the status quo of Ginny’s Iowa farm life. Secrets and subplots move this novel forward, as the tension between highly valued “social respectability” and the dangers of “confronting reality” (Holstad, 5) mounts. The women, at first, tend to keep quiet to keep the peace, for instance. Throughout the story and for each character, appearances are deceiving. In this way and because of the first-person point of view, the novel offers insight and reveals characters’ manipulation of each other in ways Shakespeare’s version does not. What is most powerful and lasting about Smiley’s novel, perhaps, is its insistence that abuse—of land, of women—is systemic rather than merely an individual’s decision. The problems Ginny and her sisters face are not isolated incidents but rather symptoms of the larger farming community in which they live. Ginny, for example, attributes her inability to carry a pregnancy to term and Rose’s cancer to the poisons that farming have introduced to the water. Likewise, her father’s treatment of his daughters stems from the same attitudes that he holds about farming and land acquisition. The language and metaphors Smiley uses convey this sense that the seemingly natural and necessary attributes of a successful farm are the same attributes that lead to destruction, silence, and grief. Shakespeare’s evil sisters, then, are interestingly complicated in Smiley’s retelling. The evil is systemic, and every individual harbors the potential for great evil. Even Ginny contemplates murder and takes action. Evil, among other influences, shapes each character; yet no character is simply or inherently evil. The men, in fact, are often practical and good-natured with the best of intentions to preserve the farm and the family, but when the women assert themselves, the men

1266 THUNDER HORSE

react cruelly or tragically. The lawsuit that divides Ginny and Rose from Caroline and her father is another aspect of how larger influences shape the relationships, often changing what seems once pleasant enough into something filled with resentment. A Thousand Acres can also been defined as a family saga, as it “traces the history of a family over many generations, from its roots in a specific location or time to its downfall. The theme is almost inevitably the destruction of this family and a reversal of its rules, which may be seen as a negative or tragic downfall or as a liberating and positive step.” In addition, like other family sagas, The novel has an oral quality to it and “impart[s] opinions and varying versions of ‘history’ based on hearsay or gossip. . . . Finally, the families portrayed become representatives of their communities. . . .” (Ween, 111). Smiley’s novel, then, functions as a history to be left to the next generation, to—in the terms of the novel—Rose’s daughters.

SOURCES Green, Michelle, and Barbara Kleban Mills. “Of Serpents Teeth in Iowa,” People, 13 January 1992. Holstad, Scott C. “Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 26, no. 2 (1996): 5–6. Kakutani, Michiko. “Pleasures and Hazards of Familial Love,” New York Times, 31 October 1989. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York: Knopf, 1991. Weatherford, Kathleen Jeannette. “Inextricable Fates and Individual Destiny in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres and Annie Proulx’s Postcards,” Philological Papers 44 (1998–1999): 147–153. Ween, Lori. “Family Sagas of the Americas: Los Sangurimas and A Thousand Acres,” The Comparist 20 (1996): 111–125. Anna Leahy

THUNDER HORSE PETER BOWEN (1998) Thunder Horse is the fifth and, arguably, most distinguished of Peter Bowen’s Montana mysteries featuring the Deputy and amateur sleuth Gabriel Du Pré. (By 2005, 12 of Bowen’s Du Pré books had been published.) A hard-drinking, coarse-mannered, middleaged Mitis Indian, Du Pré dominates all the books’ narratives, using legal and not so legal means to get to the bottom of local mysteries. In Thunder Horse, after a

significant earthquake, a Berkeley academic, Palmer, is found shot dead near Toussaint, a remote, rural, rugged part of Montana. The death coincides with the inexplicable desire of some Japanese businessmen to dig ponds for recreational fishing in the lightly populated area that has only “a whole load of nothing.” After many twists, the discovery of remains of ancient Caucasians, distractions concerning deposits of uranium ore, media scrums, and other developments, it turns out that the Japanese businessmen and Palmer have been seeking a very valuable Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—the “Thunder Horse” of the title. Du Pré learns that Palmer was shot by a family of Crow Indians who conceal the T-rex bones because they lie in the same place as an old Indian burial site— “one not found by the whites.” Palmer came too close to violating the secrecy surrounding the sacred site. Respecting the wishes of the steadfast Crow guards, Du Pré will not reveal the cause of Palmer’s murder or the whereabouts of the dinosaur bones. The Crows actually have knowledge of three complete T-rex skeletons, and will eventually concede one to the authorities. But the yielding of the secret T-rex will not compromise the secrecy of their ancestors’ burial ground. The plot, then, is sensational and possibly over-the-top, but the novel’s themes—antipathy between Indians and whites, and excessive human greed—transcend the compelling if far-fetched story. Du Pré has an ingrained distaste for archaeologists and anthropologists, many of whom compete with one another aggressively in the hunt for dinosaur and human skeletons. Indian remains are treated with no more respect than those of insects, Du Pré believes. He also ruminates ruefully about historical crimes committed by Europeans against Indians and the environment—he is particularly angered by the slaughtering of millions of bison in the late-19th century. Du Pré thinks to himself that Indians fought little before the coming of the whites, after which they had to fight with more determination: “[T]hem damn whites . . . are very serious about war.” The Crows guard their ancestor’s secret burial place so doggedly simply because they suspect that whites will ransack the site, caring only for the profitability of the ore and the T-rex remains, and caring nothing for the location’s elevated

TIME TO BE BORN, A 1267

holiness. But a white man has been a hero, one who has done much to keep the Crows’ burial place undiscovered. One Morgenstern had visited the site in the late 1800s, when surveying ore deposits. In his esoteric book about the subject, he gave directions—but willfully incorrect ones. He respected the Crows, and was as anxious as the Native Americans to keep the site holy and hidden. Learning this, despite reservations about whites’ intent, Du Pré accepts that cooperation between Indians and whites can often be highly desirable and successful. Human greed is a major theme in the novel. Palmer has died because he seeks financial reward from the dinosaur skeleton, and the Japanese businessmen, though no more egregious than others, are concerned only about profits. Bowen places a great stress upon food in the novel: Characters seem constantly to eat unhealthy mounds of fries and cheeseburgers. Drinking is a perennial activity in Toussaint. One extraordinary old character, Benetsee, an amalgam of a medicine man and a con artist, seems to desire only the cheap wine that Du Pré gives him in exchange for historical and local knowledge. Subtly, Bowen compares human greed to the less appealing habits of animals. Noticing a bald eagle, “so stuffed with [deer] meat it couldn’t fly,” struggling to walk, and then falling over, Bart, a companion of Du Pré, remarks sarcastically that the plight of this specimen of the national bird “makes ya proud to be an American.” Excessive eating in a carrion bird, then, is clearly connected to humans’ greed for food, a greed that is linked to the lust for money that causes the murder of Palmer and other damaging upheavals. A comparison between coyotes and humans is also made apparent. Coyotes eat the thighs of Palmer’s corpse, profiting from his death—in the same way, humans with less integrity than Du Pré seek to profit from the ancient deaths of the Indians and the dinosaurs. And squabbles between magpies and other carrion-eating birds over another deer cadaver symbolizes the unholy squabbles between the media, academics, and a hooligan-like gang of Sioux Indians who all clamor relentlessly over access to the bones of the ancient Caucasians. These themes may appear familiar, but Bowen’s unusual style and storytelling verve render Thunder

Horse an engaging read. The book is packed with quaint paradoxes (at one point, Du Pré and his wife, Madelaine, are “both too tired to sleep”) and even quainter characters. We meet an accident-prone Jesuit priest who knocks himself out by trapping his head in his car door, and Oleson, a Norwegian who places his false teeth on the Du Prés’ bar. Oleson wants to play his hardfinger fiddle, but the move is vetoed by Du Pré, who cannot tolerate the scratchings of a “deaf old arthritic drunk.” Bowen has other engaging tendencies: one is that of using seemingly bizarre but ultimately appropriate onomatopoeia. Another extraordinary character is the 91-year-old scholar, Morgenstern—a relative of the 19th-century Morgenstern. He examines a dinosaur tooth. There is often an elision between the voice of the omniscient narrator and that of a character’s inner voice. The narrator articulates Morgenstern’s inner voice as he peruses the bone: he mumbles, inwardly, “umumumumhumhumhumumumumumyesyesyesyesyes.” In Thunder Horse, an entire paragraph can consist of the word, “Ah”; such a paragraph can be followed immediately by another with only the word “Ho.” The plot of Thunder Horse may feature improbable events, and the novel’s themes are unremarkable, but it is touches such as the quirky characterizations and striking use of onomatopoeia that make it so distinctive, readable, and memorable.

SOURCE Bowen, Peter. Thunder Horse. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Kevin De Ornellas

TIME TO BE BORN, A DAWN POWELL (1942) POWELL apparently conceived A Time to Be Born in fall 1940, as a diary entry for October 29 contains preliminary notes for the novel’s opening meditation (Diaries, 182). Powell started writing the novel in January 1941 and completed it in May 1942 (Diaries, 196, 200). Sometime in 1941, Powell wrote a synopsis for Scribner’s (Selected Letters, 112–13), which published the novel in August 1942 (191). The title was taken from Ecclesiastes (Selected Letters, 112), projecting the novel’s portrayal of “a time to love” and “a time of war” (3:1–8). Scribner’s advertised the novel in Publishers’ Weekly

1268 TIME TO BE BORN, A

(June 20, 1942) as “amusing, witty, slightly mad, romantic, pungent” and “tops in entertainment.” In a letter of July 6, 1942, Powell told editor Max Perkins that there was “nothing wacky in the book” and defended it as “serious satire in the way Dickens or Thackeray built satire—the surface may be entertaining but the content is important comment on contemporary affairs.” Powell thought “the book’s contemporary scene value should be stressed,” and that if it was “slightly mad,” it was “merely reflecting the times” (Selected Letters, 116). The novel covers approximately the year before America entered World War II in December 1941. As Powell notes at the outset: “Paris was gone [June 1940], London was under fire, the Atlantic was now a drop of water between the flame on one side and the waiting dynamite on the other” (1). Against the background of this nervous, indecisive time, Powell tells the story of two young women— Amanda Keeler and Victoria Haven—who have both migrated to New York from Lakeville, Ohio (a fictitious town whose name derives perhaps from Lake Erie College in Painesville, Ohio, where Powell had studied before coming to New York herself in 1918). “At thirty, Amanda had all the beauty, fame and wit that money could buy, and she had another advantage over her rivals, that . . . she knew exactly what she wanted from life, which was, in a word, everything” (23). Amanda had married the wealthy and powerful newspaper magnate Julian Evans, whose influence had made it possible for her to publish what became the best-selling historical novel Such Is the Legend (14–15). “Such fabulous profits from this confection piled up for the pretty author that her random thoughts on economics and military strategy became automatically incontrovertible” (4). There were real-life models for these characters, foremost among whom was the beautiful, ambitious playwright and journalist Clare Boothe Luce (1903–87), who had appeared frequently in New York society columns (for example, Cholly Knickerbocker’s in the New York American) and was profiled in the New Yorker for January 4 and 11, 1941. Clare had first married (1923) and divorced (1929) New York millionaire George Tuttle Brokaw (1880–1935) and then attracted the attention of the publisher of Time magazine, Henry

R. Luce (1898–1967), who left his wife and two sons to marry Clare in 1935. Powell denied for years that Clare was the major model for Amanda (Diaries, 356 [1956]), but after newly elected congresswoman Luce attacked Vice President Henry Wallace for his internationalist views in 1943, Powell confessed: “I was glad I had slashed her in my last book and realized that my immediate weapons are most necessary and can help. The lashing of such evil can only be done by satire and I am the only person who is doing contemporary satire” (Diaries, 213 [1943]). Numerous parallels in the novel also suggest the Luces as the primary historical (contemporary) models for the Evanses. “Bored with two years of fidelity” (23), however, Amanda takes advantage of the arrival of Vicky Haven, 26, in New York by getting her a job with one of Julian’s publications, Peabody’s magazine, and by providing her a “studio” apartment “in the Murray Hill section just off Park” (97), which Amanda can use as a cover by day to renew a relationship with a former lover, writer Ken Saunders. Working at Peabody’s, Vicky, who has “no gift for self-exploitation,” is befriended by such “would-be Amandas” (Selected Letters, 113) as Miss Finkelstein and Nancy Elroy, who are interested only in her connection with Amanda. Dinner parties at the Evans’s “graystone mansion off Fifth Avenue” (6) and Mrs. Elroy’s “spacious suite” in the Marguery Hotel (107) at Park Avenue and 47th Street provide Powell opportunity for satirical treatment of the Evanses, the Elroys, and their guests in social and political conversations. Vicky complicates matters by falling in love with Ken Saunders, whom Amanda had discarded to marry Julian, and by moving to Greenwich Village (where Powell had lived since 1924), where Ken’s writer friend, Dennis Orphen (who also appears in Powell’s other New York novels), lives. Amanda is “so wounded by this personal blow” (Selected Letters, 113) to her vanity that she recklessly endangers her marriage and reputation. The latter part of the novel deals with Amanda’s frantic, but ultimately disastrous, efforts to indulge her private emotions without surrendering her public position. Losing Ken to Vicky, Amanda pursues (in vain) another writer, Andrew Callingham (modeled on

TOBACCO ROAD 1269

Ernest HEMINGWAY [188]), but is followed by a private detective hired by Julian, for whom the last straw, however, is the publication of Amanda’s confessional article on her humble origins, “I Came from the Wrong Side of the Tracks,” in Peabody’s magazine for August 1941 (306). Physically threatened, Amanda flees the Evans mansion, and Julian files for divorce. In the final scene, Ken and Vicky are on their brief honeymoon before he joins the army. “There isn’t a thing in the papers about it,” marveled Vicky. “You’re not looking for Cholly Knickerbocker’s account of our wedding, are you, my love? . . . No, dear, people like us have to push each other out the window before we’re news.” “I’m looking for Amanda, silly,” Vicky answered. “You never see a thing about her anymore” (325). Ken’s reply recalls the opening meditation: “There was no future; every one waited, marked time, waited. For what? On Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump; . . . and in the tension of waiting it was a relief to have one little man jump” (3). Vicky and Ken may be “unimportant people” who have “no news value” in “this important age” (5), but in the end they are the true subjects of Powell’s novel of “a time to love” and “a time of war.”

SOURCES Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Homefront in World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Morris, Sylvia Jukes. Rage for Fame. The Ascent of Clare Boothe Luce. New York: Random House, 1997. Page, Tim. Dawn Powell. A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. ———, ed. The Diaries of Dawn Powell 1931–1965. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth, 1995. ———, ed. Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913–1965. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Powell, Dawn. A Time To Be Born. New York: Scribner, 1942; reprinted in D.P. Novels 1930–1942, edited by Tim Page. New York: The Library of America, 2001. ———. A Time To Be Born. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth, 1999. (Quotations from this edition.) Rice, Marcelle Smith. Dawn Powell. Twayne’s United States Authors Series 715. New York: Twayne, 2000. Frederick Betz

TOBACCO ROAD ERSKINE CALDWELL (1932) Published as a novel in 1932 and staged as a drama in New York City in 1933, Erskine CALDWELL’s Tobacco Road shocked readers and audiences alike with its unflinching portrait of the last, starving days of impoverished Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family. Critics could not reconcile Caldwell’s mix of grotesque comedy and social realism, unsure of whether to laugh nervously at Jeeter or feel sympathy for his relentlessly pathetic existence. Decades of readers such as Sylvia Jenkins Cook, however, have recognized that while the “suffering and degeneracy of [Caldwell’s] characters is virtually irremediable,” his narrative of the successive catastrophes of these vividly drawn people “demands justice for a humanity that is so destroyed as to be scarcely recognizable” (Cook, 65). Jeeter’s narrative begins and ends against the backdrop of his dilapidated cabin and barren land, once the center of a large Lester tobacco farm, now abandoned by its last landlord, Captain Jack. Though Jeeter and his wife, Ada, recollect having had 17 children, only two remain with them, along with the slowly withering Mother Lester, whom they ignore and beat in the hopes that there will be one less mouth to feed. Into this tableau comes Lov Bensey, to whom Jeeter betrothed his 12-year-old daughter Pearl in exchange for seven dollars, “some quilts and nearly a gallon of cylinder oil” (32). Lov begins to complain of Pearl’s frigidity, but the starving Jeeter can only concentrate on the sack of turnips at Lov’s feet. While Lov is distracted by the rutting movements of daughter Ellie May, scooting bare-bottomed across the yard toward him, Jeeter pounces on the turnips and runs into the broom hedge. As the scene ends, a bedraggled Lov limps home while old Mother Lester lights a hopeful fire of twigs lest there be any turnips left. The reader is left to wonder: What kind of world is this? What kind of man trades his little girl, steals from his son-in-law, and starves his mother? As the narrative unfolds, the reader begins to understand just what kind of world has formed Jeeter Lester. Though he is indeed lazy and ignorant, Jeeter is also buffeted by the forces of the Depression, centralizing changes in agriculture, and unscrupulous moneylenders. Thus, when we learn that “there were always well-

1270 TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them” (70), we realize that in part the crushing economic system dissuades him from taking any initiative. So he doesn’t get Ellie May the operation to fix her harelip; he doesn’t contact his oldest son Tom; and he never gets around to planting a crop, though he sorely wishes to do so. Instead, he gets involved with a wily widow preacher, Sister Bessie Rice, who “marries” herself to his youngest son, 16-year-old Dude. Her involvement sets in motion a chain of hilarious and pathetic events, as the country bumpkins travel to town and encounter sophisticated city folk. When Sister Bessie, with all the money in her possession, buys a car, the reader knows it is doomed. As she and Dude successively crash, mangle, and poke the car into salvage parts over a period of days, the ridiculous auto becomes a metaphor for the forces, both external and internal, that have led to the Lester family’s downfall. The reader wants to reach into the novel and shake some sense into Jeeter, but ultimately must admire the stubborn, foolish will that keeps him rooted, a forlorn, brutally comic symbol of American independence. Jeeter himself acknowledges, “Maybe I ain’t got much sense, but I know it ain’t intended for me to work in the mills. The land was where I was put at the start, and it’s where I’m going to be at the end” (152). And it is.

SOURCES Caldwell, Erskine. Tobacco Road. 1932. Reprint, New York: Book of the Month Club, 1994. Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. From Tobacco Road to Route 22: The Southern Poor White in Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. Devlin, James E. Erskine Caldwell. Boston: Twayne, 1984. McDonald, Robert L., ed. The Critical Response to Erskine Caldwell. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Mixon, Wayne. The People’s Writer: Erskine Caldwell and the South. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995. Patricia Becker Lee

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT ERNEST HEMING(1937) To Have and Have Not is the story of Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain who manages to eke out a living only by smuggling alcohol and people in Cuba and the Florida Keys. The novel is characterized

WAY

by HEMINGWAY’s sharp ear for dialogue as well as a penchant for describing various forms of human suffering. The “haves” and “have nots” of the title are ostensibly those who have money and those who don’t—the former being the yachtsmen and sportsmen who inhabit Key West, the latter being Harry Morgan, his associates, and people such as Cuban revolutionaries. However, these “have nots” have something that the rich and idle do not have, namely an ideology or just a simple set of morals. In the middle are a college professor and a writer who deal with their own struggles. The writer’s wife has a monologue in which she describes her working-class father: “He was a boiler maker and his hands were all broken and he liked to fight when he drank, and he could fight when he was sober. He went to mass because my mother wanted him to and he did his Easter duty for her and for Our Lord, but mostly for her, and he was a good union man and if he ever went with another woman she never knew it” (187). So, in Hemingway’s presentation, there is a certain nobility in the common man. In another moving passage, a veteran elucidates, “We are the desperate ones. The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try to do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it” (206). Harry Morgan, the main character, quite literally loses something—his leg. But he doesn’t allow his pride to be taken, even as he goes to his death after being mixed up with the wrong people. He is also able to hold his liquor, which is a running theme in this novel as a sign of character—those who let alcohol affect their behavior are either the “have nots” who deserve their fate, or the overly privileged, moneyed class. Even the emotions and relationships of the lower classes are portrayed in a more deserving, deeper way than those of the wayward privileged men and women: “To Have and Have Not juxtaposes the beauty and depth of Harry and Marie’s love with the shallow and unfulfilling loves of the economic haves” (Knott, 140). Hemingway paints picture after picture of failing relationships among those who feel entitled to “the good life” simply because of their positive economic

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1271

status. This is also a novel of the 1930s, one which some see as a “testament to Hemingway’s newfound social consciousness . . . and his desire to sign on as a literary soldier in the social battle for brotherhood in opposition to the bosses, the demeaning bureaucracies, and the fascist oppressors” (Knott, 188). Some argue with this interpretation, but ultimately the novel comes out on the side of the individual over organized groups of any sort.

SOURCES Hemingway, Ernest. To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996. Knott, Toni D., ed. One Man Alone: Hemingway and To Have and Have Not. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999. Reynolds, Michael. Hemingway: The 1930s. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997. Allie M. d’Augustine

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD HARPER LEE (1960) Winner of the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Harper LEE’s To Kill a Mockingbird draws from the author’s loving recollections of her own childhood in the South. Set during the Depression in the small rural Alabama town of Maycomb, the story is told by childnarrator Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed Scout, daughter of widowed lawyer Atticus Finch. Not quite six when the novel opens, Scout relates many events of interest to herself and her older brother Jem over the course of three summers, but the two constant narrative strands are the children’s obsession to see their reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, and the trial of the Negro laborer Tom Robinson for the alleged rape of the white woman Mayella Ewell and its tragic aftermath. These two storylines come together dramatically in the novel’s climax. In the character of Scout, Harper Lee has achieved the perfect balance between the dominant voice of innocent naivete and the hindsight of adult experience. Maycomb is first seen as a kind of Eden for children: It’s a hot, slow-paced summer, a time for treehouses, new friends, and new games. Yet Maycomb County is gradually revealed by the observant Scout to be a society divided by race, class, gender, and even heredity as defined by such accepted truisms

as “Every third Merriweather is morbid” (131). The Tom Robinson trial acts as a catalyst that brings all the tensions and prejudices to the surface of what had initially appeared to be a peach-pie perfect picture of small-town America. The Finch household ostensibly breaks all the conventional rules: Atticus and his brother Jack have broken the family tradition of males living off the family’s land; the children call their father “Atticus”; the stern mother-figure is the black cook Calpurnia who teaches Scout how to write; Scout persists in wearing overalls to the special abhorrence of her proper Aunt Alexandra; Scout has fistfights with boys in the schoolyard; and Scout enters the first grade knowing how to read and write, thus earning censure from the new teacher armed with up-to-date pedagogical methods. Scout is even encouraged in her anarchy: Jem tells her, “sometimes you act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’ ” (38). Despite these eccentricities, the Finch family is known and respected throughout the county because they are rooted there historically and because Atticus himself is so highly regarded by the County’s “Fine Folks,” those who do the best they can with the sense they have (147). Atticus Finch is the moral center of the novel, as well as the unacknowledged center of his children’s universe. They find him merely “satisfactory,” for they are embarrassed that he isn’t like other fathers: “He did not do the things our schoolmates’ fathers did: he did not play poker or fish or drink or smoke. He sat in the livingroom and read” (89). Others must teach the Finch children about their father’s skill as a lawyer, as a teacher, and as a human being: “[Y]ou don’t know you’re pa’s not a run-of-the-mill man . . . you haven’t seen enough of the world yet,” the “sinful” Mr. Dolphus Raymond tells Scout (201). Atticus holds himself to a strict code of personal morality: “before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience” (105). He advises the hot-headed Scout to try to consider another person’s point of view before flying to the defense of her own—“climb into his skin and walk around in it” (30), thus explaining his patient tolerance toward all. The Robinson trial is a kind of personal Golgotha for Atticus: At his summation, his

1272 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

children watch in horror as he loosens his tie and vest, takes off his jacket, and wipes sweat from his forehead, things they have never seen him do. Despite the verbal dryness of his defense, it requires a complete baring of his soul to everyone assembled in the courthouse. Bob Ewell stands in direct contrast to Atticus. During his testimony Ewell is all rant and evasion. Where Atticus has “an infinite capacity for calming turbulent seas” (169), with one sentence Ewell “turned happy picnickers into a sulky, tense, murmuring crowd” (173). He drinks his welfare money so that his many children live in a filthy hovel surrounded by a yard that looks “like the playground of an insane child” (170); they are dependent on game caught out of season and on the charity of the county which otherwise despises them. One son is observed on his annual morning appearance in the first grade, where he curses the teacher, making her cry, before stomping off, having fulfilled the county’s educational requirement for the year. During the Robinson trial, daughter Mayella unintentionally reveals that he beats her, and it is implied that he abuses her sexually as well. Nor are these characters unique: “Every town the size of Maycomb had families like the Ewells.” The foil for the Finch children, whose father’s love is like the daylight which banishes nightmares, is their friend Dill Harris, a character based on Lee’s close childhood friend Truman CAPOTE. Dill is passed around among his relatives because his mother and stepfather, though not physically abusive, have no time for him. In self-defense, his lively imagination fashions Tom Sawyer–like adventure stories with himself as the hero, many involving an imaginary father figure. He too comes to adopt Atticus as a father figure. It is Dill who makes the Radley Place a source of such fascination to the Finch children, who had hitherto simply regarded it as another part of their lives’ background. The Robinson trial, which Atticus acknowledges was lost months before it opened, reveals many ugly truths about racism and hypocrisy to the children. Yet Lee’s novel also shows that there are those in Maycomb whose sense of justice and fairness under the law outweigh any consideration of color. This hope for the future lies in Judge Taylor’s assignment of the case to the conscientious Atticus rather than the most junior

public defender; in attorney Gilmer’s half-hearted prosecution; in the white male jury’s long deliberation. “We’re making a step,” says their neighbor Miss Maudie Atkinson, “it’s just a baby-step, but it’s a step” (216). Most of all, hope lies in Jem’s heartbroken and angry reaction to the verdict, for Jem represents the next generation of Southern lawyers and politicians. Though Scout is the narrator, Jem is the child most affected by the events of the novel, for he is the child on the brink of maturity. By the opening of part 2, Jem is 12 and Scout finds him changed almost overnight: “Jem had acquired an alien set of values and was trying to impose them on me. . . . ‘It’s time you started bein’ a girl and acting right!’ ” he snaps, sending her into tears (115). Jem is the one who cries in secret when Boo’s hiding place—Boo’s only avenue of communication with the world—is cemented shut, the one moved to fury by the irascible Mrs. Dubose who shouts her criticism of Atticus from her front porch, the one whose worldview is utterly crushed by the injustice of the Robinson trial verdict. Jem completes the archetypal journey from innocence to experience the evening he escorts Scout to the Halloween pageant— “our longest journey together” (254)—an evening that opens with the hilarious picture of Scout costumed as a ham butt to represent part of Maycomb County’s agricultural bounty, and ends with Bob Ewell’s vicious attack on the children with a carving knife while they are walking home in the woods and their rescue by Boo Radley. Though easily categorized as a regional novel, To Kill a Mockingbird’s universal appeal is proven by its translation into 40 languages. Also, an Academy Award– winning film version of the novel was released in 1962 starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. With a script by Horton Foote, it remains one of the most successful cinematic adaptations of a literary work.

SOURCES Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources and Historic Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. ———. To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries. New York: Twayne, 1994. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1960.

TOOLE, JOHN KENNEDY 1273

O’Neill, Terry, ed. Readings on To Kill a Mockingbird. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven, 2000. Shakelford, Dean. “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel,” Mississippi Quarterly 50 (1996–97): 101–113. Nona Flores

TOOLE, JOHN KENNEDY (1937–1969) John Kennedy Toole was the posthumous winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). After his suicide in 1969, his mother, Thelma Toole, vowed to publish her son’s manuscript, ignoring rejections and finally asking novelist Walker PERCY to read the manuscript. Percy did so and, to his astonishment, he thought the novel original and talented; he recommended it to Louisiana State University Press, who published it in 1980 to rave reviews. A Confederacy of Dunces became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, a best-seller, and a film. At once hilarious and sad, it satirizes contemporary middle-class life and achieves much of its humor from its “reverse satire,” that is, the hero of the novel embodies all the flaws that he detests in the society that is the object of his wrath. John Kennedy Toole was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1937, to John Toole, a car salesman, and Thelma Ducoing Toole, a teacher. He received a bachelor’s degree (Phi Beta Kappa) from Tulane University in 1958, graduating with honors, and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959. He served with the U.S. Army from 1962 to 1963, stationed at Fort Buchanan in Puerto Rico, during which time he wrote A Confederacy of Dunces. Returning to New Orleans, Toole attempted unsuccessfully to publish the novel between from 1963 and 1966. After holding a succession of teaching jobs, Toole committed suicide on March 26, 1969, in Biloxi, Mississippi. The novel features Ignatius J. Reilly, a rebel who loathes his middleclass existence and leaves the Catholic Church. As scholar Beverly Jarrett notes, “[I]f there is one central theme in Toole’s work, it is the loss of faith and the failure of the church to meet contemporary man’s needs” (Jarrett, 436). An antihero frequently compared to Jonathan Swift’s antihero in Gulliver’s Travels, Ignatius, too, feels contempt for everyone he criticizes, yet he is

as guilty as they. Toole’s sense of humor and carefully crafted language invites the reader’s sympathy, however, and Ignatius J. Reilly takes his place alongside the characters of Joseph HELLER’s Catch-22 and John IRVING’s The World According to Garp. A manuscript that Toole had written at age 16, called The Neon Bible, was published as a novel in 1989 amid the family feuds chronicled by Pat Carr in Modern Fiction Studies that same year. In it, the protagonist, David, finds religion the villain of contemporary society. The John Kennedy Toole Papers are in the HowardTilton Memorial Library at Tulane University.

NOVELS A Confederacy of Dunces. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. The Neon Bible. New York: Grove Press, 1989.

SOURCES Bell, Elizabeth S. “The Clash of World Views in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces,” Southern Literary Journal 21 (Fall 1988): 15–22. Carr, Pat. “John Kennedy Toole, The Neon Bible, and a Confederacy of Friends and Relatives,” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (Winter 1989): 716–718. Coles, Robert. “Gravity and Grace in the Novel A Confederacy of Dunces.” The Flora Levy Lecture in the Humanities, No. 2. Delivered as a lecture, September 18, 1981, at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and published as a booklet by Savoy-Sicie Press, Lafayette, La., in 1983. Jarrett, Beverly. “John Kennedy Toole.” In Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 432–440. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. McNeil, David. “A Confederacy of Dunces as Reverse Satire: The American Subgenre,” Mississippi Quarterly 38 (Winter 1984–85): 33–47. Nelson, William. “Unlikely Heroes: The Central Figures in The World According to Garp, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and A Confederacy of Dunces.” In The Hero in Transition, edited by Ray B. Browne and Marshall W. Fishwick, 163–170. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1983. Reilly, Edward C. “Batman and Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces,” Notes on Contemporary Literature 12 (January 1982): 10–11.

1274 TOOMER, JEAN

OTHER John Kennedy Toole. Bohemian Ink. Available online. URL: http://www.levity.com/corduroy/toole.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

TOOMER, JEAN (1894–1967) Jean Toomer, poet and experimental novelist, was one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Along with Langston HUGHES, Countee Cullen, Claude MCKAY, Arna BONTEMPS, and Zora Neale HURSTON, Toomer interpreted the black experience in a new way. Author of CANE, published in 1923, and rediscovered in the 1960s and acclaimed as a work of genius, the novel is a montage of vignettes, poetry, stories, and drama. Because it broke new ground, it belongs alongside such works as Sherwood ANDERSON’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Ernest HEMINGWAY’s In Our Time. The mysterious, haunting, imagistic and lyrical quality of his vision has also prompted comparisons of Toomer to William FAULKNER, both chroniclers of the questing modern soul seeking solace. Toomer’s experimentation with the form of the novel is also echoed in the postmodern works of John WIDEMAN and Gayl JONES, and even in the science fiction of Octavia BUTLER and Samuel DELANY. Jean Toomer was born on December 26, 1894, in Washington, D.C., to Nathan Toomer and Nina Pinchback Toomer, daughter of P. B. S. Pinchback, former Louisiana governor during Reconstruction. He married Marjorie Latimer in 1931; after her death, he married Marjorie Content in 1934. Educated at a number of universities without taking a degree, Toomer read voraciously and met many writers, including Sherwood ANDERSON, with whom he corresponded extensively. The turning point in Toomer’s life came in 1921, when he accepted a temporary position as principal of a school in Sparta, Georgia. He was transformed by his immersion in southern black culture and exposure to the strength and dignity of black people in the face of poverty, brutality, oppression, and enforced segregation. He transformed this dual awareness into Cane; the seemingly disparate elements of the novel accommodate both southern rural experience and northern urban life in a three-part structure. The novel is unified through the story of Kabris, a wandering black man

who seeks to identify himself through black culture. The title has been interpreted in various ways, suggesting both the land of sugar cane and the characters who are descendants of the Old Testament Cain. After publishing Cane, Toomer experimented with the Eastern mysticism of Georges Gurdjieff, and in his last years he became a practicing Quaker. Although he wrote poetry and plays, Toomer never published another novel, but his manuscript collection at the Fisk University Archives includes four full-length novels. At this point, however, Toomer’s considerable reputation rests on one slim volume, Cane, a literary masterpiece.

NOVELS Cane. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923.

SOURCES Benson, Brian Joseph, and Mabel Mayle Dillard. Jean Toomer. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Byrd, Rudolph P. Jean Toomer’s Years with Gurdjieff: Portrait of an Artists, 1923–1936. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Jones, Robert B. Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larson. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993. McKay, Nellie. Jean Toomer: Artist. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

OTHER Jean Toomer. American Literature from the Civil War to 1930. Available online: URL: http://www.unc.edu/courses/ pre2000fall/eng81br1/toomer.html. Accessed September 22, 2005. The Jean Toomer Page. The San Antonio College Lit Web. Available online. URL: http://www.accd.edu/sac/english/ bailey/toomer.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

TORTILLA FLAT JOHN STEINBECK (1935) Although John STEINBECK had been writing and publishing for 15 years before writing Tortilla Flat, his warm-hearted, comic depiction of Mexican paisanos in Monterey, California, this novel brought John Steinbeck public recognition and notable critical attention for the first time. On the surface, the novel may seem to be simply a humorous depiction of the Mexicans

TRACKS 1275

who worked in the fields around Monterey and at the Spreckels Sugar Mill, whom Steinbeck had come to know and love. A penetrating reader, however, will discover the seeds of the major themes that preoccupied Steinbeck for the next decade and found more detailed expression in his most celebrated works of that period, especially In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Tortilla Flat is a lighthearted and humorous novel. Steinbeck’s stylized dialogue and elevation of Danny and his friends’ convoluted quests for women and wine to the level of heroic exploit contributes to the book’s hilarity. Steinbeck writes, “Danny’s house was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny’s friends were not unlike the knights of it” (1). The Arthurian backdrop contributes further to the fantastic and mythical quality of the already exaggerated tales of the paisanos’ lives. It likewise adds a moral dimension to the lifestyle of Danny and his friends, who might otherwise be viewed as amoral bums. In many ways, then, Tortilla Flat is an experimental novel, combining myth and fantasy, local legend and folklore, to create a humorous picture of paisano life that harbors very serious undertones. Steinbeck’s choice of subject matter was also experimental and quite radical for that time. The novel is one of the first in American literature to use Mexican Americans as its main characters and to celebrate a group of derelicts’ sexual and immoral exploits. Tortilla Flat, however, is strikingly moral. With its emphasis on loyalty and charity, the novel condemns greed and materialism. Ultimately, Danny’s inheritance of a piece of property destroys the bond that exists among the paisanos. The novel’s celebration of the paisanos’ unattached, worry-free, and unconventional lives also flouts what Steinbeck saw as the hypocritical morality of Monterey’s bourgeois society. Perhaps the most important aspect of Tortilla Flat is that it gives voice to Steinbeck’s thinking on the phalanx theory, or “group man” theory, a subject that fascinated him and gave shape to many of his succeeding works. Steinbeck, influenced by the ideas of William Emerson Ritter, believed that wholes in nature are made up of interdependent parts that not only constitute the whole, but exercise control over it. Each member of the whole, be it an animal in a specific ecosystem or a

human in a community, governs itself differently in a group than it does as an individual, ensuring the continued functioning of the whole. In the novel Steinbeck writes, “This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house. . . . when you speak of Danny’s house you are understood to mean a unit of which the parts are men” (1). The novel, then, is concerned with examining the individual characters and their relationships with others to see how they cooperate to form the whole that becomes Danny’s house. Steinbeck’s analysis of their behavior is distinctly biological and provides early insight into his own views of biology and holistic ecology that heavily influence his later works, making Tortilla Flat both an entertaining and important text in the Steinbeck canon.

SOURCE Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. New York: Penguin, 1986. Kathleen M. Hicks

TRACKS LOUISE ERDRICH (1988)

Louise ERDRICH’s Tracks is the third installment in a five-book sequence that began with Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen (1986) and concluded with The Bingo Palace (1994) and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001). Often compared to William FAULKNER because of her use of multiple narrators, her sustained development of a single fictional setting (the imaginary town of Argus, North Dakota), and her exploration of family life across generations, Erdrich has also been deeply influenced by traditional Anishinaabe (Chippewa) mythology and culture. In Tracks, she draws heavily on this heritage to tell a story about the cultural fragmentation following the passage of the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) of 1887. By reinterpreting a number of archetypal figures from Anishinaabe myth, especially the trickster, the gambler, and the weendigo, Erdrich produces a powerful and nuanced account of the struggle against cultural extermination in the first two decades of the 20th century. Tracks tells the story of Fleur Pillager, the last of a line of midewewin—tribal shamans who draw their power from a spiritual connection with the dangerous, lake-dwelling spirit, or manitou, known as Misshepesshu. Throughout the book, Fleur struggles to protect her lands from tax collectors and logging companies

1276 TRACKS

and to keep her family together in the face of a range of threats—including infidelity, famine, and tribal politics. Fleur’s connections to the traditional world of Anishinaabe spirituality are not only complex but also ambiguous. Early in the novel, for example, while working at a butcher shop in Argus, she reenacts the mythic story of the trickster Nanabozho’s contest with Nina Ataged (the great gambler). In that myth, Nanabozho (acting here as a culture-hero) tricks the gambler at his own game and saves the spirit of the people from eternal destruction. In the novel, Fleur’s uncanny card-playing skills enable her to win a large sum of money from her white coworkers, money that she uses to pay the fees on her lands and temporarily save them. The mythic parallel to Nanabozho’s victory is not perfect, however, for Fleur is then brutally raped by the enraged and drunken men. Although nature itself seems to avenge this violation as a tornado sweeps through Argus, and Fleur’s assailants are frozen in the meat locker, this early episode sets up some of the novel’s recurrent questions. What are the limits of Fleur’s power? Can the old ways truly stand up to the encroachment of the white world? Fleur’s experiences throughout the balance of the book suggest that Erdrich’s answer to the second question is a qualified no. Early on in the text, Fleur’s spirit power seems persistent and potent. For example, a drunken bear—an embodiment of earth power and the spirit of transformation—plays an instrumental role in the birth of her first child, Lulu. Later in the book, however, Fleur proves unable to guide her husband Eli in hunting the vanishing game they need to survive, and her second child is stillborn when she loses a rematch with the gambler in a dream vision. Most significantly, at the end of the novel, Fleur is unable to prevent the logging company from seizing her land. She does obtain a measure of revenge for the loss, cutting through the trees around her cabin so they fall upon the astonished loggers when they arrive to survey the area. The gesture may strike some readers as a pyrrhic victory, however. The fact remains that the land has been lost, the trees have fallen, and Fleur must leave the reservation alone, for Lulu has been sent away to boarding school and Eli has taken a job with the logging company. If Fleur is defiant in the novel’s final pages, she is also entering a period of exile.

Although Fleur’s story has the scent of tragedy, there is much more to Erdrich’s novel than the preceding account suggests. While Fleur is the focus of the book’s plot, Tracks is also very much the story of its two narrators, Nanapush and Pauline Puyat. Perhaps the most useful way to read the book, in fact, is to see it as a presentation of three different paths, or “tracks,” that Native American peoples might follow—Fleur’s, Nanapush’s, and Pauline’s. Nanapush is clearly an avatar of the Anishinaabe trickster, Nanabozho. His chapters are written to suggest the immediacy of an oral tradition and the tremendous power of language—the trickster’s greatest weapon. A traditionalist who nonetheless understands the white world because he received a Jesuit education, the elderly Nanapush “tells” his story to Fleur’s estranged daughter Lulu, hoping to reconcile the two and awaken in Lulu a greater appreciation of the old ways. To do so, he presents Fleur as a mysterious, dangerous, but essentially positive presence, a figure who uses her sacred power to preserve and protect traditional life. As he tells his tale, Nanapush himself emerges as a different kind of tribal leader. As we would expect of a trickster, Nanapush can use words to influence others, to achieve his ends, and even to heal. He is a mediating presence who knows the ways of both the Indian and white worlds. He understands the law that is being used to defraud his people and the importance of the old stories. By the end of the novel, these gifts have enabled Nanapush to become tribal chairman, a position he uses to bring Lulu home from the boarding school. In this respect, Nanapush reveals a second path that Native peoples might follow. Unlike Fleur, he represents a blending of old and new, an ability to laugh at difficulties and to accommodate change without assimilating. If Nanapush represents a positive kind of an ability to live between cultural extremes without being torn apart by contradiction, Pauline’s divided nature takes her in a different direction. A psychologically complex character, Pauline is a “mixed-blood” proponent of assimilation whose desire to fit into the white world leads her to a tragic form of self-hatred. Early in the book, she repudiates her Indian heritage and language and actively sets out to facilitate the destruction of the old ways. Erdrich reinforces her characterization of

TRAGEDY OF PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, THE 1277

Pauline as a self-destructive midwife of cultural death by linking her to the mythic figure of the windeego, a skeletal, cannibalistic monster that preys on its own people and suffers from constant hunger. Pauline’s hunger in the novel seems primarily existential. She yearns for a positive sense of identity but cannot seem to find a way to make sense of what it means to be a “mixed-blood.” Consequently, she deludes herself into thinking that she can be “purified” by Christianity and emerge as wholly white. Pauline’s tortured religious consciousness manifests itself in her schizophrenic attitude toward Fleur. While she initially displays a strong attraction to Fleur, Pauline also presents her to the reader as a kind of witch. As the novel progresses, this early ambivalence gives way to overt aggression. Pauline comes to define her own life as a crusade against the traditionalism that Fleur represents. In doing so, she develops a morbid fixation on martyrdom, emblematic of her misguided yearning for the obliteration of her Indian identity. Pauline’s path leads her to self-mortification, the repudiation of her own illegitimate child, delusions, murder, and, finally, a darkly ironic entry into a convent. In the end, Pauline reveals herself to be a classic unreliable narrator. At the same time, her highly subjective account of Fleur’s life offers readers a powerful portrait of the psychological damage caused to Indian peoples by the assimilationist policies of the early 20th century and by the racial categorization of individuals as “mixed-bloods” or “half-breeds.”

SOURCES Brehm, Victoria. “The Metamorphosis of an Ojibwa Manido,” American Literature 68, no. 4 (December 1996): 677–706. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Clarke, Joni Adamson. “Why Bears Are Good to Think and Theory Doesn’t Have to Be Murder: Transformation and Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks,” SAIL 2, no. 4 (Spring 1992): 28–47. Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Johnson, Basil. The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. David J. Carlson

TRAGEDY OF PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, THE MARK TWAIN (1894) Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark TWAIN) began writing the book that would become The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson in the early 1890s. A manuscript version of the novel, which included a long portion that would become the companion piece Those Extraordinary Twins, was completed in 1892 while the Clemenses were living in Italy; however, Clemens had to revise the manuscript substantially before eventually publishing Pudd’nhead Wilson serially in the Century magazine from December 1893 to June 1894. The aesthetically challenged book was published late in 1894: It remains open to charges of narrative confusion and structural weakness. The novel has gained in importance as a statement on race relations and identity. It is a more complex and more disturbing investigation of racial tensions than Clemens’s earlier Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The first chapter of the novel offers a detailed description of Dawson’s Landing and the community’s social structure. The year is 1830. The town is primarily poor; however, there is a strong awareness of class distinctions among the citizens, made clear as the town’s leaders are introduced and their pedigree established. The townspeople’s sense of superiority is reinforced when they confront a newcomer, David Wilson, and promptly label him “Pudd’nhead” after a joke he tells falls flat. The townspeople have no sense of humor, and irony is alien to their sensibility, something that is underscored at the end of the novel. Clemens uses this opening to set the stage for a carefully plotted story that emphasizes questions of race identity and the implications of social stupidity mixed with a tale of murder.

1278 TRAGEDY OF PUDD’NHEAD WILSON, THE

There are several competing plotlines: David Wilson’s ability to forge a life in a community that has judged him incompetent so quickly; the town’s quick and unquestioning embrace of a pair of supposed “twin” brothers, though there is little support for their claims of a European background and little evidence of their exceptionality that supposedly kept them for years as a sideshow exhibit; and the murder of the town’s beloved Judge Driscoll and David Wilson’s defense of the twins, made possible by Wilson’s collection of fingerprints. The tale, however, is held together by a supremely complex set of events starting with the introduction of Roxana, a young woman who is bound in slavery even though she appears to be white and whose child, Valet de Chambre, following the law and custom of the society, is identified as black because of his 1/32 of African blood. Slavery is central to this society: Miscegenation lurks in the background, as does the overarching social power of whites. Fearful that she and her child will be sold down the river, Roxy decides to drown herself and the baby, until she notices that the boy is so similar to her master’s son Thomas a Becket Driscoll. They are similar in complexion if not status. She switches the children in the hope that her own child will benefit from the privilege of white society. As the children grow, and as Roxy’s son becomes more and more spoiled and violent and racist, questions arise regarding the nature of character, the possibility of a racial base for corruption, and the possibility of justice within a society locked into defining its members by physical characteristics and stereotypical behaviors. Readers who approach the novel looking for definite answers come away deeply disappointed. At times, the story seems to fall on the side of nature as the basis for human identity, reinforced by both Roxy and her son’s thinking that his corruption is natural to his being black; at other times, there is strong conflicting evidence that corruption is the result of nurturing that emphasizes pampering and profligacy and white assumptions of superiority. Clemens offers no clear position on these issues, and the text swings back and forth as various events unfold: from Roxy’s careful raising of both boys in line with their adopted identities rather than their original social status, to Chambre’s (as

Tom) absolute acceptance of his inferior status after Roxy unmasks her role in placing him within the Driscoll household, to the narrator’s comment on the willingness of the Driscolls to spoil the young man. In the end, the novel is best seen as Clemens’s attempt to write through the debate. His uncertainty influences both the design and the content of the tale. Most troubling is the final act of the mystery when David Wilson takes center stage to free the wrongly accused twins Luigi and Angelo and thereby identify the murderer. The crime is quickly dismissed and attention shifts to Wilson’s more sensational charge that a white child and black child were switched: a black child has had inappropriate advantages; a white child was deprived of his rightful place and assigned to the slave quarters. This is the crime that horrifies the town. Clemens works the scene to enable David Wilson to reclaim his place within the community. In a romantic flourish, Wilson resets the balance in the community, a balance that Roxy disrupted 20 years earlier and that has upset the delicately and legally enforced identities of Tom and Chambre. His setting things right brings him thanks from and notoriety within Dawson’s Landing, and he finally achieves his social reward: His reputation is made and he becomes mayor. But at what cost. The tragedy of David (Pudd’nhead) Wilson is that neither he nor the town understands that order is achieved on the backs of slaves. He and the townspeople are complicit in the system of slavery and enforce that system by emotional and psychological violence. When Chambre is finally sold down the river to recover some of the value for Judge Driscoll’s estate, the circle that began in chapter 1 is complete. It is a circle marked by racial prejudice and enforced fictions of law and custom. The novel becomes the record of Clemens’s and his (our) society’s confusion regarding identity and the social fictions that are created so that the socially prominent retain power.

SOURCES Emerson, Everett. Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Foner, Philip S. Mark Twain Social Critic. New York: International Publishers, 1958.

TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK 1279

Gerber, John C. Mark Twain. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. Gillman, Susan. Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Gillman, Susan, and Forest G. Robinson, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Michael Kiskis

TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK MAXINE HONG KINGSTON (1989) The first of her Chinese immigrant parents’ American-born children, Maxine Hong KINGSTON was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California, where she lived until she attended the University of California. Initially an engineering student, she graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in English in 1962. Since that time, she has published several essays, short stories and novels, including Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989). Kingston’s focus on the experiences of Chinese Americans places her in the company of such other Chinese-American writers as Amy TAN and Frank CHIN. Her focus on gender issues parallels that of other ethnic women writers, Toni MORRISON and Leslie Marmon SILKO, for instance. Her novel reflects the complex style of such literary classics as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book tells the story of Wittman Ah Sing, an aspiring Chinese-American playwright who seeks to produce his own play during the 1960s. Wittman exudes cockiness and chauvinistic tendencies but remains committed to the ChineseAmerican community and its welfare. His personality is multivalent, for he takes on different personas during the course of the novel. The novel follows Wittman through a series of adventures as he seeks to make his dream of a production a reality. Wittman considers casting Nanci Lee, a former classmate and aspiring Chinese-American actress who is also the object of his unspoken affection. He scares her off when she reacts negatively to his poetry, thus propelling him to seek other potential actors. Wittman recruits potential performers after attending a party given by Lance Kamiyama, a Japanese-

American friend who lives a fairly normal, middleclass lifestyle. After observing several scenes of partygoers engaged in various conversations, Lance and Wittman argue. Wittman accuses Lance of participating in the degradation of Chinese Americans by embodying the “model minority” stereotype that presents all Asian Americans as impossibly quiet and selfeffacing with a resistance to “making waves.” They reconcile and Wittman enlists Lance and the remaining partygoers in an informal rehearsal of his play. He also meets his future wife, a white bohemian. He takes her home to meet his parents, Ruby Ah Sing, a former showgirl, and Zeppelin Ah Sing, a retired performer who lives by the river. Wittman’s adventures next take him to his unemployment caseworker, whom he manages to incorporate into his production. He secures a venue for his play and puts on a wild show of several vignettes that range from tong wars to depictions of Chang and Eng, the celebrated “Siamese” twins of the 19th century. Wittman caps the performance by a lengthy monologue about his thoughts on the state of the ChineseAmerican community. Kingston’s novel possesses several characteristics of postmodern literary production. The narrative represents a fragmented story. The primary plot diverges on tangents that appear completely unrelated. Wittman’s encounter with Judy Louis on a bus to Lance’s party seems insignificant, especially when Judy does not reappear in the narrative until the end. Kingston also employs pastiche, using her narrative as a collage of various cultural sources, especially from Chinese lore. She uses the image of the Monkey King from “Journey to the West,” which tells the story of the mythic Monkey King as he journeys to obtain Buddhist scripture for China. “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” describes power struggles among the three major kingdoms of China and the lifelong friendship among three men. “The Water Margin” represents the legend of 108 outlaws known for their loyalty to each other and subversion of government policies. In addition, the novel also contains references to high and low Western culture that disintegrate the distinctions between them. Wittman pays just as much homage to Walt Whitman as he does to West Side Story.

1280 TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK

In addition to postmodern strategies, Kingston also employs innovative narrative techniques. The novel possesses two distinct narrative voices. On one hand, Wittman’s worldview is chauvinistic, mired in the contemporary moment of the 1960s, and committed to an individualistic perspective that borders on the egotistical. On the other hand, the omniscient narrator identified by Kingston as Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy from the Chinese oral tradition, acts as a balance to Wittman’s character. She represents a more communal voice that is also distinctly female. Her memory reaches back to the earliest history. Together, Wittman and Kwan Yin represent a mode of narration that captures the complexity of the novel’s fragmented narrative. While Wittman seems to be limited by some aspects of his personality, he achieves a great deal of agency as a trickster figure. His very identity shifts. His first name links him to the quintessential American poet, Walt Whitman, while his surname places him squarely within the Chinese cultural tradition. Moreover, he is the modern-day version of the legendary Chinese Monkey King, a mythical trickster. Wittman uses his own transformative abilities to infiltrate spaces and disrupt proceedings, as he does at the management trainee seminar. The prominence of performance in the novel also underscores his transformative proclivities. For Wittman, all the world is indeed a stage as he takes on several roles on and off the theater platform. His facility with several cultural traditions marks him as one who traverses cultural boundaries. Wittman easily uses references to Chinese oral tradition and Western literary tradition. He can move among the hectic scene of 1960s bohemia with ease. Rather than alienating him from both Chinese and American culture, his liminal status reinforces a complex American identity. At the same time, Wittman can be viewed as having no allegiance to creating social change and actually chafes at any kind of imposition of social responsibility. He represents a subject that is not beholden to a single perspective, which accounts for his interest in various cultural perspectives and art forms. His commitment to individuality causes him to avoid becoming a representative of something larger than himself. As a trickster novel, Tripmaster Monkey critiques various cultural phenomena. Through Wittman and

Kwan Yin, the novel interrogates the relationship between individuals and communities. Wittman learns to balance his need for individualistic expression with the needs of the community. In the process, he continues to question the amount of actual freedom in an individual’s separation from a group and to note the limiting tendencies of communal expectations. Wittman focuses his critical eye on the ChineseAmerican community in particular. While Wittman’s antics often ensure a certain amount of distance between himself and the community, he remains concerned about its viability. In his monologue, he urges the community to take responsibility for its image in the popular culture. He implores Chinese Americans to reject stereotypes and actively create their own collective identity. Wittman calls attention to the diversity within the Chinese-American community and the Asian-American community at large and advises both to reject the notion that all Asian Americans look alike and are alike. Wittman also addresses more sensitive topics regarding the Chinese-American community. He highlights the fault lines between Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans forged in historical experiences. Wittman’s argument with Lance draws on the way the Japanese Americans joined American culture in denigrating Chinese immigrants while depicting themselves as the “good” Asian immigrant group. Wittman also problematizes the hyphenated descriptions of Chinese Americans, which, Kingston argues, keeps them as foreigners and inauthentic Americans in the cultural imagination. She uses Wittman to erase the hyphen between Chinese American, thus allowing for more ambiguity in Chinese-American identity. The novel also questions the Western cultural narrative, particularly in the literary tradition and the popular culture, and its impact on Chinese Americans. During the course of his monologue, he cautions Chinese Americans against the ways they have been stereotypically characterized in film. War movies produced by Hollywood depict Asian soldiers as dispensable. Fantasy movies portray Chinese Americans as inherently evil and perverse with characters like Fu Manchu. Detective movies represent Chinese Americans as inscrutable with characters like Charlie Chan. Wittman

TRIPMASTER MONKEY: HIS FAKE BOOK 1281

also finds ways to celebrate and honor the ways in which Chinese Americans have contributed to American culture. In doing so, Wittman seeks not only to transform the way Chinese Americans view their experiences in America, but also to transform America itself. The novel additionally targets the discourse of war. Wittman admires the writings of war strategists and wants to feature big battles in his play. Yet, Kwan Yin suggests the dangers of war mongering, especially for Asian Americans during the Vietnam War era, where they were often not differentiated from the enemy. Kingston also examines the concept of the heroic discourse by basing Wittman’s status as hero not on violent exploits, but on nonviolent acts that further social change. Wittman clearly identifies himself as a pacifist and he takes a job in a toy department to avoid a profession that supports the military. By the end of the novel, he manages to produce a play that promotes peace. In focusing on peace, Kingston provides a counterpoint to other Chinese-American writers who define the tradition as martial in nature. Chinese-American writers like Frank Chin argue that Chinese-American culture is guided by a martial aesthetic that values combat. Through this novel, Kingston challenges Chin by creating a character remarkably similar to him and using that character to question the suitability of the martial tradition as the defining ethos for ChineseAmerican literature. She defends her revision of Chinese legend and uses the novel to question the emphasis on the masculine by Chin. She advocates a concept of gender that is constantly in flux. The hybrid form of the novel, from the narration to the characterization, questions the stereotypical assignations of male and female behavior by blurring the lines. Tripmaster Monkey, through its allusions to various cultural traditions, multiple narrators, and multipronged cultural critique, ultimately presents a complex view of Chinese-American experiences.

SOURCES Chang, Hsiao-hung. “Gender Crossing in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey,” MELUS 22, no. 1 (1997): 15–34. Chu, Patricia P. “Tripmaster Monkey, Frank Chin, and the Chinese Heroic Tradition.” In Assimilating Asians: Gendered

Strategies of Authorship in Asian America, 169–187. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2000. Furth, Isabella. “Bee-e-een! Nation, Transformation, and the Hyphen of Ethnicity in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey,” Modern Fiction Studies 40, no. 1 (1994): 33–49. Gao, Yan. “Wittman Ah Sing’s “Song of Myself ”: Tripmaster Monkey. In The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources, 97–147. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Hogue, W. Lawrence. “The Postmodern Subject: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Richard Perry’s Montgomery’s Children.” In Race, Modernity and Postmodernity: A Look and the History and Literatures of People of Color Since the 1960s, 151–198. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Kingston, Maxine Hong. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Vintage, 1990. Lin, Patricia. “Clashing Constructs of Reality: Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book as Indigenous Ethnography.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 333–348. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Shostak, Debra. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fake Books.” In Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan. 233–260. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994. Simmons, Diane. “Tripmaster Monkey and the Scrutable Self.” In Maxine Hong Kingston, 140–162. New York: Twayne, 1999. Smith, Jeanne. “Monkey Business: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Transformational Trickster Texts.” In Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature, 31–70. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Suzuki-Martinez, Sharon. “Trickster Strategies: Challenging American Identity, Community and Art in Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey.” In Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity, edited by Wendy L. Ng and Soo-Young Chin, 161–170. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995. Tanner, James T. F. “Walt Whitman’s Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” MELUS 20, no. 4 (1995): 61–74. Wang, Jennie. “Tripmaster Monkey: Kingston’s Postmodern Representation of a New ‘China Man,’ ” MELUS 20, no. 1 (1995): 101–114.

1282 TROPIC OF CANCER

Williams, A. Noelle. “Parody and Pacifist Transformations in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” MELUS 20, no. 1 (1995): 83–100. Crystal Anderson

TROPIC OF CANCER HENRY MILLER (1934) “It may well be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for any of us,” wrote Henry MILLER in Tropic of Cancer, “but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentations! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” (257). Tropic of Cancer, Miller’s first published book, is such a dance, a fullbodied, hot-blooded celebration of joy and pain, of lust and decay, of poverty and plenty. Its frankness so shocked censors upon its publication in 1934 that the book remained banned in the United States for another 27 years. To this day, Tropic of Cancer still incites arguments between those who laud Miller for his liberated worldview and those who see him (or, perhaps more accurately, the book’s narrator) simply as a misogynistic, selfish boor. Ironically, this book, set in Paris, owes much of its spirit to writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. Miller’s disdain for western society and how it crushes those who do not march to its beat is reminiscent of Thoreau’s Walden, while Miller’s depiction of sex and the body is frank in much the same way as Whitman’s verse. Yet, like Whitman and Thoreau, Miller is hardly a crank, and his seriousness is tempered with good humor and joy, wonder and awe. Miller makes no secret of his love for Whitman in Cancer, explicitly stating that he considered Whitman “the poet of the body and soul,” and that “there is no equivalent in the languages of Europe for the spirit which he immortalized. Europe is saturated with art and her soil is full of dead bones and her museums are bursting with plundered treasures, but what Europe has never had is a free healthy spirit, what you might call a MAN. Goethe was the nearest approach, but

Goethe was a stuffed shirt, by comparison . . . Goethe is an end of something, Whitman is a beginning” (240). Many of Miller’s champions picked up the connection. Writers from Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs NIN, and George Orwell through to Norman MAILER and Erica JONG saw Miller as nothing less than Whitman’s successor: a uniquely American writer who accepted and reveled even as he condemned and recoiled. Orwell, quoted in Nin’s introduction to Cancer, stated that “it is the book of a man who is happy. . . . So far from protesting, he is accepting. And the very word ‘acceptance’ calls up his real affinity . . . Walt Whitman” (xi). More than accepting, though, Miller celebrates, as did Whitman, the odd, the grotesque, the fantastic, the obscene, the unusual in all its manifestations. As Miller put it in The Books in My Life, “there is nothing but the marvelous and only the marvelous” (Miller 1969, 125). His narrator in Cancer flows from scene to scene, never even sure at times where his next meal will be coming from, spending francs as quickly as they come into his hands, watching as his friends wallow in misery and use the women around them. All the while, he remains detached; in the words of Leon Lewis, resisting “the squalor which he could have easily slipped into” (Lewis, 81). The narrator in Cancer, Lewis notes, “often gets angry or discouraged, but . . . he never curses life” (Lewis, 90). It is testament to Miller that Cancer was a shout of exhilaration and not a curse. Miller wrote the book in Paris in the early 1930s after struggling through the 1920s as an office worker in his native New York City. “I had written three (novels) that weren’t published (in the 1920s) and was finally at the end of my rope,” he said in a 1956 interview. “That was how I got my start, by being completely defeated, and then I found I could write; I found my own voice” (Kersnowski, 5). According to Miller, in 1927 he typed out over 30 pages of autobiographical notes that, in retrospect, formed “an outline of everything I was going to write,” he said, “the substance of everything I’ve written that concerns my life” (Kersnowski, 67). Later novels such as Black Spring and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus) clearly were based on those notes. But Tropic of Cancer, according to Miller, “was written on the spot, while I was living it. It was the story

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN 1283

about how I’m writing that book a thing of the immediate present. In a way, that makes it different from everything else I’ve ever done” (Kersnowski, 51, 67). Many critics have taken issue with Miller for his narrator’s supposed misogynistic view of women, but, as Lewis points out, “both the men and the women Miller spends time with (in Cancer) are treated with similar harshness” (Lewis, 78–79), if not in the direct language of the narrator, then in their own self-damning dialogue and monologues. Much of the controversy around Cancer swirled around the language of the book. Miller stated that his lifestyle in Paris, that of “an exile living on the French without money, brought me into contact with the strangest people: rogues, prostitutes, wastrels, people you wouldn’t meet if you were living an ordinary life . . . In talking of them, I would transcribe their language” (Kersnowski, 5). When asked, in the 1950s, if he would consider editing the book in an effort to revoke its “banned” status, Miller stated that he considered the “obscenity” of the book “so integral that (removing it) would destroy the whole value of the book from a literary standpoint . . . I don’t know what the book would look like without it” (Kersnowski, 5). Lewis suggests that to call Cancer a novel “confuses the issue and tends to induce expectations that are not satisfied . . . The narrative consciousness of the artist/ hero gives it some continuity, but it does not have any real character development, a chronological linear progression, a plot one could outline, or any dramatic denouement or even a conclusion that ties things up” (Lewis, 81). Miller would probably have agreed with that assessment. When asked in a 1962 interview about the possibility of filming Tropic of Cancer, he said, “I can’t see how anybody could possibly make a film of that book. I don’t see the story there” (Kersnowski, 62). While there may be no clear plotline and no blatant denouement or resolution, and the narrator of the “story about writing a book” really seems no closer to finishing his book at the end of Cancer than he was at the beginning, Cancer still ends on a note of exhilaration at the constancy of change. “I feel this river flowing through me,” the narrator concludes after having flowed thought the events in the novel (318), and the

overwhelming feeling is that Miller is every bit as much “the happiest man on earth” on the last page of the book as he was on the first.

SOURCES Gordon, William A. The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Jong, Erica. The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller. New York: Random House, 1993. Kersnowski, Frank L., and Alice Hughes, eds. Conversations with Henry Miller. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Lewis, Leon. Henry Miller: The Major Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. Mailer, Norman. Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove Press, 1976. Miller, Henry. The Books in My Life. New York: New Directions, 1969. ———. Henry Miller on Writing. New York: New Directions, 1964. ———. Tropic of Cancer. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Nelson, Jane A. Form and Image in the Fiction of Henry Miller. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Perles, Alfred. My Friend Henry Miller: An Intimate Biography. New York: J. Day and Company, 1956. Max H. Shenk

TROPIC OF CAPRICORN HENRY MILLER (France, 1939; U.S., 1961) A “prequel” to the more uniformly admired Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn continues MILLER’s mythologized autobiography, concentrating on his time in 1920s New York before leaving his first wife for Paris expatriate life, the fallout from which is chronicled in Cancer. Depending on whom you ask, Capricorn is either the sloppiest or most formally innovative of Miller’s works—George Wickes characterizes it as “more disconnected than the rest of his books, creating the impression that he was constantly distracted, ‘a pastiche of brilliant passages,’ which by their discontinuity indicate where he sat down to write and where he left off.” In keeping with conventional thinking on Miller—both champions and detractors agree on his profound aliterariness—its formal peculiarities are generally viewed as defiant aimlessness. The first section, comprising a fifth of the whole and subtitled “On the Ovarian Trolley”—a reference to

1284 TROPIC OF CAPRICORN

recreational sex, the involuntariness of birth/existence, and a character’s diatribes about his wife’s reproductive health problems—concerns Miller’s tenure at the Cosmodemonic (alternately “Cosmococcic”) Telegraph Company of North America. The initial event prefigures the haphazard nature, in the novel’s eyes, of nearly all organizational endeavor: Henry Miller applies in desperation for a messenger’s position, is turned down, heads to the president’s office to complain, and emerges as the new employment manager. The resultant picture is one of utter chaos: “The system was wrong from start to finish, but it was not my place to criticize the system. It was mine to hire and fire. I was in the center of a revolving disk which was whirling so fast that nothing could stay put . . . the important thing was to keep hiring and firing; as long as there were men and ammunition we were to advance, to keep mopping up the trenches” (22–3). Miller uses his position as both a means to “save” unqualified immigrant applicants and a means of extracting sexual favors from female applicants and subordinates alike—most prominently his secretary Valeska, news of whose suicide will open the second section. Regarding the supposed aimlessness of the ensuing four-fifths of Capricorn, it seems too appropriate to be accidental that the setting for the first act is a telegraph company (the real Miller’s time at Western Union notwithstanding). As an overseer of messengers, Miller controls communication itself for the web of imposing architecture that is New York City—just as the author navigates communication through the architecture of the novel, and the human through a fluctuating existence (Miller, of course, does not distinguish between the latter two). As corporate communication breaks down—revealed from within as a senseless impossibility of Great War proportions—the illusions of novelistic unity and linear biochronology dissolve with it. The second section opens on Miller’s miserable home life; he cannot abide “personal” sex—which, reversing traditional Western morality, he characterizes as artificial in comparison to anonymous sex—and loathes his wife. The reader is foiled in expectations for any number of affairs to materialize into plotlines; none do. The only sustained female presence in Capricorn aside from Valeska and Miller’s wife is the dance-

hall star Mara (his second wife, June, renamed Mona in The Rosy Crucifixion). An 80-page dance-hall daydream comprises the middle fifth of the book, and she and Miller fly into each other’s arms in Capricorn’s rapturous coda. It is, of course, Miller’s depiction of sex and characterization—or lack thereof—of women, in Capricorn and elsewhere, that have sparked the most heated debates over his moral value. Kate Millett presents the most comprehensive indictment of his supposed barbarism in her 1970 landmark Sexual Politics (others, including Miller’s lover Anaïs NIN, have accused Millett of ignoring the tragicomic intent). But in Capricorn, it is precisely the most offensive aspects of Millerian sexuality—the aggressive, impersonal stance in relation to the act; the near-constant referral to women as cunts— that align with the novel’s formal transcendence: Just as worker-Miller both revolts against and surrenders to the Cosmodemonic Company, lover-Miller is fascinated and bored with the human as sexual being. The eschewing of personality in favor of metonymic focus on genitalia highlights the absurd simplicity of the fact that humans, for all their achievements and pretensions, have nothing necessary to do except fulfill the dictates of form—we are little besides floating genitalia, so few of us being truly alive. At the summation of the flashback sequence on Miller’s childhood— which begins with his accidentally killing another boy with a thrown rock—his father dies after being disappointed in an attempted religious awakening. Immediately afterward, at the exact center of the novel, the “Land of Fuck” interlude commences—an extended pornographic fantasy blurring the line between sacred and profane: The father reaches after that which is most hypothetical, dies, and is succeeded by that which is most verifiable. All communication/communion is futile, all interaction is necrophilia, and all deaths lead to all births. The remainder of Capricorn is reminiscence, concerned alternately with sex and books. Though Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and the Dadaists are all identified as inspirations, the “bible” of Capricorn is Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, which argues that the concept of disorder is illusory, and proposes instead a dichotomy between two antithetical orders. The first is “dead,”

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA 1285

geometric order, of which the analytical mind constructs templates; the second is “vital” order, the animus of flux, the domain of intuition. Micky Riggs writes that “salvation” for the Miller of Capricorn “is the search for the vital order—autonomy rather than automatism.” This is true, but also bound in paradox—Miller the character is Miller the author and will one day write the book in which he appears. More so than to live, his goal is to write, and so his ultimate, ironic “salvation” must involve killing the “vital” order by capturing it in words, the novel-as-object being as dead a form as geometry. Similarly, recreational sex will eventually (via either marriage or bad luck) destroy itself by creating a child. But literary forms are necessary to provoke new revolutionary responses, and children are necessary to continue the existence of sex itself. The fact that Tropic of Capricorn must end by—and can only ever have existed through— stopping its own motion is the central ridiculousness of its dream.

SOURCES Blinder, Caroline. “La Revolte enfantine: On Georges Bataille’s ‘La Morale de Miller’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Un Nouveau mystique,’ ” Critique 40, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 39–47. Also available online. URL: http://www.sauer= thompson.com/essays/Bataille%20on%20Miller.doc. Accessed January 13, 2006. Gordon, William A. The Mind and Art of Henry Miller. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Gottesman, Ronald, ed. Critical Essays on Henry Miller. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992. Mailer, Norman. Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Writings of Henry Miller. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1976. Miller, Henry. Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc, 1961. Mitchell, Edward, ed. Henry Miller: Three Decades of Criticism. New York: New York University Press, 1971. Nelson, Jane A. Form and Image in the Work of Henry Miller. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1970. Riggs, Micky. “Bergsonian Order in Tropic of Capricorn,” Artes Liberales 4, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 9–15. Wickes, George. “Henry Miller: Down and Out in Paris.” In Critical Essays on Henry Miller, edited by Ronald Gottesman. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992. Chris O. Cook

TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA RICHARD BRAUTIGAN (1967) Some critics consider Trout Fishing in America a cult book; a band took the name as its own, and one person legally changed his name to the title. Popularly, it is too often dismissed as happy, hippy nonsense. However, the novel deserves greater attention and serious study. BRAUTIGAN is a conservationist of the imagination and uses the American West as metaphor, hoping to regain the open range of the mind. His narrator’s whimsical, ironic humor and the simplicity of his prose, ironically, disguise a complex web of literary allusions and symbolism. Some of the literary range Brautigan covers is Ben Franklin’s autobiography (Franklin is mentioned frequently in the book, but sometimes by tricorner hat alone), Ernest HEMINGWAY, Henry David Thoreau, Nathanael WEST, Mark TWAIN, and Herman MELVILLE. Brautigan is like a Huck Finn who lit out to the territory of the imagination and found it fenced in and cemented over. What does he do when he arrives? He parodies some, he uses others as pastiche to make a larger point about America. Brautigan, a late arrival to the San Francisco Beat scene, knew the Beat poets and their work intimately. Allen Ginsberg’s poem “On Burrough’s Work” is instructive in understanding Brautigan’s novel. Ginsberg says: The method must be purest meat and no symbolic dressing, . . . But allegories are so much lettuce. Don’t hide the madness. Trout Fishing in America is “so much lettuce.” The book’s first chapter, “The Cover for Trout Fishing in America,” describes, literally, the photo on the cover of the book, which includes a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco’s Washington Square. Brautigan continues, saying poor people gather in the park to wait for a church to begin handing out food. It’s sandwich time for the poor. But they cannot cross the street until the signal is given. Then they all run across the street to the church and get their sandwiches that are wrapped in newspaper. They go back to the park and unwrap the

1286 TURN OF THE SCREW, THE

newspaper and see what their sandwiches are all about. A friend of mine unwrapped his sandwich one afternoon and looked inside to find just a leaf of spinach. That was all. (2) Brautigan suggests Franklin’s work ethic and his inventiveness, both symbolized by the statue, are marble now. Brautigan finishes the chapter by ironically using a quote from Kafka, who, after reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, wrote, “I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic.” Brautigan’s technique is to move from an idea, to an adjective for the idea, to metaphor of the idea, and then to a full-blown conceit. This yoking of ideas through conceit is often done for humor, but they have deeper meanings as well. “Knock on Wood (Part One),” the second story in the book, uses this method explicitly: The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal. Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing. I’d like to get it right. Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow- filled river acting as foundry and heat. Imagine Pittsburgh. A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels. The Andrew Carnegie of Trout! (3) These steps are less frequently made explicit as the novel progresses, causing the characters and the reader to bump their imaginations up against unpleasant realities. For example, in “Knock on Wood (Part Two),” the narrator mistakes an old woman for a trout stream: “ ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I thought you were a trout stream.’ ‘I’m not,’ she said” (5). Finally, in one of the concluding stories, “The Cleveland Wrecking Yard,” there is no explanation as to why the narrator visits a junkyard to see a Colorado trout stream stacked and ready for sale. The narrator here has no problem with the commodification of the environment or what he sees. In “Trout Fishing in America Nib,” the narrator describes first a gold nib for a fountain pen, then he imagines writing with one made from trout: “I thought

to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river’s shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.” The descriptions suggest the Mississippi River in Twain’s time or Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River.” However, America changed; the experience is only imaginary and the conceit, unfortunately, is even more removed from experience. In “Prelude to the Mayonnaise Chapter,” the narrator says “expressing a human need, I always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise.” Then, in the final story, “The Mayonnaise Chapter” ends with “P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonaise.” Even the narrator’s desire to accomplish a small, easily accomplished idea such as finishing a novel with the word “mayonnaise” fails because it is misspelled. It’s sandwich time for the poor. What Brautigan can gather from the American West to make a sandwich, such as lettuce and mayonnaise, are not what they used to be.

SOURCES Boyer, Jay. Richard Brautigan. Western Writers Series. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1987. Brautigan, Richard. Trout Fishing in America. New York: Delta, 1967. James M. Wilson

TURN OF THE SCREW, THE HENRY JAMES (1897) The Turn of the Screw, a deceptively simple novella by Henry JAMES, has generated considerable debate from the time the author penned it in 1897 to the present. A ghost story, the tale utilizes many of the conventions found in other 19th-century examples of the genre—an ancient estate, a plucky young woman, and a commonsense housekeeper, for example—but it also introduces psychological, theological, educational, historical, sociological, and sexual issues that continue to fascinate modern readers. Most of James’s supernatural fiction was written between 1891 and 1900; of this body of work, The Turn of the Screw is the most celebrated and widely read. The story is a masterpiece of ambiguity, and James refused to clarify its meaning, saying that “it just gleams and glooms” (quoted in Varnado, 87).

TURN OF THE SCREW, THE 1287

In a letter of 1898, James identifies the source of his plot as a story told by the father of Archbishop Benson (letter to Percy Lubbock in Smith, 124). Leon Edel, James’s biographer, discovered an additional source in “Temptation,” by Tom Taylor, an 1855 story that includes a villain named Peter Quin, a probable model for Peter Quint in James’s novella (Smith, 124). Peter Beidler suggests that a case of an eight-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy accused of demonic possession, discussed by James’s brother William in an 1896 lecture, may also have contributed material for The Turn of the Screw (Beidler, 173). The fact that James mentions “witchcraft cases” in the preface to his collected works lends credence to Beidler’s suggestion (Wilson, 94). The story is nevertheless uniquely Jamesian in its ironic opacity, its refusal to be definitively interpreted. Contributing to its complexity is a narrative structure by means of which the long-dead governess’s written account is read by Douglas, an acquaintance of the governess, to a small group of guests at a country inn, among whom is the chief narrator of the story as James presents it to the reader. The reliability of each narrator is open to question. The existence of the ghosts is therefore open to question. A young woman, the naive daughter of a British country parson, takes a job at Bly, an isolated estate. Her employer, a carefree bachelor now living in London, wishing not to be burdened with the upbringing of his orphaned niece and nephew, tells the governess that he expects her to handle all contingencies at Bly and not to consult him about decisions concerning his wards. The governess finds eight-year-old Flora, her youngest charge, enchanting and engaging. Flora’s brother Miles, who arrives at Bly after his expulsion from school, seems also charming and innocent. The governess and the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, cannot imagine why he was expelled; nor do they ask. The governess proceeds to educate both children at home, a task that she finds delightful. The idyl at Bly is soon interrupted, however, by the ghosts of the former governess, Miss Jessel, and Peter Quint, who once served as valet to the children’s uncle. According to Mrs. Grose, the bachelor uncle had left the children under Miss Jessel’s care, and Miss Jessel became intimate with the valet, who spent consider-

able time with the children, particularly Miles. The thoroughly Victorian Mrs. Grose implies that this relationship was highly inappropriate, partly because of Quint’s class and partly because of his character. The governess assumes when the ghosts appear that they wish to contact, possess, or at least influence the children. She believes she must “save” them (40, 76), become “an expiatory victim” (31), and “protect and defend” (34) her pupils from unfathomable horrors. But she veils her mission in silence until she concludes that her pupils also see the ghosts and are faking their innocence; she then tries to force them to admit their complicity with evil. In the end, Flora turns against the governess, and Mrs. Grose takes her away to London. Left with Miles, the governess attempts to coerce the child to “confess” to consorting with the ghosts (92). When Quint’s ghost appears at the window, Miles claims not to see him. The governess, in a last ditch effort to thwart Quint’s designs upon the child, grabs Miles, who then dies in her arms. Edmund Wilson, in his oft-cited interpretation of James’s novella, contends that the ghosts are merely figments of the governess’s disturbed imagination. He acknowledges Edna Kenton as the first to opine that the governess “is a neurotic case of sex repression” who projects her own desire onto the two ghosts (Wilson, 88–89). He supports Kenton’s view with Freudian theory and with the observation “that there is never any reason for supposing that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts” (Wilson, 90). Others, such as R. W. B. Lewis, believe that the ghosts are meant to be real. Lewis reminds readers that Mrs. Grose corroborates the governess’s vision by identifying Quint as the ghostly figure the governess describes. For Lewis, the specters evoke what James himself called “the reader’s general vision of evil” (Lewis, xv). Robert Heilman agrees that the ghosts cannot be dismissed as the “symbolization of evil” (Heilman, 346), which he characterizes as “ubiquitous, mysterious, and, though limited in scope, eternal” (Heilman, 346–347). Peter Beidler makes a good case for the objective existence of the ghosts, claiming that the children do not see the ghosts because they are possessed by them. The children are, hence, both innocent and evil

1288 TUROW, SCOTT

(Beidler, 149), a reading that maintains what Rimmon calls “the moral and epistemological” dimension of the novella (Rimmon, 117). Contemporary critics are split on the issue of whether or not the governess “invents” the ghosts. However, they read the ghosts less often as generalized, “ubiquitous, mysterious” evil and more often as representatives of specific, marginalized behavior condemned by Victorian mores. Smith, for example, recognizes a “reverberating current of homophobia” in the tale (Smith, 126) and believes that James also portrays a rigid “English class consciousness” in his characters. Pifer sees in the story suggestions of “childhood sexuality,” “pedophilia,” and “child abuse” (Pifer, 53–56). One must conclude that James’s work “gleams and glooms” as much for the present generation as it has for past generations. No doubt, this classic will also speak to whatever specters haunt us in the future.

SOURCES Beidler, Peter G. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: The Turn of the Screw at the Turn of the Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Heilman, Robert B. “The Lure of the Demonic: James and Durrenmatt,” Comparative Literature 13 (Fall 1961): 346–357. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction by Henry James. New York: Bantam, 1981. Lewis, R. W. B. Introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction by Henry James. New York: Bantam, 1981. Pifer, Ellen. Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Rimmon, Shlomith. The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Smith, Elton E. “Pedophiles amidst Looming Portentousness.” In The Haunted Mind: The Supernatural in Victorian Literature, edited by Elton E. Smith and Robert Haas. Metuchen, N.J..: Scarecrow Press, 1999. Varnado, S. L. Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Wilson, Edmund. The Triple Thinkers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. Gwen M. Neary

TUROW, SCOTT (1949– ) Successful attorney and best-selling novelist Scott Turow is famous for legal thrillers. To date, more than 25 million copies of his novels are in print and have been translated into 20 languages (scottturow.com). His biographer, Derek Lundy, notes that “Turow’s novels are mediations on the dark side of human behavior” (Lundy, 10); not surprisingly, he is often ranked with Dashiell HAMMETT and Raymond CHANDLER. His first and most successful novel, Presumed Innocent (more than 4 million copies in print), won the 1988 Silver Dagger Award. The key to his success, reviewers and critics suggest, is that he still practices law. Words of praise for Turow’s literary skill come from no less a talent than Wallace STEGNER, who calls Presumed Innocent “an achievement of a high order—with marvelous control and touch, an awesome capacity to assemble and dispense (and sometimes withhold) evidence,” not to mention “a cast of characters who are dismayingly credible” (quoted in scottturow.com). Scott Turow was born on April 12, 1949, in Chicago, Illinois, to David D. Turow, a physician, and Ria Pastron Turow, a writer. Turow received his bachelor’s degree at Amherst College (1970), his master’s degree at Stanford University (1974), and his law degree at Harvard University (1978). After marrying Annette Weisberg, an artist, on April 4, 1971, Turow published a best-selling book based on his experiences during his first year at Harvard law school. Presumed Innocent burst onto the best-seller lists in 1987. This enthralling novel centers on a lawyer, Rusty Sabitch, his mathematician wife Barbara, and his murdered paramour Carolyn Polhemus. He followed with The Burden of Proof (1990), which opens with the suicide of Clara, wife of defense attorney Alejandro “Sandy” Stem (who defended Sabitch in Presumed Innocent). In his third novel, Pleading Guilty (1993), Turow returns to Kindle County, by now familiar territory, as McCormack A. “Mack” Malloy seeks a missing litigator and nearly $6 million. Turow’s fourth novel, The Laws of Our Fathers (1996), takes for its subject Kindle County’s housing projects and a mysterious murder. The judge is Sonia “Sonny” Klonsky, a character from The Burden of Proof; the trial reveals that the wrong man has been appre-

TWAIN, MARK 1289

hended. Robbie Feaver is the protagonist of Personal Injuries (1999), which returns to the lives of privileged lawyers: Robbie’s wife is dying and Robbie himself is charged with embezzlement, a charge that leads him to an affair with Evon Miller, an FBI agent assigned to his case. Turow’s most recent novel, Reversible Errors (2002), is a suspense-filled tale about a triple-murder charge, and Arthur Raven, the court-appointed attorney for Rommy “Squirrel” Gandolph, the accused man. Turow published the novel Ordinary Heroes in 2005. Scott Turow, whom Anne RICE has called “a profoundly gifted writer” (Rice, 29), lives with his wife in Chicago, where he is a partner in the Sonnenschein, Carlin, Nath & Rosenthal law firm. Presumed Innocent, a 1990 Warner Brothers film, directed by Alan J. Pakula, starred Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Brian Dennehy, and Raul Julia. In 1992, The Burden of Proof, a two-part television film based on the novel, starred Hector Elizondo, Brian Dennehy, and Adrienne Barbeau; Reversible Errors was adapted as a CBS television miniseries in 2004.

NOVELS The Burden of Proof. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1990. The Laws of Our Fathers. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1996. Ordinary Heroes. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2005. Personal Injuries. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Pleading Guilty. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1993. Presumed Innocent. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987. Reversible Errors. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002.

SOURCES Lundy, Derek. Scott Turow: Meeting the Enemy. East Toronto, Ontario: Ecw Press, 1995. Rice, Anne. “She Knew Too Many, Too Well,” The New York Times Book Review, 28 June 1987, pp. 1, 28–29.

OTHER Buckley, James, Jr. “Going Undercover in Life and Law: A Talk with Scott Turow.” BookPage. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com. Accessed September 22, 2005. Groner, Jonathan. Review of Personal Injuries. Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com. Accessed September 22, 2005. O’Leary, Shannon. “Legal Letdown.” January. Available online. URL: http://www.januarymagazine.com. Accessed September 22, 2005.

Scott Turow Web site. Available online. URL: http://www. scottturow.com. Accessed September 22, 2005.

TWAIN, MARK (SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS) (1835–1910) Considered the father of modern American fiction by his literary descendants, William FAULKNER and Ernest HEMINGWAY, Mark Twain, the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is synonymous with two of his most famous books, The ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, (1884) and The ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (1876). Those novels contain the hallmarks for which Twain continues to be revered: honesty, truth, the use of the plain vernacular of the ordinary American, humor, and above all, a genius for telling a story. Mingled with these obvious talents are his penetrating social criticism, sympathy for the plight of the oppressed, and his powerful ability to evoke the beauty and promise of America. Samuel Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, the year of Halley’s Comet, in Florida, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River. His father was John Marshall Clemens, a merchant and a lawyer, and his mother was Jane Lampton Clemens. He worked as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, a Nevada and California newspaperman, and a successful public speaker and storyteller. All of these prepared him for the writing career that began with short stories and travel books. His first novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, appeared in 1873, after Twain’s move to the East and marriage in 1870, to Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, New York. Twain collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner on The Gilded Age, a sentimental novel that contains the memorable optimist, Colonel Sellers, and some of Twain’s most trenchant satire on the greed and political corruption that gave the age its moniker. Twain’s portion was later published as The Adventures of Colonel Sellers in 1965. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with its nostalgic view of Twain’s own childhood, evokes, even today, a sense of childhood innocence. The romance between Tom and Becky, the unforgettable Aunt Polly, and Tom’s involvement with Injun Joe and Huck Finn in the murder plot are some of the major ingredients of this novel. The PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, a historical novel written concurrently with Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1882.

1290 TWAIN, MARK

Set in 16th-century England, it relates the mix-up in identity between the urchin Tom Canty and Prince Edward VI. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), though it continues to inspire spirited debate, is recognized today for the brilliant use of an innocent child’s voice and perception as a means of telling the powerful story of slavery’s survival in the United States. The novel, banned in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1885 because of Huck’s vulgar behavior, has disturbed a number of late-20th-century readers because of Huck’s use of the 19th-century racial epithet “nigger,” despite his apparent friendship with Jim, the escaped slave with whom he rafts down the river. The novel’s power, its painful rendering of antebellum America, and its classic portrayal of Huck himself, ensures that this novel will remain a classic for the foreseeable future. Next Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) a literary burlesque of the Age of Chivalry and Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur that features Hank Morgan, another colloquial narrator and a prototypical 19th-century ordinary American. He intends to do good by modernizing the medieval country, but becomes a power-hungry mogul. It also addresses an immediate concern of the day: the effects of industrialism and technology on then-rural America and its inhabitants. The TRAGEDY OF PUDD’NHEAD WILSON (1894) involves another mix-up in identity, this time between Valet de Chambre, born to the slave Roxana, and Thomas a Becket Driscoll, the son of Roxy’s master, Judge Driscoll. Roxy switches the babies when they are infants, and the ensuing tragedy illuminates the destructive presence of racism in American society. The “pudd’nhead” in the novel is the attorney who eventually discovers the identities of the young men and also solves a murder. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), written under the pseudonym Sieur Louis de Conte, is a historical novel that has been praised for its insight into the political situations that resulted in the death of Saint Joan. Twain died on April 21, 1910, of heart disease, in Redding, Connecticut, with Halley’s Comet ushering him out just as it had welcomed him into this world. He was buried in Elmira, New York. A number of his

works have been published posthumously, including The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance (1916); Simon Wheeler: Detective, a novel unfinished at Twain’s death and edited by Franklin R. Rogers in 1963; Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Collaboration, an unfinished novel completed by Stephen Stewart in 2001; and Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians, an unfinished novel completed by Lee Nelson in 2003. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was adapted as a film four times: in 1931 by Paramount, in 1939 and again in 1960 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and in 1974 by United Artists; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was adapted in 1930 by Paramount, in 1938 by Selznick International, in 1973 by United Artists, and the film “Tom Sawyer, Detective” by Paramount in 1939. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was adapted as a film in 1931 by Twentieth Century-Fox, and in 1949 by Paramount; The Prince and the Pauper was adapted in 1937 by Warner Bros., in 1969 by Childhood Productions, and as a film titled “Crossed Swords” in 1978 by Warner Bros. The Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley houses the Mark Twain papers, the major collection of Mark Twain materials. Other major holdings of significant Twain materials include Yale University Library, the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Vassar College, and the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.

NOVELS; UNDER PSEUDONYM MARK TWAIN, EXCEPT WHERE INDICATED: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer’s Comrade. London: Chatto & Windus, 1884; New York: Webster, 1885. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1876. The American Claimant. New York: Webster, 1892. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. New York: Webster, 1889; published as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. London: Chatto & Windus, 1889. Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. New York: Harper, 1909. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. (With Charles Dudley Warner) Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1873; Twain’s portion published separately as The Adventures of

TWAIN, MARK 1291

Colonel Sellers. Edited by Charles Nelder, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians. (novel unfinished by Mark Twain completed by Lee Nelson). Springville, Utah: Council Press, 2003. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Collaboration. (novel unfinished by Mark Twain completed by Stephen Stewart). Meadow Vista, Calif.: New Mill, 2001. The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine and Frederick A. Duneka. New York: Harper, 1916. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. (Under pseudonym Sieur Louis de Conte) New York: Harper, 1896. The Prince and the Pauper. London: Chatto & Windus, 1881; Boston: Osgood, 1882. Pudd’nhead Wilson: A Tale. London: Chatto & Windus, 1894; expanded as The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1894. Simon Wheeler: Detective (unfinished novel). Edited by Franklin R. Rogers. New York: New York Public Library, 1963. Tom Sawyer Abroad, by Huck Finn. New York: Webster, 1894.

SOURCES Andrews, Kenneth. Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950. Benson, Ivan. Mark Twain’s Western Years. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1938. Clemens, Cyril. My Cousin Mark Twain. Rodale, 1939. De Voto, Bernard. Mark Twain’s America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1932. Ferguson, J. DeLancey. Mark Twain: Man and Legend. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943. Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Gale, Robert L. Plots and Characters in the Works of Mark Twain. 2 volumes. Nottingham, England: Shoe String Press, 1973. Gibson, William M. The Art of Mark Twain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Gillis, William R. Gold Rush Days with Mark Twain. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Hill, Hamlin. Mark Twain: God’s Fool. New York: Harper, 1973. Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1997. Kaplan, Justin. Mark Twain and His World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.

———. Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twain. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966. Lawton, Mary. A Lifetime with Mark Twain. New York: Harcourt, 1925. Masters, Edgar Lee. Mark Twain: A Portrait. New York: Scribner, 1938. McMahan, Elizabeth, ed. Critical Approaches to Mark Twain’s Short Stories. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981. Mencken, H. L. A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Knopf, 1949. Miller, Robert Keith. Mark Twain. New York: Ungar, 1983. Neider, Charles. Mark Twain. New York: Horizon Press, 1967. Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography; the Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 4 volumes. New York: Harper, 1912. Rasmussen, Kent. Mark Twain A to Z. New York: Facts On File, 1995. Sanborn, Margaret. Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Shillingsburg, Miram Jones. At Home Abroad: Mark Twain in Australasia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1963. ———, ed. Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1962. Stahl, J. D. Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America through Europe. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Stone, Albert E. The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961. Tenney, Thomas. Mark Twain: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Twain, Mark. Old Times on the Mississippi. Toronto: Belford, 1876; reprinted as The Mississippi Pilot. London: Ward, Lock & Tyler, 1877, revised as Life on the Mississippi. Boston: Osgood, 1883. ———. Mark Twain’s Autobiography 2 volumes. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. New York: Harper, 1924, edited as one volume by Charles Neider. New York: Harper, 1959. Wagenknecht, Edward. Mark Twain: The Man and His Work. 3rd edition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton, 1952. Wilson, James D. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Mark Twain. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Zall, Paul M., ed. Mark Twain Laughing: Humorous Anecdotes by and about Samuel L. Clemens. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

1292 TYLER, ANNE

TYLER, ANNE (1941– )

Author of 15 novels and numerous short stories, Anne Tyler is one of America’s most distinguished novelists. After several nominations in the 1980s for major literary awards, Tyler won the 1983 PEN/Faulkner Award for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle award for The ACCIDENTAL TOURIST, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. In the work of Tyler, individuals try to assert themselves and come to terms with their complex involvements with family and community. They frequently try to break free of family tradition and convention. Even when her characters fail to escape and instead return home, they have usually learned lessons that will stand them in good stead. As scholar Alice Hall Petry points out, these ideas make it difficult to label Tyler: Critics have called her “a realist, a romantic, a Victorian, a postmodernist, a minimalist, a sentimentalist, a feminist, a non-feminist, and a naturalist,” terms that are, according to Petry, “stridently incompatible” (Petry, 5). Although the influence of earlier writers, including poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Southern writers, particularly Eudora WELTY and Carson MCCULLERS, have often been noted, the most salient aspect of her work is the “upbeat stance” usually missing in contemporary fiction: “No wonder,” comments Petry, “she defies classification” (Petry, 17). She is, in scholar Elizabeth Evans’s words, “more interested in endurance and reconciliation than in alienation and isolation” (Evans, 20). Anne Tyler was born on October 25, 1941, in a Quaker community in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Lloyd Parry Tyler, a chemist, and Phyllis Mahon Tyler. After moving with her Quaker parents to North Carolina, she studied writing at Duke University with Reynolds Price, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1961. In her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes (1964), Ben Joe Hawkes discovers that it is he, not the women in his life, who lacks self-sufficiency. Tyler’s second novel, The Tin Can Tree (1965), set in an isolated, rural three-apartment row house on the border of a North Carolina tobacco field, features a photographer, James, who enlarges a photo of Rosie; the six-year-old’s unexpected death causes numerous family reactions. The protagonist of The Clock Winder (1972) travels from

North Carolina to Baltimore, where she finds a home with an upper-class family named Emerson, while one of the young Emersons escapes the family by moving South with his bride, a Georgia waitress. A SlippingDown Life (1970) depicts Evie Decker, a teenager who survives an elopement with would-be rock star Drumstrings Casey to learn something about herself and her forthcoming baby. In Celestial Navigation (1974), the agoraphobic artist figure Jeremy Paulding is aware of his need to replace his dead mother through his marriage to the self-confident and efficient Mary Tell. Searching for Caleb (1976), like several subsequent Tyler novels, depicts an artist seeking freedom from his family in order to practice his craft; it uses the idea of travel as a metaphor for escape: Sixty-one years earlier, Caleb left the family, and now Duncan and Jessie Peck are the only two of their generation who will escape the restrictions of the Baltimore clan. Earthly Possessions (1977) is told through the perspective of Charlotte Emory, who alternates between the past, when she was taken hostage and forcibly removed to Florida, and the present, when she realizes that “life” itself takes us where it will. Her eighth novel, Morgan’s Passing (1980), won the 1981 Janet Heidinger Kafka prize, a 1980 National Book Critics Circle fiction award nomination, and a 1982 American Book Award nomination in paperback fiction. The title character, Morgan Gower, changes his identity by wearing a variety of hats, beards, and masks. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is a dark tale of a Baltimore family abandoned by Beck Tull, the traveling salesman and father; despite the efforts of the mother, Pearl Tull, to hold the family together, the adult children bear the scars of poverty and deprivation. In Tyler’s 10th novel, The Accidental Tourist, Macon Leary, a travel-guide writer who, after his son dies and his wife leaves him, gradually returns to life and reality. Maggie Moran and her husband, Ira, take a one-day train trip in Breathing Lessons that symbolizes the continuity of family and the inescapable passage of time. In Tyler’s 12th novel, Saint Maybe (1991), the teenager Ian Bedloe partially causes and then reacts to the upheavals resulting from his brother Danny’s marriage to a divorcee; these upheavals include a suicide, drug overdose, and the unwitting interference of the

TYLER, ANNE 1293

Reverend Emmett. In Ladder of Years (1995), Delia Grinstead walks out on her family only to return to them after supporting herself for a time; like many other Tyler characters, Delia learns to examine her options and make the choice that brings her the most happiness possible under the circumstances. The 29year-old Barnaby Gaitlin in A Patchwork Planet (1998) tells his tale through a first-person narrative, gradually changing from a delinquent teenager presented in flashbacks into a young man with a clear sense of his own place. When We Were Grownups presents 53-yearold Rebecca Davitch, a large, eccentric woman who, temporarily dressed as a bag lady, thinks about her high school boyfriend and her two husbands but returns to the life that she has left behind. Anne Tyler, who was married to Taghi Modarressi, a psychiatrist and writer, from 1963 until his death in 1997, lives and writes in her adopted city of Baltimore. The Accidental Tourist, starring Kathleen Turner and William Hurt, was released by Warner Brothers in 1988. A Slipping-down Life was adapted for film in 2004. Three unpublished novels by Tyler and some correspondence are housed at the Perkins Library at Duke University. Tyler’s most recent novel is The Amateur Marriage (2004).

NOVELS The Accidental Tourist. New York: Berkley Books, 1985. The Amateur Marriage. New York: Knopf, 2004. Breathing Lessons. New York: Berkley Books, 1988. Celestial Navigation. New York: Ivy Books, 1974. The Clock Winder. New York: Berkley Books, 1972. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. New York: Berkley Books, 1982. Earthly Possessions. New York: Ivy Books, 1977. If Morning Ever Comes. New York: Ivy Books, 1964. Ladder of Years. New York: Knopf, 1995. Morgan’s Passing. New York: Knopf, 1980. A Patchwork Planet. New York: Knopf, 1998. Saint Maybe. New York: Ivy Books, 1991. Searching for Caleb. New York: Ivy Books, 1976. A Slipping-Down Life. New York: Ivy Books, 1970. The Tin Can Tree. New York: Berkley Books, 1965. When We Were Grownups. New York: Knopf, 2001.

SOURCES Betts, Doris. “The Fiction of Anne Tyler,” Southern Quarterly 21 (Summer 1983): 23–28. Reprinted in Peggy Whitman

Prenshaw, ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984, pp. 23–37. Brown, Laurie L. “Interviews with Seven Contemporary Writers,” Southern Quarterly 21 (Summer 1983): 3–22. Croft, Robert W. Anne Tyler: A Bio-bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Eder, Richard. Review of Ladder of Years, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 May 1995, 3. Evans, Elizabeth. Anne Tyler. New York: Twayne, 1993. Gilbert, Susan. “Anne Tyler.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, 251–278. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress Novel: Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Harper, Natalie. “Searching for Anne Tyler,” Simon’s Rock of Bard College Bulletin 4 (Fall 1984): 6–7. Jones, Anne. “Home at Last and Homesick Again: The Ten Novels of Anne Tyler,” Hollins Critic 23 (April 1986): 1–13. Kissel, Susan. Moving On: The Heroines of Shirley Anne Grau, Anne Tyler, and Gail Godwin. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1969. Magee, Rosemary M., ed. Friendship and Sympathy: Communities of Southern Women Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Nesanovich, Stella. “The Individual in the Family: Anne Tyler’s Searching for Caleb and Earthly Possessions,” Southern Review 14 (Winter 1978): 170–176. Petry, Alice Hall. Critical Essays on Anne Tyler. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1992. ———, ed. Understanding Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. Robertson, Mary F. “Anne Tyler: Medusa Points and Contact Ponts.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheik, 119–142. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1985. Ross-Bryant, Lynn. “Anne Tyler’s Searching for Caleb: The Sacrality of the Everyday,” Soundings 73 (Spring 1990): 191–207. Salwak, Dale, ed. Anne Tyler as Novelist. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Smith, Lucinda Irwin. Women Who Write: From the Past and the Present to the Future. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989. Stephens, C. Ralph, ed. The Fiction of Anne Tyler. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

1294 TYLER, ROYALL

Updike, John. “Family Ways,” New Yorker, 29 March 1976, pp. 110–112. Reprinted in John Updike. Hugging the Shore. New York: Random House, 1983, pp. 273–278. ———. “Imagining Things,” New Yorker, 23 June 1980, pp. 97–101. Reprinted in John Updike. Hugging the Shore. New York: Random House, 1983, pp. 293–294. ———. “On Such a Beautiful Green Little Planet,” New Yorker, 5 April 1982, pp. 193–197. Reprinted in John Updike. Hugging the Shore. New York: Random House, 1983, pp. 292–299. Voelker, Joseph C. Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Willrich, Patricia Rowe. “Watching through Windows: A Perspective on Anne Tyler,” Virginia Quarterly Review 68 (Summer 1992): 497–516. Zahlan, Anne R. “Anne Tyler.” In Fifty Southern Writers after 1900: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 491–504. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

OTHER Books and Writers. Anne Tyler. Available online. URL: http:// www.kirjasto.sci.fi/atyler.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

TYLER, ROYALL (1757–1826)

Principally known as a dramatist, Royall Tyler wrote the first successful comedy by a native-born American. The Contrast (published in 1790) was first produced in New York City on April 16, 1787; it features the usual admirable Yankees who contrast sharply with the hypocritical English character. A decade later, Tyler wrote a novel, The ALGERINE CAPTIVE, a satirical picaresque work in two volumes published in 1797. These are his two most significant works, although he also wrote at least six additional plays, one of the first American musical dramas, poetry, travel letters, and a newspaper column, as well as speeches, sermons, and legal tracts. Tyler (initially named William Clark Tyler) was born on July 18, 1757, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Royall Tyler, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. When his father died in 1771, Tyler legally adopted his first name, Royall. He was educated at Harvard, receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1776 (as well as an honorary B.A. from Yale, in those days a courtesy practiced by the two colleges). After serving briefly with General Sullivan in Newport, Rhode Island, he earned

his master’s degree from Harvard in 1779 and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1780. When his romance with Abigail Adams, daughter of John Adams, ended in 1785, Tyler performed diplomatic and legal missions for General Benjamin Lincoln over the next two years, arriving in New York in time to see The Contrast performed. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Guilford, Vermont, to begin what became a successful law practice. In 1794 he married Mary Palmer, daughter of Joseph Palmer, with whom he had lived during the Shays Rebellion. While practicing law and contributing to newspaper columns, Tyler wrote The Algerine Captive, featuring Updike Underhill, a naive narrator whom critics compare to Voltaire’s Candide or Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver. After losing his schoolhouse to a fire, he wanders south, where he observes the degradation of the slaves and becomes a ship’s doctor, but realizes too late that he is, himself, on a slave ship. Updike also becomes a slave in Algeria and is finally rescued by a Portuguese ship and an American treaty. Tyler uses satire and irony not only to evoke the brutality of slavery wherever it occurs but also to warn his fledgling nation. In the years after he published The Algerine Captive, Royall Tyler served as chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court (1807–13) and as a professor at the University of Vermont. His reputation today rests on his conviction that American characters speaking real American dialects were artistically viable in the new republic and across the Atlantic as well. Most of his papers are in the Royall Tyler collection at the Vermont Historical Society in Montpelier, Vermont.

NOVELS The Algerine Captive; or, the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill: Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. 2 volumes. Walpole, N.H.: Printed & sold by David Carlisle, 1797.

SOURCES Carson, Ada Lou, and Herbert L. Carson. Royall Tyler. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Dennis, Larry R. “Legitimizing the Novel: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive,” Early American Literature, 9 (Spring 1974): 71–80. Tanselle, G. Thomas. Royall Tyler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

TYPICAL AMERICAN 1295

TYPICAL AMERICAN GISH JEN (1988)

Gish JEN’s Typical American is a landmark novel in ChineseAmerican women’s writing. It stands apart from the West Coast second-generation writing of Maxine Hong KINGSTON and Amy TAN in that it deals with great irony and humor with the immigrant life of a Chinese family in the New York region. The novel concentrates on the lives of the central characters Ralph, Theresa, and Helen Chang after their arrival in the United States from China. Although they initially have a strong sense of their Chinese identity, the fact that they are known in the novel by their American names reveals the absence of any concern or backward glances to China. Despite being set in the context of a Chinese-American family, the novel is concerned primarily with the general immigrant experience of becoming an American and integrating into a capitalist American society. Although Ralph first comes to America in order to study for a doctorate, at which he eventually succeeds and gains a tenured teaching post in an American university, he abandons such a career in order to plunge himself into the (to him) unexplored and exciting world of entrepreneurial capitalist America. For this reason the critic Rachel C. Lee considers the novel to be a pioneer story in which “Jen substitutes a green lawn in the suburbs for buffalo-roaming plains, and, instead of hostile Native Americans, Ralph must grapple with an American-born Chinese man named Grover Ding. . . . In the mid-20th century, the frontiersman becomes an Asian-American engineer; the frontiers, a Connecticut residence and venture capitalism” (Lee, 13). At first glance, much of the novel follows the Chang family’s steady rise up the American social ladder—so much so that they call themselves the “Changkees”— and the novel appears to be celebrating the possibilities of immigrant integration and success through buying property and being a “self-made” entrepreneur. The novel, in fact, begins with the statement, “It’s an American story: Before he was a thinker, or a doer, or an engineer, much less an imagineer like his self-made millionaire friend Grover Ding, Ralph Chang was just a small boy in China, struggling to grow up his father’s son” (3). However, the Changs’ success is shaken when the building they have

extended in order to expand their fast food restaurant is found to have poor foundations. Jen appears to be suggesting through symbolism that the foundations of the immigrant American dream is indeed built on shaky ground. Indeed, the fact that they are Chinese and are therefore not fully accepted in a racist suburban America is a barely audible but nonetheless present refrain throughout the novel. Following the collapse of the business, Ralph has to return to his teaching post feeling like an entrepreneurial failure, and they begin the process of selling their family home. However, the novel does not purely consist of this capitalist and rather masculinist plot. The family, too, is beginning to be fractured through the pressures of assimilation into suburban American life. In particular, as the critic Rachel C. Lee states, the novel strongly portrays the changing position of women and the way in which they are both affected by Ralph’s involvement with the capitalist system and liberated by their position in American society (Lee, 45). Ralph’s wife, Helen, is as seduced by the trappings of capitalist America as is her husband. She sees her own success in the manner in which she is able to furnish her new home, and her desires are focused upon items of furniture such as a “love seat.” In fact, she allows herself to be seduced by Ralph’s millionaire business partner on that very love seat, where she dreams of being the mistress of a grander home with a maid and all the trappings of a rich wife. Typical of Jen’s novel, it is possible to understand Helen’s motivation as both an embrace and a criticism of capitalism. Helen is looking not only for riches in the arms of Grover Ding but also for the attention that her husband withholds from her during his infatuation with chasing financial gain. Ralph’s sister Theresa could be viewed as the heroine of the novel. Whenever Ralph faces failure, Theresa saves him—once by miraculously finding him sitting on a park bench with his last few pennies and once when she recovers from a coma reminding Ralph of the priorities of love and family above financial success. From a feminist perspective it is Theresa who transforms her own life, through expanding her independence and her personal liberty. The narrator expresses the thoughts of the family, asking, “Was this finally, the

1296 TYPICAL AMERICAN

New World? They all noticed that there seemed to be no boundaries anymore” (126). The dilemma in the novel is what one does with such liberty. Theresa works quietly and consistently at succeeding in her original aim to train as a doctor, unlike Ralph, who rejects his aim to become a professor in order to follow his capitalist desires. Moreover, she also slowly gains success in finding happiness by leaving behind her strict Chinese morals and social mores in favor of finding love and a love of life with a man who leaves his failed marriage for her. As Ralph goes to reconcile himself with Theresa when she wakes from her coma, his lasting image of her is during the summer, when she was splashing in a paddling pool wearing a brightly colored swimsuit with her lover. This strongly contrasts with Ralph’s circumstance at the time, tightly bound by his heavy clothing in a winter storm and nurturing the thought that “a man is as doomed here as he is in China” (296). The novel ends with an optimistic note despite its critical stance toward capitalist America and its effects

on the lives of women and families. The ending image of Theresa splashing in the pool signifies the possibility of attaining success in America, not through capitalist success, but through following Theresa’s example of embracing the personally liberating possibilities of being an immigrant in the United States.

SOURCES Jen, Gish. Typical American. London: Granta, 1998. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. “Immigration and Diaspora.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, 289–311. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Xiaojing, Zhou. “Becoming Americans: Gish Jen’s Typical American.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche, edited by Katherine Payant and Toby Rose, 151–163. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Maggie Ann Bowers

C

UD

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1852) Harriet Beecher STOWE’s controversial fictional account of the horrors of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was written in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. A best-selling novel of the 19th century, it contributed to the rise of antislavery sentiment before the Civil War. Many critics interpret the characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be stand-ins for various groups in society. The evil slave-holder Simon Legree, whose horrific treatment of his slaves leads ultimately to the death of the novel’s namesake, represents the worst of the Southern slave-holding aristocracy. Uncle Tom represents Stowe’s notion of people of color. She writes that Tom “had, to the full, the gentle, domestic heart, which, woe for them! has been a peculiar characteristic of his unhappy race.” Miss Ophelia, the sister of one of the slave owners who comes to live on a slave plantation in the South, represents the upright, prudent Northern woman, and perhaps Stowe herself. Aside from its dominant aim of contributing to the anti-slavery cause, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also a work of feminist literature. Stowe’s voice is prominent. With 43 asides, Stowe as author is just as important a character in the novel as Miss Ophelia or Legree. At the same time, however, Stowe claims to be an agent of God, a passive vessel for God’s words. Her novel is markedly religious and stresses the immorality of slavery on the grounds of Christian ethics. Like many other works of protest literature of the period, Stowe emphasizes the

importance of social injustice as not only destructive to the nation but also as sinful. She addresses the reader at the close of the novel: “not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than the stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!” (485). Some critics have dismissed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as simplistic. James BALDWIN wrote famously, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel” (Baldwin, 11). Baldwin criticized the work for its sentimentality as well as its racism. Indeed, Stowe characterizes people of color as submissive and incapable of resistance, as exemplified by her characterization of Tom. In the context of the abolitionist, antiracist writing of her time, Stowe was a moderate. David Walker had published his much more radical Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829, and Frederick Douglas wrote The Heroic Slave in 1853, a work that featured a strong black man who fights and rebels against slavery and is viewed by some critics as a direct challenge to the representation of masculinity in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe nevertheless succeeds in drawing readers into the drama she constructs. It is difficult to resist falling in love with characters like Eliza, an innocent and beautiful girl who risks her life to save her angelic child upon learning that he had been sold by her master. The severing of compelling maternal bonds at the hands of agents of the institution of slavery occurs many times throughout Stowe’s narrative. Stowe successfully uses the strategy of depicting the

1297

1298 UNVANQUISHED, THE

horror and suffering that result from these separations to convince the reader of slavery’s evils. Indeed, Stowe’s novel had so deep an impact on antislavery sentiment upon its publishing that Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted Stowe when they met at the White House with, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” In all, criticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is best put by Darryl Pinckney, who wrote the introduction to the 150th anniversary edition of Stowe’s work: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is always better or worse than anyone has said” (Pinckney, 10).

SOURCES Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Donovan, Josephine. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Pinckney, Darryl. Introduction. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Signet Classic, 1998. Rosenthal, Deborah J., ed. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” New York: Routledge, 2004. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Salem, Mass.: Ayer, 1987. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Salem Classic, 1998. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Westbrook, Ellen E., Mason I. Lowance, Jr., and R. C. De Prospo, eds. The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Jeff Rakover

UNVANQUISHED, THE WILLIAM FAULKNER (1934) The Unvanquished is a series of connected stories set during and after the Civil War. William FAULKNER published six of these seven stories individually in popular magazines, five in the Saturday Evening Post and one in Scribner’s. He then revised the stories and incorporated them into a novel. Only the final story, “An Odor of Verbena,” was new in the published book. Some readers find this, the least difficult of Faulkner’s novels, too conventional in its romantic view of the Old South and the Civil War. The romanticism is due, at least in part, to the adolescent narra-

tor of the first few sections, and it is undercut in the final section when the narrator is more mature. In the first section, titled “Ambuscade,” the narrator, Bayard Sartoris, is 12 years old. To him, the war is an adventure, and his father, Colonel John Sartoris, is a hero. Many of the characters in the Sartoris family were modeled after Faulkner’s own family, especially Colonel Sartoris who resembles Faulkner’s great-grandfather. The reader is introduced to a later generation of this family, when Bayard is an old man, in Faulkner’s early novel Sartoris (1929). In The Unvanquished, Bayard experiences the Civil War with his best friend, Ringo, a slave. Their friendship transcends, as much as is possible in a slave society, the confines of race: “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny “Granny” just like I did, until maybe he wasn’t a nigger any more or maybe I wasn’t a white boy any more, the two of us neither” (9). Their friendship is one reason this book is sometimes labeled unrealistic. Though he is described as more intelligent than Bayard, Ringo never openly bridles at his slave status. When the other slaves flee to the North during the war, Ringo stays with the family, perhaps because he is considered one of the family. As the two boys play at war and idolize the colonel, this section takes on the humorous quality of Mark TWAIN’s tall-tale fiction, especially when they kill a Yankee’s horse and hide together from the irate officer underneath Granny’s full skirt. The grandmother, Rose Millard, also takes on a heroic quality. During the war, she develops a scheme to get mules from the Union Army with forged documents. She distributes the mules to her neighbors to help them work their devastated land but winds up getting involved with some scalawags, and it is here that the tone of the book becomes darker. One of the scalawags, a man named Grumby, murders Granny. In the section titled “Vendee,” 15-year-old Bayard sets out to avenge her death. He kills Grumby, and he and Ringo nail the man’s body to the door of the old cotton compress, cut off his right hand, and place it on Granny’s grave. Faulkner portrays an ordered and traditional society brought to chaos and lawlessness by war. Once-loyal servants desert their masters; women,

UNVANQUISHED, THE 1299

such as Granny, must take on the roles normally played by men; men kill ladies, who ought to be protected; and boys commit grisly acts of vengeance. In the section titled “Skirmish at Sartoris,” we find that Drusilla is another woman driven to unconventional behavior during the war. After her fiancé dies at Shiloh, Drusilla “had deliberately tried to unsex herself” (131) in order to take an active role in the war. She dresses as a soldier and rides in John Sartoris’s troop. When the war ends and she continues to live at Sartoris’s estate, not as a lover but as an extra hand, Aunt Louisa, Drusilla’s mother, is scandalized by the impropriety of the situation and demands that Colonel Sartoris marry her. Though they are not in love, they agree to marry to appease their female relations. As Drusilla and John Sartoris ride into town to be wed, they interrupt an election organized by two carpetbaggers, the Burdens, to elect former slave Cash Benbow as U.S. Marshal. Acting on the wishes of the white citizens of Jefferson, John shoots and kills the Burdens and gives Drusilla the ballot box to take back to the house. At Sartoris’s house, they hold a sham election in which George Wyatt, a former soldier under Colonel Sartoris, writes out all the ballots. In all the commotion, Drusilla and John had forgotten to get married, much to the dismay of Aunt Louisa. The marriage is finally performed by a minister summoned to the house. The final section, “An Odor of Verbena,” begins when Bayard Sartoris, away at law school, receives the news that his father has been shot by a political opponent, Ben Redmond, in Jefferson. Bayard rides back to Jefferson with Ringo, who had been sent to summon him and who offers to help him kill Redmond. Bayard refuses all who offer to exact vengeance for him, and through his introspection, the reader sees that Bayard has matured from the 15-year-old who unquestioningly killed Grumby: “At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were” (148). Through a flashback the reader learns about some of the situation’s complexity. Bayard is in love with Drusilla, his stepmother, who is only eight years his senior. Her feelings for John had never been more than admiration, and she marries him only for the sake of appear-

ances. When, the summer before his father’s death, he kisses Drusilla, Bayard is compelled by honor to tell his father. John, however, is so preoccupied with his political plans that he either doesn’t fully comprehend or doesn’t care. The characters compare Sartoris’s dream of building a railroad to Thomas Sutpen’s design, which is the subject of Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Unlike Sutpen, however, John Sartoris wants to improve the whole community, not just his own family. When Bayard arrives at his father’s house after learning of his father’s murder, Drusilla greets him with two dueling pistols. Obsessed with honor and yearning for her days as a soldier, Drusilla wishes she could avenge her husband’s death, but because the war is over, she is constrained by conventional feminine behavior. Although he says nothing, Drusilla senses that Bayard has no plans to kill Redmond, and she dismisses him contemptuously. But Bayard is not a coward. Perhaps he carries out what he sees as his father’s last wishes, uttered the previous summer: “I’m tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end” (159). Bayard walks into Redmond’s office unarmed and allows Redmond to fire at and purposefully miss him twice. Redmond then boards a train and leaves Jefferson forever. Cleanth Brooks says, “The Unvanquished is a novel about growing up—it is the story of an education” (84), and this scene with Redmond is Bayard’s initiation into manhood. Unlike the boy of 12 in the book’s opening section, this man no longer romanticizes violence. The novel ends when Bayard returns to the house and discovers Drusilla has left Jefferson to live with relatives in Montgomery. She has left on his pillow a sprig of the verbena she always wears, in effect retracting the harsh words she spoke to him earlier and commemorating all they lost.

SOURCES Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. Creighton, Joanne V. William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision: The Snopes Trilogy, “The Unvanquished” and “Go Down, Moses.” Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1977. Faulkner, William. The Unvanquished. 1934. London: Penguin Books, 1970. Betina Entzminger

1300 UPDIKE, JOHN

UPDIKE, JOHN (JOHN HOYER UPDIKE) (1932– ) John Updike is one of America’s most prolific fictional chroniclers. Among his numerous awards are a National Book Award in 1964 for The Centaur and a National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 1998. Author of more than 20 novels, nearly 20 volumes of poetry, more than 20 volumes of collected short stories, and 15 books of essays, he is internationally known for his Rabbit series—RABBIT, RUN (1960), RABBIT REDUX (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—a tetralogy that follows high school athletic star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom through four decades of a changing American social and sexual landscape. Rabbit Is Rich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982; Rabbit at Rest won another Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Award in 1990. John Updike is repeatedly praised for his perceptive insights and ability to evoke absurdity, irony, helplessness, and joy in lyrical, rhythmic prose that is rich with metaphor. Nearly all his work involves Americans who attempt to reconstruct lives that have become shabby and meaningless; he typically writes about middle-class suburbanites whose lives mirror the cultural angst and commonplace joys of the last 50 years. His settings most resemble those of his Pennsylvania childhood (in his novels, the fictional Olinger, Pennsylvania) or his adult life in Ipswich, Massachusetts, his home for many years. John Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania, to Wesley Russell Updike, a high school teacher, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, a writer. He married Mary Entwistle Pennington in 1953, the year before he received his bachelor’s degree (summa cum laude) from Harvard. (The marriage lasted until 1977, when they divorced and Updike married Martha Ruggles Bernhard.) After graduation, Updike spent two years working at the New Yorker—to which he would contribute poetry and short fiction for four decades—and then published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, in 1959. Set in the future, it describes the deplorable state of elderly people in a welfare state. The Centaur (1963), paralleling the mythic relationship between Chiron and Prometheus, portrays a high school teacher and his son; their rapport is based on Updike’s adolescent relationship with his own father. It

was followed by Of the Farm (1965), based on Updike’s relationship with his mother. Couples (1968) portrays marital infidelity among 10 couples in a Massachusetts town. With Rabbit, Run, Updike received both popular and critical acclaim. The novel introduces Rabbit Angstrom and details his marriage to Janice, his infidelity, and his vague feeling that life has deteriorated since the glory days of his high school basketball stardom. In Rabbit Redux, set in the turbulent 1960s, Janice and Rabbit have decided to remain married despite their mutual infidelities, particularly Rabbit’s relationship with a young hippie woman. Updike moves to the 1970s, with its excesses and oil crises, in Rabbit Is Rich. Rabbit now owns a Toyota dealership. He finally dies in Rabbit at Rest. The Coup (1978), a dark satiric comedy, received excellent reviews. Unusual for Updike, the novel is set in an emerging African nation governed by a dictator amid political and social turmoil. The Witches of Eastwick (1984) involves a humorous portrayal of modern witchcraft and demonic possession as practiced by suburban women in Rhode Island. Drawing on Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s The SCARLET LETTER, Updike wrote three novels that examine the classic lovers’ triangle from the perspective of the shamed Hester Prynne’s illicit clergyman lover (A Month of Sundays [1975]); from her cuckolded husband (Roger’s Version [1986]); and, finally, the woman’s viewpoint (S. [1988]). Memories of the Ford Administration (1992) involves academic scandal and a reminiscing history professor; Brazil (1994) reworks in contemporary times and tones the legendary medieval love story of Tristram and Iseult. In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) traces four generations of the Wilmot family; their deterioration mirrors that of the increasingly vulgar consumer culture until they begin to reawaken to their diminished spirituality. In 1997, Updike published Toward the End of Time, a futuristic 21st-century novel set in the aftermath of a nuclear war with China; it features an old man in Massachusetts who recalls his youth. John Updike lives with his wife at Beverly Farms in Massachusetts. His most recent novels include Gertrude and Claudius (2000), focusing on Hamlet’s mother and her second husband; Seek My Face (2002); and Villages (2004), where 75-year-old Owen Mackenzie reflects on

U.S.A. TRILOGY

all the women he has known in Willow, Pennsylvania, where he was reared, and Middle Falls, Connecticut, where he lived as an adult. Several of Updike’s novels have been selected for the screen: Couples was purchased by United Artists in 1969; Rabbit, Run was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1970; and director George Miller’s movie The Witches of Eastwick in 1987 was loosely based on Updike’s novel of the same title.

NOVELS Brazil. New York: Knopf, 1994. The Centaur. New York: Knopf, 1963. The Coup. New York: Knopf, 1978. Couples. New York: Knopf, 1968. Gertrude and Claudius. New York: Knopf, 2000. The Indian, Blue Cloud. Marvin, S.D.: Abbey, 1971. In the Beauty of the Lilies. New York: Knopf, 1996. Marry Me: A Romance. New York: Knopf, 1976. Memories of the Ford Administration. New York: Knopf, 1992. A Month of Sundays. New York: Knopf, 1975. Of the Farm. New York: Knopf, 1965. The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Knopf, 1959. Rabbit at Rest. New York: Knopf, 1990. Rabbit Is Rich. New York: Knopf, 1981. Rabbit Redux. New York: Knopf, 1971. Rabbit, Run. New York: Knopf, 1960. Roger’s Version. New York: Knopf, 1986. S. New York: Knopf, 1988. Seek My Face. New York: Knopf, 2002. Toward the End of Time. New York: Knopf, 1997. Villages. New York: Knopf, 2004. The Witches of Eastwick. New York: Knopf, 1984.

SOURCES Aldridge, John W. Time to Murder and Create: The Contemporary Novel in Crisis. New York: McKay, 1966. Bloom, Harold, ed. John Updike: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Boswell, Marshall. John Updike’s Rabbit Tetralogy: Mastered Irony In Motion. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Broer, Lawrence R., ed. Rabbit Tales: Poetry and Politics in John Updike’s Rabbit Novels. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. De Bellis, Jack. John Updike: A Bibliography, 1967–1993. Foreword by Updike. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. Boston: Twayne, 1972. Revised edition, 1984.

1301

Greiner, Donald J. Adultery in the American Novel: Updike, James, Hawthorne. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. ———. John Updike’s Novels. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1984. Hunt, George. John Updike and the Three Great Secret Things. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1980. Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. Miller, D. Quentin. John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Neary, John. Something and Nothingness: The Fiction of John Updike and John Fowles. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. Newman, Judie. John Updike. New York: St. Martin’s, 1988. Plath, James, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. ———. Updike’s Version: Rewriting “The Scarlet Letter.” Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Singh, Sukhbir. The Survivor in Contemporary American Fiction: Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Delhi, India: B. R. Publishing, 1991. Thorburn, David, and Howard Eiland, eds. John Updike: A Collection of Critical Essays. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Trachtenberg, Stanley, ed. New Essays on “Rabbit, Run.” Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Updike, John. Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. New York: Knopf, 1989. Uphaus, Suzanne Henning. John Updike. New York: Ungar, 1980. Yerkes, James, ed. John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999.

OTHER Audio Interview with John Updike. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/johnupdike. Accessed September 22, 2005. Books and Writers. John Updike. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/updike.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

U.S.A. TRILOGY JOHN DOS PASSOS (1930, 1932, 1936) Composed of The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932), and The Big Money (1936), John DOS PASSOS’S U.S.A. stands alongside James T.

1302 U.S.A. TRILOGY

FARRELL’s Studs Lonigan trilogy as one of the most important works of American literature to come out of the 1930s. Rarely read today or discussed in classrooms, U.S.A. has often been lumped together with the proletarian literature of its time and thus is seen more as a sociohistorical or political document. Certainly, Dos Passos’s trilogy is informed by leftist politics and by the radicalization he underwent during and after his involvement with the Sacco-Vanzetti case, but to dismiss it on such grounds is to oversimplify the novels. Not one book of the trilogy ends in some kind of triumphant message of socialism, working-class revolution, or even national unity. Even the paragraph-long description of what U.S.A. is, found at the beginning of each novel, struggles to articulate a unified vision and instead reveals how disparate and fractured the country is. Indeed, fragmentation is one of the dominant themes in the novels and is reflected in their content and style. Dos Passos’s previous novel, Manhattan Transfer (1925), provided him with the chance to experiment with a fragmented, modernist style and with multiple narratives, both tactics intended to mirror the chaotic and disorienting nature of the urban fabric in which the characters find themselves. In some ways, the urban environment of Manhattan Transfer develops a life of its own and comes to have more power to effect change than the characters do. This kind of situation, a remnant of literary naturalism, where static characters are dwarfed by larger forces, continues in the trilogy where not only characters but also the narrative structures themselves are determined by historical forces and events. The 42nd Parallel traces America from the Spanish-American War until its entry into World War I; Nineteen Nineteen (1932) concerns itself with the war and its aftermath; and The Big Money depicts the hedonistic materialism of the 1920s. Furthermore, the discontinuous narratives of the 12 main characters are invariably influenced and interrupted by historical information, whether it be in the form of the newsreels, the biographies, or the stream-ofconsciousness Camera Eye sections. Historical forces come to overshadow the lives of the characters and the language structures used to give form to history invariably fall short. The final Camera Eye section may

state that “we have only words against” and imply perhaps that words can be potent weapons for truth, but the biography section that follows, that of Samuel Insull, ends with “thousands of ruined investors, at least so the newspapers said, who had lost their last savings sat crying over the home editions at the thought of how Mr. Insull had suffered.” Language does not necessarily lead to enlightenment, and the form in which it is framed can be manipulated in order to deceive. Like FITZGERALD’s stories of Jazz Age dissipation, the U.S.A. trilogy paints a bleak portrait, made especially so because the world depicted here is not necessarily one of disintegration but one where repeated patterns prevent both progression and regression. The young man who walks by himself in search of a job at the beginning of the trilogy is there at the end, in the somewhat different form of Vag, who has been promised opportunity by his society yet finds himself still without a job. In fact, nearly all the characters in the narratives—even those who die, such as Eveline and Joe Williams—are static. J. Ward Moorehouse, who has achieved material success in The Big Money, remains essentially the same exploitative personality who appeared in The 42nd Parallel. This applies as well to minor characters such as Doc Bingham, who by the end has substituted his pornographic books for patent medicines but remains a huckster, making money on false promises. The narratives themselves are static, episodic and aimless, devoid of the elements of conventional plot structure. No profound epiphanies or grand realizations occur, and more often than not characters repeat their mistakes. Moreover, the biographies depict types embodied again and again in various historical figures. The ruthless capitalist, for example, appears in many guises, as J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Samuel Insull, but they are all essentially the same story, just variations on a theme. Dos Passos thus presents history as cyclical, as a series of repeated patterns, like watching figures on Keats’s “Grecian Urn.” For the 12 characters whose lives are governed by such larger forces, then, history itself becomes a trap. In this way, the newsreels, biographies, and Camera Eyes can be viewed as structural reflections of Dos Passos’s thematic aims. The patterns of fragmented facts, ironic commentary, and stream-of-consciousness, as well as

U.S.A. TRILOGY

the concerns about capitalism, war, and injustice, appear again and again, their repetition occurring because history fails to resolve these concerns and achieve closure. Toward the end of the trilogy, in The Camera Eye (50), the narrator announces in response to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti that “all right we are two nations” and says in bitter resignation that “we stand defeated America.” It is appropriate, therefore, in cyclical fashion, that Dos Passos should wind up the trilogy where he began, with a case that brings only despair and defeat, echoes numerous other stories of injustice told throughout the three novels, and reveals a U.S.A. fractured once again. The Big Money does not end with a satisfying, resolved closure but with a simple state-

1303

ment—“a hundred miles down the road”—that looks to an ever-receding horizon, an unreachable destination.

SOURCES Colley, Iain. Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Hook, Andrew, ed. Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Maine, Barry, ed. Dos Passos, the Critical Heritage. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988. Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. Rosen, Robert C. John Dos Passos, Politics and the Writer. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981. Monty Kozbial Ernst

C

VD

V. THOMAS PYNCHON (1963)

Thomas PYNCHON’s first novel, V., published in 1963, contains more than 200 character names and a dizzying array of plots; nevertheless, it focuses primarily upon two narrative threads. The first is the story of Benny Profane, a drifter looking for meaning in contemporary (1950s) America. The second features Herbert Stencil, a privileged European drifting around the European-American world searching for meaning attached to a reference in his father’s journal: a woman called, simply, V. The two narrative threads intertwine as Profane and Stencil meet as part of a group of young people in New York called The Whole Sick Crew. By means of their struggles for meaning, Pynchon is able to draw attention to the problem of the unreliability of history and the impossibility of arriving at stable, reliable knowledge. As the novel begins, Benny Profane has just left the navy and is working as a day laborer. One of the odd jobs Profane takes is as a night guard at Anthroresearch Associates, where he strikes up an imaginary conversation with “SHOCK (synthetic human object, casualty kinematics)” and “SHROUD (synthetic human, radiation output determined)” (285). Profane argues with SHROUD that the robots are not human but merely “masquerading as a human being” (295). SHROUD responds: Of course. Like a human being. Now remember, right after the war, the Nuremberg war trials? Remember the photographs of Auschwitz?

Thousands of Jewish corpses, stacked up like those poor car-bodies. Schlemiel. It’s already started. “Hitler did that. He was crazy.” Hitler, Eichmann, Mengele. Fifteen years ago. Has it occurred to you there may be no more standards for crazy or sane, now that it’s started? (295). In a world without standards for sanity, Profane is unable to establish clearly a meaning for himself or others, leaving him feeling essentially passive and inanimate. However, it is Profane’s real human life as a “schlemiel,” in all its contingency, that effectively denies his mechanization and asserts his animateness. Herbert Stencil, who speaks of himself in the third person, is the son of a British Foreign Office man, Sidney Stencil. Herbert is born “in 1901, the year Victoria died” (52) and raised without a mother whose existence remains a mystery. “No facts on the mother’s disappearance. Died in childbirth, ran off with someone, committed suicide: some way of vanishing painful enough to keep Sidney from ever referring to it in all the correspondence to his son which is available. The father died under unknown circumstances in 1919 while investigating the June Disturbances in Malta” (52). His obsession with learning the truth about V., which he pursues “for no other reason than that V. was there to track down” (55), allows him to live almost entirely in “the network of white halls in his own brain” (53). Here he turns vague correspondences with his father’s journal into the rationale for his life, seeking, and as often as

1304

V. 1305

not, manufacturing connections. These plots about his history form what critic Tony Tanner calls the novel’s “historical episodes,” but because these histories are based on largely unreliable data and Stencil’s consistently faulty inductive analysis, Pynchon is able to draw attention to the fictive elements of history. Thus while the central question of these “historical episodes” is “What is V.?” the novel provides no answer. Appearances of the V.-symbol proliferate in the novel, but the letter V is most consistently attached to the various appearances of a female figure. We meet Victoria Wren in chapter 7, a beautiful young woman whose life has, at the age of 19, become a series of affairs with wealthy and powerful men whom she uses and discards. “At age nineteen she had crystallized into a nun-like temperament pushed to its most dangerous extreme. Whether she had taken the veil or not, it was as if she felt Christ were her husband and that the marriage’s physical consummation must be achieved through imperfect, mortal versions of himself ” (167). The central plot of chapter 7 is the theft by a group of Venezuelan revolutionaries and a few Florentines of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, the painting representing a European male notion of female beauty and love. As the chapter develops, a contrast emerges between Botticelli’s ideal of beauty and that of Victoria Wren, whose beauty masks a lust for power exemplified by her adherence to Machiavelli’s assertion in The Prince of the importance of virtue, a term variously defined by Machiavelli but understood by Victoria Wren to mean individual agency. Victoria’s cruelty, her distance from the savagery of her world, is seen in the comb that she wears in her hair: a depiction of five crucified figures. While the Venezuelans riot, Victoria watches dispassionately: Her face betrayed no emotion. It was as if she saw herself embodying a feminine principle, acting as complement to all this bursting, explosive male energy. Inviolate and calm, she watched the spasms of wounded bodies, the fair of violent death, framed and staged, it seemed, for her alone in that tiny square. From her hair the heads of five crucified also looked on, no more expressive than she. (290)

The suggestion of inanimateness in this passage, the notion that Victoria is not quite human, is carried over to the next appearance of a woman in Paris in the 1920s. The woman is involved in a ballet (based on the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, a ballet whose first performance in Paris caused a riot); she takes the 15-year-old Melanie l’Heurmaudit (the surname translating to “damned hour”) as her lover and employs her as the human sacrifice in a ballet employing automata as handmaidens. This mixture of the human and the mechanical corresponds to the woman herself, having had mechanical parts fitted into her body, replacing the natural human parts. At the first performance of the ballet, Melanie, the human sacrifice, is impaled and dies on stage. “Of the woman, her lover, nothing further was seen” (414). She seems to reappear in the 1940s in Valletta, Malta, as recounted in the diary of the Maltese poet, Fausto Maijstral in chapter 11. Here she appears as the Bad Priest who is trapped under a fallen beam during a German bombing raid. As she lies dying, children remove her clothing, discovering for the first time that the priest is a woman. One of the items the children take from her seems to be a comb like the one with the crucified figures worn by Victoria Wren. However, Pynchon distributes this clue between two boys, one finding “an ivory comb” and the other “a twocolor Crucifixion” in the form of a tattoo, thereby calling this connection into doubt. Furthermore, this woman’s body is young, so it does not seem possible that she is Victoria Wren, unless the various mechanical objects incorporated into the body of the woman in chapter 14 included sufficient cosmetic changes to allow a woman of some 60-odd years to appear youthful. But as we struggle to connect these clues, we are again undone: None leads reliably to a truth. As this story comes to us through Maijstral’s “Confessions,” and these from Stencil, all of the appearances of women who might be the lady V. are dubious. A central idea in V. is the impossibility of reliable knowledge. As Melvyn New writes, “Pynchon’s V. leads one quite readily into an examination of the critical process because it is so profoundly concerned with the human need to order fragments. While Herbert Stencil searches for clues to the meaning of the woman V., we, as readers, parallel his activity” (New, 399). We search

1306 VALIS

for a reliable meaning to emerge and satisfy our expectation of closure, but the frustration we feel at the failure of the novel to provide certainty places us side-by-side with Stencil and Profane. As Stencil creates conspiratorial connections, there develops “a relationship between making fictions and imagining conspiracies. The difference is between consciousness in control of its own inventions, and consciousness succumbing to its inventions until they present themselves as perceptions” (Tanner, 52). For Stencil, his imaginings become as real as perceptions; consequently, his histories are irretrievably flawed. Stencil’s histories are not accurate in any reliable sense; rather they are interpretations of stories about the past. Richard Patteson writes, “If anything is clear in Pynchon, it is that every interpretational foray . . . leads inevitably to another version” (Patteson, 307). Pynchon draws attention to the role of invention in the creation of history, blurring the distinction between history and fiction. As Maarten Van Delden asserts, since “it is impossible to distinguish in any consistent or meaningful way between history and fiction . . . writers may now regard the past as a largely unmarked terrain upon which they can freely impose their own designs” (Van Delden, 133). Pynchon’s novel becomes, in part, a commentary on the ways we create meaning. This commentary allows Pynchon to question those historical truths that have dominated modern European thought and its hierarchical power structures. The truths upon which Stencil’s father’s generation built its power can no longer be sustained. Stencil’s and Profane’s failed quests for external meaning point to the failure of attempting to construct absolute truths. Readers are left in the same state as Stencil and Profane: We cannot find a clear meaning either in the novel or in the world. We have to accept contingency; we have to be satisfied with whatever meanings we can assemble for ourselves.

SOURCES New, Melvyn. “Profane and Stenciled Texts: In Search of Pynchon’s V.,” Georgia Review 33 (1979): 395–412. Patteson, Richard F. “How True a Text? Chapter Three of V. And ‘Under the Rose,’ ” Southern Humanities Review 18, no. 4 (Fall 1984): 299–308. Pynchon, Thomas. V. 1963. New York: Harper, 1989.

Tanner, Tony. “Caries and Cabals.” In Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz, 49–65. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. Van Delden, Maarten. “Modernism, the New Criticism, and Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” Novel 23 (1990): 117–136. Alan W. Brownlie

VALIS PHILIP K. DICK (1981)

Valis is this prolific science fiction writer’s masterpiece. It represents DICK’s attempt to use fictional narrative as a way of making sense of visionary experiences he had undergone in February and March 1974, whose dubious significance he had spent eight years and over 2 million words in his journal commentaries, “Exegesis,” trying to comprehend. These experiences began with a visitation, recorded in the novel. A mesmerizingly beautiful black-haired girl (a recurring motif in his writing that is usually identified with desire and torment) delivers a prescription of pain killers for an impacted wisdom tooth. His attention is drawn to the centerpiece of her gold necklace, a fish, which she identifies as a sign used by early Christians. This seems to trigger subsequent episodes of communications from “one or more archetypes” who he felt “had taken him over” with the intention of waking him out of spiritual sleep and compelling him to remember what he had always been genetically programmed to remember: his celestial origins—the fact that he is “in this world in a thrown condition, but . . . not of this world” (Dick quoted in Sutin, 210). Reflecting an ironic awareness of his cognitive and emotional bipolarity, Dick splits himself in the novel between two alter egos, a troubled writer named Philip Dick and his even more disturbed friend, Horselover Fat (a bilingual pun: phil [Greek, “love”], hippos [Greek, “horse”], dich [German, “thick”]). Fat, like the author himself, receives coded pictographic revelations beamed from “Vast Active Living Intelligence System” (acronymically, VALIS)—who is sometimes identified with Sophia, the female emanation of Divine Wisdom in Gnostic theology, and sometimes with an artificial intelligence or advanced alien form beaming prophetic messages from the future. Speculating that temporal planes are layered, simultaneous, and interpenetrating, Fat (again, like the author) comes to believe that he

VALIS 1307

may have been contacted by immortal Christian resistors to the tyranny of the Roman Empire (“the Empire never ended”), who had entered Watergate America to help bring down Richard Nixon. (At the time of these experiences, indeed for many years prior to them, Dick had been living in increasingly paranoid panic that he was either being groomed by the KGB or having his patriotic loyalty tested by the FBI because of his growing popularity among left-wing intellectuals due to his career-long satirizing of capitalism and his more recent attacks on Nixon.) Fat further believes that despite the hegemony of the Black Iron Prison in which “everyone dwelt without realizing it,” the birth of the spirit can occur whenever the “plasmate” of the divine replicates itself in the human cortex as a “homoplasmate” (53ff). This accords with Dick’s avowal in his “Exegesis”: The Savior woke me temporarily, & temporarily I remembered my true nature & task, through the saving gnosis [i.e., a mystically revealed knowledge of origins], but I must be silent, because of the true, secret, transtemporal early Christians at work, hidden among us as ordinary humans. I briefly became one of them, Siddhartha himself (the Buddha or enlightened one)” (Dick quoted by Sutin 1995, 288). Synthesizing Dick’s wide reading in world mythology, Gnostic theosophy, Christian and Jewish mysticism, Buddhism, and German philosophy, and suffused with pop culture references (particularly, music and TV), Valis epitomizes his conviction that “the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum” (256). Many of the preoccupations that had always typified Dick’s are reworked: the machinations of galactic puppet masters, their clandestine infiltration of consciousness by way of popular culture (the words to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” figures significantly in the “Exegesis”), the disintegration of psychological structures in the encounter with ambiguities generated in equal measure by the consensual hallucination manufactured by media elites and by cultic counter-hegemonic resistance. Plot elements are also recycled: the shabby, humdrum life of a “little guy” is again totally disrupted upon the

discovery that he has always been implicated, without knowing it, in an intricate, massive and sustained illusion. Formerly hidden forces, agencies, networks are suddenly revealed, whose magnitude and scope exceed the individual’s capacity to deny them. Precisely because nightmarish disclosures cannot be rationalized away in the hope of maintaining the illusion of autonomy, Dick’s conspiracy narratives function simultaneously as casestudies of paranoia and as allegorical critiques satirizing the totalitarian tendencies of postwar American social formations. But in Valis and the subsequent novels Radio Free Albemuth and The Divine Invasion, which form a kind of trilogy, these plot elements are directed more explicitly to a Gnostic project of anamnesis, the reversal of forgetfulness in regard to ontological and metaphysical reality. This process is far from comforting. The exposure of phantasmatic “paraworlds” (that is, alternative realities) that preclude systematic comprehension torments Dick’s protagonists, who, unable to live with ambiguity and doubt, become ever more complicit in their own victimization. Obsessively picking at the scab of enigma, they restlessly scratch at their lives for clues and traces of unseen powers. Dick’s protagonists (like Dick himself in the “Exegesis”) proceed to construct more and more elaborate explanatory models in compensatory response to profound feelings of personal insubstantiality and impotence. By blurring the demarcation between “actual” events and psychic processes, and thereby surrendering cognitive suppositions to endless permutation, Dick’s destabilizing novels of epistemological quandary throw into question all criteria for establishing credibility or warrant for credulity and future action. Sanitythreatening confusions multiply with each ostensible verification of a hypothesis. The paranoid’s search for an unimpeachable founding premise is tinged for comic effect with the self-reflexive, endlessly digressive thought processes typically conduced by certain pharmaceuticals Dick was known to consume in legendary quantities. Dick parodies (or does he?) the paranoid’s determined effort to interconnect seemingly incongruent phenomena as if they were systematized signs; thus, for example, a TV ad for Food King segues to a Felix the Cat cartoon, thereby producing King Felix—code for Christ the Savior (252). And, for all

1308

VAN DINE, S. S.

its desperation (Fat tries to commit suicide in chapter 4, just as Dick did many times), the book can carnivalize that desperation: “ ‘Come to me, artificially accelerated cortical-development idea,’ he said in prayer.” Thus, the novel self-reflexively dramatizes, in alternately comic and melancholy tones, Dick’s recognition that the fictions and commentaries inspired by his experiences were probably at one and the same time the overwrought speculative jags of a manic-depressive, paranoid, suicidal, sometimes quasi-psychotic, pillpopper and authentic spiritual meditations on intimations sent by the divine to redeem him, and those who he could reach, from life-long delusion, sin, and spiritual wretchedness. Like their creator, Dick’s protagonists live in a universe of intimations, visitations, and epiphanies. And like him, they seem to be inspired by the thought of being conspired against insofar as conspiracy-thinking reenchants existence. While Valis can take its place in the American literary tradition that seeks to transmogrify (monstrously deform) metaphysical speculation, the tradition of MELVILLE, the later TWAIN, Flannery O’CONNOR, and PYNCHON, Dick’s idiosyncratic exegetical commentaries put him in the company of other eccentric American autodidacts: Charles Fort’s assurance that “we are property,” Elijah Muhammad’s revelation that the white race was devolved from the black by a cosmic “big head scientist,” and L. Ron Hubbard’s claim that humans derive from incorporeal entities who became entrapped and selfforgetful while playing at “the game” of incarnation.

SOURCES Dick, Philip K. Valis. London: Gollancz, 2001. Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2003. Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony Books, 1989. ———, ed. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. New York: Vintage, 1995. David Brottman

VAN DINE, S. S. (WILLARD HUNTINGTON WRIGHT) (1888–1939) Art critic, newspaper and magazine editor (including Smart Set [1912–14]), fiction writer, creator of the detective Philo

Vance, and inventor of “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” Willard Huntington Wright wrote all but one of his novels under the pseudonym of S. S. Van Dine. Among his most popular novels were The Benson Murder Case (1926) and The CANARY MURDER CASE (1927). Willard Huntington Wright was born in 1888 in Charlottesville, Virginia; although little information is available about his family, they were reportedly wellto-do. Wright was educated at a number of schools, colleges, and universities in the United States and abroad, and graduated from Pomona College at age 16. After working with the Los Angeles Times and Smart Set, Wright published his first novel, The Man of Promise, in 1916, a novel well reviewed by H. L. Mencken, who had taken the reins as editor of Smart Set. Autobiographical in nature, it describes a youth painfully aware of the intelligence level and talent that separated him from his contemporaries. Mencken found in it a touch of “the Greek spirit” and an “appeal to the intellect,” concluding that “such novels are as rare in the United States as good music” (Mencken, 491). Two years later, Wright suffered a nervous breakdown exacerbated by his dependence on alcohol and drugs. During his convalescence he read some 2,000 detective novels, publishing his own, The Benson Murder Case (1926), under the name S. S. Van Dine. Here he introduced Philo Vance, the erudite amateur sleuth who quotes philosophy and brings his intuition to the plodding facts of a crime scene. It made Van Dine an overnight sensation. According to critic Roger Rosenblatt, the uniqueness of the monocle-wearing Vance lies not in his snobbishness or intellect, but in the fact that “we are not permitted to like him” (Rosenblatt, 32); unlike Sherlock Holmes, Vance has no Watson; unlike Nero Wolfe, he has no Archie Goodwin. It is arguably this solitariness that makes him such a success, as he stands on the periphery of the action, he pays meticulous attention not only to detail but to the psychology of the players in the drama. As Michael E. Grost points out, “The Van Dine school sleuths” are recognizable by “the exhaustive search of both victims’ rooms and crime scenes; they query disinterested passersby who have tons of information to share; and they institute resourceful police inquiries for information” (Grost).

VENUS ENVY 1309

Willard Huntington Wright was married to Katharine Belle Boynton from 1907 until their divorce in 1930. He died of heart failure on April 11, 1939. The Winter Murder Case was published posthumously that same year. During Wright’s lifetime, numerous films were made of his Philo Vance novels.

NOVELS The Benson Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1926. The Bishop Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1929. The Canary Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1927. The Casino Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1934. The Dragon Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1934. The Garden Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1935. The Gracie Allen Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1938, published as The Smell of Murder. New York: Bantam, 1950. The Greene Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1928. I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now. New York: Scribner, 1929. The Kennel Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1933. The Kidnap Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1936. The Man of Promise. New York: Lane, 1916. The President’s Mystery Story. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935. The Scarab Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1930. The Winter Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1939.

SOURCES Mencken, H. L. “American Produces a Novelist,” Forum 55 (April 1916): 490–496. Rosenblatt, Roger. “S.S. Van Dine.” New Republic, 26 July 1975, pp. 32–34.

OTHER Grost, Michael E. Classic Mystery Home Page. Available online. URL: http://members.aol.com/MG4273/classics. htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

VENUS ENVY RITA MAE BROWN (1993)

Although Venus Envy could be read as a sequel to Rita Mae BROWN’s earlier work Rubyfruit Jungle, this novel tackles issues and characters that are vastly different. While Rubyfruit’s protagonist, Molly Bolt, deals with growing up as a confidently gay woman and struggles to complete her journey from poverty to artistic success, in Venus Envy we encounter a woman who risks all that has brought her social and material comfort in order to face her own fears concerning her sexuality. In this

sense, there couldn’t be a wider chasm between Molly and Frazier Armstrong. While Molly struggles against others, Frazier must ultimately confront herself. Venus Envy reads much like a comedy of errors, where misplaced partners search for their true match in love. The novel’s strong mythological undercurrent, represented by Frazier’s painting of the Greek deities, serves to reinforce this cast of characters whose actions often seem guided by the gods themselves. Left to their own devices, Frazier’s friends and relatives might have continued in their sometimes unhappy routine as part of a wealthy and rigidly structured society that often leaves little room for individual differences. The problem is that Frazier is very different, and when at the start of the novel she believes she is dying, she decides to make peace with her own conscience by writing a series of letters to family and friends, letters that not only reveal she is lesbian but that also detail her feelings toward them. In essence, the letters she sends before her doctor corrects the faulty diagnosis tell their recipients that life is too short to lie to ourselves and others, and that everyone is entitled to seek out happiness and pleasure in life. The way the message is conveyed is not necessarily good-natured: Frazier tells her on-off closeted lover Ann that she feels their relationship was like a “job,” and ends by stating: “[Y]ou are as sick as you are secret” (51). Convinced that both her father and brother are trapped in loveless marriages, Frazier encourages them to stand up for what they desire in life, even if—in her brother’s case—it means leaving what has become so familiar for an unknown future with another person. Finally, she scolds both her mother and her gay friend Billy for being cold in their relationships, and blatantly manipulating the love others felt toward them in order to achieve their own material and emotional ends. Needless to say, the letters hit hard, and the stage is set for Frazier herself to examine her relationships; after all, what has she done by writing the letters in what seem to be her final moments besides assuaging her own guilty conscience for not having stood up and voiced these feelings at a time when she would have had to face their consequences? In a stroke of what must be fate, Frazier’s condition goes from lung

1310

VIDAL, GORE

cancer to a bad bronchitis; the gods are surely playing a joke on her, especially when the letters have already been sent. The situations that arise from her letters force Frazier to explore her own feelings on truth, love, and taking one’s pleasure before it’s too late. In a short time, she finds out who her real friends and allies are. Who are her real family? The mother who has guided her through her social duties without contemplating Frazier’s own desires, or the apparently scatter-brained father who has allowed her to grow into her own character? Her gay friends Ann and Billy, who appear at social functions with “dates” of the opposite sex; or her outspoken assistant Mandy and Billy’s ex-boyfriend Kenny, who are not afraid to explore their own sexuality and encourage Frazier to do the same? Gradually, Frazier finds herself isolated by people she thought liked and respected her: social clubs, mothers who no longer want their daughters around her, and people who suddenly believe that their own reputation depends on Frazier’s sexual orientation. It is, to say the least, disconcerting for Frazier: What good has telling the truth done? Her family is falling apart, her friends have abandoned her, and she has become unpopular in her community. The uncomfortable meetings and tense social reunions escalate into hostility until it seems as if Frazier will succumb and surrender her newfound convictions. And then something extraordinary happens. In the lengthy mythological scene near the end, Frazier is transported to Mount Olympus, and more specifically to the realm of Venus and Mercury, carefree gods who don’t hesitate to play and fulfill their desires. There she experiences herself on a grander scale and looks down on her world with a combination of dismay and pity. How can she return when she has done so much harm? However, the gods will not let her give up so easily. Once she has seen herself and her surroundings from such a distance, they reason, she will be able to see her future path more clearly: “Remember, there are no separate solutions. There are only community solutions. You fight for your place in the community. It doesn’t matter that not everyone will accept you for yourself” (388). In other words, isolation does not bring about

change. And once Frazier gazes down and sees her father finally standing up to her mother, she realizes that she has inspired some change. After all, Frazier’s brother has also left his wife to be with the woman he really loves, and her friend Kenny has escaped Billy’s psychological abuse. With this realization, Frazier sees that “life is calling” and returns to earth uncertain of her future, but willing to confront whatever obstacles still stand in the way of her own fulfillment. Thus, Venus Envy challenges the reader to define pleasure and happiness: Do we approach them always in relation to what others can give us, or as something that needs to flow from ourselves first, in order to later share it with others? Rubyfruit Jungle dealt with our basic right to grow into a society as a full-fledged member, no matter our race, sex, social status, etc. As the next step, Venus Envy seeks a higher level of maturity, focusing on our need to experience all the physical and emotional joys that we cultivate through our honest relationship with ourselves and others.

SOURCE Venus Envy. New York: Bantam, 1993. Maria Luisa Antonaya

VIDAL, GORE (1925– )

Increasingly known today as the author of The City and the Pillar, the first American novel to focus on homosexuality, and for the satire Myra Breckinridge (1968), made into a film starring Mae West, Gore Vidal has long been esteemed for his achievements in the historical novel. He wrote about America in Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), and produced the more classical Julian (1964) and Creation (1981). In the 1950s, he also wrote three detective novels under the pseudonym of Edgar Box. With more than 20 novels, several successful stage and screen credits, and dozens of essays, Vidal is a versatile post–World War II writer with a biting wit. His acerbic commentaries on American social mores have appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, and he won a National Book Critics Circle Award for literary criticism in The Second American Revolution and Other Essays (1982).

VIDAL, GORE 1311

Gore Vidal was born Eugene Luther Vidal on October 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, to Eugene Vidal, an aeronautics instructor at West Point, and Nina Gore Vidal, a distant cousin of Senator Albert Gore. When Vidal was 10, his mother divorced his father, married Hugh Auchincloss, and moved her family to Merriewood, the Auchincloss estate in McLean, Virginia. Auchincloss then divorced her and married Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s mother, thereby connecting Vidal to the Kennedy family. In 1943, Vidal joined the U.S. Army Reserve Corps, in which he served as a warrant officer. While onboard a ship to the Aleutian Islands, he gathered material for his first novel, Williwaw (1946), an account of the squall’s effect on the ship’s crew and officers. With Williwaw (which means “a sudden, violent storm”), Vidal joined the ranks of such literary enfants terribles as Norman MAILER, who dominated the American cultural scene just after World War II. His name was often linked with other postwar prodigies: Truman CAPOTE, John Horn Burns, and James JONES, for instance. This desire to break the mold emerges again in his second novel, In a Yellow Wood (1947), when the protagonist, Robert Holton, chooses the “road not taken,” the title of the Robert Frost poem to which the title alludes. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), caused an immediate sensation. The protagonist, Jim Willard, longs to return to those halcyon days spent with his boyhood love, Bob Ford, but at their reunion many years later, Bob rejects him as a “queer,” and Jim rapes and kills Bob. Seventeen years later, Vidal revised the novel and amended the violent ending. During the 1950s, Vidal, determined to make money, wrote Hollywood and television screenplays, including adaptations of Henry JAMES’s The TURN OF THE SCREW, Ernest HEMINGWAY’s A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and Tennessee WILLIAMS’s Suddenly Last Summer. In the 1960s, he returned to novel writing. Julian chronicles the Roman emperor’s battle against Christianity, dramatizing his relationships with his fourth-century contemporaries; in Creation (1981), a grandson of Zoroaster interacts with such figures as Confucius and Buddha. Both novels exhibit Vidal’s use of satire and familiar detail, hallmarks of his historical novels. The

American sequence followed in the late 1960s and 1970s, the novels linked by the Schuyler/Sanford dynasty, descended from Aaron Burr, and chronicle the emergence of the modern United States. Burr and Lincoln are particularly admired by critics, both historical figures revealed and rendered human through the eyes of Charles Schemerhorn Schuyler, illegitimate son of Aaron Burr. In spite of Vidal’s enormous output, his penchant for demythologizing and lampooning American cultural icons was probably best and most humorously realized in Myra Breckinridge, a novel about a transsexual. The Twentieth Century-Fox film appeared in 1970, and Vidal published the sequel, Myron, in 1974. Critics and scholars are discovering that some of Vidal’s lesser known works deserve reexamination: The Season of Comfort (1949), Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1970), The Judgment of Paris (1965), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000). For decades, Gore Vidal lived and wrote in Salerno, Italy and Los Angeles. He now resides permanently in the Hollywood Hills.

NOVELS Burr. New York: Random House, 1973. The City and the Pillar. New York: Dutton, 1948. Revised edition. Published as The City and the Pillar Revised, 1965. Creation. New York: Random House, 1981. Dark Green, Bright Red. New York: Dutton, 1950. Duluth. New York: Random House, 1983. 1876. New York: Random House, 1976. Empire. New York: Random House, 1987. The Golden Age. New York: Broadway, 2000. Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s. New York: Random House, 1990. In a Yellow Wood. New York: Dutton, 1947. The Judgment of Paris. New York: Dutton, 1952. Revised edition, Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Julian. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Kalki. New York: Random House, 1978. Lincoln. New York: Random House, 1984. Messiah. New York: Dutton, 1954. Revised edition, Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Myra Breckinridge. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968. Myron. New York: Random House, 1974. A Search for the King: A Twelfth-Century Legend. New York: Dutton, 1950.

1312 VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, THE

The Season of Comfort. New York: Dutton, 1949. The Smithsonian Institution: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1998. Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Washington, D.C. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Williwaw. New York: Dutton, 1946. (Published in paperback as Dangerous Voyage, New York: Signet, 1953.)

UNDER PSEUDONYM EDGAR BOX; MYSTERIES Death before Bedtime. New York: Dutton, 1953. Death in the Fifth Position. New York: Dutton, 1952. Death Likes It Hot. New York: Dutton, 1954.

SOURCES Baker, Susan. Gore Vidal: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997. Dick, Bernard F. The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal. New York: Random House, 1974. Kaplan, Fred. Gore Vidal: A Biography. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Kiernan, Robert F. Gore Vidal. New York: Ungar, 1982. Parini, Jay, ed. Gore Vidal: Writer against the Grain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Stanton, Robert J., and Gore Vidal, eds. Views from a Window: Conversations with Gore Vidal. Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1980. Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1995. Weightman, John. The Concept of the Avant Garde: Explorations in Modernism. LaSalle, Ill.: Library Press, 1973. White, Ray Lewis. Gore Vidal. Boston: Twayne, 1968.

OTHER Audio Interview with Gore Vidal. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/gorevidal. Accessed September 22, 2005. Gore Vidal. Bohemian Ink. Available online. URL: http:// www.levity.com/corduroy/vidal.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY, THE FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1955) While much of the literary criticism on Flannery O’CONNOR’s complicated novel The Violent Bear It Away rightly focuses on religion, the novel also offers a strong indictment against formal education and its outcomes. The action shifts between Francis Tarwater’s burden to complete the religious work of his great-uncle, Mason Tarwater, who has died

when the story opens, and the struggle of Francis’s cousin, Rayber, a school teacher who conducts sociological research, to convince Francis of the possibilities of living a more modern and secular life. Mason Tarwater’s legacy to his nephew, Francis, is that he will become a prophet and baptize Rayber’s young son, Bishop. The story takes place alternatively between the Tarwaters’ home in the backwoods of Powderhead, Tennessee, and an unnamed city that functions both as Rayber and Bishop’s home and a symbol of the fallen city to the story’s self-declared prophets. The structure of the novel is complicated. The story begins with young Francis Tarwater digging the grave for his recently deceased great-uncle, Mason, but the reader gets to know Mason through flashbacks and Francis’s reflections of his life with the old man. Having been raised by his great-uncle from infancy, Francis learned his lessons at home rather than having attended school. “His uncle had taught him Figures, Reading, Writing, and History beginning with Adam expelled from the Garden and going on down through the Presidents to Herbert Hoover and on in speculation toward the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment” (4). Young Francis Marion Tarwater learns only those subjects that his great-uncle wants him to know, with an emphasis on religion, since the old man considers himself to be a prophet and agent of God. The novel includes scenes that show the desperate measures that Mason takes to kidnap Bishop in order to baptize him, urging Francis to complete this mission if the old man fails. Francis clearly recalls his great-uncle’s instructions: “ ‘If by the time I die,’ he had said to Tarwater, ‘I haven’t got him baptized, it’ll be up to you. It’ll be the first mission the Lord sends you’ ” (9). But the novel offers a complicated commentary on the place of religion in a person’s life. Francis Tarwater, who is only 14 years old when his great-uncle dies, questions the role of prophet that his great-uncle had played. That is, Francis recalls a trip to the city with Mason to meet with several lawyers in an attempt to transfer the title of the land on which they live. Young Tarwater challenges Mason’s motives for conducting such business in the name of religion. “Now I see what kind of prophet you are. Elijah would think a heap of you” (27). But Mason defends his actions. He focuses

VIRGINIA 1313

on the potential financial gain from the land while he denounces the city and what it represents. The incongruity of the old man’s speech and actions gives Francis pause. Although the burden to baptize Bishop falls to Francis, he struggles internally about his role as a prophet and battles questions about his faith. The interaction between Rayber and Francis highlights the novel’s most pressing questions about organized religion and formal education, and whether the two institutions complement each other in any way. Francis remembers Mason’s warnings about Rayber— and his invasive research in the area of social science: Where he wanted me was inside that school teacher magazine. He thought once he got me in there, I’d be as good as inside his head and done for and that would be that, that would be the end of it. Well, that wasn’t the end of it! Here I sit. And there you sit. In freedom. Not inside anybody’s head! (20) Clearly, the elder Tarwater envisioned Rayber’s research as a limited space that confined rather than liberated his research subjects. But young Tarwater is reminded by a friend that the old man limited his options as well. That is, Francis was denied community and agency and was prohibited from traveling to the city, and, therefore, the opportunity to sample its offerings: You could have been a city slicker for the last fourteen years. Instead, you been deprived of any company but his, you been living in a twostory barn in the middle of this earth’s bald patch, following behind a mule and plow since you were seven. And how do you know the education he give you is true to the facts? Maybe he taught you a system of figures nobody else uses? (46) The unnamed friend squarely asks “What is truth?” He calls into question the truth that Mason insisted on teaching Francis and, by extension, the truth that Rayber pursues in his research. The novel’s conclusion brings Rayber and Francis together—with Bishop serving as the innocent victim of the men’s competing belief systems. In a compli-

cated move that Francis may not understand himself, he drowns Bishop in a ritual baptism. Rayber stares at the pond from the window: He knew with an instinct as sure as the dull mechanical beat of his heart that he had baptized the child even as he drowned him, that he was headed for everything that the old man had prepared him for, that he moved off now through the black forest toward a violent encounter with his fate. (203) This violent encounter that takes the novel’s title into account refers to the stranger’s rape of Francis. Throughout the novel, the voice of the unnamed stranger prevails as an eerie motif. Finally, after Bishop’s complicated and upsetting death, Francis, exhausted and anxious, is picked up and raped by a stranger who drives along the road toward Powderhead. The end brings Francis Tarwater full circle— back to his Uncle Mason’s grave. His return is one of great change, however, for he enacted violence and violence is enacted upon him. Yet, he comes to understand his place in the world more clearly—with all of its complexity and potential.

SOURCES O’Connor, Flannery. The Violent Bear It Away. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955. Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. “Apocalypse of Self, Resurrection of the Double: Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away.” In Flannery O’Connor New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, 121–138. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Westling, Louise. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Carla Lee Verderame

VIRGINIA ELLEN GLASGOW (1913)

Many critics have described GLASGOW’s Virginia as the turning point in her prolific writing career. As Dorothy Scura notes, it is in Glasgow’s 10th novel that her ideas about “women and freedom” (40) come to the forefront and find expression for the first time in a female protagonist (30). Glasgow’s Virginia becomes both a

1314 VIRGINIA

psychological and literary battleground for the author’s conflicting ideas about womanhood. Glasgow juxtaposes many different images of women throughout her novel, always exposing the more pitiable characteristics of some by the more positive expressions of others. The innocent shyness and intellectual emptiness of Virginia Pendleton, for example, is cleverly contrasted with the strength and mental rigor of Susan Treadwell from the beginning pages of the novel, foreshadowing the law of natural selection that will determine each character’s fate. The older generation of the women of Dinwiddie represents various responses to the time-honored call of femininity. Both Lucy Pendleton and Belinda Treadwell answer the call in the expected manner by marrying and producing offspring. Lucy Pendelton, depicted as the worn, selfless, shell of a once beautiful and lively woman, garners pleasure from a selfmartyrdom to her husband and child, an inherited mode of thinking she will pass on to her daughter, Virginia. Once her husband dies and she feels that her daughter’s life is well established, Lucy Pendleton anxiously awaits death, having fulfilled her purpose in living. Similarly, Belinda Treadwell becomes paralyzed and ceases to “live” after she recognizes that she cannot reconcile the troubles of her marriage. The responses of both these women to their fates foreshadow Virginia’s tragic demise. As Phillip Atterberry points out, Virginia, like her mother and Belinda Treadwell, is “paralyzed in her capacity to understand or deal . . .” with her domestic troubles (126). The two women who do not receive proposals of marriage, Miss Priscilla Batte and Miss Willy, though decidedly wistful about not being able to fulfill what they feel is the call of the ages, manage to attain relative happiness. Priscilla Batte, the embodiment of the old order, clings to the traditional notions of the feminine ideal of her era by partaking in a form of surrogate motherhood. By reforming the minds of the new generation at the Academy for Young Ladies, “the only nice and respectable occupation which required neither preparation of mind or the considerable outlay of money,” Priscilla Batte proudly marries herself to the established principles of anti-intellectualism for women instilled by her ancestors (9). But Priscilla

Batte, in contrast to her contemporaries Lucy Pendelton and Belinda Treadwell, is spared the debilitating effects of marriage and childrearing. Priscilla, like these women, lives via her offspring, but Priscilla has the advantage of never “outliving her usefulness,” as will Lucy, Belinda, and eventually Virginia herself (390). Miss Pricilla has a seemingly endless supply of young in which to instill the age-old ideals of the era, and in fact it is only after the Academy has closed and she begins to witness the old law begin to crumble, that she begins to show her age. Miss Willy also achieves a similar degree of happiness via the antiquated notions of a woman’s utility. Miss Willy serves as the dressmaker for generations of women in Dinwiddie, and by putting a little of herself into her dresses and into the dreams of the young girls who wear them, she too is able to maintain that spring in her step that the other women find so enviable. Although there are women who have learned to be happy despite the limitations of tradition in the older generation, Glasgow’s conception of the free woman is more accurately represented in the next generation, through the person of Susan Treadwell. While Virginia Pendleton is a slave to the sacrificial notions of love and marriage instilled by maternal heritage, Susan Treadwell’s intellectual competence and energy are more admirable. Susan’s intellectualism is still dependent upon the societal constraints imposed upon women of the period, but she manages to take control of her destiny by marrying a man who does not threaten her intellectual freedom. Susan Treadwell’s marriage to John Henry Pendleton—the other TreadwellPendleton union in the novel—is successful perhaps because it mirrors Virginia’s marriage; in this case, however, the female retains mental autonomy. Susan, a realist, marries John Henry because of his goodness and with full awareness of his limitations. By marrying a man with a “safe, slow mind” and an “excellent heart” who drops out of school at the age of eight to care for his widowed mother, Susan reveals her understanding of what it takes to secure independence in the era in which she lives (33). In contrast to Susan, who characteristically enters marriage with open eyes, both Virginia Pendleton and Oliver Treadwell become victims of the sentimental

VIRGINIAN, THE 1315

visions of marriage predominant in the Victorian era. In the chapter entitled “White Magic,” Virginia falls madly in love with Oliver after just one lingering glance from across the street. From the moment Virginia happens upon a man her fancy can mold into the “object of worship” she has been taught to seek, she devotes herself entirely to this end (70). Oliver, for his part, marries Virginia because she “appeal[s] to the strongest part of him, which is not his heart, but his imagination” (117). Despite his noble intentions of reforming the old world of its imperfections, Oliver falls prey to the temptation of the conventional ideal of femininity and realizes it too late. While Susan Treadwell is the vision of a happy and intellectually liberated female at the end of Glasgow’s novel, Virginia is not treated as kindly. The ending of Glasgow’s sympathetic condemnation of the version of womanhood transmitted through the character of Virginia leaves her much as we find her at her story’s commencement—waiting patiently for the action of a male to determine her future. Virginia as the “classic ideal of her sex” (154) meets her tragic end because, unlike Susan’s, “her soul craves no adventure beyond the permissible adventure of being sought in marriage” (153).

SOURCES Atterberry, Phillip D. “The Framing of Glasgow’s Virginia,” Tennessee Studies in Literature (1995): 124–131. Glasgow, Ellen. Virginia. New York: Penguin, 1989. Scura, Dorothy M. “A Knowledge in the Heart: Ellen Glasgow, the Women’s Movement, and Virginia,” American Literary Realism 22 (1990): 30–43. Alicia Clay

VIRGINIAN, THE OWEN WISTER (1902)

Published in 1902, Owen WISTER’s The Virginian was reprinted 15 times within its first eight months and sold more than any other book during 1902–03 (Etulain, 11). Its popularity has been steady over the last hundred years. Hollywood has made four versions of The Virginian, including Ted Turner’s 2000 production (Graulich, 299). The novel has inspired dozens of formula westerns by authors such as Zane GREY and Max Brand (Etulain, 36). And it is still widely read and studied in college classrooms across the country. So what about this book

continues to interest both casual reader and scholar? The Virginian is certainly a romantic tale of the ultimate American folk hero: Wister’s “son of the soil” ascends from cowboy to foreman to wealthy landowner through hard work and natural ability; he repeatedly beats and finally kills the villain Trampas; and, of course, he marries the beautiful and spirited schoolmarm Molly Wood. But there is more to Wister’s western story than romance. The Virginian complicates, among other things, issues of race and gender; it provides historical and literary perspectives; and, as Melody Graulich and other scholars contend in Reading The Virginian in the New West, it “offers a stage for debating central issues for the next century” (XIII). Race is a complicated issue in Wister’s novel. Although the Virginian is a Southerner whose attitudes toward blacks appear in his trail songs, his—and Wister’s—attitudes toward Indians in the novel are more difficult to categorize. Absent for most of the story, Indians occasionally appear to sell food and wares to railroad passengers, and they listen with approval to the Virginian’s “frawgs” of Tulare, California, story (116, 123). But Indians don’t play a significant role until they ambush the Virginian halfway through the book. Wister builds up to the attack by positioning the Virginian and Balaam, his traveling companion, on a trail where Indians have been. Balaam seems nervous when they pass the remains of an Indian camp, but the Virginian is unconcerned. He assures Balaam the Indians “have gone on to visit their friends” (190). But just a few pages later, the Indians strike. Wister doesn’t describe the Indian attack; in fact, he doesn’t even explain the reason for it. After Molly discovers the wounded Virginian and takes him to safety, readers find out that “The Indians who had done this were . . . in military custody,” that they had come “unpermitted” from a southern reservation, and that they “perhaps had killed a trapper” in the mountains (212). Indians make convenient villains when Wister needs them, but the savage Indians disappear as suddenly as they appeared. Wister’s novel could be accused of both ignoring Native Americans and perpetuating negative stereotypical images of them. But the Indian reference directly following their attack of the Virginian complicates that reading. Ironically, the Virginian recovers

1316

VIRGINIAN, THE

from his wound under the warmth of Molly’s Navajo blanket. Indians aren’t simply bloodthirsty savages threatening the safety of the good white settlers: They make blankets “striped with . . . splendid zigzags of barbarity” that provide warmth, comfort, and safety (221). And suddenly, Indians aren’t just Indians; they’re Navajo Indians. While it is impossible to deny the book’s racism, it is a mistake to ignore the complex and interesting ways Wister deals with race. Equally ambiguous and interesting is The Virginian’s treatment of gender, class, land use, and religion. Wister’s depiction of these social issues is, according to Richard Etulain, a reflection of the cultural tensions of the Progressive Era (37). In fact it was personal and cultural tension that first sent Wister west. Owen Wister was a wealthy eastern gentleman whose friends included William Dean HOWELLS, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Theodore Roosevelt. Educated at Harvard, well-traveled, and talented, Wister’s first ambition was music composition. At the encouragement of his father, who wanted his son to choose a financially rewarding, practical career, Wister took a job computing interest at Union Safe Deposit Vaults in Boston. Wister’s health declined, so he quit his job. His health deteriorated further as his difficulty choosing a profession grew. So, on the advice of family friend Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Wister headed west in 1885 (Etulain, 8). Mitchell often sent “privileged young [men] on a wild western journey” as a cure for neurasthenia, or nerves (Owens, 76). The clean air and brisk activity Wister found there seemed to cure his malaise. He fell in love with the West and returned nearly every summer for the next 15 years. Etulain calls his excursions “more than sightseeing tours; they were antidotes for the perplexities that were eating at his psyche” (9). He suggests that other turn-of-the-century Americans had similar feelings. They “hungered and thirsted after a frontier that would continue and would not be engulfed by the tidal wave of urbanism and industrialism that seemed to threaten the nation (11). The Virginian attempts to meet that need—for Wister and for his readership. In the Virginian, they found a cowboy hero who was self-reliant, strong, and independent. He lived and worked in a spacious, clean land, virtually untainted by man or machine. But, according to the progressive

mentality, the Virginian had to move toward marriage, community connections, and the machine. As Etulain points out, “Though his son will continue to ride his father’s horse, the hero takes up with the machine which steams into his territory” (37). Wister’s novel glorifies the mythic American hero and his qualities, but it also requires him to embrace the changes that will make him less heroic. Wister’s final chapter often leaves readers unsatisfied because, as Stephen Tatum suggests, the point of The Virginian is “to dramatize, for better or worse, the evolution of the ‘nomadic, bachelor West’ into the ‘housed, married West’ ” (Tatum, 255). A century has passed since the publication of Wister’s influential western work, and the West continues to evolve. Although Wister’s West is in some ways long gone, Americans continue to think about relations between Native Americans and Anglos, the construction of gender, the effects of immigration on the economy, and how much we should embrace or resist technology that changes where we live and who we are. Some things remain the same. After all, Melody Graulich reminds us, “in 2002 we have a president in the White House who wears cowboy boots for photo ops, who runs a Texas cattle ranch for a hobby and digs oil wells for profit” (Graulich, XII). Much more than a romantic, overdone, and outdated piece of Americana, The Virginian is a rich text that complicates the way we think about the West and offers us insights into its future.

SOURCES Etulain, Richard W. Owen Wister. Western Writers Series 7. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1973. Graulich, Melody, ed. “Introduction.” In Reading The Virginian in the New West, edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum, XI–XIX. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Owens, Louis. “White for a Hundred Years.” In Reading The Virginian in the New West, edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum, 72–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Tatum, Stephen, ed. “Afterword.” In Reading The Virginian in the New West, edited by Melody Graulich and Stephen Tatum, 255–272. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Rachel Rich

VIZENOR, GERALD ROBERT 1317

VIZENOR, GERALD ROBERT (1934– ) Gerald Vizenor is a prolific poet, novelist, short story writer, filmmaker, and teacher. His novel, Griever: An American Monkey King in China, won the 1988 American Book Award, and Vizenor himself won the 2001 Lifetime Literary Achievement Award from the Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas at the University of Oklahoma. He is admired not only for his innovative use of Native American culture and history in his novels, his depiction of people of mixed-blood, and his deromanticizing of false images of Native Americans, but for his sense of humor and his refusal to write from the perspective of a victim. Gerald Vizenor was born on October 22, 1934, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Clement William Vizenor, an Ojibwa Indian painter and paper hanger originally from Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation, and LaVerne Lydia Peterson Vizenor. His father was murdered when Vizenor was just 20 months old; when his mother remarried six years later, Vizenor was raised by her second husband, Elmer Petesch, a mill engineer, until his death nine years later. Vizenor married Judith Helen Horns in 1959, earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota in 1960, served in the Minnesota National Guard (1950–51) and the U.S. Army (1952–55), and began a long career as a university professor. In Vizenor’s first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1973), republished as Bearheart in 1990, Proude Ceadarfair and his wife, Rosina, are forced from the Red Cedar Reservation by the government. They want Proude’s cedar trees for fuel. In this novel Vizenor introduces the Native American trickster figure, especially important in Anishinabean myth and literature and in Vizenor’s own work. Griever: An American Monkey King in China, based on the author’s experiences, depicts an American trickster, Griever, teaching English at Tianjin University in China. Their culture contains Monkey, Trickster’s counterpart. Griever is unsuccessful in liberating the people from oppression. Griever reappears in The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988), although the focus in this novel is on the Brownes, the most notable family on the White Earth Reservation. They include China, a magazine writer, Tune, founder of the New School of Socioacupunc-

ture, Tulip, a private investigator, and Eternal Flame, a social worker who helps abused women living on the reservation. With an entirely original profile of Christopher Columbus, Vizenor presents him as a Native American, specifically a Mayan, in The Heirs of Columbus (1992). Most of the novel focuses on Columbus’s descendants, in particular the trickster storyteller Stone Columbus. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (1992) once again uses the trickster figure, this time as a figure in a contemporary card game. Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (1997) features a son of Eternal Flame Browne, featured in The Trickster of Liberty. At the center of Chancers: A Novel (2000), Vizenor’s most recent novel, is the contemporary issue of access to the remains of Native people. Vizenor lives and writes in Berkeley, California, with Laura Hall, an ethnic studies scholar who has been his wife since 1981. In addition to his life as a novelist, Vizenor is a talented writer for film: His Harold of Orange won the 1983 Film-in-the-Cities competition sponsored at the Robert Redford Sundance Film Institute, and a best film citation at the San Francisco Film Festival for American Indian Films. His papers are housed with the American Literature Manuscripts Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

NOVELS Chancers: A Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. St. Paul, Minn.: Truck Press, 1973. Published as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Griever: An American Monkey King in China. New York: Fiction Collective, 1987. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997. The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

SOURCES Blaeser, Kimberly M. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

1318

VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR, THE

Coltelli, Laura. “Gerald Vizenor.” In her Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, 155–184. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. McCaffery, Larry, and Tom Marshall. “On Thin Ice, You Might As Well Dance: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor.” In Some Other Fluency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors, edited by McCaffery, 287–309. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Miller, Dallas. “Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 7 (Spring 1995): 77–95. Owens, Louis. “ ‘Ecstatic Strategies’: Gerald Vizenor’s Trickster Narratives.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, 225–254. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Ruppert, James. “Mythic Vision: Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles.” In his Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 92–108. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, pp. 123–148. Vizenor, Gerald. “The Envoy to Haiku,” Chicago Review 39, nos. 3–4 (1993): 55–62. ———. Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———, with Larry McCaffery and Tom Marshall. “Head Water: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor,” Chicago Review 39, nos. 3–4 (1993): 50–54.

OTHER Gerald Vizenor. Minnesota Author Biography Project. Minnesota Historical Society. Available online. URL: http://people. mnhs.org/authors/biog_detail.cfm?PersonID=Vize363. Accessed September 22, 2005. Gerald Vizenor. Minnesota Author Biography Project. Minnesota Historical Society. Available online. URL: http://www. hanksville.org/storytellers/vizenor. Accessed September 22, 2005. Gerald Vizenor. Available online. URL: http://www.ipl.org/div/ natam/bin/browse.pl/A96. Accessed September 22, 2005.

VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR, THE ELIZASPENCER (1956) Although Elizabeth SPENCER wrote The Voice at the Back Door while in Italy on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and although it appeared in print after she had permanently moved to the North, BETH

the book’s subject is near to her Southern roots. It deals with race relations in Lacey, Mississippi, a fictional small town much like Carrollton, where Spencer grew up. The author commented in an interview that the racist attitudes the book records from the early 1950s are part of the reason she left the South. The novel received almost universal praise from reviewers, and it was compared to the novels of William FAULKNER for its examination of Southern attitudes and apt portrayal of Southern characters. In fact, Spencer has two of her characters, Kerney Woolbright and Duncan Harper, mention Faulkner; his books have become a part of the landscape she explores. Like Faulkner’s, Spencer’s treatment of racial issues isn’t didactic. The major characters are complexly drawn, so the novel is more than just an allegory of good versus evil. The third-person omniscient narrator delves into characters’ thoughts and sometimes reveals them in the idiom of that character, helping the reader understand motivations and personalities. Spencer also uses flashbacks to show how the past has shaped the present. The context through which Spencer treats her subject is an election for county sheriff that turns on the candidates’ positions on prohibition and civil rights. As the novel opens, Winfield County sheriff Travis Brevard has just died of a heart attack in Duncan Harper’s store. Brevard wants Duncan to replace him instead of his deputy, Willard Follansbee, because he hopes Duncan can change some of the town’s hypocrisy. Brevard has allowed this hypocrisy to control his life for the past 15 years, the time he has been having an affair with a black woman, Ida Belle, though he has been married to his white wife, Miss Ada, for 30 years. Though the sheriff has children with Ida Belle and prefers her company to that of his wife, he cannot openly acknowledge the relationship. Through the roles of these two women, Spencer reveals how racist attitudes that lingered long after slavery divided black and white women into two halves of one whole human being: the black woman being consigned to a role of sexual and material comfort and the white woman being consigned to a role of distant, idealized symbol. The novel covers the six months between Brevard’s death and the next election, during which

VONNEGUT, KURT, JR. 1319

time Duncan serves as acting sheriff and campaigns for the election. The novel’s title comes from an internal monologue of Duncan’s wife, Tinker: “It is part of the consciousness of a Southern household that a Negro is calling at the back door in the night” (83). This voice at the back door calls for help in times of difficulty. Implicit in the approach to the back door instead of the front door is the paradox of black and white relations in the South, that is, simultaneous intimacy and inequality: the former because only an intimate can come to the more private rear entrance, and the latter because by approaching the rear entrance, the visitor does not merit the formal reception reserved for equals or betters. The voice calling at the back door could also be the voice of conscience, admonishing whites for their mistreatment of blacks. Besides Duncan and Tinker, two other major characters are Jimmy Tallant, Duncan’s friend who owns a bar though they live in a dry county, and Beck Dozer, a black man who is in business with Tallant though his father had been lynched by Tallant’s father 30 years ago. Tallant and Dozer act as if they are enemies to throw Harper off the scent of their bootlegging operation, but when Tallant is shot and seriously wounded by some of his disreputable New Orleans associates, the town assumes Dozer did it. The town wants to lynch Beck Dozer for shooting a white man, and Beck goes to Harper for protection. When the mob comes to the jail, however, they have cameras instead of guns. They destroy Harper in the media by making him appear too liberal to be elected sheriff. Is Duncan really liberal, the reader wonders, or does he merely follow the tradition of paternalistic gentlemen who protect women and blacks? Another major character who complicates the situation is Kerney Woolbright, a 25-years-old graduate of Yale Law School who wants to be a state senator. Although Duncan Harper is a close friend, Woolbright’s political views are influenced by the powerful and conservative Jason Hunt, whose daughter, Cissy, he wants to marry. Woolbright ultimately betrays Harper, concealing a telegram that would exonerate Beck Dozer, but he is plagued by a guilty conscience. When the lynch mob still threatens Dozer, Duncan

Harper arranges to meet him on the outskirts of town and drive him to safety. Two white men witness Dozer getting into the front seat with Harper and his wife and become outraged. As Harper speeds away, his tires blow out, but the reader suspects the tires have been purposely punctured by the white men. The novel offers some hope for the reconciliation of racial conflict, for although Harper dies in the accident, he becomes a type of martyr for the cause of racial equality. Jimmy Tallant, Beck Dozer, and Kerney Woolbright all have a moral awakening at the end. The novel’s ending also suggests that many of the characters, including Jimmy Tallant with the widow Tinker Harper, find renewal through love. One character, however, is denied a healing relationship. Marcia Mae Hunt, the eldest daughter of the conservative and powerful Jason Hunt, has never been content with her Southern heritage. She longs to be a more powerful woman than her passive mother and sister. Years ago, she had been engaged to Duncan Harper, but she had left him because he would not leave the South with her. She has recently returned after her Yankee husband was killed in World War II, and she and Duncan renew their old feelings in an extramarital affair. It is Marcia Mae who warns Duncan about the approaching mob, and she confronts Kerney Woolbright for his treachery. At the end of the novel she realizes, as did Spencer herself around the time of the novel’s publication, that there is no place for her in the South.

SOURCES Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Elizabeth Spencer. Boston: Twayne, 1985. Roberts, Terry. Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Spencer, Elizabeth. The Voice at the Back Door. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956. Betina Entzminger

VONNEGUT, KURT, JR. (1922– ) Kurt Vonnegut is the author of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE; OR, THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE: A DUTY-DANCE WITH DEATH (1969), now considered a classic in the annals of postmodern American fiction. With 14 additional novels, four short fiction collections, and several plays, Vonnegut is widely

1320

VONNEGUT, KURT, JR.

considered one of the foremost living American writers. Using intriguing blendings of black humor, science fiction, fantasy, the comic strip, recurring characters like Kilgore Trout, a sense of fatalism and Zen-inspired phrases like “So it goes,” Vonnegut writes of ordinary individuals caught up in a complicated, greedy, materialistic, and often absurd world. Occasionally, they connect and recognize their shared humanity. Kurt Vonnegut was born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Kurt Vonnegut, an architect, and Edith Sophia Lieber Vonnegut. After studying at Cornell University (1940–42) and Carnegie Institute of Technology (1943), Vonnegut served in the U.S. Army infantry in Germany, where he was a prisoner of war and received a Purple Heart. After his discharge in 1945, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox on September 1, 1945, and studied at the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1947. His first published novel, Player Piano (1952), set in the fictional city of Ilium (based on Schenectady, N.Y.), features a computer named EPICAC who controls the lives of its residents until challenged by the rebellious Dr. Paul Proteus and his subversive group. The Sirens of Titan (1959) also has a fantastical setting on several planets, including Mars, whose military dictatorship electronically controls all residents. He followed with Mother Night (1962), the story of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an American expatriate who performs as a double agent for the Nazis and Allies during World War II. He eventually commits suicide. Cat’s Cradle (1963), one of his most acclaimed novels, uses the familiar children’s game of intricately looped string to denote the empty nature of conventional religion and uses a man-made image in ice called “ice-nine,” that can freeze all water on earth, to symbolize the destructive potential of ill-conceived forms of progress. In his next novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (1965), Eliot Rosewater, a controversial and odious character, appears sympathetic to others and stands juxtaposed to the materialistic, greedy, self-centered individuals by whom he is surrounded. Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as a POW, features protagonist Billy Pilgrim, who has been profoundly affected by the bombings of Dresden. His feelings coalesce two decades after the

war, causing a nervous breakdown and a dissolution of linear time. Billy begins to experience past, present, and future events at random, without reference to chronology. Familiar to most readers of contemporary literature are the novel’s refrains of “po-tee-weet,” the song of the birds who reappear even on the sites of atomic devastation, and “And so it goes,” the narrative editorial comment on the apparent randomness of good and evil. From this point onward, Vonnegut’s novels explore the postwar phenomenon of loneliness and spiritual malaise in Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (1973). Here Vonnegut divides his personal traits among author Philboyd Sludge; Sludge’s protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, a used car dealer; and science fiction novelist Kilgore Trout, often seen as Vonnegut’s alter ego. Other novels treat the aftermath of the Watergate scandal of President Nixon’s era ( Jailbird [1979], another Kilgore Trout novel); environmental pollution (Galapagos [1985], featuring Kilgore’s son Leon Trotsky Trout); and the Vietnam War (Hocus-Pocus; or, What’s the Hurry, Son? [1990]). Vonnegut is also the author of Bluebeard (1987), a study of the nature of art through painter Rabo Karabekian of Breakfast of Champions; and his most recent, Timequake (1997), another Kilgore Trout novel. Kurt Vonnegut, who married photographer Jill Krementz in 1979 after his divorce from his first wife that same year, lives and writes in New York City. He is currently at work on a novel entitled If God Were Alive Today. Many of Vonnegut’s short stories and novels have been adapted for film, including Slaughterhouse Five, in 1972; Slapstick, as Slapstick of Another Kind, in 1984; Mother Night, in 1996; and Breakfast of Champions, with a screenplay by Alan Rudolph, who also directed, in 1999. In honor of his 80th birthday, New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg designated November 2, 2002, “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Day.”

NOVELS Bluebeard. New York: Delacorte, 1987. Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1973. Cat’s Cradle. New York: Holt, 1963. Deadeye Dick. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1982. Galapagos. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1985.

VONNEGUT, KURT, JR. 1321

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine. New York: Holt, 1965. Hocus Pocus. New York: Putnam, 1990. Jailbird. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1979. Mother Night. New York: Gold Medal Books, 1962. Player Piano. New York: Scribner, 1952. Published as Utopia 14. New York: Bantam, 1954. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1959. Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1976. Slaughterhouse Five; or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte, 1969. Timequake. New York: Putnam, 1997.

SOURCES Broer, Lawrence R., ed. Sanity Plea: Schizophrenia in the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Revised edition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. Chernuchin, Michael, ed. Vonnegut Talks! Forest Hills, N.Y.: Pylon Press, 1977. Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1977. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer, eds. The Vonnegut Statement: Original Essays on the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Delacorte, 1973. ———. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. ———, and Donald L. Lawler, eds. Vonnegut in America: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Delacorte, 1977.

———. The American 1960s: Imaginative Acts in a Decade of Change. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980. ———. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Methuen, 1982. ———. Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. Krementz, Jill, ed. Happy Birthday, Kurt Vonnegut: A Festschrift for Kurt Vonnegut on His Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Delacorte, 1982. Leeds, Marc. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia: An Authorized Compendium. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Ungar, 1977. Mustazza, Leonard, ed. The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Plimpton, George, ed. Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, sixth series. New York: Penguin, 1984. Reed, Peter J. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. New York: Warner Books, 1972. ———, and Marc Leeds, eds. The Vonnegut Chronicles: Interviews and Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1976.

OTHER Audio Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Wired for Books. Available online. URL: http://wiredforbooks.org/kurtvonnegut. Accessed September 22, 2005. Kurt Vonnegut Essay Collection. Mark Uit’s Kurt Vonnegut Corner. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/ Hollywood/4953/kv_essays.html. Accessed September 22, 2005. The Official Website of Kurt Vonnegut. Available online. URL: http://www.Vonnegut.com. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WD

C

WAITING HA JIN (1999) HA JIN’s second novel, Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, set in Jilin Province in Northeast China, has a deceptively simple plot based on a triangle relationship. Manna Wu, a nurse in an army hospital, is in love with Dr. Lin Kong, but has to wait 18 years for him to divorce his wife, Shuyu, a peasant woman whom Lin married out of filial obligation. Lin’s parents need a kind, dutiful daughter-in-law to take care of them in their old age. This plot is laid out in the prologue, which begins with Lin’s apparently comic, yet intriguing saga of divorce: “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town many times, but she had always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce” (3). Thus year after year, Lin goes back to the country from the city to bring his case to the town courthouse during his annual 12-day vacation for 17 years. He is finally granted a divorce in the 18th year, because according to the army hospital’s rule, only after 18 years’ separation can an officer end his marriage without his wife’s consent. There are other strict rules established by the army hospital, including the prohibition of “a man and a woman on the staff from walking together outside the compound, unless they were married or engaged” (16). Within a few pages of the prologue, Ha Jin is able to give the reader a poignant sense of Lin’s dilemma, and of the messy entanglement of the Chinese legal system with local

and military authorities, especially the extent to which individuals’ conduct is regulated and their personal lives are constrained by a rigid morality, under the surveillance of the public and authorities, during a particular period of Communist China, from the 1960s to the 1980s. But Waiting is as much a dramatization of humanity that transcends geographical and cultural borders as it is a story about life in a historically situated location in China. Written in the tradition of the realist, particularly the Russian, novel, Waiting entails remarkable scope and depth in portraying both the characters and their society. Its narrative is structured on the relationship among Lin, Shuyu, and Manna, and unfolds with its twists and turns, especially the unexpected development in Lin’s relationship with Manna. In fact, this relationship is like the center of a spider’s web, from which a complex, interrelated web of social structures and power relations is spun. By situating the relationship among the three characters in this intricate web over a span of 20 years, Ha Jin is able to reveal changes in the major characters—Lin and Manna—by relating these changes to the social surroundings shaped by China’s political climate. Following the prologue, the narrative begins with the first stage of Lin’s relationship with Manna, when Lin is working in an army hospital and teaching at a small nursing school where Manna is a student. It is extremely important to pay close attention to the way this relationship develops in order to understand why it ends tragically.

1322

WAITING 1323

The other part of the triangle, the relationship between Lin and Shuyu, enables Ha Jin to shift the narrative from the army hospital to the village, from the country to the city, thus further broadening the world and revealing other circumstances that contribute to the long delay in Lin’s divorce. Through keen observation, Ha Jin depicts the differences of life in the city and the country, including the contrasts in food, values, and human relationships, with great details, which give the reader a sense of the sounds, smells, and sights of the surroundings and the localized rhythms of life. While these details paint a vivid picture of the different worlds between which Lin moves, they also help explain why Lin’s attempts at divorce fail time and again. Although Shuyu is plain, illiterate, looks much older than Lin, and has bound feet (unusual in the 1960s), she is a good mother to their daughter, and a dutiful daughter-in-law to Lin’s parents, whom she has nursed in their old age and illness. For Lin, Shuyu is utterly “unrepresentable” as his wife in the hospital or the city, whereas the villagers regard Shuyu as a perfect wife, and no one pays much attention to her bound feet. Lin asks the court to grant him a divorce because there is no love in his marriage, but for the villagers, the absence of love as a condition for divorce is irrelevant. In fact, in the eyes of the villagers, particularly Shuyu’s brother, Lin’s attempt to “discard” his wife after she has devoted her life to caring for his parents is utterly immoral and heartless. Despite her reticence, Shuyu obviously does not want a divorce and always breaks into tears in court. On one occasion, her brother rallies a group of supporters for his sister outside the courthouse, threatening violence against Lin if the divorce is granted. The petty judge of the town courthouse relishes his power over Lin in the name of morality. To make this divorce case even more impossible, Lin not only feels guilty about the divorce, he actually enjoys being home in the country. The selfless, devoted Shuyu makes life peaceful and comfortable for Lin during his yearly visit home. Thus Lin does not need much persuasion to give up pressing his wife for divorce. Meanwhile, his relationship with Manna gradually becomes a trap for both of them. After waiting for 18 years for his divorce to come through so he can marry the woman he loves, Lin finds

his marriage to Manna disappointing. During the wait for Lin’s divorce, Manna has suffered a great deal of humiliation, disappointment, and betrayal. By the time she and Lin are married, she has changed from a gentle, healthy, innocent, vivacious young woman to a bitter, jealous, and bad-tempered middle-aged woman. Soon after giving birth to twin sons, Manna is found to be dying of heart disease. Lin finds Manna boring and unpleasant to be with, and his married life seems “so tedious, so chaotic, and so exhausting” that he begins to miss the “peaceful time” that now appears remote. By the end of the novel, Lin realizes that suffering has changed Manna. He also begins to question whether he has really loved Manna. Once, when he leaves home after Manna loses her temper over burnt rice, Lin experiences a moment of epiphany. He suddenly realizes that he has never loved Manna or any other woman the way Manna loves him. “His instinct and ability to love passionately had withered away before they had an opportunity to blossom” (296). To his dismay, he recognizes that he has been “pulled and pushed about by others’ opinions, by external pressure,” and by his illusions and “the official rules” he has “internalized.” He reaches the devastating, profound conclusion that he has been misled because he believed that “what you were not allowed to have was what your heart was destined to embrace” (295). To understand Lin’s inability to love as wholeheartedly as he wants to, and to understand why it takes 18 years for him to get a divorce, and why his marriage to Manna turns out to be a tragedy, it is necessary to gain some insights into the society that has shaped Lin’s life. Ha Jin is masterful in offering the reader a range of intimate perspectives on the society in which his characters live, by making the most of the relationship among Lin, Manna, and Shuyu. As the relationship between Lin and Manna develops from one between teacher and student, to one between friends, and finally to one between an engaged couple of sorts, their physical contact has been restricted to holding hands in secret. During the development of this relationship, a number of minor characters are introduced through their contact with Lin or Manna, or both: a fine arts teacher who is a widower with three children, a highranking army officer whose close ties with the radical

1324

WAITING TO EXHALE

leftist “Gang of Four” leads to his death in prison, and a demobilized soldier who rapes Manna but gets away with the crime and even becomes an entrepreneur in the 1980s economic reforms. While these characters help broaden the world of the army hospital, a number of other minor characters on the hospital staff provide an intimate glimpse into the network of gossip and politics that determine the fate of both Lin’s and Manna’s lives and careers. Ha Jin portrays both the major and minor characters with compassion, humor, irony, and an unflinching critical eye. Waiting renders a world vastly different from the West, yet accessible without reducing its complexity and humanity.

SOURCES Feeley, Gregory. Review of Waiting, “Time’s Corrosive Effect on a Love That’s Stuck on Hold,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, 20 January 2000, p. 34. Quan, Shirley N. Review of Waiting, Library Journal 124, no. 17 (October 15, 1999): 105. Zhou Xiaojing

WAITING TO EXHALE TERRY MCMILLAN (1992) Waiting to Exhale is the third novel by Terry MCMILLAN, after Mama (1987) and Disappearing Acts (1989). Immensely popular, especially since its film adaptation in 1995, the novel strengthened McMillan’s popularity in her main audience (African-American women) while also appealing to a wider public. The novel traces the lives, friendship, and ties of four women in their 30s, Savannah, Bernardine, Robin, and Gloria, at various points. They have different views of the world and in their place in it, but nonetheless all of them share a common trait: They are looking for a good man, for a potential “Mr. Right” to replace the imperfect men they have encountered up to this point of their lives. Working in Phoenix, the four women strive to find sense in the world around them, especially in their love affairs. Savannah, a successful public relations executive, just moved from Denver to be with her friend Bernardine, abandoned after a marriage of 11 years and left with two children. Savannah, educated and attractive, is always about to find the man of her dreams but places too much stress on sexual attraction.

Never married, she realizes that in the eyes of her family, her success at work is irrelevant, since she has not been able to start her own family. As a counterpoint, Bernardine has just been disappointed by her exhusband and is trying to reevaluate her priorities while undergoing all kinds of emotional and personal metamorphoses. Their friend Robin, an insurance professional, is a specialist in bad choices, pathologically in need of a man to make her life complete, yet always attracting inadequate men: As she places her own value and desirability in others, she is usually disappointed in herself and turns to compulsive shopping to escape her lack of self-esteem. Finally, Gloria is an overweight, matronly type who tries to balance her lack of a love and sex life with food, her work in her beauty salon, religion, and her teenager son, Tarik. Never married and afraid to date, she still holds feelings for her son’s father. As the novel progresses, the reader discovers the personality of each of the four friends and their relationships with their families and community. While they work, party, date, and talk, we witness the different kinds of experiences they have had in their relationships with men, to the assorted degrees of loneliness that each of them have to face, and to the support they offer each other, as their friendships keep them from losing their grip on reality. A key issue in the book is that of female bonding and friendship, and how the enduring structures of loving, supportive friends can complement (or replace) love relationships. The dialogue in Waiting to Exhale is witty and creates characters that become real for the reader. Part of the success in the characterization is, however, due to a technique by no means new, but masterfully used by McMillan: The “four-woman form” has also been successfully used by May Louise ALCOTT in LITTLE WOMEN, Julia ALVAREZ in HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, and Amy TAN in The JOY LUCK CLUB. It allows multiple perspectives through each of the characters, and at the same time it stresses common experiences for women in a male-dominated society (Richards, 124). Since this narrative structure is based on the characters themselves, the writer must strive to create characters that are credible to the reader and that can relate meaningfully to one another. In McMillan, the

WALKER, ALICE 1325

“four-woman form” allows her to explore how different women may react to the same situation and find an array of different approaches to everyday dilemmas. To further enrich the variety of perspectives, Robin and Savannah narrate their stories in the first person, while the parts concerning Gloria and Bernardine are told in the third person along alternating chapters. The combination of these different points of view offers positive resources for the characterization: an exclusively thirdperson narrator would have placed a distance between characters and readers, and thus lessened the intimacy that broadens the circle of the four friends to include the reader herself. Also, the two characters that are chosen to narrate in the first person are precisely Savannah, the most incisive one, and Robin, an ingénue to the point of self-delusion. Savannah discovers and grows throughout her narration, while Robin is bent on repeating the same mistakes over and over: In this sense, they complement each other’s narration, emphasizing how Robin’s lack of self-analysis makes her the kind of woman who has to depend on men to regard herself as valuable. The combination of this first-person intimate reporting with parts narrated in the third-person stresses the collective view of the women as a group and their collective experience. Unlike the film version, McMillan’s novel is not bent on criticising men per se, although males sometimes appear as stereotypes (the pretender, the married man who is always promising to leave his wife—this time for good—the magnificent man who suddenly discovers his homosexuality). Male-bashing is not an end: In fact, both Bernardine and Gloria seem to find caring and intelligent men by the end of the novel, and women are depicted as guilty of making poor choices involving romantic partnerships. Rather, the novel deals with a series of basic issues (divorce, love disenchantment, loneliness, kids, family, friendship) that transcends ethnic demarcations. Also, the nice depiction of the protagonists’ families (Bernardine’s kids, her cynical but loving mother, Robin’s senile father and debilitated mother) make the emotions disclosed in the novel appear universal, not strictly African American. The last part of the novel stresses self-discovery, as Robin and Savannah learn to reconsider their priori-

ties, and Gloria and Bernardine seem to have good prospects regarding men. The end of the book makes it also a story about self-growth and personal advancement through bonding and friendship in convoluted surroundings.

SOURCES Fish, Bruce, and Becky Durost Fish. Terry McMillan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. McMillan, Terry. Waiting to Exhale. New York: Viking, 1992. Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Carmen Méndez García

WALKER, ALICE (ALICE MALSENIOR WALKER) (1944– ) One of the most widely read contemporary American authors, Alice Walker has made a distinct place for herself in American culture and in American literature. Novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and critic, Walker, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning The COLOR PURPLE (1982), uses her talents to point out injustices against any oppressed individual, with a special focus on black women. As many critics have noted, however, her women characters are rarely powerless; the majority of them transcend victimization to become life-affirming and dignified individuals. In the opening pages of her essay collection, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983), she explains her coinage of the term “womanist”: She invented it to describe black feminists or any women of color, but the term has expanded to describe women’s culture in general and has become basic to women’s studies courses. Walker is also one of those responsible for revived interest in Zora Neale HURSTON, Walker’s favorite author, and despite resistance within parts of the African-American community, she has been relentless in her depiction of black men’s oppression of black women. Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, to Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker and Willie Lee Walker, both sharecroppers who toiled in the cotton fields. As biographers and scholars point out, Walker was blinded in one eye when her brother accidentally shot her with his BB

1326 WALKER, ALICE

gun; the resulting handicap led not only to her introspectivity and feelings of marginalization, but to her scholarship to Spelman College. She transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1965, then worked as a civil rights activist in Mississippi and married civil rights lawyer Melvyn Roseman Leventhal in 1967. She published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, in 1970. It follows the lives of three generations of Georgia sharecroppers, Grange Copeland and his son Brownfield Copeland. They abuse their wives; Grange’s wife Margaret commits suicide; Brownfield murders his wife. Grange, however, himself the victim of abuse by his white boss, becomes the protector of his granddaughter Ruth. In MERIDIAN (1976), Walker chronicles the racial and sexual politics of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. The novel moves back and forth between the present, the mid-1970s, and the early 1960s, using interior monologue, flashbacks, storytelling, and symbols to evoke Meridian Hill’s past and give meaning to her survival and her dedication to improving her community. Her next novel, The Color Purple, was not published until 1982. In an epistolary form, Walker recounts the story of Celie, who survives incest and abuse to become a successful entrepreneur. The novel remained on the New York Times best-seller list for 25 weeks, and, in 1985, Steven Spielberg made it into a popular and wellreceived feature-length film, and a Broadway musical. Seven years later, Walker published The TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR (1989), a complex treatment of black men and women (one of whom, Fanny, is the granddaughter of Celie in The Color Purple); all are examples of the civilizations of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Walker recounts not only the evolving history of blacks but also of women, who gradually lost their power to domineering men. In Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), Walker uses Tashi, another character from The Color Purple, to draw attention to certain African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures that practice female genital mutilation. From this overtly political work, Walker donated a percentage of her profits to educate people about genital mutilation. By the Light of My Father’s Smile (1998) is Walker’s most recent novel. Walker continues to live in the San Francisco area, where she has founded Wild Trees, a small press dedi-

cated to publishing lesser-known writers. A pioneering figure who has invented new voices for American fiction, Walker still travels and lectures frequently both in the United States and abroad.

NOVELS By the Light of My Father’s Smile. New York: Random House, 1998. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt, 1982. Meridian. New York: Harcourt, 1976. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt, 1992. The Temple of My Familiar. New York: Harcourt, 1989. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. New York: Harcourt, 1970. The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart. New York: Random House, 2000.

SOURCES Allan, Tuzyline Jita. Womanist and Feminist Aesthetics: A Comparative Review. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. New York: Anchor, 1984. Howard, Lillie P., ed. Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Johnson, Yvonne. The Voices of African American Women: The Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Kaplan, Carla. The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kramer, Barbara. Alice Walker: Author of “The Color Purple.” Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 1995. O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. Prenshaw, Peggy W., ed. Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. Wade-Gale, Gloria. “Black, Southern, and Womanist: The Genius of Alice Walker.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Walker, Alice. The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult: A Meditation of Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the film “The Color Purple,” Ten Years Later. New York: Scribner, 1996. Washington, Mary Helen. “An Essay on Alice Walker.” In Sturdy Black Bridges, edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 133–149. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1979.

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE 1327

WALKER, MARGARET (MARGARET ABIGAIL WALKER) (1915–1998) Margaret Walker wrote her much-acclaimed novel JUBILEE (1966) as her doctoral dissertation at the University of Iowa. It has captured the attention of readers and critics alike. Many of those critics believe that Jubilee is the first historical black American novel, or in the words of scholar and critic Bernard W. Bell, “the first major neoslave narrative” (Bell, 289). Because Bell considers the novel to be the first important contemporary fictional account of slavery, he places it next to Ernest GAINES’s The AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN, Sherley Ann WILLIAMS’s DESSA ROSE, Toni MORRISON’s BELOVED, and Octavia BUTLER’s KINDRED (Bell, 289) in the canon of African-American literature. Margaret Abigail Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund C. Walker, a minister, and Marion Dozier Walker, a music teacher. Reared mainly in New Orleans, Walker earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935 and her master’s (1940) and doctoral (1965) degrees from the University of Iowa. After her graduation from Northwestern, Walker, then a poet, worked on the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago and met Langston HUGHES, Richard WRIGHT, Gwendolyn BROOKS, and Arna BONTEMPS. After marrying Firnist James Alexander in 1943, she raised four children and embarked on a 30-year teaching career at Jackson State University in Mississippi. During this time, she carried in her head the tales that belonged to her maternal grandmother, daughter of an ex-slave, and did formal research on slavery and the Civil War. Jubilee is the result; a meticulously structured epic featuring Vyry—the fictional version of Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown—a slave on a Georgia plantation, during antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction days. Using Vyry as a focal point, Walker details the cruelties inflicted on the slaves and the issues of miscegenation, broken families, and racial and class tensions. She writes, too, about the attitudes of the white families and the communal life among the slaves, which included singing, sermons, conjuring, and making herbal remedies. In 1972, Walker published How I Wrote “Jubilee,” implicitly answering critics who questioned her verac-

ity. She continued writing essays, poetry, and a biography entitled Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988). Margaret Walker died of breast cancer on November 30, 1998, in Chicago, Illinois.

NOVELS Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

SOURCES Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Christian, Barbara. “ ‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women’s Historical Novels.” In Wild Women in the Whirlwind, edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin, 326–341. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Goodman, Charlotte. “From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Vyry’s Kitchen: The Black Female Folk Tradition in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee.” In Tradition and the Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, 328–337. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Gwin, Minrose. Black and White Women of the Old South. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. Traylor, Eleanor. “Music as Theme: The Blues Mode in the Works of Margaret Walker.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980), edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Walker, Margaret. How I wrote “Jubilee” and Other Essays on Life and Literature. Edited by Maryemma Grahm. New York: Feminist Press, 1990. ——— and Nikki Giovanni. A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Williams Delores S. “Black Women’s Literature and the Task of Feminist Theology.” In Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, 88–110. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

WAR

AND REMEMBRANCE HERMAN WOUK (1978) WOUK’s popular novel The Winds of War (1972) chronicles the events leading up to the American involvement in World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The story is told largely through the experiences of naval attaché Victor “Pug” Henry and those of the members of his expanding and increasingly scattered family. Pug is stationed in Berlin as the Nazi aggressions are beginning, and because of

1328

WAR AND REMEMBRANCE

his astute observations, he soon becomes a personal adviser to President Roosevelt. War and Remembrance picks up the story in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor and chronicles events in the European and Pacific theaters of the World War up to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As in Winds of War, the focus is still primarily on Pug, but here greater emphasis and more space are given to events involving his children and their spouses and lovers. Still, Pug racks up a lot of mileage. He commands several ships in the Pacific theater, participating in the naval battles off Guadacanal and much later at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. In between, he is assigned to the United Kingdom to address issues involving the craft to be used in the landings at Normandy, and to Persia, to coordinate the transportation of lend-lease materials through that country and into the Soviet Union. Through Pug, the reader is presented with concise characterizations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Adolph Hitler, and Joseph Stalin, as well as many of the historical figures involved in their governments and regimes. Through Pug’s increasingly estranged wife Rhoda, aspects of the American home front are presented—in particular, the economic constraints and the strains on marriages. Through Pug’s intermittent relationship with Pamela Tudsbury, the daughter of a well-known British war correspondent who becomes Pug’s second wife, glimpses of many minor theaters of operation are provided. In addition, Pug and Rhoda’s son Warren is a pilot who participates in the battle of Midway. Their daughter Madeline has an affair with a married man who is a USO entertainer; she later marries a man involved in the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Their son Byron commands a submarine in the Pacific theater. He is married to Natalie Jastrow, a Jewish woman who is forcibly transported with their son and her uncle Aaron, a famous author, from the uncle’s home in Italy to the concentration camps at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Even more views of the war are provided by extended fictional reconstructions of documentary texts included within the novel: a memoir by a German general convicted as a war criminal, which Pug translates, and a

concentration-camp diary kept secretly by Aaron Jastrow while confined at Theresienstadt. The Winds of War and War and Remembrance are each well over 1,000 pages long. Wouk has clearly attempted to provide a panoramic fictional treatment of the American involvement in World War II that is comparable in scope and method to Leo Tolstoy’s treatment of the French invasion of Russia under Napoleon in War and Peace. Reviewers have praised Wouk’s ability to create distinctive characters, to write believable dialogue, to generate suspense through careful plotting, and to provide an authentic, insightful, and engaging view of historical events within the confines of his narrative. Nonetheless, Wouk’s novels have not achieved any sort of sustained critical recognition. Winds of War was a great commercial success and adapted for a very successful miniseries. But, as a fictional treatment of the prewar years, it did not—and could not—have quite the concentrated effect of James JONES’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1951). Moreover, the traditional, realist novel had generally fallen into critical disrepute at the time of the novel’s publication, and the influence of Marxist criticism had undermined the belief in the individual’s role in the shaping of historical epochs. In large part because Norman MAILER offers a critique of that belief without entirely abandoning the scope, shape, and energy of the expansive, realist novel, The NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948) is still considered the greatest novel about the war. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, other novels such as Irwin SHAW’s The Young Lions (1948) and Jones’ The Thin Red Line (1962), which had been regarded as contenders to that title, were increasingly passed over in favor of more experimental, postmodern treatments of the conflict, such as John HAWKES’s The Cannibal (1949). Joseph HELLER’s CATCH-22 (1961) and Kurt VONNEGUT, Jr.’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE (1969). War and Remembrance was the number two bestselling novel of 1978, behind only James MICHENER’s Chesapeake. The broader association with Michener’s increasingly workmanlike historical sagas did not serve Wouk’s critical reputation. In fact, the great commercial success of War and Remembrance and its development into an extravagantly produced 91/2-hour

WARNER, SUSAN BOGERT 1329

miniseries reinforced the notion that Wouk had been driven by commercial incentives, rather than literary ambitions, to write the novel. In an online review, the commercial investment in—and anticipated profitability of—the novel’s adaptation to the miniseries are conveyed through a few numbers. The working script was almost 1,500 pages long. It contained more than 2,000 scenes filmed at almost 800 locations on three continents. The script included more than 350 speaking parts and required more than 40,000 extras. In even some of the most positive reviews of the novel, the reviewers observe that the novel seems to have been written with its adaptation to a miniseries in mind.

SOURCES Beichman, Arnold. Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004. Bondebjerg, Ib. “Popular Fiction, Narrative and the Melodramatic Epic of American Television,” Dolphin 17 (1989): 35–51. Phillipson, John S. “Herman Wouk and Thomas Wolfe,” Thomas Wolfe Review 12 (Fall 1988): 33–37. Zhang, Yidong. “Two Panoramas about Great Wars,” Journal of Popular Culture 19 (Summer 1985): 57–63. Martin Kich

WARNER, SUSAN BOGERT (1819–1885) Susan Bogert Warner wrote The Wide, Wide World (1850), the first American novel to sell more than a million copies; scholar Edward Halsey Foster calls it “one of the greatest publishing successes of all time” (Foster, 35). Indeed, this publishing phenomenon has frequently been compared to both Harriet Beecher STOWE’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN and Louisa May ALCOTT’s LITTLE WOMEN. The tale of a motherless girl on her own in the big world captured the imagination of readers both in the United States and abroad and established a blueprint for the female bildungsroman. Warner published more than 30 novels, including several—Wych Hazel (1876), for example, and Say and Seal (1860)— that she coauthored with her sister Anna Bartlett Warner. Like many other women, Warner, who used the pen name “Elizabeth Weatherell,” wrote to earn money after the financial reversals of her father. Susan Bogert Warner was born on July 11, 1819, in New York City, to Henry Whiting Warner, a lawyer,

and Anna Marsh Bartlett Warner, from a wealthy Long Island family. Warner’s mother died when she was only nine years old, an event reflected in her motherless fictional creations. She and her sister were reared by their father’s sister, Frances Warner. She was educated at home, studying German, French, and Italian as well as Latin and Greek, along with literature, science, mathematics, and the arts. When her father suffered financial losses during the Panic of 1837, the family moved to Constitution Island, a family property opposite West Point; Warner would remain at this farmhouse until her death. Her first novel, The Wide, Wide World, tells the tale of the motherless preadolescent girl, Ellen Montgomery, as she suffers and succeeds and grows spiritually mature; she marries John Humphreys, son of the Rev. John Humphreys and brother of Ellen’s friend, Alice. In the final chapter of the novel, not published until 1987 in the Jane Tompkins edition (see bibliography), John Humphreys marries Ellen and takes her home from Scotland to America. This novel, along with the semiautobiographical Queechy (1852), was also praised for its detailed depiction of domestic life and work. Here, the orphaned Fleda Ringgan is raised by affluent relatives until financial exigencies force a move to rural Queechy, where Fleda must perform physical labor. She becomes spiritually fulfilled through her immersion in religion, although, unlike Ellen, Fleda marries a wealthy Englishman named Guy Carleton. All her novels contain extensive descriptions of 19th-century New England and New York State life. Warner continued to write novels until she died on March 17, 1885, in Highland Falls, New York. The Constitution Island Association Archives is the primary repository for Susan Warner’s manuscripts, journals, scrapbooks, and correspondence. Special Collections at the Cadet Library at the United States Military Academy houses another important collection of her correspondence. The manuscript for The Wide, Wide World is at the Huntington Library.

SELECTED NOVELS The Gold of Chickaree. By Warner and Anna Warner. New York: Putnam’s, 1876. The Hills of Shatemuc. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1856. Melbourne House. 2 vols. New York: Carter, 1864.

1330 WARREN, ROBERT PENN

Nobody. New York: Carter, 1882. Queechy. 2 vols. New York: Putnam’s, 1852. Say and Seal. By Warner and Anna Warner. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860. The Wide, Wide World. 2 vols. New York: Putnam’s, 1850; 1 volume, London: Nisbet, 1852. Wych Hazel. By Warner and Anna Warner. New York: Putnam’s, 1876.

SOURCES Baker, Mabel. The Warner Family and the Warner Books. West Point, N.Y.: Constitution Island Association, 1971. Bauermeister, Erica R. “The Lamplighter, The Wide, Wide World, and Hope Leslie: Reconsidering the Recipes for Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels,” Legacy 8 (Spring 1991): 17–28. Foster, Edward Halsey. Susan and Anna Warner. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Hovet Grace Ann, and Theodore R. Hovet. “Identity Development in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World: Relationship, Performance and Construction,” Legacy 8 (Spring 1991): 3–16. Meyers, D. G. “The Canonization of Susan Warner,” New Criterion 7 (December 1988): 73–78. O’Connell, Catharine. “ ‘We Must Sorrow’: Silence, Suffering, and Sentimentality in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World,” Studies in American Fiction 25 (Spring 1997): 21–39. Sanderson, Dorothy Hurlbut. They Wrote for a Living: A Bibliography of the Works of Susan Bogert Warner and Anna Bartlett Warner. West Point, N.Y.: Constitution Island Association, 1976. Schnog, Nancy. “Inside the Sentimental: The Psychological Work of The Wide, Wide World,” Genders 4 (March 1989): 11–25. Stewart, Veronica. “Mothering a Female Saint: Susan Warner’s Dialogic Role in The Wide, Wide World,” Essays in Literature 22 (Spring 1995): 58–74. ———. “The Wild Side of The Wide, Wide World,” Legacy 11 (1994): 1–16. Stokes, Olivia E. Phelps. Letters and Memories of Susan and Anna Bartlett Warner. New York: Putnam’s, 1925. Tompkins, Jane. “Afterword.” The Wide, Wide World. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. White, Isabelle. “Anti-Individualism, Authority, and Identity: Susan Warner’s Contradictions in The Wide, Wide World,” American Studies 31 (Fall 1990): 31–41. Williams, Cynthia Schoolar. “Susan Warner’s Queechy and the Bildungsroman Tradition,” Legacy 7 (Fall 1990) 3–16.

OTHER Susan Warner [a.k.a. Elizabeth Wendell]. Domestic Goddesses. Available online. URL: http://www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/warner1.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WARREN, ROBERT PENN (1905–1989) An American Renaissance man, Robert Penn Warren, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1947) and for poetry (1948), was a member of the Fugitive Group in the 1920s, the first U.S. Poet Laureate (1986), and a distinguished writer of novels, poems, short stories, and literary criticism. With John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth Brooks, he was one of the leading New Critics, a group that revolutionized the teaching of literature by emphasizing closer reading of the work itself. Warren was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1970. His critically acclaimed novels include Night Rider (1939), ALL THE KING’S MEN (1946), WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME (1950), BAND OF ANGELS (1955), At Heaven’s Gate (1943), The Cave (1959), Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War (1961), Flood: A Romance of Our Time (1964), Meet Me in the Green Glen (1971), A Place to Come To (1977), and the novella Blackberry Winter (1946). All his novels acknowledge the complexities and ironies inherent in the modern world and the necessity of a link between the individual and his community. His vision includes protagonists who desperately seek identity and meaning in a modern wasteland without respect for integrity and old values. Robert Penn Warren was born on April 24, 1905, in Guthrie, Kentucky, to Robert Franklin Warren, a banker, and Anna Ruth Penn Warren, daughter of Gabriel Penn, a Confederate cavalryman under General Nathan Bedford Forrest. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Vanderbilt University, graduating summa cum laude in 1925, and a master’s degree from the University of California in 1927, then earned a B. Litt. from Oxford University in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar. He married Emma Brescia in 1930; after they divorced in 1950, he married the writer Eleanor Clark in 1952. His first novel, Night Rider, uses a fictional protagonist who resembles Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrator in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Warren used this device through Band of Angels, and it is especially noticeable in

WASHINGTON SQUARE 1331

the Pulitzer Prize–winning All the King’s Men, featuring narrator Jack Burden. He tells the tale of Louisiana governor Willie Stark, who is based on Louisiana Governor Huey Long. Burden sees that he must take some responsibility for his own actions and become more involved in the lives of others. World Enough and Time, another history-based novel, fictionalizes the murder of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp by Jeroboam O. Beauchamp and the sensational trial that followed in 1826. Although some critics criticized Warren for exploiting sex and violence in Southern gothic novels, most readers feel that his is a moral voice exhorting the individual to transcend the spiritual wasteland of contemporary life and to understand that evil can be overcome. Robert Penn Warren died on September 15, 1989, in Stratton, Vermont. The majority of his papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

NOVELS All the King’s Men. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946. At Heaven’s Gate. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943. Band of Angels. New York: Random House, 1955. Blackberry Winter. Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1946. The Cave. New York: Random House, 1959. Flood: A Romance of Our Time. New York: Random House, 1964. Meet Me in the Green Glen. New York: Random House, 1971. Night Rider. New York: Houghton, 1939. A Place to Come To. New York: Random House, 1977. Wilderness: A Tale of the Civil War. New York: Random House, 1961. World Enough and Time. New York: Random House, 1950.

SOURCES Berger, Walter. A Southern Renaiscence Man: Views of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. Blotner, Joseph Leo. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. Burt, John. Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. Casper, Leonard. The Blood-marriage of Earth and Sky: Robert Penn Warren’s Later Novels. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Clark, William Bedford, ed. Critical Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Ferriss, Lucy. Sleeping with the Boss: Female Subjectivity and Narrative Pattern in the Fiction of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Gray, Richard, ed. Robert Penn Warren: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Grimshaw, James A. Jr., ed. Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons: A Discussion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Grimshaw, James A., Jr. Time’s Glory: Original Essays on Robert Penn Warren. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1986. Justus, James H. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Koppelman, Robert S. Robert Penn Warren’s Modernist Spirituality. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Nakadate, Neil, ed. Robert Penn Warren: Critical Perspectives. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Watkins, Floyd C., and John T. Hiers, eds. Robert Penn Warren Talking: Interviews 1950–1978. New York: Random House, 1980. West, Paul. Robert Penn Warren. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964.

WASHINGTON SQUARE HENRY JAMES (1880) One of Henry JAMES’s last “early phase” novels, Washington Square is also one of his “American” novels, which also includes The Bostonians and The Europeans. First serialized in both Cornhill Magazine and Harper’s Magazine in 1880, it was published in book form in 1881. While it received favorable reviews at the time, James’s own estimation of the novel was fairly low and he did not include it in the collected “New York Edition” of 1907–10. Following its initial appearance, James wrote to William Dean HOWELLS, describing it as “a poorish story.” Despite the author’s own feelings, the novel has remained one of his more popular and was adapted into a successful stage play and adapted several times for the screen. Gender theorists, Marxist critics, and cultural theorists have all taken the novel as their object of study in recent years. The novel centers on the character of Catherine Sloper, the daughter of the widowered Dr. Austin Sloper, a successful physician who lives in the fashionable Washington Square neighborhood of mid-century New York. As the title suggests, the setting was important to James’s conception of the work. Critics have argued, however, that his long descriptive passages of

1332

WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS, THE

the setting detract from, rather than add to, the novel’s impact. Whatever its effect, the social and economic circumstances of the novel’s setting, especially in the opportunities for women, contribute greatly to the situation in which Catherine Sloper finds herself, as essentially a commodity in a system of financial exchange. James’s attention to the downtown business district emphasizes the economic aspect of the novel. Catherine Sloper, described as plain, shy, and passive, grows up under her father’s disappointed eye; she cannot fill the place of her dead mother or brother. When Morris Townsend, penniless suitor who has squandered one inheritance abroad, proposes to Catherine, Dr. Sloper, recognizing him as a fortune hunter, refuses his consent, threatens his daughter with disinheritance, and forbids future contact. The two young people continue to meet surreptitiously and Catherine promises Townsend she will marry him when he is ready, as he is waiting for Dr. Sloper to change his attitude toward the inheritance. Dr. Sloper decides to take Catherine to Europe on a Grand Tour for a year. During this time, Catherine’s melodramatic Aunt Lavinia Penniman, who lives in the Sloper household, encourages Morris to continue his suit. While in Europe, Catherine realizes the reason for Townsend’s interest and, upon returning to New York, breaks the engagement. Although she does not see Townsend again, she persists in a battle of wills with her father by also refusing to concede to her father’s dying request to never marry Townsend, even after his death. By so refusing, her inheritance is reduced considerably. Years later, Townsend returns and proposes again. Catherine refuses and the final lines of the novel reveal her returning to her needlework: “Catherine, meanwhile, in the parlour, picking up her morsel of fancywork, had seated herself with it again—for life, as it were.” Critical attention to Washington Square has never been large in terms of quantity, especially as compared to that given to James’s later novels, The PORTRAIT OF A LADY, The AMBASSADORS, Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl, or even shorter works such as The TURN OF THE SCREW and DAISY MILLER. The novel’s place in James’s literary development has been examined, noting, for example, how Catherine Sloper prefigures the character of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady,

James’s next book following Washington Square. Both characters are known for the psychological intensity and their moments of self-realization, although Catherine’s realization in Europe of Morris Townsend’s intent is not as developed as the integral chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. The relationship between father and daughter has also been a popular topic as have locating the sources for James’s novel; in Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, critics identify a model for Catherine Sloper and a similar use of sparing dialogue. Other critics have noted the novel’s humor, especially James’s characterization of Lavinia Penniman. Recently, critics of the novel have focused on its successful adaptation to film, notably in William Wyler’s The Heiress (1949) and Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square (1997).

SOURCES Bell, Ian F. A. “Washington Square”: Styles of Money. New York: Twayne, 1993. Berlant, Lauren. “Fancy-Work and Fancy Foot-Work: Motives for Silence in Washington Square,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 29 (1987): 439–458. Bradley, John R., ed. Henry James on Stage and Screen. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Griffin, Susan M., ed. Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. James, Henry. Washington Square. New York: Penguin, 1984. Maini, Dashan Singh. “Washington Square: A Centennial Essay,” Henry James Review 1 (1979): 81–101. Poirier, Richard. The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Eric Leuschner

WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS, THE LANGSTON HUGHES (1933) Langston HUGHES, a towering figure in American literature, is certainly best known for his poetry. His nonfiction work, and also his ill-fated dramatic collaboration with Zora Neale HURSTON, Mule Bone, also hold places of prominence in the study of African American literature. Nonetheless, his 1933 work The Ways of White Folks stands as a significant literary achievement in its own right. With its stunning array of characters and its vivid depiction of the often explosive nature of social contact between black and white Americans in the first half of the 20th century, this collection of stories is another example of Hughes’s

WAYS OF WHITE FOLKS, THE 1333

prolific and varied contribution to the artistic output of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead of one storyline and one set of characters, Hughes gives us 14 diverse and seemingly unconnected episodes. No geographic location is common to all, but throughout The Ways of White Folks, the influence of Hughes’s own experience as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and his close, often intimate contact with the white world and its money, power, and patronage can be seen. Because of its unity of theme, some critics consider the work a novel. In both form and content, Ways holds a strong similarity to Jean TOOMER’s Cane, written a decade earlier than Hughes’s work. Though Ways lacks Toomer’s multigenre approach, Hughes does experiment with narrative point of view in this work, and according to David Michael Nifong, he “meets with varying degrees of success” (94). Hughes’s book is at its best when well-developed African-American characters view the hypocrisy and caprice of the affluent white Americans around them, in episodes such as “Slave on the Block,” “A Good Job Gone,” and “Poor Little Black Fellow.” The more experimental sections, as far as narration goes, include “Passing,” “Red-Headed Baby,” and “Little Dog.” Hughes also creates several memorable and extremely thought-provoking African-American characters, including the indomitable Cora Jenkins in “Cora Unashamed,” the tortured musician Roy Williams from “Home,” and the brilliant, yet pragmatic piano protege Oceola Jones of “The Blues I’m Playing.” This achievement is significant, since literary critic Houston A. Baker, Jr., states that Hughes “[was] not averse to criticizing blacks in works that are sometimes scathing in their satire” (107). The reader should not forget the title of the book, though, and should keep in mind that each story is intended as a view of white Americans and their culture through the eyes of the black characters. Hughes intends many of these episodes to be commentaries not only on his white characters, but on white society in general, with its strange, fitful, and often violent ways. All of the episodes do have African-American characters at the center of the action, but in almost every case, it is actually the white characters being presented for the inspection of the reader.

Understandably, Hughes is not as sympathetic in his creation of white characters. The frivolousness of these individuals is exceeded only by their almost universal lack of understanding of African Americans as human beings. The Carraways are attracted to Luther, in much the same way that Mrs. Dora Ellsworth is drawn to Oceola, but none of the white characters can accept that these black artists have lives of their own, full of love and passion, outside the confined paternal worlds that the whites have created for them. Even the benevolent Mr. Lloyd from “A Good Job Gone” demonstrates a huge blind spot when it comes to understanding African Americans; Pauline drives him crazy with lust, and he ends up “in a padded cell” (65). Amusingly, the “great” Mr. Eugene Lesche also understands this interracial lust, and he and his partner make a fortune by conning rich white women with their therapeutic program of “primitive” African art and music in “Rejuvenation Through Joy.” This connection between “primitive” African art and “modern” European art is at the heart of much of the work produced during the 1920s and 1930s; Gertrude STEIN and Pablo Picasso were a few of the prominent artists strongly influenced by African culture. Ultimately, the strength of Hughes’s book comes not from its demonstration of the lives of common African Americans living in a racist society, as seen in the fiction of Richard WRIGHT and Zora Neale Hurston, but from its depiction of exceptional African Americans. Like Hughes himself, the artists and the musicians of The Ways of White Folks have the unique opportunity to see firsthand the inexplicable ways of rich white Americans, and what they see amazes them. Oceola Jones perhaps sums it up best in her description of Mrs. Ellsworth: “Strange! Too strange! Too strange!” (117). In this same episode, Hughes points to an apparently unbridgeable gap between these two races that reappears throughout the book; Mrs. Ellsworth is insatiably drawn to Oceola, but the nature of the attraction comes from the fact that she sees Oceola as “just as black and she herself was white” (103).

SOURCES Baker, Houston A., Jr. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.

1334 WEBER, KATHARINE

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West, eds. The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country. New York: Free Press, 2000. Hughes, Langston, ed. An African American Treasury: Articles, Stories, Poems, By Black Africans. New York: Pyramid Books, 1961. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press: Distributed by Persea Books, 1986. ———. The Ways of White Folks. New York: Knopf, 1963. Nichols, Charles H., ed. Arna Bontemps–Langston Hughes Letters, 1925–1967. New York: Paragon House, 1990. Nifong, David Michael. “Narrative Technique and Theory in The Ways of White Folks,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 3 (1981): 93–96. North, Michael. The Dialect of Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume I. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Randy Jasmine

WEBER, KATHARINE (1955– )

Katharine Weber, author of OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR (1995), The Music Lesson (1999), and The Little Women (2003), and a well-known book reviewer, is a writer of indisputable merit who was included on the list of Granta’s Best American Writers Under 40 after the publication of her debut novel. Katharine Weber was born on November 12, 1955, in New York City, to Sidney Weber, a film producer, and Andrea Warburg Weber, a photographer. At age 16, Weber was recruited for the then brand-new New School college program. She worked in various jobs and married the art historian and writer, Nicholas Fox Weber, in 1976. She attended Yale University for two years in the 1980s and began teaching there in 1997. In her first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear, New York photographer Harriet Rose temporarily leaves her new love, Benedict, while she travels to Switzerland and becomes involved in her friend Anne Gordon’s affair with Victor, a married man and Auschwitz survivor. The Music Lesson, on the other hand, is a psychological thriller set in Ireland and centers on an IRA plot to steal a Vermeeer painting. A New York art historian, Patricia Dolan, realizes that her passionate love affair with Michael O’Driscoll has blinded

her to the fact that she is being used for political as well as sexual purposes. Weber’s most recent novel, The Little Women, interests readers for two reasons: Although it is not, as Weber points out, a sequel to Louisa May ALCOTT’s classic novel, it clearly comments on that 19th-century novel in contemporary ways; and second, its self-reflexive, postmodernist structure intentionally augments and undercuts Weber’s story about Meg, Joanna, and Amy Green, who, shocked at learning of their mother Janet’s affair with one of her graduate students, decide to live together at Meg’s apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, where Meg is a first-year student at Yale. Harriet Rose, the protagonist of Objects in Mirror, reappears in The Little Women. Katharine Weber lives in rural Connecticut with her husband. Next to their 18th-century house is Weber’s studio, where she is at work on a new novel that incorporates the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (Steinberg, 52) and some of Weber’s grandmother’s experiences at the factory.

NOVELS The Little Women. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 2003. The Music Lesson. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1999. Objects in Mirror Are Closer than They Appear. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995.

SOURCES Bader, Eleanor J. Review of The Little Women, Library Journal 128, no. 11 (June 15, 2003): 103. Baker, John F. “New Take on Little Women,” Publishers Weekly 249, no. 37 (September 16, 2002): 14. Joyce, Alice. Review of Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Booklist 91, no. 17 (May 1, 1995): 1,554. Steinberg, Sybil. “Turning a Classic on Its Head: Katharine Weber,” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 36 (September 8, 2003): 50–52.

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE SHIRLEY JACKSON (1962) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley JACKSON’s final novel, is a witty, poignant, and ultimately chilling tale of madness, misanthropy, and sisterly love. A powerful and wickedly humorous fictionalization of the Lizzie Borden murder case, the novel represents the culmination of preoccupations present in Jackson’s writing from the very beginning of her career and is considered, along

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE 1335

with The HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, one of her finest accomplishments. The novel was anticipated in a journal entry Jackson made toward the beginning of her career, an entry which, as S. T. Joshi has noted, serves as an accurate encapsulation of her work: “I thought I was insane and would write about how the only sane people are those who are condemned as mad and how the whole world is cruel and foolish and afraid of those who are different” (quoted in Joshi, 54). Sisters Mary Catherine (or Merricat) and Constance Blackwood have been social pariahs since the murders of the rest of the Blackwood family six years before. Since the murders (for which Constance, the elder, was tried but acquitted), they and their senile uncle Julian have existed in their own peaceful, comfortable world, a world in which the upkeep of the family home and the loving preparation of food take center stage; ironic considering that the rest of the family died after eating one of Constance’s splendid meals. Constance, the cheerful mother figure of the house, is an agoraphobic, unable to venture beyond the boundaries of the Blackwood property. It is a status quo welcomed by the cunning, childish Merricat, the family’s only envoy to the outside world, who sees anyone apart from her immediate circle as inhuman “ghosts” and “demons.” She dreams of living with her beloved Constance on the moon, where no one can reach them, and the thought of losing her sister scares her as nothing else can. Appropriately, her household job is fence mending: keeping the family “safe.” She spends her time erecting charms and totems all over the property. For Merricat, the house is everything, and she is unable to understand her sister’s gradual longing for change. When Constance asks, “Don’t you ever want to leave here, Merricat?” she blithely responds, “What place would be better for us than this?” (448). The novel opens with a masterful account of her lastever shopping trip to the local village. The village and the people in it fill Merricat with fear and paranoia. The depth of her loathing for the villagers she encounters, and the extent of her madness, is made clear in her graphic fantasies of murder and violence. As she makes her way down the main street, she wishes “they were all dead and I was walking on their bodies” and, even

more gruesomely, “. . . thought of them rotting away and curling in pain and crying out loud; I wanted them doubled up and crying on the ground in front of me” (407). However, family pride and a kind of savage dignity (instilled in her by Constance) are still important; she keeps up a pretence of politeness despite the provocation she encounters. This insistence upon maintaining gentility and social superiority is poignantly maintained at the novel’s conclusion. The closest we come to an outsider’s perspective in Castle comes with the introduction of the eminently dislikeable cousin Charles. He conforms to a frequent Jackson character type: the feckless, lazy, untrustworthy young man, a nastier version of Essex in The Sundial or Luke Sanderson in The Haunting of Hill House. Charles insists (perhaps rightly) that something be done about Merricat, but his greed and arrogance make everything he says suspect. The insidious manner in which he slots into the position previously occupied by the sister’s tyrannical father, and the searing resentment he inspires in Merricat, means that some sort of violent resolution is inevitable. Though we eventually discover that Merricat is a remorseless mass murderer, and that the aptly named Constance had taken the blame out of a misguided sense of guilt or responsibility, their actions are never analysed or judged within any context wider than the confines of their own home. Indeed, we are even invited to look upon Merricat’s act in a sympathetic manner. Constance is said to have announced to the police upon her arrest that “those people (meaning her father, mother, aunt, and little brother) deserved to die?” (432). Either the seemingly mild-mannered, good-natured Constance has been affected with some of the bloodthirstiness of her sister, or Jackson wants us to be aware that the Blackwood family was in some way deserving of their deaths. Unlike Jackson’s earlier psychological novels Hangsaman (1951) and The Bird’s Nest (1954), in which certain events are cited as the trigger for mental imbalance, no explanations are ever supplied in Castle. Merricat suffers no pangs of conscience and clings to no moral code: The only absolute wrong to her is anything that will hurt Constance or separate them.

1336

WELCH, JAMES

Castle ends not with a return to societal standards of normality but with a final retreat into deranged isolationism. Merricat’s paranoid worldview is ultimately vindicated when a vengeful mob of villagers destroys the family home (the fact that she has brought them there in the first place, by setting the place on fire, does not occur to her). By the novel’s conclusion, the sisters have resigned themselves to living in the blackened ruins and have done their best to reestablish their familiar domestic routine. The identification of mind with place that recurs so often in Jackson’s fiction here provides a striking and poignant conclusion: The Blackwood sisters sit huddled in the blackened ruins of their once magnificent house, forever shunning the outside world. As so often happens to the women in Jackson’s fiction, their home becomes both refuge and prison.

SOURCES Hattenhauer, Darryl. Shirley Jackson’s American Gothic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Jackson, Shirley. We Have Always Lived in the Castle. In The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson, edited by S. T. Joshi. London: Constable Robinson, 1996. Joshi, S. T. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2001. Bernice Murphy

WELCH, JAMES [PHILIP] (JAMES PHILIP WELCH, JR.) (1940–2003) James Welch came to public attention with WINTER IN THE BLOOD (1974), his first novel, about a part Blackfoot and part Gros Ventre Indian living on a Montana reservation. Following N. Scott MOMADAY’s HOUSE MADE OF DAWN (1968), Winter in the Blood is considered the second major novel in the Native American renaissance of the late 20th century and has become a classic of modern Native American literature. In the book, Yellow Calf, grandfather of the nameless protagonist, helps his troubled and aimless grandson come to terms with his identity. James Welch was born on November 18, 1940, in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfoot Reservation, to James Philip Welch, predominantly Blackfoot, and Rosella O’Bryan Welch, predominantly Gros Ventre. Welch studied at the University of Montana, where he

earned his bachelor’s degree in 1965. He and Lois Monk, now professor of English at the University of Montana, married in 1968. His second novel, The Death of Jim Loney (1979), features the tortured “halfbreed” Jim Loney, who agonizes over his accidental shooting of Myron Pretty Weasel, a high school classmate, and finally, unable to understand himself as either Indian or white, intentionally provokes tribal policeman Quentin Doore into shooting him. With his third novel, Fools Crow (1986), which won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, Welch ushers in a different sort of protagonist: Fools Crow is a fullblood Blackfoot and the story is set in the 1860s and 1870s, when the tribe was strong and confident. Unlike the protagonists in the first two novels, Fools Crow is untroubled with alcoholism or identity issues; instead, he must witness helplessly the ceaseless encroachment of the whites on to Native territory. In The Indian Lawyer (1990) Welch again switches theme and perspective, this time featuring Sylvester Yellow Calf, a successful Indian in a white world. He bears the name of the grandfather of the protagonist in Winter in the Blood, however, and that is ironic: the further he enters the white world, the more he leaves his heritage behind; at the end he rejects the white world and offers pro bono legal expertise to his people. In his last novel, Welch features a young Oglala Sioux, a witness to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Charging Elk joins Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, moves to France, is imprisoned for murder, and finally, on his release, begins to build a new life in Marseilles. James Welch died of a heart attack on August 4, 2003, in Missoula, Montana.

NOVELS The Death of Jim Loney. New York: Harper, 1979. Fools Crow. New York: Viking, 1986. The Heartsong of Charging Elk. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2000. The Indian Lawyer. New York: Norton, 1990. Winter in the Blood. New York: Harper, 1974.

SOURCES Auer, Tom. “The Indian Writer: An Interview with James Welch,” Bloomsbury Review 11 (March 1991): 11, 25.

WELLS, REBECCA 1337

Ballard, Charles G. “The Question of Survival in Fools Crow,” North Dakota Quarterly 59 (Spring 1991): 251–259. ———. “The Theme of the Helping Hand in Winter in the Blood,” MELUS 17 (Spring 1991–1992): 63–74. Barry, Nora. “The Lost Children in James Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney,” Western American Literature 25 (May 1990): 35–48. Bevis, William W. “James Welch,” Western American Literature 32, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 33–53. ———. Ten Tough Trips: Montana Writers and the West. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990. ———. “Wylie Tales: An Interview with James Welch,” Weber Studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 15–32. Fitz, Karsten. “Bridging the Gap: Strategies of Survival in James Welch’s Novels,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20–21 (1996): 131–146. Gish, Robert. “Word Medicine: Storytelling and Magic Realism in James Welch’s Fools Crow,” American Indian Quarterly 14 (Fall 1990): 349–354. Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978, 140–149. McFarland, Ron, ed. James Welch. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986. Pavich, Paul N. Review of The Death of Jim Loney, Western American Literature XV, no. 3 (November 1980): 219–220. Sands, Kathleen Mullen. “Closing the Distance: Critic, Reader and the Works of James Welch,” MELUS 14, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 73–85. Tatum, Stephen. “Distance, Desire, and the Ideological Matrix of Winter in the Blood,” Arizona Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 73–100. Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982, pp. 66–103. Wild, Peter. James Welch. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983.

WELLS, REBECCA (1952– )

Author of the best-selling Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996), as well as the acclaimed Little Altars Everywhere (1992), Rebecca Wells writes about her native space, central Louisiana, via a fictional town called Alexandria. She peoples her territory with ordinary individuals who, like the rest of us, often have complicated and deleterious family relationships. The popularity of her novels (Ya-Ya Sisterhood has sold more than 3 million copies, Little

Altars more than 1 million) demonstrates the power of “word-of-mouth” publicity: Wells’s work achieved “phenomenal success” (a phrase used repeatedly in reviews of her books) without the usual marketing techniques: interviews and television appearances. Rebecca Wells was born in 1952 in Rapides, Louisiana. Her father was a self-employed businessman. She prefers not to reveal her exact birthday, nor to discuss details of her family. She studied at Louisiana State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 before studying with Allen Ginsburg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and then moving to New York City to study the Stanislavsky method of acting. It was not until after her move to Seattle, Washington, in 1982, that she published her first novel. Little Altars Everywhere is told from the perspectives of Siddalee Walker, now a New York theater director, and other family members. They re-create the warmth of family love, on one hand, and the half-remembered moments of physical abuse, on the other, all experienced during the 1960s on their 900-acre farm, Pecan Grove. In addition to its “deceptively simple” first-person narrator and realistic use of language and dialogue, as reviewer Beth Farell notes, the novel “explores such weighty issues as the loss of innocence, the traditional roles of women in the South, and the plight of farmers” (Farell, 142). Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, the sequel, also features Sidda, who decides to reunite with her mother, Vivi. During her visit home she learns that her mother was part of a group of women—the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—who had formed their own spiritual group presided over by a benign “Holy Lady,” which was better suited to them than the Catholic Church, in which they were raised. Because of Wells’s book, The Sisterhood, “a gang of merry, smart, brave, poignant, and unforgettable goddesses” (Seaman, 1674), has been recreated all over the United States. Rebecca Wells, who also writes plays and occasionally performs on stage, is married to photographer Tom Schworer and lives near Seattle on a small island in Puget Sound. Bette Midler’s All-Girl Productions purchased the movie rights to Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood, and the Warner Brothers movie, directed by Callie Khouri and starring Ellen Burstyn, Ashley Judd, and Sandra Bullock, appeared in 2002.

1338 WELTY, EUDORA

NOVELS Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. Little Altars Everywhere. Seattle, Wash.: Broken Moon Press, 1992.

SOURCES Farell, Beth. Review of Little Altars Everywhere, Library Journal 124, no. 18 (November 1, 1999), 142. Gantt, Patricia. “ ‘Against Regulations’: Southern Women in the Fiction of Rebecca Wells.” In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Suzanne Disheroon-Green and Lisa Abney, 163–171. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Rowlett, Lori. “Lady of the Earth and Moon: Goddess Imagery and the Ya-Yas.” In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Disheroon-Green and Abney, 115–122. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001. Seaman, Donna. Review of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Booklist 92, nos. 19–20 (June 1, 1996): 1,674. Unsigned Review of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Publishers Weekly 243, no. 15 (April 8, 1996), 57. Unsigned Review of Little Altars Everywhere, Publishers Weekly 239, no. 29 (June 29, 1992), 58. Van Boven, Sarah. “Getting their Ya-Yas Out.” Newsweek, 6 July 1998, p. 71. Whitney, Scott. Review of Little Altars Everywhere, Booklist (June 1, 1999), 1,853. Wilson, Mary Ann. “Living on the Edge in Rebecca Wells’s Little Altars Everywhere.” In Songs of the New South: Writing Contemporary Louisiana, edited by Disheroon- Green and Abney, 3–9. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.

OTHER Bain, Rebecca. “Women Everywhere Embrace the Ya-Ya Sisterhood of Rebecca Wells.” BookPage. Available online. URL: http://www.bookpage.com/9710bp/firstperson2.html. Accessed September 22, 2005. Frye. Donna. “Rebecca Wells.” A Celebration of Women Writers. Formerly available online. URL: http://webpages. marshall.edu/~frye16/overview.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WELTY, EUDORA (1909–2001) Eudora Welty is one of the most important American writers of the 20th century. Mississippi, her native state, is the locus for nearly all her fiction. Although she is inevitably compared with William FAULKNER, because they both use

myths and symbols, her detached, ironic tone and frequent use of humor and satire, combined with her intensely lyrical style, results in a vision of humanity that is tragicomic rather than tragic. Her themes include the significance of human connectedness, the central place of family, the presence of wanderers, isolates, and grotesques, all of whom remain part of the universal panorama. Each dream, myth, and symbol is notable for the way it evokes a Weltian world, although this world can be depicted in realistic, concrete detail, as well. Eudora Alice Welty was born on April 13, 1909, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Christian Webb Welty, an insurance executive, and Mary Chestina Andrews, a teacher. She was educated at Mississippi State College for Women for two years and the University of Wisconsin for the next two, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1929. Although she knew she wanted to become a writer, she attended graduate classes in advertising at Columbia University from 1930 to 1931, returning to Jackson when her father died in 1931. She lived in the family home for the rest of her life; after a three-year employment with the Works Progress Administration, during which she interviewed and photographed a wide range of Mississippians across the state, she began producing stories, novels, reviews, and essays. Her first novel (some call it a novella), THE ROBBER BRIDEGROOM, appeared in 1942. Set in Mississippi during pioneer days, the novel blends fairy tale, legend, folktale, and southwestern humor as well as the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche; the title derives from a fairy tale called the Robber Bridegroom by the brothers Grimm. Most critics agree that her next novel, DELTA WEDDING (1946), is more realistic. She describes the first of many social events to gather together various family members who emerge as individual portraits and as storytellers with memorable ways of speaking. Here the elder family members overcome the reluctance of other relatives to accept Dabney Fairchild’s hill-country husband. In the novel, Welty also creates a benign matriarchy headed by Ellen Fairchild, who takes under her wing a nine-year-old girl who has lost her mother. Continuing to publish short story collections, Welty also wrote The Ponder Heart, a comic tour de force of a novel (some call it a novella) featuring Edna Earle Poole, who delivers a

WELTY, EUDORA 1339

dramatic monologue about her uncle Daniel Ponder. At the Clay, Mississippi, Beulah Hotel that she manages, Edna Earle tells a traveling salesman her outraged but comic story about Daniel, who woos the 17-yearold Bonnie Dee Peacock and ends up literally tickling her to death. The novel was adapted by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields as a Broadway play in 1956 and an opera bouffe in 1982. LOSING BATTLES (1970) is Welty’s longest work, as well as the first to appear on the best-seller lists. The occasion for the Vaughn-Beecham-Renfro clan reunion is Granny Vaughn’s 90th birthday and Jack Renfro’s release from prison. Through stories, yarns, and personal battles (against ignorance, against the Depression, against outside interference), the reader learns the history of this six-generation family. They maintain unity in the face of discord and family feuds by holding reunions. The OPTIMIST’S DAUGHTER, Welty’s last novel, appeared in 1972. Her most autobiographical work (Welty’s mother died in 1966 after a protracted illness), the novel opens as Laurel McKelva, a young professional woman in New York City, returns home to New Orleans to be with her dying father who, after his first wife’s death, married a vulgar younger woman, Fay Chisom. In this emotionally complex novel, Laurel faces the destructive as well as the positive aspects of love and the inevitability of change. The recipient of a remarkable number of awards, including the American Book Award, the National Medal of Arts, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal, the first Cleanth Brooks Medal, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres, Eudora Welty honestly and realistically depicted the dark side of life while joyously celebrating the victory of love and connectedness. She received the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy for The Ponder Heart (1954) and the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter (1972). She died of pneumonia on July 23, 2001, in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1991, the Eudora Welty Society was formed, and various Internet resources, including the Eudora Welty Newsletter, are available online. Eudora Welty’s papers and manuscripts are housed at the University of Mississippi.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt, 1946. Losing Battles. New York: Random House, 1970. The Optimist’s Daughter. New York: Random House, 1972. The Ponder Heart. New York: Harcourt, 1954. The Robber Bridegroom. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1942.

SOURCES Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Eudora Welty. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Buckley, William F., Jr. “The Southern Imagination: An Interview with Eudora Welty and Walker Percy,” Mississippi Quarterly 26 (Fall 1973): 493–516. Carson, Barbara Harrell. Eudora Welty: Two Pictures at Once in Her Frame. Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1992. Champion, Laurie. The Critical Response to Eudora Welty’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Craig, Turner, W., and Lee Emling Harding, eds. Critical Essays on Eudora Welty. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. Evans, Elizabeth. Eudora Welty. New York: Ungar, 1981. Gretlund, Jan Norby. Eudora Welty’s Aesthetics of Place. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. Gygax, Franziska. Serious Daring from Within: Female Narrative Strategies in Eudora Welty’s Novels. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. Harrison, Suzan. Eudora Welty and Virginia Woolf: Gender, Genre, and Influence. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Kreyling, Michael. Author and Agent: Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991. Mortimer, Gail L. Daughter of the Swan: Love and Knowledge in Eudora Welty’s Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Pingatore, Diana R. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Eudora Welty. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996. Polk, Noel. Eudora Welty—A Bibliography of Her Work. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman, ed. Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984. ———. Eudora Welty: Critical Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979. ———, ed. More Conversations with Eudora Welty. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Trouard, Dawn, ed. Eudora Welty: Eye of the Storyteller. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990. Vande Kieft, Ruth. Eudora Welty. Boston: Twayne, 1962; revised, 1987. Waldron, Ann. Eudora: A Writer’s Life. New York: Doubleday, 1998.

1340

WEST, DOROTHY

Westling, Louise. Eudora Welty. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes, 1988. ———. Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

OTHER Eudora Welty Newsletter. Available online. URL: http:// www.gsu.edu~wwwewn. Accessed September 22, 2005. Eudora Welty Society. Available online. URL: http://www. textsandtech.org/orgs/ews. Accessed September 22, 2005. Mississippi Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.olemiss. edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/welty_eudora. Accessed September 22, 2005. Moses, Kate. “Happy Birthday, Miss Welty.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/ 04/13/welty. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WEST, DOROTHY (1907–1998)

When Dorothy West died in 1998 at 91, she was mourned as the last of the living Harlem Renaissance writers. A novelist, short story writer, and editor, West’s first literary success was “Typewriter,” which tied for second place in the 1926 Opportunity magazine short story contest, along with Zora Neale HURSTON’s “Spunk.” West founded and edited two short-lived but influential literary magazines, Challenge (1934–36) and New Challenge (1937), coedited with Richard WRIGHT; the magazines included work by Langston HUGHES, James Weldon JOHNSON, and Ralph ELLISON. West published her first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), to general critical acclaim. Although her work disappeared from literary anthologies and college classrooms, she reappeared after the republication of The Living Is Easy in 1982. In 1995, at age 85, with the encouragement of Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, West published The Wedding, a tale set in the Martha’s Vineyard, which satirizes middle-class values and explores social and racial issues, to enthusiastic reviews. In 1998 Oprah Winfrey adapted the novel for television. Dorothy West was born on June 2, 1907, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Isaac Christopher West, a man born into slavery and emancipated at age seven. (He became a successful grocer known as the “Black Banana King” of Boston.) Her mother, Rachel Pease Benson West, was West’s model for Cleo Jerico Judson, the hero of The Living Is Easy. After attending Girls Latin School in

Boston, West moved to New York, where her friends included Hurston, Wright, Claude MCKAY, Countee Cullen, and Arna BONTEMPS. She traveled to Russia in 1932 with 20 other African Americans to produce “Black and White,” a film documentary on race. Although the film never appeared, West remained in Russia for a year with Hughes. She returned to New York and to editing and working for the Federal Writers Project before publishing The Living Is Easy. Set in Boston, the novel portrays the Black elite and the problems caused by wealth, power, and leisure. The light-skinned and determined Cleo Jerico marries the older businessman Bart Judson. She invites her sisters to live with them and to share the wealthy lifestyle. This scenario provides West with a chance to explore class and gender roles and the superficial values of the elite. West remained in Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, for the rest of her days, where she wrote The Wedding. The main character, beautiful blond Shelby Coles, is a black woman engaged to the white musician. Jute McNeil, a black man, tries to persuade Shelby to change her mind and marry him. More than a love story, the novel is about entrenched attitudes about skin color. Dorothy West died in Boston on August 16, 1998, after enjoying renewed attention from literary circles during her final years; she lectured, gave interviews, and wrote stories that have been collected, together with her earlier ones, in a volume entitled The Richer, The Poorer: Stories, Sketches, and Reminiscences. The majority of West’s papers are held in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University.

NOVELS The Living Is Easy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948; London: Virago, 1987. The Wedding. New York: Doubleday, 1995; London: Abacus, 1995.

SOURCES Dekgard, Katrine. “Alive and Well and Living on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard: An Interview with Dorothy West, October 29, 1988,” The Langston Hughes Review (Fall 1993): 28–44. Guinier, Genii. Black Women Oral History Project Interview with Dorothy West, May 6, 1978. Cambridge, Mass.: Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, 1981, pp. 1–75.

WEST, NATHANAEL 1341

Karpen, Lynn. “The Last Leaf,” New York Times Book Review, 12 February 1995, p. 11. Perry, Margaret. Silence to the Drums: A Survey of the Literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976, p. 132. Roses, Lorraine Elena. “Interviews with Black Women Writers: Dorothy West at Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts,” SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women (Spring 1985): 47–49. Rueschmann, Eva. “Sister Bonds: Intersections of Family and Race in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun and Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy.” In The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature, edited by JoAnna Stephens Mink and Janet Doubler Ward, 120–131. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1992. Steinberg, Sybil. “Dorothy West: Her Own Renaissance,” Publishers Weekly 242, no. 27 (July 3, 1995): 34.

OTHER Voices from the Gaps [VG]. Dorothy West. Available online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/auvg/Bios/entries/west_ dorothy.html. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WEST, NATHANAEL (1903–1940) Novelist and screenplay writer Nathanael West is commonly associated with the years of the Great Depression that he experienced for much of his adult life. In both reality and in his most famous fictional works, MISS LONELYHEARTS (1933) and THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (1939), West attempted to transcend the poverty, pain, and emptiness of modern life (as he saw it) by helping those in need. He provided rent-free accommodations to such writers as Dashiell HAMMETT, Lilian Hellman, and S. J. Perelman during the years he managed inexpensive New York City hotels, and in all his novels his characters, often with the help of an artist protagonist, try to overcome despair and disillusionment. While his novels received critical but not popular acclaim, his screenplays, unlike those of his friend and fellow novelist-turned-screenwriter F. Scott FITZGERALD, earned him money during the last years of his life. Born Nathan Weinstein on October 17, 1903, in New York City, to Max Weinstein, a building contractor, and Anna Wallenstein Weinstein, West graduated from Brown University with a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1924. He changed his name to Nathanael West on August 16, 1926, and published his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, in 1931. This sur-

realistic work follows Snell, an artist, to ancient Troy, where he finds the Trojan horse and enters it through its anus. In this and other satiric episodes, the artist is presented as a figure of mockery—vain and selfcentered. In his next novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, the title character is the pseudonym of the otherwise nameless protagonist who, as an lovelorn advice columnist, becomes caught up in and tries to help the sad souls who write to Miss Lonelyhearts. West presents him as a Christ-like figure who tries to demonstrate love for everyone but whose attempts fail at the end of the novel when he is accidentally shot by one of his readers. The last of his New York novels, A Cool Million, satirizes the American Dream and the Horatio ALGER myth. It attracted the attention of a movie studio and, encouraged, West moved to Hollywood in 1935. It provided the seed for The Day of the Locust, West’s Hollywood novel combining a surrealistic view of “Tinseltown” with the already familiar theme of the artist concerned with rescuing those around him. As in Miss Lonelyhearts, however, his efforts result in failure. Nathanael West married Eileen McKenney (real-life hero of Ruth McKenney’s novel My Sister Eileen) on April 19, 1940, just months before the couple were killed in an automobile accident in December, in El Centro, California. Miss Lonelyhearts has been adapted for the screen twice: by Leonard Praskins for the film “Advice to the Lovelorn” in 1933, and by Dore Schary for the film “Lonelyhearts” in 1958. Michael Dinner and others adapted it as a PBS television play in 1983, and Howard Teichmann adapted Miss Lonelyhearts for the stage in 1957. The Day of the Locust was adapted by Waldo Salt as a film in 1975.

NOVELS A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin. New York: Covici, Friede, 1934. The Day of the Locust. New York: Random House, 1939. The Dream Life of Balso Snell. Paris: Contact Editions, 1931. Miss Lonelyhearts. New York: Liveright, 1933.

SOURCES Auden, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1962. Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

1342 WHARTON, EDITH

Bloom, Harold, ed. Nathanael West: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Comerchero, Victor. Nathanael West: The Ironic Prophet. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1964. Hyman, Stanley Edgar. Nathanael West. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Light, James F. Nathanael West: An Interpretive Study. Second edition. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971. Long, Robert Emmet. Nathanael West. New York: Ungar, 1985. Madden, David, ed. Nathanael West; The Cheaters and the Cheated: A Collection of Critical Essays. DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1973. Martin, Jay. Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1970. Martin, Jay, ed. Nathanael West: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971. Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays on Nathanael West. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Widmer, Kingsley. Nathanael West. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Wisker, Alistair. The Writing of Nathanael West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

OTHER Books and Writers. “Nathanael West (1903–1940).” Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/nwest.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WHARTON, EDITH (NEWBOLD JONES) (1862–1937) One of the most brilliant, versatile, and prolific writers of the 20th century, Edith Wharton wrote more than 40 volumes, including novels, short stories, essays, criticism, poetry, and travel writing. The first woman awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Yale University (1923), Wharton received the Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for the novel The AGE OF INNOCENCE. Wharton took for her subject matter the nature of Americans, both at home and abroad, a topic particularly well suited to her penchant for wit and satire. Since she was an expatriate who lived nearly half her life in France, she was particularly adept at exposing hypocrisy among the socially elite or as evidenced in the cultural values of Americans. Another major interest of Wharton is the plight of the intelligent woman, and the nature of the men—many of

whom she saw as “negative heroes”—with whom they fell in love or from whom they tried to escape. Edith Wharton was born on January 24, 1862, to George Frederic Jones, heir to a merchant-ship fortune, and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander Jones, a descendant of Revolutionary War general Ebenezer Stevens. Like most young women of her class and financial position, Wharton was educated privately, both at home in New York and in Europe, where the family traveled extensively. She married Edward (Teddy) Robbins Wharton, a banker, in 1885 and divorced him in 1912. After suffering a nervous breakdown, commonly called “neurasthenia,” Wharton, like her contemporaries Charlotte Perkins GILMAN and Owen WISTER, consulted Dr. S. Weir Mitchell and, against his advice, persevered with her writing. She published The Greater Inclination, a short story collection, in 1899; a novella, The Touchstone, in 1900; and her first novel, The Valley of Decision, a historical tale of moral decline set in 18th-century Italy, in 1902. Sanctuary came out in 1903; however, most readers agree that her first significant novel was The HOUSE OF MIRTH (1905), the story of Lily Bart, the quintessential young woman who exemplifies the social pressures of the time. On one level, she must marry well to continue in her life of leisure; on another, she is too honest to marry for money, and her refusal to compromise her principles results in her tragic demise. The novel also features Lawrence Seldon, the first major exemplar of Wharton’s many charming but weak male characters. Madame de Treymes (1907), the first of two novels set in France, pits the European decadence of Madame Christiane de Treymes against her brother’s widow, the young American Fanny Malrive. In The Fruit of the Tree (1907), set in New England, Justine Brent responds to a number of such contemporary social dilemmas— euthanasia and factory worker reform—and simultaneously must revise her opinion of her husband, wealthy factory owner John Amherst. In ETHAN FROME (1911), Wharton explores the agony of a man torn between loyalty to his wife Zeena and love for the young Mattie Silver. A suicide attempt that fails results in the crippling of the lovers and of their passion for each other. The REEF (1912) focuses on three Americans in France: the

WHARTON, EDITH 1343

widowed Anna Leath, her fiancé George Darrow, a friend from her New York childhood, and Sophy Viner with whom George has a brief affair. Eventually, this affair changes all three characters and they go their separate ways. The CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY (1913) features one of Wharton’s best known and most controversial characters, Undine Spragg, who sees no harm in following the logical outcome of the customs of the United States, where women are viewed as commodities. In Wharton’s view the country has spawned women who, like men, view marriage as a business and as a way to realize the American Dream of wealth and position. SUMMER (1917) was written as a companion piece to Ethan Frome (Wharton often referred to the former as “hot Ethan” and the latter as “cold Ethan”): again set in New England, the novel belies the romantic view of the region. Instead it describes the cold reality of Charity Royal and her inability to leave her birthplace. Pregnant with the child of her New York lover Lucius Harney, she finally understands that he will marry a woman of his own social class. The Marne (1918) tells the story of an American who volunteers as a U.S. Ambulance Service driver, only to lose his life during the Battle of the Marne. The Age of Innocence (1920) is another story of Old New York and the Four Hundred, as the cream of the elite were termed. Newland Archer’s love for May Welland is diverted by Ellen Olenska, an expatriate New Yorker whose marriage to a Polish count has failed. In The Glimpses of the Moon (1922), Nick Lansing leaves his wife, Suzy, whom he accuses of adultery. Suzy does penance by becoming a governess to five children. In A SON AT THE FRONT (1923), set during World War I, artist George Campion, who carelessly abandoned his son 20 years previously, now awaits his son’s return from the war; he must face the fact that his newly awakened love for him has come too late. Old New York (1924), a series of four novellas set in the mid-1800s, describes the lives of New York women in a period ruled by social convention and oppression; particularly popular is The Old Maid, in which Charlotte Lovell gives up her out-of-wedlock daughter to her rival, Delia Ralston, who is married to the child’s father. Charlotte suffers when her daughter identifies increasingly with her “mother,” Delia. The MOTHER’S RECOM-

(1925) tells the story of the reunion of expatriate Kate Clephane and her daughter Anne, whom she left behind after divorcing Anne’s father years earlier. Kate is shocked when Anne later marries Chris Fenno, one of her former lovers. The Children (1928), republished as The Marriage Playground (1930), explores the tensions between the widowed expatriate Rose Sellars and her fiancé Martin Boyne. He is attracted to a 15-yearold girl, one of five children whom he met onboard ship. Hudson River Bracketed (1929) and its sequel, The Gods Arrive (1932), two of Wharton’s favorite novels, depict a semiautobiographical hero, Halo Tarrant, who divorces Lewis Tarrant, and moves to Europe with her young lover Vance Weston; the romance wears off as Halo sees his vain and philandering nature. She returns to her home on the Hudson River, where she prepares to give birth to the child she and Vance have conceived. The Buccaneers (1938, 1995) was unfinished at Wharton’s death, but published along with the notes she left: Wharton projected a happy ending for her hero, expatriate New Yorker Nan St. George, who suffers through one European marriage but will marry an Englishman who loves her and will run away with her to Australia. In this novel Nan and her friends surmount class distinctions and rigidities to live life as they choose. The foremost American woman of letters at her death, Edith Wharton succumbed to a heart attack on August 11, 1937, at Pavilion Colombe, her home in St. Brice-sous-Foret, France, and is buried in the American Cemetery at Versailles, France, next to her friend Walter Berry. In addition to Broadway performances of a number of her novels, a film version of The Age of Innocence starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Michelle Pfeiffer was produced by Columbia Pictures and directed by Martin Scorsese in 1993; a film version of The House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson and Dan Aykroyd was written and directed by Terence Davies and released by Sony Pictures in 2000. Most of Edith Wharton’s papers are housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

PENSE

NOVELS The Age of Innocence. New York and London: Appleton, 1920. The Buccaneers. New York and London: Appleton-Century, 1938.

1344 WHAT MAISIE KNEW

The Children. New York and London: Appleton, 1928; republished as The Marriage Playground. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930. The Custom of the Country. New York: Scribner, 1913. Ethan Frome. New York: Scribner, 1911. The Fruit of the Tree. New York: Scribner, 1907. The Glimpses of the Moon. New York and London: Appleton, 1922. The Gods Arrive. New York and London: Appleton, 1932. The House of Mirth. New York: Scribner, 1905. Hudson River Bracketed. New York and London: Appleton, 1929. Madame de Treymes. New York: Scribner, 1907. The Marne. New York: Appleton, 1918. The Mother’s Recompense. New York and London: Appleton, 1925. Old New York. 4 vols. New York and London: Appleton, 1924. The Reef. New York: Appleton, 1912. Sanctuary. New York: Scribner, 1903. A Son at the Front. New York: Scribner, 1923. Summer. New York: Appleton, 1917. The Touchstone. New York: Scribner, 1900; republished as A Gift from the Grave. London: Murray, 1900. The Valley of Decision. 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1902.

SOURCES Ammons, Elizabeth Miller. “Fairy-Tale Love and The Reef,” American Literature, 47 (January 1976): 615–628. Auchincloss, Louis. Edith Wharton: A Woman in Her Time. New York: Viking, 1971. Bauer, Dale M. Edith Wharton’s Brave New Politics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Beer, Janet. Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Studies in Short Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Bell, Millicent. Edith Wharton and Henry James: The Story of Their Friendship. New York: Braziller, 1965. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Benstock, Shari. No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton. New York: Scribner, 1994. Dwight, Eleanor. Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life. New York: Abrams, 1994. Fracasso, Evelyn E. Edith Wharton’s Prisoners of Consciousness: A Study of Theme and Technique in the Tales. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Goodman, Susan. Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Joslin-Jeske, Katherine. Edith Wharton. New York: St. Martin’s, 1991. Killoran, Helen. Edith Wharton: Art and Allusion. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996. Lawson, Richard H. Edith Wharton. New York: Ungar, 1977. Lewis, R. W. B. Edith Wharton: A Biography. New York, Evanston, San Francisco & London: Harper & Row, 1975. Lubbock, Percy. Portrait of Edith Wharton. New York: Appleton-Century, 1947. Nevius, Blake. Edith Wharton. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953. Price, Alan. The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Singley, Carol J. Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tuttleton, James W., Kristin O. Lauer, and Margaret P. Murray, eds. Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. White, Barbara Anne. Edith Wharton: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Wilson, Edmund. “Justice to Edith Wharton.” In The Wound and the Bow, 195–213. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Wright, Sarah Bird. Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Guide to the Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 1998. ———. Edith Wharton’s Travel Writing: The Making of a Connoisseur. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Zilversmit, Annette. Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1992.

OTHER The Edith Wharton Page. San Antonio College. Available online. URL: http://www.accd.edu/Sac/english/bailey/ wharton.htm. Accessed September 22, 2005. Edith Wharton. An Overview with Biocritical Sources. Available online. URL: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/ 6741. Accessed September 22, 2005.

WHAT MAISIE KNEW HENRY JAMES (1897) In What Maisie Knew Henry JAMES explores some of the new narrative techniques that were developing at the turn of the century. The novel recounts the story of Maisie, a girl of five, whose parents, Beale and Ida Farange, divorce and start a virulent war against each other using their own daughter as the main weapon. They do not fight for actual custody of the child;

WHAT MAISIE KNEW 1345

rather, they find it much more effective to express their mutual hatred by leaving Maisie in the other’s care beyond the period settled by the court. Meanwhile, both parents begin having affairs and remarrying, so that Maisie soon finds herself with four parents, two of whom—the real ones—take no responsibility for her. Her stepfather, Sir Claude, becomes Maisie’s friend but is too dependent on his passion for women, first Ida Farange and then Mrs. Beale, to be a real source of support for the child. Consequently, a succession of governesses becomes central to the girl’s life. Miss Overmore is Maisie’s governess until she marries Beale Farange, when, as Mrs. Beale, she becomes Maisie’s ostensibly fond stepmother, but her lack of honesty and subsequent affair with Sir Claude prevent her from establishing a meaningful relationship with her. If Mrs. Beale is not altogether reliable, Mrs. Wix—Maisie’s second governess—instills in the child a certain sense of morality and the difference between right and wrong. Mrs. Wix, however, is not a flawless character either—although she really wants to help the child, she worries about losing her job if she is even partially disloyal to her employer, Ida Farange. Moreover, she also falls in love with Sir Claude, who is half her age. But in the end, she is the only person to whom Maisie can turn. Henry James chooses the story of a child struggling to make sense of adult wickedness and irresponsibility to demonstrate the wide range of perceptions, interpretations, and tricks she develops to help her construct a meaningful world. James does not make Maisie the narrator of her own experience because, as he explains in the preface, “Small children have many more perceptions than they have terms to translate them; their vision is at any moment much richer, their apprehension even constantly stronger, than their prompt, their at all producible, vocabulary” (27). Though the narrating voice is not Maisie’s, it reflects the vision, perceptions, and thoughts of the girl, making her the focalizer of the story. Maisie sees and listens to adults uttering baffling sentences in front of her—and the reader follows her train of thought, but the narrator masterfully provides the meaning that is beyond the full comprehension of an innocent child.

James is not as interested in the morality of sexual liaisons among parents and their lovers, as in the way the neglected child comprehends them. In fact, he seems to imply that if Maisie acquires a moral sense, she does so through assimilated experience, rather than through avoidance of thorny situations. Maisie is, then, the most highly developed character in the novel, and we learn about the others through her. She succeeds in maintaining her own natural goodness, harboring no feelings of rancour, revenge, or contempt for her parents, and—although perfectly conscious of not being loved—she still rejoices when she discovers that they are not entirely wicked. And despite her innocence, Maisie develops some artful tricks as means of self-defense. She learns to keep silent in order to exasperate her parents, because this apparent stupidity renders her useless in their vengeful schemes. Because of her profound desire to be loved and to trust others, she is quick to shift her affection from one person to the other according to the amount of care she receives from them. In the end she has learned to judge the reliability of human feelings and so act accordingly. What Maisie Knew can also be read as a critique of the British upper classes in the late 19th century. Neither Beale Farange nor Sir Claude have any sort of career or occupation, depending instead on their wives for support. Mr. Farange is determined to divorce his second wife and leave England to follow a wealthy Countess. Ida Farange has an affair with Mr. Perriam simply because of his fortune. Love is apparently determined by money and status, even in regard to the child. The problem of bringing her up is not just an affective one. Sir Claude, Mrs. Beale, and Mrs. Wix raise this issue in their last argument, though it is Mrs. Wix—the penniless governess—who keeps the child, however uncertain their future may be. In the development of the novel genre, one of the important techniques developed by James, as well as such other writers as Virginia Woolf and Joseph Conrad, involved nuanced ways of representing perception. In this novel, James engages in diverse manners of articulating or concealing reality and the ways a child perceives. Maisie “was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories” (42). By presenting two perspectives, Maisie’s and the

1346

WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT

adult narrator’s, we are offered a multilayered view of her situation and permitted access to the child’s inner world. What Maisie Knew constitutes thus a sample of the reasons why Henry James is considered one of the milestones in the narrative technique of the last two centuries.

SOURCES Bellringer, Alan W. Henry James. London: Macmillan, 1988. Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Henry James. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Kaplan, Fred. Henry James. The Imagination of Genius. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897. Edited by Paul Theroux. Reprinted, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1985. Reeve, N. H., ed. Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments. London: Macmillan, 1997. Ana Beatriz Delgado

WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT CECILIA MANGUERRA BRAINARD (1999) Drawing in part from the recollections of her parents, Cecilia Manguerra BRAINARD commemorates the suffering and triumph of the Filipino people during World War II in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, originally published in the Philippines in 1991 as Song of Yvonne. Nine-year-old child-narrator Yvonne Macaraig and her upper-middleclass parents leave their home in edenic Ubec, a fictional city based on Brainard’s native Cebu, in 1941 to join the guerilla movement, assuming that America will win the war in six months. They are rapidly disabused of this hope: They suffer hunger, deprivation, and threats from Japanese soldiers. Yvonne’s delicately bred mother gives birth to a dead infant son while squatting in the jungle as Japanese troops patrol nearby. They witness horrific Japanese atrocities against civilians and the traumatic aftermath suffered by survivors, but the greatest betrayal they experience is from the renegade American guerilla Martin Lewis, who is responsible for the death of Filipino leader Gil Alvarez. Liberation in 1944 brings the family back to a fallen Ubec. There they find that Yvonne’s cousin Esperanza and her Aunt Lourdes—serving as foils to Yvonne and her mother— have survived largely due to the kindness of a Japanese army doctor. Amid the wreckage, Yvonne’s father

reminds them that the war has just been a moment in time in the city’s long history, and that Ubec will rebuild and grow as it has so many times in the past. Yvonne’s solace throughout her archetypal journey from innocence to experience are the legends and folklore passed on to her by the family cook Laydan, who had trained with the epic singer Inuk: “Her stories were part of my soul; they sustained my spirit” (123). These myths and stories represent the survival of native Filipino culture in the face of Western culture imported by colonizers and conquerors. This is a society where the American-trained physician Doc Mendes can see auras, use leeches, and learn from faith healers. At the midpoint of the novel, Yvonne assumes Laydan’s role and burden—“Become the epic”—when the old woman dies. Yvonne uses these stories to illuminate contemporary situations: Her mother’s defying a Japanese soldier is like the woman warrior Bongkatolan, her desire to search for her missing father is compared to Bolak Soday’s search for her kidnapped husband. She relates these tales to others in an effort to bring them “peace and hope” (97). By the novel’s end, Yvonne realizes that the epic she must tell is her own life: “We had experienced a story that needed to be told, that needed never to be forgotten” (216). This story, as told by its child-narrator, juxtaposes unsentimental description of the horrors of war with childish preoccupations and fantastic musings: Griefcrazed Doc Mendes runs by carrying his dead wife’s head like a ball while the frightened Yvonne concentrates on a sparrow; Laydan comforts her with the story of the goddess Meybuyan, who cares for the souls of dead infants. Yvonne sees the war not so much as fighting and death, but as change and loss of the past: “I missed Ubec, our life before the war. . . . It came to me that even if the war ended and we returned home, things would not be the same” (147). In her innocence she is more apt to recognize common humanity than political differences. After joining with other children who play with the bloated corpse of a Japanese soldier that has washed up on the beach, Yvonne wonders if this man might also have a daughter who anxiously awaits her father’s return, just as she does: “I could not help but feel sad for the dead man. You can hate someone with all your might and yet you couldn’t help thinking” (153).

WHITE FANG 1347

Yvonne’s movement from innocence to experience, from childhood to the threshold of maturity is paralleled by other characters in the novel, as well as by the Philippines as a nation. For so many of the characters, including Yvonne, the watershed event is the kidnapping, imprisonment, and torture of Gil Alvarez, Yvonne’s father, and their friend Max by the American Lewis and Alvarez’s subsequent death. Women from all over the island flock to the funeral of Alvarez, Ubec’s demigod: “Crying, they talked about how Alvarez symbolized their youth, and how his death signaled the unquestionable end of the days when they laughed and rhumbaed and jitter-bugged. . . . They mourned for the death that happened in their souls” (196–197). This experience is also the turning point for Yvonne’s father Nando, an American-trained engineering professor who had previously put his trust in American aid to the beleaguered Philippines, a man who had lovingly told his daughter about snow, pine trees, and oranges, experiences completely alien to his child. Now Nando and his men fight the Japanese with a new intensity for their country’s freedom: “my father realized that Filipinos must shape their own destiny, that they were responsible for their own future, that America (with all her professed good intentions) watched out for herself and her citizens . . . even if this means using other countries and peoples” (198). Thus the war brings both individuals and the Philippines as an independent nation-state to the brink of maturity. In its historical context, Brainard’s novel is postmodernist in its reexamination of the relationship between America and the Philippines during this period.

SOURCES Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra. Song of Yvonne. Quezon City, The Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1991. ———. When the Rainbow Goddess Wept. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Caspar, Leonard. “Song of Yvonne: Possibilities of Humanities in An Age of Slaughter,” Philippine Studies 41 (Second Quarter 1993), 251–254. Hidalgo, Cristina Pantoja. Filipino Woman Writing: Home and Exile in the Autobiographical Narratives of Ten Writers. Manila, The Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994.

Ty, Eleanor. “Cecilia Manguerra Brainard.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 29–33. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Nona C. Flores

WHITE FANG JACK LONDON (1906) Following the success of his earlier novel The CALL OF THE WILD (1903), Jack LONDON turned his attention to a new story inspired by life in the North. White Fang was intended as a companion, indeed the antithesis, to The Call of the Wild. London stated that he was “going to reverse the process” (14). White Fang would present the civilization or evolution of a wolf-dog rather than the decivilizing of a dog. This story would depict the wild animal brought under the forces of domesticity, morality, love, and faithfulness and treated to the amenities of modern society. In The Call of the Wild and The SEA-WOLF, a domesticated creature (Buck, Humphrey van Weyden) is forced to become strong and self-reliant through exposure to the cruelty and brutality of a Darwinian struggle, while in White Fang the self-reliant creature is made docile and dependent. More than twice as long as The Call of the Wild, White Fang did not give in to the reader’s desire for access to wilderness and nature. Instead it confronts those who might seek the freedom of the wild with their own domestic status, their own tameness. If The Call of the Wild could be identified by critics as a piece of escapist literature, appealing to the longings of overcivilized Americans who sought access to Buck’s vital, unrestrained life in the North, White Fang allowed no such sentimental escape. In London’s depiction, the wolf-dog is made to shift its allegiance from the wild to a human deity. White Fang learns that the man who lights the fires and carries the weapons is the god, the pinnacle of nature’s chain. In exchange for food, fire, protection, and companionship, White Fang exchanges his own liberty. As London describes it, for the possession of a flesh-and-blood god, White Fang guards the god’s property, defends its body, and works for and obeys it. The primacy of law in industrial America is highlighted quite directly when White Fang saves his master’s father from a criminal escaped from a local

1348

WHITE FANG

prison. While White Fang experiences great internal struggles between his wild impulses and the civilizing tendencies, the animal’s domestication is complete by the novel’s ending as the wolf-dog settles into a pleasant life with its partner, the dog Collie, and their puppies. The animal ends not as that leader of a pack of wild wolves, having proven its character in the day-to-day struggles of nature but as an object of leisurely affection for middle-class domesticates. In White Fang the natural and basic, even authentic, loses out to the world of comfort, leisure, amenities, and virtues. For London, a lifelong socialist, this is the victory of industrial capitalism and its slave morality. This is the triumph of bourgeois laws and the regulation of the particularities and mundanities of life. White Fang, like the citizen of industrial capitalist America, is made to learn obedience, loyalty, and work discipline. The story of domestication relates to London’s commitment to socialism and his criticism of the hypocrisy of bourgeois culture. It also expressed his sense that capitalist society dampened the natural strengths and desires of the working class, its capacity to struggle for a better world, through the civilizing processes instilled through morality and laws. This sense was expressed in London’s own life, even within the socialist groups of which he was a part, when he quit the Socialist Labor Party in 1916 complaining of “its lack of fire and fight, and its loss of emphasis on the class struggle” (“Resignation Letter”). In White Fang, London’s socialist concerns are combined with a critique of bourgeois morality drawn from his readings of Nietzsche. This combination has contributed to London’s identification as a revolutionary nihilist. London’s reading of sociology, biology, and philosophy had deeply marked him with a Darwinian perspective that informed his views of the Yukon as a field of ongoing survival of the fittest and natural selection. For London, the North, with its “white silence,” was the place where the ultimate meaning of life, survival, and reproduction could be most fully known. Its wilderness drew out qualities that had been submerged by the conditioned layers of civilization. The period of the novel’s release was one of relentless American imperial expansion in the Western Hemisphere. It was

written at a time when the influence of literary naturalism was great. The confrontation of citizens of modernity with the elements of nature was a theme that enjoyed widespread resonance during the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. White Fang expresses the naturalist emphasis on the significance of environment in shaping characters’ actions. London provides a vivid and memorable description of the threatening, desolate, and unforgiving landscape of the Northland Wild in the opening section of the story as two men, Henry and Bill, struggle with their dog team to pull their dogsled across the forbidding terrain. The violent character of the wilderness is expressed by the hunger-stricken wolf pack that follows the men and dogs, luring away and eating a dog each evening. This is not the romantic “call of the wild” that spoke to Buck, but a world in which one either “eats grub or is grub.” Deprived of the comforts of civilization, men are rendered puny and weak, lacking wisdom in the face of the “great blind elements and forces” (172). Critically less well received upon its release, the story represents a more extreme version of London’s naturalist vision. It is also evoked most forcefully during the process of White Fang’s maturation in section two: “Life itself is meat. Life lived on life. There were eaters and the eaten. The law was EAT OR BE EATEN” (243). London’s emphasis on natural selection is symbolized further in the fact that White Fang, the strongest and fiercest of the litter of five pups, is the only one to survive the several famines that the animals must endure. London allows for no sentimentality over any of the story’s deaths, whether Bill, the dogs, or White Fang’s siblings. London confronts his readers with the treacherous reality behind the alluring appeal of the wild that he had presented in The Call of the Wild. At the same time, London was familiar enough with Darwin’s writings to know that a key characteristic in his discussions of the survival of species is not strength but adaptability. Thus while White Fang’s strength in surviving famines and gunshots is legendary, an equally important, if overlooked, aspect of his survival is his capacity to adapt to new and changing circumstances. White Fang learns to fight and later to obey, love, and be tamed.

WHITE MULE 1349

SOURCES London, Jack. The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 1993. ———. “Resignation Letter to the Socialist Labor Party.” Available online. URL: www.bedfordsmartins.com/ litlinks/fiction/london.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Jeff Shantz

WHITE MULE WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1937) At the beginning of White Mule, a baby girl is born into an immigrant home in upper Manhattan circa 1900. WILLIAMS, who was a pediatrician as well as a poet, describes the birth clinically, as only a doctor would: “In behind the [baby’s] ears there was still that white grease of pre-birth.” Williams is a tough writer, and on the surface he is unsentimental about birth and motherhood. As soon as the baby is born, its mother, a Norwegian immigrant named Gurlie Stecher, tells the midwife to “Take it away. I don’t want it. All this trouble for another girl.” Gurlie had wanted all boys, and now she is irritated at having to look after her second girl. This birth, unremarkable yet at the same time infused with the wonder Williams had about children and their ability to flourish in the most unlikely circumstances, begins the first book in a trilogy about a German emigre, Joe Stecher, and his family living the American Dream. The book’s title refers to the infant Flossie, whose powerful kick the author compares to a brand of whiskey called White Mule. In the first part of the book, Flossie refuses to nurse and is close to death. Williams does not romanticize what it was like to grow up in an immigrant house; Gurlie is routinely disgusted by Flossie’s failure to thrive, and the baby is only saved when Joe buys a can of condensed milk, which the baby hungrily sucks down. This is not a world of sterile hospitals but of overburdened doctors who care more about their dinner than about a baby suffering in a walk-up apartment. After getting the can of milk, the baby Flossie finds a way to hang on to dear life, though in the course of reading this book, we constantly ask why she wants to. Her father, once a labor organizer and now a press operator, is kicked about by corrupt bosses and has to endure a strike during which he is the object of physi-

cal abuse. Joe sympathizes with working men, but he cannot abide their dislike of honest work. Gurlie, while clearly in love with her husband, constantly berates him about his reluctance to ask for a raise, and she wants to move her family to the country, where she is sure her children will prosper. It is easy to find Gurlie cold, but she has enough backbone to support her family and push them to something greater. When we see Gurlie leaving her hot West Side apartment and striding across Central Park, we know that her strong legs can take her anywhere, and we understand that she is a country girl who feels cooped up in the airless city. Williams had a busy practice as a pediatrician in New Jersey, and his life was filled with immigrant women like Gurlie whose children he loved and whose plight he understood. Yet the doctors in this book are uncaring and weary of mothers trying to raise their children in the dust and heat of New York City. The doctors are tired out from trying to make babies grow without air and light. Williams’s heroes in this book are the children, not the doctors. His dedication at the beginning of the book simply reads “To the Kids.” In one unforgettable scene, Joe goes to visit an unemployed worker in his infested tenement and meets the man’s robust children. Joe thinks to himself “what wonderful children sometimes come out of such places as this.” When Joe leaves, the father returns to beat his wife in a drunken fury while the children hide behind the stove or busy themselves reading. It is almost as if the children survive in spite of their parents, not because of them. In the later installments of the Stecher trilogy, the family goes on to claim their small piece of the American Dream, but the theme of this first dark book is merely survival. Williams implies that the Stechers are able to survive the city life because they have roots in the primeval forests of Europe. In one passage, Joe is walking to work through the hot city while his mind is on the verdant green of the rural world he came from: “Joe knew he was a working man, he had to be, that’s all he asked them to expect of him. But very deep inside him moved another man . . . under water, under earth . . . among the worms and fishes, among the plant roots . . . an impalpable atmosphere through which he strode.” In the passages where Williams waxes lyrical

1350 WHITE NOISE

about the countryside, we see the poet underneath the novelist, just as we see the country man underneath Joe the urban worker. In the end of the book, the country and its wholesomeness save Joe’s family. It’s almost as if the Stechers have to return to their roots to get the energy to survive their new urban life. Williams is better known for his poetry, but his novels will delight his poetry readers. He does not offer sentimentality or even a clean version of the American Dream. Instead, he gives us honest prose that is worked over to the point of scrubbed perfection. Williams is clinical and severe in his vision, but there is a soft, sweet underside, the subtle kind you might see in a city doctor.

SOURCES Williams, William Carlos. White Mule. New York: New Directions, 1937, 1967. Blythe Grossberg

WHITE NOISE DON DELILLO (1984) Don DELILLO’s novel White Noise has been hailed by many critics as a model of postmodern writing for both form and content. The novel is composed of a barrage of images and words gleaned from the ever-increasing media consumption of one typical American family intermingled with the musings and anxieties of the novel’s central character. DeLillo uses this format to expose and discuss the intrusion of media, industry, and technology into the lives of 20th-century Americans as we struggle to rediscover meaning and identity in an increasingly globalized community. DeLillo’s exaggerated portrait of the “typical” American family, immersed in the mindless babble of a technocentric culture, preaches media awareness while simultaneously presenting a foreboding image of such a culture’s full impact upon human conceptions of agency and identity. DeLillo is also clear about the toxic effects of such a culture, not only on its members, but on its landscape as well. As a postmodern text, White Noise neither condemns nor exonerates those elements of society (the media, technology, etc.) that constitute the “white noise” that DeLillo refers to in the novel’s title; however, he does call into question the ideologies and objects against which people immersed in a mediated culture identify themselves.

White Noise chronicles the often ordinary and occasionally extraordinary events in the life of a small-town college professor and the amalgamation of wives, exwives, children, and stepchildren that constitute his family. From the caravan of station wagons depositing upper-middle-class teenagers at the archetypal Collegeon-the-Hill, through the toxic chemical spill that becomes known as the airborne toxic event, to the desperate and sometimes violent attempts to eradicate an overwhelming fear of death, DeLillo uses the running commentary of his main character, Jack Gladney, to examine what life in America in the 20th century has come to mean. Through Jack’s eyes, we glimpse a society that is inundated with information, but unable to make sense of it, unable to understand how to utilize it and how to construct meaning from it. We see characters who urgently desire and fumble toward some sense of union or community, but who more often than not fall just short of achieving this goal. Plagued by anxieties regarding their own mortality, these characters are often separated from one another by the very things they have in common. For example, the main obstacle standing between Jack and his wife, Babette, is their mutual horror at the prospect of their own deaths. Instead of drawing comfort from one another or experiencing relief at the fact that, despite their previous assumptions, this is a shared fear, not only between them but among most human beings, they engage in a competition of sorts to decide who fears death more. They hide secrets from one another, to such an extent that they question whether they truly know one another. In this manner, they both come to recognize the identities they have placed on one another, the conceptions of who the other person is and how they have come to rely upon these illusions, even though they are far from the truth. When Babette reveals the affair she has had with Willie Mink and her involvement with the experimental drug Dylar in order to cure her fear of death, Jack self-pityingly exclaims, “This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self-pity . . . You are the happy one. I am the damned fool. That’s what I can’t forgive you for. Telling me you’re not the woman I believed you were. I’m hurt, I’m devastated” (191, 197). As with the other events in the novel, DeLillo

WHITE NOISE 1351

uses this crisis in Jack and Babette’s relationship to expose the illusions about ourselves and one another that we embrace in order to sustain some sense of order and meaning in an increasingly chaotic and meaningless world. DeLillo also uses ordinary, everyday experiences of American suburban life, such as going to the grocery store or watching television, to explore how the identity we construct for ourselves is constantly mediated by information technology. During an airborne toxic event, members of the community are outraged and dejected when they realize that their communal disaster has somehow escaped recognition from the local news programs and television stations. The victims of the airborne toxic event depend on media coverage to identify themselves as victims and to justify their terror. They look to the media to confirm the reality of what has happened to them. Even Jack’s “death” is only real because it is projected by computer analysis. As John Frow has noted, in White Noise, there is no distinction between representation and reality. This is again evident when Jack’s daughter and stepdaughter, Steffie and Denise, begin adopting symptoms related to the airborne toxic event only after they hear about them on the radio. It is obvious that the characters in White Noise rely on elements of media and technology to guide their behavior and reassure them about the meaning of their own existence. Likewise, the characters rely on consumerism as a buffer against their own mortality. The supermarket setting is prevalent throughout the novel. Again and again we encounter Murray (Jack’s colleague), Jack, Babette, and the children at the supermarket, deriving pleasure from the act of consumerism. The supermarket, with its incredible array of exotic and foreign foods as well as the necessary allotment of familiar comfort foods, represents the increasing globalization of society. The number of choices is dizzying and empowering for Jack, Babette, and Murray. In fact, Murray continually points out how the meaning that appears to be missing from all of their lives, for which they are searching, can be regained through purchasing. Shopping is a way to deny death and to ensure, through the products that are purchased, that one not only continues a material

existence but also that this existence is as stable and rich as one would like. In this way, consumerism is linked to immortality. Ultimately, White Noise forces us to recognize the impact that our postmodern world has had on us as individuals as well as a culture and community. DeLillo pushes us as readers to acknowledge the shifts taking place in our own identity formation and our reliance on outside forces, specifically technology and media, for self and cultural definition. DeLillo’s portrait of life in late-20th-century America is a grim one, in which the characters are often confused and alienated. Unfortunately, as Bruce Bawer has noted, DeLillo seems to suggest in the novel that the only outlet for the feelings of terror and meaninglessness that Jack Gladney, and all those like him, experience is violence. As Murray suggests to Jack, brutal, random violence, the ability and desire to take another human life, is the only escape from the anxieties and emptiness that characterize postmodern existence. However, even this fails in the end. Although Jack does shoot Mink at the end of the novel in an attempt to recover his own meaning and life, Mink shoots Jack in the wrist, once again bringing Jack closer to his mortality. Consequently, even this last outlet appears to have been an illusion, and the novel ends on a note of loss and capitulation to something inevitable. The novel concludes, fittingly enough, in the supermarket where the vast array of items has been rearranged. Symbolic of the ultimately inescapable terror and emptiness that is a direct result of the fast-paced postmodern era, DeLillo claims, “There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweettempered people taken to the edge” (326).

SOURCES Bawer, Bruce. “Don DeLillo’s America,” New Criterion (1985): 34–42. Bonca, Cornel. “Don DeLillo’s White Noise: The Natural Language of the Species,” College Literature 23, no. 2 (1996): 25–44. Conroy, Mark. “From Tombstone to Tabloid: Authority Figured in White Noise,” Critique 35, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 97–110. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Duvall, John N. “The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in Don DeLillo’s White

1352

WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL?

Noise,” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 50, no. 3 (1994): 127–147. Frow, John. “The Last Things Before the Last: Notes on White Noise,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (1990): 413–429. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Postmodern Parataxis: Embodied Texts, Weightless Information,” American Literary History 2, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 394–421. King, Noel. “Reading White Noise: Floating Remarks,” Critical Quarterly 33, no. 3 (1991): 66–83. Peyser, Thomas. “Globalization in America: The Case of Don DeLillo’s White Noise,” CLIO 25, no. 3 (1996): 255–271. Heather Bliven

WHO WILL RUN THE FROG HOSPITAL? LORRIE MOORE (1994) Lorrie MOORE’s fourth work of fiction, Frog Hospital, is narrated by Berie Carr, a photograph curator at a Midwest museum who is approaching 40. When the story opens, she is in Paris with her husband, Daniel, a medical researcher, who is attending a professional conference. It’s clear from the outset that troubles threaten their childless marriage, as Berie observes: “I feel his lack of love for me” (5). Perhaps because of her marital problems, while in Paris Berie conjures pleasant memories of summer 1972, when she was 15 and living with her middleclass family in the town of Horsehearts, in Upstate New York. The local draft board has sent many of the local young men fleeing for Canada to avoid Vietnam; Watergate is in the air; and the federal government has just legalized abortion. It is Berie’s memories of that summer, interpolated into the text, that enliven the narrative, making Frog Hospital a fascinating comingof-age story. As is true with most small towns, Horsehearts offers little diversion for adventuresome teens. While managing to remain “babysitting material” with high scores on standardized tests, Berie and her friend Sils rebel in the teenage fashion by smoking cigarettes, staying out after curfew, and visiting area bars using fake identifications. Theirs is a strong and intriguing friendship. While Berie is flat-chested and plain looking, given to making frequent self-deprecating wisecracks, Sils possesses the body of a 20-year-old, with a face that lands her a job as Cinderella at Storyland,

a local theme park. As Sils roams the grounds in full costume, charming young girls and older boys and men, Berie works as a cashier at the park’s entrance. Rather than feeling jealousy, Berie admires her friend, though all the while fearful that Sils might ditch her for more mature pursuits. When Sils becomes pregnant by an older boy she’s met at a bar, self-sacrificing Berie embarks on a scheme to steal from the Storyland till, taking small amounts every day to avoid arousing suspicion. With the money, Sils undergoes an abortion in Vermont because, while abortion is now legal, none of the local Horsehearts physicians will perform one. Even after she already has raised enough money for the abortion, Berie continues to steal on the job. Theft has become an addiction. Eventually, management sets a trap and catches Berie, but because the park owner, the town millionaire, wants to keep trouble out of the newspaper, she is dismissed without facing charges. Deeply disappointed, Berie’s parents send her to a religious boarding school, in part to separate her from Sils, whom her parents consider a negative influence. From there the story races through Berie’s high school and college career, chronicling her late blooming, her first boyfriends, and sexual initiation. After a while, the narrative pace slows again to show a series of poignant reunions and partings, first with Sils, who has moved to Hawaii to serve as a letter carrier, and then LaRoue, Berie’s frumpy overweight foster sister, whom Berie mostly ignored while she was pals with Sils. The last remaining family member in Horsehearts, LaRoue, is three years from suicide, a revelation that reinforces the theme of lost hope. The unique title comes from a painting made by Sils after she is hired as Cinderella at Storyland. The painting recalls the time when, as young girls, Berie and Sils used to visit a nearby marsh to bandage frogs wounded by neighborhood boys with BB guns. The Cinderella fable adds new dimension to the coming-of-age story and opportunities of irony, though critics, on occasion, have argued that the use of Cinderella might strike readers as too contrived, and the numerous allusions to frogs in the novel can seem overdone. The novel features a unique construction. By interpolating scenes from Berie’s past, Moore sets up many

WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR 1353

interesting contrasts and comparisons. For example, in the back story one focus is on Sils’s abortion, while in the contemporary story, we learn that Berie and Daniel have been unable to conceive a child and that his professional conference, in fact, is related to fertility. In a more general sense, Moore depicts the limitless hopes of youth and the major disappointments that can occur in adult life. The two narrative threads move in chronological order, except for the moving final scene, which, in an interesting coda, shows Berie and Sils singing together in an all-girls choir in high school. Most critics consider Frog Hospital a breakthrough for Moore, combining her lush style with a newfound depth of characterization. Moore possesses an uncanny ability to identify and report the revealing details that enliven the setting and makes all the characters, even the minor ones, vivid and unforgettable. Whether it’s a clubfooted taxi driver, a frumpy stepsister, or Berie’s cold father, Moore evokes the essence of their personality in swift, economical brush strokes. Moore’s work is more than sheer surfaces; it is full of keen psychological insights, capturing the depths of adolescence and adulthood. It possesses warmth, wisdom, and a voice that is both funny and original.

SOURCES James, Caryn. “I Feel His Lack of Love For Me.” Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New York Times, 9 October 1994, p. 7. Johnson, Claudia. “A Sad and Gory Land.” Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? The London Review of Books, 23 February 1995, pp. 28–29. Larsen, Eric. “That Anteroom of Girlhood.” Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? Los Angeles Times, 27 November 1994, p. 15. Miner, Valerie. “Connections and Disconnections.” Review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? The Women’s Review of Books 12 (1995): 14. Moore, Lorrie. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? New York: Warner Books, 1994. William Grattan

WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR (1941– )

John Edgar Wideman, the only American novelist to win two PEN/Faulkner Awards (for SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY [1984] and PHILADELPHIA FIRE [1990]), is, in the opinion

of many scholars, one of the most accomplished writers in the United States. Reviewer Laura Miller praises “Wideman’s potent, lyrical voice,” one that “picks up strands of Shakespeare and Poe, as well as more ancient storytelling traditions” (Miller). He is the author of seven novels and two short story collections, as well as numerous articles and essays. Although Wideman’s early novels were influenced by William FAULKNER and T. S. Eliot, he has changed his narrative voice in later novels. From 1981 onward, he has chosen to explore African-American cultural and identity issues. To do so, he uses the African-American oral tradition, which includes communal myth and memory, and mirrors or pairs two characters to make a larger point. And throughout his career, he continues to examine the role of violence in American cities. John Edgar Wideman was born on June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C., to Edgar Wideman and Betty French Wideman. Reared in Homewood, a predominantly African-American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, until he was 12, and then Shadyside, a predominantly white neighborhood. Wideman earned a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1963. As a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford University, he received a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1966. Wideman married Judith Ann Goldman in 1965, became the first African American tenured at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded its first African-American studies program in 1971, and now holds an endowed chair at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Wideman’s first novel, A Glance Away (1967), focuses on Eddie Lawson, a recovering drug addict who returns to Homewood to reintegrate himself into the community. Also in residence are Brother Small, an albino black man, his lover Robert Thurley, a white homosexual college professor who is Eddie’s racial double and mirrors his fears and bigotries. In Hurry Home (1970), Wideman examines the estranged black intellectual, a recurring interest, Here Cecil Braithewaite, the first black lawyer in his community, travels to Europe and becomes involved with a mulatto baby who dies. Cecil returns home, knowing that Europe does not have the answers and that he must take

1354 WIDEMAN, JOHN EDGAR

responsibility for his own story and his place in the American community. In The Lynchers (1973), Wideman introduces his first black vernacular voice, that of Tom Wilkerson, and a plan by four black men to lynch a white Philadelphia policeman. Wilkerson eventually averts the lynching, questions the ritual killing, and suggests the power and potential of the voice that can articulate oral history. Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy (1981) includes Damballah, a series of interconnected stories, and Hiding Place, a novel. Hiding Place continues the tale of Tommy Lawson of Damballah, one of whose themes is the role of language rituals in shaping the black cultural tradition. Tommy has returned to his relative, Bess, who lives at their ancestral home. After he is shot by the police, Bess leaves her “hiding place” and moves to Homewood so that she can tell his story. The trilogy concludes with the award-winning Sent for You Yesterday, in which John (Doot) Lawson returns to Homewood to learn the stories of his uncle, Carl French; of his lover, the albino Brother Tate; and Brother’s sister Lucy. The tension between their stories of the past and the violence threatening the community of the present reveal a lesson that John, and the reader, must learn. In Reuben (1987), Wideman blends his earlier interest in the alienated black intellectual with his later interest in positive mythmaking and storytelling roles. Reuben, a lawyer in Homewood, advises Kwansa, a black prostitute whose daughter is kidnapped, and Wally, a college basketball coach who has been involved with the murder of a white man. With Philadelphia Fire (1990) and The Cattle Killing, however, Wideman explores the issue of urban violence. Philadelphia Fire is based on the 1985 police bombing of the headquarters of MOVE, a black organization resisting eviction notices from the city. In the novel, Cudjoe, a writer, searches for a boy seen running from the scene. He symbolizes society, both black and white, and its failing structure. The title refers ironically to William Penn’s statement that Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, would never burn. The Cattle Killing is also based on a real incident, the 1793 persecution of African Americans by whites who believe that blacks brought yellow fever to Philadelphia. Alternating between past and present, the immensely complex novel gives voices to whites and

blacks, using as a central metaphor the African Shosa’s killing of their cattle, in the erroneous belief that the act would save them from the European invaders. In an interview with Laura Miller shortly after the publication of The Cattle Killing, Wideman mused about the issues of skepticism and faith, citing his mother’s profoundly unshakable faith in her religion. “Like Ellison said, beneath our certainties, there’s always chaos. I’m examining that profound skepticism and reinforcing whatever positive faith I have that it’s worth writing another sentence, worth making another try to make myself a better person, to understand things. I’m trying to find reasons to live a rational and ethical life” (Miller). Wideman’s most recent novel, Hoop Roots, links basketball with jazz, with art, with writing, but also with the roots of black life and culture in America.

NOVELS The Cattle Killing. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1996. A Glance Away. New York: Harcourt, 1967. “A Glance Away,” “Hurry Home,” and “The Lynchers”: Three Early Novels by John Edgar Wideman. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994. Hiding Place. New York: Avon, 1981. The Homewood Trilogy (includes Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday). New York: Avon, 1985. Hoop Roots. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2001. Hurry Home. New York: Harcourt, 1970. The Lynchers. New York: Harcourt, 1973. Philadelphia Fire. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1990. Reuben. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1987. Sent for You Yesterday. New York: Avon, 1983. Two Cities. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1998.

SOURCES Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Harris, Trudier. Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Lustig, Jessica. “Home: An Interview with John Edgar Wideman,” African American Review 26, no. 3 (1992): 453–457. Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1995.

WIELAND; OR THE TRANSFORMATION, AN AMERICAN TALE 1355

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy,” Contemporary Literature 32, no. 3 (1991): 312–345. Samuels, Wilfred D. “Going Home: A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman,” Callaloo 6 (1983): 40–59. Wideman, John Edgar, with Bonnie Tusmith. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

OTHER John Edgar Wideman. African American Literature Book Club. Available online. URL: http://aalbc,com?authors/johne,htm. Accessed January 17, 2006. John Edgar Wideman Literary Society. Available online. URL: http://www.ship.edu/-rejani. Accessed January 17, 2006. Miller, Laura. “Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Salon .com. Available online. URL: http://www.salon.com/nov96/ interview.961111.html. Accessed January 17, 2006. Simon, Scott. “Jamming: John Edgar Wideman Connects Life and Sport.” NPR [National Public Radio]. Available online. URL: http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/ 2001/wideman/011103.wideman.html. Accessed January 17, 2006.

WIELAND; OR THE TRANSFORMATION, AN AMERICAN TALE CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1798) Wieland; or the Transformation, an American Tale, was greatly admired by Charles Brockden BROWN’s contemporaries, an important influence on later American writers like POE, HAWTHORNE, and MELVILLE, and judged today by critics as among the greatest, if not the greatest work by an early American author. Set in the years before the Revolutionary War in rural Pennsylvania, the tale is written in an “Americanized Gothic style,” meaning the story is psychologically complex, dark, and mysterious (Watts, 72). Clara Wieland, sister to the titled character, narrates the novel. Though Clara is passive at times, in general, she is as resilient, courageous, and intelligent as any male character in the text. She begins the narrative with the ending “Fate has done its worst” (5), setting the reader on guard for a lurid tale. Nevertheless, Clara’s stated purpose is not to excite, but to teach “the duty of avoiding deceit . . . and show, the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline” (5).

To exemplify the latter caution, Clara begins with the story of her father’s uneven and “narrow” religious study (9). From this study in his native Germany, Theodore Wieland feels a call to proselytize North American Indians. Upon arriving in America, his courage quickly fails him; instead, he marries, has children, and becomes wealthy enough to retire from physical labor. With leisure, his call to preach revisits him with a vengeance, and when he fails in another attempt to teach the Indians, Theodore believes he is under God’s condemnation. The narrator treats her father’s assessment almost mockingly, but she cannot do the same for his punishment for it is unequivocal and immediate—and one of the strangest incidents in all American literature. One night, compelled to solitary worship in the temple he’s built to his God, Wieland self-combusts—or at least all his clothing does, leaving him naked, bruised, and barely breathing. He dies, and his wife soon follows him to the grave, leaving a son, Theodore Jr., and daughter Clara haunted by the extraordinary experience. Brown insists the possibility of auto-combustion exists—even offering scientific proof from contemporary journals— whether it is God’s punishment or not (23). Less important than the veracity of the story is the fact that the burning and aftermath are described sincerely. Brown clearly means to encourage the belief that the events are possibly divine, or at least that Clara and Theodore Jr. believe so. After their parents die, Theodore and Clara are raised by a kind aunt who gives them a rational education, free of the religious prejudice that marked their father’s instruction. The two remain very close, even after Theodore marries their neighbor Catharine Pleyel. Their tiny social circle is complete when Catharine’s brother, Henry, returns from his travels to Germany. The four adults, along with Theodore and Catharine’s four children and a young servant girl, form an isolated group that deals little with the outside world. The idyllic group, most often engaged in listening to Theodore and Henry debate the meaning in classic Roman speeches, is upset by two events: First, Theodore is certain he hears the voice of his wife when out at night, though she is with the others at home all

1356 WIELAND; OR THE TRANSFORMATION, AN AMERICAN TALE

the while; second, a former acquaintance of Henry’s, Francis Carwin, insinuates himself in the group. Carwin, a mysterious stranger with the persuasive powers of a Cicero, the Roman orator Theodore Wieland so admired, lacks the moral powers necessary to regulate his gift and thus unwittingly wreaks havoc with his talent (Axelrod, 85). Still, no one associates Carwin’s sudden appearance with the peculiar voices they all hear at different times. The voices Clara hears are the most ominous: She perceives two men plotting to kill her from her bedroom closet; and while meditating in a secluded spot, another voice warns her of impending danger. Although known for her reason and courage, Clara falters in the face of the disembodied voices. She is certain someone is plotting her death but equally sure she will be protected by divine powers. The voices Henry hears also affect Clara: While walking to her house to declare his feelings for her, Henry is certain he overhears Clara and Carwin in a sexual encounter. No amount of tears or reason can convince Henry his senses have been deceived; he rejects Clara as a profligate, wounding her pride and breaking her heart. This, however, is the least of Clara’s worries: Clara returns from arguing with Henry to find, on her own bed, her sister-in-law, Catharine, murdered. As she flees to warn her brother at his house against Carwin—the certain culprit—she discovers the four children and servant girl butchered. Clara’s shock at these gruesome events is such that it takes weeks for her to comprehend that the destruction of the Wieland family comes not from an outside source but from within. For just as Clara and Henry sought an explanation for the voices their ears undeniably hear, so does Theodore. While Henry represents the limitations of 18th-century rationalist thinking, Theodore characterizes religious enthusiasts, or those with a tendency to mistake one’s own ardor for heavenly messages (Axelrod, 67). Henry believes, like other followers of Locke, that all knowledge is derived from human experience with their senses. He discredits any innate knowledge and emphasizes human reason. Theodore, on the other hand, believes in supernatural interventions and accepts the voices as divine, not human-made—the predilection for which he certainly inherited from his

father. The two characters “crudely represent the temperamental division of the age” (Fliegelman, viii), and Brown indicates both can lead to society’s destruction. Wieland is a “devastating critique” of the rationalists (Watts, 82) because the novel continually shows senses cannot be trusted and that rationalism is “impotent to deal with an irrational element at the core of human nature” (Axelrod, 83). Equally destructive are humans who rely on their limited perceptions to interpret God’s will, as clearly illustrated in all the Wieland men, most especially Theodore Jr. The voices Theodore hears demand the sacrifice of his family, and to show his faithfulness, like Abraham of the Old Testament, Theodore complies. Still, the biblical story of Abraham “affirms man’s capacity for attaining absolute truth whereas Brown’s novel denies the human capacity for attaining any truth absolutely” (Axelrod, 91–92), since the source of Theodore’s voices is never ascertained. Taken into custody, Theodore claims no remorse, believing he’s been obedient. The final sacrifice would be the life of his beloved sister; Theodore escapes prison three times to fulfill this command. He finally succeeds in finding Clara in her house where she’s gone to meet Carwin for a promised defense of his innocence. Carwin admits his guilt at sporting with Clara’s fears and reputation, but denies greater culpability. He achieves his aims through the skill of ventriloquinism, new to the 18th century. Carwin explains that, early on, he learned both to imitate the voice of others and to throw his own voice. It was his voice Clara and Henry heard on every occasion, pretending the voices of others; it was even his voice that Theodore first heard. But Carwin adamantly denies being the source of Theodore’s command to kill. By way of proof, Carwin, through the use of his skill, saves Clara in the final physical struggle with her brother. Carwin throws his voice and commands Theodore to “Hold!” adding that his design to kill his family has been his own, not God’s. Theodore, in a moment of clarity, recognizes his responsibility and takes his own life. Carwin remains an enigma throughout the novel. In the final confrontation he shows he is not completely malevolent by saving Clara; yet Clara would never have been in mortal danger had Carwin not began his

WIESEL, ELIE 1357

mischief. And in the end, it appears as though that is all Carwin is guilty of. Carwin, then, is merely the catalyst for Theodore’s lunacy and the destruction of an idyllic society, suggesting that, as Clara’s moral expresses, imperfect discipline inevitably allows one to be deceived, despite social class, economic status, or higher education. Brown based his narrative of a true account of a New York man who killed his family in 1781, convinced it was God’s command. But Brown hoped for more than mere sensationalism, as the novel’s subtitles suggest. The Transformation refers to the psychological developments necessary to transform a man from loving husband to murderer. But it also refers to the difficulties the new nation felt in the transformation from a government of absolute authority to a government where any with enough skill might gain authority (Fliegelman, xii). In such a society, men must learn which voices to listen in order to choose their leaders wisely—not an easy task when Brown shows you can’t trust your own senses or your religious inclinations. The second subtitle, An American Tale, indicates Brown meant this warning specifically for the new nation, and he does not seem very hopeful. The novel ends with Clara, married at last to Henry, and relatively happy. But she no longer lives in America; she finds peace only in Europe. There may be a way to make a graceful and meaningful transformation, but the sad fate of the Wieland family shows failure is a terrifying reality.

SOURCES Allen, Paul. The Life of Charles Brockden Brown. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975. Axelrod, Alan. An American Tale: Charles Brockden Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Edited and with an introduction by Jay Fliegelman. New York: Penguin, 1991. Clark, David Lee. Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. Grabo, Norman S. The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

Lewis, Paul. “Charles Brockden Brown and the Gendered Canon of Early American Fiction,” Early American Literature 31, no. 2 (1996), 167–188. Rosenthal, Bernard, ed. Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Watts, Steven. The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Wiley, Lulu Rumsey. The Sources and Influence of the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown. New York: Vantage Press, 1950. H. L. Johnsen

WIESEL,ELIE(ZER) (1928–2005)

Elie Wiesel was a survivor of the Nazi death camps of World War II and the preeminent chronicler of the horrors that he witnessed and endured. A novelist, playwright, essayist, historian, Wiesel won an impressive number of awards for literature and humanitarianism; in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All his work is grounded in the Holocaust and its aftermath; his millions of readers are indelibly moved by his descriptions of this part of the Jewish experience, and of the faith in God that sustains a humanity who might otherwise have succumbed to despair. His first and best-known novel, NIGHT (1960; published as La Nuit in 1958), became part of The Night Trilogy, composed of Night, Dawn (1961; published as L’Aube in 1960), and The Accident (1962, published as Le Jour in 1961). Wiesel was driven by the need to speak out so people will know and remember, and by the opposite, the impossibility of words to describe the full extent of the horror. Always enveloping his writing in surrealism or opacity, Wiesel achieved an understated, mystical style that collides with the horrific reality that is his subject. Many critics of Wiesel’s work point out that his descriptions of the Holocaust are a metaphor for the modern human condition. Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Romania, to Shlomo Wiesel, a grocer, and Sarah Feig Wiesel. Although he survived four Nazi death camps—Birkenau, Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald—his mother, father, and younger sister were murdered by the Nazis. After the war, he studied at the

1358 WIESEL, ELIE

Sorbonne from 1948 to 1951. He immigrated to the United States in 1956 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1963. In 1969 Wiesel married Marion Erster Rose, a Holocaust survivor who would become the major translator of his works from French to English. The French novelist Francois Mauriac persuaded young Wiesel to break his silence and to write about the Holocaust, and the result was the novel Night, a powerful autobiographical evocation of the atrocities Wiesel witnessed at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. The underlying premise of this title is that we are accustomed to looking into the night sky and seeing the stars and the eyes of God; but in Wiesel’s endless-seeming night sky, filled with the smoke of burning bodies, even the stars seem to emanate from the fires of the crematorium. In Dawn, Eliezer, a young Holocaust survivor, moves to Palestine but forsakes his religious ideals and becomes a persecutor himself. The Accident tells the story of a journalist who, struck by a taxi (as Wiesel himself was struck), realizes that his guilt as a death-camp survivor has fueled his self-destructive desires. Wiesel’s subsequent novels focus on the moral issues faced in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In La ville de la chance (1962; The Town beyond the Wall), the survivor returns to Hungary to confront his Nazi prison guard only to try to come to grips with his own sense of responsibility. In Les portes de la foret (1964; The Gates of the Forest), the survivor confronts a God who, he thinks, may in fact be mad, only to move beyond his own suffering to acknowledge his connection to others. Le cinquième fils (1983; The Fifth Son) follows the son of a survivor to Europe. Although the son initially intends to avenge his father by killing the guard who brutalized him in the death camps, he abandons his plans when he realizes that the man, now old, does not comprehend his guilt. L’Oubli (1989; The Forgotten) examines the reactions and responsibilities of the children of Holocaust survivors. Wiesel’s most recent novel, Le juges (1999; The Judges), uses a snowstorm to examine the revelations of five stranded airline passengers and to raise significant philosophical questions of good and evil. Wiesel wrote a memoir in two volumes: All Rivers Run to the Sea (taking him from youth to the 1960s) and And the Sea Is Never Full (taking up the story of

Wiesel in the last three decades of the 20th century). After working at the Jewish Daily Forward, Wiesel taught at numerous universities, including City College of New York, where he was Distinguished Professor from 1971 to 1976, and Boston University, where he was professor of philosophy from 1988. With his wife, Marion Wiesel, he founded the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity in 1986. He served on the advisory board of more than 70 organizations and received more than 100 honorary degrees. Wiesel died in 2005.

NOVELS IN ENGLISH All Rivers Run to the Sea. New York: Knopf, 1995. And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs. 1969–. Translation by Marion Wiesel. New York: Knopf, 1999. The Forgotten. Translated by Stephen Becker. New York: Summit Books, 1992. The Judges. New York: Knopf, 2002. La Nuit. 1958; translation by Stella Rodway published as Night. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960. L’Aube. 1960; translation by Frances Frenaye published as Dawn. New York: Hill & Wang, 1961. La Nuit. L’Aube. [and] Le Jour. 1969; translation published as Night. Dawn. [and] The Accident: Three Tales. New York: Hill & Wang, 1972; reprinted as The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987; translation by Stella Rodway published as Night. Dawn. Day. New York: Aronson, 1985. La Ville de la chance. 1962; translation by Stephen Becker published as The Town beyond the Wall. New York: Atheneum, 1964; new edition, New York: Holt, 1967. Le Jour. 1961; translation by Anne Borchardt published as The Accident. New York: Hill & Wang 1962. Le Mendiant de Jerusalem. 1968; translation by the author and L. Edelman published as A Beggar in Jerusalem. New York: Random House, 1970. Les Portes de la foret. 1964; translation by Frances Frenaye published as The Gates of the Forest. New York: Holt, 1966.

SOURCES Berenbaum, Michael. Elie Wiesel: God, the Holocaust, and the Children of Israel. West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1994. Davis, Colin. Elie Wiesel’s Secretive Texts. Gainesville: University Press of Florida Press, 1994. Franciosi, Robert. Elie Wiesel: Conversations. Edited by Robert Franciosi. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2002. Heffner, Richard D. Conversations with Elie Wiesel. Thomas J. Vinciguerra, ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2001.

WIFE 1359

Lazo, Caroline Evensen. Elie Wiesel. New York: Macmillan, 1994. Pariser, Michael. Elie Wiesel: Bearing Witness. Brookfield, Conn.: Millbrook Press, 1994. Rosenfeld, Alvin. Confronting the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Schuman, Michael. Elie Wiesel: Voice from the Holocaust. Springfield, N.J.: Enslow, 1994. Sibelman, Simon P. Silence in the Novels of Elie Wiesel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Stern, Ellen Norman. Elie Wiesel: A Voice for Humanity. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. Wiesel, Elie. L’Oublie: Roman. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989.

OTHER Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Available online. URL: http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org. Accessed June 25, 2003.

WIFE BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1975)

Bharati MUKsecond novel, Wife, opens in Calcutta with Dimple Dasgupta’s father seeking her a suitable mate of appropriate caste, an engineer, by scouring matrimonial advertisements. When we first meet Dimple she is fantasizing about marriage, not to an engineer, but to a neurosurgeon. She imagines it will bring her freedom, love, and a more desirable life. Life has so far been simply a rehearsal for real life, the kind of real life that comes with marriage; for marriage brings opportunities that single women are denied in Indian culture, and Dimple longs for those freedoms more than anything. Dimple worries that she is not fair or bosomy enough for marriage. From the start Dimple seeks to manipulate her identity through whatever means in order to become more desirable. Dimple studied at Calcutta University but is unable to take her exams, over which she despairs because without a B.A. she will be considered less marketable. She is presented as unformed and malleable; she simply adapts and adjusts according to others. Mukherjee presents a feminist perspective, creating an image of the oppressed woman who struggles with her identity but does not know it. Dimple is subject to the desires and whims of others and has been socialized to be unaware of her own desire for an independent identity. She believes she wants to be a wife, but her longing is confused with her desire for freedom.

HERJEE’s

She also is unaware that such a role will not grant her those desires. Dimple’s Calcutta neighbor Parameta Ray (Pixie), is colorfully drawn and represents all that Dimple would like to be. Pixie is a gregarious go-getter who eventually achieves the status and fanfare for which Dimple longs. Dimple will measure herself against Pixie throughout as Pixie becomes at first a working woman and eventually the wife of a film star. But Pixie, too, is limited in her potential, as she is content being “Mrs. P Bagchi of Calcutta and Bombay.” Dimple seeks instruction and confirmation for her life through various media channels. She writes Miss Problem-Walla c/o Eve’s Beauty-Basket in Bombay for guidance, not of the beauty kind, but as if she might be some sort of guru able to aid in emotional matters as well. Dimple is compelled by the authority of print, but her letters go either unanswered or dismissed, further highlighting her isolation in society. Dimple’s husband, Amit Kumar Basu, is eventually found in the papers; Dimple is not, however, the Basu family’s first choice. While the wedding is perfect, it is clear that the marriage will not be. The first of Dimple’s series of disappointments comes in learning that Basu is a short Prince Charming rather than a tall one. And in general her marriage does not turn out to be what she has hoped and dreamed. Rather than blossoming by gaining a firmer identity as a married woman, she finds that with each day she becomes less enthused. First her mother-in-law takes away her name, preferring instead Nandini. Then the newlyweds move into Dimple’s mother-in-law’s, where they live a far-lessthan-glamorous life. And Amit wants Dimple to act robotically, knowing simply what to do and say to please him. When the two immigrate to America, Dimple finds herself further removed, now in an even more unfamiliar society. She sees in those Indians who surround her further reflections of what she should and should not be. Meena Sen represents the ideal Indian woman, perpetually satisfied with her position and her identity as wife and mother. Ina Mullick represents the opposite extreme, an emboldened pants-wearing woman who is determined to live freely and to also free Dimple. Dimple sees in herself neither.

1360

WILDER, THORNTON

Dimple is cast into the world of the “other,” exiled, unassimilated, but also unable to fully embrace her role as Bengali housewife. As such she is depicted as a character to whom things happen. Staying home, she is isolated and grows more and more depressed. She is detached and begins to confuse her reality with television. She reacts to others passively, never actively engaging in socializing or housework. She sleeps nearly all day, cooks when necessary, and increasingly watches television and reads magazines while her husband repeatedly inquires what she does all day. Amit begins to become something of a caricature: at one time he is even imagined as a profile in a whiskey ad; he is in many ways cast as the one-dimensional character of the matrimonial ad. Dimple even has a brief affair with the American Milt Glasser, from which she is equally detached. It is as if the sexual act occurred in a surreal dream world like television. Dimple seems at all times absent, but there is violence beneath her passive exterior. Before they left Calcutta for America, Dimple had found herself pregnant. Unable to face motherhood, she jumped rope until she aborted her fetus. Foreshadowing the climax of the novel, Dimple had then exclaimed that it wasn’t murder, that she could never commit murder. There is little early evidence that Dimple will act violently toward others, since the violence she fantasizes about is largely self-imposed; she imagines her own suicide regularly, compiling a list of various ways to succeed and even using it as a way of “counting sheep” to sleep. Being found dead would grant her some form of identity. But once, when Amit sneaks up to embrace her, she lashes at him with a knife, reflecting how impulsive her nature can be when she responds instinctively to the uncontrollable fears she has of her environment. Wife ends climactically, with Dimple committing murder after all. She kills Amit by stabbing at the mole on his face, her realities so confused that she is not fully aware of her own actions. Again it is depicted like a dream. She is symbolically freed from the power Amit and their marriage had over her through this violent act and seems to hope to embrace such freedom since she believes women on television get away with murder. It is ironic that with a name like Dimple, she

chooses to kill Amit by stabbing at his mole. Her identity might simply be described as the slight indentation for which she is named, and in vengeance she has sought Amit’s much more identifiable facial feature as the target for her frustrations. The novel is written in three sections, the first taking place in Calcutta, the second in America while Amit and Dimple are living with Sens, and the third when they are subletting an apartment in Manhattan. Wife develops many of the themes for which Mukherjee’s work is celebrated in her depiction of the life of one woman exiled from her country and herself.

SOURCES Koshy, Susan. “The Geography of Female Subjectivity, Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity, edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora. London: Longman, 1998. Krishnan, R. S. “Cultural Construct and the Female Identity: Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife,” International Fiction Review 25, nos. 1–2 (1998): 89–97. Ramachandra, Ragini. “Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife: An Assessment,” Literary Criterion 26, no. 3 (1991): 56–67. Sarkar, Farida. “Suppression, Frustration, Anger, and the Identity Crisis of Dimple Dasgupta in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife.” In Contributions to Bengal Studies: An Interdisciplinary and International Approach, edited by Enayetur Rahim. Dhaka. Beximco, 1998. Shankar, Lavinia Dhingra. “Activism, ‘Feminism’ and Americanization in Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3, no. 1 (1995 Winter): 61–84. Wickramagamage, Carmen. “Relocation and Positive Act: The Immigrant Experience in Bharati Mukherjee’s Novels,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 2, no. 2 (1992 Fall): 171–200. Deirdre Fagan

WILDER, THORNTON (NIVEN) (1897– 1975) Although primarily known as an award-winning, innovative playwright who celebrated the lives of ordinary individuals, Thornton Wilder was also the author of eight novels. They included the best-sellers Heaven’s My Destination (1928); The Ides of March (1948); The BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY (1927) (which won the Pulitzer Prize); and The Eighth Day (1967) (which won the National Book Award). He was considered by

WILDER, THORNTON 1361

his contemporaries to be one of the most sensitive and erudite observers of American culture. Thornton Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, to Amos Parker Wilder, a newspaper editor and American Consul to China, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder. After attending schools in the United States and China, Wilder earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1920 and a master’s degree from Princeton University in 1926. He served twice in the U.S. Army: as a corporal in the Coast Artillery Corps in 1918, and as a captain in Army Air Intelligence from 1942 to 1945, earning the rank of lieutenant colonel and receiving the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star; Legion d’Honneur, and Honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.). His debut novel, The Cabala (1926), set in Rome, Italy, is about a young American student who joins a mysterious association comprised of the youthful but decaying European aristocracy; he returns to the United States as a more mature artist. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, his second novel, established his reputation when it won a Pulitzer Prize. (He would win two additional Pulitzers, for his plays Our Town [1938] and in 1943 for The Skin of Our Teeth.) Central to the novel, which is set in 18th-century Peru, is a rope bridge that collapses and causes the deaths of five people—a boy, an adolescent girl, a young man, a middle-aged man, and an elderly noblewoman. The priest-protagonist finds in their deaths the evidence of unrequited love and questions of a deeply spiritual significance. The Woman of Andros (1930), as in the first two novels, explores both cultural and theological issues, this time by juxtaposing pre-Christian Greek culture against later Christian ideas. A pagan boy falls in love with both an older woman and her younger sister, both of whom die, leaving him, the novel suggests, without benefit of Christian solace. The novel survived a famous attack by Marxist critic Michael Gold, who castigated Wilder for not writing instead about Depression-era social issues. Set during the Depression era, Heaven’s My Destination is a picaresque novel that portrays a Don Quixote figure named George Brush, a book salesman who travels around the United States. It was a popular success, as was The Ides of March, which, as the title suggests, is a historical novel that centers on

the assassination of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. It has earned high praise for its historical accuracy and vision. The Eighth Day, often considered Wilder’s most important accomplishment, depicts a man on the run from a false murder charge. Set in a small southern Illinois town, the novel follows John Ashley as he becomes a fugitive and examines the families of Ashley and Breckenridge Lansing, the man whom Ashley was convicted of shooting. Theophilus North (1973), set in Newport, Rhode Island, is a novel composed of autobiographical short stories that Wilder said represented his twin (who died at birth) and what he might have made of his life. Thornton Wilder died of a heart attack in December 1975 in Hamden, Connecticut. His numerous honorary degrees and prizes include the 1952 Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 1965 first-ever presentation of the National Book Committee’s National Medal for Literature. The Bridge of San Luis Rey was filmed three times, initially in 1929; Theophilus North was made into the movie Mr. North by John Huston, starring Danny Huston, Anjelica Huston, and Robert Mitchum.

NOVELS The Bridge of San Luis Rey. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1927. The Cabala. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1926. The Eighth Day. New York: Harper, 1967. Heaven’s My Destination. New York: Coward-McCann, 1928. The Ides of March. New York: Harper, 1948. Theophilus North. New York: Harper, 1973. The Woman of Andros. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930.

SOURCES Blank, Martin. Critical Essays on Thornton Wilder. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995. Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Burbank, R. Thornton Wilder. Boston: Twayne, 1961. Castronovo, David. Thornton Wilder. New York: Ungar, 1986. Cowley, Malcolm, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. New York: Viking, 1957. De Koster, Katie, ed. Readings on Thornton Wilder. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 1998. Goldstein, Malcolm. The Art of Thornton Wilder. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.

1362

WILD MEAT AND THE BULLY BURGERS

Goldstone, Richard H. Thornton Wilder, An Intimate Portrait. New York: Dutton, 1975. Grebanier, Bernard. Thornton Wilder. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1965. Harrison, Gilbert A. The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder. New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983. Kuner, M. C. Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark. Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1972. Simon, Linda. Thornton Wilder: His Work. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979. Wilder, Amos Niven. Thornton Wilder and His Public. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980. Wilder, Thornton. The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961. Edited by Donald Gallup. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985.

OTHER The Official Thornton Wilder Site. Available online. URL: http://www.thorntonwilder.com. Accessed September 25, 2005. The Thornton Wilder Society. Available online. URL: http:// www.thorntonwildersociety.org. Accessed September 25, 2005.

WILD MEAT AND THE BULLY BURGERS LOIS ANN YAMANAKA (1996) Lois Ann YAMANAKA’s Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers begins with an ending, specifically “Happy Endings,” the first chapter of her debut novel. Readers quickly realize that the happy ending of the initial chapter’s title alludes not to the tone of the novel but to the longing of the adolescent protagonist, Lovey Nariyoshi, for she desires to live the life of her movie idol, Shirley Temple, fantasizing about a screen life far different from her own. Yamanaka’s quirky coming-of-age story is set in the mid-1970s in Hilo, Hawaii, and chronicles a year in Lovey’s life as she grows from being 12 and playing with Barbie dolls to attending the junior high school end-of-the-year dance. Lovey lives in a working-class neighborhood with her younger sister, Calhoon, who is endowed with the gift of spiritual sight; her mother, Verva, who feels harassed by her two daughters but also protective of them; and her father, Hubert, a modern-day hunter and gatherer who wanted sons but ended up with daughters. Narrated entirely in pidgin, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is told through the first-person perspective of Lovey as she describes the daily trials and tribulations

she experiences as a girl who is not in the popular crowd; whose one and only best friend is an effeminate boy, Jerry; and who desires to achieve acceptance through marrying a haole (white American) and living a middle-class lifestyle. Lovey, ashamed of her family’s working-class and Japanese-ethnic roots, struggles with standard English in school, with her teenage consumer desires (wanting store-bought food and clothes versus her family’s homemade products), and with the changes occurring to her body in her adolescence. Praised for writing in an authentic local voice, Yamanaka divides her novel into three sections with very brief chapters (9–10 pages at most), and because of their brevity, her prose has an intensity that reflects the immediacy of Lovey’s painful adolescent experiences. Lovey narrates things as they directly unfold, describing with raw honesty the shame she feels trickor-treating in the rich enclave of Reed’s Island, the overwhelming embarrassment and confusion she experiences when she gets her period and must buy sanitary napkins at the local store, and her exultation at being asked to dance the last slow dance by the most popular boy at her school. In many senses, this is a novel about fitting in and not fitting in. Many characters do not adhere to white, mainland American societal models or molds. Her best friend, Jerry, does not conform to notions of male gender identity because of his attraction to David Cassidy and his interest in Barbie dolls. And both he and Lovey are ostracized by the popular clique at their school, the Rays of the Rising Dawns, a group of rich girls who taunt Lovey and Jerry due to their poorer economic status. The second-generation Hawaii-born Nariyoshis, by virtue of their class standing, do not fit into the model-minority myth of upwardly mobile Asian Americans, nor do they reflect a portrait of Hawaiian leisure and luxury, since they struggle to put food on the table through Hubert’s hunting forays and Verva’s home-gardening efforts. Lovey herself does not fit into gender expectations of a Japanese-American girl in Hawaii, as she constantly tries to win her father’s affection by accompanying him on hunting expeditions and participating in his many schemes to earn extra money for family luxuries like a secondhand stereo or cassette player.

WILLIAMS, SHERLEY ANNE 1363

Acting like the eldest son and hunter’s side-kick that Hubert longs for, Lovey and her father draw closer together, making this novel an atypical Asian-American story about a daughter’s bond with her father. For it is on these trips that Lovey learns about her father’s life growing up on a Kauai plantation, his relationship with his brothers and parents, and the importance of home and family, which is central to his pride and identity as a local Hawaiian man. Through the portrait of Lovey’s relationship with Hubert, Yamanaka investigates the tension Lovey feels between pride in her family’s identity and shame at not fitting in with her richer peers. In particular, Yamanaka critiques the materialist and racist effects of mass consumer culture, which has poisoned Lovey into believing that in order to be accepted, she must be either rich, white, or skinny (or preferably all three). However, by the end of the novel, Lovey truly understands the lessons that her father has imparted to her through stories of the Nariyoshis, allowing Lovey to come of age through an appreciation of her local identity and place. And although the novel does not end with the idyllic movie happy ending that Lovey idolizes, the journey Lovey takes on her road to maturity is both heartbreaking and rewarding.

SOURCES Bromley, Roger. “This Body Is Your Only Real Home: Migrancy and Identity—Dreaming in Cuban, Native Speaker, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, and My Year of Meats.” In Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions, 66–95. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Davis, Rocio G. “I Wish You a Land”: Hawai’i Short Story Cycles and Aloha ’Aina,” Journal of American Studies 35 (2001): 47–64. Takahama, Valerie. “Controversial Adventures in ‘Paradise’: Bully Burgers and Pidgin,” Orange County Register, 15 February 1996, morning ed., E01. Wilson, Rob. “Bloody Mary Meets Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Imagining Hawaiian Locality, from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond.” In Reimagining the American Pacific: from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond, 163–189. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Interview, Asian Reporter, 20 February 2001, 12. ———. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Jennifer Ho

WILLIAMS, SHERLEY ANNE (1944–1999) Critic, novelist, poet, essayist, and educator, Sherley Anne Williams is probably best known for her first book, Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in NeoBlack Literature (1972), and her first novel, DESSA ROSE: A RIVETING STORY OF THE SOUTH DURING SLAVERY (1986). The first sets forth Williams’s philosophy: her belief in the unbroken connection between contemporary black writers and their ancestors, and the need to analyze and understand black literature within the black, not the white, experience. Williams also tries to tell the stories of uneducated and poor black women. In Dessa Rose, she uses the oral tradition of black culture to present slavery and the South from the perspective of a black woman and, as their friendship develops, a white woman. The novel earned positive reviews for its poetic style. Dessa Rose, who leads a slave revolt while on a coffle (a group of slaves chained together on the way to the auction bloc), and Ruth, a white woman, provide sanctuary to escaped slaves. Sherley Anne Williams was born in 1944 in Bakersfield, California, to Jesse Winson Williams, who died of tuberculosis when she was seven years old, and Lelia Marie Williams, who died when she was 16. Williams received her bachelor’s degree in history from California State University at Fresno in 1966 and a master’s degree from Brown University in 1972. She was professor of Afro-American literature until her death, from cancer, in San Diego, on July 6, 1999. Dessa Rose has become standard fare in university-level courses on black history and literature in particular, and American literature in general.

NOVELS Dessa Rose: A Riveting Story of the South during Slavery. New York: Morrow, 1986.

SOURCES Davies, Carole Boyce. “Mother Right/Write Revisited: Beloved and Dessa Rose and the Construction of Motherhood in Black Women’s Fiction.” In Narrating Mothers: The Theorizing Maternal Subjectives, edited by Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, 44–57. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Fisher, Dexter, and Robert B. Stepto, eds. Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1979.

1364 WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE

Kekeh, Andree Anne. “Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose: History and the Disruptive Power of Memory.” In History and Memory in African American Culture, edited by Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally, 219–227. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating between Tenses: Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad, 144–163. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Porter, Nancy. “Women’s Interracial Friendships and Visions of Community in Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Civil Wars, and Dessa Rose.” In Tradition and Talents of Women, edited by Florence Howe, 251–267. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Woman Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Trapasso, Anne E. “Returning to the Site of Violence: The Restructuring of Slavery’s Legacy in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose.” In Violence, Silence and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, edited by Deirdre Lashgari, 219–230. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. Williams, Sherley Anne. Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature. New York: Dial, 1972.

WILLIAMS, TENNESSEE (THOMAS LANIER WILLIAMS) (1911–1983) For an enormous number of readers, theatergoers, and critics all over the world, Tennessee Williams was the premier American playwright of the 20th century, known for a long list of now-classic dramas; they include The Glass Menagerie (1945), winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Prize; A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), both of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Fifteen of his works were made into motion pictures, and a number were Broadway successes, including Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1961). But although he was a dramatist first and foremost, publishing more than 60 plays, he was also a talented fiction writer who wrote two novels, four volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, an autobiography, and various essays. His first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), was made into a Warner Brothers film in 1961. His second, Moise and the World of Reason, published 25 years later, is a tale about the

artistic process and love, both heterosexual and homosexual. Although neither novel is set in the South, the usual setting for most of his plays and short fiction, both novels contain sensitive portraits of women who are artists, and both are about love. Tennessee Williams was born on March 29, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, to Cornelius Coffin Williams (a boisterous traveling shoe salesman who later served as the model for Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire), and Edwina Dakin Williams. The family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, when Williams was seven; he attended the University of Missouri, eventually graduating from the University of Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in 1938. He was an established playwright by the time he published The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. As scholar Ren Draya points out, in some ways the work resembles a play, in that it opens with descriptions of place and lighting (Draya, 657) and uses no quotation marks for dialogue. In this novel Karen Stone, an actor approaching 50, is criticized by both critics and theatergoers as being too old for her role. So when her husband, 20 years her senior, dies of a heart attack on a flight to Rome, Mrs. Stone stays in Italy, leases an apartment with a magnificent view, and meets a young man named Paolo di Lio, with whom she falls in love. Critics have noted her similarity to Williams himself, whose long-term partner was an ItalianAmerican named Frank Merlo. In 1961, Jose Quintero directed Roman Spring as a motion picture starring Vivien Leigh as Karen Stone, Warren Beatty as Paolo, and Lotte Lenya as the Contessa who introduces them; in 2003 Robert Ackerman directed it as a made-for-TV movie starring Helen Mirren as Karen Stone, Olivier Martinez as Paolo, and Anne Bancroft as the Contessa. Moise and the World of Reason is narrated by an aging playwright, and, unlike Williams’s earlier work, is a specifically gay novel, a tale of anguished loss that ends happily for both the playwright-narrator and for Moise, the artist. Moise is happy only when she can paint, and at the end, a large delivery of art supplies appears at her studio so she can continue to create art. Both novels explore the characteristic Williams themes of loneliness and desire. Although he made his mark in the modern theater and will continue to be viewed primarily as a play-

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS 1365

wright, Williams’s prose fiction needs to be better known. Indeed, at least one critic finds his fiction “perhaps even more consistent in quality that his drama” (Draya, 647). The novels, taken together with Williams’s short fiction, cover the full range of his obsessions—violence, murder, rape, nymphomania, castration, drugs, alcoholism, and sexuality, both straight and gay, all often cloaked in the sensual, pungent, emotional world of the South. Tennessee Williams, who wrestled with his own drug and alcohol addiction, died accidentally by choking on the cap of a pill bottle on February 24, 1983, in his suite at Hotel Elysie, in New York. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri. His manuscripts and letters are housed in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

NOVELS Moise and the World of Reason. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. New York: New Directions, 1950.

SOURCES Crandell, George W. Tennessee Williams: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. ———. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996. Devlin, Albert J., ed. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Draya, Ren. “The Fiction of Tennessee Williams.” In Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, edited by Jac Tharpe, 647–662. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. Falk, Signi. Tennessee Williams. 2nd edition. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Griffin, Alice. Understanding Tennessee Williams. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Leverich, Lyle. Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, 1995. ———. Tenn: The Timeless World of Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers, 1997. Londre, Felicia Hardison. Tennessee Williams. New York: Ungar, 1979. Martin, Robert A., ed. Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall International, 1997. McCann, John S. The Critical Reputation of Tennessee Williams: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Spoto, Donald. The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. Tharpe, Jac, ed. Tennessee Williams: A Tribute. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. Williams, Tennessee. Conversations with Tennessee Williams. Edited by Albert J. Devlin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986.

OTHER The Tennessee Williams Page. Available online. URL: http://www.lambda.net/~maximum/williams.html. Accessed September 25, 2005. Tennessee Williams. The Mississippi Writers Page. Available online. URL: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/mswriters/dir/williams_tennessee. Accessed September 25, 2005. Tennessee William. Eastern Illinois University. Available online. URL: http://www.eiu.edu/~eng1002/authors/ williams3. Accessed September 25, 2005.

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS (1883– 1963) Best known as one of the great American poets of the modernist period and author of the fivebook epic poem Paterson, William Carlos Williams is also admired for five novels, particularly WHITE MULE (1937), In the Money (1940), and The Build-Up (1952). These three novels comprise Williams’s Stetcher Trilogy, patterned on the early lives of his wife Flossie Herman and her immigrant family. Williams uses his art to transform their lives into a story about American materialism and its effect on individual members of a family. As both a poet and a novelist, Williams admired the person who questioned the status quo. Particularly during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Williams, a physician, wrote compassionately about the poverty endured by many of his patients. William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey, to William George Williams, a British businessman, and the Puerto Rican Raquel Helene Hoheb Williams. Williams was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his medical degree in 1906. In 1912 he married Florence Herman. In The Great American Novel (1923), an experimental work, Williams paints a selfportrait. He is attracted by Paris and avant-garde art, a yen he was able to satisfy a year later when he and his wife divided their time between New York and Paris. A

1366 WILLIE MASTERS’ LONESOME WIFE

Voyage to Pagany (1928), based on that trip, features an innocent American on his first tour of Europe; it is written in a more conventional style than his first novel or his third, A Novelette (1932). White Mule portrays Flossie, the assertive baby, who can kick like White Mule whiskey. Born in New York City to an immigrant Scandinavian named Joe, a printer, and his ambitious wife, Gurlie, Flossie moves to upstate New York, where the country life improves her health and her father starts his own printing company. In the Money depicts Joe’s success and move to the suburbs, and The BuildUp exemplifies the newly acquired middle-class values of the family; all grow from the ambition Gurlie has instilled in her newly American family. William Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963, in Rutherford. Most of his manuscripts and letters are housed in the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Build-Up. New York: Random House, 1952. The Great American Novel. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1923. In the Money. New York: New Directions, 1940. A Novelette and Other Prose. Toulon, France: TO Publishers, 1932. A Voyage to Pagany. New York: Macaulay, 1928. White Mule. New York: New Directions, 1937.

SOURCES Axelrod, Steven Gould, and Helen Deese. Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams. New York: MacMillan, 1994. Berry, S. L. William Carlos Williams. Mankato, Minn.: Creative Education, 1997. Bloom, Harold, ed. William Carlos Williams. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Breslin, James E. William Carlos Williams: An American Artist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Doyle, Charles, ed. William Carlos Williams: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Engels, John. Guide to William Carlos Williams. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. Guimond, James. The Art of William Carlos Williams: A Discovery and Possession of America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968.

Laughlin, James. Remembering William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1995. Lenhart, Gary. The Teachers & Writers Guide to William Carlos Williams. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1998. Miller, J. Hillis, ed. William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Morris, Daniel. The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. Nardi, Marcia. The Last Word: Letters Between Marcia Nardi and William Carlos Williams. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. Wagner, Linda Welshimer, ed. Interviews with William Carlos Williams: “Speaking Straight Ahead.” New York: New Directions, 1976. ———. The Prose of William Carlos Williams. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970. ———. William Carlos Williams: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978. Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. Revised edition. Boston: Twayne, 1989. Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions, 1967. ———. Selected Letters. Edited by John C. Thirlwall. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1957.

WILLIE MASTERS’ LONESOME WIFE WILLIAM H. GASS (1968) Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife self-consciously defies an unreflective and unengaged reader/text interaction. Originally published as an oversize volume featuring page signatures of varying color, texture, and thickness, GASS’s work of fiction even challenges the conventional materiality of the book form. Punctuated with nude pictures of a buxom young woman (perhaps referring to the wife in the title, but as we read, representation as such becomes more and more complicated), the “text” of the novel speaks to itself—its own conventions, limitations, even desires—as the reader must balance the narrative of the text as “imagination imagining itself imagine” and the impasses reached when attempting to connect the world of the text to the world proper. Though exemplary of metafictional works (works that directly address and focus upon their status as fiction), the text does not function simply as an allegory of reading;

WILLIE MASTERS’ LONESOME WIFE 1367

rather, the work directly confronts the reader with its structural difficulties and limitations, demanding that reading occur on its terms, not on those with which a learned reader comes to a work of fiction. The metaphor of the body—developed both pictorially and textually—pervades the text at numerous points. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—whether this title should refer to Babs, Olga, or any other of the numerous characters nominally present within the text— requires a stand-in for the inattentive lover, the inattentive husband: the reader. Yet, the reader cannot approach the text without first experiencing the abrupt jolt resulting from the stark interplay of textual high jinks on the page. Numerous fonts, typefaces, digressions, shifts in narrative perspective/point of view, proper names, sexual images, footnotes, page designs, inserted documents, mirror images, textual arrangements, and even a number of simulated coffee stains provide the only direction for the reader to follow; without even the guidance of numbered pages, the text sets the rules and conventions for reading. So how should the reader attempt to interpret the text? Gass gives few clues, always insisting that the text, the words on the page, constitute their own reality and should not have to match up or directly correlate with any world outside the text itself. As Gass notes in his collection of essays Habitations of the Word, words remain “concerned only with survival, domination, and their success in supplanting all rival realities with their own” (Gass 1997, 101). In this sense, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, as a self-contained textual body, fights against the reader’s attempt to correlate the text itself with any stable, outside reality. In a similar assessment of the text, Arthur Saltzman notes: “[L]anguage is not revitalized by emphasizing its referential status” (Saltzman, 107). Language, that which comprises her body—the textual body of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife—does not require an outside referent (something to correspond directly to in the outside world); it stands alone within the text, circling in upon itself, “imagining itself imagine.” Yet certain scholars such as H. L. Hix have criticized such a reading of the text, pointing out that the book, as a whole, does not achieve its intended effect(s). Hix writes: “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife proved too

exclusively an intellectual exercise, without enough emotional charge to sustain it” (Hix, 63). Though Gass himself has noted the project’s shortcomings—“Too many ideas turned out to be only ideas . . . I don’t give a shit for ideas—which in fiction represent inadequately embodied projects—I care only for affective effects” (quoted in LeClair 22)—nonetheless, the work does succeed in, if nothing else, forcing the reader to give up some of her autonomy in reading and following the dictates of the text itself. What, exactly, might represent important results and/or “affective effects” of reading the text on its own terms? Unlike Hix, Michael Kaufmann argues that the book—though a self-contained unit which does not make any claims to direct representation of the real world—forces the reader to reflect on the nature of the reading experience, interpreting the experience alongside more traditional uses of language, of communication. Kaufmann succinctly sums up such a reading when he remarks: “The narrator’s insistence that we attend to the language itself may seem to have implication only for aesthetics, but the power of language to shape the world makes it important that everyone see language” (Kaufmann, 92). Language, as Kaufmann points out, always seeps in and out of our interaction with the text; the reading experience demands it. Arguably, the experience of reading Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife demands it more adamantly than most texts. Interestingly, at certain points in the work, the text addresses and confronts the reader directly, antagonizing the reader so as to highlight the agency of the text. In one particular footnote the text (narrator? Babs? Gass?) taunts the reader: “Now that I’ve got you alone down here, you bastard, don’t think I’m letting you get away easily, no sir, not you brother; anyway, how do you think that you’re going to get out . . . well you don’t know anything, do you? not anything, do you? not why you came or how you can back yourself out.” This tension between text and reader, while quite explicit in such a passage, plays itself out in numerous ways throughout the text. Though Gass’s intentions might confuse and disorient the reader, that undoubtedly is the point. Toward the end of the work, the text (again, the reader cannot decipher the speaking subject) isolates

1368 WILSON, HARRIET E. ADAMS

the reader, indicating the mistakes she made in reading: “You’ve been had . . . from start to finish.” The inattentive reader, just like the inattentive lover, skips, glosses over, rushes through the act, as language—in this case the text of the novel—never receives the attention, the interaction it deserves. Arguably, any text, no matter how clearly it offers up its mechanisms to the scrutiny of the reader, falls victim to such inattentiveness when read. For Gass, such is the nature of language: its simultaneous pleasure/frustration, clarity/duplicity, promise/subversion of such promise, reductiveness/generative force. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife brings these characteristics to the fore, making them the essence of the work as such, which encourages readers to look a bit more closely the next time they approach any text.

SOURCES Gass, William H. Habitations of the Word. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. ———. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1989. Hix, H. L. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Kaufmann, Michael. “The Textual Body of William Gass’s Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.” In Textual Bodies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Print, 87–105. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1994. LeClair, Thomas. “William Gass: The Art of Fiction LXV.” In Conversations with William H. Gass, edited by Theodore G. Ammon, 17–38. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003. Saltzman, Arthur M. The Fiction of William Gass: The Consolation of Language. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Zach Weir

WILSON, HARRIET E. ADAMS (1827?– 1870) Since the reissuing of OUR NIG;

OR SKETCHES FREE BLACK, IN A TWO-STORY WHITE HOUSE, NORTH. SHOWING THAT SLAVERY’S SHADOWS FALL EVEN THERE (1859), scholars have attempted to place this novel and its author, Harriet E. Adams Wilson, within literary history. Our Nig is the first novel by an African American and is clearly fictionalized autobiography, but it also seems to derive from the sentimental FROM THE

LIFE

OF A

tradition in literature as well as from the genres of black autobiography and the slave narrative. Apparently Wilson not only copyrighted the novel but also paid for its publication in 1859, hoping, as she declares in the preface, to improve the near destitute circumstances she suffered after her husband deserted her and her baby. Our Nig features Frado, the mulatto protagonist, who struggles to find a voice despite her situation as a black woman utterly alone. Particularly striking in this novel is Frado’s virulent anger against the Northern abolitionists, who rarely appear in fiction in roles other than those of saviors of black people. Many of the details of the life of Harriet E. Adams Wilson are uncertain. She was born in either 1807 or 1808—or 1827, depending on which census record correctly names her—in either Fredericksburg, Virginia, or New Hampshire, and she died prior to 1863 or in 1870. If some of Wilson’s statements in Our Nig are autobiographical rather than fictional, then she did indeed work as an indentured servant to a white family in Milford, New Hampshire, but the identity of the family has been a subject of scholarly debate. Wilson was married on October 6, 1851, to Thomas Wilson, who deserted her before she gave birth to their son, George Mason Wilson. Ironically, this son died about six months after his mother published Our Nig. Wilson herself apparently lived in Boston until 1863, after which she disappeared from public records. Although scholars have not determined the final place of Our Nig in the American literary canon, it is clear that it was published earlier than previous contenders for the first black American novel. The first black woman published in the United States was thought to be Frances Ellen Watkins HARPER and her novel IOLA LEROY, OR SHADOWS UPLIFTED, appeared in 1892. William Wells BROWN published CLOTEL in London in 1853. As readers and critics, especially AfricanAmerican scholars, come to learn more about both Wilson and her novel, however, at least one fact will remain unchanged: the untenable situation of a blackAmerican woman in 19th-century America.

NOVEL Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a TwoStory White House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows

WIND FROM AN ENEMY SKY 1369

Fall Even There. Boston: George C. Rand and Avery, 1859. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

SOURCES Bell, Bernard W. “Harriet E. Wilson.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Foster, Frances Smith. “Adding Color and Contour to Early American Self-Portraitures: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-American Women.” In Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, edited by Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gates, Henry Louis. Introduction. In Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story House, North. Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. Boston: George C. Rand and Avery, 1859. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1983, pp. xi–lv. ———, and David Ames Curtis. “Establishing the Identity of the Author of Our Nig.” In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afro-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, edited by Joanne Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Shockley, Ann Allen. “Harriet E. Adams Wilson.” In AfroAmerican Women Writers, 1746–1933. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Tate, Claudia. “Allegories of Black Female Desire: Or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” In Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, 98–126. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989. White, Barbara A. “Our Nig and the She-Devil: New Information About Harriet Wilson and the ‘Bellmont’ Family,” American Literature 65 (March 1993): 19–52.

WIND FROM AN ENEMY SKY D’ARCY MCNICKLE (1978) In 1936, D’Arcy MCNICKLE’s first novel, written under the name “D’Arcy Dahlberg,” was rejected by Harcourt, Brace, and Company. One reader’s response to the novel, included in the rejection letter, contained a portentous comment: “Perhaps the beginning of a new Indian literature to rival that of [the] Harlem [Renaissance]” (Owens, 60). The novel was eventually published as The Surrounded, and the

reader’s comments proved to be true, as D’Arcy McNickle and John Joseph Mathews are seen today as two writers from the first half of the 20th century who strongly influenced the Indian writers of the 1960s and 1970s. One could argue, perhaps correctly, that these two writers were almost totally responsible for the flourishing Native American Renaissance that took place in the second half of the 20th century. McNickle was born on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana in 1904, and his work, like that of most of his successors, focuses on the people and issues he was exposed to on the reservation. He was particularly interested in traditional Indian cultures, which found their way into his fiction as well as his widely acclaimed anthropological work, Native American Tribalism. Though it went unpublished until after his death in 1977, Wind From an Enemy Sky is a novel that offers a strong statement on the relationships and differences between Native Americans and Euro-Americans, with basic themes of language and land or place. But most every area of focus in the novel revolves around difference—the differences between how Indians and whites make use of the land, how they value sacred objects, how they communicate, and, simply, how they live their lives. In almost every aspect, this novel should be considered an early example (along with the work of John Joseph Mathews) of postcolonial writing in the United States. McNickle makes no apologies for his open (and dangerous for his time) criticism of the colonization of Native Americans and how whites have abused the land and the people who lived there before Europeans arrived. The novel begins as Antoine, the grandson of a chief named Bull, returns from his experience in the government boarding-school system just as two important events occur. He accompanies his grandfather into the mountains so the old man can view, for himself, the existence of a dam that has been built by the whites. The old man, stunned at the concept of someone’s stopping the water, is overwhelmed and saddened by the industrial intrusion into his traditional homeland. Soon afterward, Bull’s brother Henry Jim, who had chosen 30 years before to follow the white man’s ways, returns to Bull’s camp with an offer of reconciliation

1370 WINDS OF WAR, THE

and promising to ask the government agent to help with the return of a sacred bundle that Henry Jim had given to a government museum (the cause of his ostracization from Bull’s camp). Thus the central conflict of the novel begins. Henry Jim is eager to become reconciled with his brother and people, and the somewhatsympathetic agent Rafferty wants to help, hoping that his doing so will convince Bull to come to the reservation as his brother did, an act that all the previous agents had been unable to accomplish. As readers may suspect, the attempts to regain the Featherboy Bundle are unsuccessful. Adam Pell, the man who is responsible for the dam and who is in possession of the sacred bundle, argues that the Natives should give up on objects of the past and move on with the process of assimilation into the dominant white culture—a life of farming instead of hunting, a life of living in city homes instead of close to the land, a life of rejecting a traditional earth-based religion and becoming Christians. It is important to note that Bull, upon seeing the dam for the first time, fires at the concrete structure repeatedly and uselessly with his .22 rifle. This may seem like a minor detail in the plot, but it is actually very significant. As critic Louis Owens and others have pointed out, Bull’s shooting at the dam is symbolic of the Native American’s struggle with white colonization. The dam, which is technologically impressive, is representative of white culture and its intrusion on the land. The Indian, shooting at it hopelessly with a very small caliber rifle, can do nothing to stop the intrusion. There are other gunshots in the novel that are important as well. A young man named Pock Face (think smallpox and germ warfare) shoots Adam Pell’s nephew, and when Bull’s people come to the agency hoping to receive their sacred bundle, Bull shoots both Adam Pell and the agent Rafferty when they are told that the bundle, which they held as an extremely sacred object, had been destroyed by mice in storage. Bull is then killed by The Boy, leaving his grandson Antoine to continue to struggle to find peace between Indians and whites. It may be difficult for readers to pin down the time/place setting of Wind from an Enemy Sky, and perhaps McNickle confuses his readers intentionally. In

the novel, we encounter modern dams, sidewalks, and lawn sprinklers, yet Bull and his people live in the mountains outside the agency (reservation) and live in a traditional manner, somewhat isolated from the influence of the white world. McNickle may want readers to become lost in time so they may fully consider the damage that the white intrusion does to the small band living in the mountains and, in a larger sense, the damage that colonization has done to Native American cultures as a whole.

SOURCES Allen, Paula Gunn. “Whose Dream Is This Anyway?” In The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, 76–85. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. McNickle, D’Arcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Owens, Louis. “Maps of the Mind: John Joseph Mathews and D’Arcy McNickle.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, 48–89. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. James Mayo

WINDS OF WAR, THE HERMAN WOUK (1971) Herman WOUK achieved early critical and commercial success, especially with his third novel, The CAINE MUTINY (1951), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. For that novel, he drew directly on his experiences as a naval officer during World War II. Its success made him begin to conceive a much more expansive fictional treatment of the war, a novel that would suggest the massive scale on which the war had been conducted. Although Wouk’s next three novels—Marjorie Morningstar (1955), Youngblood Hawke (1962), and Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965)— were commercially successful (all three were, for instance, Book of the Month Club selections), the critical response seemed to become more mixed with each novel. Wishing to recover the critical standing he had earned with The Caine Mutiny, Wouk resurrected his dormant plan for a broader novelistic treatment of the war. After devoting more than half a decade to primary as well as secondary research on the war, he began to draft the novel that would become The Winds of War. His research, however, had yielded so much rich material that there was too much to fit into one novel, even one that would approach a thousand pages. Wouk decided to split the

WINDS OF WAR, THE 1371

narrative into two novels, each of which would ultimately approach a thousand pages: The Winds of War, covering the events from 1936 to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and War and Remembrance, covering the period of direct U.S. involvement in the war from Pearl Harbor to the Japanese surrender. Given Wouk’s ambitions, it is ironic that these two novels would cement his reputation as a commercially successful novelist whose work lacks the subtlety, complexity, and ambiguity that, taken together, define great literature. The Winds of War was number seven on the composite list of the best-selling novels of 1971 and number six on the list for 1972. It would more briefly rejoin the best-seller lists in 1983, when the television miniseries adapted from it became one of the mostwatched programs in television history. While readers found Wouk’s depiction of historical events to be absorbing and his characters to be engaging American types, critics felt that the historical material sometimes overwhelmed—or was simply more interesting than—the fictional elements and that the characters were too much confined to familiar types. The most common complaint, however, was that Wouk’s attempt to tell the story through the points of view of the members of one extended family created the preposterous premise that someone from the family would be present at just about every major historical event between 1936 and 1941. So, although critics expressed admiration for Wouk’s ambition and for his efforts to present an authentic sense of historical events, they were almost unanimous in their judgment that The Winds of War and War and Remembrance do not warrant inclusion with the best novels about World War II. The Winds of War opens with the assignment of American Captain Victor “Pug” Henry as naval attache to Berlin. Although he is not especially tall, Pug is a physically imposing man with the bearing of someone who demands to be taken seriously. He has much more skill and subtlety as a diplomat and as an intelligence agent than one might expect. The Nazis have consolidated their power in Germany and are beginning to make threatening gestures toward their neighbors. Pug’s mission is to make an assessment on the seriousness and immediacy of the threat. Shortly after his

arrival in Berlin, Pug is formally introduced to Hitler himself. From his contacts with Germans not naturally sympathetic to the Nazis, such as the conservative general Armin von Roon, and from his own attention to the news and to rumors, Pug subsequently learns enough about the direction of Nazi diplomacy to predict the seemingly unthinkable nonaggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, states that were ideologically antagonistic. The almost singular insight that Pug demonstrates with this prediction of this pact brings him to the notice of President Roosevelt, who, after a face-to-face meeting, makes Pug one of his informal personal emissaries. This role takes Pug not only back to Berlin, but to London, Rome, and Moscow, where he has access to most of the major personalities who are shaping the events that lead to the outbreak of war in the European and then the Asian theaters. At the end of The Winds of War, Pug arrives in Honolulu the day after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The other members of the Henry family provide firsthand perspectives on events in still further corners of the world. As Pug becomes more peripatetic, his wife, Rhoda, settles back in the United States. A somewhat self-involved personality, who drinks too much and resents her husband’s absences, Rhoda eventually engages in an extended affair with a scientist who becomes involved in the Manhattan Project. The Henrys’ oldest son, Byron, becomes involved with a young Jewish woman named Natalie Jastrow, who is living in Italy with her learned uncle. Together, Byron and Natalie witness not only Fascist Italy’s increasing commitment to an alliance with the Nazis, but also the Nazis’ invasion of Poland and the destruction of Warsaw. Byron’s less-bookish brother, Warren, pursues a career as a fighter pilot as the American military leadership attempts almost overnight to create a credible fighting force. Their sister, Madeline, is employed in the fledgling television industry, where she has contacts with all sorts of celebrities in entertainment and politics alike. Through Rhoda, Warren, and Madeline, Wouk provides a variegated view of life in America as the nation seemed to be drifting just behind the rest of the world toward a catastrophic war.

1372 WINTER IN THE BLOOD

SOURCES Beichman, Arnold. Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2004. Bolton, Richard R. “The Winds of War and Wouk’s Wish for the World,” Midwest Quarterly 16 (1975): 389–408. Bondebjerg, Ib. “Popular Fiction, Narrative and the Melodramatic Epic of American Television,” Dolphin 17 (1989): 35–51. Hawley, William M. “Spying on the Margins: George Smiley and Pug Henry,” Culture & Communication 2 (Summer 1999): 129–146. Mazzeno, Laurence W. “Herman Wouk (1915– ).” In Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook, edited by Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub, 460–467. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997. Phillipson, John S. “Herman Wouk and Thomas Wolfe,” Thomas Wolfe Review 12 (Fall 1988): 33–37. Zhang, Yidong. “Two Panoramas about Great Wars,” Journal of Popular Culture 19 (Summer 1985): 57–63. Martin Kich

WINTER IN THE BLOOD JAMES WELCH (1974) Perhaps arriving in a very timely fashion, James WELCH’s first novel, Winter in the Blood, helped established Welch as a major figure in what critic Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the “Native American Renaissance,” a period of interest in Native American writing that began in the late 1960s and peaked in the 1970s. Many works by Native American authors in this time period, including Welch, twist together traditional Native modes of storytelling and other cultural ideas with plots that reflect the life of contemporary Native peoples, focusing on the bleak life on modern reservations, alcoholism, depression, suicide, and feelings of alienation. Another important thematic idea prevalent in many of these works concerns the psychological impact of the loss of traditional ways of life, especially for males, who in the past were considered warriors charged with the task of protecting their communities. When first introduced to Winter in the Blood, readers find a deceptively simple tale of a young reservation Indian’s attempt to recover a rifle and an electric razor that were stolen by his former girlfriend. The unnamed narrator’s quest to find this woman and regain his possessions takes him on a series of strange, somewhat inter-connected incidents that seem to give the novel

an almost absurdist feel. Divided into three sections of roughly 60 pages each, the action follows the unnamed narrator’s activities on the reservation (mostly internal and family matters), his flashbacks to the past as he tries to come to terms with the unrelated deaths of his father and brother, and his trips off the reservation to the small cities of Harlem and Havre in the northern extremes of Montana. At home, he is faced with the usual reservation activities. His life is boring (he fishes in a river that has no fish; he flips through popular magazines looking for an article he hasn’t already read), which is probably related to the fact that he’s 35 and still living with his mother, her new husband, and his aged grandmother. He has duties on his mother’s ranch that he has to attend to with Lame Bull, his mother’s husband. He listens to his grandmother’s stories about the past and visits an old prophet, Yellow Calf, who can fill in the gaps in the traditional stories. There’s plenty of drinking around the kitchen table with family and friends. On the other hand, life off the reservation offers something of adventure. His trips into town to find the woman who stole his razor and gun find him “rolling” a drunk white man and helping steal his wallet; pursuing drinking and sexual interludes in the local bars; getting a broken nose, when the brother of his exgirlfriend punches him when he doesn’t expect it; and becoming involved in a strange, absurd intrigue with a local tourist known only as “the airplane man.” None of these events have any meaning for the narrator, though, and it’s only at home on the reservation that he can find what he’s looking for. In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, Louis Owens introduces a very useful method of interpreting this novel. Owens points out that the novel contains a great deal of myth, from both American Indian and “western” (that is, European) mythologies, arguing that Welch has “great fun parodying” the Fisher King myth, as notably portrayed in T. S. Eliot’s modern poem The Waste Land (132). In the ancient grail myth, the Fisher King has been maimed and becomes unable to tend to his lands, which then fall into disrepair and infertility. In order for the lands to become fertile again, the Fisher King must be healed and restored (Weston, 2).

WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, THE 1373

Owens’s reference to the Fisher King and The Waste Land can easily be expanded to offer a comprehensive way of looking at the novel. Welch’s narrator, who is nameless (the Fisher King has several names himself), is on a quest himself that has similarities to both some Native American spiritual quests and the quest for spiritual enlightenment similar to that of the Fisher King. The novel is loaded with images that suggest both death and the idea that the land is arid and sterile: “burnt grass” (1); “the dry, cracked gumbo flats” (2); “dried crushed chokeberries” (3); a stagnant river devoid of fish; “the dry irrigation ditch” (26). And like the Fisher King, who is maimed both physically and mentally, the narrator suffers from a knee injury that occurred in the same accident in which his brother was killed and an emotional scar resulting from the guilt he feels from his brother’s death. He knows that something is not right in the world and that he must come to terms with the death of his brother to gain full emotional and psychological recovery. The Fisher King of the novel must be restored physically and mentally, and the Holy Water sprinkled by his Catholic mother (40) is not quite enough. But it’s T. S. Eliot’s version of the Fisher King story that Welch obviously found appealing, probably because Eliot’s poem captures the modern sensibility (hopelessness, despair, sexual dysfunction) so well. The novel is rich with allusions to Eliot’s poem—from the Fisher King motif to the sterility of the land to the drunken secretary the narrator meets and tries to seduce (a typist and a pimple-faced young man who have awkward sex in Section III of Eliot’s poem) to the blind Indian prophet (the blind prophet Tiresias in Eliot) to the quest for answers and redemption. The young narrator never really finds the answers he’s looking for (his rifle and razor aren’t returned and his brother is still dead), but the blind Indian prophet named Yellow Calf, who speaks to the animals and knows of tradition, leads him to an answer that he did not know he was searching for. Like Tiresias in The Waste Land, Yellow Calf knows and sees all things and serves as a link between the narrator and his traditional Indian past. As the old man talks of the old days, the narrator comes to realize that Yellow Calf is actually his grandfather, as Yellow Calf cared for and developed a

relationship with the narrator’s grandmother years before when her husband was killed in a battle with white soldiers. It seems that this would only cause more confusion for the narrator, but once this knowledge is gained, the skies open up and rain comes to the valley, suggesting that the Fisher King and order have been restored to the land.

SOURCES Lincoln, Kenneth. “Blackfeet Winter Blues: James Welch.” In Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. McFarland, Ron, ed. James Welch. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1986. ———. Understanding James Welch. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Owens, Louis. “Earthboy’s Return: James Welch’s Acts of Recovery.” In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Welch, James. Winter in the Blood. New York: Penguin, 1986. Weston, Jessie L. The Quest of the Holy Grail. New York: Haskell House, 1965. Wild, Peter. James Welch. Boise State University Western Writers Series Number 57. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1983. James Mayo

WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, THE JOHN STEINBECK (1961) As STEINBECK told a reporter in England, the theme of The Winter of Our Discontent is immorality. Using the Hawley family of New Baytown as representative of every American, the novel condemns the American nation as soft, comfortable, and content. Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent grew out of two aborted attempts at transforming and modernizing older texts. Begun in 1958, the first work, Don Keehan, was a modern western and was evidently a takeoff on Cervantes’s Don Quixote; it was also interrelated with a second work, an adaptation of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, since both legends and quests were direct descendants of each other and were, Steinbeck felt, in some way intermingled with the American Dream. Consequently, Steinbeck decided to use the translation of Arthur to say what he wanted to say about his own time: condemning its immorality and decrying the decay of such values as loyalty, courtesy, courage, and honor.

1374 WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, THE

Another source for the novel was the Steinbeck short story “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank,” which was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1956. In fact, some of the story’s details have direct parallels in Winter. Hogan is a grocery clerk like Ethan Allen, and he schemes to rob the bank next to his grocery on the Saturday night before Labor Day. Unlike Ethan, however, he goes through with the robbery, obtaining $8,320. Yet another factor in the composition of Winter was the fact that Steinbeck had discovered that the new generation, including his own sons, was being raised by example to believe that success was more important than honesty and that greed and lack of principles had become an accepted norm. Specifically, the television quiz show scandals and the election of 1960 influenced the production of Winter. Steinbeck felt that the scandal over the TV game show, The $64,000 Question, especially scholar Charles van Doren’s involvement in the fraud, asserted America’s superficiality and greed. Steinbeck saw the conflict on which the novel is centered (Ethan Hawley’s betrayal of himself and his brother Danny Taylor) in larger terms. Thus the Bible, Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, especially Richard III, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and documents from American history are all alluded to in important ways by the text. Not surprisingly, the Republican candidate for president, Richard Nixon, became for Steinbeck a symbol for such degradation in the political scene. His given name in Richard fit well into America’s Revolutionary past (as in Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack) and also provided an association with the villainous Richard III who betrayed both his brothers for a kingdom and for an increase in his estate. The biblical characters of Judas and Cain were also natural associations with “tricky Dick,” suggesting still another betrayal of a friend/brother that causes his ultimate death. Steinbeck’s manipulation of religious images is perhaps the most obvious technique used in The Winter of Our Discontent. The temptation, betrayal, crucifixion, and burial of Christ provide a time pattern for the first half of the novel and shape its characters as well. Religious images thus appear and disappear, and some merge into paradoxical opposites that suggest the char-

acters’ good and evil natures simultaneously. The first section of the book begins on Good Friday and ends on Easter Tuesday. During this brief time period, Steinbeck brings his protagonist Ethan Allen Hawley (suggesting a New England pronunciation of “holy”) to a confrontation of his two natures—sinful and godly. Like Christ before him, Ethan must decide if he can bear the temptations of the world and conquer them. The other option is, of course, to capitulate, worshipping power, prestige, and money as the new American gods and ignoring the moral beliefs on which this country was founded. Three more temptations remain before Ethan capitulates to “death.” First, the bank president, Mr. Baker, urges Ethan to invest his wife’s legacy. However, despite Baker’s convincing argument, Ethan recognizes that at this point he is unwilling to risk his wife’s legacy to gain more wealth. Second, Margie Young-Hunt, the town whore, offers herself to Ethan. Despite her suggestive words and her attempts at seduction, Ethan is able to resist the temptation of the flesh by quoting the Gospel for Good Friday. The third temptation occurs as Ethan is confronted in the dark store by Mr. Biggers, an agent for B. B. D. & D. Wholesalers, who asks Ethan to deceive his boss, Alfio Marullo, and buy from Biggers in return for a 5 percent kickback. Biggers jests at Ethan’s honesty and his suggestion that he will turn the 5 percent over to Marullo. To Biggers, no sin is involved, and he offers a richly constructed wallet as a bribe. This time Ethan capitulates. He recognizes that a betrayal of Marullo will win him the grocery store, a betrayal Baker will bring him power and prestige, and a betrayal of Danny will restore riches as well as an increased social status (he can sell Danny’s property for a planned airport). As the novel’s central metaphor, betrayal implies that selling one’s soul has become the norm of society. Ethan’s subsequent visit to his “Place,” a cave about five feet deep carved into the harbor, prefigures his eventual death and burial. Thus Ethan’s entry into the cave begins a subsequent moral decline and a loss to an unholy Trinity of mortal and materialistic temptations. Ethan’s descent into hell begins approximately on Holy Saturday; his eyes are suddenly open to the world around him, and he appears to others as a

WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT, THE 1375

changed man. Ironically, he also receives more respect for his Judas traits than for his Christian ones. Not surprisingly, very few residents of New Bay town are shocked by Ethan’s changes since, like the majority of Americans, he maintains the facade of respectability and makes his motives appear pure rather than tainted. Easter Tuesday reveals an Ethan who has been thoroughly “converted” to evil but who maintains a paradoxical revulsion for moral betrayal on higher levels. Although Ethan maintains he has changed goals and is no longer influenced by morality, he still exhibits a double standard by expecting his children to reject his self-centered role modeling. Unfortunately, he fails to see his own duplicity and continues his “descent into hell,” though at times he inexplicably calls out to Mary, his wife, to serve as his intercessor (the role of the Virgin Mary) and to guard him from evil within and without. Other biblical symbols used by Steinbeck involve Margie Young-Hunt (the town whore with a witchlike personality). Margie’s visions reveal Ethan as the hanged man in the tarot pack and as a snake shedding its skin. This snake image also brings to mind Steinbeck’s preoccupation with the book of Genesis and the first stories of mankind. Thus Ethan’s association with the serpent not only reminds the reader of the first temptation in Eden but is complicated by the fact that Ethan also functions as the innocent Adam who is tempted by Margie’s sensual Eve. Steinbeck first examines specific early forefathers, including the protagonist’s given name, Ethan Allen. The name recalls a revolutionary war figure who can be historically associated with a takeover of land and with secret attacks on a neighboring country. Moreover, some of the revolutionary Allen’s unethical acts were approved by the U.S. Congress, giving him respectability and prestige despite his tendency to play both ends against the middle for his own benefit. The strong parallels to the present-day Ethan are obvious. The book also examines the original American stock from which Ethan has descended and suggests it is not nearly as pure as he might claim. First of all, Ethan acknowledges he is descended from both Puritans and pirates, underscoring the duality of America. Even though literal piracy is out, the impulse lingers: People

want something for nothing, wealth without effort. Steinbeck asserts that a new generation of greedy Americans, including some of the biggest people in the country, have defected from honor, ethics, and morality and have chosen evil methods to attain desired success. As he observes the past, he recognizes that all of New Baytown is involved in a similar sellout of morality. Consequently, the value of the historical past has become relative since Ethan’s present tarnished reputation is revealed to be an inherited trait from the patriarchs who first settled America. Even the admirable words of famous men like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln (patriarchs whose words are plagiarized in Ethan’s son’s “I Love America” essay) cannot resuscitate the dying morals and values that were once so important. Yet Ethan’s so-called honesty is still impressive to Alfio Marullo, who wants to make a monument to what America once was, a down payment so the light of morality will not flicker and die out. To Marullo, the Statue of Liberty, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights are still praiseworthy. The positive side of America is still alive. In fact, Steinbeck symbolizes Marullo’s hope for America’s future in the July 4 setting of a land of justice, love, and equality. Steinbeck’s historical references are designed to reform American society: to motivate the removal of ethnic prejudices, kickbacks, political manipulation, sexual blackmail, and phony real estate promotion. Ethan’s remorse about his history, his simultaneous action and regret of action, indicate that perhaps his integrity will return and his morality and America’s will be renewed. Steinbeck’s use of literary allusion is significant, especially to Shakespeare’s history play Richard III. The title is taken from the opening soliloquy and is spoken by the title character himself. This soliloquy effectively sets up the theme of opposites, for in Shakespeare’s play, the winter of discontent has been miraculously transformed into summer by the ascension of the Yorkist monarch and the abdication of Henry VI, the Lancastrian holder of the throne. Furthermore, Richard himself is revealed as a paradox. Outwardly he appears to be the helpful servant of his brothers, King Edward IV and the Duke of Clarence, but inwardly he is plotting their deaths and his own ascension to power.

1376

WISE BLOOD

Richard is the epitome of duplicity, providing a clear parallel to Ethan. As Ethan contemplates suicide and returns to the cave to slit his wrists, he is paralleled to King Arthur, too, who despairs over the decline of the Round Table and the rise of his evil nephew/son Mordred. Though Arthur/Ethan may die, the light-bearer of the future is ready to reassume the moral task. Thus as Ethan reaches for the razor blades to slit his wrists, he discovers the family talisman instead. Similar to the Holy Grail in the Arthurian legend, the talisman becomes his salvation. Although a metamorphosis occurs a second time as Ethan dismisses suicide, the reader is still unsure of both Ethan’s future and that of his family. The heritage of truth, justice, and honesty is hanging in the balance and its continuance is questionable. It is still threatened by materialism, greed, and selfishness. The reader, as in the Arthur myth, must wait for the return of the king (Jesus/religious morality) before a restored Camelot (Paradise) can be attained. This renewal takes on historical meaning as well when associated with the Kennedy presidency and the descriptions of a return to Camelot, where knightly actions would right wrongs by means of potent deeds and legislation. As Steinbeck has skillfully shown, Ethan and the America he stands for are at that low point. The jeremiad was designed to recall them to a higher purpose. Steinbeck’s interweaving of biblical, historical, and literary texts in this story of America’s declining morals indicates the complexity of the work. What appeared to the early critics as weakness now seems an insightful and innovative technique utilized by a determined experimenter. Steinbeck’s final novel is an excellent example of the well-crafted tale. His interweaving of opposites, his merging of symbols, and his experimentation with style and humor make the novel a worthy successor to The GRAPES OF WRATH as a social document calling on all America to account for its ambivalent reaction and commitment to moral uprightness.

SOURCES Astro, Richard, and Tetsumaro Hayashi, eds. Steinbeck: The Man and His Work. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1971. Benson, Jackson L. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Viking, 1984.

French, Warren. John Steinbeck’s Fiction Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1994. Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. John Steinbeck: The Years of Greatness, 1936–1939. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. ———. A New Study Guide to Steinbeck’s Major Works, with Critical Explications. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1993. McElrath, Joseph R., Jr., Jesse S. Crisler, and Susan Shillinglaw, eds. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Owens, Louis. John Steinbeck’s Re-Vision of America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1995. Simmonds, Roy S. John Steinbeck: The War Years, 1939–1945. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1996. Tedlock E. W., and C. V. Wicker, eds. Steinbeck and His Critics: A Record of Twenty-five Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957. Timmerman, John H. John Steinbeck’s Fiction: The Aesthetics of the Road Taken. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986. Michael J. Meyer

WISE BLOOD FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1952) In 1962, 10 years after publishing Wise Blood, Flannery O’CONNOR explained her first novel was “about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death” (2). The malgre lui is the text’s protagonist, Hazel Motes, who finds divine redemption through suffering, despite his attempts to evade both by denouncing Christ. Through the figure of Motes, the novel posits nihilism as a false antithesis to faith, as his asserted belief in nothing inadvertently affirms his faith in Christ. A devout Catholic her entire life, O’Connor develops the theme of redemption in the text by employing comic and grotesque motifs. Using brutal and stark imagery, she challenges modern audiences to abandon secularism by empathizing with the characters’ suffering. The novel opens as Motes returns from his military service on a train headed toward his hometown, although he no longer has family there. While he insists that he is “not a preacher” and does not “believe in anything” (15), Motes becomes the only member of his

WISE BLOOD 1377

newly established Church Without Christ once he settles into the city. In Motes’s aggressive efforts to denounce Christ, he visits Mrs. Watts, a prostitute; tries to avoid Enoch Emory, the only man to show him friendship; and resists the advances of Sabbath Lily, despite his earlier resolution to seduce her. Although he avoids Sabbath, Motes becomes obsessed with the con artist Asa Hawks, her father. Hawks had once called his former congregation to see the spectacle of his selfblinding as a testament of his proclaimed faith, but he was unable to completely blind himself and is able to see a shocking revelation when Motes discovers the truth. Disillusioned and eventually displaced from his own church, Motes tries to leave the city, but a police officer destroys his car, prompting Motes to return to his boarding room and successfully blind himself. The end of the novel finds him under the care of his landlady, who discovers Motes has been walking with small rocks and glass in his shoes and has wound barbed wire around his chest. His landlady, Mrs. Flood, tells Motes her desire to marry him because, she explains: “If we don’t help each other, Mr. Motes, there’s nobody to help us. . . . Nobody. The world is an empty place” (118). However, Motes leaves without responding to her offer, but his dead body is soon returned to her home. With his body laid before her, Mrs. Flood stares “with her eyes shut, into his eyes” until “she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light” (120). The landlady’s vision suggests that Motes in fact finds redemption as his life of suffering transforms him into the light amid the darkness. The kind of transformation Motes undergoes, from nihilist to believer, is linked by his continuous view of suffering as symbolic of one’s devotion and faith. Until he discovers Hawks’s lie, Motes could not believe that a self-blinded preacher could be as “all the way evil” as his daughter claims (62). Certainly, he cannot believe that someone who punishes himself so drastically would not be redeemed. When he discovers Hawks to be a fake, Motes confirms his own belief in ascetic displays of redemption: Only authentic suffering warrants divine redemption. This link originated with Motes’s grandfather and mother, who are dead by the time of the novel. In dif-

ferent ways, they modeled lives of Christian devotion, leaving Motes with the contrary desire to avoid both Christ and pain. Maddened by his own preaching, his grandfather used to point at his grandson, the “mean sinful unthinking boy,” and insist that “Jesus would have him in the end” (10). The soul-hungry Jesus, “a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown,” becomes in Motes’s mind the object to be avoided (10). For him, this menacing image of Christ embodies the risk of faith, in effect the terror of the unknown. Motes’s resolution to believe in nothing only temporarily staves off the terror but does not resolve it. On the train ride home, Motes thinks explicitly about the deaths of every member of his family. With the exception of his mother, each death signifies grave and terrifying finality, without any sign of resurrection. Even his grandfather, who kept “Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger,” dies like everyone else: “they shut the top of his box down and he didn’t make a move” (9). Only Motes’s mother stirs after death, at least in his imagination, as he “wondered if she walked at night” (13). She is also the first ascetic Motes knows; she always and only wore long black dresses and deprived herself of pleasure. Affecting his mother’s asceticism as a boy, Motes’s first experience with self-inflicted suffering does not relieve him of his guilt. Hence, he comes to believe his repentance does not satisfy Christ, and he is haunted into adulthood by unrelenting guilt: “He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him” (38). He mistakenly assumes that he has done something, so his adulthood denial of Christ cannot protect him, since the “giant blank thing” is original sin, a much greater burden than he realizes. Yet Sabbath is correct, in a sense, when she declares that Motes has wanted “Jesus” all along. His final acts of violence to himself are attempts to reconcile his earlier denial of Christ, as he comes to understand that original sin is unavoidable. As a result, he transforms his nihilistic, intellectualized belief. Motes’s faith indeed becomes a matter of “life and death,” and, as

1378 WISTER, OWEN

critic Richard Giannone writes, “the would-be nihilist Hazel Motes becomes a saint for our unbelieving age” (Giannone, 9).

SOURCES Edmondson, Henry I. Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism. Lanham, Md.: Rowan & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2002. Giannone, Richard. Flannery O’Connor and the Mystery of Love. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. 3 By Flannery O’Connor. New York: Penguin Books, 1983. pp. 1–120. Heather Ostman

WISTER, OWEN (1860–1938)

When the 100th-anniversary edition of Owen Wister’s The VIRGINIAN: A HORSEMAN OF THE PLAINS appeared in 2002, critic Michael Rogers called it “a beauty” and summed up the work as follows: “Considered by many to be the best Western novel, Wister’s work essentially defined the genre, both in print and on film, and also created the archetypal Western hero: the strong silent type who rides in from the range and saves the day by shooting the bad guys full of holes” (Rogers, 124). Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia), Pennsylvania, to Owen Jones Wister, a physician, and Sarah Butler Wister, a writer, linguist, pianist, and daughter of renowned actress Fanny Kemble. Wister, who some consider the creator of the cowboy, America’s arguably most enduring cultural icon, was himself from a highly cultivated family, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 1882 and counted among his friends Henry Cabot Lodge, President Theodore Roosevelt, artist Frederic Remington, and novelist and editor William Dean HOWELLS. Dissuaded by his parents from a promising musical career, he earned a Harvard law degree and, like authors Edith WHARTON and Charlotte Perkins GILMAN, was treated by Dr. S. Weir Mitchell for a nervous collapse. As a result, Wister headed for Wyoming and began his lifelong love affair with the West. His first book, Red Men and White (1895), was a collection of short stories; his first novel, Lin McLean (1897), was an interrelated grouping of sketches about Wister’s first western hero. In 1898 he married Molly

Channing, an intellectual Philadelphia socialite who worked with needy children until her death in childbirth in 1913. She is the model for the women heroes in both The Virginian and Lady Baltimore (1906). The Virginian, Wister’s only western, narrated by an outsider unfamiliar with Wyoming, features an unnamed hero who is falsely accused of cheating by the villain, Trampas. It is to Trampas that the Virginian addresses his now classic line, “When you call me that, smile!” On the eve of his marriage to the schoolteacher, Molly Wood, the Virginian kills the evil Trampas in a shoot-out. (The villain draws and shoots first.) Critic Frederic D. Schwarz observes that “The dominant theme throughout is the contrast between Western vigor and Eastern decadence” (Schwarz, 96). His next novel, Lady Baltimore, another best-seller, was a comedy of manners set in Charleston, South Carolina. The genealogist narrator has come to Charleston to do research and becomes entranced with the antics of John Mayrant, the hero in search of a wife. Owen Wister died from a cerebral hemorrhage on July 21, 1938, at his summer home in North Kingston, Rhode Island. In addition to his novels and stories, he wrote several volumes of poetry and biographies of three presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt. Four film versions of The Virginian were released during Wister’s lifetime: two, in 1914 and 1923, were silents. The third starred Gary Cooper in 1929, and the fourth in 1946 starred Joel McCrea. A television series employing Wister’s title and major characters aired on NBC from 1962 to 1971, and the Western Writers of America has honored significant writers with a lifetime achievement award named for Wister. The bulk of his papers is housed at the Library of Congress.

NOVELS Lady Baltimore. New York: Macmillan, 1906. Lin McLean. New York: Harper 1898; reissued Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House, 1970. The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. New York: Macmillan, 1902.

SOURCES Cobbs, John L. Owen Wister. Boston: Twayne, 1984. Etulain, Richard W. Owen Wister. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College Western Writers Series, 1973.

WOLFE, THOMAS CLAYTON 1379

Fifty Years of the Virginian 1902–1952. Laramie: University of Wyoming Library Associates, 1952. Mason, Julian. “Owen Wister: Champion of Old Charleston,” Quarterly Journal of The Library of Congress 29 (July 1972): 162–185. ———. “Owen Wister and World War I: Appeal for Pentecost,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101 (January 1977): 89–102. Rogers. Michael. Review of Owen Wister’s The Virginian: 100th-Anniversary Edition, Library Journal 128, no. 2 (February 1, 2003), 124. Rowe, Anne E. The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South 1865–1910. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978, pp. 96–122. Schwarz, Frederic D. “1902: ‘when you call me that, smile!’ ” American Heritage 53, no. 2 (April–May 2002): 96. Stokes, Frances K. W. My Father, Owen Wister. Laramie, Wyo.: (Self-published), 1952. Vorpahl, Ben Merchant. My Dear Wister—The Frederic Remington-Owen Wister Letters. Palo Alto, Calif.: American West Publishing Co., 1972. White, G. Edward. The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968.

OTHER Owen Wister (1860–1938). Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/owister.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister. Available online. URL: http:// world.std.com/~dpbsmith/phil4back.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

WOLFE, THOMAS CLAYTON (1900–1938) Thomas Wolfe is remembered today as a genius who attempted to write all of America into his novels and to create a national epic. Also a short story writer and playwright, Wolfe wrote novels, characterized by a lyric exuberance, that employed myth and sociology, symbol and image. During his brief lifetime, he published the Pulitzer Prize–winning LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL (1929) and Of Time and the River (1935), massive autobiographical novels cut drastically for publication by Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribners. When Wolfe realized that Perkins did not fully understand his intent to move from a focus on his character’s youth to a focus on American life itself, he switched editors and publish-

ers. Unfortunately, he did not live to see his edited 1 million word manuscript in print: At age 38, Wolfe died of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and Edward C. Aswell, the editor at Harper and Brothers, reduced and published The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940). Because the manuscript was excised, scholars have never been entirely comfortable with the published versions of these novels, and in 2001, Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli published O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life, the original manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel. Thomas Clayton Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900, to William O. Wolfe, a tombstone cutter, and Julia Elizabeth Westall Wolfe, who ran a successful Asheville boarding house. He matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 15, loaded cargo and ammunition at the Newport News, Virginia, docks in 1918, graduated in 1920, and earned his master’s degree from Harvard University in 1922. While teaching at New York University, Wolfe met Sinclair LEWIS and F. Scott FITZGERALD. Of great importance is his meeting with Aline Bernstein, a married woman 17 years his senior, with whom he had a celebrated five-year love affair. He dedicated Look Homeward, Angel to her and modeled Esther (in The Web and the Rock) after her. Look Homeward, Angel features Eugene Gant, a clearly autobiographical figure, as he progresses through childhood and early adulthood. He falls into and emerges from the traps that are in his path to artistic success and spiritual tranquillity. Of Time and the River continues where Look Homeward, Angel ends, as Eugene Gant, now in Europe, is homesick—he describes memorably vivid scenes of American life. On the ship returning home, he falls in love with Esther Jack. In the posthumously published The Web and the Rock, George Webber, a successful novelist, passionately loves, and then leaves, the beautiful Esther Jack. He flees New York for Europe, only to find that Hitler has risen to power. Like its predecessor, You Can’t Go Home Again, the sequel, also ponders increasingly the human propensity for evil and violence, leading Webber to excoriate the idle wealthy and to feel compassion for the less fortunate. Thomas Wolfe studies, including the Thomas Wolfe Society and several Web sites, are flourishing. More of

1380 WOLFE, THOMAS CLAYTON

his original manuscripts are forthcoming. Wolfe’s manuscripts and papers have been dispersed among several major university libraries: the Houghton Library of Harvard University; the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the BradenHatchett Thomas Wolfe Collection at Memphis State University; the Sarah Graham Kenan Library of St. Mary’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina; and the Pack Memorial Library in Asheville, North Carolina.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS From Death to Morning. New York: Scribner, 1935. The Hills Beyond. New York and London: Harper, 1941. Look Homeward, Angel. New York: Scribner, 1929. The Lost Boys: A Novella. Edited by James W. Clark, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Of Time and the River. New York: Scribner, 1935. O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life. Original manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel. Text established by Arlyn Bruccoli and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. The Party at Jack’s. Edited by Suzanne Stutman and John L. Idol, Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. The Short Novels of Thomas Wolfe. Edited by C. Hugh Holman. New York: Scribner, 1961. The Starwick Episodes. Edited by Richard S. Kennedy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. The Story of a Novel. New York and London: Scribner, 1936. The Web and the Rock. New York and London: Harper, 1939. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York and London: Harper, 1940.

SOURCES Berg, A. Scott. Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. New York: Dutton, 1978. Bruccoli, Matthew J., and Park Bucker, eds. To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe–Maxwell Perkins Correspondence. Chapel Hill: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Donald, David Herbert. Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1987. Evans, Elizabeth. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Ungar, 1984. Field, Leslie A. Thomas Wolfe and His Editors. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Griffin, John Chandler. Memories of Thomas Wolfe: A Pictorial Companion to “Look Homeward, Angel.” Columbia, S.C.: Summerhouse Press, 1996. Holman, C. Hugh. The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

Idol, John Lane, Jr. A Thomas Wolfe Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987. Johnson, Elmer D. Of Time and Thomas Wolfe: A Bibliography with a Character Index of His Works. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1959. Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Hungry Gulliver. New York: Scribner, 1948; republished as The Art of Thomas Wolfe. New York: Scribner, 1963. Johnston, Carol Ingalls. Of Time and the Artist: Thomas Wolfe, His Novels, and the Critics. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995. ———. Thomas Wolfe: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987. Kennedy Richard S., and Paschal Reeves, eds. The Notebooks of Thomas Wolfe. 2 volumes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970. Magi, Aldo P., and Richard Walser, eds. Thomas Wolfe Interviewed. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Norwood, Hayden. The Marble Man’s Wife. New York: Scribner, 1947. Phillipson, John S. Thomas Wolfe: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977. Reeves, Paschal ed. Studies in Look Homeward, Angel. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. ———, ed. Thomas Wolfe: The Critical Reception. New York: Lewis, 1974. Ryssel, Fritz Heinrich. Thomas Wolfe. New York: Ungar, 1972. Snyder, William U. Thomas Wolfe: Ulysses and Narcissus. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1971. Steele, Richard. Thomas Wolfe: A Study in Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1976. Walser, Richard. Thomas Wolfe, Undergraduate. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1977. ———. Thomas Wolfe: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961. Wheaton, Mabel Wolfe, and Legette Blythe. Thomas Wolfe and His Family. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961. Wheelock, John Hall, ed. Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins. New York: Scribner, 1950.

OTHER The Thomas Wolfe Society Web Site. Available online. URL: http://www.thomaswolfe.org. Accessed September 25, 2005. The Thomas Wolfe Web Site. Available online. URL: http://library.uncwil.edu/wolfe.html. Accessed September 27, 2005.

WOLFE, TOM 1381

WOLFE, TOM (THOMAS KENNERLY WOLFE, JR.) (1931– ) The quintessential counterculture novelist and nonfiction writer of the late 20th century, Tom Wolfe, reminiscent of Mark TWAIN in his ever-present trademark white suit, has been an icon of pop culture since his emergence on the literary scene in the late 1960s. Like Truman CAPOTE, Wolfe wrote what became known as the New Journalism, a blending of factual information into a short story or novel. His first book of essays, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), a satiric treatment of 1960s pop culture icons, preceded The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), his account of his travels with novelist Ken KESEY and the Merry Pranksters on their psychedelic bus. The Right Stuff (1979) won both an American Book Award and a National Book Award and was acclaimed for its depiction of real-life astronauts and the wonders of space. His first traditionally constructed novel, The BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1987), about racial, ethical, and legal issues in contemporary New York City, remained on the best-seller lists for 10 weeks. A Man in Full (1998) examines the concept of a satisfying life at the beginning of the new millennium. His latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, examines modern college life through the eyes of a brilliant but naive young heroine. Wolfe continues to be known for his inimitable style, which uses slang, vernacular, satire, exclamation points, and a journalist’s eye for detail to involve the reader in Wolfe’s current subject. Tom Wolfe was born on March 2, 1931, in Richmond, Virginia, to Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, a scientist and business executive, and Helen Hughes Wolfe. He was educated at Washington and Lee University (B.A., cum laude, 1951) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1957). A journalist and correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, he published his first book in 1965 and married Sheila Berger, art director of Harper’s magazine in 1978. His first “nonfiction novel,” The Right Stuff, features the seven astronauts in the Mercury program, focusing particularly on Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and Chuck Yeager; he contrasts the public and the private personas of each man, and relates the world of test pilots to the larger culture of mainstream America. The Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel about contemporary New York that many critics call Wolfe’s Dickensian novel, follows

Wolfe’s protagonist, bond trader Sherman McCoy, on a painful journey. McCoy’s mistress hits a young African American while the two are driving through Harlem. McCoy is blamed for the accident and becomes enmeshed in the American criminal justice system as well as in the turbulent urban class and racial divisions. A Man in Full (1998), follows Charles Croker, a 60-yearold Atlanta real estate developer who meets a 23-yearold unemployed factory worker. I Am Charlotte Simmons describes the frenzy of college life from the point of view of a brilliant, previously sheltered female student. Thomas Wolfe lives in New York with his wife. In 1983, Warner Brothers adapted The Right Stuff for a film of the same title. Bonfire of the Vanities, directed by Brian DePalma and starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis, was filmed and released in 1990.

NOVELS The Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1987. I Am Charlotte Simmons. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2004. A Man in Full. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1998. The Right Stuff. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979.

SOURCES Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Bing, Jonathan. “Tom Wolfe on Top,” Publishers Weekly 245, no. 49 (December 7, 1998): 37–39. Connery, Thomas B., ed. A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Crowther, Hal. “Clinging to the Rock: A Novelist’s Choices in the New Mediocracy,” South Atlantic Quarterly 89 (Spring 1990): 321–336. Epstein, Mikhail. “Tom Wolfe and Social(ist) Realism,” Common Knowledge 1, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 147–160. Harvey, Chris. “Tom Wolfe’s Revenge,” American Journalism Review (October 1994): 40–46. Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Konas, Gary. “Traveling ‘Furthur’ with Tom Wolfe’s Heroes,” Journal of Popular Culture 28 no. 3 (Winter 1994): 177–191. Lounsberry, Barbara. “Tom Wolfe’s American Jeremiad.” in The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1990. McKeen, William. Tom Wolfe. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995.

1382

WOLFF, TOBIAS

O’Sullivan, John. “Honor amid the Ruins,” American Spectator 32, no. 1 (January 1999): 64–68. Reilly, Charlie. “Interview: Tom Wolfe,” On The Bus 6, no. 1, issue 13 (Winter 1993–Spring 1994): 226–229. Scura, Dorothy, ed. Conversations with Tom Wolfe. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Shomette, Doug, ed. The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992. Special Tom Wolfe Issue. Journal of American Culture 14 (Fall 1991). Special Tom Wolfe Issue. Journal of Popular Culture 9 (Summer 1975). Stull, James N. Literary Selves: Autobiography and Contemporary American Nonfiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Towers, Robert. “The Flap over Tom Wolfe: How Real Is the Retreat from Realism?” New York Times Book Review, 28 January 1990, pp. 15–16. Varsava, Jerry A. “Tom Wolfe’s Defense of the New (Old) Social Novel: Or, the Perils of the Great White-Suited Hunter,” Journal of American Culture 14 (Fall 1991): 35–41.

OTHER Tom Wolfe Web Site. Picador. Available online. URL: http://www.tomwolfe/index2.html. Accessed September 27, 2005.

WOLFF, TOBIAS (JONATHAN ANSELL) (1945– ) Tobias Wolff, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novella The BARRACKS THIEF (1984) and finalist for a National Book Award for his novelistic autobiography, THIS BOY’S LIFE: A MEMOIR (1989), writes in spare, muscular prose reminiscent of Ernest HEMINGWAY, one of the many 20th-century writers Wolff admires. On record for his lack of interest in the “self-indulgence” of experimental fiction (Lyons and Oliver, 140), Wolff is renowned for depictions of ordinary middle-class children and adults who frequently find themselves at an ethical crossroads. He uses detail and dialogue in both his fiction and his nonfiction, the latter of which has been praised for its novelistic merits. Tobias Wolff was born on June 19, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Arthur Saunders Wolff, an aeronautical engineer, and Rosemary Loftus Wolff, a secretary and waitress. After serving with the U.S. Army Special Forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968, Wolff, who had left the service as a first lieutenant, earned a bachelor’s degree with first class honors from Oxford

University in 1972, a master’s degree, also from Oxford, in 1975, and a master’s degree from Stanford University in 1978. In 1975, Wolff married Catherine Delores Spohn, a clinical social worker and art history teacher, and published his first novel, Ugly Rumours. It follows two young men, Woermer and Grubbs, during their training in officer’s candidate school and their departure for the Vietnam War. It was the novella The Barracks Thief, however, that brought serious recognition to Wolff. Featuring three paratroopers—Philip Bishop, Hubbard, and Lewis—at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the tale depicts the unlikely bonding of the three through such experiences as a July 4 fire and an antiwar protest outside the base. When the less intelligent and less appealing Lewis proves to be the man who was stealing from his friends, the matter is resolved unofficially through a “blanket party” and the ethical musings of Bishop, who narrates most of the story in retrospect. The critically acclaimed This Boy’s Life, based on Wolff’s childhood memories, was an ironic commentary on the idealistic and unrealistic portrayals of American boyhood in the magazine Boy’s Life. It was followed by In Pharoah’s Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994), another well-reviewed memoir evoking in all its hellish detail the village of My Tho, Vietnam, where Lieutenant Tobias Wolff served with the U.S. Special Forces. His most recent novel, Old School (2003), was nominated for both the PEN/Faulkner and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004. Tobias Wolff lives in Stanford, California, where he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University. In 1993, This Boy’s Life: A Memoir was made into the movie This Boy’s Life, directed by Michael CatonJones and starring Robert De Niro as Wolff’s stepfather, Ellen Barkin as Wolff’s mother, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Wolff.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS The Barracks Thief. New York: Ecco Press, 1984. Old School. New York: Knopf, 2003. Ugly Rumours. London: Allen & Unwin, 1975.

SOURCES Gates, David. “Our Stories, Our Selves,” Newsweek, 23 January 1989, p. 64. Gill, Jonathan. “Fourth Grade Never Dies Out,” New York Times Book Review, 15 January 1989, p. 28.

WOMAN OF GENIUS, A 1383

Lyons, Bonnie, and Bill Oliver. “An Interview with Tobias Wolff.” In Tobias Wolff: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by James Hannah, 129–143. New York: Twayne, 1996. Prose, Francine. “The Brothers Wolff,” New York Times Magazine, 5 February 1989, pp. 22–31. Wolff, Geoffrey. “Advice My Brother Never Took,” New York Times Book Review, 20 August 1989, pp. 1, 22.

OTHER “A Conversation with Tobias Wolff. Stanford Home Page. Available online. URL: http://www.stanford.edu. Accessed September 26, 2005. Edwards, Jerome. “Tobias Wolff.” Central Booking: The Reading Life Online. Available online. URL: http://www. centralbooking.com. Accessed September 26, 2005. Peterson, Anne Palmer. “Talking with Tobias Wolff.” Continuum. Available online. URL: http://www.alumni.utah.edu/ continuum.summer 98/Finally.html. Accessed September 26, 2005. “Tobias Wolff.” Salon.com. Available online. URL: http://www. salon.com/dec96/interview961216.html. Accessed September 26, 2005. Wolf, Tobias. Interview: Tobias Wolff. By David Schrieberg. Stanford Today. Available online. URL: http://www. stanford.edu/dept/news/stanfordtoday/ed/9809/9809fea101. shtml. Accessed September 27, 2005.

WOMAN OF GENIUS, A MARY AUSTIN (1912) One of Mary AUSTIN’s earliest novels, A Woman of Genius, remains, as Nancy Porter observed in 1985, an often “overlooked classic of feminism” (297), despite Austin’s recovery as a significant literary regional writer, one whose characters “gain their identity from the regions they inhabit” (Fetterly and Pryse, xvii). Described by its first-person narrator, Olivia Lattimore, as “the story of the struggle between a Genius for Tragic Acting and the daughter of a County Clerk, with the social ideal of Taylorville, Ohianna, for the villain,” this “drama” is also, Olivia tells her readers, “one in which none of the characters played the parts they were cast for, and invariably spoke from the wrong cues.” It is also one in which there is “no plot,” since “plot is distinctly the province of fiction” (Austin, 4). This “plotless” dramatic novel utilizes elements of situational and verbal irony; literary regionalism (particularly in its depiction of the dogmatic social values of an early-20th-century Midwestern small town); psycho-

logical, if not mystical, self-discovery (of its firstperson narrator); inverted melodramatic conventions; and early 20th-century gender discourse to offer an experimental novel that is neither tragic nor comic. The novel is divided into four books, each with between six and 10 chapters. Book I begins with a reference to Pauline Mills, a woman who plagues the memory of the narrator, Olivia Lattimore, because Pauline represents the “social ideal” of what a woman is supposed to be, according to the small Midwestern community of Taylorville, Ohianna. That ideal is “true womanliness,” which involves legal marriage, doting motherhood, and domestic servility to one’s husband (Austin, 3). Olivia recounts the uneasiness of her childhood, one troubled not only by her father’s early death and her mother’s coldness, but the rigid gender expectations imposed upon her (but not her brother Forester) by her mother and the Taylorville community. In Taylorville, too, she first meets Helmeth Garrett, a man who, with one kiss, awakens something “electrical” in her (Austin, 58) but then leaves town. Shortly after, Olivia becomes engaged to Tommy Bettersworth, a man she does not love but eventually marries (in Book II) for the sake of social convention. In Book II, also, Olivia has a child with Tommy, a child who (like Austin’s actual child) is “feeble from birth” (Austin, 79) and eventually dies. This traumatic experience leaves Olivia not only with a deeper understanding of herself as a woman but also a deeper emptiness—an emptiness that eventually leads to the dissolution of her marriage to Tommy and to her career as an actress. Between Books I and II, Olivia also begins to refer to herself in the third person, and these narrative shifts from first to third person reinforce Olivia’s self-division and conflicts regarding her early social and gender conditioning in Taylorville. She also meets a colleague, an actress, Sarah Croyden, who will become an increasingly important alternate female “ideal” in the second half of the book. Book II culminates with the death of Olivia’s mother and the beginning of her acting career. Books III and IV continue to explore what Esther Lanigan describes as “the modern ideas in many of Austin’s novels, particularly her thoughts about genius . . . and a woman’s place in the modern world

1384 WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME

of the 1910’s and 1920’s, a world in which the writer deemed herself a ‘feminist’ ” (14). In these final sections, Olivia struggles to and does finally become a successful actress, first in regional theaters, then in Chicago, and finally in New York and London. In Book III, however, Olivia still struggles more with gender roles or irritatingly “true” women such as Pauline Mills (who she literally encounters again) and their often ineffectual male counterparts than with her acting career. Acting, in these sections, becomes a metaphor for any woman who would be an artist, and the theatrical career itself is not as important to Olivia (or Austin) as the process of breaking free from the regional and social constraints imposed upon her in Taylorville. She develops respect and friendship with other theatrical “artists,” most notably the actress Sarah Croydon. In Book III, too, Olivia again meets Helmeth Garrett, who still attracts her but is married. However, two years later, in Book IV, Helmeth’s wife has died, and when Helmeth and Olivia kiss again, they quickly become lovers. Much of the rest of Book IV details Olivia’s conflicted feelings about whether to become Helmeth’s wife or to pursue her increasingly successful acting career. This conflict is resolved by Helmeth who, much to Olivia’s surprise, becomes engaged to another woman. Book IV concludes not only with Olivia’s final encounter and rejection of Pauline Mills as a feminine ideal, but also her bittersweet ruminations and strong conviction to refrain from being “like the other” women, despite the difficulties it will doubtless continue to cause her (Austin, 294). Although Austin’s critics now recognize the significance of A Woman of Genius to an understanding of her self-declared feminist perspective, the novel continues to provoke differing views about what that perspective is. For example, while Melody Graulich regards the novel as one “about an exceptional woman” who “explores the importance of support from other women” (140), Nancy Porter believes it reveals Austin’s irritation with “groups of women” and belief “in the individual genius leading the group” (311). These seemingly opposite readings are, however, both supported by this novel. For even as Olivia Lattimore spends much of her time attempting to free herself from the female “social ideal” embraced by groups of

women like her mother or Pauline Mills, she works toward a new sense of egalitarian community with other female actresses, or, in terms of the novel, artists. Because of this dual impetus, A Woman of Genius pioneers, along with Austin’s theoretical essay on literary regionalism, a more complex way of understanding the relationship between gender and regional writing—not only in Austin’s writings, but in writings by other significant American women regional writers, such as Sarah Orne JEWETT, Mary Wilkins FREEMAN, and Willa CATHER.

SOURCES Austin, Mary. A Woman of Genius. Old Westbury, N.Y: The Feminist Press, 1985. ———. “Regionalism in American Fiction,” English Journal 21 (February 1932): 97–107. Fetterly, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Introduction. American Women Regionalists: A Norton Anthology. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Graulich, Melody. “Creating Great Women: Mary Austin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” In Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Contemporaries: Literary and Intellectual Contexts, edited by Cynthia J. Davis and Denise D. Knight. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Lanigan, Esther. Introduction. A Mary Austin Reader. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996, pp. 3–20. Porter, Nancy. Afterword. A Woman of Genius. Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1985, pp. 295–321. Beverly Hume

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME MARGE PIERCY (1976) Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is a novel that fits into many categories: fantasy, women’s literature, and utopian literature. As a novel produced during the active second wave of American feminism, it questions the roles of women within American society. Further, it anticipates the more inclusive third wave of feminism, in that it explores elements of class and race as well: Connie, the protagonist of the novel, is a poor Chicana who is unjustly committed to an insane asylum due to her attempt to protect her niece from physical and sexual abuse. Geraldo follows Dolly to Connie’s home and breaks in as Connie attempts to protect Dolly, physically abusing Connie and knocking her unconscious.

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME 1385

He brings her to Bellevue, and they readily believe Geraldo’s fabrication that he and Dolly were attacked by Connie. Her commitment to Bellevue is made possible by all three markers of her identity—her gender, race, and class—in that all three are marked as deviant in our culture; her previous incarceration within Bellevue also makes her commitment easy, since it marks her as already insane. She is readily and repeatedly marked as a monstrous madwoman. Connie’s belief in her own sanity makes her commitment even more terrifying. In her previous commitment, she had believed herself to be ill, accepting Anglo definitions of success, relationships, and sanity. However, she comes to learn the codes by which she is judged within the mental hospital and learns to trust in herself for validation rather than in American institutions. She learns that playing the roles of the stereotypical female, nonresistant to the values of dominant society, marks one as more normal, as acquiescing rather than transgressing. When Connie learns the codes and how to manipulate them, she gains a measure of power over them (rather than vice-versa). She is thus able to fool the staff that she is progressing by their definitions, that she is compliant and able to be controlled. She does not allow the codes of femininity and the codes that negatively label her a monster to constrain and hurt her any longer. In the present of the novel, it is Connie’s connection to a possible future that allows her to maintain and continue to construct her sense of agency, sanity, and redefinition. Luciente, a “sender” from the future (the year 2137) assigned to the project of visiting the past, connects with Connie, a “catcher,” in order to learn about the late 20th century and to influence individuals there. She is able to visit Connie in her time and to allow Connie into the future, specifically Luciente’s village of Mattapoisett. Through Connie’s forays into the future, we are introduced into a possible utopian future while our present is critiqued. The differences in cultures allow for the discussion of norms and behaviors. This possibility is central to utopian and dystopian representations, and often to fantasy and science fiction in general. Connie acts as the standard visitor to a different world, a common trope of utopian

texts. This visitor represents our voice and viewpoints and gradually is educated as to the deficiencies of her/his culture or, at least, to the differences in norms between the two cultures and the constructedness of such norms. While Connie believes in her own sanity and in her self, she also holds onto dominant contemporary notions of progress, child care, childbirth, work, and relationships, among other concepts. The conflict between her beliefs and those that confront her in the future, as well as conversations with the people of that future, enable Connie to critique her situation and her society more pointedly. She is also able to see the result of certain oppressive behaviors, such as the psychosurgery being performed upon her in order to control her behaviors, and understand how her place in society relates to the whole. This encourages her to further action, as she realizes that her life can, indeed, make a difference and count for something. Connie’s confrontation with alternative futures (she also visits a dystopian alternative future) directly affects her sense of agency. Contact with the dystopian future horrifies Connie, and this horror, as well as a deep connection to the people of Mattapoisett, is a catalyst to action. The connection between the psychosurgery being performed on Connie (and a handful of others deemed violent or psychologically incorrigible) and the dystopian future is clear from events transpiring before and after Connie’s visit there. Connie is part of a small test population of people deemed uncontrollably violent; the purpose of the experiment is to eradicate that violence and produce more socially desirable emotions. These people form the test population because they do not have advocates for their rights. While Connie’s body has been a battleground between dominant and dominated cultures all her life, her body has now become more explicitly a battleground between present and future, oppression and freedom. In order to act against the intrusion on civil rights that the psychosurgery represents, as well as safeguard the utopian future, Connie decides to poison her doctors. In a scene reminiscent of Lady Macbeth’s obsession with the blood—and guilt—upon her hands, Connie cleanses her hands out of fear of the poison, acknowledging her guilt but emphasizing the

1386 WOMAN WARRIOR, THE

war she sees herself engaged in: “I killed them. Because it is war. . . . I’m a dead woman now too. I know it. But I did fight them. I’m not ashamed. I tried. . . . At least once I fought and won” (375). Connie does not easily kill these people; she came to the decision to murder slowly and painfully. Her act, a monstrous one, is performed in order to protect and preserve. She understands her own agency and rejects a negative connotation of monstrosity for herself or her actions. She is the monstrous mother now as she has killed to protect others, but this monstrousness is a positive, enabling image. She has revisioned the image of the monster rather than attempting to deny it by associating herself with the forces of hegemony. In the view of the psychiatrists in the novel, she has chosen madness over acquiescence. For the readers of the text, however, she has rejected both categories and acted to ensure the freedom of future societal “misfits.” Her so-called madness is used as a means to action.

SOURCES Adams, Karen C. “The Utopian Vision of Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time.” In Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy, edited by Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability, 1991. Afnan, Elham. “Chaos and Utopia: Social Transformation in Woman on the Edge of Time,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 37, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 330–340. Buckman, Alyson R. “Blunting the Razor’s Edge of Sanity: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.” Under Revision for FEMSPEC. Gygax, Franziska. “Demur—You’re Straightway Dangerous: Woman on the Edge of Time.” In Ways of Knowing: Essays on Marge Piercy, edited by Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner. Mobile, Ala.: Negative Capability, 1991. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. “Mothers Tomorrow and Mothers Yesterday, but Never Mothers Today: Woman on the Edge of Time and The Handmaid’s Tale.” In Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, edited by Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Haran, Joan. “(Re)Productive Fictions: Reproduction, Embodiment and Feminist Science in Marge Piercy’s Science Fiction.” In Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers, edited by Karen Sayer and John Moore. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Kessler, Carol Farley. “Woman on the Edge of Time: A Novel ‘To Be of Use,’ ” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 28, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 310–318. Kormali, Sema. “Feminist Science Fiction: The Alternative Worlds of Piercy, Elgin, and Atwood,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 4 (Fall 1996): 69–77. Moylan, Thomas P. “History and Utopia in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.” In Science Fiction Dialogues, edited by Gary Wolfe, 133–140. Chicago: Academy Chicago Press, 1982. Orr, Elaine. “Mothering as Good Fiction: Instances from Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time,” Journal of Narrative Technique 23, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 61–79. Seabury, Marcia Bundy. “The Monsters We Create: Woman on the Edge of Time and Frankenstein,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 131–143. Silbergleid, Robin. “Women, Utopia, and Narrative: Toward a Postmodern Feminist Citizenship,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 12, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 156–177. Alyson R. Buckman

WOMAN WARRIOR, THE MAXINE HONG KINGSTON (1976) Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best book of nonfiction published in 1976, Maxine Hong KINGSTON’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts chronicles pivotal phases of a Chinese-American woman growing up in California. Through her childhood memories, Kingston, “fictionalizing” the episodes in an autobiographical manner, integrates her mother’s stories told to her as a child. The narrative shifts between different voices of various generations, jumping from the past to the present. Using the story of the legendary woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, Kingston astutely reinscribes the Chinese myth within the Western context. Fa Mu Lan, who disguised herself as a man to be a conscript in her father’s place, is said to have led an army throughout China fighting against the barbarians. Inspired by the heroine, the narrator also imagines herself as a woman warrior leading an army to protect Chinese-American women from sexism within the patriarchal system and racism in Western society. As critic Lee Quinby has argued, “Kingston represents her girlhood as triply displaced because of America’s deeply embedded Sinophobia, her parents’ ambivalence about America and the poverty they face,

WOMAN WARRIOR, THE

and the misogynistic attitudes she finds in both her American and Chinese heritages” (301). Structurally, the novel consists of five sections, and each section, intertwined with Chinese tales and the narrator’s childhood memoirs, brings up important identityformation questions. Kingston raises issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class that the protagonist encounters in constructing a new Chinese-American identity, particularly Chinese-American women’s subjectivity. A feminist reading could illuminate the novel’s complexity. The first section, “No Name Woman,” tells the tragedy of the protagonist’s transgressive paternal aunt whose disgrace because she conceived an illegitimate child makes her an outcast in the small Chinese village. The protagonist’s mother tells the story of this “no name” woman to warn the girl about the dangers of sexual immorality. The second section, “White Tigers,” in which the Fa Mu Lan tale is introduced in the mother’s “talk stories,” describes the mighty power of the woman warrior who lives to protect her family and village. In this section, Kingston interweaves two narrative voices: the mythical swordswoman in ancient China and the verbal woman warrior in modern America. The third section, “Shaman,” examines the life of the narrator’s mother, Brave Orchid. The ghost is also introduced in this section. The protagonist’s mother uses the word ghost to refer to both spirits and to Americans; that the girl grows up among the Bai Gwei, white ghosts, explains why the book is subtitled “Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts.” For the narrator, the supernatural ghost, representing a battle between the two cultures, crosses historical and geographical borders, and the use of ghost allows the narrative to strategically shuttle back and forth between the past and the present, between China and the United States, and between reality and imagination. The fourth section, “At the Western Palace,” describes the earlier years of Brave Orchid and her sister Moon Orchid in China before their immigration to the United States. In China, Brave Orchid is a doctor/midwife and she moves to America to join her husband to run a laundry. Moon Orchid, too, later tries to rejoin her husband in the United States, but he has remarried and thus rejects her. Becoming mentally ill, Moon Orchid is put in an asylum, where she dies.

1387

In the concluding section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” Kingston reinterprets another Chinese legend, that of Ts’ai Yen, a woman kidnapped by barbarians and forced to become a concubine to raise her children in an alien—and alienated—land. Like Fa Mu Lan, Ts’ai Yen has fought in battle, but as a captive soldier. Ts’ai Yen’s story echoes Brave Orchid’s bringing up her children on a foreign soil and this last section retells the protagonist’s childhood memoirs of the ways culture and identity create complex clashes in the real world. Many critics point out Kingston’s literary strategy of articulating silences by exploding the stock image of the quiet Oriental damsel. One of Kingston’s major concerns is the way gender roles and femininity are redefined in Asian American culture. Throughout the five sections, by expressing her ideas and telling the stories of many silenced women, the writer/narrator Kingston believes in the power of words that eventually transform the silent girl into a strident word warrior. In claiming her identity in the (un)hyphenated Chinese American space, the protagonist is constantly caught in a kind of cultural ambivalence. Critic Amy Ling calls this ambivalence “the between world condition,” one that recalls W. E. B. DuBois’s notable concept of an African American’s “double-consciousness”: In this state, “one ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (3). The space occupied by the modern woman warrior is thus between the two poles of different cultures. Within this space of cultural ambivalence, the narrative exemplifies the protagonist’s desire to establish a new Chinese-American female selfhood. One may thus read the entire novel (and despite its designation as memoir, it has all the techniques of an excellent novel) as an extended exploration of the meanings of three words: Chinese, American, and woman. To deconstruct a monolithic Chinese-American identity, Kingston uses different, mixed voices in her narrative: her own voice, her mother’s voice, and the voices of other mythical and historical figures from her mother’s talk-stories. In providing her reader with so many narratives, the writer demonstrates her awareness of writing as a reflection of multiplying images. The use of memoirs, different from the traditional autobiography that uses a

1388 WOMAN WHO OWNED THE SHADOWS, THE

singular I in a chronologically sequenced account, constructs a multiple and complicated subjectivity. It is important to notice Kingston’s use of memoirs, whose dialogical format destabilizes unified selfhood; in other words, the writer/narrator’s memoirs, a sign of separation from her mother’s oral tradition and women’s enforced silences, accentuate the conflicts and confusions of identity that constitute her discursive I. Therefore, acquiring a new voice by breaking the longstanding silence is the feature of the female subjectivity that allows the writer to construct a new collective identity for the Chinese women born in the United States.

SOURCES Cheung, King-Kok. “The Woman Warrior Versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?” In Asian American Studies: A Reader, edited by Jean Wu and Min Song, 307–323. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. ———. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Reprinted, Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1973. Juhasz, Suzanne. “Maxine Hong Kingston: Narrative Technique and Female Identity.” In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheik, 173–189. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. Quinby, Lee. “The Subject of Memoirs: The Woman Warrior’s Technology of Ideographic Selfhood.” In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 297–320. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Bennett Fu

WOMAN WHO OWNED THE SHADOWS, THE PAULA GUNN ALLEN (1983) According to Paula Gunn ALLEN, “stories out of the oral tradition, when left to themselves and not recast by Indian or white collector, tend to meander gracefully from event to event; the major unifying device . . . is the relationship of the tale of the ritual life of the tribe” (Allen

1992, 153). This then is the structure of her 1983 novel The Women Who Owned the Shadows, which contains any number of stories from Keres and Navajo oral tradition and history, as well as stories of the half-breed Guadalupe protagonist Ephanie Atencio and her grandmother. In fact, according to Elizabeth Hanson, “It’s setting, time, plot, and characters are derived largely from Allen’s own contemporary time and experience in the post-war American Southwest” (Hanson, 35). Allen herself argues that the “plotting is as near to a conversation with Indians as [she] could make it” (Allen 1992, 153). This conversation centers on Ephanie’s struggle to find her place in life and to combine all the parts of herself because as a half-breed, she is in-between two cultures. Specifically, she struggles to find psychic balance by recognizing the parallels between her life and the life of the gods, particularly Spider/Thought Woman. And as she finds balance in her life, that life turns into one that could easily fit into, in form and action, the tribal narrative of the Keres. Gunn Allen insists that time is a central theme of the novel; “in the book, dream, ‘actual’ event, myth, tale, history, and internal dialogue are run together, making it evident that divisions do not lead to comprehension” (Allen 1992, 153). Furthermore, Allen’s choppy, repetitive style at times seems unedited and confusing, but at other times perfectly captures a mood. As Vanessa Holford argues, readers “experience Ephanie’s panic by reading it. Spasmodic flights between images and thoughts communicate Ephanie’s personal fragmentation” (Holford). In “Naiya Iyatiku Is Calling,” the emotions and feelings of parents and their baby twins are perfectly captured by Allen’s style: “At four in the morning. After being up all day. Too exhausted. Two babies, crying. Or one then the other. Crying. Wet. Hungry. Colicky. Lonely. Cold. Restless. Bored. Not sleeping” (103). Or after the death of one of the twins: “So still. So silent. The spindly bundle blue. Mottle blue. Still” (103). This style also works to capture the everyday details of her life. Elizabeth Hanson argues that Ephanie’s “fear is made visible through the minutiae of her life; the details of her private rituals of daily experience . . . what she wears, what she eats, how she deals with the ‘simple dust of her house’ are juxtaposed to a Native American belief system that might explain

WOMAN WHO OWNED THE SHADOWS, THE 1389

the workings of the world” (Hanson, 37–8). And Allen uses these daily experiences as “clues to a new way of seeing and interpreting women’s writing, her own included” (Hanson, 38). The Anglo-European society is what causes Ephanie to be so lost. The pressure to be heterosexual and stereotypically feminine creates chaos and unhappiness for Ephanie. Vanessa Holford argues that these pressures turn Ephanie into a “non-person, an acceptable woman” (Holford). Ephanie dreams of being “tall and pretty and dated. Adored. Mated. Housed in some pretty house somewhere far from the dusty mesas of her childhood” (203). Gone are her dreams of heroism, bravery, strength; she became “passive and plastic” (Holford). Ephanie also becomes heterosexual. Holford points out that “lesbianism in the novel is vitally important because it is representative of women’s self-love. The characters who forbid Ephanie to love Elena are forbidding her to love herself, to be complete. Distrust of lesbianism is fear of women’s renewed strength, self-value, and unity” (Holford). In fact it is her lover Teresa who during a physic reading first points Ephanie toward her grandmother’s spirit. This spirit represents all the women in her life, past and present, and her dreams reveal that her deepest fear is being shut out from the females of her culture, including the gods. In her struggle to find peace, forces seem to work against Ephanie to “destroy whatever link she has to the traditional [Keres] culture in which the women are central figures,” suggests Annette Van Dyke (8). While Ephanie is a passive receptacle for life, life does not treat her well. When she takes hold of her own life, things improve. Or as Allen puts it, when she realizes that she has “power in her own right,” and does not expect a man to give it to her, things improve (quoted in Ballinger and Swann, 7). Readers participate, following Ephanie through her healing journey. Thus in some way balance is restored to readers’ communities or the community at large through this participation (Van Dyke, 8). The parts of the novel trace Ephanie’s fall and rise. In part I, Ephanie is abandoned by the woman she loves, Elena, and her husband Stephen. In part II’s “Naiya Iyatiku Was Singing,” Ephanie is lost; she “understood that there was no way to understand. Anything. Ever”

(106). Near the end of part II are “Therapist’s Notes” and at the very end is a “Divorce Settlement” document (109–112, 120). These are written documents from the non-Native world representing her troubles. Their inclusion in the novel suggests how far Ephanie has wandered from Keres ways, as well as the fact that she is subject to the “documents” and “cures” of the nonNative world. According to Peter Nabokov, “Unlike oral tradition, print was marked by the impersonality of its transmission.” These documents are extremely impersonal, and cannot capture the essence of her pain, as the spoken word could. However, a document like a divorce decree is necessary in the print-driven “White” world and does allow her to move on “officially.” Yet it isn’t documents or “White” cures alone that can heal her; she also needs her Keres beliefs. In part III’s “There’s Four Sides to Every Question,” her Keres ways begin to enter her consciousness again as Ephanie realizes that life fits together, that “it all came together somewhere” (147). Then in the prologue’s “In the Shadows She Sang, Remembering,” Ephanie “understood at least that everything was connected. Everything was related . . . What had happened in time immemorial . . . happened now” (191). This understanding comes through the examination of traditional native stories. She realizes that they are not separate from her; they personally affect her— “hours she pondered [the stories], slowing growing stronger, more clear, as the light in the room turned to shadows, to twilight, to dark. Still she sat, re membering” (196). Just as Gunn redesigns the creation myth in the prologue by feminizing Spider Woman, Ephanie is redoing herself in the light of the traditional stories, as the separation of the word “re membering” in the title and the previous quote illustrates. Remembering her life is “remember[ing] the [Keres] story that told it” (195). By the end of the novel Ephanie has “entered the song” (213). She is now not only thinking as a Keres but also believing as one who knows she is part of a greater song.

SOURCES Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop. Boston: Beacon, 1992. ———. The Women Who Owned the Shadows. New York: Fire Keepers, 1995. Ballinger, Franchot, and Brian Swann. “Interview with Paula Gunn Allen.” In Native American Women Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 5–7. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 1998.

1390 WOMEN

Hanson, Elizabeth. Western Writers Series #96: Paula Gunn Allen. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1990. Holford, Vanessa. “Re Membering Ephanie: A Woman’s ReCreation of Self in Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows,” Studies in American Indian Literature 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 99–113. Nabokov, Peter. “American Indian Literature: A Tradition of Renewal,” Studies in American Indian Literature 2, no.3 (Autumn 1978). Van Dyke, Annette. “Critical Extracts.” In Native American Women Writers, edited by Harold Bloom, 8–9. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 1998. Kristen Rozzell

WOMEN CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1978) In no other work does Charles BUKOWSKI seem to exhibit himself as purely as he does in Women (1978). Nothing else could account for the book’s enduring appeal and seductiveness. It is true that the main character has a pseudonym, Henry Chinaski, and there is a publisher’s note that says, “This novel is a work of fiction and no character is intended to portray any person or combination of persons living or dead” (6). And yet there are seemingly no other masks or precautions. Throughout this work, Bukowski, apparently, shows himself as himself, revealing to the reader his self in all its ugliness and misanthropy. It is no accident, from this perspective, that Women is almost completely devoid of novelistic qualities. What is remarkable about the work is the bluntness of its “style,” its total reliance on ordinary language, and the junk that is stockpiled in its every corner—that is, the superabundance of digressions, seemingly culled from the surfaces of everyday life. Because of its coarse and digressive character, Women does not read like a novel; instead, it resembles a raw document of an experience, a bloody chunk excised from the tissue of ordinary life. Perhaps this is the reason for the work’s repetitiveness. Each scene of the “narrative” (if the book has one) follows exactly the same pattern: (1) Chinaski meets a woman who is invariably significantly younger than him and who, in most cases, knows and admires his work. (The women in the novel are drawn to Chinaski partly because of his literary reputation and partly because of the way in which he describes women in his books. As a selfportrait, Women resembles nothing more than a liter-

ary personals advertisement. (2) He has some form of sexual intercourse with the woman. (By having sex with young women, Chinaski hopes to achieve victory over death, a kind of sexualized immortality. And perhaps this is also the reason that he writes, “My art is my fear” [189].) Intermittently, there are also poetry readings, noisy breakups, trips to a racetrack, and laconic conversations with friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Nothing extraordinary happens. Chinaski’s account of his life is as uneventful and banal as most lives are thought to be. A book that is repetitive and tedious may express a life that is repetitive and tedious; and if one accepts that the book documents an engagement with life, how could one fault the author for this? Throughout the pages of Women, the reader watches as an endless parade of women move in and out of Chinaski’s life. One bout of copulation is succeeded by another. Each of Chinaski’s sexual encounters resembles a form of violent appropriation, the besmirching of what is sacred or the slaughtering or maiming of a wild beast (“one animal knifing another into submission” [77]). It is not coincidental that racetracks and boxing matches serve as the backdrop for much of the action in Women, for sex, according to the logic of this book, is a sport—indeed, it is the bloodiest sport of all. Although he defines himself as a writer, Chinaski prefers women to writing: “ ‘You’re good enough with the ladies,’ the character Dee Dee said. ‘And you’re a helluva writer.’ [Chinaski replies:] ‘I’d rather be good with the ladies’ ” (50). Writing is, for him, merely a vicissitude of life; it is an addiction (“an insanity,” he says at one point), but no more gripping than any of his other addictions—such as horse-betting, drinking, and sex. Writing is indeed a compulsion, but only one compulsion among others. All his compulsions are variations of the same compulsion, the American wet dream. That dream, of course, is to acquire and to accumulate as much of a thing as possible. More money. More sex. More drinks. More of everything. Like everyone else in his milieu, Chinaski is “sick on the dream” (104)—the dream of gross acquisition and accumulation that defines American culture.

SOURCES Brewer, Gay. Charles Bukowski. New York: Twayne, 1997.

WOOLSON, CONSTANCE FENIMORE 1391

Bukowski, Charles. Women. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1978. Fox, Hugh. Charles Bukowski: A Critical and Biographical Study. Somerville, Mass.: Abyss Publications, 1969. Harrison, Russell. Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1994. Miller, William Joyce. Bukowski, and Their Enemies: Essays on Contemporary Culture. Greensboro, N.C.: Avisson, 1996. Joseph Suglia

WONG, SHAWN HSU (1949– )

Shawn Wong published his first novel, Homebase, in 1979, the year that his landmark book Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian American Writers, edited with Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank CHIN, and Lawson Fusso Inada, appeared. The timing of the two publications suggests the twin goals that have driven much of Wong’s career: his ongoing search to rediscover older Asian-American voices and to seek out the new, and to find his own complex voice. Homebase, one of the first novels published by a Chinese American (Chen, 391), depicts the life of Rainsford Chan, a fourth-generation Chinese American whose odyssey leads to an understanding of his ancestors and to his personal self-discovery as an American. Wong uses diaries, journals, essays, real and imagined letters, etc., to reclaim for the reader, as well as for Rainsford, significant truths about the building of the Pacific Railroad over the Sierra Nevada mountains and Angel Island, the West Coast equivalent to Ellis Island. Wong’s second novel, American Knees (1995), tells the story of Raymond Ding. Schoolyard taunts aimed at Ding provide the book’s title: “Are you,” asks one character, “Chinese, Japanese, or American knees?” The novel follows Raymond, director of minority affairs at a small Bay Area college, on a quest for love and an understanding of the way his heritage blends with his American self. Wong, who was born on August 11, 1949, in Oakland, California, was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1971, and at San Francisco State University, where he received his master’s degree in 1974. Homebase evolved from his master’s thesis, directed by the novelist and creative writing instructor Kay BOYLE, who

believed in his talent. Wong also coedited The Big Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature (1991), and edited Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996), several other anthologies, and “I Miss the Person I Love Every Day” (1998), a tribute to his wife Vicki, who died in 1997, for the anthology A Few Thousand Words About Love, edited by Mickey Pearlman (1998). Responsible, with others, for rediscovering such now classic writers as John OKADA, SUI SIN FAR, and Louis CHU, Wong remains firmly in the anti-assimilationist camp of Asian-American literature, reminding writers and readers alike to remain vigilant and self-critical.

NOVELS American Knees. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Homebase. New York: I. Reed Books, 1979.

SOURCES Chen, Chih-Ping. “Shawn Wong.” In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 391–397. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Kim, Elaine H. “Shawn Hsu Wong.” In Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, 194–197. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Wong, Shawn. “I Miss the Person I Love Every Day.” In A Few Thousand Words About Love, edited by Mickey Pearlman, 157–158. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.

WOOLSON, CONSTANCE FENIMORE (1840–1894) Novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist, and widely published during her lifetime, Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote most of her best work after she immigrated to Italy in 1880. Viewed by her contemporaries as a local colorist, especially about the Great Lakes, she also created bizarre, lonely, even weird characters related to the gothic tradition. She has been the subject of much scholarly study in recent years. In addition to For the Major (1883), a novella, she wrote four novels: Anne (1882), Horace Chase (1894), East Angels (1886), and Jupiter Lights (1889). Woolson, the grand-niece of James Fenimore COOPER, was born on March 5, 1840, in Claremont, New Hampshire, but she was reared in Cleveland,

1392 WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE

Ohio. She was educated at Miss Hayden’s School and the Cleveland Female Seminary, completing her formal education in New York at Madame Chegaray’s boarding school, from which she graduated at the head of her class in 1858. Unlike such New England contemporaries as Sarah Orne JEWETT or Mary Wilkins FREEMAN, Woolson traveled often; consequently, New England, the Midwest, the South, and Europe figure in her work. In Florence, Woolson met Henry JAMES, who became a close friend and significant literary influence. Although Woolson’s novels were written in Europe. Anne is set on Michigan’s Mackinaw Island and in New York, and depicts the outsider who moves into a multiethnic community and becomes engaged to the wrong man. This early novel demonstrates Woolson’s penchant for psychological analysis, as does For the Major, the first of her novels to take place in the American South. Madame Carroll, who needs a stable home, subsumes her identity in order to make her marriage to the much older major succeed. In East Angels, Margaret Harold struggles unsuccessfully with her husband’s philandering; she cannot bring herself to break up her marriage to be with the man whom she ardently loves. The Florida setting features characters of New England, Cuban, or Spanish heritage. Woolson’s final novel, Jupiter Lights, is a singularly penetrating analysis of the dismal effects of child and wife abuse. Woolson’s life ended at age 54 when she fell from her Venetian apartment window. Whether she committed suicide remains unresolved, but Henry James was so convinced of it that he refused to attend her funeral. Buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Woolson is receiving an increasing amount of scholarly attention and is gradually appearing on American-literature course syllabi. The largest collection of her papers is held at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland, Ohio.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Anne. New York: Harper, 1882. East Angels. New York: Harper, 1886. For the Major. New York: Harper, 1883. Horace Chase. New York: Harper, 1894. Jupiter Lights. New York: Harper, 1889.

SOURCES Dean, Sharon. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Homeward Bound. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Kern, John Dwight. Constance Fenimore Woolson: Literary Pioneer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934. Moore, Rayburn S. Constance F. Woolson. Boston: Twayne, 1963. Torsney, Cheryl B. Constance Fenimore Woolson: The Grief of Artistry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989. ———, ed. Critical Essays on Constance Fenimore Woolson. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.

WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE JOHN IRVING (1976) The World According to Garp, published in 1976, brought John IRVING out of the arena of critically acclaimed but lackluster-selling fiction to critically acclaimed and best-selling fiction, an arena the East Coast–based author has yet to leave. Garp won an American Book Award for best paperback novel, and in 1983 director George Roy Hill brought Garp’s unique world to the silver screen. Many of Irving’s other novels have graced movie theaters, among them The HOTEL NEW HAMPSHIRE, A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY (released under the title Simon Birch), and most recently The CIDER HOUSE RULES, for which Irving won a best-adapted screenplay Oscar. While his other work cannot be dismissed, it is Garp that resonates as Irving’s masterpiece. Some readers may find Garp’s plot elements absurd: Garp’s conception when Jenny Fields has sex with one of her brain-damaged patients, the World War II ball turret gunner Technical Sergeant Garp; Garp’s wife Helen Holm castrating her graduate student Michael Milton during an act of fellatio; and the transsexual Roberta Muldoon being a former tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. But through his prose, Irving masterfully points out the obvious—that life is absurd, full of drama as well as humor. The cliché that an event so weird would not be believed in a work of fiction does not occur here because Irving fleshes out each of his characters and presents these events so true that they cannot be dismissed. As critics Carol C. Harter and James R. Thompson note in their book on Irving, this is “. . . a novel whose voice, structure, and vision define it as a unique expression of ‘true’ (as opposed to ‘real’)

WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, THE 1393

human experience” (74). It should be no surprise that Donald Whitcomb, the author of Garp’s biography, entitles his work Lunacy and Sorrow: The Life and Art of T.S. Garp. The realization that, no matter how hard people try, life cannot be controlled can be a hard one to grasp, even when the unplanned repeatedly appears on their doorstep. Garp’s life and death demonstrate this. Even when he tries to apologize to the Ellen Jamesians for his multitude of angry letters, he still meets his death at the hands of Ellen Jamesian Pooh Percy—the sister of Cushie Percy, whom he lost his virginity to at the novel’s start. Pooh now belongs to this sect of women who cut off their own tongues in solidarity of the little raped girl Ellen James. Pooh associates Cushie’s own death to “. . . Garp’s adolescent lust for her sister . . .” (Campbell, 73). Despite Garp’s own effort to control the anger he created toward him within this sect, Pooh nonetheless assassinates him, still tying in the absurd thought of her sister’s death to a teenage romp. With writing being one of the novel’s crucial elements, Irving shows that his characters’ only sense of control is within their own literary creations. The journey toward maturity plays a huge role in Garp, as is the journey Garp and Jenny take to Vienna to concentrate on and nurture their own writing. As scholar Josie P. Campbell notes in her own criticism of Irving and his work, “It is a plot of becoming [author’s emphasis]” (9). Campbell notices “. . . the protagonists of Irving’s novels demonstrat[ing] growth. They are, to be sure, characters who bumble and fumble their way through life, but they are much more than a bundle of mechanical gestures” (11). By constructing certain works of fiction during crucial periods of his life, Garp grows as a writer and a person, most notably with his novel The World According to Bensenhaver, written after the death of his son Walt. Perhaps the strongest prevailing theme is Irving’s take on gender roles throughout Garp. While Garp’s mother, Jenny, rejects the label “feminist” attached to her, Jenny’s actions and the writing of Sexual Suspect demonstrates the contrary. Irving’s novel begins in the ’40s, a time when women’s independent thoughts and actions were not believed acceptable. Despite this social norm and the bemoaning of her parents, Jenny

Fields remain true to herself, even deciding to have a child out of wedlock, so she is not tied to a husband the rest of her life. And Garp himself rejects the typical role of adult son and husband by letting Jenny and Helen support him financially while he concentrates on his own writing. Women play a central role in Irving’s novel, whether it is the strong Jenny, “. . . the independent Roberta Muldoon . . . the little girl he ‘saves’ after she is raped in the park . . . Ellen James . . . [his] own lust for baby-sitters . . .” (81). At the end of Garp, Garp’s son Duncan, obviously without any prejudice, marries a transsexual, with Irving calling it “[a]nother gift to Duncan’s life from Roberta Muldoon!” (604–605). Irving seems to question the labels attached to men and women. He brings in the flipflopped gender role of Garp’s own life as well as Jenny’s and Helen’s, adding Garp’s friendship with the former jock and transsexual Roberta and Duncan’s decision to marry a transsexual for the ultimate effect. Whereas in other works of fiction women are penalized for their sexual desires, in Garp it is the men who meet this fate, most notably Michael Milton. In addition to the accident that cost Duncan his eye, Walt his life, and Garp his speech, Milton loses his penis. Like the soldier that Jenny injures at the beginning of the novel and Garp’s death toward the novel’s conclusion, Milton in a way is punished for his libidinousness. When Garp writes The World According to Bensenhaver, he has the raped character of Hope stab the rapist with the rapist’s own fisherman’s blade. Family stands at the Garp’s forefront. In addition to his biological family of Jenny Fields and the one produced by his marriage to Helen, of whom he has two sons, Duncan and Walt, and a daughter named after Jenny, there are the characters with whom Garp has no blood or civil union. This other family includes Roberta, Ellen James, and Garp’s agent, John Wolf, who mirrors Jenny’s role as nurturer and protector. But in this case, Wolf nurtures Garp as a writer. In fact the name Wolf harkens back to Garp’s own description of Jenny as “. . . a lone wolf” (2). The Grim Reaper can be called an additional character in Garp. In addition to assassination, the act that took Jenny and Garp, cancer takes the lives of a majority of the characters, notably the Vienna prostitute

1394

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME

Charlotte, Garp’s daughter, Jenny, and John Wolf. A last chapter entitled “Life After Garp” accounts the lives and deaths of the rest of the characters. Garp foreshadows his own death in chapter 2 “Blood and Blue“: “ ‘Like my father,’ Garp wrote, ‘I believe I have a knack for brevity. I’m a one-shot man’ ” (33). Walt calls the undertow at Dog’s Head the “Under Toad,” a childishly erroneous phrase that the novel repeats throughout in terms of the death and tragedy stalking the characters. Having death so prominent in the novel is another plot element that adds reality and relates back to control and absurdity. The World According to Garp’s complexity touches on specific thoughts and moments within the individual reader. While the last line of the novel states “. . . we are all terminal cases” (609), the depth of Irving’s writing in Garp proves that powerful literature can stave off the inevitable.

SOURCES Campbell, Josie P. John Irving: A Critical Companion. Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers. Series edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. John Irving. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Irving, John. The World According to Garp. 1976. New York: Ballantine, 1997. Laura Durnell

WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME ROBERT PENN WARREN (1950) No single work better reveals Robert Penn WARREN’s purposes than World Enough and Time, which appeared in 1950 in the middle of his career. Subtitled A Romantic Novel, Warren’s fiction re-creates the historical case of the “Kentucky Tragedy,” a sensational story of love and jealousy, then of murder and suicide, earlier taken as a literary subject by 19th-century Southern writers including William Gilmore Simms and Edgar Allan POE. However, Warren chooses Nathaniel HAWTHORNE as his model, especially in terms of The Scarlet Letter, published just a century earlier, in 1850. As in Hawthorne’s “The Customs House” preface, Warren’s own voice seems to discuss the documents that present this tragic story of love and death that follows, but his

narrative voice takes a detached, realistic view of the romantic tale told by its 19th-century protagonist. Warren’s long and complex novel for the most part stays close to its historical sources, in particular the autobiographical justification penned by its narrator, here called Jeremiah Beaumont. Warren invents some of young Jerry’s development, including the early death of his father, which leaves him to find his own way in the world. As in many of Warren’s works, the search for a father surrogate preoccupies his central character until he finally realizes his own psychic selfhood, often by becoming a father himself. Jerry’s most important father figure is his employer, Colonel Cassius Fort, a successful lawyer, politician, and speculator on the Kentucky frontier in the early decades of the 19th century. When Wilkie Barron, another protégé of the colonel’s, reveals that their mentor seduced and impregnated a fatherless local beauty, Rachel Jordan, Jerry rejects Fort and courts Rachel in an act of romantic rebellion. This personal story is paralleled by a complicated political plot, one again drawn realistically from the documents of the 1820s. After the national financial panic of 1819, the populist Kentucky legislature enacted a number of “Relief” measures to protect debtors from foreclosure, and Warren uses the reaction of an “Anti-Relief” party to depict the historical tension between liberal and conservative impulses throughout our history. Personal and political factors were closely intertwined in the historical sources, and Warren makes them even more symbolic by showing Colonel Fort a turncoat, deserting his theoretical support for Relief for the practical advantages of Anti-Relief. Jerry has moved in the opposite direction, encouraged by the equally romantic Rachel, whose farm has been saved by Relief laws. Finally, she brings Jerry to the grave of her stillborn baby and promises to become his beloved and his wife if he will kill the colonel in an act of personal and political revenge. The pragmatic Fort refuses a duel, and Jerry considers his debt of honor paid to Rachel, who then marries him and soon carries his child. Jerry thus discovers his psychological selfhood by settling down as a successful country squire. In a subsequent political campaign, the colonel seems to refute charges of

WOUK, HERMAN 1395

seduction by circulating the rumor that Rachel had been impregnated by her black coachman. When she again miscarries, Rachel demands revenge, withholding her love from Jerry until the deed is done. When Fort still refuses his challenge, Jerry stabs him to death in a mysterious midnight meeting. The long middle section of the novel then concerns itself with his trial for murder in the state capitol at Frankfort, a trial made more sensational by the political undercurrents to his personal revenge. Warren underlines another of his characteristic themes, the elusive nature of philosophical truth and therefore of practical justice, as both prosecution and defense resort to perjury, subornation, and intimidation. When Jerry is sentenced to death, Rachel swears to share his fate by suicide. At this point Warren makes his major deviation from his historical sources. Wilkie Barron reappears to engineer the couple’s “delivery” from prison to far western Kentucky, still essentially the frontier. On his earlier hunting trips, Jerry was possessed by a romantic vision of pure nature, much in the tradition of American romanticism. Warren’s works depict his native state as the “dark and bloody ground” of folklore, however, and World Enough and Time proves no exception. The hunted couple find shelter in the wilderness domain of the “Gran Boz,” the monstrous patriarch of the Ohio River pirates. Thus Warren’s invented westward expedition extends his concern with the ideal and the real, the romantic and the realistic, into the American future. In this heart of darkness, the weakened Rachel sickens and dies; Jerry is then murdered trying to return to civilization to protest his innocence. Wilkie Barron’s killer decapitates Jerry’s corpse to collect a reward, with proof of the head preserved in a mud-filled sack. Readers of All the King’s Men and Warren’s earlier works should not have been surprised by World Enough and Time, though many were. Popular readers, anticipating the historical costume drama implied by the dust-jacket illustrations, were only a bit more taken aback than academic critics, who thought Warren had descended into depressing melodrama and shocking violence. The novel is a demanding text—long, complex, and thick with ideas and images; indeed, its rhetoric seems to strain after poetry in much the same way

that the central characters communicate by means of their poems for and to each other. Warren’s immediately succeeding works, the epic poem Brother to Dragons (1953) and the historical novel Band of Angels (1955), continued many of the directions discovered in World Enough and Time, especially in the realistic treatment of romantic historical material from his native state. Later critics have even broader perspectives that place it among Robert Penn Warren’s halfdozen best books.

SOURCES Blotner, Joseph. Robert Penn Warren: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1997. Justus, James. The Achievement of Robert Penn Warren. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. Millichap, Joseph R. “Robert Penn Warren’s West,” Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1993): 54–63. Warren, Robert Penn. World Enough and Time. New York: Random House, 1950. Watkins, Floyd C., et al., eds. Talking with Robert Penn Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. Joe Millichap

WOUK, HERMAN (1915– )

Herman Wouk, novelist and dramatist, has written 12 novels, eight of them best sellers, and four plays, two of them popular and successful. His works, which have sold millions of copies worldwide, have been translated into some 30 languages. Wouk is still best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The CAINE MUTINY (1951), the starkly compelling tale of mutiny aboard a World War II destroyer, and for his novels WINDS OF WAR (1971) and WAR AND REMEMBRANCE (1978), the latter nominated for an American Book Award. Wouk was also a pioneer in writing about Jewish issues in otherwise mainstream novels. Born in New York City, Herman Wouk (pronounced “Woke”) is the son of Russian immigrants Abraham Isaac Wouk, owner of a laundry chain, and Esther Levine Wouk, daughter of a rabbi. Wouk was educated at Columbia University and, in 1934, he received a bachelor of arts degree with honors. After some radio writing assignments, including a job assisting Fred Allen with his weekly radio scripts, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, became a lieutenant, and served as a deck

1396 WOUK, HERMAN

officer on the destroyer/minesweeper U.S.S. Zane in the Pacific for three years, receiving four campaign stars and a Presidential Unit Citation. In December 1945, Wouk married Betty Sarah Brown and in 1947 published his debut novel, Aurora Dawn, a satire about the New York advertising world, featuring moneyhungry Andrew Reale, and City Boy (1948), a partially autobiographical Bronx bildungsroman centered on protagonist Herbie Bookbinder. The Caine Mutiny, although set at the time of Wouk’s naval shipboard duty during World War II, is a fictional account of mutiny against Captain Queeg, commander of the U.S.S. Caine. Because of the sympathetic portrayal of such likable characters as Lieutenants Keefer and Maryk, main players in the mutiny, the dramatic courtroom scene that ends the novel catches readers offguard with its condemnation of the mutineers who morally betrayed the military service that was protecting Americans against fascism. Wouk’s fourth novel, Marjorie Morningstar, is a sympathetic portrayal of a young aspiring actress who fails in her career, marries a lawyer, and learns to understand herself through plumbing her Jewish heritage. The following year, Wouk published The Lomokome Papers, a science fiction novel that appeared in Collier’s in 1956 and in book form in 1968. In Youngblood Hawke (1962), Arthur Youngblood, a writer clearly modeled on novelist Thomas WOLFE, loses his talent to his preoccupation with business, finance, and women without values. Don’t Stop the Carnival (1965), a wittily conceived novel, depicts former Broadway press agent and heart attack victim Norman Paperman as he takes over a Caribbean hotel, only to find that insane employees and destructive typhoons prove even more stressful than New York City, to which he eventually returns. When Wouk finished The Caine Mutiny, he wrote in his journal, “Unless I’m mistaken, this is a good book. But it’s not yet the war novel I mean to write” (quoted in Edwards). Wouk’s next two novels, the best-selling The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, have been called the American War and Peace (Liukkonen). The Winds of War focuses on Navy commander (later admiral) Victor Henry and his family from 1939 through the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941); War and Remembrance continues the epic tale of

World War II and the Holocaust, following Admiral Henry and his family until the end of the war and the end of his marriage; by the end of the two novels, the clear implication is that only through memory of war can peace be attained. In his next three novels, Inside Out (1985), The Hope (1993), and Glory (1994), Wouk features the Jewish experience: In the first, Israeli David Goodkind travels as an envoy between the United States and Israel as he also moves mentally between his “outside” political life and his “inside” family life and Jewish culture; in the second, the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the Arabs is presented through the perspective of Israeli officer Zev Barak; and in the third, Wouk brings the story of modern Israel up to the leadership of Prime Minister Menachim Begin and the Camp David Peace Accords of the 1980s. Herman Wouk lives with his wife in Palm Springs, California, and maintains a home in Washington, D.C. His nonfiction books include The Will to Live on and This Is My God, both of which set forth Wouk’s religious views. His most recent novel is A Hole in Texas (2004), an espionage thriller about the underground Superconducting SuperCollider. Wouk’s war-novel manuscripts are housed at the Library of Congress, while the others may be found at Columbia University’s Butler Library. Numerous film and television adaptations of Wouk’s novels include The Caine Mutiny, filmed by Columbia in 1954 and starring Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg; The City Boy, filmed by Columbia in 1950; Marjorie Morningstar, filmed by Warner Bros. in 1958 and starring Natalie Wood as the title character; and Youngblood Hawke in 1964. A television adaptation of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, starring Barry Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, and Frank Lovejoy, aired on “Ford Star Jubilee” in 1955; in 1983 and 1988, respectively, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance aired as television miniseries on ABC-TV.

NOVELS Aurora Dawn. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947. The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1951. The City Boy. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948. Don’t Stop the Carnival. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. The Glory. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

WRIGHT, RICHARD 1397

A Hole in Texas. Boston: Little, Brown, 2004. The Hope. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993. Inside, Outside. Boston: Little, Brown, 1985. The Lomokome Papers. New York: Pocket Books, 1968. Marjorie Morningstar. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Slattery’s Hurricane. New York: Permabooks, 1956. War and Remembrance. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. The Winds of War. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Youngblood Hawke. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962.

SOURCES Beichman, Arnold. Herman Wouk: The Novelist as Social Historian. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984. Bolton, Richard R. “The Winds of War and Wouk’s Wish for the World,” Midwest Quarterly 16 (July 1975): 389–408. Darby, William. Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987, pp. 43–55. Fussell, Paul. Review of War and Remembrance, New Republic, 14 October 1978, pp. 32–33. Geismar, Maxwell. American Moderns from Rebellion to Conformity. New York: Hill & Wang, 1958, pp. 38–45. Mazzeno, Laurence. Herman Wouk. New York: Twayne, 1994. McElderry, B. R. “The Conservative as Novelist: Herman Wouk,” Arizona Quarterly 15 (Summer 1959): 128–136.

OTHER Brawarsky, Sandee. “The Torah and the Tank: Herman Wouk, at 84, Reflects on the Apocalyptic 20th Century and the Future of the Jewish Enterprise,” Jewish Week. Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?DOCID=1P1:79391741. Accessed September 25, 2005. Edwards, Bob. “Interview: Herman Wouk Discusses His New Book, A Hole in Texas,” Morning Edition (NPR). Highbeam Research. Available online. URL: http://www. highbeam.com/library/doc3.asp?docid=1P1:92513002. Accessed September 25, 2005. “Herman Wouk (1915– ).” Books and Writers. Available online. URL: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wouk.htm. Accessed September 25, 2005. Liukkonen, Petri. “Herman Wouk: 1915– .” LitWeb.net. Available online. URL: www.biblion.com/litweb/biogs/ wouk_herman.html. Accessed April 17, 2006.

WRIGHT, RICHARD (RICHARD NATHANIEL WRIGHT) (1908–1960) Richard Wright, one of the most notable American authors of the 20th century, was one of the first black Americans to have a novel—NATIVE SON (1940)—adapted for the Broadway

stage, and the first black American to see his books—both Native Son and BLACK BOY (1945)—on the mainstream best-seller lists. As Ralph ELLISON said, Richard Wright, through his life and his writing, altered the black American tendency “toward self-annihilation and ‘going underground’ into a will to confront the world,” and to confront unabashedly the racism of the United States. Less appreciated in America after his self-exile to Paris during the last 14 years of his life, Wright nonetheless continued to write realistically about oppressed individuals who stood up to bigotry and persevered in their quests for selfhood. Since his death in 1960, a large body of scholarship attests to the importance of his vision and example. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi delta cotton plantation near Natchez, to Nathan Wright and Ella Wilson Wright, a former schoolteacher. After his father deserted the family in 1914, Wright moved with his chronically ill mother and brother to family homes in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Although his formal schooling ended at age 15, Wright read voraciously, particularly the unsentimental, ascerbic essays of H. L. Mencken; from Mencken he learned of and read the American naturalists—Theodore DREISER, Stephen CRANE, and Sherwood ANDERSON, as well as the Europeans Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, and Henrik Ibsen. After moving to Chicago in 1927, he joined the Communist Party in 1932 and published short stories and poems in such left-wing magazines as Partisan and New Masses. Like many writers of his era, Wright worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA); he published his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas (1938), and won first prize in a WPA-sponsored writing contest. The novellas expose white hatred, prejudice, and violence against blacks, as well as the violence that some of the black characters resort to in reaction to that hatred. Native Son appeared two years later and shocked the reading public into an awareness of the rage, misery, and helplessness of black men in 20th century America, emblematized by Bigger Thomas, an inarticulate black who is driven by circumstances to commit murder. The book sold approximately 250,000 copies in its first month and was adopted as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Although Native Son would probably have secured Wright’s reputation, the publication of Black Boy in

1398 WRIGHT, RICHARD

1945 gained for Wright even more acclaim; like its predecessor, it, too, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. A number of critics see the book as more novel than autobiography; scholar Thadious M. Davis, for example, calls the book a “fictionalized autobiography” (Davis, 549) because its structure, technique, and impassioned voice rely on the fictional and creative talents normally associated with the novel. Critics have also written about Black Boy as a modern slave narrative and sociological study. Wright depicts himself as an outcast, a rebellious outsider who resists the subservient role expected of Southern blacks in the 1920s and 1930s. By rejecting religion and upbraiding fellow blacks for their servile attitudes, in this book and other books, Wright broke ground for such later writers as James BALDWIN and Ralph Ellison. After moving to Paris in 1947, Wright continued to write fiction, publishing The OUTSIDER (1953), a novel clearly influenced by the existentialist writer JeanPaul Sartre, with whom Wright had become friendly; in fact, the work is one of the earliest American existentialist novels. Its hero is a black man, Cross Damon, but the issues are more philosophical than specifically racial: Damon escapes family encumbrances to join the Communist Party as a way to live his life; he is ultimately killed by one of the communists. A more effective dramatization of Wright’s interest in existentialism is the novella The Man Who Lived Underground, published posthumously in 1971. Fred Daniels finds a new identity in the sewer system, staying alive by robbing those above who have excluded him. “Invisibility,” however, is not the answer; when he emerges from the sewer, the police shoot him dead. Savage Holiday (1954) is Wright’s only novel to feature a white protagonist, an insurance salesman whose rootless wandering suggests the state of the modern individual. The Long Dream (1958) centers on Fishbelly, a middle-class black youth who, like Wright himself, embarks on an odyssey away from the South and toward a selfconstructed, meaningful philosophy. Rite of Passage, a novella written in the 1940s, was published posthumously. Fifteen-year-old Johnny Gibbs returns home with his straight-A report card only to learn that his parents are actually foster parents, not blood rela-

tives, and that they must send him to a foster home. He runs away and joins a violent Harlem street gang. Richard Wright was married briefly to Dhimah Rose Meadman in the late 1930s and in 1941 married Ellen Poplar, at the time a fellow communist and daughter of Polish immigrants. Richard Wright died of a heart attack on November 28, 1960, in Paris, France, and his ashes, along with those of the manuscript of Black Boy, are buried in the Colambarium in Paris. At the beginning of the 21st century, it is difficult to overestimate Richard Wright’s significance.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper, 1945. Lawd Today. New York: Walker, 1963. The Long Dream. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. The Man Who Lived Underground. Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1971. Native Son. New York and London: Harper, 1940. The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. Savage Holiday. New York: Avon, 1954. Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. New York and London: Harper, 1938; expanded as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories. New York and London: Harper, 1940.

SOURCES Abcarian, Richard. Richard Wright’s Native Son: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970. Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Ungar, 1973. Bloom, Harold, ed. Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Bone, Robert. Richard Wright. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Butler, Robert. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. ———. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank. New York: Scribner, 1995. Davis, Thadious M. “Richard Wright.” In Fifty Southern Writers After 1900: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Joseph M. Flora and Robert Bain, 545–559. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987.

WRIGHT, RICHARD 1399

Dickstein, Morris. Gates of Eden. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” In Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, 77–94. New York: Random House, 1964. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: William Morrow, 1973. ———. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Fabre, Michel, and Charles Davis. Richard Wright: The Primary Sources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. ———. Understanding Richard Wright’s Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. ———. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Twayne, 1997.

Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Miller, James A., ed. Approaches to Teaching Wright’s “Native Son.” New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997. Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs. N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995. Ray, David, and Robert M. Farnsworth, eds. Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. Reilly, John M. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Stepto, Robert B. Literacy and Ascent: Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.” In From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative, edited by Robert B. Stepto, 128–162. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books/Amistad Press, 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1968. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1977.

C YAMANAKA, LOIS-ANN (1961– )

YD

One of the most distinctive of the young Asian-American writers, Lois-Ann Yamanaka has made an enormous impact with her Hawaiian trilogy—WILD MEAT AND THE BULLY BURGERS (1996), BLU’S HANGING (1997), and Heads by Harry (1999). All these novels focus on adolescent Japanese Americans in a series of coming-of-age tales, usually with females as the leading characters. Thematically, each covers similar territory but with a whole new set of characters and situations. While the teenagers experiment in the usual adolescent manner with drugs, sex, and alcohol, with sometimes disastrous results, the heart-wrenching reality that all these young characters share is absent parents, who have sometimes physically disappeared and are at other times emotionally absent. And these parents, like their children, are frequently depicted as incapacitated or irresponsible because they are descendants of Japanese-American plantation laborers. Stylistically, Yamanaka blends her own poetic intonations with the tough and gritty pidgin dialect of her characters. This remarkable feature of her work began with Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (1993), a four-part verse novella depicting four working-class Japanese-American teenage girls, and continues through the trilogy and her most recent novel, Father of the Four Passages (2001). Inspired by The HOUSE ON MANGO STREET (1996), the award-winning novel by Chicana writer Sandra CISNEROS, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is composed of a series of loosely connected stories that take place in

Hilo, Hawaii, in the 1970s. Narrating in pidgin dialect, Lovey Nariyoshi relates the incidents of this workingclass Japanese-American bildungsroman. Blu’s Hanging, similarly narrated in first-person pidgin, this time by 13-year-old Ivah Igata, tells the poignant and painful tale of three children (Ivah is the eldest). In the case of the youngest child, the mother’s death leaves him literally speechless. The middle child, Blu, is left vulnerable to exploitation. The concluding novel in the trilogy, Heads by Harry, is again narrated by a young girl, Toni Yagyuu. As the middle child, Toni is sandwiched between Sheldon, her homosexual brother, and Bunny, her beautiful, attention-craving younger sister. Toni battles drug and alcohol addiction and several unwanted pregnancies before finally learning to assert her individuality. In Father of the Four Passages, Yamanaka’s most recent novel, the hip Sonia Kurisu, after having three abortions, decides not to abort Sonny Boy, the baby conceived in her fourth pregnancy—but for much of the remainder of the book she is haunted by the three aborted babies and returns from college in Las Vegas to begin the healing process in Hawaii. Yamanaka was born in 1950 on Molokai and was reared in the Hilo, Kau, and Kona districts of Hawaii. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1983 and a master’s degrees in education in 1987 from the University of Hawaii, she began teaching in the Honolulu public schools and married John Inferrera. Although controversy boiled up among the Asian-American community

1400

YEARLING, THE 1401

over perceived racial slurs directed at Filipino Americans in her first two books, Yamanaka was defended by such other writers as Amy TAN, Maxine Hong KINGSTON, and Jessica HAGEDORN, who affirmed her right to artistic freedom. Like many other Asian-American writers, Yamanaka says she writes her own truth and does not believe that she speaks for all Asian Americans.

NOVELS Blu’s Hanging. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997. Father of the Four Passages. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001. Heads by Harry. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996.

YEARLING, THE MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS (1938) Set in the rural landscape of Cross Creek, Florida, where RAWLINGS resided, The Yearling may seem like a rather local, time and place–specific novel. Rawlings’s uncompromising use of the region’s dialect suggests this localness. The devotion to the sound of rural Florida speech sometimes manifests itself in benign comedy. For instance, “Ma” Baxter stipulates a “carefully written” list of items to be purchased during a trip to town: She demands “A haf bolt perty blue and wite check gingham for Mrs. B now a real perty blue.” Later, she chides her son, Jody, for using grammar incorrectly: “You’d ought to say, ‘The roaches has eat it,’ ” she confidently asserts. This vivid regard for local oral habits is matched by Rawlings’s meticulous reconstruction of Florida’s then-present fauna and flora. Like the humans who struggle against nature to farm, the animals, too, struggle through extreme weather and perennial competition from other species in untamed Florida. Yet the book transcends local concerns. Telling of the development of Judy—an only child—growing up with his hardship-accustomed parents, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939, found a massive readership, and has continued to be reprinted and read by adolescents and adults ever since. There are at least three reasons for The Yearling’s almost universal appeal: Jody comes to realize that selfinterest largely drives adults; he learns about what Benjamin T. Spencer, writing in 1939 about The Yearling, memorably identified as the necessity of “supporting

life at the expense of justice”; and Jody, on the cusp of adolescence, must deal with what is to him an inexplicable awakening of sexuality. Cross Creek contains families that are—necessarily because of the poverty caused by the terrain’s harshness—self-interested. The Baxters have a particularly strained relationship with one large family, the Forresters. Although some Forresters are more aggressive and unreasonable than others, they are prone to violence: During one fight, Jody is knocked out, and they are strongly suspected of burning down a house during a feud over a girl, Twink. Jody’s father, “Pa” Baxter, is renowned for his honesty, but even he is prepared to use reverse psychology to outwit his neighbors. Keen to sell to the Forresters a hunting dog that has thus far proved useless, “Pa” stresses, insincerely, that “I jest wouldn’t put no notion o’ tradin’ in your minds.” The deal is made, to the Baxters’ advantage. Jody learns that in order to flourish when people are as predatory as animals, even honest persons must be occasionally dishonest. The Baxters have to protect themselves against families such as the Forresters—and they have to protect themselves against the appetitive needs of wild animals. The yearling of the title is an orphaned fawn that Jody has rescued. At first, the animal causes little disruption to the Baxters’ habits, but Flag soon becomes too big for the house, knocking over food and essential household items. Keeping Flag outside proves to be an inadequate solution, because he soon uproots and irrevocably damages the family’s crops. The Baxters, who struggle to produce enough food to last through challenging Florida winters, cannot afford to lose any crops. Jody’s parents insist that Flag must be killed— they see the fawn as a rival, not a companion as does Jody. After an initially hysterical reaction to the shooting of Flag, Jody comes to terms with the death, realizing that, indeed, the killing of the splendid creature was unjust and unwanted, but necessary for the family’s survival. Although the action takes place over the course of just one eventful year, The Yearling is in many respects a bildungsroman—it is a novel about Jody reaching a life milestone. Like the fawn, Jody too is called a “yearlin’ boy” by “Pa” Baxter when the father is reminding the son of his naivety and unreadiness for adult negotiations. By

1402 YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER, A

the novel’s end, however, “Pa” observes newfound maturity in Jody, who can now even wash his feet without parental instruction. “Pa” insists with grave pride: “You ain’t a yearlin’ no longer.” Future conversations between Jody and “Pa” will be “man to man,” not adult to child. Jody’s initial, prepubescent distaste for the company of girls amuses because it is stereotypical. He feels a “murderous fury” when teased about an alleged fondness for a local girl, proclaiming that “I—I hate girls. I hate Eulalie most of all.” This romance-averse attitude is consistent with Jody’s difficult relationship with an obstreperous cousin, Oliver. Jody resents the time that Oliver spends with his sweetheart, Twink—and with the time that Oliver spends fighting the Forresters over her. “Hit’s Twink,” Jody complains, blaming Oliver’s inconsiderate behavior on his passion for the young woman, “Hit’s gals does it. I don’t never aim to have no gal.” Predictably, Jody’s attitude changes. At a social gathering, Jody is stirred by the sight of Eulalie in feminine attire, with a white dress, ribbons, and ruffles; in particular, he resents the girl’s attention being distracted by a ferry-boy, because “in a remote fashion, [she] belonged to him, Jody, to do with as he pleased, if only to throw potatoes at her.” He cannot explain or identify his sexual feelings, but he feels them vividly nonetheless. He even enjoys a gentle kiss from Twink, who has married Oliver, finding her touch “strangely agreeable.” Jody now tolerates Oliver and Twink’s romance because, albeit unconsciously, he now feels empathy for their affective desires. Earlier, Jody has helped to kill an especially violent bear. His pride in his role is expressed through the narrator’s use of phallic imagery. Standing near the “tallest pine,” Jody “slid one hand along the barrel of his gun,” and “a blessed stiffening and clarity came to him.” In this environment, masculinity is tested by the ability to kill; phallocentric satisfaction is felt by Jody, who complements the coming of sexual feelings with the coming of a sense of responsibility to harden himself to the dog-eat-dog realities of this poor backwater in Florida.

SOURCES Balee, Susan. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in the New Millennium,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature 11 (2002): 7–14. Bellman, Samuel Irving. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Boston, Twayne, 1974.

Brown, Stephen Gilbert. “The Storytellers: Marjorie Talking to Harry Talking to Me about The Yearling,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature 9 (1999): 1–16. Cauthen, Sudye. “Sacred Place in the Work of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature 11 (2002): 61–70. Doig, Ivan. “Introduction.” The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2002, pp. 5–12. Keeley, Jennifer. Understanding “The Yearling.” San Diego, Calif.: Lucent Books, 2000. King, Laura. “A ‘Cosmic Maturity’: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Use of Rain in The Yearling,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature 11 (2002): 45–49. Spencer, Benjamin T. “Wherefore this Southern Fiction?” Sewanee Review 47 (1939): 500–513. Turk, Janet K. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953).” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 287–294. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000. Kevin De Ornellas

YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER, A MICHAEL DORRIS (1987) Michael DORRIS’s first novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is sometimes categorized as young adult fiction. Themes of initiation, maturation, discrimination, peer problems, and family confusions all speak to young adult readers. The three first-person narrators also suggest such a categorization. The novel begins with the voice of 15-year-old Rayona, narrating the disintegration of her family. When the novel moves to the two other first-person narrators, each also begins her section of the novel with a significant event in her 15th year. Yet the novel is not strictly for young adults; the label is not inappropriate, only limiting. The characters in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water speak to any reader interested in the position of minorities in America; its style speaks to any reader interested in the power of storytelling; its themes and voices speak to any reader interested in women in American culture and in the struggle constantly waged between an individual and family. Characters of mixed heritage have the most difficulty with discrimination in this novel. Rayona, the initial narrator, has an African-American father and a Native American mother. Although raised in an urban

YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER, A 1403

setting as an Indian, even knowing the language of her mother’s reservation, Rayona looks more like her African-American father. Of mixed ancestry himself (Dorris’s father was part Modoc; his mother was of European descent), Dorris portrays well the confusion Rayona displays as she struggles both in urban Seattle and rural Montana to make sense of herself and find a place for herself in the culture and in the family. Reflecting on Rayona’s situation, her mother Christine thinks Rayona “was the wrong color, had the wrong name, had the wrong family—all an accident” (276). In a 1997 interview on National Public Radio, Dorris addressed the idea of family in the novel. In response to the suggestion that Rayona’s family is not “usual,” Dorris quipped that although he grew up watching model families on The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best, he didn’t know many “usual families.” Despite the surprising turns in family history that unfold in Yellow Raft, the genuine quality of Rayona’s family prevails largely because of the voices of the three women narrators. The oral quality of the three voices ensures storytelling as a major theme. Snippets of stories, imagined or real, fill the novel, and stories untold haunt the novel. The same incident told from varying perspectives reveals the subjectivity of stories. The novel gains momentum and complexity because the three narrators have different tones and motives for telling their stories. The order of the three narratives, from present into past, encourages readers to make assumptions that are later overturned. Rayona’s opening narrative in the present tense appears straightforward. Yet once the reader feels comfortable with Rayona’s perspective, Christine begins narrating, filling in family history that forces readers to reevaluate some of their judgments. As Dorris widens the scope by incrementally giving the vision of someone who has lived longer, complications arise. One of the main problems in Rayona’s family is the apparent refusal to communicate feelings. Christine and Aunt Ida’s pride causes rifts in the family, some of which can never be bridged. Aunt Ida’s narrative, the final and by far the briefest, clarifies that Rayona’s family problems in the 1980s have roots in the Depression. Yet as the novel moves from one narrator to another, parallel scenes and repeated symbols hold out hope that some gener-

ation, perhaps Rayona’s, may dissolve the family grudges. The repeated symbol of braiding, for example, mirrors the three-narrator structure but also provides optimism for family unity. Dorris’s novel centers on women, but a constellation of interesting male characters swirl around his women narrators. Some of the male characters are family members; others are not strictly so. Yellow Raft indicates how families need not be defined by genetics. Adalaide Morris notes how Dorris extends the concept of family; she writes that families “are the first place that compels us to process more than one issue, more than one point of view, more than one emotion at a time” (19). Several important male characters help the three women narrators grow precisely by providing different experiences, feelings, and views. Dayton Nichols, for example, who is not biologically or maritally related to any of the narrators, gradually comes to play an important familial role. Not all the male characters are positive influences. Through structural parallels, Dorris touches on the important role priests as missionaries played on Native American reservations. Both Ida and Rayona are befriended by missionary priests but with vastly different results. Both priests are privy to secrets in Rayona’s family, but only one of the priests exhibits a familial concern. Ten years after the publication of Yellow Raft, Dorris published a sequel, Cloud Chamber (1997). Covering 12 decades and five generations, beginning in Boyle, Ireland, County Roscommon, it ends on the Indian Reservation in eastern Montana, where Rayona’s mother was born. As Yellow Raft reveals the hidden history of Rayona’s matriarchal line, Cloud Chamber uncovers her father’s family history. The later novel may well remind readers of the virtues of Yellow Raft, as it too untangles a web of family bitterness and deceit as well as love through multiple narrators.

SOURCES Cowart, David. “Braid of Blood: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.” In Other Americans, Other Americas: The Politics and Poetics of Multiculturalism, edited by Magdalena J. Zaborowska and Tim Caudery, 140–149. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 1998. Dorris, Michael. Cloud Chamber. New York: Scribner, 1997. ———. Interview with Bob Edwards. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. WVIA, January 13, 1997.

1404

YELLOW WALLPAPER, THE

———. A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. 1987. New York: Warner, 1988. Morris, Adalaide. “First Persons Plural in Contemporary Feminist Fiction,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 11–29. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. “Taking Place: African-Native American Subjectivity in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.” In Mixed Race Literature, edited by Jonathan Brennan, 165–176. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. Marion Petrillo

YELLOW WALLPAPER, THE CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1892) In January 1892, Charlotte Perkins GILMAN, through her novella The Yellow Wallpaper, first revealed to her readers the horror of the then-popular “rest cure,” a remedy often prescribed for women suffering from what was then diagnosed as neurasthenia or hysteria. The story, printed in The New England Magazine, with illustrations by Jo. H. Hatfield, appeared as a hybrid fictional form—combining influences of both sentimental fiction and an American gothic tradition, as well as including some autobiographical elements. Gilman, who would become a vocal advocate for feminist social issues, had known the extreme isolation and severe psychological distress that the rest cure caused for the women forced to follow its mandates and drew upon her own personal experience with S. Weir Mitchell’s experimental treatment for melancholia for her fictional piece. The story still enthralls readers today due to Gilman’s remarkable style of demonstrating, through formal literary presentation, the mental deterioration of her narrator through a first-person point of view maintained in what appears to be a woman’s journal. The form of the story contributes much to the fictional realism of the literary piece. As in Poe’s well-established and widely read gothic short stories, the narrative assumes the perspective of a first-person point of view, which brings the reader directly into the mental state of the narrator, as one might observe in “The Black Cat” or “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Stories told from this perspective often seem authentic, given the immediacy of the thoughts, feelings, and information related through the assumed narrative voice. Sentimental fiction often used this point of view, with narrators attributing the appellatives “gentle reader” or “dear reader” to the audience—

for example, Charlotte Brontë’s famous “Reader, I married him,” from Jane Eyre. Due to the formal aspects of the printed text, Gilman’s audience could analyze the story’s pages for evidence of the acute mental disorder from which the narrator might be suffering. Sentence fragments, choppy lines, truncated paragraphs, and writing that becomes increasingly frantic through exaggerated punctuation, italicized words, and repetition suggest that the narrator is indeed becoming mad, but the investigative work on the part of the reader will be to figure out what the cause of that mental distress might be. In his scholarly work No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920, Jackson Lears examines the malaise of the “late-Victorian bourgeoisie” that resulted from modernization. Possessing the learned Protestant practice of self-examination, many white men and women of the upper middle class could not justify their inactivity, from which a growing nervous restlessness resulted. From a cultural historical perspective, Lears notes that observers proposed that this widely spread nervousness, often defined and treated as “neurasthenia,” in actuality, stemmed from “overcivilization” (51). Lears continues: “Neurasthenia was historically important not because nervous ailments had actually increased—that point is impossible to substantiate— but because observers believed nervousness was on the rise, and treated its spread as a cultural problem” (51). Numerous “remedies for nervousness” directly resulted from this fascination and obsessive interest in what was thought to be the psychological disintegration of the privileged class, extremely popular during the 1880s in the United States. Lear continues, “For many neurasthenics, the therapy was worse than the disease. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s autobiographical short story ‘The Yellow Wall Paper’ (1892) typified one response” (53). Gilman’s story gave voice to the woman imprisoned within her own home, trapped in her own private asylum. In her story, Charlotte Perkins Gilman responds to the treatment that she endured under the care of S. Weir Mitchell, who believed that Americans had too much “moral and intellectual strenuosity.” The popular physician advised his patients to undergo a “protracted

YERBY, FRANK 1405

‘rest cure’ designed to isolate his patients from nervous stimuli, to ‘fatten’ and ‘redden’ them until they could return to active life” (Lears, 52). Gilman’s female narrator shows how her own physician husband fails to properly identify or acknowledge her symptoms and who along with the narrator’s brother, also a doctor, acts in a manner similar to S. Weir Mitchell (48). The reader bears witness to the mental suffering of the narrator, who obsessively details the room in which she is imprisoned—with a peculiar interest in the putrid, acrid, yellowed paper that covers its walls. Scholars still debate over the significance of the color yellow— symbolizing urine, Asian immigration, or arsenic used in wallpaper production in late Victorian America (Bauer, 27). Yet the room itself becomes an eerie site for investigation. Clues appear in the room—the ripped wallpaper, the “sickly, sulphur tint” of the paper observed in places, the “scratched” “gouged” floor, the pitted plaster, the nailed-down, immovable bed, the barred windows and the “rings and things in the walls”—to suggest that the house had once been an asylum or mental hospital, which conjures up haunting specters of insane patients who had been there long before. This contributes to the narrator’s own sense of the room’s maddening influence. Given current medical knowledge, the modern reader would likely diagnose the narrator as suffering from postpartum depression, as she had given birth to a baby not too long before the story begins. Elaine Showalter, in Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing, suggests that the true ghost that haunts the female narrator in Gilman’s text is the “specter of infanticide,” a desire that stems from postpartum depression. Showalter writes: “Psychosis, involving hallucinations and delusions, can develop from postpartum depressions marked by crying spells, confusion, sleeplessness, and anxiety. Victorian doctors already knew what recent studies have documented: that ‘it’s during a psychotic depression that mothers are at great risk of killing their babies’ ” (134). The narrator’s desire to kill her own baby here becomes “transformed” into violent self-destruction. Showalter places Gilman’s story within a tradition of “American Female Gothic plots” that examined the “repression and incarceration typical of late nineteenth-century psychiatric

practice” (135). Certainly, Gilman’s piece gives insight into the medical treatment of female neurasthenics from the 1890s and provides a commentary on a historical social issue that affected contemporary readers.

SOURCES Chessler, Phyllis. Foreword. Women of the Asylum: Voices Behind the Walls, 1840–1945. Edited by Jeffery L. Geller and Maxine Harris. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. Bedford Cultural Edition. Introduction. Edited by Dale M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998. Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Tuttle, Jennifer S. “Rewriting the West Cure: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Owen Wister, and the Sexual Politics of Neurasthenia.” In The Mixed Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, edited by Catherine J. Golden and Joanna Schneider Zangrando, 103–121. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000.

YERBY, FRANK (FRANK YERBY) (1916–1991) The first

GARVIN

African-American author to write a best-selling novel, and the first to sell a novel to Hollywood (The Foxes of Harrow [1946]), Frank Yerby died in 1991 with an unsurpassed record of 33 novels, 12 of them best-sellers, with translations into 14 languages and sales exceeding 55 million copies (Pratt, 505). His so-called formulaic novels and “costume” novels resulted in decades of controversy about the depth and extent of his talent. He has, consequently, been excluded from numerous anthologies and courses on African-American literature. Many scholars are now arguing for more recognition for Yerby and, indeed, his reassessment has already begun in scholarly journals; a book on Yerby will likely follow soon. Yerby was born on September 15, 1916, to Rufus Garvin Yerby and Willie Smythe Yerby, in Augusta, Georgia. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1937 from Paine College, and a master’s degree in 1938 from Fisk University. After winning an O. Henry Memorial Award for his short story “Health Card,” Yerby wrote

1406 YEZIERSKA, ANZIA

but failed to publish a protest novel. However, within two years he published The Foxes of Harrow, an epic Civil War romance that focuses on the fortunes and perspectives of hero Stephen Fox. Yerby continued in this vein for two decades until he began using black characters instead of white in Speak Now (1969) and A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest (1979). The novel that attracted the most acclaim, however, was The DAHOMEAN (1971), set in 19th-century Africa and focusing on the Dahomean people. The hero, Nyasanu, becomes province governor but watches his fortunes decline and his family disappear; his enemies sell him into slavery in the United States. Frank Yerby died on November 29, 1991, of congestive heart failure in Madrid, Spain. The Foxes of Harrow, filmed by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1951, starred Rex Harrison and Maureen O’Hara. The Golden Hawk and The Saracen Blade were filmed by Columbia in 1952 and 1954, respectively; Pride’s Castle was a madefor-television movie.

SELECTED MAJOR NOVELS Benton’s Row. New York: Dial Press, 1954. Bride of Liberty. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954. Captain Rebel. New York: Dial Press, 1956. The Dahomean. New York: Dial Press, 1971. A Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest. New York: Dial Press, 1979. The Devil’s Laughter. New York: Dial Press, 1953. Devilseed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1984. Fairoaks. New York: Dial Press, 1957. Floodtide. New York: Dial Press, 1950. London: Heinemann, 1951. The Foxes of Harrow. New York: Dial Press, 1946. The Garfield Honor. New York: Dial Press, 1961. Gillian. New York: Dial Press, 1960. The Girl from Storyville: A Victorian Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1972. Goat Song: A Novel of Ancient Greece. New York: Dial Press, 1967. The Golden Hawk. New York: Dial Press, 1948. Griffin’s Way. New York: Dial Press, 1962. Hail the Conquering Hero. New York: Dial Press, 1977. Historical Novel. New York: Dial Press, 1971. Jarrett’s Jade. New York: Dial Press, 1959. Judas, My Brother: The Story of the Thirteenth Disciple. New York: Dial Press, 1969. McKenzie’s Hundred. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. An Odor of Sanctity. New York: Dial Press, 1965.

The Old Gods Laugh: A Modern Romance. New York: Dial Press, 1964. Pride’s Castle. New York: Dial Press, 1949. A Rose for Ana María. New York: Dial Press, 1976. The Saracen Blade. New York: Dial Press, 1952. The Serpent and the Staff. New York: Dial Press, 1958. Speak Now. New York: Dial Press, 1969. Tobias and the Angel. New York: Dial Press, 1975. Treasure of Pleasant Valley. New York: Dial Press, 1955. The Vixens. New York: Dial Press, 1947. The Voyage Unplanned. New York: Dial Press, 1974. Western: A Saga of the Great Plains. New York: Dial Press, 1982. A Woman Called Fancy. New York: Dial Press, 1951.

SOURCES Hill, James L. “The Anti-Heroic Hero in Frank Yerby’s Historical Novels.” In Perspectives of Black Popular Culture, edited by Harry B. Shaw, 144–154. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990. Morgan, Gwendolyn D. “Challenging the Black Aesthetic: The Silencing of Frank Yerby,” Florida A and M University Research Bulletin 35 (September 1993): 19–30. Pratt, Louis Hill. “Frank Garvin Yerby.” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, 506–511. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Turner, Darwin T. “Frank Yerby as Debunker,” Massachusetts Review 20 (Summer 1968): 569–577. ———. “Frank Yerby: Golden Debunker,” Black Boots Bulletin 1 (1972): 4–9, 30–33. ———. “The Negro Novelist at the South,” Southern Humanities Review 1 (1967): 21–29. ———. “An Interview with Frank Garvin Yerby,” Resources for American Literary Study 21, no. 2 (1995): 206–239.

YEZIERSKA, ANZIA (1885–1970) Anzia Yezierska, novelist and short story writer, known widely as the “sweatshop cinderella,” took as her subject New York’s early-20th-century immigrant Jewish community. A volatile, forthright, passionate tone characterizes her writing and remains the source of much of her fiction’s appeal. She became a celebrity when her well-received first collection of stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), was optioned for the movies by Samuel Goldwyn, as was her first novel, SALOME OF THE TENEMENTS (1923). BREAD GIVERS: A STRUGGLE BETWEEN A FATHER OF THE OLD WORLD AND A DAUGHTER OF THE NEW (1925), Yezierska’s depiction of the tension between

YEZIERSKA, ANZIA 1407

genders and generations, is admired by feminist scholars and social historians. It depicts a young woman’s struggle against Old World patriarchy, one of many strong, self-reliant women heroes who must negotiate the boundaries between immigrant culture and poverty and the life of the recently enfranchised New American Woman. Anzia Yezierska did not know her exact birth date, but many literary historians agree on 1885 as the year she was born on the Russian-Polish border, to Rabbi Bernard Yezierska and Pearl Yezierska. The family immigrated to New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1890s. As usual, in immigrant families, the boys were educated, while tradition dictated that Yezierska and her sister worked in low-paying menial jobs until marriages were arranged for them. Yezierska, however, educated herself at Columbia University by working in a laundry and gaining the financial assistance of wealthy patrons; she graduated from Teachers College in 1904. In 1910 she married Jacob Gordon, an attorney, but the marriage was annulled six months afterward, and she married Arnold Levitas, a teacher and textbook writer, in 1911. By 1915, however, she had permanently separated from him and published her first story. In 1917 she approached the philosopher and educator John Dewey in his office at Columbia University. He encouraged her and apparently initiated a romantic relationship with her that ended with his departure for China the following year. Thereafter the theme of the passionate immigrant woman and the repressed Protestant man recurs frequently in her fiction. Salome of the Tenements is based on the life of her friend Rose Pastor, who married philanthropist Graham Stokes; unlike Rose, however, Sonya Vrunsky, Yezierska’s protagonist, finds only failure in her marriage to the Anglo-Saxon John Manning. Her next and most autobiographical work, Bread Givers, earned Yezierska critical acclaim. Rabbi Smolinsky tyrannizes his daughters, sends them to work in sweatshops, and then sells them into marriage; only the youngest, Sara, escapes, educating herself, rejecting her Protestant suitor, and marrying Hugo Seelig, an Americanized Jew who bridges the two cultures. Her next novels, Arrogant Beggar (1927) and All I Could Never Be (1932), were neither critical nor com-

mercial successes. Arrogant Beggar again explores the theme of the immigrant woman, here named Adele Lindner, who moves from a tenement to a Home for Working Girls and then reacts with disillusion to the shallow hypocrisy she finds. All I Could Never Be is, according to Yezierska’s daughter, Louise Levitas Henrikson, a fictionalized version of her relationship with Dewey: The novel presents the relationship through the immigrant character Fanya Ivanova and the famous professor Henry Scott, who ends up losing interest in her because she lets emotion rather than reason rule her reactions. Yezierska’s final autobiographical novel, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), was a critical success and, according to scholar Aleta Cane, enabled her to work for the New York Times as a book reviewer (Cane, 380). Yezierska continued to write essays, stories, and reviews until her death in California on November 21, 1970. Boston University houses a collection of Yezierska’s manuscripts and letters.

NOVELS All I Could Never Be. New York: Putnam, 1932. Arrogant Beggar. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927. Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1925. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. New York: Scribner, 1950. Salome of the Tenements. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923.

SOURCES Boydston, Jo Ann, ed. The Poems of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977. Cane, Aleta. “Anzia Yezierska.” In American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 378–382. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988. Henriksen, Louise Levitas. “Anzia Yezierska.” In The Oxford Companion to American Women Writers, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, 948. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. ———. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. Konzett, Delia Caparoso. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Rosen, Norma. John and Anzia: An American Romance. New York: Dutton, 1989.

1408 Y NO SE LO TRAGÓ LA TIERRA

Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Wexler, Laura. “Looking at Yezierska.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Judith Baskin, 153–181. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Wilentz, Gay. “Cultural Mediation and the Immigrant’s Daughter: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers,” MELUS 17, no. 3 (1991–1992): 33–41.

OTHER Drucker, Sally Ann. “Anzia Yezierska (1881?–1970).” Houghton Mifflin. Online Study Center. Available online. URL: http://college.hmco.com/english/heath/syllabuild/ iguide/yeziersk.html. Accessed September 25, 2005.

Y NO SE LO TRAGÓ LA TIERRA TOMÁS RIVERA (1971) This widely acclaimed novel by Tomás RIVERA was published in 1971 under the auspices of Quinto Sol, of which prize the author was the first recipient the same year of its publication. First published entirely in Spanish, . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra/ . . . And the Earth Did Not Part became . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him in a bilingual edition, including Evangelina Vigil-Piñón’s translation into English for Arte Público Press in 1987. Rivera always refused to write in English, so it had to be his good friend Rolando HINOJOSA-SMITH who re-created the novel under the title of This Migrant Earth, also published in 1987 by Arte Publico Press. Both Rivera and Hinojosa belong to the generation of writers who would inaugurate the Chicano literary renaissance that took place in the 1970s. In 1995, Severo Perez directed the film And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him, based on Rivera’s novel, to document the study the novelist did on the life of the migrant Chicano worker. It was a study unparalleled since STEINBECK’s GRAPES OF WRATH and showed the white lower-class American worker traveling along the country to work on South-Western fields during the Depression era. Through a series of sketches, Rivera presents a bildungsroman (a coming-of-age novel) in which the protagonists fight against environmental racism and exploitation to save their families from the situation of starvation and oppression in which they are immersed. All these conditions make them one and the same boy trying to reach adulthood against the difficulties of thirst, hunger, and sunstrokes among other

calamities. The stereotypical image of the workingclass Chicano, the migrant farm laborer bending his back in the field until he collapses, gets repeated along the multiple situations Rivera presents the reader. Contempt for the “gringos” is widely manifested throughout the narrative, especially in the passage when “the earth did not devour” the adolescent who loses his faith in God. He complains against injustice, against the sun striking on his father and younger brothers while working in the fields from dawn to dusk. A tribute to Luis Valdez and Cesar Chavez, several scenes remember El Teatro Campesino, the theater Valdez created to support Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Y no se lo tragó la tierra maintains Chavez’s rebellious spirit and enhances his tone of protest while reflecting the broken soul of the Chicano. The novel is told for the most part by a child or young adult who contemplates with a critical eye his family situation and that of his neighbors in a symbolic one-year time period. The time symbolism resides in the fact that the hard reality of the Chicano farmworker gets repeated invariably every year, either with the same or with different protagonists. The stories stand on their own as an interrelated network of events, or they fit together as a whole novel about itinerant workers moving from childhood to adulthood and from state to state along the South and the Midwest searching for crops to harvest in order to survive. Through these descriptions of the seasonal workers, the reader gets to know the route of the Chicano farm workers through the United States and the nomadic character of their lives. The story “When We Arrive” symbolizes the nomadic life of the Chicano that never reaches a final destination; hence, the bus breaking down represents the eternal traveling condition. Even if the novel represents the life of a community, there is a noticeable empty space: The feminine voice is still absent in Rivera’s work. The migrant experience seems genuinely masculine while women remain in the background, their lives subordinated to their husbands’ place of work. Only the woman in “The Night Before Christmas” acquires a relevant role, for it is through her nervous condition and her anxiety attack in a shopping center crowded with whites that Rivera expresses the feeling of alienation Chicanos experience in U.S. cities.

¡YO! 1409

Rivera’s novel sounds a song of resistance to assimilation, to surrendering to the American way of life, and as a call to retain a past that is getting lost with new generations. Rivera rebels against the English language, makes his characters speak in Spanish and preserve their cultural background, rejecting assimilation to the Anglo culture. The Chicano voices of these stories never become bicultural, although they wish their descendants would be fluent in English and able to work in a white world. Among all the pessimistic views about the future that Rivera’s characters share, the hope for the youngest to get an education seems the only light left burning in a dark night. Unfortunately, many of these hopes get killed or missing in action in the Korean War, like “Julianito” or “el Chuy.” On the Chicano farmworker’s grave, no epitaph will be written, no honors received for breaking his back in the field from sun to sun. The difficulty of fieldwork and the time employed in the task haunt Rivera’s characters and uproot them from a universe of incomprehension where the border always marks the difference for the exploitation of “la raza.” Tejano migrant laborers, crossing the border illegally, without rights, rich and poor equal, all get a voice and an identity through Rivera’s sketches, a voice that had previously been silent because the life of the farmworker has always been deemed worthless.

SOURCES Rivera, Tomás. . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra/. . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. 1971. Reprinted, Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1992. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

FURTHER READING Augenbraum Harold, and Margarite Fernandez Olmos M. U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Calderon, Hector, and Jose David Saldivar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Olivares, Julian. International Studies in Honor of Tomás Rivera. Houston, Tex.: Arte Publico Press, University of Houston, 1986. Imelda Martin-Junquera

¡YO! JULIA ALVAREZ (1997)

More than merely a sequel to ALVAREZ’s brilliant HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, ¡Yo! is a response to that earlier narrative, a metafictional tour de force that reflects on the nature, power, and effects of stories and storytelling. Yolanda García, the narrator of the first book, becomes the subject of the second volume recounted, in turn, by many of the characters she had previously written about. After infuriating her family by writing about them in the first novel, she is converted into the target of their creative imagination, and ¡Yo! gathers the responses of the people around her to Yolanda’s need to write about what she knows. The first novel described Yolanda’s act of writing about her family as an integral part of her process of healing and coming to terms with her biculturality, and this novel also centers on the act and art of writing, and is a commentary on the nature of fiction. Composed of a prologue and three parts with five stories in each, the stories are narrated or focalized by a different character (or characters, as in “The wedding guests”). The stories’ titles identify the speaker and match the story with either a literary form (“The mother nonfiction,” “The teacher-romance”), a rhetorical device (“The caretaker’s revelation,” “The suitor resolution”), and elements of fiction (“The night-watchment setting,” “The third-husband characterization”). But Yolanda, professor and writer, is now the subject and object of the telling, rather than the narrator. The voices of this novel belong to an impressive melange of people: her parents and sisters, a cousin and the daughter of their maid, an old professor and a student, a boyfriend and her third husband, her best friend, a landlady, a man who stalks her, the caretakers, and the night watchman of the house in the Dominican Republic at which she vacations. Alvarez’s penchant for nuanced titles is evidenced here once again. The title of the book may be read bilingually, doubling its meaning: Read in English, it is Yolanda’s nickname; in Spanish, it means “me” or “I.” Yolanda does not speak of herself or for herself in this novel; nonetheless, her voice is never heard, except through that of others. The Yolanda that emerges from these stories is a composite built up through memories, encounters, episodes, difficulties, and conversations

1410 YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

with others. The diverse accounts reflect on her animated personality, the meaning of writing for her, and her position as a Latino American, living in two languages. She is presented as brilliant, kind, insecure, headstrong, fearful, imaginative and impulsive, engaged in a lifelong and dangerous romance with stories and storytelling, hovering between American pragmatism and Dominican superstition. She even comes close to being represented as a trickster figure—appearing as many different things to different people, transforming the lives of all that know her. The novel also examines the effect writers have on those around them. Her sisters are furious at Yo’s revealing their lives in her book, her mother is embarassed at Yo’s revelations of family secrets, one of her former students realizes she has plagiarized a story he wrote, the caretakers in the house in the Dominican Republic consider her habits strange, and the stalker’s obsession with her lasts for years until he manages to get her to listen to his story. On another level, the narratives contradict Yolanda’s version in the earlier book. “The cousin,” for example, challenges Yo’s portrayal of Lucinda as a Latin-American Barbie doll with a sizethree soul. Speaking for herself, Lucinda challenges Yolanda to revise her feminist conclusions and decide which cousin is actually more stable and fulfilled in her personal life and has come to terms with her personal contingencies and cultural choices. ¡Yo! negotiates many of the issues developed in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents but takes some of them further: The question of class difference becomes more important and a central theme in several of the accounts, because the people in the Dominican Republic have difficulty comprehending Yolanda’s American liberalism. Her ambivalence about a definition of home and affiliation with language also makes her return periodically to the Dominican Republic, where she writes. The easy binary between American feminism and Dominican patriarchy is complicated in this novel, as the adult characters explain Dominican women’s diverse tactics for survival. Most important, it delves deeper into Yolanda’s path toward selfhood and narrates details of the relationships that marked her journey—from her father’s early prohibition against telling stories because she has put them in danger, to his real-

ization that she is destined to become a storyteller, to her struggles to find a professional calling, to her three marriages and affairs, to the point where she appears to have found her personal and cultural niche as a writertraveler who lives between countries and languages.

SOURCE Alvarez, Julia. ¡Yo! Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1997. Rocío G. Davis

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS JOYCE CAROL OATES (1987) With its title taken from Herman Hupfield’s 1931 song “As Time Goes By,” Joyce Carol OATES’s novel You Must Remember This captures the worries of the decade 1946–56, with its concern over communism and nuclear war. This authorial remembering of a “now remote decade” is what excited Oates the most during the “fifteen months of its composition” (Oates 1988, 379). She based her fictional Port Oriskany on places she remembers from her youth; specifically, it is “an amalgam of two cities in upstate New York—Buffalo and Lockport . . .” (Oates 1988, 379). Although Oates sums the novel up as a family chronicle, it is young Enid Stevick who interests the reader most. Enid’s passion for her father’s half brother Felix counteracts her desire for suicide. For Felix, a retired boxer in his 30s, the intense relationship with his niece seems a way of regaining his youth, but through it he also “exorcises an instinct for self-destructive violence” (Oates 1988, 380). Just as witnessing a boxing match allows an audience to enjoy the thrill of two people beating each other up—for once to relish an experience that seems so wrong, Oates permits her reader to share the excitement of the affair of Enid and Felix. Since Oates is careful to give us the innermost thoughts of both characters, readers feel as if for once they can understand even the most extreme passions of each gender. In Oates’s work, readers feel free to take pleasure in what we ourselves usually consider taboo because her works are considered worthy of scholarly analysis. Although no one ever discovers their secret, Enid and Felix do pay a high price for their obsessions. The

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS 1411

implication is that their secret relationship inspired them to live and thrive in those few years of clandestine meetings. Despite the fact that Felix really controls when and where, or even if, the two will meet, it is Enid who unexpectedly benefits most from the affair: She was in love and her love set her in a relationship with the world that was unexpected, potent, mysterious. Because of Felix she had the power to cultivate friendships where she wished, she had the power to cultivate her own quick restless analytic intelligence as if it were a factor distinct from her personality (210). However, the memory of what they had will also haunt them both, even as they move on to their separate lives. Oates certainly exposes double standards of male-female sexual behavior in this novel, but Enid’s ability to harness her sexual experience into her musical and academic pursuits puts a fresh spin on the notion of young girls as victims of male dominance. Ironically, Felix has quite the conservative view of how women should behave in public. He is furious to discover that Enid hitches rides, not because it was dangerous, but because it was “cheap” (121). The reader realizes that jealousy is Felix’s motive for leaving his car and running after Enid in broad daylight on one occasion. He couldn’t bear to see her with boys from school. He obsesses over her as his possession, revealing that for him, this relationship is less than healthy. Although Felix takes advantage of his niece for selfish desires, Oates never paints him as an evil character. In fact, Enid warms immediately to the sexual relationship with her uncle; the only difference is how each views what they are doing. Felix dismisses it as “just something they had to do” (307). He insists that what is between them isn’t love. On her 16th birthday Felix leaves her a heart-shaped locket and chain with her mother, but when she calls to thank him, he is careful to explain that it “doesn’t mean anything” (182). Looking back, Enid notes the way her older sister Lizzie and her friends talk about love and sex: “She thought how coarse was the connection between men and women, you started out thinking love and wound up thinking sex, everything reduced to jokes that were

vulgar, flippant, sometimes even funny, Felix himself used the expression fuck a good deal as if intent upon showing her how little it all meant really, how little she could count upon it . . .” (353). You Must Remember This explores how men and women view life so differently (Showalter, 19). Although Oates’s research on boxing allows her to incorporate a behind-the-scenes look at this sport and “male experience” (Wesley, 65), Enid wonders at Felix’s sanity when she hears his “masculine reading of the world so alien to her own she could barely comprehend it” (214). The structure of You Must Remember This, like much of Oates’s fiction, is a unique presentation of time. Although the novel’s events are presented chronologically, the narration often gives further detail of an earlier event later as it is recounted by a character’s memory, furthering the element of obsession that pervades the novel. This technique allows Oates to hook the reader periodically into wanting to know more about one moment but then having to wait to find out later. Important moments in the lives of the other members of the Stevick family come intermittently so that readers are diverted by the worries of the father, Lyle, whose midlife crisis takes the palpable form of a bomb shelter he has built belowground at the family’s rented home. Meanwhile, the only son, Warren, who returned mentally and physically scarred from the war, has begun working tirelessly for nuclear disarmament. The two older Stevick daughters are opposites, since Geraldine marries early and takes pride in motherhood, while Lizzie moves out and supports herself by singing in nightclubs. These two sisters and their mother serve as foils for Enid, who is the most intellectual and secretly the most sexual. Mrs. Stevick remains a traditional motherly figure for most of the novel; she once remarks in a resigned way that Enid will “only get married anyway” (307) as if there were no point to her piano lessons. However, by the novel’s end, she has gone into business with her sister as a professional seamstress, and this career clearly improves her outlook as a person. The novel’s epilogue focuses on Mr. and Mrs. Stevick’s relationship, ending with them spontaneously making love for the first time in 18 years and admitting that they love each other after all that time. Oates sets this final scene in the bomb

1412 YOUNG LIONS, THE

shelter Lyle has built despite his wife’s objections, but now she has used her newly marketable skill to sew bedspreads for the shelter’s bunks. Throughout the novel Oates reveals the culture of this chapter in American history, but she also reveals the humanity behind social change. Although there is nostalgia for the innocence of the past, there is also hope for a future grounded in greater equality for all. Oates creates characters whose obsessions enable them to suppress emotionally the individual concerns that threaten them, and the reader cannot help but admire their means of survival.

SOURCES Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Oates, Joyce Carol. The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews. New York: Ontario Review, 1983. ———. You Must Remember This. New York: Ontario Review, 1987. ———. Woman Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Ontario Review, 1988. Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Strandberg, Victor. “Sex, Violence, and Philosophy in You Must Remember This,” Studies in American Fiction 17, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 3–17. Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Wesley, Marilyn C. “On Sport: Magic and Masculinity in Joyce Carol Oates’ Fiction,” Literature Interpretation Theory 3, no. 1 (1991): 65–75. Rachel G. Wall

YOUNG LIONS, THE IRWIN SHAW (1948) In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Irwin SHAW established himself as a major playwright. Between 1936 and 1945, seven of his plays were produced on Broadway. The most widely remembered has been the first, Bury the Dead, which was first produced on Broadway and published by Random House in 1936. Ironically, Shaw’s first novel, The Young Lions, has also been typically considered his most ambitious and most successful effort in that genre, even though he would subsequently write 11 other novels. Shaw served in the military from 1942 to 1945. In The Young Lions, he combines a firsthand knowledge of

military life with the progressive political convictions that define the themes of his plays. Consistent with the classification of his plays as “proletarian” literature, he focuses in The Young Lions on three ordinary soldiers: an American WASP, an American Jew, and a German. The attitudes of each of these men about the military, about the war effort, and about his own place in the world undergo significant changes directly connected to his experiences in the war. In civilian life, Michael Whiteacre has been a successful playwright. When the United States enters the war, he decides to enlist as an ordinary soldier and not to make use of his many social connections to acquire a commission as an officer and a preferential posting. The outbreak of war stirs Whiteacre from the unsettling complacency that has begun to characterize much of his personal and professional life. His marriage is deteriorating under the weight of predictability and the absence of real intimacy. His commercial success as a playwright has come at a cost of much of the emotional and intellectual intensity that initially attracted him to the theater. He is a political progressive whose success has removed him from the social, economic, and political realities that have shaped his convictions. After he is initially given a bureaucratic posting well out of combat, he requests a transfer to a combat unit. Although his battle experience is hardly ennobling, it does restore his sense of cause, arousing in him a deep antipathy toward fascism. Yet, exactly how this transformation might carry over as he reenters civilian life after the war remains ambiguous. Because he has clearly been hardened by his experience of combat, he might simply become more exasperated by the superficiality of many of the manifestations of his success without being able to recapture the energetic idealism of his youth. In many ways, Noah Ackerman is Michael Whiteacre’s opposite number. Whereas Whiteacre comes from a world of privilege, Ackerman is an ordinary Jew who has had no opportunity to become complacent or affluent. The one reliable reference point in his life is his wife, Hope, but in order to marry her, he has had to overcome the ingrained anti-Semitism of her hardheaded father. Then, when he is drafted into the army, Ackerman literally has to fight for his life well

YOUNG LIONS, THE 1413

before he sees combat. Stigmatized as an outsider, he fights, in succession, 10 of the toughest men in his company until his sheer capacity to endure the brutal beatings wins him a reprieve and even some grudging respect. When Ackerman is shipped overseas and enters combat, he faces it with greater steadiness than most of his fellow soldiers. He has already reached the point where he no longer feels the need to prove himself. That he does not survive the war is a terrible irony for Shaw’s readers—and one that the film adaptation of the novel reverses. Nonetheless, it is the sort of irony that Ackerman has been conditioned—and has conditioned himself—to accept. The German Christian Diestl has been indoctrinated by Nazism to view warfare as a glorious pursuit and to accept death in battle as the most noble sacrifice that the most inherently superior race of men can make. As the Nazis move victoriously across Europe, their decisive conquests, though not without cost, seem to confirm the party’s propaganda about the historic destiny of the Third Reich. But the general collapse of the German effort in North Africa combines with Diestl’s own immediate experience to erode his confidence in the Nazi cause and in his own integrity and purpose. The ghastly costs, the pointless sacrifices, and the arbitrary command decisions that actually define most warfare are highlighted more pointedly and horribly in defeat than in victory. As the war becomes an escalating disaster for Germany, Diestl becomes something of an apathetic automaton, unwilling to desert his “duty” only because he has no identity whatsoever without it. In the climactic scene of the novel, which occurs symbolically near a concentration camp, Diestl ambushes Ackerman, killing him with little emotion, and then Diestl himself is killed, but in a cold fury, by Whiteacre. Interestingly, in the film adaptation, Diestl has thrown down his weapon and is stumbling down a hillside is a sort of disoriented hopelessness when he startles the Americans and is shot dead. Then, in a denouement full of sentiment, Ackerman returns safe

and whole to his wife and home in a working-class urban neighborhood. The success of the film adaptation—which starred Dean Martin as Whiteacre, Montgomery Clift as Ackerman, and Marlon Brando as Diestl—has thus reinforced the critical judgement that The Young Lions is thematically simplistic, even though the novel’s resolution is much more complex and ambiguous than is the film’s. As a compliment to Shaw’s craftsmanship, John Aldridge has painstakingly delineated the complex pattern of parallels and counterpoints in the novel’s structure. Some subsequent critics have, however, dismissed that complexity as a great contrivance that inevitably reduces any thematic complexity that Shaw may be trying to achieve. Indeed, as Shaw’s novels increasingly became commercially successful and were adapted not only to profitable films but even to very popular television miniseries, there was a tendency to view The Young Lions both as the evidence of the literary promise that he betrayed for commercial success and as the first evidence of such a betrayal.

SOURCES Aldridge, John. After the Lost Generation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951, pp. 150ff. Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 110–111. Giles, James R. “Interviews with Irwin Shaw: Summer 1980,” Resources for American Literary Study 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. ———. Irwin Shaw. Boston: Twayne, 1983. ———. “Irwin Shaw’s Original Prologue to The Young Lions,” Resources for American Literary Study 11 (Spring 1981): 115–119. Krementz, Jill. “Irwin Shaw.” In The Jewish Writer, 108–109. New York: Henry Holt, 1998. Milic, Louis T. “Naming in Shaw’s The Young Lions.” Style 23 (Spring 1989): 113–123. Salter, James. “Winter of the Lion,” Esquire, July 1989, pp. 69–76. Shnayerson, Michael. Irwin Shaw: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1989. Martin Kich

C

ZD

ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND PHILIP ROTH (1981) Zuckerman Unbound, the second book in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy, follows Nathan Zuckerman as he tries to adjust to life and forge a new identity in the wake of the great success of his novel Carnovsky, which closely resembles ROTH’s own infamous PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT in its concern with the carnal escapades of its young Jewish protagonist. With Carnovsky’s publication came huge amounts of fame and money, but that’s not all to which Zuckerman must adjust. Shortly before Carnovsky’s publication, Zuckerman left his wife Laura and moved from New York’s Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side; in matters of economics, public opinion, family, and home his life has changed drastically. He is completely at sea, unhinged or “unbound” by the speed and extent to which the entire fabric of his life has changed. “It wasn’t like this in Zuckerman’s study” (137), he thinks. Being a writer now means more than actually writing, and Zuckerman does not have the necessary skills to negotiate these waters. Zuckerman becomes anxious, a shutin, a paranoiac, and a depressive who is disturbed by how things have changed, by all the work he’s not doing, all the television he’s watching, and “the strangeness of sitting in your bathrobe on your Oriental rug eating a takeout barbecued chicken and hearing someone [on television] suddenly talking about you” (185). One thing has not changed much, though: Everyone has an opinion on what Zuckerman should do, act like, and be. And with his boost in public recog-

nition, “everyone” includes not just his family and the Newark Jewish community. Complete strangers approach Zuckerman on the street, on the bus, and even on the phone to offer him advice and their opinion. Alvin Pepler, a fellow Jew from Newark, is one such stranger. Pepler begins talking to him in a deli and, despite Zuckerman’s best efforts to politely cut the conversation short, follows him doggedly. Although Pepler is insistent, unsettling, and probably paranoid, Zuckerman nonetheless responds to him as something familiar in the sea of change. The familiarity may even be their shared sense of paranoia. Peplar tells Zuckerman about being a quiz-show contestant during the 1950s quiz show scandals, maintaining that “it didn’t do the Jewish people any harm having a Marine veteran of two wars representing them on prime-time national television for three consecutive weeks” (120). But the show was rigged, and Pepler feels he was ousted from the show over just this question of representation. “What it came down to was that they couldn’t afford to let a Jew be a big winner too long” (129). Peplar is Zuckerman’s doppelganger in this regard: While Peplar sees himself as representing Jews to America, Zuckerman wishes he were not held responsible for representing American Jewry to his readers. Peplar is enraged that his stay on national television was cut short and that none of the promises of a future television career came through. He feels that by not being on television, he has let American Jews down (121).

1414

ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND

Zuckerman, on the other hand, is uncomfortable in the spotlight, and especially so when his book is read as autobiography or as otherwise representational. But representation is a central issue for Zuckerman, and the confusion of fame, fortune, and new circumstances is something that Zuckerman has brought deliberately upon himself. Zuckerman himself thinks of his wife Laura, a lawyer working against the Vietnam War, as his alter ego: “She is the reputable face that you turn toward the reputable, the face you have been turning to them all your life” (141). Laura, then, represents for him a part of himself, a part that existed before he even met her and that is diametrically opposed to “everything that enlivens [his] writing” (141). In giving vent to all the libido and angst that made up Carnovsky, Zuckerman has finally done away with his own respectable side. The result, far from being a productive liberation, is turmoil and chaos. Without Laura propping up his identity, without his respectable side telling him how to conduct his affairs, he is completely at sea. He even questions “whether Laura’s purpose wasn’t the shield behind which he was still hiding his own, even from himself” (140). Zuckerman quickly latches on to another woman to prop up his identity. His agent’s wife has set him up with the devastingly beautiful—and far more famous— movie star Caesara O’Shea. Zuckerman sees O’Shea as someone who can teach him how to negotiate his new outward identity by teaching him how to handle fame. Although he still does not feel like he can write, “at least he’d been able to focus on something other than himself being stuffed to bursting at the trough of inanities. He was bursting now with her” (168). From Laura, to the inanities of his new life, to Caesara O’Shea, Zuckerman has turned outward to fill the empty spaces of his identity. After his date with O’Shea, Zuckerman feels energized to begin life anew. He tends to the outward aspects of his personality by being fit for a wardrobe of new, expensive suits. His desire to use Ceasara as the new front for his identity is foiled, however, when she flies to Havana without warning. Zuckerman finds out from his agent’s wife that “ ‘She’s been having an affair. Since March. With Fidel Castro’ ” (170). Despite his best efforts to get a grip on his life, “[Zuckerman’s] world was getting stupider by the hour” (211).

1415

At sea again, Zuckerman must deal with an extortionist who continually phones him, threatening to kill Zuckerman’s mother if he does not pay. He must also deal with Pepler, who shows up at the funeral home across the street from his apartment when a famous mobster dies. Zuckerman alternates between enjoying his conversation with Pepler and worrying that Pepler is unhinged, dangerous, and perhaps even the extortionist who is phoning him for money. Pepler certainly is unhinged—after Zuckerman critiques a piece of his writing, he takes offense, accuses Zuckerman of stealing the material for Carnovsky from his own life, and, a la Carnovsky, returns to Zuckerman’s mailbox, defiled, the handkerchief Zuckerman had loaned him. Roth never reveals for certain who the extortionist is. To some extent, the extortion plot is simply another illustration of how unstable his life has become, driven increasingly by nothing more than mere circumstance. The extortion plot segues into family drama when Zuckerman receives an urgent message from his aunt Essie to phone. He assumes the extortionist has put his plot in motion, but finds instead that his ailing father has had a coronary and is on his deathbed. Zuckerman flies to Florida to be with his family. Once there, however, the only thing he can think to tell his father is a summary of the book he read on the plane: an explanation of the creation of the universe via the big bang. His father is much more direct: His dying word, delivered as he looks directly at Zuckerman, is “Barely audible, but painstakingly pronounced. ‘Bastard’ ” (224). The cryptic nature of his father’s last word, and Zuckerman’s need to rationalize it, are Victor Zuckerman’s coup de grace, ensuring that Zuckerman will never feel entirely free of his father’s opinion. On the way home from the airport, Zuckerman stops in the Newark neighborhood in which he grew up, only to find it drastically changed as well. At the “garage where the superintendent’s wayward daughter, Thea, and the grocer’s daughter, Doris, has enticed him one day” (242) to repeat dirty words, the garage where Zuckerman had “his first strong experience of the power of language and of the power of girls” (242), one of the new residents asks Zuckerman, “Who you supposed to be?” (242). “No one,” replied Zuckerman, and that was the end of that. “You are no longer any

1416 ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND

man’s son, you are no longer some good woman’s husband, you are no longer your brother’s brother, and you don’t come from anywhere anymore, either.” (242). The last vestige of Zuckerman’s former identity is gone; the last of his ties are broken. In their place stands only Zuckerman with his unchecked libido, unable, finally, to negotiate his identity crisis, and primed for the full-fledged midlife crisis to come in The Anatomy Lesson. Zuckerman Unbound, like Roth’s earlier The GHOST WRITER, is a Künstlerroman, or novel about the development of an artist. But Zuckerman Unbound pushes the Künstlerroman beyond its typical bounds in showing the artist after his initial development, in dissolution and at odds with society. In bringing the issues of representation raised in The Ghost Writer to bear upon Zuckerman’s new world, Roth shows that balancing art with societal

dictates does not come easily or naturally after the artist’s first success, and that the possibilities for the Künstlerroman are greater than is often thought. Roth continues to explore the Künstlerroman genre through the character of Nathan Zuckerman in The Anatomy Lesson (1983) and “The Prague Orgy” (1985), which were published with The Ghost Writer (1979) and Zuckerman Unbound (1981) as Zuckerman Bound (1985), “a trilogy and an epilogue” (cover), in The Counterlife (1986) and in the later “AMERICAN TRILOGY”: AMERICAN PASTORAL (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000).

SOURCE Roth, Philip. Zuckerman Unbound. 1981. In Zuckerman Bound. 1985. Reprint, New York: Ballantine, 1986, pp. 109–243. Kerry Higgins Wendt

SUBJECT ENTRIES CD THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

In 1982, when Professor Henry L. Gates, Jr., published his “major discovery,” Harriet Wilson’s novel, Our Nig, or Sketches of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859), identifying it as one of the first novels published by an African American, his “find” shook the foundation of the history of the development of the African-American novel. Scholars of the AfricanAmerican literary tradition had remained unaware that Wilson, a free northern black, had published her novel a century and a quarter before its rediscovery, authentication, and republication; consequently, its significance had been completely ignored. These scholars were sent scurrying back to the site of excavation to revisit and revise their unanimously endorsed time line. They continued to identify The Heroic Slave (1853), a novella by former slave Frederick Douglass, and Clotel or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), by former abolitionist leader William Wells Brown, as the first full-length works of fiction published by African Americans. They now, however, correctly distinguished these works, which were first published in England, from Wilson’s novel, which was published in the United States, making Our Nig the first known novel written by an African American—a woman—to be published on native soil. Two decades later, Professor Gates once again shook the foundation of the African-American literary tradi-

tion and the history of the development of the AfricanAmerican novel with yet another “find”: his recent procurement, authentication, and publication of Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, an autobiographical novel, written, like the novels identified above, before the Civil War and emancipation, but unlike them, not published until the 21st century. Purporting to be the story of a fugitive female slave from North Carolina and her escape north to freedom, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, Professor Gates maintains, is “definitely the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave.” In addition to the two works mentioned above, the first known novels written and published by AfricanAmerican writers also include Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Martin Delany’s Blake or the Huts of America (1859). Inevitably, given the dominance of slavery, each author developed his novel around themes, characters, and metaphors that exposed extant disparity and hypocrisy in the land of the free. Their ultimate objective was to solicit the assistance of readers in abolishing slavery and recognizing the basic humanity of their black, often biracial, characters. This almost formulaic approach to the novel is best offered by Brown’s Clotel, which is prefaced by his own autobiographical account of his enslavement and life as a fugitive slave. Brown purports to tell the longrumored story of Thomas Jefferson’s slave property: his enslaved mulatto mistress and daughters. Visibly white

1417

1418 THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

but sociopolitically black, Clotel, Brown’s heroine, is tragic because she is liminal: She is neither black nor white, yet she must remain, legally, a slave forever. In the end, while trying to kidnap her daughter to take her to freedom, Clotel, herself a fugitive, is forced to choose death over a life of reenslavement. More important, however, the first novels derived in part from the black autobiography/slave narrative—record the heroic feats of the central characters, despite the hue of their skin or condition of servitude. In spite of the general shift in thematic focus brought by emancipation, African-American novelists writing during the post-Reconstruction period, including Frances E. W. Harper, Charles Chesnutt, and Paul L. Dunbar, were concerned with the efforts of their main characters to achieve meaningful communal aggregation in a world of prevailing marginalization and fragmentation, not solely in the American South, where legal segregation was endorsed by the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), but also, as in Dunbar’s novel, in the urban, more modern North, the envisioned “Promised Land” of generations of African Americans, enslaved and freed. This central theme can be found in Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and in such turn-of-thecentury novels as Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Lives North and South (1900), Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), Sutton E. Griggs’s Overshadowed (1901), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man (1912), a forerunner to the novels of the Harlem Renaissance. In the end, one can argue, as does William Andrews, that Chesnutt remained, to a large degree, a “social problem novelist”; however, Dunbar and Johnson successfully pioneered the modern AfricanAmerican novel, one steeped in literary realism, even naturalism, that would crystallize in the abundance of works produced from the Harlem Renaissance to the publication of Wright’s Native Son (1940). The bountiful harvest of novels published during the “New Negro Renaissance” or Harlem Renaissance—the blossoming in African-American culture that took place following World War I—included Walter White’s Fire in the Flint (1924), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1925), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), McKay’s

Home to Harlem (1928), Jessie Redmond Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) and Plum Bun (1929), Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928), and Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry (1929), all representing nuggets of the empowered and untrammeled voices of African-American writers during the Jazz Age. A new generation of black writers, basking in the sociopolitical activities of W. E. B. DuBois and the National Association of Colored People (NAACP), Charles S. Johnson and the National Urban League, and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and experiencing what Alain Locke described as “a spiritual emancipation,” demanded, as did Locke in The New Negro (1925), that “the Negro . . . be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past controversy. . . .” They, too, declared that “it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogey and settle down to a realistic facing of fact.” According to the renaissance’s designated poet laureate, Langston Hughes, younger African-American artists would write “to express [their] individual darkskinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.” In themes and characterizations, the novelists unabashedly explored and celebrated (even satirized) the full spectrum of black life, from the common folk and exoticism of Harlem cabaret nightlife (a prerequisite in renaissance novels) to the parlors and intellectual gatherings of the genteel DuBois’s “talented tenth.” Equally important was the psychological complexity of racial passing (crossing over the color line) thematically examined by many of the writers. The level of maturity achieved by these novelists is evidenced, for example, by Toomer’s experimental novel, Cane (1925), and by the spectrum of their artistic lenses and genres (realism, naturalism, satire, detective, and African-American music—jazz and the blues—as legitimate literary art forms). While George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932) are satires, Fisher’s The Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932) is the first known detective novel to be published by an African-American writer. Published in 1937, Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder offers a fictional account of the historical slave uprising led by Gabriel Prosser.

THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1419

Interest in the literary productivity of renaissance writers was not only evidenced by the sponsors many writers (for example Hughes and Hurston) had, but also by the willingness of major mainstream publishers (Knopf, Macaulay, and Harper and Brothers) to publish their works and the critical attention the works received, not only in such black-owned journals as the Crisis magazine and Opportunity, but in mainstream journals like the Atlantic Monthly. In 1928, McKay’s Home to Harlem became the first novel by an African-American writer to be placed on New York’s lists of best-sellers. While many novelists, such as McKay and Hughes, were also award-winning poets, many women writers, particularly Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy West, who continued writing beyond the 1930s, were concerned with gender politics. For example, Janie, Hurston’s heroine in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), discovers her voice and reaches independence after three unfulfilling marriages. Hurston and Their Eyes were embraced by the feminist movement of the 1980s. In her works, Hurston, a trained anthropologist, was also celebrated for her use of folk custom, superstition, and, above all, speech. West published her last novel, The Wedding, in 1995, shortly before her death. At this historical juncture the significance of these writers and their works lies not solely in their composite contributions to American/African-American culture, but in the ways which they affected the marginal space African Americans continued to occupy in modern America and the development and coming of age of the African-American novel. Indeed, they paved the way for the prolific Mississippi-born novelist Richard Wright, whose life, as he claimed in his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), had shaped him for “the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel.” Deeply influenced by the naturalistic works of Theodore Dreiser (particularly An American Tragedy [1925]), Wright uses Bigger Thomas, the psychologically demented protagonist of Native Son (1940), to call America’s attention to the dehumanizing consequences of racism. Trapped, like the rat he kills at the beginning of the novel, Bigger feels like he is “on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence.” The novel ends with him claiming a sense

of existential freedom, the result of two murders he commits, accidentally and intentionally. As he prepares to go to the electric chair, Bigger defiantly tells his Communist attorney, Max, “. . . what I killed for I am,” assuming responsibility for his action; refusing the proscription America had assigned him, he had refused to act in bad faith and falsehood. Although, as one critic put it, Native Son “jolted the nation,” the critical response to Wright and his novel far surpassed any heretofore received by an African-American writer. It is general consensus that, with the publication of his collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), and his Book-of-the-Month Club novel, Native Son (1940), Wright, as Donald B. Gibson noted, “changed the landscape of possibility for African American writers. . . . [Wright’s] insistence on the expression of an African American voice allowed later writers to do the same.” Writers following in what are called the Wrightian schools of literary naturalism and protest literature dominated the literary landscape with one best-seller after another for more than a decade. They included Anne Petry’s The Street (1946), Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947), William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941), Curtis Lucas’s Third Ward Newark (1946) and Alden Bland, Behold a Cry (1947), William Gardner Smith’s Last of the Conqueror (1948), and Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947), which, devoid of a single black character—the protagonist is an Italian Catholic—was made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart. African-American writers—including Frank Yerby, whose works were generally not racially specific (for example, The Foxes of Harrow [1946])—published more than 28 novels during the 1940s. Movement away from the naturalism of Wright’s Native Son and toward what Bernard Bell calls myth, legend, and rituals is found in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and the novels of James Baldwin, particularly Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Another Country (1962). Ellison’s now classic encyclopedic work, which traces the spiritual journey and coming of age of its anonymous protagonist, drawing both on AfricanAmerican folklore and the epic tradition in Western culture, won the National Book Award, was on the bestseller list for 16 weeks, and has been translated into at

1420 THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

least 15 languages. Not surprisingly, Ellison has been compared to the masters of Western literature and culture: Joyce, Melville, Camus, Kafka, and Faulkner. Recognized for its “universal” appeal, as well as for Ellison’s masterful incorporation of jazz and blues forms and themes, Invisible Man was listed among the best 100 novels published during the 20th century. Rejecting Wright’s protest genre because it represented the “rejection of life, the human being, the denial of beauty, dread, power, in is insistence that it is [this] categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended,” Baldwin sought to provide what Bell calls “a more faithful, comprehensive portrayal of the richness and vitality of Afro-American character” in such novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979), which, as their titles reveal, are rooted in AfricanAmerican folk culture, specifically its orality and music: spirituals, gospel, blues, and jazz, the central sounds of the black church, the threshing floor on which Baldwin was fashioned and shaped by age 14 to become a youth preacher. In his work, redemption is possible through love that is not only unconditional but unbound by social or religious parameters. As Baldwin’s narrator in If Beale Street reminds readers, irrespective of race, class, or orientation, “When two people love each other, when they really love each other, everything that happens between them has a sacramental air.” Although African-American male authors, including Hal Bennett, Ronald Fair, Ernest Gaines, William Melvin Kelley, John O. Killens, Clarence Major, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams continued to dominate the African-American literary landscape through the 1980s, women novelists would reign throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams moved to the head of the class. Their novels were not only read by a general audience but popularized in courses in American and AfricanAmerican literature, ethnic and African-American studies, women’s studies, and cultural studies in classrooms on university campuses across the nation. They were recognized with major literary awards, including Nay-

lor’s Women of Brewster Place (1983), which won the American Book Award; Walker’s epistolary novel, The Color Purple (1982), which won the National Book Award (1983) and the Pulitzer Prize (1983), and Morrison’s National Book Critics Circle Award and Book-ofthe-Month Club selection, Song of Solomon (1977), and her Pulitzer Prize and Robert F. Kennedy Award winner, Beloved (1987). In general, African-American writers, and specifically novelists, began the 20th century vociferously trying to call attention to their works; they ended it at the opposite end of the spectrum. Not only had many received awards and recognition as producing works that were clearly central to the canon, particularly Morrison’s receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, but many continued well-established traditions begun by other writers. For example, Morrison’s Beloved, Sherley Anne William’s Dessa Rose, and Charles Johnson’s National Book Award winner, Middle Passage (1990), further developed the neo–slave narrative genre introduced by Bontemps. In such novels as Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Flight to Canada (1976), Ishmael Reed mastered the satiric tradition established by Schuyler. Whereas Baldwin evolved the blues novel with If Beale Street Could Talk, two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner postmodern novelist John Edgar Wideman, in such works as Sent for You Yesterday (1983) and Two Cities (1998), uses jazz as a form for the novel (as does Morrison with her novel Jazz [1992]). The experimentation with the novel as form begun by Toomer in Cane can be found in the works of Wideman, Gayl Jones (for example, Eva’s Man [1976]), and Octavia Butler, who wrote Kindred (1979). In addition, Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren (1976), stands in the vanguard of American science fiction writers, while new arrival Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), takes science fiction to yet another dimension by adding to it West Indian fantasy and mysticism. Paule Marshall, who builds her work around her West Indian heritage and Brooklyn experience, as she does in Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) and Praisesong for the Widow (1983), continues to have her characters cross borders from New York to Barbados and back, projecting a more pan-African perspective of the black experience.

THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1421

With novelists such as Terry McMillan (Waiting to Exhale [1992]), a major voice of the feminist movement, and E. Lynn Harris (Invisible Life [1991]), a major voice of the gay and lesbian literary movement, topping the charts of national best-seller lists, including the New York Times Book Review, while having their works made into blockbusters and being identified as “crossover” writers, one can only conclude that, no matter how many new finds are excavated and published in the future, the African-American novel and its development remain central to the American literary tradition, indeed to world literature overall, irrespective of its unique characteristics.

WORKS CITED Andrews, William L. Introduction. Three Classic AfricanAmerican Novels. New York: Mentor Book, 1990. ———, et. al., eds. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bell, Bernard W. The African American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bruck, Peter, and Wolfgang Karrer, eds. The Afro-American Novel Since 1960. Amsterdam: B. R. Gruner Publishing Co., 1982. Davis, Arthur P. Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Gates, Jr., Henry L. Introduction. The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts. New York: Warner Books, 2002. Gibson, Donald. “Richard Wright.” In The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, edited by William Andrews, et. al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Locke, Alain. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Boni and Liverright, 1925. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. Wall, Cheryl A. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Wilfred D. Samuels

THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL The umbrella term “Asian-American novel” designates writing by people of national origins in countries like China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, India, Singapore, Vietnam, and Cambodia who either were born in or immigrated to the United States. The expression “Asian

American,” popularized in the 1960s, promotes political solidarity and cultural recognition for Asian Americans, and stresses shared experiences of Asian immigrants in the United States. The narratives of Asian-American writers creatively engage the experience of being of Asian descent in the United States while dealing with the historical, linguistic, and ethnic specificities of each nationality. Early novels tended to focus on stories of immigration and questions of assimilation and the “between worlds” situation. They also tended to challenge American perceptions of Asians; analyze what constitutes an “Asian” or “American” identity; examine language, generational conflicts and relationships, racism and social class; and remember national history and claim the immigrants’ place in the history of America, among other concerns. Later novels, apart from experimentation with narrative forms, expanded the scope of thematic concerns to engage urban living and interethnic relationships; examine the question of assimilation and suggest the possibility of different cultural choices, including biraciality, biculturality, and bilingualism; explore the question of authenticity; develop issues of gender and sexuality; analyze the intersections of the personal and the political; and engage the histories of Asian countries and the definitions of the term American. Literary criticism has also shifted from an early concern with authenticity and with claiming a unique literary tradition, as opposed to the Euro-American tradition. Asian-American novels are today being read in the wider contexts of diaspora, postcolonialism, and the traditions of Asian writing, as well as in conjunction with other ethnic literatures in the United States. The changing parameters of criticism, and the increasing international recognition that Asian-American literature is receiving, responds to the explosion of writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Though Asian-American novels have been written from the beginning of the century, the 1980s and 1990s established the field as an important constituent of American studies.

CHINESE-AMERICAN NOVELS In general, the beginnings of Chinese-American fiction are traced back to Edith and Winnifred Eaton, daughters of a British father and Chinese mother, who settled

1422 THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

first in Canada and then in the United States. Both wrote under pseudonyms: Edith adopted the Chinese name Sui Sin Far and published numerous short stories in popular journals at the turn of the century, and a collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), while Winnifred, aware of the negative views of the Chinese at the time, appropriated a Japanese-sounding name, Otono Watanna, and a fictionalized family story. She became an extremely well-known writer of deliberately exotic “Japanese” romances, including Miss Nume of Japan (1899, the first known Asian-American novel), The Heart of Hyacinth (1903), and Tama (1910), many of which catered to the stereotypical ideas Americans had about “Orientals” at the time. The complicated position of the Chinese in America in the early 20th century, and the bachelor society that existed as a result of Exclusion Acts, is the subject of several important novels, notably Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) and Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), the story of a Chinese woman who is forced to work as a prostitute. A deliberate engagement with historical recuperations is notably visible in novels such as Shawn Wong’s Homebase (1979) and Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991), both of which deal with young boys learning about and coming to terms with how the untold history of the Chinese in America influences their lives. McCunn’s fictionalized biography of Lue Gin Gong, Wooden Fish Songs (1995), examines the life of a pioneer who transformed the horticulture industry in Florida in the late 1800s. Stories of immigration and strategies of assimilation, as well as generational/cultural conflicts (particularly between mothers and daughters), are the themes of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991) and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996). In Gus Lee’s China Boy (1993), Shawn Wong’s American Knees (1995), and David Wong Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming (2001), Chinese-American protagonists negotiate interethnic relationships in urban settings and struggle to define their identity and positions in multiethnic America. Other novels involve Chinese-American writers’ and characters’ relationship with the homeland, such as Andrea Louie’s Moon Cakes (1995), Ha Jin’s National

Book Award–winning Waiting (1999), and Terrence Cheng’s Sons of Heaven (2002), the story of how political affiliations destroy families and set against the backdrop of the Tiananman Square Massacre. Chinese-American novels also demonstrate a variety of narrative stances and styles. Maxine Hong Kingston’s seminal The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) examines possible definitions of her Chinese-American identity through an experimental text that mirrors the fragmentary and communal nature of her self-perception. Chuang Hua’s Crossings (1968) is an experimental novel of high modernism whose protagonist attempts to come to terms with her racial affiliations. Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993) and Aimee Liu’s Face (1994) subvert narrative chronology and tell stories of Chinatown and family tragedies backward. Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses (1999) exhibits characteristics of magic realism as it shifts from San Francisco to China. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989) is formally and stylistically innovative and challenging.

FILIPINO-AMERICAN NOVELS American colonization of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century led to the immigration of migrant workers and student-scholars, many of whom settled permanently and began to creatively engage the cultural consequences of the Filipino’s ambivalent relationship with America. In general, three generations of writers may be identified: the pioneering generation of both the Filipino novel in English and Filipino-American writing, whose works dealt with the situation of early Filipino immigrants; the second, more politically conscious group who immigrated in the 1960s–70s, many of whom were exiles from the Marcos regime; and the new generation that arose in the 1990s, mostly second-generation children whose stimulating writing expands existing structural and thematic approaches. The most important writers of the first generation include Bienvenido Santos, whose novels The Man Who (Thought He) Looked like Robert Taylor (1983) and What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco (1987) foreground the lonely lives of Filipino expatriates in the United States and their longing for their homeland, and N. V. M. Gonzalez, who wrote both in the Philip-

THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1423

pines and in the United States novels like The Season of Grace (1954) and The Bamboo Dancers (1961), which explore Filipino country life with nostalgia, as well as the difficulties of returning home. Linda Ty-Casper is one of the central, though littlerecognized, writers of the second generation, and her works helped shape many of those of her contemporaries. In novels like The Peninsulars (1964), The ThreeCornered Sun (1979), Fortress in the Plaza (1985), Wings of Stone (1986), and Awaiting Trespass (1989), she explores the Filipino history of successive colonizations, as well as the period of Marcos’s dictatorship; several of her novels could not be published in the Philippines because they were set during the martiallaw years. Her work has become a subtext for Ninotchka Rosca’s revision of the successive colonizations of the Philippines, State of War (1988) and Twice Blessed (1992), a political satire on the downfall of the Marcoses. Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (1994) centers on the horrors of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines as told by a young girl growing up between traditional Filipino myths and the realities of war. In this group is Jessica Hagedorn, perhaps the most well-known FilipinaAmerican writer today, who immigrated to the United States as a teenager. Her two novels, Dogeaters (1990) and The Gangster of Love (1996), blend representations of pop culture and family ties with political intrigue and explores the characters’ ambivalent cultural affiliations. The third group of writers explore the relationship of second-generation children with the contradictions of America, and nuance the representation of immigration. Peter Bacho’s award-winning Cebu (1991) presents a Filipino-American priest whose return to the Philippines shatters his complacency about his ideas of home and religious commitment. The protagonist of his Nelson’s Run (2002) subverts accepted ideas about American neocolonialism in the Philippines. R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s (1995) experiments with narrative structure, perspective, and language to address growing up gay in 1970s Hawaii. Bino Realuyo’s The Umbrella Country (1999) is the coming-of-age novel of a boy before his immigration to the United States and provides a clear-eyed view of Filipino familial and social structures. Sophia G. Romero’s Always Hiding

(1998) explores rampant illegal immigration and issues of social class. The war in the Philippines and the importance of cultural memory is also the subtext of Tess Urriza Holte’s When the Elephants Dance (2002). Two recent novels demonstrate a growing consciousness of issues beyond race, particularly the question of class and social status, as well as the awareness of how American perceptions of Asians can be manipulated: Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son (2001) presents two biracial Filipino-American brothers growing up amid the contradictory opulence and violence of Los Angeles, embarrassed by their Filipina mother, and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao (2001) powerfully subverts Asian stereotypes through his character, a gay Filipino American in New York who poses as a feng shui expert and deceives the upper class until his deception backfires.

JAPANESE-AMERICAN NOVELS Japanese-American narratives must be read in the context of the two historical events that gave the community its shape: the arrival, in the first two decades of the 20th century, of tens of thousands of Japanese “picture brides,” leading to the birth of a large generation of Americans of Japanese descent and the establishment of flourishing communities; and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Novels like Yoshiko Uchida’s Picture Bride (1987); Milton Murayama’s Five Years on a Rock (1994), based on his mother’s life; and Yoji Yamaguchi’s Face of a Stranger (1995) all deal with the lives of women who crossed the sea to marry men they had not met and to raise American children. In general, the novels stress the courage and resilience of the Japanese women, educated in the virtues of patience and loyalty, who encountered poverty and suffering upon arrival. Yamaguchi’s novel, nonetheless, demonstrates the deception played on some Japanese women who, thinking they were going to the United States to be married, find out upon their arrival that they have actually been bought to work in brothels. The story highlights the ingenuity of some of these women, who manage to salvage a sense of dignity and eventually escape their lives of bondage. Two emblematic texts from the 1950s may be said to have established the Japanese-American

1424 THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL

novel: first, John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), largely ignored at the time by Japanese Americans and mainstream readers, mostly because of its portrayal of postwar Japanese-American life and the problematic position of its hero, Ichiro Yamada, who struggles to define his identity; second, Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body (1959) (the sequel to Five Years, though written first), set in a Hawaiian sugar plantation in the 1930s and 1940s, which explores the turbulent parent-child relationship and the clash of traditional Japanese values with the exploitation of the plantation system and new American possibilities. The concept of generational identity constitutes a vital part of Japanese-American cultural manifestations, and the concerns of each generation—issei, the first generation; nisei, their children; sansei, third generation—are clearly reflected in their narratives. Julie Shigekuni’s The Bridge Between Us (1995) and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s Why She Left Us (1999) narrate the complexities of generational relationships, as well as delve into the importance of links with the homeland. Japan and the idea of family heritage has increasingly occupied the Japanese-American creative imagination, as in Lydia Minatoya’s The Strangeness of Beauty (1999), Mako Yoshikawa’s One Hundred and One Ways (1999), and Kyoko Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow (2000). Here the protagonists, women at critical points in their personal lives, turn to the memory of Japanese parents or grandparents or enact a physical return to Japan in order to acquire a sense of self and as a springboard for present decisions and choices. Other writers have widened the themes and approaches to narrative. Cynthia Kadohata’s novels The Floating World (1989) and In the Heart of the Valley of Love (1992) expand the representation of JapaneseAmerican characters and themes. Both are travel narratives that repeatedly challenge the stereotypes of Japanese Americans and their families, as well as the themes traditionally attributed to Asian-American writers: The second novel, for example, envisions a futuristic world where survival is of the essence. LoisAnn Yamanaka’s novels feature characters growing up in Hawaii’s multicultural setting. In Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996), Blu’s Hanging (1997), and Heads by Harry (1999), she skillfully uses the child’s per-

spective to explore the Hawaiian experience with insightful humor, using pidgin—the language of her Hawaiian childhood—creatively to stress dramas of identity and belonging, as well as the specificity of the local experience. The novels emphasize multiplicity of experiences, as well as diverse ways of engaging the heritage culture and how it has evolved in American’s multicultural context. Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998) uses humor and romance to describe a Japanese American and a Japanese woman’s search for self, as well as to expose the unethical practices of the American meat industry.

KOREAN-AMERICAN NOVELS Relatively few Korean-American novels were published before the 1980s, and autobiographies and memoirs outnumber fiction. The first important Korean-American novels, The Martyred (1964) and The Innocent (1968), were written by Richard E. Kim, who was studying in the United States after serving in the Korean Army from 1950–54. Both set in Korea during the war, The Martyred explores existentialist questions on death and faith and became an American best-seller, and The Innocent describes the events surrounding a military coup d’ etat in South Korea. The painful legacy of the Japanese occupation of Korea, in particular the institution of “comfort women”—Korean women forced to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army—becomes the subtext of other novels: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1998) and Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life (1999). Keller’s narrative focuses on the memory of the abuse suffered by a mother, a former comfort woman now living in the United States, and her daughter. Lee’s novel offers the perspective of a Korean-born Japanese army officer living a perfectly ordered life in a small town and struggling with the guilt over errors in his past. Other recent novels explore the consequences of the Korean War and American occupation and the drama of biracialism: Heinz Insu Fenkl’s autobiographical Memories of My Ghost Brother (1996) and Keller’s Fox Girl (2002). Two novels center on young girls growing up in postwar Korea who struggle to overcome the effects of war and learn the importance of family and cultural history: Helen

THE ASIAN-AMERICAN NOVEL 1425

Kim’s Long Season of Rain (1996) and Mia Yun’s House of the Winds (1998). The immigrant struggle is described in Kim Ronyoung’s Clay Walls (1987), which narrates a mother’s efforts to succeed and her children’s process of defining their Korean-American identity. Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998) is an interracial love story between a Korean man and an American girl, set in 1950s Tennessee. Narratives that explore the second generation’s attempts to find their place in America include ChangRae Lee’s, Native Speaker (1995), which delves into questions of language, interethnic marriage, the death of a child, and urban politics, Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable (1997), the story of a young Korean girl whose mother abandons her and her father and centers on the child’s attempts to find cultural markers for her evolving identity as she discovers hidden truths about her family, and Frances Park’s When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon (2000), about two Korean-American sisters struggling to define themselves. Perhaps the single most complex Asian-American novel is Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), a multilayered, multilingual collage that explores processes of subject-formation.

SOUTH ASIAN–AMERICAN NOVELS In spite of the presence of South Asians in the United States from the beginning of the 20th century, novels by writers of this ethnic group developed proportionately late, and flourished after the 1970s. Among the earlier writers of note are Zulfikar Ghose, with novels such as The Murder of Aziz Khan (1967) and The Incredible Brazilian (1972), Peter Nazareth with In a Brown Mantle (1972) and The General Is Up (1984), and the prolific Anita Desai. In Desai’s case, in particular, charting her trajectory as a novelist allows the reader to comprehend her process of transculturality. From novels set in India like Fire on the Mountain (1977), In Custody (1984), and Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), to her most recent Fasting, Feasting (1999), she multiplies the manners in which her Indian characters function in a globalized world as she engages the influences of the West on the East and vice versa. The drama of immigration is central to novels such as Bharati Mukherjee’s The Wife (1975) and Jasmine (1989), one of the most analyzed Asian-American

texts, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997). Her Sister of My Heart (2000) begins the account of two cousins in India, and their separate but interlocking destinies in the United States, continued in Vine of Desire (2002). The experience of American universities gives humor to the process of adaptation in Kirin Narayan’s Love, Stars, and All That (1994), a romantic comedy about an Indian student who goes to Berkeley believing she is destined to meet Mr. Right, and Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat (1993), where Parsi Feroza Ginwalla trades religious fundamentalism for American freedoms. Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music (1997) centers on an immigrant who struggles between cultures and relationships and succumbs to mental illness; Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters (2002) describes the relationship of siblings in different continents. The question of a possible return to a homeland becomes another recurring theme. In both Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter (1971) and Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road (1991), women educated in the West return to India, where they struggle to define their place and role in a place that they no longer recognize. Indian or Pakistani history, social divisions, customs, and cultural life are the center of novels such as Gita Mehta’s A River Sutra (1993) and Raj (1993); Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s Tivolem (1998), set in a quiet village in Goa in the 1930s; Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu (2001); and David Davidar’s The House of Blue Mangoes (2002). Kiran Desai’s Hulabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998) announces the arrival of a secondgeneration writer who looks back on the homeland. The Partition is a central event in both Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (1999), which traces the life of two women and the history of a Sikh community.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN–AMERICAN NOVELS Novels by writers with links to countries in Southeast Asia also form part of the canon of Asian-American writing. In The Coffin Tree (1983) and Irrawaddy Tango (1993), Wendy Law-Yone explores the political situation in Burma and the immigration of diverse people. In the first novel, the narrator’s brother descends into madness in New York; in the second, a dictator’s wife experiences the trauma of shifting

1426 THE LATINO NOVEL

allegiances. Fiona Cheong’s The Scent of the Gods (1991) foregrounds events in Singaporean history of the 1960s, narrated though the eyes of a young girl. National Book Award–winning poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim also engages the intersection of the personal with the political in her first novel, Joss and Gold (2001), set in three countries—Malaysia, the United States, and Singapore. The continuing trauma of the Vietnam War is the subtext of Lan Cao’s The Monkey Bridge (1997). Thai-born T. C. Huo’s novels, A Thousand Wings (1998) and Land of Smiles (2000), are narratives of immigration and assimilation into American society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cheung, King-kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Chu, Patricia Press. Assimilating Asians: Gendered Strategies of Authorship in Asian America. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2000. Davis, Rocío G., and Sämi Ludwig, eds. Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance. Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2002. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek & Oxford: AltaMira Press, 1999. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. ———. “Defining Asian American Realities through Literature,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 86–111. Koshy, Susan. “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 315–346. Reprinted in Asian American Studies: A Reader, edited by Jean Yu-Wen Wu and Min Song, 465–495. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Lee, Rachel C. The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. “Assaying the Gold; or, Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 147–169. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, and Amy Ling, eds. Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon Press, 1990.

Ling, Jinqi. Narrating Nationalism: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Maira, Sunaina, and Rajini Srikanth, eds. Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America. New York: Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 1996. Nelson, Emmanuel, ed. Asian American Novelists: A BioBibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, and Stephen H. Sumida, eds. A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association, 2001. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Yamamoto, Traise. Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Rocío G. Davis

THE LATINO NOVEL

Literary scholars face a formidable challenge in evaluating the Latino novel for two reasons. First, this kind of fiction expresses the divergent cultural histories of Hispanics in the United States from the 19th century to the present. Second, there is no consensus on the appropriate term for individuals of Spanish-speaking origin. The Census Bureau favors the term Hispanic and reports that they constitute the largest minority in the United States. Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans, as well as immigrants and exiles from Latin America, make up 12.5 percent of the U.S. population (Census 2000). On the other hand, artists, academics, and politicians tend to use the term Latino to build bridges from one ethnic group to another and to call attention to a shared resistance to U.S. hegemony (the predomination of one set of values, practices, and cultural expressions over another). The terms Hispanic and Latino are basically interchangeable, but the connotation is different—the former usually reflects official business and data-gathering, and the latter becomes a way to explain cultural production and to create coalition. Given the United States’s 19th- and early-20thcentury occupation of Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, many Latino authors address their vexed relationship with U.S. imperialism

THE LATINO NOVEL 1427

by reclaiming their Caribbean or Latin-American roots. In relating stories of translocation and migration, Latino novelists preserve through storytelling the ways of their communities; in doing so they owe much to their colonial, bourgeois, immigrant, and exilic predecessors, as well as to their own families who have passed down anecdotes. Although Latino literature dates from the 1800s, novels have proliferated in the last 50 years with the momentum of the Civil Rights movement, the validation of ethnic studies, and the boom in Latin-American fiction. Mexican-American novelists include Tomás Rivera, Arturo Islas, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Rolando Hinojosa. Esmeralda Santiago, Magali García Ramis, and Nicholasa Mohr represent Puerto Rican communities, both on the island and in New York. Cuban-American literature features the erudite narratives of Cristina Garcia and Oscar Hijuelos. Finally, award-winning author Julia Alvarez and best-selling brash writer Junot Díaz have put the Dominican Republic on the literary map Though not sharing one uniform experience, Latino authors engage in dialogue with one another as they document the past, reflect on the present, and speculate about the future. This documentation through fiction reveals an ongoing debate about Latino literature— whether it articulates a search for identity or whether it affirms identity through its narration (Horno-Delgado, 3). In either case, one can analyze the Latino novel by considering the 19th-century print culture from which it sprang as well as by looking at authorial application of language and plot.

AUDIENCE AND LANGUAGE Latino writers may express themselves in English, Spanish, or a combination of the two. Both languages, by virtue of their colonial origins, reproduce hegemonic relations. When writers are bilingual, one choice over another indicates a certain postcolonial position and attempt at authenticity. Texan novelist Tomás Rivera, though perfectly fluent in English, published his groundbreaking novel in Spanish Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), translated as And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1992). Rolando Hinojosa, who won the prestigious Casa de Las Americas award, writes well in both

languages and has translated his own works, such as Klail City y sus alrededores and Mi Querido Rafa, from Spanish to English. Hinojosa’s translations speak to the fact that authors want to reach as broad a readership as possible. While Spanish is widely spoken in the United States, Latino readers do not necessarily choose to read in Spanish. Increasingly, we find writers such as Sandra Cisneros and Julia Alvarez injecting Spanish into English prose; this code-switching underscores allegiances that cut across generational, as well as urban and rural, divisions. Urban writers such as Junot Díaz (Drown, 1996) use, for example, African-American slang to express cultural affiliation. In narrating episodes of acculturation, exile, or migration, Latino novels, as suggested earlier, capture a particular postcolonial moment (one that reflects on the colonial past from the critical viewpoint of the present). These moments, in turn, stem from a broader context of writing and transmigration that began in the 1800s. Latino fiction originates in the 19th century when Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexicans made the United States their home, willingly or otherwise. Local newspapers and magazines disseminated poetry, essays, and memoirs, mostly those written by the bourgeoisie, who, motivated by political freedom and economic prosperity in the United States, abandoned their Latin-American homes. Nineteenthcentury salons and writing communities found their 20th-century equivalent in cafes, universities, and literary journals such as Arizona Quarterly and Revista Chicano-Riqueña, which was later named Americas Review to dismantle the Mexican-American and Puerto Rican binary that fails to describe Latino fiction. Notwithstanding the distinct histories giving rise to it, the Latino novel features characters who strive to maintain their individuality while balancing family and community obligations. To be sure, before the Latino novel gained notice in the 1980s and 1990s, several influential autobiographies left their mark on the literary scene. These include Piri Thomas’s grim portrait of Puerto Rican and Cuban Harlem, Down These Mean Streets (1967); Ernesto Galarza’s epic story of Mexican immigration, Barrio Boy (1971); Victor Villaseñor’s California–Mexico border saga, Rain of Gold (1991); and Richard Rodriguez’s intellectual memoir, Hunger of Memory: The Education of

1428 THE LATINO NOVEL

Richard Rodriguez (1981). Hunger of Memory demands special attention for the controversy it has created over bilingual education (Rodriguez opposes it), and for the argument that United States and European knowledge may come at the expense of the Mexican-American self, in all its manifestations. These issues of language and acculturation surface in many coming-of-age accounts, notably Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993). One challenge to publishers has been making autobiographies and Latino fiction relevant to a wider audience. In this regard academic presses, as well as English and Spanish teachers, have bridged the gap between writer and public. Venues include academic and commercial presses such as Random House, HarperPerennial, Penguin, and Ballantine. Arte Público Press has actually shaped the Latino “canon,” while coordinating the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Project” at the University of Houston. The World Wide Web, too, avails itself as a literary space for students of writing and for independent authors. The Internet will also have major consequences in the cultural exchanges that take place between the United States and the border, and between the Caribbean and the mainland, especially as technology becomes more accessible in developing countries such as Cuba, where at present Internet-access cards are available on the black market for the cost of a month’s wages.

PLOTS AND THEMES Latino novels mirror the cultural clashes taking place on the U.S.–Mexico border, in urban areas such as New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as in the Caribbean. The plots often center on discord within the community and the resolution of these tensions through acceptance of a maverick character or affirmation of an elder’s decisions. Toward that end, Latino narratives often incorporate daily routines, travel through “the visitor,” and diaries to take the reader to another space in time. Often biographical and autobiographical, Latino fiction renders memorable the rhythms of salsa and son (a Cuban form of music) in Miami, the bustling tenements of the Bronx and Harlem, and the resilient migrant communities of the Southwest.

Generally speaking, though, Latino literature has shifted its settings (and its politics) from harvesting the fields to personal adjustment in cities and suburbs. While generational differences, politics, education, and class make it difficult to generalize about the Latino novel, certain themes do recur. These include the lament for the loves of yesteryear, the need for family approval, the delights of the kitchen, the betrayals by one’s father or husband, the forbidden ecstasies of a Catholic culture, the barriers to success, and pervasive feelings of loss and displacement. Writers commonly will use an instigatory moment in the present to review the past or to anticipate the future. This technique allows readers to examine the values ranging from a conservative, patriarchal LatinAmerican culture to a Westernized, English-speaking, commercialized, and often fragmented one. Yet Latina novelists find the apertures of assimilation potentially liberating; more specifically, Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia illustrate in their works the productive outlets for American women outside the home. For her part, Alvarez observes that the “ready enfranchisement” of Latina writers—and by extension their characters— “has something to do with the fact that a generation has come before them, abriendo caminos” [opening roads or paths]. She explains that Latinas’ narrators owe much to their own tías and abuelas [respectively, aunts and grandmothers] who “told, but never wrote, their own stories” (Latina, 107). Latino fiction, therefore, has much to contribute to larger discourses of storytelling and life in a patriarchal—but transformative—society. Given the striking topographies of the MexicanAmerican border and the island cultures of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans, assessing the Latino novel is a daunting task. The languages, histories, and themes vary, but interstices do appear. Therefore, this essay addresses the Latino novel by surveying the most populous and influential groups—Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans, and Dominican Americans. Hopefully such an overview will allow entry into this fascinating literary realm.

MEXICAN-AMERICAN NOVELS Mexican-American authors enjoy the longest history of storytelling among Latino novelists, and they are also,

THE LATINO NOVEL 1429

perhaps, the most political in their blurring of autobiography, politics, and narrative. Post–civil rights Mexican-American writers often refer to themselves as Chicanos, a truncated version of mexicano. Whether identifying with Chicanos and “La Raza” (the united people or the race), or whether claiming their place in American letters without such a designation, MexicanAmerican novelists descend from families who were here before the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo of 1848 converted Mexican land into U.S. territory—now the American Southwest. Or they are immigrants or children of those who emigrated here from Mexico. The distinction remains an important one, particularly in Californian, Texan, and New Mexican fiction, where well-established families are shown to snub the “wetbacks” of recent decades. In his inventory of histories, memoirs, and novels, Raymund Paredes observes that Mexican-American writers regard their U.S. citizenry through a lens of nostalgia, ambivalence, or a combination of the two, as in Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1945) and José Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) (Paredes, 40–41). These texts appeared at a critical time in history, re-creating the delicate and potentially explosive social climate of the 1940s and 1950s. After World War II and the Korean War, the GI Bill opened the university to Latino servicemen and in doing so offered greater opportunities to individuals who otherwise might have had to settle for menial jobs. However, such change could undermine longstanding family beliefs, as seen in Villarreal’s novel. Pocho, the title a term for an Americanized Mexican American, depicts Richard Rubio’s rejection of his family (especially his mother’s faith) and search for freedom from the constraints and dead ends of his life through enlistment in the U.S. Navy. Not surprisingly, Richard Rubio’s assimilation involves loss, a theme that continues to inform Chicano fiction. Writers of the 1970s, Tomás Rivera most prominent among them, articulate feelings of loss and disempowerment in straightforward yet poetic ways. Rivera’s Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), translated as And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, remains one of the most important texts not just in Chicano letters but also in U.S. literature more broadly. Through the use of vignettes of migrant farming, Rivera exposes abusive labor practices, barriers

to education, and other forms of discrimination that Mexican Americans have historically faced from the 1940s on. He details the risks and economic dead ends of the Texan laborer trucking to Utah and Minnesota to harvest beets, spinach, and other crops. Given their transitory and marginal status, Rivera’s migrant characters sleep in chicken coops and endure the health dangers (tuberculosis, heat stroke, and kidney failure) of agricultural life. At the same time, family and community provide their members protection and support. Since Rivera’s groundbreaking work, Latino novelists tend to validate or play with the concept of identity and in doing so divulge entangled family relations. Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Rolando Hinojosa Smith, and Arturo Islas draw on oral traditions, prayers, natural remedies, culinary arts, and horticulture to bring the reader into the border communities of the Southwest and into the barrios of, say, El Paso and Chicago. One novel that ties together cultural tradition (the rebozo, or Mexican shawl), the notion of family, and the movement across the border is Cisneros’s Caramelo, a book of epic proportion that tells the story of the Reyes family and their yearly trips from Chicago to Mexico (2002). Meanwhile, folk elements inform the melodramatic and surreal episodes of Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994), the urban loss of innocence in Sandra Cisneros’s tightly crafted House on Mango Street (1984), the weekly scandals of unplanned pregnancy and barroom brawls in Hinojosa’s Klail City (1987), and the beautiful imagery of the desert of Arturo Islas’s semiautobiographical work The Rain God (1984). Before dying in 1991, Islas produced one of the most lyrical Latino novels in The Rain God. Using an old photograph of Miguel Chico and his grandmother as the text’s point of departure, Islas expounds upon the personal tribulations of the Angel clan: Mama Chona and her immigration to the states after the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Miguel Grande’s marriage in the 1940s, and the postmodern angst of the third generation: Miguel Chico and his cousins. By moving to San Francisco from his arid and isolated Texan hometown, the prodigal son tries to evade his duties and efface his ties to the past; but family loss prevents Miguel Chico from doing so. The novel parallels the unspoken desires of Miguel Chico with those of his

1430 THE LATINO NOVEL

uncle Felix, who is kicked to death after propositioning a young American soldier. But by reclaiming Felix in his memory, the aging professor better understands his own frustrations and therefore forgives himself and his loved ones. Although Miguel Chico is separated from the Angels by virtue of his Ph.D., sexuality, and chronic illness, the dead beckon him from their grave: “He needed very much to make peace with the dead, to prepare a feast with them so that they would stop haunting him. He would feed them words and make candied skulls out of paper. He looked, once again, at the old photograph of himself and Mama Chona. The white daisies in her hat no longer frightened him; now that she was gone, the child in the picture held only a ghost by the hand and was free to tell the family secrets” (160). When Miguel Chico dies, he will return to the desert storms of his childhood, buried with the rest of the Angels, seeking their rest.

PUERTO RICAN NOVELS As in Chicano fiction, the idea of searching for acceptance figures in many Puerto Rican novels. This should not be surprising considering the island’s century of troubled relations with the United States. Narrative perspective depends in part on whether Puerto Rican authors hail from the island or from the mainland, particularly New York. When Puerto Rico became a U.S. commonwealth in 1898, islanders regarded this bold transformation with interest and anxiety. Apprehensions about the island’s American future from turn-ofthe-century novelists Ana Roqué (Luz y sombra, 1903) and Manuel Zeno Gandía (La Charca, 1894) came to pass, especially after World War II. The U.S.-driven Operation Bootstrap targeted industrialization and public health as its priorities in the 1950s and brought to the island changes that both dispensed summarily with Spanish colonialism and furnished benefits of American capitalism. This becomes the crux for many Puerto Rican narratives, particularly those of Esmeralda Santiago and Magali García Ramis. Harvard graduate Esmeralda Santiago and Columbia-educated Magali García Ramis grew up in San Juan and then relocated to the Northeast. In their novels, protagonists often question, celebrate, and critique Puerto Rican–U.S. relations. García Ramis employs the

bildungsroman structure to develop the plot of Happy Days, Uncle Sergio (1995), which is set during the 1950s in Santurce, an affluent suburb of San Juan. The main conflict stems from the arrival of Uncle Sergio, who offers his niece, Lidia, an alternative to the insular habits of her mother and aunts, who head the household. From Lidia’s adolescent point of view, Sergio departs from norms by refusing to marry, by listening to romantic boleros, by consorting with the lower classes, and by maintaining communist tendencies in the age of McCarthy. He also opens Lidia up to the popular songs and practices that her family has denied her. But as she comes of age, Lidia sees that her uncle is a homosexual outcast and that her beloved neighborhood has given way to U.S. encroachment; developers replace the plant-lined balconies of Santurce homes with new homogenous constructions, signifying a modern, suburban, and alienating present. Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican (1993) also recalls the troubled and enlightening years of youth, but from her narrator’s jíbara, or “hillbilly,” perspective. In this text, U.S. economic development brings vaccinations, electricity, running water, and breakfast at school. But Esmeralda recognizes the mismatch of Caribbean and mainland values when officials force her to eat processed food in the name of nutrition: “[T]he server slapped margarine on two bread squares, which he laid like a pyramid over the eggs. . . . [The food] was warm and gave off that peculiar odor I’d smelled coming in. It tasted like cardboard covers of our primers, salty, dry, fibrous, but not as satisfyingly chewy. If these were once eggs, it had been a long time since they’d been inside a hen. . . . The bread formed moist balls inside my mouth, no matter how much I chewed it” (76). Esmeralda begins to see fences where she once played, and she watches as Rockefeller’s hotels pepper the beaches. In the classroom, she attunes to how the harsh Anglo-Saxon language replaces the Latinate rhythms of Spanish. After her translocation from the island to Brooklyn, Esmeralda undertakes a completely different and stressful life with her nine siblings and mother on welfare. Her days walking to school are marked by curiosity and some feelings of terror, particularly as Santiago describes the gente mala (bad people) of the slums. Education, how-

THE LATINO NOVEL 1431

ever, allows the narrator to forge a path out of poverty and toward new literary and intellectual territory.

CUBAN-AMERICAN NOVELS Contemporary Cuban-American authors partake in the literary dialogue about identity that advances the novels of Santiago and García Ramis. Prominent Cuban-American novelists include Oscar Hijuelos, born in New York in 1951, and Cristina Garcia, born in Havana in 1958. The backgrounds of these authors reflect the seeds of exile, which were planted in New York in the late 19th century. In the 1890s, Cuban revolutionary José Martí asked his readers to accept mestizos (persons of mixed race) and to reject foreign ideas if those ideas corrupt the essence of being Latin American. Martí’s essay “Nuestra America” (“Our America,” 1891) urged Latin Americans to look out for the deleterious effects of European colonialism and U.S. intervention. In 1959, Fidel Castro took up Martí’s rallying cry, and even in the 21st century he uses the “Apostle’s” rhetoric to promote Cuba’s autonomy. But this valorization of independence comes at the price of alienating many Cubans, some of whom seek repatriation to the United States. This first wave of exiles has been able to maintain its island connections. For writers like Cristina Garcia, and her counterparts who were only born on the island, maintaining Cuban relations is difficult with the U.S. embargo. The blockade provides one narrative thread in Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992), which relates Pilar’s desire to leave the United States to visit her Cuban grandmother. Notwithstanding the reunion at the end, Dreaming in Cuban presents a family divided by communism, capitalism, and sexism. Episodes cut across three generations, from Celia’s unrequited romance with a married Spaniard, to Felicia’s fascination with the Afro-Caribbean practice of Santeria, to Pilar’s punk rebellion in New York. In Dreaming in Cuban, Celia supports Castro, but in Garcia’s second novel, The Agüero Sisters (1997), it is the next generation, that of the 1960s, that openly partakes in the Cuban Revolution. Reina Agüero serves her comrades as a highly skilled electrician, even though she will eventually leave the country. In this text, Reina’s adherence to communism contrasts with the materialism of her enterprising sister, Constancia, who lives in Miami. But the real crux of The

Agüero Sisters is in the inexplicable murder of their mother during a bird-collecting expedition in the Zapata swamp, a setting rendered in exquisite description. This story, while corresponding somewhat with Garcia’s own family, departs dramatically from the usual plots and inspirations of the Latino novel in its dual settings of Cuba and Miami, its application of botanical and zoological discourse, and its elegant weaving of three disparate story lines. The same sophistication can be said of Oscar Hijuelos. An energetic and popular author, Hijuelos has six novels to his credit, including Our House in the Last World (1983), which won the Rome Prize in literature, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Empress of the Splendid Season, and his recent A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good (2002). Mambo Kings (1990), later made into a film, tells the story of the Castillo brothers, who leave Habana in 1949 to perform the wildly popular mambo in New York. With their translocation comes decadence and heartache, especially for Nestor Castillo, who, having failed at love, produces multiple versions of the song “Beautiful Maria of My Soul” as a kind of therapy. Hijuelos elaborates on the theme of ill-fated love and music as therapy with his latest novel, A Simple Habana Melody (2002). Here we meet the successful zarzuela and habanera composer Israel Levis, who, having written “Rosas Puras,” seeks European recognition as a musician and conductor. Like his fictional counterparts who escape their woes through drink and women, Levis compensates for the unrequited love of Rita Valladeres by frequenting the red-velvet brothels of Paris. Like Garcia, Hijuelos’s novels dramatically depart from the usual autobiographical coming-of-age or reflection plots of most Latino novels. Instead, he uses rich Cuban lyrics and cabaret imagery to set the scene for Levis’s fall to Nazi authorities who identify him as a Jew. Levis survives the Buchenwald concentration camp, shedding every last trace of bourgeois privilege, including his own corpulence. Interestingly, Hijuelos allows his character to die in 1953 before he has to face Castro’s Cuba. Hijuelos reveals his range of writing in Empress of the Splendid Season (1999), where he assumes a Cuban-immigrant woman’s point of view and does so admirably. This is the story of Lydia España, who,

1432 THE LATINO NOVEL

having lost her wealth and status after the revolution, moves to the United States and cleans houses for a living. Lydia recognizes that she lives in the greener pastures of years gone by to temper the inescapability of class and to accept the humble advantages of serving the wealthy. Her strength and resiliency are tinged, as in Hijuelos’s other novels, with a sense of loss and inconclusiveness.

DOMINICAN-AMERICAN NOVELS In addition to Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans, the immigration of families from the Dominican Republic and South America merits attention. This is especially true of DominicanAmerican writers Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz, who add to the Latino novel an important historical dimension and faithfulness to the individualism that characterizes American letters. Julia Alvarez, though born in New York, spent her childhood in the Dominican Republic and fled Trujillo’s regime in 1960. Díaz, born in Santo Domingo, was raised and educated in the Northeast. Alvarez and Díaz write their fiction from radically different worldviews—Díaz’s work exposes the poverty, dirt, and disappointment of life in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. Alvarez, though sensitive to class prejudice and racism, writes about the Dominicans with land, maids, and the option to attend elite American private schools; this is especially true of her self-reflective novel ¡ Yo!. In ¡ Yo! (1997), Julia Alvarez blurs the lines between fact and fiction in her depiction of aspiring author Yolanda García. Alvarez organizes the novel according to Yolanda’s development as a storyteller; each of the chapters represents a form of narration (for example, “omniscient”), a genre (for example, “poetry”), or mode (for example, “resolution”) relevant to Yo’s craft. Alvarez’s applies this format to illustrate how Yolanda’s invention of tales has grave consequences in the Dominican Republic, while in the United States it is something that can be given full reign. This is a message important for Alvarez, who uses the pen to put into perspective the disturbing aspects of Trujillo’s regime and to sharpen insights about her own bicultural situation. In what is arguably her best work, In the Time of the Butterflies (1995), Alvarez conflates fact and fiction in

her depiction of the Mirabal family and their revolutionary activity during Rafael Trujillo’s regime. By assuming the perspective of each sister, Alvarez recreates the diaries of Maria Teresa, which record her and Minerva’s imprisonment. She depicts the sacrifices Minerva Maribal makes as a leader of the June 14 movement, and she renders memorable Patria Mirabal’s conversion from devout housewife to rebel. To wrap up an emotionally exhausting story, Alvarez uses scattered details about the sisters’ belongings before they were kidnapped to reiterate the incompleteness of knowing fully about their deaths. This novel was made into a mediocre film that, while failing to deliver the richness of the text, nevertheless serves as an index of Alvarez’s achievement. Alvarez’s focus has shifted rather markedly with her most recent novel, In the Name of Salomé (2000), which recounts the life and trials of Dominican poetess Salomé Ureña. Junot Díaz’s work stands in stark contrast to that of Alvarez for its subject matter. In his best-selling debut novel, Drown (1996), Díaz shows the horror of being poor on the island and the tough side of the turnpikes and wastelands of New Jersey and New York. His style and message are conveyed with a postmodern passivity that characterizes Latino urban fiction, notably that of Bronx writer Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Díaz’s narrative voice is terse and loaded as he depicts a fatherless childhood in the Dominican Republic and a young criminal adulthood in the Northeast. He explains his living by observing that “I deal close to home, trooping up and down those dead end streets where kids drink and smoke. . . . Now that the strip malls line Route 9, a lot of folks have part time jobs; the kids stand around smoking in their aprons, name tags dangling heavily from their pockets” (106). Drown relies on distancing techniques to convey survival in a world of drugs, AIDS, and domestic violence.

CRITICISM Despite the intricacies of the Latino novel, literary critics have zeroed in on this vein of American literature. Substantive analyses of Latino fiction appear in Ramón Gutierrez and Genero Padilla’s Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Project (1993) and in Asunción Horno-

THE LATINO NOVEL 1433

Delgado, Eliana Ortega, and Nina Scott’s Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings (1989). Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States (1997) furnishes the reader with a wonderfully detailed history of what the author calls “Spanish Caribbean” literature. Luis locates a rich literary tradition in 19th-century precedents—the work of Puerto Rican and Cuban exiles living in the United States. Alvarez Borland’s Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona (1998) is likewise a good resource for its focus. And for Chicano studies, readers will find helpful Calderón and Saldívar’s Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology (1991) and Rosemary King’s Border Confluences: Borderland Narratives from the Mexican War to the Present (2004). Readers of the Latino novel will find a wealth of histories, geographies, and voices from which to choose and, in doing so, will discover that this brand of fiction has much in common with American literature as a whole. Tales of difficult journeys, the trials of immigration and migration, and the desire for acceptance characterize many American tales. Thus Latino writers are building upon a larger tradition while maintaining their individuality and linguistic style. In the future, one can expect more novels from the four major Latino groups, and one can anticipate writing from Latin Americans (Guatemalans, Chileans, Colombians, etc.) who have made the United States their home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alvarez, Julia. “Cafecito Cup Readings: Latina literature is coming of age—almost!” Latina, January 2000, p. 107. ———. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992. ———. In the Name of Salomé. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 2000. ———. In the Time of the Butterflies. New York: Plume, 1995. ———. ¡Yo!. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1997. Alvarez Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. Calderón, Hector, and José David Saldívar. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture and Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. Castillo, Ana. So Far from God. New York: Plume, 1994.

Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. ———. House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage Books, 1991. Díaz, Junot. Drown. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Galarza, Ernesto. Barrio Boy. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Garcia, Cristina. The Agüero Sisters. New York: Ballantine, 1997. ———. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. García Ramis, Magali. Happy Days, Uncle Sergio. Fredonia, N.Y.: White Pine Press, 1995. Gutierrez, Ramón, and Genero Padilla, eds. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1993. Hijuelos, Oscar. Empress of the Splendid Season. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. ———. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. ———. A Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Hinojosa, Rolando. Klail City. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1987. Horno-Delgado, Asunción, Eliana Ortega, et al., eds. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Islas, Arturo. The Rain God. New York: Avon Books, 1984. King, Rosemary A. Border Confluences: Borderland Narratives from the Mexican War to the Present. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Luis, William. Dance between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. Martí, José. Nuestra America. Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1974. Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village. 1945. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Ramirez, Luz Elena. “Hispanic-American Short Fiction.” In Companion to the American Short Story, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock. New York: Facts On File, 2000. Rivera, Tomás. Y se no lo tragó la tierra / . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Translated by Evangelina VigilPinón. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1992. Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1981. Villareal, José. Pocho. (1959) New York: Anchor Press, 1970. Villaseñor, Victor. Rain of Gold. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1991. Luz Elena Ramirez

1434 THE DETECTIVE NOVEL

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL

Detective fiction is often defined in narrow terms to avoid confusing it with crime fiction, spy fiction, or other classes of fiction that present a puzzle to be solved. Frederic Dannay, writing as his alter ego Ellery Queen in 1942, summed this up most succinctly when he called it “a tale of ratiocination, complete with crime and/or mystery, suspects, investigation, clues, deduction, and solution; in its purest form the chief characters should be a detective, amateur or professional, who devotes most of his (or her) time to the problems of detection.” The pure detective novel begins with the crime (murder, robbery, or blackmail, for instance), during which the criminal makes mistakes and inadvertently leaves clues that the detective must be clever enough to recognize. The detective fits together the evidence and identifies the perpetrator of the crime. The formula differs from that of the crime novel, in which the criminal may be the central figure and the story concerns his motive for committing the crime. He may or may not escape the law. The suspense novel has no central detective to solve the mystery but may have a protagonist who becomes involved in events and situations that must be resolved by the end of the story. Variants of the detective novel include the police procedural, in which the police solve the mystery by means of official police methods. Many readers refer to all these forms as murder mysteries even when there is no murder and little mystery. The difference between the detective short story (created in 1841 by Edgar Allan Poe is his “Murders in the Rue Morgue”) and the detective novel is not merely one of length. The broader canvas allows the writer greater freedom to shift points of view, delineate character, describe setting, and otherwise build up suspense while unfolding the plot. Just as there were detective elements in fiction prior to Poe’s short stories, there were detective elements in the fiction that followed his examples in both the short form and the novel. However, it was not for 20 or 30 years that there were novels that contained enough of the elements of a detective story to be classed as detective novels. Historians of the genre tend to ignore the dime novel and story paper serials that flourished in

the decades following Poe, but these melodramatic tales established the popular concept of police and detective procedures, and heroes like Nick Carter became household names. Some critics argue that The Dead Letter (1866), by Seeley Regester, the pseudonym of Metta Fuller Victor, is not really the first American detective novel because the detection is unorthodox. Still, the central concern of the novel is the investigation of a murder by two individuals who act as detectives, Burton, a private citizen employed by the police, and the lawyer Redfield. No one doubts however that Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878) is a detective novel, the first in a series of novels that feature the police detective Ebenezer Gryce. Green was the first truly popular American writer of detective fiction, and some of her novels (among them That Affair Next Door, 1897) include one of the first female detectives in fiction, Amelia Butterworth. While Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novels are not, strictly speaking, detective novels, they do feature protagonists (such as Rachel Innes in The Circular Staircase, 1908) who take on the role of detective, at least in part. She is credited with having created the “Had I but Known” school of suspense, in which the narrator’s reflections on her situation foreshadow the solution. Beginning with The Clue (1909), Carolyn Wells’s long series of novels about scholarly detective Fleming Stone reflected a more traditional approach to detection, although Stone seldom arrived on the scene until the story was more than half told. During the Golden Age of the detective story (the 1920s and 1930s), Earl Derr Biggers published The House without a Key (1925), the first of six novels about Honolulu police detective Charlie Chan, who would achieve greater fame in the movies. At about the same time, art critic Willard Huntington Wright, writing as S. S. Van Dine, published his first novel, about the excessively erudite amateur sleuth Philo Vance, whose erudition on the printed page was supported by equally erudite footnotes. The Benson Murder Case (1926) was a best-seller and was followed by 11 other cases for Vance, which were almost equally well received. The increased interest in detective novels after Van Dine’s success may have inspired others

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL 1435

to follow suit. The feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a mystery novel in 1929, Unpunished, which included a case for women’s freedom and empowerment, but it went unpublished until 1997, long after her death in 1935. Van Dine’s popularity definitely inspired cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee to create Ellery Queen, both as the name for the detective and as their joint pseudonym. Beginning with The Roman Hat Mystery in 1929 and concluding with A Fine and Private Place in 1971, the Ellery Queen novels (especially Calamity Town, 1942) and short stories reflected the changes in American society in the 20th century. The Ellery Queen series contained imaginative puzzles (at some point there would be a formal “Challenge to the Reader” to provide a solution based on what he/she had read so far), and detective Ellery had a greater social conscience than Philo Vance. Perhaps the most significant development in the genre was the creation of the hard-boiled detective. Dashiell Hammett, the father of the form, spun fairy tales inhabited by real people, and some of his characters, especially Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1930) have become American icons. Working independently of Hammett, Raymond Chandler reworked some of the short stories he had written for the pulp magazine Black Mask into seven novels about private detective Philip Marlowe, beginning with The Big Sleep in 1939. The hard-boiled form is characterized by a greater realism than the artificial world of the classic, formal detective story, and the stories are usually narrated by the detective. It has been imitated by many writers, most successfully by Ross Macdonald (the pseudonym of Kenneth Millar) in his California stories of Lew Archer (The Moving Target, 1949) and by Robert B. Parker in his stories about Boston private eye Spenser (The Godwulf Manuscript, 1973). It has also frequently been the subject of parody and satire: Richard S. Prather’s stories of breezy Shell Scott (Scrambled Yeggs, 1958) are a prime example. The most innovative approach to the hard-boiled story came in the l970s and 1980s with the work of Marcia Muller (Edwin of the Iron Shoes, 1976), Sue Grafton (A Is for Alibi, 1982), and Sara Paretsky (Indemnity Only, 1982). Their female private eyes (Sharon

McCone, Kinsey Milhone, and V. I. Warshawsky) prove to be as tough as their earlier male counterparts. John Dickson Carr, working in a more traditional form inspired by G. K. Chesterton, wrote 70 novels about British sleuths, Dr. Gideon Fell (The Mad Hatter Mystery, 1933), Sir Henry Merrivale (The White Priory Murders, 1934), and others in which he displayed a fertile imagination as he baffled his readers. The Merrivale books were published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson. Among his most ingenious plot devices was the use of the “Locked Room” puzzle, in which the murder was committed in a room locked from the inside, from which the murderer could not have escaped but seemingly did. Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe (described as weighing a seventh of a ton) and Archie Goodwin (the narrator and legman in the series) have been described as a blend of the great detective of the Sherlock Holmes school and the wise-cracking style of the hard-boiled form. Beginning with Fer-de-Lance in 1934 and concluding with A Family Affair in 1975, most of the stories took place in Wolfe’s brownstone on West 35th Street in New York. The narrative style and the dialogue, especially the sparring between Wolfe and Archie, were sometimes more satisfying than the plot. Other writers who entertained without necessarily being innovative include Frances and Richard Lockridge with their stories of Mr. and Mrs. North (The Norths Meet Murder, 1940). Richard Lockridge had been a frequent contributor to the New Yorker prior to embarking on the mystery writing trail. George Harmon Coxe, creator of Flashgun Casey for Black Mask, alternated stories about urbane Kent Murdock, Boston newspaper photographer, with novels set in the Caribbean. Brett Halliday (the pseudonym of Davis Dresser) varied the traditional private eye California location by setting his Michael Shayne novels in Miami, Florida. Craig Rice (the pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig) brought the screwball comedy of the movies to the printed page in her Chicago-based novels about scruffy lawyer John J. Malone and his friends Jake and Helene Justus (Trial by Fury, 1941). Another writer who served his apprenticeship in the pulps was Erle Stanley Gardner, but he achieved a kind

1436 THE DETECTIVE NOVEL

of immortality in 1934 when he wrote the first of 85 books about lawyer-detective Perry Mason, The Case of the Velvet Claws. Formulaic yet complex, they were very popular, and the concept translated readily to film, radio, and television. Under the pseudonym A. A. Fair, he also wrote numerous stories about private detectives Donald Lam and Bertha Cool (The Bigger They Come, 1939). Following the death of Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan, the Saturday Evening Post arranged with social satirist and popular novelist John P. Marquand to write serials (Think Fast, Mr. Moto, 1937) about another Asian character, the secret agent Mr. I. A. Moto, who also had a brief film career in the l940s. Moto is not really a detective in Marquand’s six novels, but in the films that is his role. Historical novelist F. Van Wyck Mason turned out stories about intelligence officer Captain Hugh North (later promoted to major and then to colonel), who solved mysteries from Washington, D.C., to the far corners of the world (The Singapore Exile Murders, 1939). Following World War II, the police procedural, in which realism is attained by having the police investigate multiple and overlapping cases, became a significant form. It had been popular in England for some time but did not make an impression in the United States until 1945, when Lawrence Treat’s V as in Victim was published. Hillary Waugh’s Last Seen Wearing (1952) moved the setting from the big city to a smaller New England town, but the day-to-day police operations were the same. Perhaps the longest-lasting series has been the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain (the pseudonym of Evan Hunter). Set in a fictitious New York City that is not named New York, the first novel was Cop Hater in 1956. Writing directly for the paperback market, McBain’s intention was not to single out one character as a hero but to make the entire detective squad the hero. The postwar period also saw the popularity of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury (1947) and other cases for vigilante Mike Hammer. The books were once criticized for their excessive violence and sex (though little is explicit in either area), but later critics have come to see the novels as a reflection of the psyche of America from the loss of innocence following World War II to the loss of purpose and direction in the 1980s.

In recent years writers have combined ingenious mysteries solved by equally ingenious detectives with other elements, and plot is often less important than character. The detectives tend to be concerned about society and the novels include themes of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, occupation, and avocation. There are black detectives, Native American detectives, gay detectives, lesbian detectives, and feminist detectives, as well as detectives who work in various professions besides that of detection and police science. Chester Himes has been called the first black mystery writer to use black detectives in his work, and his stories of Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson (The Crazy Kill, 1959) are set in Harlem. He has been followed by Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins, a private eye in Los Angeles (Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990), and Barbara Neely’s Blanche White, a black domestic worker who investigates a murder in Blanche on the Lam (1992). Tony Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee are Native American detectives who solve crimes set in the Southwest (Skinwalkers, 1987). Joseph Hansen wrote 12 novels about Dave Brandstetter, a gay private eye (Skinflick, 1979), and Ellen Hart’s Jane Lawless is a lesbian restaurateur in Minneapolis in Stage Fright (1992). A variety of professions and avocations are represented, from Amanda Cross’s feminist university professor Kate Fansler (Death in a Tenured Position, 1981), to Emma Lathen’s banker-detective John Putnam Thatcher in Green Grow the Dollars (1982), to M. D. Lake’s campus cop Peggy O’Neill in Amends for Murder (1989), to Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon, a park ranger like her creator, in Track of the Cat (1993), to Bill Pronzini’s “Nameless Detective,” who collects pulp magazines (Scattershot, 1982), and Elizabeth Peters’s Egyptologist Amelia Peabody, who solves mysteries in the late Victorian and Edwardian era (Lord of the Silent, 2001). Other writers have explored the history and lore of specific areas such as New England in Jane Langton’s Homer Kelly mysteries (Emily Dickinson Is Dead, 1984) or old England in Martha Grimes’s Inspector Richard Jury novels, which are named for actual inns (The Old Contemptibles, 1990). There is a small body of culinary mysteries that involve food, kitchens, restaurants, and culinary professionals; some of these include recipes as well (Virginia Rich’s The Nantucket

THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL 1437

Diet Murders, 1985; Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks, 1938). It should come as no surprise that this branch of the genre has also inspired cookbooks such as Jeanine Larmouth and Charlotte Turgeon’s Murder on the Menu (1972) and Stout’s own Nero Wolfe Cookbook (1971). Where once fictional detectives were distinguished largely by their methods of detection or their personal idiosyncracies, today’s writers have a richly diverse canvas on which to exercise their imaginations and entertain their readers.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, Robert A., and Michael T. Nietzel. Private Eyes: One Hundred and One Knights; A Survey of American Detective Fiction 1922–1984. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Bakerman, Jane, ed. And Then There Were Nine . . . More Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1985. Bargainnier, Earl F., ed. Ten Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. ———, and George N. Dove, eds. Cops and Constables: American and British Fictional Policemen. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986. Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Revised edition New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Cox, J. Randolph. Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Salem Press, 1989. Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. Geherin, David. The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1985. Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941. ———, ed. The Art of the Mystery Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946. Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1998. Panek, Leroy Lad. Probable Cause: Crime Fiction in America. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller, eds. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House, 1986. Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, a History. Revised edition. New York: Viking, 1985. J. Randolph Cox

THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL Native American novels and novelists exist in a complex historical and critical context. There are approximately 310 distinct Native American cultures existing in the continental United States, using languages from seven different language families. Speaking of Native Americans or Indians as though the members of various tribal societies hold a singular worldview comes from faulty and uninformed thinking. Native American novelists often identify themselves first according to their tribal affiliation, then according to their indigenous identity, and finally in terms of their American citizenship. Such categories, however, become further complicated by the question, “What, exactly, is an Indian?” in terms of blood quantum, participation in tribal communities, and degrees of assimilation into Western cultural ways, including conversion to Christianity. Native American peoples, historically, have experienced gross injustice. Precontact estimates for American Indian populations in North America are 15 million (Stiffarm and Lane, 27). Disease, warfare, genocidal policies, and U.S. government legislation against traditional cultural practices reduced Native populations to 10 percent of their original numbers. Many Native novelists recount the impact on their people of numerous laws passed against them by the U.S. government. Among the laws most frequently referred to in Native fiction are the following: The Indian Removal Act (1830), The Major Crimes Act (1885), The General Allotment Act (1887), The Indian Citizen Act (1924), The Indian Reorganization Act (1934), The Indian Claims Commission Act (1946), The Termination Act (1953), The Relocation Act (1956), and The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). Essentially, these laws forced various Indian tribes to move from their immemorial tribal lands to “Indian Territory” (Oklahoma); forced tribal

1438 THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL

governments to adhere to American legal ideologies; allotted portions of communal lands to individual tribal members (thus becoming taxable property); left all other Indian lands open for homesteading; forced U.S. citizenship onto members of indigenous nations; and reorganized traditional tribal systems of government into councils patterned after corporate leadership. In other words, Native peoples have generally been denied self-determination. The history of Native American novels is often divided between works written before and after N. Scott Momaday’s 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn. Edward M. Bruner says that before 1970, the story told by anthropologists about American Indians was that “the present was disorganization, the past was glorious [or barbaric—noble or savage], and the future assimilation.” After 1970, the story took on a “sharp epistemological break,” where “the present was resistance, the past was exploitation, and the future was ethnic resurgence” (Bruner, 18). While any attempt to reduce an entire body of works to simple thematic descriptions is fraught with flaws, Bruner’s descriptions are useful in describing the ways that academics have read Native experiences, including Native authors. Few novels by American Indians were published before Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. Those novels that were published, though, have significant historical, thematic, and artistic merit. In 1854, John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Scott B. Vickers says that although the novel describes “the trials and revenge of a mixed-blood Mexican,” the novel is actually “a picaresque western adventure based on the resistance of California Natives to the incursion of whites brought on by the gold rush.” Ridge’s personal history is probably more fascinating than his novel. Ridge was among those on the Trail of Tears during the Cherokee Removal from their eastern homeland to Oklahoma. Ridge’s grandfather and father were both assassinated for their part in signing away their ancestral lands without permission of the tribe. S. Alice Callahan’s (Creek) Wynema: A Child of the Forest was published in 1891. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff notes that “this novel incorporates explanations of Creek customs” and is a fictional account “of the

events that led to the murder of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee,” as well as a novel that pleads for “women’s rights and suffrage” (Ruoff, 222). A Potawatomi Indian, Simon Pokagon was the last Native novelist to publish during the 19th century; he published Queen of the Woods in 1899. Ruoff describes this novel as “a romance that laments the Potawatomi’s loss of their Edenic past and warns about how alcohol can destroy Indians and whites” (Ruoff, 148). Early 20th-century novels include Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927) by Mourning Dove (OkanagonColville), Brothers Three (1935) by John Milton Oskison (Cherokee), and Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road (1932) and Sundown (1934) by John Joseph Matthews (Osage). D’Arcy McNickle (Cree/Metis/Salish) also published three novels prior to the era that Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance: The Surrounded (1936), Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (1954), and Wind from the Enemy Sky (published after McNickle’s death in 1978). Of these early 20th-century novels, three have received considerable attention and acclaim: Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, John Joseph Matthews’s Sundown, and McNickle’s The Surrounded. Cogewea is a romantic/tragic tale of a mixed-blood woman who is wooed by two men—a mixed-blood (the foreman on the ranch where Cogewea lives) and a duplicitous, fortune-hunting white man. In Paula Gunn Allen’s words, “The novel turns on the question of identity—a question peculiarly American. Cogewea’s conflict between traditional family values and the siren call of city life and modern values very nearly costs her her life” (79). Matthews’s Sundown is the story of a Osage Indian, Challenge Windser, the son of a man who believes in progress, and a traditional Osage mother. Chal enrolls in college, joins the U.S. Army Air Corps, and is so seduced by the white man’s world that he becomes somewhat ashamed of his Indian heritage while remaining attached to his mother and her spiritual values. Terry P. Wilson claims that “The last portion of the novel focuses on Chal’s inability to develop meaning and direction in his life after the war, wavering between the hedonism and decadence of oil-rich Indians and the hardheaded capitalism of the white men” (Wilson, 247). An excellent full-length study of

THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL 1439

Matthews’s intellectual contribution to human letters can be found in Robert Allen Warrior’s Tribal Secrets. In this book, Warrior challenges traditional interpretations of Matthews and his works; he sees Sundown as a literary treatise on the survival of Native identity against overwhelming odds (Warrior, 26). McNickle’s The Surrounded tells the story of Archilde Leon, another mixed-blood whose forays into the white world leave him disassociated and silent. Louis Owens writes: “Again and again in the novel, understanding fails and something goes inexplicably wrong for the Indians, as if they are in the grip of an incomprehensible fate—as if, in fact, McNickle’s Indians are playing out their tragic roles in the American epic, roles that simply require that they perish and that deny them what Bakhtin calls ‘another destiny or another plot’ ” (65). McNickle’s Natives are “surrounded”—like fenced-in cattle—by powerful alien government and religious representatives trying to turn Indians into artifacts or remake them into their own Euro-American image. These themes—loss of land, identity, and traditional beliefs complicated by mixed-blood identities—go through a revision in the works of Momaday and those novelists that followed him. Indeed, as Louis Owens suggests, “other destinies” than degradation, poverty, and forced assimilation are possible for Native Americans. The most prominent post–Civil Rights novelists include N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), James Welch (Blackfoot-Gros Ventre), Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), and Linda Hogan (Chickasaw). Sherman Alexie (Coeur d’ Alene), Thomas King (Cherokee), and Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee) are also rapidly becoming wellknown and highly acclaimed novelists. While these authors address unique tribal problems and issues, common themes abound. One prevalent theme involves the movement of various characters from profound, debilitating suffering into well-being, brought about through ceremonial reclamations of their traditional heritages. Both House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday are founded on this plot. None of the above authors claim that Native peoples can return to ancient material or spiritual culture. For example, Leslie Silko’s character Tayo, in her novel

Ceremony (1977), must create a healing ceremony out of his own troubled past and a combination of revised Pueblo and Navajo myths and rituals. His acknowledgment of the necessary role of the ceremony means that myth and ritual are dynamic processes, and that revelation of the sacred is ongoing. Sexual perversion, violence, and abuse are also typical themes in these novels. In fact, sexual violence is a predominant symbol for the psychological condition of disassociation experienced by many characters. The works of Linda Hogan (especially Solar Storms [1995]), Leslie Silko (especially Almanac for the Dead [1991]), Sherman Alexie (especially The Toughest Indian in the World [2000]), and Louis Owens particularly explore this topic. Perhaps all of Louise Erdrich’s North Dakota novels—from Love Medicine (1984) to Four Souls (2004)—are grounded on the exploration of intimacy patterns, especially as these patterns relate to complex genealogies and religious ideologies. In these works, harmony and respect between genders is also a symbol for harmony in the world. Other issues that these novelists explore include those of mixed-blood identities, the significance of place, the coexistence of spiritual truth with everyday existence, the significance of ancestors to full well-being, and the comic (not tragic) nature of Native discourse. Many of the novels by these authors are peopled with characters who demonstrate that truth comes into the world with two faces—one smiling, the other frowning. And yet, the comic mode prevails, strongly suggesting that the most profound dislocations can be overcome. All these contemporary authors have won numerous awards for their fiction; their art both represents their particular traditional perspectives and transcends cultural boundaries. Moreover, all these authors are still living as the 21st century opens. Most are also poets, short-story writers, autobiographers, and critics and either have been or are currently university professors. Literally dozens of other Native authors have written or are writing novels. Many writers have proved very prolific, yet are not as widely known as those previously discussed. Joseph Bruchac’s (Abenaki) works, for example, appear in more than 400 publications. His novel, Dawn Land, re-creates the value system of precontact Natives. He has also recorded traditional stories and

1440 THE NATIVE AMERICAN NOVEL

made them available in print and on audiocassettes known variously under the general title Keepers of the Earth. Bruchac cofounded the Greenfield Review Press so he could promote the works of emerging Indian authors. Janet Campbell Hale’s (Coeur d’Alene) The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985) was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), well-known activist and critic, also wrote a novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). The now-deceased husband of Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris (Modoc), wrote A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and, with Erdrich, coauthored the financially successful The Crown of Columbus (1991). Legitimate concerns abound. Can, should, or do individual American Indian authors represent the views and beliefs of those tribes from which they come? Who owns traditional beliefs? And who, if anyone, has the right to police the creative products of individual Native American writers? More important, can individuals from one tribe claim to know the belief systems of those from other tribes? Some critics, for example, claim that Leslie Marmon Silko “fell from the sky.” The implication of such a statement is that Pueblo creation narratives are emergence narratives: Original Laguna people emerged from the earth rather than fell from the sky. The origin myths of the Iroquois describe the original people as falling from a world above this one. In other words, critics are suggesting that Silko’s use of Laguna mythology without permission in her novel Ceremony marks her as someone who does not respect her beliefs. The fact that Silko also incorporates Navajo mythology is also suspect to some critics. Many Coeur d’ Alene were upset with Sherman Alexie’s depiction of reservation life in the film Smoke Signals (adapted from his fiction), a fact that brings into focus the problems of one urban Indian’s interpretation of collective reservation experience. When Native peoples have traditionally been misrepresented, the new focus on their problems in literature (even by insiders) could be seen as perpetuating the victimage. Who, from any family, dysfunctional or not, wants any member to presume to describe the family as a whole? Craig S. Womack (Muskogee Creek and Cherokee) has written Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), and Arnold Krupat has written Red Matters (2002), both of which explore these dilemmas. Many of these issues also collapse boundaries

between and among ethnology, mythology, history, politics, and multicultural studies. Can Natives and nonNatives engage in dialogue across such vast boundaries? Is it the moral imperative of our time to hear the stories of the “other” with the hope that such shared experience can help humans overcome suffering, violence, and humiliation? And, finally, do we have to be a people in order to learn from them?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Paula Gunn. “Mourning Dove (Humishuma).” In Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1900–1970, edited by Paula Gunn Allen, 78–79. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Bruner, Edward M. “Experience and Its Expressions.” In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 3–33. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Churchill, Ward, and Glenn T. Morris. “Key Indian Laws and Cases.” In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistence, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 13–23. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. “The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, The Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty.” In Nothing but the Truth, edited by John L. Purdy and James Ruppert, 23–39. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001. Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1963. Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown. “S. Alice Callahan.” In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 221–225. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. ———. “Simon Pokagon.” In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 277–281. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. Stiffarm, Lenore A., with Phil Lane, Jr. “The Demography of Native North America.” In The State of Native America, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 23–55. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Vickers, Scott B. Native American Identities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Wilson, Terry P. “John Joseph Matthews.” In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 245–251. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996. Suzanne Evertsen Lundquist

APPENDIX I CD LIST OF MAJOR PRIZEWINNERS

1998

PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler

The Pulitzer Prize, established at Columbia University by American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, awards prizes in the genres of fiction, general nonfiction, history, poetry, and biography/autobiography.

1996

2006

1994

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

1997

Geraldine Brooks, March

Richard Ford, Independence Day

1995 Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries E. Anne Proulx, The Shipping News

2005

1993

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

2004

Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (story collection)

Edward Jones, The Known World

1992

2003

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

1991

2002

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Richard Russo, Empire Falls

1990

2001

Oscar Hijuelos, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

1989

2000

1988

Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (story collection)

Toni Morrison, Beloved

1999

1987

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis

1441

1442 APPENDIX I 1986

1968

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner

1985

1967

Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

1984

1966

William Kennedy, Ironweed

1983

Katherine Anne Porter, Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (story collection)

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

1965

1982

Shirley A. Grau, The Keepers of the House

John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

1981 John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

1980 Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song

1979 John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (story collection)

1964 No Award

1963 William Faulkner, The Reivers

1962 Edwin O’Connor, The Edge of Sadness

1961

1978

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

James Alan McPherson, Elbow Room (story collection)

1960

1977

1959

No Award

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent Robert Lewis Taylor, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters

1976

1958

Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

James Agee, A Death in the Family

1975

1957

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels

Honorary Award to Kenneth Roberts

1974

1956

No Award

MacKinlay Kantor, Andersonville

1973

1955

Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter

William Faulkner, A Fable

1972

1954

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

No Award

1971

1953

No Award

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

1970

1952

Jean Stafford, Collected Stories (story collection)

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

1969

1951

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn

Conrad Richter, The Town

APPENDIX I 1443

1950

1931

A. B. Guthrie, The Way West

Margaret Ayer Barnes, Years of Grace

1949

1930

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor

Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy

1948

1929

James Michener, Tales of the South Pacific

Julia Peterkin, Scarlet Sister Mary

1947

1928

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

1946 No Award

1945 John Hersey, A Bell for Adano

1944 Martin Flavin, Journey in the Dark

1943 Upton Sinclair, Dragon’s Teeth

1942 Ellen Glasgow, In This Our Life

1941

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

1927 Louis Bromfield, Early Autumn

1926 Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith

1925 Edna Ferber, So Big

1924 Margaret Wilson, The Able McLaughlins

1923 Willa Cather, One of Ours

No Award

1922

1940

Booth Tarkington, Alice Adams

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

1921

1939

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling

1920

1938

No Award

John P. Marquand, The Late George Apley

1919

1937

Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

1918

1936

Ernest Poole, His Family

Harold L. Davis, Honey in the Horn

1935

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

Josephine W. Johnson, Now in November Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom

The National Book Award was established in 1950. It is given annually to recognize achievements in four genres: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature.

1933

2005

T. S. Stribling, The Store

William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

1932

2004

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay

1934

1444 APPENDIX I 2003

1984

Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

Ellen Gilchrist, Victory over Japan (story collection)

2002

1983

Julia Glass, Three Junes

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

2001

1982

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

2000 Susan Sontag, In America

1999 Ha Jin, Waiting

1998 Alice McDermott, Charming Billy

1997 Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

1996

John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

1981 Wright Morris, Plains Song

1980 William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

1979 Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

1978 Mary Lee Settle, Blood Tie

Andrea Barrett, Ship Fever and Other Stories (story collection)

1977

1995

1976

Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater

1994 William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird William Gaddis, JR

1975

1993

Thomas Williams, The Hair of Harold Roux and Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News

1974

1992

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

1991 Norman Rush, Mating

1990

1973 John Barth, Chimera and John Williams, Augustus

1972

Charles Johnson, Middle Passage

Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (story collection)

1989

1971

John Casey, Spartina

Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler’s Planet

1988

1970

Pete Dexter, Paris Trout

Joyce Carol Oates, them

1987

1969

Larry Heinemann, Paco’s Story

Jerzy Kosinski, Steps

1986

1968

E. L. Doctorow, World’s Fair

Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day

1985

1967

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

APPENDIX I 1445

1966 Katherine Anne Porter, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (story collection)

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

John Updike, The Centaur

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974, consists of approximately 700 active book reviewers. Every year the circle selects award winners in fiction, as well as general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry and criticism.

1963

2005

J. F. Powers, Morte d’Urban

E. L. Doctorow, The March

1962

2004

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

1961

2003

Conrad Richter, The Waters of Kronos

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

1960

2002

1965 Saul Bellow, Herzog

1964

Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus

1959 Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel (story collection)

1958 John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle

1957

Ian McEwan, Atonement (non-American)

2001 Winfried Georg Sebald, Austerlitz (non-American)

2000 Jim Crace, Being Dead (non-American)

1999

Wright Morris, The Field of Vision

Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

1956

1998

John O’Hara, Ten North Frederick

Alice Munro, The Love of a Good Woman (non-American)

1955 William Faulkner, A Fable

1997

1954

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower (non-American)

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

1953 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

1952 James Jones, From Here to Eternity

1951

1996 Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds (story collection)

1995 Stanley Elkin, Mrs. Ted Bliss

William Faulkner, The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (story collection)

1994

1950

1993

Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson before Dying

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

1446 APPENDIX I 1992 Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

1991

PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

1990

Named for William Faulkner, the PEN Faulkner Award was established in 1980 by writers to honor their peers each year.

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

2005

1989

Ha Jin, War Trash

E. L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

2004

1988

John Updike, The Early Stories (story collection)

Bharati Mukherjee The Middleman and Other Stories (story collection)

2003

1987

2002

Philip Roth, The Counterlife

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

1986

2001

Reynolds Price, Kate Vaiden

Phillip Roth, The Human Stain

1985

2000

Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist

Ha Jin, Waiting

1984

1999

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

Michael Cunningham, The Hours

1983

1998

William Kennedy, Ironweed

Rafi Zabor, The Bear Comes Home

1982

1997

Stanley Elkin, George Mills

Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds

1981

1996

John Updike, Rabbit Is Rich

Richard Ford, Independence Day

1980

1995

Shirley Hazzard The Transit of Venus

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

1979

1994

Thomas Flanagan, The Year of the French

Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

1978

1993

John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever

E. Annie Proulx, Postcards

1977

1992

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Don DeLillo, Mao II

1976

1991

John Gardner, October Light

John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire

1975

1990

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

E. L. Doctorow, Billy Bathgate

Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres

Sabina Murray, The Caprices (story collection)

APPENDIX I 1447

1989 James Salter, Dusk (story collection)

EDGAR AWARD

Richard Wiley, Soldiers in Hiding

Established by the Mystery Writers of America to present annual awards for the best mystery novel published each year, the Edgar Awards are named after Edgar Allan Poe. Other categories include stories, criticism, and biographies of mystery writers.

1986

2006

Peter Taylor, The Old Forest and Other Stories

Jess Walter, Citizen Vince

1985

2005

Tobias Wolff, The Barracks Thief

T. Jefferson Parker, California Girl

1984

2004

John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday

Ian Rankin, Resurrection Men

1983

2003

Toby Olson, Seaview

S. J. Rozan, Winter and Night

1982

2002

David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident

T. Jefferson Parker, Silent Joe

1981

2001

Walter Abish, How German Is It?

Joe R. Lansdale, The Bottoms

NOBEL PRIZE

2000

1988 T. Coraghessan Boyle, World’s End

1987

Nobel Prizes in literature awarded to American novelists:

1993 Toni Morrison

1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer

1976 Saul Bellow

1962 John Steinbeck

1954

Jan Burke, Bones

1999 Robert Clark, Mr. White’s Confession

1998 James Lee Burke, Cimarron Rose

1997 Thomas H. Cook, The Chatham School Affair

1996 Dick Francis, Come to Grief

1995

Ernest Hemingway

Mary Willis Walker, The Red Scream

1949

1994

William Faulkner

Minette Walters, The Sculptress

1938

1993

Pearl Buck (Pearl Walsh Nie Sydenstricker)

Margaret Maron, Bootlegger’s Daughter

1930

1992

Sinclair Lewis

Lawrence Block, A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

1448 APPENDIX I 1991

1973

Julie Smith, New Orleans Mourning

Warren Kiefer, The Lingala Code

1990

1972

James Lee Burke, Black Cherry Blues

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal

1989

1971

Stuart M. Kaminsky, A Cold Red Sunrise

1988 Aaron Elkins, Old Bones

1987 Barbara Vine, A Dark-Adopted Eye

1986 L. R. Wright, The Suspect

1985 Ross Thomas, Briar Patch

Maj Sjowall, Per Wahloo, The Laughing Policeman

1970 Dick Francis, Forfeit

1969 Jeffery Hudson, A Case of Need

1968 Donald E. Westlake, God Save the Mark

1967 Nicolas Freeling, The King of the Rainy Country

1966

1984

Adam Hall, The Quiller Memorandum

Elmore Leonard, La Brava

1965

1983

John le Carre, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Rick Boyer, Billingsgate Shoal

1964

1982

Eric Ambler, The Light of Day

William Bayer, Peregrine

1963

1981

Ellis Peters, Death and the Joyful Woman

Dick Francis, Whip Hand

1962

1980 Arthur Maling, The Rheingold Route

1979 Ken Follett, The Eye of the Needle

1978 William Hallahan, Catch Me: Kill Me

1977 Robert B. Parker, Promised Land

1976 Brian Garfield, Hopscotch

J. J. Marric, Gideon’s Fire

1961 Julian Symons, The Progress of a Crime

1960 Celia Fremlin, The Hours before Dawn

1959 Stanley Ellin, The Eighth Circle

1958 Ed Lacy, Room to Swing

1957 Charlotte Armstrong, A Dram of Poison

1975

1956

Jon Cleary, Peter’s Pence

Margaret Millar, Beast in View

1974

1955

Tony Hillerman, Dance Hall of the Dead

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

APPENDIX II CD SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Adams, James Truslow. The Founding of New England. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921. American Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide from Colonial Times to the Present. 4 vols. New York: Ungar, 1983. Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Banta, Martha. Failure and Success in America: A Literary Debate. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. Barbour, J., and Tom Quirk, eds. Writing the American Classics. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Bardes, Barbara, and Suzanne Gossett. Declarations of Independence: Women and Political Power in Nineteenth Century American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Bateson, F. W., and H. T. Meserole. A Guide to English and American Literature. 3rd ed. London: Longman, 1976. Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. ———. Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70. 2nd ed. Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1993. Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Cambridge History of American Literature. 5 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, and Myra Jehien, eds. Ideology and Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Office of The Scarlet Letter. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ———. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975. Bewley, Marius. Complex Fate. London: Chatto and Windus, 1952. Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1977. Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel (New Edition). Oxford and Boston: Oxford University Press, 1992. Brodhead, Richard H. Hawthorne, Melville and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Bruccoli, Matthew J., ed. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870: The Papers of William Charvat. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968. Bryer, Jackson R. Sixteen Modern American Authors; A Survey of Research and Criticism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1974. Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. Burgess, Anthony. The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction. New York: Norton, 1967. Bynum, Victoria E. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social & Sexual Control in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

1449

1450 APPENDIX II Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. Cameron, Sharon, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Chase, Richard V. The American Novel and Its Tradition. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Conn, Peter. Literature in America: An Illustrated History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Contemporary Authors: A Bibliographical Guide to Current Writers in Fiction. Detroit: Gale Research, 1962. Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Cowley, Malcolm. The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing since 1941. New York: Viking, 1985. Cunliffe, Marcus, ed. American Literature to 1900. New York: Penguin, 1993. Dearborn, Mary. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Donoghue, Denis. Reading America: Essays on American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Donohue, Agnes McNeill. Hawthorne: Calvin’s Ironic Stepchild. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977. Duke, Maurice, ed. American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983. Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. London: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Elliot, Emory, ed. The Columbia History of the American Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Feidelson, Charles. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Fifty Southern Writers before 1900: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Robert Bain and Joseph M. Flora. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987 Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Frye, Joanne S. Living Stories Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1986. Gates, Henry Lewis, Jr., ed. The Schomburg Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers. 30 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. ———. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century. 3 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987, 1988, 1994. Gilmore, Michael. American Romanticism and the Marketplace. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Greenblatt, Stephen, and Giles Gunn, eds. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. New York: Modern Language Association, 1994. Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Harbert, Earl N., and Robert A. Rees. Fifteen American Authors before 1900; Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism. Rev. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Hart, James D. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961. Hobson, Fred C. Tell about the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. Hoffman, Daniel, ed. Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Holman, C. Hugh, comp. The American Novel through Henry James. 2nd ed. Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing, 1979. Horton, Rod, and Herbert Edwards. Backgrounds of American Literary Thought. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1974. Horwitz, Howard. By The Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

APPENDIX II 1451

Howard, June. Form and History in American Literary Naturalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Howe, Irving. The American Newness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (1986). James, Henry. The Future of the Novel. Edited by Leon Edel. New York: Vintage, 1956. Jay, Paul. Being In The Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Jehlen, Myra. American Incarnation. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Karl, Frederic. American Fictions 1940–1980: A Comprehensive History and Critical Evaluation. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. 1942. New York: Harcourt, 1995. ———. A Writer’s America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers. New York: William Morrow, 1975. Knight, Brenda, ed. Women of the Beat Generation. Berkeley, Calif.: Conan Press, 1996. Kostelanetz, Richard. The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1982. Lang, Amy Schrager. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Lawrence D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. Reprint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Leary, Lewis G. American Literature: A Study and Research Guide. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Levin, Harry. The Power of Blackness. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1958. Lewis, R. W. B. American Adam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Litz, A. Walton. Modern American Fiction: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Lukács, George. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1962.

Machor, James L., ed. Readers in History: Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Manning, Carol S. The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Maxwell, D. E. American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. McCormick, John. American Literature 1919–1932: A Comparative History. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1971. Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Miller, Perry. The Raven and the Whale. New York: Harcourt, 1956. ———. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. ———. The New England Mind. 1939. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. ———. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: Macmillan, 1939. Miller, Perry, and Thomas H. Johnson, eds. The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings. 2 vols. New York: American Book Company, 1938. Muir, Edwin. The Structure of the Novel. London: Hogarth Press, 1928. Myerson, Joel. The American Renaissance in New England. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978. ———, ed. The Transcendentalists. New York: Modern Language Association, 1984. Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: Fiction in an Age of Inflation. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1985. Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecoloqy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991. Olster, Stacey Michele. Reminiscence and Re-Creation in Contemporary American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Parrington, Vernon L. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927. Pease, Donald. Visionary Compacts. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.

1452 APPENDIX II Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in NineteenthCentury American Literature. Rev. ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Poirier, Richard. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966. Poroush, David. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1985. Rees, Robert A., and Earl N. Harbert, eds. Fifteen American Authors before 1900; Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism. 1971. Rev. ed. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Reynolds, Larry. The American Renaissance and the Revolutions of 1848. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988. Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900–1954. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956. Rogin, Michael. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. ———. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989. Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New York: Modern Language Association, 1990. Schirmeister, Pamela. The Consolations of Space: The Place of Romance in Hawthorne, Melville and James. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Showalter, Elaine, ed. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature & Theory. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Spiller, Robert E., et al. Literary History of the United States: Bibliography. 4th ed., rev. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Spiller, Robert E. The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical Criticism. New York: New American Library, 1957. Tichi, Cecilia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature and Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Turner, Darwin T. Afro-American Writers. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970. Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel, 1789–1939. New York: Macmillan, 1921. Revised and enlarged, 1940. Rev. ed., 1955. Warren, Joyce W. The American Narcissus: Individualism and Women in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984. ———. The (Other) American Traditions: NineteenthCentury Women Writers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Wilde, Adam. Middle Grounds: Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Wilson, Edmund. The Shock of Recognition. 1943. 2d ed. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1955. Woodress, James. Eight American Authors; A Review of Research and Criticism. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1971. Yellin, Jean Fagan, and John C. Van Home, eds. Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Young, Thomas D., and Ronald E. Fine, eds. American Literature: A Critical Survey. 2 vols. New York: American Book Company, 1968. Ziff, Larzer. Literary Democracy: The Declaration of Cultural Independence in America. New York: Viking, 1981.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Adams, Jon Western Michigan University Adams, Morgan Rancho Cucamonga, California Ambrozic, Alex Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada Anderson, Crystal Ohio University Antonaya, Marisa Asian University, Thailand Arnel, Jill Oregon City, Oregon Asya, Ferda Bloomsburg University Austenfeld, Thomas North Georgia College and State University Baena, Rosalia Universidad de Navarra, Spain Berger, Aimee Texas Woman’s University Berkove, Lawrence J. University of Michigan Betz, Frederick Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Bezusko, Adriane University of North Dakota Blackwell, Brent M. Ball State University Bliven, Heather De Paul University Boal, David University of Toulouse, France Bowers, Maggie Ann University of Antwerp/UIA, Belgium Bradley, Patricia Middle Tennessee State University Brottman, David University of Southern Indiana Brownlie, Alan W. Anne Arundel Community College Buckman, Alyson California State University at Sacramento Califano, Sharon Kehl University of New Hampshire Camp, Mechel Jackson State Community College Campbell, Donna Gonzaga University Carey, Suzanne Stanford University Carlson, David J. California State University at San Bernardino Carson, Warren J. University of South Carolina Upstate Channing, Jill Ann Wright State University Clay, Alicia Texas A & M University Cohen, Sanda The Elisabeth Morrow School, Englewood, N.J. Cook, Chris O. DePaul University J. Randolph Cox St. Olaf College Craton, Lillie Emory University

Crawford, Valerie Matthews Georgia Perimeter College Crowther, Kathryn E. Emory University Cummins, Amy E. Fort Hays State University D’Augustine, Allie M. University of Pennsylvania Dahm, Jacobia Columbia University Davis, Rocío G. Universidad de Navarra, Spain de Jesús, Melinda L. Arizona State University de Manuel, Dolores Nassau Community College De Ornellas, Kevin Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland DePietro, Thomas Eastchester, New York Delgado, Ana Beatriz Universidad de Navarra, Spain DeNuccio, Jerome Graceland University Despain, Max University of Delaware Diaz, Lisette Gibson Capitol University Dickison, Stephanie Toronto, Ontario Dittman, Michael Franklin, Pa. Dobbins, Zachary University of Texas at Austin Dorfman, John New York, N.Y. Dukess, Mona Larchmont, N.Y. Durnell, Laura DePaul University Edelstein, Sari Brandeis University Elkin, Lauren City University of New York Ellam, Julie L. University of Hull Elliott, Rosslyn Emory University Elliott, Winter Glenville State College Entzminger, Betina Bloomsburg University Ernst, Monty Kozbial University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire Evans, Amy York Queen Mary, University of London, England Fabiano, Mark Wright State University Fagan, Deirdre University of Miami Fahy, Thomas University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Feerst, Alex Duke University Fenimore, David University of Nevada at Reno Flanagan, Kelly Prior Lake High School Flores, Nona C. University of Illinois at Chicago Fu, Bennett National Taiwan University García, Carmen Méndez Universidad Complutense Gentry, April Savannah State University

1453

Gold, Harriet Université de Montréal, Canada Grattan, William University of Missouri Grossberg, Blythe New York, N.Y. Gussman, Deborah The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Haggard, Kendra Northeastern State University of Oklahoma Han, Jihee Yonsei University, China Haugen, Hayley Mitchell Ohio University Hausmann, Jessica Drew University Hayes, Sandra Chrystal University of Southern California Henderson, Katherine Usher Point Park University Hicks, Kathleen Arizona State University Hime, Laurie Howell Miami Dade Community College Hinkle, Lynda Rutgers University Ho, Jennifer Mount Holyoke College Hoeness-Krupsaw, Susanna University of Southern Indiana Hogan, Monika University of Massachusetts Horrine Kerri A. Bellarmine University Huey, Peggy J. The University of Tampa Hume, Beverly Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne Huskey, Paige Wright State University Jasmine, Randy Dixie State College of Utah Jesús, Melinda L. de Arizona State University Jin, Li Beijing University of Technology Johnsen, H. L. Sam Houston State University Jones, Dan University of South Dakota Josyph, Peter New York, N.Y. Keller, Jane Eblen University of Baltimore Kelley, James Mississippi State University at Meridian Kenemore, Scott Logan Square, Chicago, Ill. Kich, Martin Wright State University— Lake Campus Killoran, Helen Ohio State University Kiskis, Michael J. Elmira College Konkle, Lincoln Trenton College of New Jersey Kornreich, Leron Los Angeles, Calif. Kuhl, Nancy Yale University Lansky, Ellen Inver Hills Community College Leahy, Anna North Central College Lee, Patricia Becker Fordham University Leuschner, Eric University of MissouriColumbia Lewis, Marilyn Commerce, Texas

1454 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Lewis, Timothy Adrian DePaul University Li Jin [aka Jane Lee] Beijing University of Technology, China Li Wenxin Suffolk County Community College of the State University of New York Liukkonen, Petri Kuusankoski Library, Finland Lundquist, Susan Everest Lynn, Amy D. Texas Tech University & Université de Limoges, France Maas, Wendy Drew University Mahoney, Rita De Paul University Marovitz, Sanford E. Kent State University Martín-Junquera, Imelda Universidad de León, Spain Martin, Lowell Meridian Community College, Meridian, Mississippi Martin, Quentin University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Martucci, Elise A. Fordham University Massey, Christopher Lee Wright University Mathis, Andrew Philadelphia, Pa. Maxey, Ruth University College London Mayo, James Jackson State Community College McLoughlin, Kate University of Oxford Meyer, Kurtis L. Edina, Minnesota Meyer, Michael J. DePaul University Middlebrook, Geoffrey L. California State University at San Bernardino Miga, Michael DePaul University Miguela, Antonia Dom’nguez University of Huelva, Spain Miles, Kathryn Unity College Miller, Andy University of MissouriColumbia Miller, Cynthia J. Emerson College Millichap, Joseph Western Kentucky University Mills, Fiona University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Moore, Erika New York, N.Y. Moore, Erin Flagler University Moynihan, Susan Muchshima University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Murg, Stephanie New York, N.Y. Murphy, Bernice Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Nanda, Ram Shankar Sambalpur University, India Neary, Gwen Santa Monica College Neary, Gwen Sonoma State University/Santa Rosa Junior College

Nebrida, Patricia J. DePaul University Nimura, Tamiko University of Puget Sound Norris, Jan Schubert San Antonio, Texas O’Hagan, Christine Long Island, N.Y. Ostman, Heather Iona College Overall, Keri DeVry University Packwood, A. Nicholas Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada Pamplin, Claire Borough of Manhattan Community College Panesar, Gurdip Kaur University of Glasgow, Scotland Parker, Eliot Marshall University Parry, Sally E. Illinois State University Pazos, José Gabriel Rodríguez University of Navarra, Spain Perel, Zivah University of Delaware Peterman, Terry Texas A & M University at Commerce Petrillo, Marion Bloomsburg University Pluck, Jay Brooklyn, N.Y. Pollock, Jeri Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Potter, Rebecca C. University of Dayton Quirk, Kevin Rabin, Jessica Anne Arundel Community College Rakover, Jeff Harvard University Ramirez, Luz Elena California State University at San Bernardino Ramsden, Catherine De Paul University Redwine, Elizbeth Brewer Emory University Rich, Rachel Utah State University Royal, Derek P. Texas A&M University at Commerce Rozzell, Kristen Rubin, Lance Arapahoe Community College Samuels, Wilfred D. University of Utah Sathyaraj, V. Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), India Scalia, Bill Louisiana State University Schrynemakers, Ilse Brooklyn, N.Y. Schwankle, David California State University at San Bernardino Sehulster, Patricia J. Pace University Senchyne, Jonathan William Syracuse University Shankar, Lavina Dhingra Bates College Shantz, Jeff York University Shearin, Gloria Savannah State University

Sheffer, Jolie A. University of Virginia Shenk, Max Montgomery County Community College, Bluebell, Pa. Smith, Patrick A. Bainbridge College Snyder, Carey Ohio University Spencer, William C. Delta State University Suglia, Joseph Northwestern University/De Paul University Taylor, Corey M. University of Delaware Sweeney, Brian Brown University Thacker, Robert St. Lawrence University, Canton, N.Y. Thompson, Stella Prairie View A&M University Tomkins, David University of Southern California Trefzer, Annette University of Mississippi Trodd, Zoe Harvard University Twitchell-Waas, Jeffrey OFS College, Singapore Tynberg, Nan Claire California State University, San Bernardino at Palm Desert Unrue, Darlene University of Nevada at Reno Unrue, John University of Nevada at Reno Van Dover, J. K. Lincoln University Van Dyke, Annette University of Illinois at Springfield Verderame, Carla Lee West Chester University Vescio, Bryan University of Wisconsin–Green Bay Vials, Chris University of Massachusetts Vilmar, Christopher Emory University Walden, Daniel Penn State University Wall, Rachel G. Georgia State University Weaver, Carole The College of New Rochelle Weir, Zachary Miami University of Ohio Wendt, Kerry Higgins Emory University Yoder, Paul L. Southern Illinois University Westerman, Jennifer Hughes University of Nevada, Reno Whalen, Zach University of Florida Whitlark, Jim Texas Tech University Whitsun, Carolyn Metrostate University Wiehl, John University of Kansas Wilson, James M. Flagler University Woodard, Loretta G. Marygrove College Yoder, Paul Southern Illinois University Zuidema, Leah A. Michigan State University Zhou, Xiaojing University of the Pacific

INDEX Note: Boldface numbers indicate major treatment of a topic. A Roman numeral indicates the volume containing the entry.

A Abbey, Edward I:112, 139 The Monkey Wrench Gang II:515, 904–905 Abide With Me (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557 abortion I:265–266, 376, II:940, III:1051, 1236–1237 Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966, The (Brautigan) I:177 Abortions (Dixon) I:361 About Harry Towns (Friedman) I:469 About Schmidt (Begley) I:123 Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:1–4, 55, 426, II:514, 671, 812, III:1194, 1299 academia, novels on II:577, 578, 907, III:1126–1127, 1182 Acceptable Losses (Shaw) III:1163 Accident, The (Wiesel) III:1357, 1358 Accidental Tourist, The (A. Tyler) I:4–5, III:1292, 1293

Accordion Crimes (Proulx) III:1080 Accountant (Canin) I:223 Acker, Kathy I:5–7, 375, II:652 Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream I:6, 375–377 In Memoriam to Identity I:6, II:650–653 Across the River and Into the Trees (Hemingway) II:586 Adams, Alice I:7–8, II:492 Adams, Henry I:8–10, 344, 345 Democracy I:9, 344–345 Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Nabokov) II:942, 943 Adler, Renata I:10–11 adolescence. See also bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) in Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison) I:112–114 in The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) I:232–233, III:1133 in Eugenides’s work I:407, 408 in The Mountain Lion (Stafford) II:924–925 in Price’s (Richard) novels III:1074 in This Boy’s Life (Wolff) III:1262–1263

Adultery and Other Choices (Dubus) I:384–385 Adventure of Don Juan, An (Millhauser) II:884 Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade (Hawkes) II:567 Adventures of Augie March, The (Bellow) I:11–13, 130, 131, 208 Adventures of Colonel Sellers, The (Twain) III:1289 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain) I:13–14, 167, II:684, III:1075, 1289, 1290. See also Huck Finn (character) comparisons to I:21, 104, II:701, 714, III:1076 Adventures of the Artificial Woman (Berger) I:138 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain) I:13, 14–16, 21, III:1289, 1290 Advertisements for Myself (Mailer) I:408 Affliction (Banks) I:103–104 Africa in The Dahomean (Yerby) I:317–318 in Henderson the Rain King (Bellow) II:588–589 in The Last Time They Met (Shreve) II:752 in Mama Day (Naylor) II:824

1455

in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) III:1055–1058 African-American middle class in Ansa’s novels I:66 in Fauset’s novels I:428 in Linden Hills (Naylor) II:778–779, 957 in Meridian (Walker) II:873–874 in Quicksand (Larsen) III:1087 in Song of Solomon (Morrison) III:1190 in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1196 in Waiting to Exhale (McMillan) III:1324–1325 African-American novel(s) III:1417–1421. See also neo-slave narrative(s); slave narrative(s); specific writers and titles detective I:347–349, II:918, III:1418, 1436 experimental III:1420 first II:1004–1005, III:1368, 1417 of Harlem Renaissance I:vii, 89, II:861, III:1274, 1418–1419 (See also Harlem Renaissance) late 19th-century I:vii

1456

INDEX

African-American novel(s) (continued) late 20th-century I:viii, III:1420–1421 literary canon and I:132 protest I:98, 192, 386, II:839, III:1100, 1419, 1420 realism in I:vii, III:1418, 1419 after Reconstruction III:1418 science fiction, writers of I:202, 335, III:1420 on slavery, first III:1327 in slavery era III:1417–1418 “tragic mulatta” in I:102, 253, 274–276, II:555, 620, 660 by women III:1417, 1419, 1420 after World War II I:vii African Americans. See also African-American middle class; African-American women; Afro-CaribbeanAmericans; mixed-race people; passing; race/racism; slavery in Ansa’s work I:66 in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (J. W. Johnson) I:89–91, II:689, 690 in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Gaines) I:91–92, II:474, 475 in Baldwin’s work I:98–99, II:849, III:1419, 1420 in Bambara’s work I:101, III:1420 in Band of Angels (Warren) I:101–103 in Beloved (Morrison) I:132–133, II:913 in Black Boy (R. Wright) I:148–149, III:1397–1398 in The Bluest Eye (Morrison) I:158–159, II:911 in Bontemps’s work I:164–165, III:1418 in Brooks’s work I:185 in Brown’s (W. W.) work I:192 in Butler’s (O. E.) work I:202, III:1420

in Campbell’s work I:219 in Cane (Toomer) I:221–223, III:1274, 1418, 1420 in Chesnutt’s work I:252–253 in The Chinaberry Tree (Fauset) I:258–260, 428 in Clotel (W. W. Brown) I:102, 192, 274–276 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:280–282 in Colter’s work I:282 in The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) I:276, 285–287, 346, III:1228–1229 in Corregidora (G. Jones) I:301–302, II:693 in detective novels II:918, III:1418, 1436 “double-consciousness” in identity of I:90–91, 348, II:839, III:1387 in Dunbar’s work I:59, 386–387, III:1418 in Ellison’s work I:400, III:1419–1420 in Fauset’s work I:258, 428–429 in Gaines’s work I:91, II:474–477 gay I:98, 99, II:520–521, 556, 557 in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) I:98, 99, II:520–521, III:1419, 1420 in Harper’s work II:555–556 in Harris’s (E. L.) work II:556–557 in Himes’s work I:348, II:604–605, III:1436 in Home to Harlem (McKay) II:611–612, 861 in Hopkins’s work II:615–616 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) I:252, 253, II:619–620, III:1418 in Hughes’s work II:637–638, III:1418, 1419 in The Human Stain (P. Roth) I:54 in Hurston’s work II:645, III:1419

in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) I:91, 102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 in Invisible Man (Ellison) I:399, 400, II:657–660, III:1091 in Iola Leroy (Harper) I:102, II:555, 556, 660–661, III:1368 in Jazz (Morrison) I:132, II:681–682, 795, 912, III:1018 in Johnson’s (C. R.) work II:686–687 in Johnson’s (J. W.) work I:164, 386, 400, II:689–691 in Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston) II:645, 691–693 in Jones’s (G.) work II:693 in Jubilee (M. Walker) II:699–701, III:1327 in Juneteenth (Ellison) I:399, 400, II:701–702 in The Keepers of the House (Grau) II:710, 711 in To Kill a Mockingbird (H. Lee) II:761 in Kindred (O. E. Butler) I:202, II:720–722 in Larsen’s work II:747–748 in A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines) II:765–767 in Love (Morrison) II:794–796, 912 in Mama Day (Naylor) II:824–825, 957–958 in The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) I:252, 253, II:838–840 in Marshall’s work II:840–841 in McKay’s work II:861–862 in Meridian (Walker) II:873–874 in Morrison’s work II:549, 912–914, III:1136 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:915–917 in Mosley’s work II:917–918

in Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) II:934–935 in Native Son (R. Wright) I:148, II:849, 952–953, 1008, III:1397, 1419 in Naylor’s work II:957–958 in Not Without Laughter (Hughes) II:637–638, 974–976 novels by non–African Americans on I:102–103, 276, 285–287, 346, III:1228–1229 708, 709, 759 III:1207 in Our Nig (Wilson) II:1004–1006, III:1368 in The Outsider (R. Wright) II:1006–1008, III:1398 in Paradise (Morrison) I:132, II:795, 912, III:1018–1019 in Passing (Larsen) II:747–748, III:1022–1023 in Philadelphia Fire (Wideman) III:1040–1042, 1353, 1354 in Porter (C.) work III:1058 in Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, III:1087–1088 in Reed’s work III:1100–1101, 1420 in Sent for You Yesterday (Wideman) III:1153–1156, 1354 in Song of Solomon (Morrison) II:912, III:1190–1191 in Stowe’s work III:1220 in Sula (Morrison) II:849, 911, III:1233–1235 in Tar Baby (Morrison) II:913, III:1244–1245 in Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) II:645, 863, III:1255–1256 in Thomas’s work III:1263–1264 in Toomer’s work III:1274 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) III:1220, 1297–1298 in Waiting to Exhale (McMillan) II:862, III:1324–1325

INDEX in Walker’s (A.) work II:645, III:1325–1327 in Walker’s (M.) work III:1327 in The Ways of White Folks (Hughes) III:1332–1334 in West’s (D.) work III:1340–1341, 1419 in Wideman’s work III:1153, 1274, 1353–1354 in Williams’s (S. A) work III:1363 in Wilson’s work III:1368 in Wright’s (R.) work III:1397–1399, 1419, 1420 in Yerby’s work III:1406 African-American women in Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) I: 1–4 in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Gaines) I:91–92, II:474, 475 in Band of Angels (Warren) I:102–103 in Beloved (Morrison) I:132–133, II:913 in The Bluest Eye (Morrison) I:158–159, II:911 in Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:185–186, II:840, III:1420 in Butler’s (O. E.) novels I:202, III:1420 in Clotel (W. W. Brown) I:102, 192, 274–276, II:660, III:1417–1418 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:280–282 in Corregidora (G. Jones) I:301–302, II:693 in Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:345–347, III:1363 in Fauset’s work I:428–429 as first-person narrators I:91 in Hopkins’s work II:615, 616 in Ida (Stein) III:1207 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) I:91, 102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 in Jubilee (M. Walker) II:699–700

in Kindred (O. E. Butler) II:721–722 in Larsen’s novels II:747–748 in Linden Hills (Naylor) II:779, 957 in Maud Martha (Brooks) II:848–850 in McMillan’s work II:862, 863 in Morrison’s work II:912–913 in Naylor’s work II:957 in Our Nig (Wilson) II:1005, III:1368 in Passing (Larsen) III:1022–1023 in Porter’s (C.) work III:1058 in Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, 849, III:1087–1088 in The Street (Petry) III:1223–1224 in Sula (Morrison) III:1233–1235 in Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) III:1255–1256 in Thomas’s work III:1263–1264 in Waiting to Exhale (McMillan) III:1324–1325 in Walker’s (A.) work III:1325 in Williams’s (S. A.) work III:1363 Afro-Caribbean Americans in Annie John (Kincaid) I:62–63, II:719, 720 in Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:185–186, II:840, III:1420 in Danticat’s work I:320 in Kincaid’s work II:719–720 in Marshall’s work II:840–841, III:1420 novels by and about III:1420 After (Prose) III:1078, 1079 After All These Years (Isaacs) II:666 Afterburn (C. Harrison) II:557 After the War (A. Adams) I:8 Age (Calisher) I:214

Agee, James Rufus I:16–17, 330, 331 A Death in the Family I:16, 330–331 Age of Consent (Greenberg) II:535 Age of Innocence, The (Wharton) I:17–19, II:625, III:1342, 1343 Agony Column, The (Biggers) I:143 Agüero Sisters, The (Garcia) II:477, 478, III:1431 Ah Pook Is Here (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 AIDS II:543, 544 Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers I:264, 439, III:1391 A Is for Alibi (Grafton) II:522 Alaska III:1145–1146 Albuquerque (Anaya) I:57 Alchymist’s Journal, The (Connell) I:289–290 Alcott, Louisa May I:19–21, II:780 Little Women I:19–20, II:779–780, III:1324, 1329, 1334 Alcuin (C. B. Brown) I:187 Alden Bland, Behold a Cry (Lucas) III:1419 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey I:21–22 Aleck Maury, Sportsman (C. Gordon) II:517–518 Alexander, Meena III:1425 Alexander’s Bridge (Cather) I:236 Alexie, Sherman I:22–23, III:1439, 1440 Alger, Horatio I:23–25 “hero” based on I:23, 37, 51, II:783 Algerine Captive, The (R. Tyler) I:25–26, III:1294 Algren, Nelson I:11, 26–28, 103 The Man with the Golden Arm I:26, 27, II:830–831, III:1152 Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:28–29, III:1246 All-Bright Court (C. Porter) III:1058 Allen, Paula Gunn I:29–30, III:1438, 1440

1457

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows I:29, III:1388–1390, 1440 Allende, Isabel I:35, II:825 Alleys of Eden, The (R. O. Butler) I:203 All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (Angelou) I:60 All I Asking for Is My Body (Murayama) I:30–31, II:936, III:1424 All I Could Never Be (Yezierska) III:1407 All in the Family (E. O’Connor) II:982 Allison, Dorothy E. I:31–32 Bastard Out of Carolina I:31–32, 112–114 All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (McMurtry) II:864, III:1254 All New People (Lamott) II:738 All Shot Up (Himes) II:605 All Souls’ Rising (Bell) I:126 All That Remains (Cornwell) I:298 All the Buffalo Returning (Dorothy Johnson) II:688, 689 All the King’s Men (Warren) I:32–33, III:1330–1331 All the Little Live Things (Stegner) III:1206 All the Pretty Horses (C. McCarthy) I:33–35, II:852 All the Ships at Sea: A Novel (Bausch) I:115 All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, The (Smiley) III:1182 Almanac of the Dead (Silko) III:1171 Almost Paradise (Isaacs) II:666 Almost Perfect (A. Adams) I:8 Alnilam (Dickey) I:355–356 Aloft (C.-R. Lee) II:761 Alvarez, Julia I:viii, 35–36, III:1427, 1428, 1432 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents I:35, 36, II:636–637, III:1324, 1409, 1428

1458

INDEX

Alvarez, Julia (continued) In the Time of the Butterflies I:35, 36, II:654–655, III:1432 ¡Yo! I:35, 36, III:1409–1410, 1432 Always Coming Home (Le Guin) II:764 Always Hiding (Romero) III:1423 Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Mosley) II:918 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The (Chabon) I:36–38, 241 Ambassadors, The (James) I:38–39, 42, II:673–674 Ambition and Love (Just) II:706 Ambrose Holt and Family (Glaspell) II:501 Amends for Murder (Lake) III:1436 America Is in the Heart (Bulosan) I:39–41, 196, 197 American, The (James) I:38, 41–42, II:673, 760 Americana (DeLillo) I:337 American Ambassador, The (Just) II:705 American Appetites (Oates) I:42–43, II:977, 978 American Beauty (Ferber) I:435 American Blues, The (Just) II:705 American Brat, An (Sidhwa) I:44–45, III:1170, 1425 American Claimant Manuscripts, The (Hawthorne) II:569 American Dad (Janowitz) II:678 American dream I:43. See also capitalism; immigrant experience; materialism in American Appetites (Oates) I:43 in Dos Passos’s work I:379 in Dreiser’s work I:382 in Ferber’s work I:434, 435 in Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:439–440 in The Great Gatsby (F. S. Fitzgerald) II:532

in Jen’s work II:682, 683, 902 in Lewis’s work I:96 in Martin Dressler (Millhauser) II:843–844 in The Mosquito Coast (Theroux) II:919–920 in realism I:28 in Saroyan’s work III:1139 in Sister Carrie (Dreiser) III:1176, 1177 in Steinbeck’s work III:1209 American Dream, An (Mailer) I:45–46, 408, II:815 American Girl series III:1058 American gothic style III:1355. See also gothic novel(s) American Hunger (R. Wright) I:149 American Knees (S. H. Wong) III:1391, 1422 American Messiahs (Carter) II:667 American novel I:vi–viii American Pastoral (P. Roth) I:46–47, 53, 55, II:668, III:1121–1122, 1123 American Psycho (Ellis) I:48–50 American Renaissance I:19 American Revolution III:1113–1114, 1160 American Romance, An (Casey) I:231 American Son (Roley) I:50–51, III:1116–1117, 1423 American Splendor Anthology (Pekar) II:851 American Tragedy, An (Dreiser) I:51–53, 382, 383, II:649, III:1419 American Trilogy, The (P. Roth) I:46, 53–56, II:489, III:1123, 1131, 1416 American Pastoral I:46–47, 53, 55, II:668, III:1121–1122 The Human Stain I:53, 54–55, II:489, III:1122 I Married a Communist I:53, 54, 55 Americas Review III:1427 Amnesia Moon (Lethem) II:768

Amrita (Jhabvala) II:685 Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior (Gilchrist) II:493 Anagrams (Moore) II:909 Anatomy Lesson, The (P. Roth) I:53, 54, II:489, III:1063, 1121, 1123, 1416 Anaya, Rudolfo A. I:56–57, 248, III:1108 Bless Me, Última I:56, 152–154 Ancestors (Atherton) I:79 Ancient Child, The (Momaday) II:901, 902, III:1439 Ancient Evenings (Mailer) I:409, II:815 And Chaos Died (Russ) III:1128 Anderson, Sherwood I:vii, 58–59, 115, 322, II:502, 769, 816, 975, III:1208 Dark Laughter I:58, 321–323, II:585 Winesburg, Ohio I:58, 322, II:816, III:1023, 1209, 1274 writers linked to I:58, 59, 425, II:790, III:1274, 1397 Andorra (Cameron) I:218 Andromeda Strain, The (Crichton) I:308 And the Earth Did Not Part (Rivera). See Y no se lo tragó la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) (Rivera) “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks” (W. S. Burroughs and Kerouac) I:199, II:714 And This Too Shall Pass (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557 Angel Landing (Hoffman) II:608 Angelou, Maya I:59–60, II:747 Angels and Demons (D. Brown) I:188–189 Angels on Toast (Powell) III:1069 Angle of Repose (Stegner) I:60–62, III:1206 Angry Wife, The (Buck) I:194 Animal Dreams (Kingsolver) II:726 Animal Magnetism (Prose) III:1078

Anishinabe mythology I:67, III:1275–1277, 1317 Anna Papers, The (Gilchrist) II:492 Anne (Woolson) III:1392 Annie John (Kincaid) I:62–63, II:719, 720 Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–66, II:633 Annunciation (Gilchrist) II:492 Another Country (Baldwin) I:98–99, III:1419 Another Roadside Attraction (Robbins) III:1111 Another You (Beattie) I:119 Ansa, Tina McElroy I:66 Antelope Wife, The (Erdrich) I:67–68, 404 Anthem (Rand) III:1093 anticommunism II:745, III:1093, 1094. See also McCarthyism Antin, Mary, The Promised Land III:1077–1078 antislavery movement I:276–277, II:555, 556, III:1172–1173, 1220, 1297–1298, 1368 Any Minute I Can Split (Rossner) III:1119 Anything for Billy (McMurtry) II:864 Anything Goes (Bell) I:126–127 Any Way the Wind Blows (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557 Any Woman’s Blues (Jong) II:695 Appalachia. See also Kentucky; South in Chappell’s work I:243–244 in McCarthy’s (C.) work I:255 in McCrumb’s work II:856 in Narrow Rooms (Purdy) II:950, 951 in Smith’s work III:1183–1184 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (D. Walker) III:1297 Apple, Max I:68–69 Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara) I:69–70, II:987

INDEX Archivist, The (Cooley) I:291–292 Are You Listening, Rabbi Loew (Donleavy) I:374–375 Arkansas: Three Novellas (Leavitt) II:759 Armies of the Night, The (Mailer) I:410, II:814, 815, III:1014 Arnold, Benedict III:1113 Arnold, Matthew II:786 Arnow, Harriette Simpson I:70–71 The Dollmaker I:70, 71, 371–373 Kentucky Trilogy I:70, 71, 371 Arrogant Baker (Yezierska) III:1407 Arrowsmith (Lewis) I:71–73, 365, II:769, 770 Arte Público Press III:1428 Arthur Mervyn (C. B. Brown) I:187 Arthur Rex (Berger) I:137 artist(s). See also writer(s) in Maud Martha (Brooks) II:849 in The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty) II:996–997 in The Robber Bridegroom (Welty) III:1110–1111 role of, Doctorow on III:1092 in Roth’s (P.) novels III:1416 in Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) III:1126–1127 in The Song of the Lark (Cather) III:1191–1193 in The Story of Avis (Phelps) III:1217–1218 in Sula (Morrison) II:849 in The Ways of White Folks (Hughes) III:1333 in West’s (N.) novels III:1341 in Williams’s (T.) novels III:1364 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383–1384 Arundel (K. Roberts) III:1113 Asian-American novel(s) III:1421–1426. See also specific ethnic groups and writers Chinese-American III:1421–1422

Filipino-American III:1422–1423 first III:1422 Japanese-American III:1423–1424 Korean-American III:1424–1425 South Asian II:679, III:1425 Southeast Asian III:1425–1426 writers of I:viii, III:1421–1426 Asian Americans and Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159, III:1400–1401 and Charlie Chan I:143, 258, II:631, III:1280, 1434 stereotypes of I:159, 451, II:836, III:1279, 1436 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) I:73–75, 389, 426, II:491 Asimov, Isaac I:75–77, 202, 416 Ask a Policeman (HinojosaSmith) II:606 Ask Me Tomorrow (Cozzens) I:304 As Max Saw It (Begley) I:123 Aspern Papers, The (James) I:77–78, II:673 Asphodel (H. D.) II:573 Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert, The (Hansen) II:554–555 Assassins: A Book of Hours, The (Oates) II:978 As She Climbed Across the Table (Lethem) II:768–769 Assistant, The (Malamud) II:820 As We Are Now (Sarton) I:78–79, III:1141 At Fault (Chopin) I:261 Atherton, Gertrude I:79–80, 149–150 Black Oxen I:79, 149–151 Atlantic Monthly, The I:21, II:561, 562, 633, 634, III:1419 Atlas Shrugged (Rand) I:80–81, 457, III:1093 At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Matthiessen) I:81–83, II:847 At Risk (Hoffman) II:608

Attachments (Rossner) III:1119 Attaway, William III:1419 At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft) II:796–797 Atticus: A Novel (Hansen) II:554, 555 At Weddings and Wakes (McDermott) I:83–84, II:859 Auchincloss, Louis I:84–86, II:922 The Rector of Justin I:85, III:1095–1096 August (Rossner) III:1119 Augusta Played (Cherry) I:251 Aurora Dawn (Wouk) III:1396 Auster, Paul I:86 The Invention of Solitude II:655–657 The Music of Chance I:86, II:936–938 The New York Trilogy I:86, II:960–962 Austin, Mary Hunter I:87–88 A Woman of Genius I:87, III:1383–1384 autobiographical novel(s) I:59 by Angelou I:59–60 The Bell Jar (Plath) I:129–130, 420, III:1049–1050 Bid Me to Live (H. D.) I:141–142 Black Boy (Wright) I:148–149, III:1397–1398, 1419 The Bondswoman’s Narrative (Crafts) III:1417 A Boy’s Own Story (E. White) I:172–173 Bread Givers (Yezierska) as I:179 Call It Sleep (H. Roth) as I:215 Christ in Concrete (di Donato) I:262–263, 359 The City of Trembling Leaves (W. V. T. Clark) I:271–272 Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323, III:1181 Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:438–440

1459

Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) I:98, 99, II:520–521, III:1419, 1420 HERmione (H. D.) II:573, 591–593 The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) I:266, II:629–630, III:1429 Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez) II:641–642, III:1427–1428 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou) I:59–60, 387 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) I:91, 102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 Look Homeward, Angel (T. C. Wolfe) II:785–786, III:1379 My Next Bride (K. Boyle) II:939–940 Night (Wiesel) II:963–964, III:1358 Nisei Daughter (Sone) II:970–971, III:1190 Our Nig (Wilson) II:1004–1006, III:1368, 1417 Pierre (Melville) as III:1044 Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, III:1087–1088, 1418 The Reef (Wharton) III:1101–1102 Ryder (Barnes) as I:106, II:967 Save Me the Waltz (Z. Fitzgerald) I:447–448, III:1141–1142 Singing in the Comeback Choir (Campbell) I:219 This Boy’s Life (Wolff) III:1262–1263, 1382 Tropic of Cancer (H. Miller) II:880, III:1282–1283 Tropic of Capricorn (H. Miller) II:880, III:1283–1285 The Woman Warrior (Kingston) I:36, 438, II:727, 728, III:1386–1388, 1422 Women (Bukowski) III:1390 by Yezierska III:1407

1460

INDEX

autobiography(ies). See also memoir(s) African-American III:1418 (See also slave narrative(s)) Latino III:1427–1428 vs. memoir II:648–649 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein) I:88–89, II:475, III:1207 Autobiography of an ExColoured Man, The (J. W. Johnson) I:89–91, II:689, 690, III:1418 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (Gaines) I:91–93, 346, II:474, 475, III:1327 Autobiography of My Mother, The (R. Brown) I:189 Autobiography of My Mother (Kincaid) II:719, 720 Avalanche (K. Boyle) I:170 Awaiting Trespass (Ty-Casper) III:1423 Awakening, The (Chopin) I:93–94, 261, 318, 323, 430, II:876, III:1216 Awkward Age, The (James) II:673 Azarian: An Episode (Spofford) III:1200

B Babbitt (Lewis) I:71, 95–96, 289, 365, 403, II:769, 770 Babel-17 (S. R. Delany) I:335 Baby of the Family (Ansa) I:66 Bachman, Richard. See King, Stephen Bacho, Peter I:96–97 Cebu I:96, 238–239, III:1423 Back Street (Hurst) II:644 Backward Place, A (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Bad Chili (Lansdale) II:746 Bad Man, A (Elkin) I:398 Bag of Bones (King) II:723 Bail Bondsman, The (Elkin) I:398, 399 Bailey’s Café (Naylor) II:957, 958 Baker, Nicholson I:97–98 Bakhtin, Mikhail I:50, III:1439

Baldwin, James I:vii, 98–99, II:847, 849, III:1297, 1419, 1420 Go Tell It on the Mountain I:98, 99, II:520–521, III:1419, 1420 Baldwin, Shauna Singh III:1425 Ballad of the Sad Café, The (McCullers) I:100–101, II:857, 858 Bambara, Toni Cade I:101, 219, III:1135–1136, 1420 The Salt Eaters I:101, III:1135–1137 Bamboo Bed, The (Eastlake) I:388, 389 Bamboo Dancers, The (Gonzalez) III:1423 Banana Bottom (McKay) II:861, 862 Band of Angels (Warren) I:101–103, III:1330 Banjo: A Story without a Plot (McKay) II:861 Banks, Russell I:103–104 Cloudsplitter, A Novel I:103, 276–278 Barbadian Americans I:186 Barbados (Marshall) II:840 Barbarians Are Coming, The (D. W. Louie) I:104–105, III:1422 Barbary Shore (Mailer) II:814 Barbary slave narratives I:26 Barn Blind (Smiley) III:1182 Barnes, Djuna I:105–106, II:967, III:1130, 1202 Nightwood I:105–106, II:967–968, III:1201 Ryder I:105, 106, II:967, III:1129–1130 Barr, Nevada III:1436 Barracks Thief, The (Wolff) I:106–108, III:1382 Barren Ground (Glasgow) II:499, 500 Barrett, Andrea I:108–109 The Voyage of the Narwhal I:108 Barrio Boy (Galarza) III:1427 Barth, John I:68, 109–110, 171, II:484 Barthelme, Donald I:viii, 97, 110–112 Snow White I:110, 111, III:1184–1185

writers compared to I:119, 294, II:484 Barthes, Roland I:442 baseball II:955–956, 957 Basket Case (Hiaasen) II:598–599 Bass, Rick I:112 Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison) I:31–32, 112–114 Battle-Ground, The (Glasgow) II:499 Baumgartner’s Bombay (A. Desai) III:1425 Bausch, Richard I:114–115 Baxter, Charles I:115–116 Bay of Souls (Stone) III:1216 Beach Music (Conroy) I:291 Beans of Egypt, Maine, The (Chute) I:116–118, 264 Bean Trees, The (Kingsolver) I:118, II:726 Bearheart (Vizenor) III:1317 Beast God Forgot to Invent, The (J. Harrison) II:560 Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, The (Donleavy) I:374 Beattie, Ann I:viii, 119–120, 218, 454 Chilly Scenes of Winter I:119, 256–257 Beat writers I:viii, 176, II:714, 880. See also Brautigan, Richard; Bukowski, Charles; Burroughs, William S.; Kerouac, Jack; Kesey, Ken Beautiful and the Damned, The (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:445, 446 Beautiful Room Is Empty, The (E. White) I:172 Beauvoir, Simone de I:27 Beckett, Samuel I:256, 257, II:495, 967, III:1179 Becky and Her Friends (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606 Beecher, Henry Ward I:403 Bee Season (Goldberg) I:120–121, II:511 BeetleLeg, The (Hawkes) II:566 Beet Queen, The (Erdrich) I:121–123, 404, 405 Before and After (R. Brown) I:190 Before My Time (Howard) II:633

Beggarman, Thief (Shaw) III:1162 Begley, Louis I:123–124 Behind That Curtain (Biggers) I:143 Beige Dolorosa, The (J. Harrison) II:559, 560 Being Invisible (Berger) I:137 Being There (Kosinski) I:124–126, II:735 Bel Canto (Patchett) III:1025–1026 Believers (Baxter) I:115 Bell, Madison Smartt I:126–127 Bellamy, Edward I:vii, 127–128, II:774 Looking Backward I:127, 128, II:786–788 Bellarosa Connection, The (Bellow) I:131 Bellefleur (Oates) II:978 Bell for Adano, A (Hersey) I:128–129, II:594–595 Bell Jar, The (Plath) I:129–130, 420, III:1049–1050 Bellow, Saul I:vii, 130–132, II:1011 The Adventures of Augie March I:11–13, 130, 131, 208 Henderson the Rain King I:131, II:588–589 Herzog I:130, 131, II:596–598 Seize the Day I:131, III:1150–1152 writers compared to I:68, 208, II:495, 879 Beloved (Morrison) I:132–134, 346, II:662, 795, 912, 913, III:1018, 1327, 1420 novels compared to II:662 Bendigo Shafter (L’Amour) II:739, 740 Bend Sinister (Nabokov) II:943 Benítez, Sandra I:viii, 35, 134–135 Benito Cereno (Melville) I:135–136, II:869 Bennett, Hal III:1420 Benson Murder Case, The (Van Dine) III:1308, 1434 Bent Twig, The (Fisher) I:444

INDEX Beowulf I:201, II:537, 538 Berger, Thomas Louis I:136–138 Bergson, Henri III:1284–1285 Bernard Carr trilogy (Farrell) I:424 Bernie Rhodenbarr series (Block) I:155–156 Berriault, Gina I:138–139 Berry, Wendell I:139–140 Best Friends (Berger) I:137 Bethel Merriday (Lewis) II:770 Betts, Doris I:140–141 Betty Zane (Grey) II:539 Between Two Worlds (Sinclair) II:744 Beulah Land (H. L. Davis) I:324 Beulah Quintet (Settle) III:1158 Beyond Desire (Anderson) I:58 biblical references in East of Eden (Steinbeck) I:389–392, III:1210 in Gilchrist’s work II:492 in The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) II:524 in A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines) II:766, 767 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:915–917 in The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) II:991 in The Pastures of Heaven (Steinbeck) III:1024 in Pet Sematary (King) III:1038 in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) III:1056 in The Red Tent (Diamant) I:353 in A River Runs Through It (Maclean) III:1109 in The Robber Bridegroom (Welty) III:1110 in The Slave (Singer) III:1179–1180 in The Winter of Our Discontent (Steinbeck) III:1374–1375 Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) (H. D.) I:141–143, II:573 Bierce, Ambrose II:561, 831

Bigamist’s Daughter, A (McDermott) II:859 Big as Life (Doctorow) I:364 Big Barn, The (Edmonds) I:395 Bigfoot Dreams (Prose) III:1079 Biggers, Earl Derr I:143–144, III:1434 The House Without a Key I:143, II:631–632 Big Gold Dream, The (Himes) II:605 Big Knockover, The (Hammett) II:551 Big Laugh, The (O’Hara) II:987 Big Money, The (Dos Passos) I:379, III:1301–1303 Big Rock Candy Mountain, The (Stegner) III:1205–1206 Big Sea, The (Hughes) II:975 Big Sleep, The (Chandler) I:144–145, 242, II:929, III:1435 Big Storm Knocked It Over, A (Colwin) I:283 Big Sur (Kerouac) II:714 Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (H. Miller) II:880 “Big Two-Hearted River” (Hemingway) II:516, 518 bildungsroman (coming-ofage novel) The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow) I:11–12 The Ambassadors (James) as I:39 An American Brat (Sidhwa) I:45, III:1170 American Son (Roley) I:50–51, III:1116–1117, 1423 Annie John (Kincaid) I:62–63, II:720 The Bell Jar (Plath) I:129–130 Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159–161 The Boston Adventure (Stafford) III:1202–1203 A Boy’s Own Story (E. White) I:172–173 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:185–186, II:840, III:1420

Call It Sleep (H. Roth) I:215–217, III:1120 The Cheer Leader (McCorkle) as I:250 The Cider House Rules (Irving) I:264 “creolized” I:63 Dandelion Wine (Bradbury) I:174, 319–320 The Floating World (Kadohata) I:449–450 The Ghost Writer (P. Roth) as II:487 Happy Days, Uncle Sergio (García-Ramis) III:1430 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) II:653 by Le Guin II:764 Little Women (Alcott) I:19–20, II:780, III:1334 Look Homeward, Angel (T. C. Wolfe) II:785–786, III:1379 Middlesex (Eugenides) I:408, II:878–879 The Morgesons (Stoddard) II:910 The Morning Watch (Agee) I:16 The Mountain Lion (Stafford) II:923–925, III:1203 Mountain Path (Arnow) I:71 Not Without Laughter (Hughes) II:974–976 Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote) I:228, II:1003–1004 postcolonial novel as I:45 The Red Pony (Steinbeck) III:1209–1210 A Separate Peace (Knowles) III:1156–1157 them (Oates) III:1256–1257 by Thomas III:1264 The Unvanquished (Faulkner) as III:1299 When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) III:1346–1347 Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Moore) III:1352–1353 The Wide, Wide World (Warner) as III:1329 Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) III:1362–1363, 1424

1461

by Yamanaka III:1400 The Yearling (Rawlings) III:1095, 1401–1402 Y no se lo tragó la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) (Rivera) as III:1408–1409 Billy Bathgate (Doctorow) I:364 Billy Budd, Sailor (Melville) I:145–147, II:869–870 Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (Kennedy) II:662, 712 Binding Chair; or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society, The (K. Harrison) II:560, 561 Bingo (R. M. Brown) I:190 Bingo Palace, The (Erdrich) I:403, 404 Bird Artist, The (Norman) I:147–148 Bird by Bird (Lamott) II:738 Bird’s Nest, The (Jackson) II:670, III:1335 Birds of America (M. McCarthy) II:854 Birth (Gale) II:477 Bitter Grounds (Benítez) I:134 Bitter Medicine (Paretsky) III:1020 Black Betty (Mosley) II:918 Black Boy (R. Wright) I:148–149, III:1397–1398, 1419 Black Camel, The (Biggers) I:143 Blacker the Berry, The (Thurman) III:1418 Black House, The (Theroux) III:1258 Black Is My True Love’s Hair (E. M. Roberts) III:1113 Black Mask I:242, 326, II:550, III:1435 Black Mountain Breakdown (Smith) III:1183 Black No More (Schuyler) III:1418 Black Notice (Cornwell) I:299 Black Oxen (Atherton) I:79, 149–151 Black Tarantula, the. See Acker, Kathy Black Thunder (Bontemps) I:164, III:1418 Black Water (Oates) II:977, 978

1462

INDEX

Blade Runner (film) I:362, 434 Blake, William III:1098, 1164 Blake or the Huts of America (M. Delany) III:1417 Blanche on the Lam (Neely) III:1436 Blatty, William Peter I:151–152 Bleeding Heart, The (French) I:467, 468 Blessed Assurance (Gurganus) II:543 Blessing Way, The (Hillerman) II:602 Bless Me, Última (Anaya) I:56, 152–154 Blind Man with a Pistol (Himes) II:605 Blithedale Romance, The (Hawthorne) I:154–155, II:569 Blix (Norris) II:973 Bloch, Robert II:796 Block, Lawrence I:155–157 Blood and Guts in High School (Acker) I:6, II:652 Bloodbrothers (Richard Price) III:1075 Bloodchild (O. E. Butler) I:202 Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (C. McCarthy) I:157–158, 256, II:852, III:1041 Blood of the Lamb, The (De Vries) I:349, 350 Blood on the Forge (Attaway) III:1419 Blood Oranges, The (Hawkes) II:566, 567 Bloodshed and Three Novellas (Ozick) II:1011 Blood Shot (Paretsky) III:1020 Bloodsmoor Romance, A (Oates) II:978 Blood Tie (Settle) III:1158, 1159 Bloom, Harold I:75, 157, II:891, III:1237 Blow Fly (Cornwell) I:299 Blue Angel: A Novel (Prose) III:1078, 1079 Bluebeard (Vonnegut) III:1320

Blue Calhoun (Reynolds Price) III:1074 Blue Diary, The (Hoffman) II:608 “Blue Hotel, The” (Crane) II:829 Blue in the Face (Auster) I:86 Blue Light (Mosley) II:918 Blue River (Canin) I:223 Blue Shoe, The (Lamott) II:738 blues novel II:918, III:1420 Bluest Eye, The (Morrison) I:158–159, 185, II:911 Blunderer, The (Highsmith) II:600 Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159–161, III:1400–1401, 1424 Boarding School, The (Foster) I:457 Bobby-Soxer, The (Calisher) I:214 Bodies Electric (C. Harrison) II:557, 558 Body Farm, The (Cornwell) I:299 Body of Evidence (Cornwell) I:298 Bondswoman’s Narrative, The (Crafts) III:1417 Bone (Ng) I:161–162, II:962, III:1422 Bone Setter’s Daughter, The (Tan) III:1243 Bonfire of the Vanities, The (T. Wolfe) I:162–164, III:1381 Bonney Family, The (Suckow) III:1230 Bontemps, Arna Wendell I:164–165, III:1327, 1340, 1418, 1420 Boo, The (Conroy) I:290 Boodin, John Elof III:1024 Book Class, The (Auchincloss) I:85 Book of Common Prayer, A (Didion) I:165–166, 358 Book of Daniel, The (Doctorow) I:166–167, 364 Book of Jamaica, The (Banks) I:103 Book of Lights, The (Potok) III:1067 Book of Ruth, The (Hamilton) II:549

Books of Friends (H. Miller) II:880 Boomerang (Hannah) II:553 Boston II:742, 743, 900, III:1105–1107 Boston (Sinclair) III:1173 Boston Adventure (Stafford) III:1202–1203 Bostonians, The (James) I:154, II:673 Boswell: A Modern Comedy (Elkin) I:397–398 Bottoms, The (Lansdale) II:746 Bourjaily, Vance II:563, 664 Bowen, Peter, Thunder Horse III:1266–1267 Bowles, Jane Auer I:167–168, II:857 Bowles, Paul Frederick I:168–169, II:857 The Sheltering Sky I:168–169, III:1165–1166 Boyle, Kay I:170–171, III:1391 My Next Bride I:170, II:939–941 Plagued by the Nightingale I:170, III:1045–1046 Boyle, T. C. I:171–172 boys’ books I:23–24, 75 Boy’s Own Story, A (E. White) I:172–173 Bradbury, Ray I:75, 173–175, 416–417 Dandelion Wine I:174, 319–320 Fahrenheit 451 I:174, 415–417, II:805, 843 The Martian Chronicles I:174, II:841–843 Bradley, Marion Zimmer I:175–176, 202 The Mists of Avalon I:175, II:894–895 Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra I:176, 360 When the Rainbow Goddess Wept I:176, III:1346–1347, 1423 Brand, Max III:1315 Brass Cupcake, The (J. MacDonald) II:809 Brautigan, Richard I:176–178 Trout Fishing in America I:176–177, III:1285–1286

Brave New World (Huxley) I:415, II:788, 805 Bravo, The (Cooper) I:293 Brazil (Marshall) II:840 Brazil (Updike) III:1300 Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179, III:1406–1407 Bread Upon the Waters (Shaw) III:1163 Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Capote) I:179–180, 228 Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye Blue Monday (Vonnegut) III:1320 Breast, The (P. Roth) III:1122 Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat) I:320 Breathing Lessons (A. Tyler) III:1292 Brethren, The (Grisham) II:541 Brewer, Gary I:196 Briar Rose (Coover) I:295 Bride, The (Sidhwa) III:1170 Bridegroom’s Body (K. Boyle) I:170 Bride’s House, The (Powell) III:1068 Bridge Between Us, The (Shigekuni) III:1424 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The (Wilder) I:180–182, III:1360, 1361 Bridge of Years, The (Sarton) III:1140 Bridgeport Bus (Howard) II:632–633 Bridges at Toko-Ri, The (Michener) II:877 Brighten the Corner Where You Are (Chappell) I:244 Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney) I:182–183, II:859, 860 Brightness Falls (McInerney) II:860 Bright Procession (Buck) I:194 Bright Shadow (Thomas) III:1263, 1264 Brimming Cup, The (Fisher) I:444–445 British Guiana (Marshall) II:840 Brodkey, Harold I:183 Broken Place, The (M. Shaara) III:1161

INDEX Bromfield, Louis I:183–185 Bronc People, The (Eastlake) I:388 Brook Evans (Glaspell) II:501 Brooklyn (Marshall) II:840 Brookner, Anita I:7 Brooks, Cleanth I:75, III:1299, 1330 Brooks, Gwendolyn I:185, III:1327 Maud Martha I:185, II:848–850 Brotherly Love (Dexter) I:351 Brothers (publisher) III:1419 Brothers and Sisters (Campbell) I:219 Brother to Dragons: A Tale in Verse and Voices (Warren) I:102–103 Brown, Charles Brockden I:187–188 Ormond I:187, II:1000–1003 Wieland I:187, III:1355–1357 Brown, Dan I:188–189 Brown, John I:276–277 Brown, Rita Mae I:189–190 Rubyfruit Jungle I:189, 190, III:1125–1127, 1309, 1310 Southern Discomfort I:190, III:1195–1196 Venus Envy I:190, III:1309–1310 Brown, Rosellen I:190–192, II:709 Brown, William Hill, The Power of Sympathy I:vi, 456, III:1070–1071 Brown, William Wells I:192–193 Clotel I:102, 192, 274–276, II:660, III:1368, 1417–1418 Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:185–187, II:840, III:1420 Brown Girl in the Ring (Hopkinson) III:1420 Bruchac, Joseph III:1439–1440 Bubba Ho-Tep (Lansdale) II:746 Buccaneers, The (Wharton) III:1343

Buck, Pearl S. I:vii, 193–195, II:516 The Good Earth I:193, 194, II:516–517, 708 Bucking the Sun (Doig) I:370 Budding Prospects (T. C. Boyle) I:171 Buffalo Girls (McMurtry) II:864, 865 Buffalo Woman (Dorothy Johnson) II:688, 689 Builders, The (Glasgow) II:500 Build-Up, The (W. C. Williams) III:1365, 1366 Bukowski, Charles I:195–196, II:552 Ham on Rye I:196, II:552–553 Women I:196, II:552, III:1390–1391 Bullet Park (Cheever) I:250 Bulosan, Carlos I:196–197 America is in the Heart I:39–41, 196, 197 Bulwark, The (Dreiser) I:383 Bungalow, The (Freed) I:466 Bunk (Woodward) I:403 Burden of Proof, The (Turow) III:1288, 1289 Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, The (Block) I:156 Buried Treasure, A (E. M. Roberts) III:1113 Burke, Kenneth I:216 Burning (Johnson) II:687 Burn Marks (Paretsky) III:1020 Burns, Robert II:984 Burr (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 Burroughs, Edgar Rice I:197–198 Burroughs, William S. I:viii, 198–200, II:713, 714, 831, III:1139 Junky I:198, II:704–705 The Naked Lunch I:198, II:705, 946–947 writers compared to I:6, 168, 176, II:880, 959 Bury the Dead (Shaw) III:1162 Busch, Frederick I:200–202 business culture I:95–96, II:770 But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (Loos) II:790

Butler, Octavia Estelle I:175, 202–203, III:1274, 1420 Kindred I:202, II:720–722, III:1327, 1420 Butler, Robert Olen I:203–204 Butterfield 8 (O’Hara) II:898, 987 Butterfly, The (Cain) I:210 By Love Possessed (Cozzens) I:304–305 By the Light of the Soul (Freeman) I:467 By the Rivers of Babylon (DeMille) I:343 By the Shores of Gitchee Gumee (Janowitz) II:679

C Cabala, The (Wilder) III:1361 Caballero: An Historical Novel (Mireles) II:885 Cab Called Reliable, A (P. Kim) III:1425 Cabell, James Branch I:205–206, II:499 Cable, George Washington I:206–207, II:620 Madame Delphine I:206, II:811–812 Cabot Wright Begins (Purdy) III:1081 Cactus Thorn (Austin) I:87 Cadillac Jack (McMurtry) II:864 Cahan, Abraham I:vii, 207–209 The Rise of David Levinsky I:207, 208, III:1104–1105 Cain, James M. I:209–210, II:585 The Postman Always Rings Twice I:209, III:1065–1067 Caine Mutiny, The (Wouk) I:210–212, III:1370, 1395, 1396 Calamity Town (Queen) III:1435 Caldwell, Erskine I:212–213 God’s Little Acre I:212, II:507–508 Tobacco Road I:212–213, II:507, III:1269–1270

1463

California. See also Hollywood; Stegner, Wallace; Kerouac, Jack in American Son (Roley) I:50, III:1116–1117 in Atherton’s work I:79 in Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley) I:349 in Didion’s work I:358 in The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) II:523–524, III:1210 in Harte’s work II:561–562 in McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norris) II:867–868 in Mosley’s work II:917, 918 in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Cain) III:1066 in Steinbeck’s novels III:1209, 1210 in Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) III:1274, 1275 Californians, The (Atherton) I:79 Calisher, Hortense I:213–215 Call, The (Hersey) II:595 Callahan, S. Alice III:1438 Call It Sleep (H. Roth) I:215–217, III:1120 Call of the Wild, The (London) I:217–218, II:783, III:1347, 1348 “camera eye” technique I:379, III:1302–1303 Cameron, Peter I:218–219 Campbell, Bebe Moore I:219–220 Campbell, Joseph I:339 Camus, Albert I:168, 282, II:918, 1008, III:1062, 1066, 1420 “Canary” Murder Case, The (Van Dine) I:220–221, III:1308 Cane (Toomer) I:221–223, III:1274, 1418, 1420 Canin, Ethan I:223–224 Cannery Row (Steinbeck) I:223–226, III:1029, 1209, 1210 Cannibal, The (Hawkes) II:566, III:1328 Cannibal Galaxy, The (Ozick) II:1011

1464

INDEX

Cannibal in Manhattan, A (Janowitz) II:678–679 Cannibals and Missionaries (M. McCarthy) II:854 Canticle for Leibowitz, A (W. M. Miller) I:226–228, II:883 Cantor, Jay I:68 Cao, Ian III:1426 capitalism. See also class conflict; consumerism; materialism in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–65 in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) I:362 in Dreiser’s novels III:1176 in Fight Club (Palahniuk) I:441–442, III:1016 in Gaddis’s work II:473–474 in The Godfather (Puzo) II:503, 504, III:1084 in JR (Gaddis) II:697 in Lanny Budd series (Sinclair) II:744, 745 in Native Son (R. Wright) II:952 Rand on III:1093, 1094 in Sinclair’s novels III:1172, 1173 in U.S.A. Trilogy (Dos Passos) III:1302–1303 in White Fang (London) III:1348 Capote, Truman I:228–229, II:593, 734, 761, 814, III:1272, 1311 Breakfast at Tiffany’s I:179–180, 228 In Cold Blood I:228–229, II:649–650, 789 Other Voices, Other Rooms I:228, II:1003–1004 Captain Caution (K. Roberts) III:1114 Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop, The (Garland) II:482 Captains Outrageous (Lansdale) II:746 Caramelo (Cisneros) I:266, III:1429 Caravans (Michener) II:877 Cardinal of the Kremlin, The (Clancy) I:267 Careless Love (A. Adams) I:7

Caribbean Americans III:1420, 1427, 1428. See also Afro-Caribbean Americans; Cuban Americans; Dominican Americans; Puerto Ricans Carol (Highsmith) II:600 Carolina Moon (McCorkle) II:855 Caroline’s Daughters (A. Adams) I:8 Carpenter’s Gothic (Gaddis) II:473–474 Carr, John Dickson III:1435 Carrie (King) I:229–231, II:723 Carroll, Lewis II:781 Carry Me Across the Water (Canin) I:224 Carter, John Franklin II:667 Carver, Raymond I:59, 119, 218, 454, II:707 Cary, Joyce I:82 Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The (Lovecraft) II:796, 797 Case of Need, A (Crichton) I:308 Case of the Velvet Claws, The (E. S. Gardner) III:1436 Casey, John I:231–232 Cassady, Neal II:714 Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives (Lewis) II:770 Castaway (Cozzens) I:304 Castedo, Elena I:232 Castillo, Ana I:35, III:1427 So Far from God III:1187–1188, 1429 Castle Keep (Eastlake) I:388–389 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger) I:232–234, III:1133 comparisons to I:129, 182, II:553, III:1049 Holden Caulfield character I:232–233, III:1133 comparisons to I:104, 250, II:491, 714, 728 Catch Trap, The (Bradley) I:175 Catch-22 (Heller) I:234–235, II:582, 583, III:1328 novels compared to I:210, II:593, III:1273 Cathedral (DeMille) I:343

Cather, Willa I:87, 235–238, II:502, 613, 684 A Lost Lady I:235, 236, II:793–794 My Ántonia I:235, 236, II:938–939 O Pioneers! I:235, 236, II:995–996 The Song of the Lark I:235, 236, III:1191–1193 writers compared to I:79, 115, 395, III:1230 Catherine Carmier (Gaines) II:475 Catherine Wheel, The (Stafford) III:1202, 1203 Catholicism. See also Christianity in The Company of Women (Gordon) I:284–285 in A Flag for Sunrise (Stone) III:1215, 1216 in Gordon’s (C.) work II:518 in Gordon’s (M. C.) work II:519 in Hassler’s work II:564 in Morte D’Urban (Powers) II:914–915 in Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1225–1228 Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut) III:1320 Cattle Killing, The (Wideman) III:1354 Cat Who Walks through Walls: A Comedy of Manners (Heinlein) II:580, 581 Cause of Death (Cornwell) I:299 Cavalier, The (Cable) I:206 Cavedweller (Allison) I:31, 32 Cebu (Bacho) I:96, 238–239, III:1423 Celestial Navigation (A. Tyler) III:1292 censorship of The “Genius” (Dreiser) I:383 of The Group (M. McCarthy) II:542 in The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) II:842–843 patronage of AfricanAmerican writers and II:975–976

and Ryder (Barnes) I:106, III:1129 of Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) III:1177–1178 of Tropic of Cancer (Miller) III:1282, 1283 Centaur, The (Updike) III:1300 Centennial (Michener) II:877 “central consciousness” technique II:672 Ceremony (Silko) I:29, 56, 239–240, II:623, III:1170, 1171, 1439, 1440 Certain Age, A (Janowitz) II:678, 679 Certificate, The (Singer) III:1175 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung I:240–241, 360 Dictee I:240, 356–358, III:1425 Chabon, Michael I:241–242 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay I:36–38, 241 Chad Hanna (Edmonds) I:395 Chamber, The (Grisham) II:540–541 Chan, Jeffrey Paul I:439 Chancers: A Novel (Vizenor) III:1317 Chandler, Raymond I:144, 196, 242–243, II:585, 810, 821, 929, III:1435 The Big Sleep I:144–145, 242, II:929, III:1435 Philip Marlowe character I:144, 155, 242, 243, II:929, III:1435 writers compared to I:347, II:605, 810, 917, 929, III:1288 Changing the Past (Berger) I:137 Chappell, Fred I:243–244, II:796 Charivari (Hawkes) II:566 Charley Bland (Settle) III:1159 Charlie Chan (character) I:143, 258, II:631, III:1280, 1434 Charlie Chan Carries On (Biggers) I:143

INDEX Charlotte’s Daughter: or, The Three Orphans (Rowson) III:1124 Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (Rowson) I:vi–vii, 244–247, 456, III:1124, 1125 Charmed Life, A (M. McCarthy) II:854 Charming Billy (McDermott) II:799, 859 Charm School, The (DeMille) I:343 Charms for the Easy Life (Gibbons) II:491 Chase, Joan I:247–248 Chastain, Thomas II:480 Chávez, Denise I:248–249 Face of an Angel I:248, 413–415 Cheer Leader, The (McCorkle) I:249–250, II:855 Cheever, John I:viii, 223, 250–251, II:544 Falconer I:250–251, 417–418 writers compared to I:36, 283, II:879, 907, III:1204 Cheever, Susan I:251 Cheng, Terrence III:1422 Cheong, Fiona III:1426 Cherokee people II:498, III:1082–1084 Cherry, Kelly I:251–252 Chesapeake (Michener) II:877, III:1328 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell I:vii, 252–254 The House Behind the Cedars I:252, 253, II:619–620, III:1418 The Marrow of Tradition I:252, 253, II:838–840, III:1418 Chesterton, G. K. III:1435 Chicago I:26–27, 424, II:629, 830, III:1118, 1224–1225, 1226, 1228 Chicago Loop (Theroux) III:1257, 1258 Chicago School I:27 Chicana/Chicano. See under Mexican-American Chicano (term) III:1429 Chief Joseph II:515 child, death of. See under death

Child, Lydia Maria Francis I:254–255, II:647, 648, 672, 689, 757 Child-Buyer, The (Hersey) II:594, 595 childhood. See also adolescence; bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel) in A Boy’s Own Story (E. White) I:173 in James’s novels II:673 in Millhauser’s work II:883–884 in The Prince and the Pauper (Twain) III:1076 in This Boy’s Life (Wolff) III:1262–1263, 1382 in To Kill a Mockingbird (H. Lee) III:1271, 1272 in What Maisie Knew (James) II:673, III:1345–1347 in White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349 Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses, The (the Black Tarantula) I:6 Child of God (C. McCarthy) I:255–256, II:852 Child of My Heart (McDermott) II:859 Children, The (Wharton) III:1343 Children of the Albatross (Nin) II:968, 969 Children of Violence novels (Lessing) II:726 children’s literature. See also young people’s fiction by Alcott I:19 Little Women (Alcott) I:19–20, II:780 by Lowry II:805 The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster) III:1039 by Phelps III:1040 by Porter (C.) III:1058 The Prince and the Pauper (Twain) as III:1076 Chilly Scenes of Winter (Beattie) I:119, 256–257 Chimera (Barth) I:109 Chin, Frank I:257–258 on Asian-American literature I:439, II:708, 989, III:1278, 1391

Donald Duk I:257–258, 373–374, III:1422 and Kingston I:258, II:728, III:1281 China. See also ChineseAmerican novels; Chinese American in Buck’s work I:193, 194 in The Good Earth (Buck) I:194, II:516–517 in Ha’s work II:546 in The Joy Luck Club (Tan) II:696 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730 in Lord’s work II:791 novels set in III:1422 in Tan’s work III:1243 in Waiting (Ha) II:546, III:1322–1324, 1422 Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life, The (Fauset) I:258–260, 428 China Boy (G. Lee) III:1422 China Men (Kingston) II:727, 728 China Sky (Buck) I:194 Chinese-American novel(s) III:1421–1422. See also Chin, Frank; Chu, Louis Hing; Ha Jin; Kingston, Maxine Hong; Ng, Fae Myenne; Sui Sin Far; Tan, Amy; Watanna, Onoto; Wong, Jade Snow; Wong, Shawn Hsu Chinese Americans in The Barbarians Are Coming (D. W. Louie) I:104–105, III:1422 in Bone (Ng) I:161–162, II:962, III:1422 and Charlie Chan I:143, 258, II:631, III:1280, 1434 in Chin’s work I:257–258 in Chu’s work I:263–264 in Donald Duk (Chin) I:257–258, 373–374, III:1422 in Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu) I:263, 264, 392–394, III:1422 in Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:438–440 in Jen’s work II:682–683 in The Joy Luck Club (Tan) II:696–697, 730, III:1422

1465

in Kingston’s work I:438, II:727–728 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730–731 in Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) II:682, 902–904, III:1422 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Sui Sin Far) II:931–933, III:1232, 1422 in Ng’s work II:962–963 novels by and about III:1421–1422 representations of I:143, 258, 439, II:631, III:1279, 1280, 1434 in Sui Sin Far’s work II:931–932, III:1231–1232, 1421–1422 in Tan’s work II:696, 697, 730, III:1243 in Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) III:1279–1281 in Typical American (Jen) III:1295–1296 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) II:727, 728, III:1386–1388, 1422 in Wong’s (S. H.) work III:1391 Chinese-American women in Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:439–440 in The Joy Luck Club (Tan) II:696–697 in Kingston’s work II:727–728 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730, 731 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Far) II:932–933 in Typical American (Jen) III:1295–1296 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) II:727, 728, III:1386–1388 Chinese Parrot, The (Biggers) I:143 Chippewa mythology. See Anishinabe mythology Chocolate Soldier, A (Colter) I:282 Choi, Susan I:260, III:1425 Choices (Settle) III:1159 Choke (Palahniuk) III:1014

1466

INDEX

Chopin, Kate I:vii, 260–261, II:774 The Awakening I:93–94, 261, 318, 323, 430, II:876, III:1216 writers compared to I:419, II:774, 876, III:1031 Chosen, The (Potok) I:261–262 Chosen Place, The Timeless People, The (Marshall) II:840 Christianity. See also biblical references; Catholicism; religion in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:64, 65 in Christ in Concrete (di Donato) I:263 in Elmer Gantry (Lewis) I:402–403, II:770 in Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) II:530–531 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:774 in The Mists of Avalon (Bradley) II:894–895 in A River Runs Through It (Maclean) III:1108–1109 in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) III:1195 in The Winter of Our Discontent (Steinbeck) III:1374–1375 in Wise Blood (F. O’Connor) III:1376–1378 Christ in Concrete (di Donato) I:262–263, 359 Christ the Lord (Rice) III:1103 Chu, Louis Hing I:263–264, III:1391 Eat a Bowl of Tea I:263, 264, 392–394, III:1422 Chuang Hua III:1422 Churchill, Ward II:827 Chute, Carolyn I:264 The Beans of Egypt, Maine I:116–118, 264 Merry Men I:264, II:874–875 Cider House Rules, The (Irving) I:264–266, II:663, 664, 665 cinquième fils, Le (The Fifth Son) (Wiesel) III:1358 Cimarron (Ferber) I:435

Circular Staircase, The (Rinehart) III:1434 Cisneros, Sandra I:35, 36, 266–267, III:1427, 1429 The House on Mango Street I:266, II:629–630, III:1400, 1429 Cities of the Interior (Nin) II:968 Cities of the Plain (C. McCarthy) I:34, II:852–853 Cities of the Red Night (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 City and the Pillar, The (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 City Boy (Wouk) III:1396 City of Broken Hearts (Canin) I:223 City of Glass (Auster) I:86, II:960–962 City of God (Doctorow) I:365 City of Illusions (Le Guin) II:764 City of Light (Colter) I:282 City of Your Final Destination (Cameron) I:218 Civil War in Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) I: 1–4 in Cold Mountain (Frazier) I:463–464 in Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) II:513–514, 896 in The Killer Angels (M. Shaara) III:1161 novels before and after I:vii in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus) II:989, 990 in The Red Badge of Courage III:1096–1097 in Shaara’s (J.) novels III:1160 in The Unvanquished (Faulkner) III:1298–1299 Civil Wars (R. Brown) I:190 Cixous, Helen I:434 Clam Shell, The (Settle) III:1159 Clancy, Tom I:188, 267–269 The Hunt for Red October I:267, 268, II:642–643 Clark, Carol Higgins I:269–270 Clark, John E. III:1229

Clark, Mary Higgins I:270–271 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg I:271–272, II:613 The Ox-Bow Incident I:271, 272, II:554, 1008–1011 Clarke, Arthur C. I:75, 416, II:580 Claros varones de Belken: Fair Gentlemen of Belken County (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606 class conflict. See also middle class; upper class; working class/poor in Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:28–29 in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–65 in The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Chute) I:116–118 in The Chinaberry Tree (Fauset) I:259 in Deephaven (Jewett) I:333 in hard-boiled detective novels II:929 in Martin Eden (London) II:845 in Meridian (Walker) II:873–874 in Salome of the Tenements (Yezierska) III:1134–1135 in To Have and Have Not (Hemingway) III:1270–1271 in Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) III:1362, 1363 Clavell, James I:272–273 Clay’s Ark (O. E. Butler) I:202 Clay Walls (Kim) I:273–274, II:719, III:1425 Clear and Present Danger (Clancy) I:267–268 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain, Mark Clement, Catherine I:434 Client, The (Grisham) II:540, 541 Clockers (Richard Price) III:1075 Clock Winder, The (A. Tyler) III:1292 Clock without Hands (McCullers) II:858 Close Quarters (Heinemann) II:579, III:1013

Close Relations (Isaacs) II:666 Closing Arguments (Busch) I:201 Closing Time (Heller) II:583 Clotel; or the President’s Daughter (W. W. Brown) I:102, 192, 274–276, II:660, III:1368, 1417–1418 Cloud Chamber (Dorris) I:378 Cloudsplitter, A Novel (Banks) I:103, 276–278 Clue, The (C. Wells) III:1434 Clyde Fans (Seth) II:851 Coben, Harlan I:278 Coeur d’Alene people III:1440 Coffin Tree, The (Law-Yone) III:1425 Cogewea, the Half-Blood (Mourning Dove) I:278–280, II:925, III:1438 Cold Mountain (Frazier) I:27, 463–464, II:545 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor III:1330 Colonel’s Dream, The (Chesnutt) I:252, 253 colonialism. See also postcolonial novel(s) in Annie John (Kincaid) I:62, 63, II:720 in At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Matthiessen) I:82 and Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer II: 684–686 in The Mosquito Coast (Theroux) II:919–920 in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) III:1055–1058 in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) III:1347 in Wind from an Enemy Sky (McNickle) III:1369–1370 Colorado Kid (King) II:724 Color Purple, The (A. Walker) I:280–282, III:1251, 1325, 1326, 1420 Colter, Cyrus I:282–283 Colton, David I:37 Colwin, Laurie I:283 Comanche Moon (McMurtry) II:865

INDEX Come and Get It (Ferber) I:435 Comedy: American Style (Fauset) I:258, 428–429 Comfort Me with Apples (De Vries) I:350 Comfort Woman (Keller) I:283–284, II:711–712, 761, III:1424 “comfort women” I:283–284, II:761, III:1424 comic books I:37, 38, II:551, 850, 851, III:1199 Coming Back to Me (Leavitt) II:758 coming-of-age novel. See bildungsroman (coming-ofage novel) communism I:215, III:1120, 1397. See also anticommunism; socialism Company of Women, The (M. C. Gordon) I:284–285, II:519 Company She Keeps, The (M. McCarthy) II:854 Complete Works (Melville) I:145 Composition of Tender Is the Night, The (Bruccoli) III:1253 Compromising Positions (Isaacs) II:666 Conan Doyle, Arthur II:821 Condominium (J. MacDonald) II:809 Condominium, The (Elkin) I:398 Condon, Richard, The Manchurian Candidate II:827–829 Condor Passes, The (Grau) II:529 Confederacy of Dunces, A (Toole) III:1273 Confederate General from Big Sur, A (Brautigan) I:177 Conference of Victims (Berriault) I:139 Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live with the Beasts (Bukowski) II:552 Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron) I:276, 285–287, 346, III:1228–1229 Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, The (Melville) I:287–289, II:869

Conflicting Stories (Ammons) I:178 Congo (Crichton) I:308 Conjure Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem, The (Fisher) III:1418 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A (Twain) III:1290 Connell, Evan S., Jr. I:289–290 Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge I:289, 290, II:685, 930–931 Connoisseur, The (Connell) I:289 Conqueror, The (Atherton) I:79 Conrad, Joseph I:3, 82, 292, 445, II:532, 546, 657, 706, 911, III:1345 Heart of Darkness I:126, 368 writers compared to III:1258, 1260 Conroy, Pat I:290–291, 300 Consenting Adults; Or, the Duchess Will Be Furious (De Vries) I:350 Consider This, Senora (Doerr) I:367 conspiracy narratives II:827–829, III:1307–1308 consumerism. See also materialism; Oates, Joyce Carol in American Psycho (Ellis) I:48 in Bonfire of the Vanities (T. Wolfe) I:162–163 in The Book of Daniel (Doctorow) I:167 in Fight Club (Palahniuk) I:441 in JR (Gaddis) II:697–699 in Snow White (Barthelme) III:1185 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1351 in Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) III:1363 Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Lives North and South (Hopkins) II:615–616, III:1418 Continental Drift, The (Banks) I:103

“continuous present” II:818 cookbooks III:1436–1437 Cooler by the Lake (Heinemann) II:579 Cooley, Martha I:291–292 Archivist, The I:291–292 Cool Million, A (N. West) I:327, III:1341 Cooper, James Fenimore I:vii, 292–294, II:750, 755, 757, 885, III:1391 The Deerslayer I:293, 334–335, II:755, 756 The Last of the Mohicans I:187, 292, 334, 335, II:749–751, 755, 756–757 The Leatherstocking Tales I:vii, 187, 292, 293, 334, II:755–757, 852, 1010 Natty Bumppo character I:vii, 137, 292, 334–335, II:749–750, 755, 756, 757, 811 writers compared to I:395, II:539, 614, 750, 757, 865, 999, III:1149, 1260 Coover, Robert I:68, 294–295, II:484, 908 Cop Hater (McBain) III:1436 Copperhead, The (Frederic) I:465 Coquette, The (Foster) I:vii, 295–298, 456, 457 Cora (Suckow) III:1230–1231 Cornwell, Patricia I:298–299 Corrections, The (Franzen) I:299–301, 462–463 Corregidora (G. Jones) I:301–302, II:693 Corso, Gregory I:168, II:547 Cotton Comes to Harlem (Himes) II:605 Coughlin, Charles E. II:667 Counterlife, The (P. Roth) I:53, 54, II:489, III:1053, 1062, 1121, 1123, 1131, 1416 Country Doctor, A (Jewett) II:683 Countrymen of Bones (R. O. Butler) I:203 Country of the Pointed Firs, The (Jewett) I:302–304, II:683–684 Country People (Suckow) III:1230

1467

Country Place (Petry) III:1036, 1037 Coup, The (Updike) III:1300 Couples (Updike) III:1300, 1301 Covenant, The (Michener) II:877 Cowley, Malcolm I:103, 329, III:1253 Coxe, George Harmon III:1435 Cozzens, James Gould I:210, 304–305, II:835 Cracking India (Sidhwa) III:1170, 1425 Crafts, Hannah III:1417 Craig, Georgiana Ann Randolph. See Rice, Craig Crane, Hart II:518 Crane, Stephen I:vii, 16, 305–307, 465, II:829, 973, III:1037, 1260, 1397 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets I:305, 306, II:774, 812–814 The Red Badge of Courage I:210, 305, 306, II:593, III:1096–1098 Crawford, F. Marion I:307–308 Crawford, John II:496 Crazed (Ha) II:546 Crazy Hunter, The (K. Boyle) I:170 Crazy in Berlin (Berger) I:137 Crazy Kill, The (Himes) II:605 Cream of the Jest, The (Cabell) I:205 Creation (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 Creative Evolution (Bergson) III:1284–1285 Crichton, Michael I:188, 308–309 crime novel(s) III:1434. See also detective novel(s); legal thriller(s); murder; murder mysteries by Cain I:209–210 In Cold Blood (Capote) I:228–229, II:649–650, 789 The Executioner’s Song (Mailer) I:408–410, II:814, 815 by Highsmith II:599–600

1468

INDEX

crime novel(s) (continued) Monster (Myers) II:905–906 The Postman Always Rings Twice (Cain) I:209, III:1065–1066 World Enough and Time (Warren) III:1394–1395 Crisis I:428, III:1419 Criticism and Fiction (Howells) I:307 Crooked Little Heart (Lamott) II:738 Crosby, Harry II:940 Cross, Amanda II:577, 578, III:1436. See also Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross and the Arrow, The (Maltz) II:823 Crossing, The (C. McCarthy) I:34, II:852 Crossings (Chuang) III:1422 Crossing to Safety (Stegner) I:309–310, III:1206 Crow Eaters, The (Sidhwa) III:1170 Crown of Columbus, The (Dorris and Erdrich) I:377, 378, 404–405, III:1440 Cruel and Unusual (Cornwell) I:298–299 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon) I:310–312, III:1085 Cry to Heaven (Rice) III:1103 Cuba I:381, 382, II:478, III:1428, 1431 Cuban-American novel(s) III:1427, 1431–1432. See also Garcia, Cristina; Hijuelos, Oscar Cuban Americans I:380–382, II:477–478, 601, 825–826, III:1431–1432 Cujo (King) II:723, 724 Cullen, Countee I:164, 428, III:1274, 1340 Cummings, E. E. I:312–313 Enormous Room, The I:312, 401–402 Cummins, Maria Susanna I:313–314 Cunningham, Michael I:314, II:618 The Hours I:314, 454, II:618–619

Cup of Gold: A Life of Henry Morgan, Buccaneer (Steinbeck) III:1209 Cure for Dreams, A (Gibbons) II:491 Current Climate, The (Friedman) I:469 Custom of the Country, The (Wharton) I:315–316, 366, II:760, III:1343 “cut-up” technique I:6, 199 cyberpunk II:958–960, III:1085

D Dagon (Chappell) I:243, II:796 Dahlgren (S. R. Delany) I:335, III:1420 Dahomean, The (Yerby) I:317–318, III:1406 Dain Curse, The (Hammett) II:550 Daisy Miller: A Study (James) I:38, 42, 318–319, II:672, 673 novels compared to I:169, II:793 Dalva (J. Harrison) II:559 Damascus Gate (Stone) III:1216 Damballah (Wideman) III:1354 Damnation of Theron Ware, The (Frederic) I:243, 464 Dance at the Slaughterhouse, A (Block) I:156 Dancers in the Scalp House (Eastlake) I:388 Dancing at the Rascal Fair (Doig) I:370, 371 Dandelion Wine (Bradbury) I:174, 319–320 Dangerous Friend, A (Just) II:705, 706 Dangling Man (Bellow) I:11–13, 131 Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves II:624–625 Dannay, Frederic III:1434, 1435 Dante I:376, 377 Inferno II:778, 968 Danticat, Edwidge I:320–321 The Farming of Bones I:320, 422–423

Darfsteller, The (W. Miller) II:882, 883 Dark Arena, The (Puzo) III:1084 Dark Laughter (Anderson) I:58, 321–323, II:585 Darkness at Ingraham’s Crest, A (Yerby) I:318, III:1406 Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (Vizenor) III:1317 Darkover novels (Bradley) I:175 Dark Tower, The (King) II:724 Dark Wind, The (Hillerman) II:603 Darling, The (Banks) I:104 Darwinism I:vii, 18, 93, II:499, III:1347, 1348 Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323, III:1181 Daughter of the Morning, A (Gale) II:477 Daughter of the Snows, A (London) II:783 Daughter of the Vine, A (Atherton) I:79 Daughters (Marshall) II:840–841 Davidar, David III:1425 Da Vinci Code, The (D. Brown) I:188, 189 Davis, H. L. I:324–325, II:613 Honey in the Horn I:324, II:613–614 Davis, Rebecca Blaine Harding I:vii, 325–326, 371, II:477 Life in the Iron Mills I:325, II:773–775 Davis, Richard Harding I:325, 326–327 Davita’s Harp (Potok) III:1067 Dawn (Wiesel) III:1357, 1358 Dawn Land (Bruchac) III:1439 Day, Dorothy II:518 Daybreakers, The (L’Amour) II:740 Day Late and a Dollar Short (McMillan) II:862, 863 Day of the Dead (Jance) II:676

Day of the Locust, The (N. West) I:327–330, II:754, III:1341 Dazzle (Krantz) II:736, 737 Dead Father, The (Barthelme) I:110, 111 Dead Letter, The (Regester) III:1434 Deadlock (Paretsky) III:1020 Deadly Piece, The (Hamill) II:548 Dead Man’s Walk (McMurtry) II:865 Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World (Vizenor) III:1317 Deadwood (Dexter) I:351 Dead Zone, The (King) II:723, 724 Dean’s December, The (Bellow) I:131 Dean’s List, The (Hassler) II:564 Dear James (Hassler) II:564 Dear Rafe (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606 death of child in The Lovely Bones (Sebold) II:799–800, III:1148 in Pet Sematary (King) III:1038–1039 in The Shawl (Ozick) III:1164 in Sabbath’s Theater (P. Roth) III:1132 in The Things They Carried (O’Brien) III:1260–1261 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1350, 1351 Death Comes for the Archbishop (Cather) I:235, 236 Death in a Tenured Position (Heilbrun) II:577 Death in China, A (Hiaasen) II:598 Death in the Afternoon (Hemingway) I:422 Death in the Family, A (Agee) I:16, 330–331 Death Is a Lonely Business (Bradbury) I:174 Death of a Man (K. Boyle) I:170 Death of Jim Loney, The (Welch) III:1336

INDEX Death of Vishnu, The (Suri) III:1238, 1425 Death Pulls a Doublecross (Block) I:155 Death, Sleep, & the Traveler (Hawkes) II:567 Debt of Honor (Clancy) I:268 Deception (P. Roth) I:53, III:1053 Deception Point (D. Brown) I:188 Decked (C. H. Clark) I:269 Deep Blue Good-by, The (J. MacDonald) I:331–332, II:809 Deepening Stream, The (Fisher) I:444 Deep Green Sea, The (R. O. Butler) I:203, 204 Deephaven (Jewett) I:332–334, II:683 Deer Park (Mailer) II:814 Deer Pasture, The (Bass) I:112 Deerslayer; or the First Warpath, The (Cooper) I:293, 334–335, II:755, 756 Deer Woman narratives II:527 Defoe, Daniel I:89, 137, 431, II:679 De Havilland Hand (Gilchrist) II:493 De Kruif, Paul I:72 Delany, Martin, Blake or the Huts of America III:1417 Delany, Samuel R. I:335–336, III:1274, 1420 Deleuze, Gilles I:6 DeLillo, Don I:336–338 Libra I:337, II:771–773, III:1041 Mao II I:337–338, II:832 White Noise I:337, III:1350–1352 writers compared to I:68, II:879, 907 Deliverance (Dickey) I:338–339, 355 Dell, Floyd I:340–341, II:501 Delta Wedding (Welty) I:341–342, II:791–792, III:1338 DeMille, Nelson I:342–344 Democracy (Didion) I:358, III:1051

Democracy: An American Novel (H. Adams) I:9, 344–345 Demon, The (Selby) III:1152 Depression. See Great Depression Desai, Anita III:1425 Desai, Kiran III:1425 Descendant, The (Glasgow) II:499 Descent, The (Berriault) I:139 desert, in The Sheltering Sky (P. Bowles) III:1165–1166 Desert Heat (Jance) II:676 Desert Rose, The (McMurtry) II:864 Designs of the Night Sky (Glancy) II:498 Desirable Daughters (Mukherjee) II:933, III:1425 Desolation Angels (Kerouac) II:714 Despair (Otchayanie) (Nabokov) II:942 Desperadoes (Hansen) II:554 Desperate Characters (Fox) I:459, 460 Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:345–347, III:1229, 1327, 1363, 1420 Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, The (Donleavy) I:374 detective novel(s) II:821, III:1434–1437 African-American detectives in III:1100 by African Americans II:917–918, III:1418, 1436 by Anaya I:57 antecedents of I:326 The Big Sleep (Chandler) I:144, 242, II:929, III:1435 by Block I:155–156 by Bradbury I:174 The “Canary” Murder Case (Van Dine) I:220–221, III:1308 by Chandler I:144, 242–243 by Coben I:278 by DeMille I:342, 343 Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley) I:347–349, II:918, III:1436

by Grafton II:521–522 by Hammett II:550–551, III:1435 “hard-boiled” detective in II:821, 822, 929, III:1435 by Heilbrun II:577–579, III:1436 Hemingway and II:585 by Hillerman I:57, II:602–604, III:1033–1034, 1436 by Himes I:348, II:604–605, III:1436 history of III:1434–1437 by MacDonald (J.) II:809 by Macdonald (R.) II:810–811, 929, III:1435 The Maltese Falcon (Hammett) II:550, 551, 810, 821–823, III:1435 by Marquand II:836 by Mosley II:917–918 Motherless Brooklyn (Lethem) II:920–922 The Moving Target (R. Macdonald) II:810, 928–930 multiculturalism in III:1033 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) II:934–935, III:1100 Native Americans in II:602–603, III:1033–1034, 1436 The New York Trilogy (Auster) I:86, II:960–962 by Paretsky III:1019–1020 Red Dragon (E. L. Harris) III:1098–1100 Reed’s parodies of III:1100 satires of I:196, III:1435 by Stout III:1218–1219, 1435, 1437 The Thin Man (Hammett) II:550–551, III:1261–1262 by Van Dine III:1308–1309, 1434–1435 by Vidal III:1310 woman detectives in I:298, II:522, 577, 578, III:1019–1020, 1435, 1436 Deuce, The (R. O. Butler) I:203, 204 Deus Lo Volt!: Chronicle of the Crusades (Connell) I:290

1469

Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley) I:347–349, II:918, III:1436 Devil Knows You’re Dead, The (Block) I:156 Devil’s Dream, The (Smith) III:1184 DeVoto, Bernard II:999 De Vries, Peter I:349–351 Dewey, John III:1407 Dew on the Thorn (Mireles) II:885 Dexter, Pete I:351–352 Paris Trout I:351, III:1020–1022 Dharma Bums (Kerouac) I:27, 352–353, II:714 Diamant, Anita I:353 Diary of a Rapist, The (Connell) I:289 Diary of a Young Girl (Frank) II:855, 963 Díaz, Junot III:1427, 1432 Dick, Philip K. I:354–355, 363 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I:355, 362–364 Valis I:363, III:1306–1308 Dick, The (Friedman) I:469 Dickens, Charles I:6, 201 writers compared to I:171, 264, II:548, 663, 664, 977 Dickey, James I:355–356 Deliverance I:338–339, 355 Dick Gibson Show, The (Elkin) I:398 Dickinson, Emily I:10, II:622, 774, 910, 999, III:1057 Dickson, Carter. See Carr, John Dickson Dictator, The (R. H. Davis) I:326 Dictee (Cha) I:240, 356–358, III:1425 Didion, Joan I:358–359, 459, II:706, 814, III:1051 A Book of Common Prayer I:165–166, 358 Play It as It Lays I:358, III:1050–1052 di Donato, Pietro I:359–360 Christ in Concrete I:262–263, 359 Diego Rivera (Hamill) II:548

1470

INDEX

Different Seasons (King) II:723 Digging Out (Roiphe) III:1116 Digital Fortress (D. Brown) I:188 Dillard, Annie I:139 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (A. Tyler) III:1292 Dirty Laundry (Hamill) II:548 Disagreeable Woman, The, A Social Mystery (Alger) I:23 Disappearing Acts (McMillan) II:863 Disclosure (Crichton) I:308 Disobedience (Hamilton) II:549 Dispatches (Herr) II:593 Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, The (Le Guin) II:764 Distant Music, The (H. L. Davis) I:324, II:613 Distinguished Guest, The (S. Miller) II:882 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee I:360–361, II:892, 948, III:1425 The Mistress of Spices I:360, II:892–894, III:1425 Divine Invasion, The (Dick) III:1307 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells) III:1337 Diving Rock on the Hudson (H. Roth) III:1120 Divining Women (Gibbons) II:492 Divorce, Le (Diane Johnson) II:687, 759–760 Dixon, Stephen I:68, 361–362 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) I:355, 362–364 Doctor DeMarr (Theroux) III:1258 Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret (Hawthorne) II:569 Doctorow, E. L. I:viii, 364–365, II:808 The Book of Daniel I:166–167, 364 Ragtime I:364, III:1092–1093

Doctor Sax: Faust Part Three (Kerouac) II:714 Doctor’s House, The (Beattie) I:119 Doctor Slaughter (Theroux) III:1258, 1259 Dodsworth (Lewis) I:365–367, II:770 Doerr, Harriet I:367–368 Dogeaters (Hagedorn) I:369–370, II:547, III:1423 Dog of the South, The (Portis) III:1061 Dog Soldiers (Stone) I:368–369, III:1215 Doig, Ivan I:370–371 Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War (R. M. Brown) I:190 Dollmaker, The (Arnow) I:70, 71, 371–373 domestic novel(s). See also family; marriage; sentimental novel(s) by Cummins I:313 by Hamilton II:549 by Kirkland II:729 Married or Single? (Sedgwick) II:837–838 Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge (Connell) II:930–931 by Phelps III:1040 by Sedgwick III:1149 Domestic Particulars (Busch) I:201 Dominican-American novel(s) III:1427, 1432. See also Alvarez, Julia Dominican-Americans II:636–637, III:1409–1410, 1432 Dominican Republic I:35, 36, 422–423, II:654–655, III:1432 Dominique, Jean I:78 Donald Duk (Chin) I:257–258, 373–374 Don Juan (Byron) II:897 Donleavy, J. P. I:374–375 The Ginger Man I:374, 375, II:494–496 Don Quixote (Cervantes) I:6, 376, 377, III:1373 Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (Acker) I:6, 375–377 Don’t Stop the Carnival (Wouk) III:1370, 1396

Doolittle, Hilda. See H. D. Doomswoman, The (Atherton) I:79 Dorris, Michael I:377–379, 404–405, III:1440 A Yellow Raft in Blue Water I:377, 378, III:1402–1404 Dos Passos, John I:vii, 27, 379–380 “camera-eye” technique of I:379, III:1302–1303 Three Soldiers I:210, 379 U.S.A. Trilogy I:354, 379, II:525, III:1301–1303 writers compared to I:212, 364 Dostoyesky, Fyodor I:41, 49, 400, II:1008, III:1397 “double-consciousness” I:90–91, 348, II:839, III:1387 Double Honeymoon (Connell) I:289 Double Indemnity (Cain) I:209 Douglass, Frederick I:149, 386, II:722, III:1297, 1417 Do With Me What You Will (Oates) II:977, 978 Down These Mean Streets (Thomas) III:1427 Dragon Harvest (Sinclair) II:744 Dragon Seed (Buck) I:194 Dragon’s Teeth (Sinclair) II:744, III:1172, 1173 Dread Road, The (Le Sueur) II:497 Dreamer: A Novel (C. R. Johnson) II:686–687 Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia) I:380–382, II:477, 478, III:1431 Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel (Brautigan) I:177 Dream Jungle (Hagedorn) II:547 Dream Life of Balso Snell, The (N. West) III:1341 Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The (Lovecraft) II:796 Dreams of Sleep (Humphreys) II:640 Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe) III:1220

Dreiser, Theodore I:vii, 382–384, II:768 An American Tragedy I:51–53, 382, 383, II:649, III:1419 Sister Carrie I:162, 382–383, II:686, III:1176–1177 on Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1225 writers compared to I:11, 27, 306, II:477, 507 writers influenced by I:196, III:1397, 1419 Dresser, Davis. See Halliday, Brett Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process (Bellamy) I:127 Drifters, The (Michener) II:877 Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (Lansdale) II:746 Drive-In 2: Not Just Another One of Them Sequels (Lansdale) II:746 Drop City (T. C. Boyle) I:171, 172 Drown (Díaz) III:1427, 1432 Dr. Sevier (Cable) I:206 drug addiction in Junky (W. S. Burroughs) II:704–705 in The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren) II:830, 831 in McInerney’s work II:859, 860 in The Naked Lunch (W. S. Burroughs) II:946–947 in Price’s (Richard) novels III:1075 in Selby’s novels III:1152 Drums Along the Mohawk (Edmonds) I:395 Drums at Dusk (Bontemps) I:164 Duane’s Depressed (McMurtry) II:865 Dubin’s Lives (Malamud) II:820 Dubliners (Joyce) III:1225 DuBois, W. E. B. I:90, 91, II:612, 839, 874, III:1418 Dubus, Andre I:103, 384–385 Dubus, Andre, III I:385–386

INDEX Duke of Stockbridge: A Romance of Shays’ Rebellion, The (Bellamy) I:127 du Maurier, Daphne II:671 Dunbar, Paul Lawrence I:59, 386–387, III:1418 Dune (Herbert) II:580 Dunn, Katherine, Geek Love II:486–487 Dunne Family, The (Farrell) I:424 Duplicate Keys (Smiley) III:1182 Duras, Marguerite I:6 During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (Chase) I:247 Durrell, Lawrence III:1282

E Eagle Eye (Calisher) I:214 Eagle’s Heart, The (Garland) II:483 Early Autumn (Bromfield) I:183 Earthen Pitchers (R. B. H. Davis) I:325 Earthly Possessions (A. Tyler) III:1292 Earthsea series (Le Guin) II:764 East Angels (Woolson) III:1392 East Goes West (Kang) II:708 East Is East (T. C. Boyle) I:172 Eastlake, William I:388–389 East of Eden (Steinbeck) I:226, 389–392, III:1209, 1210 East of the Mountains (Guterson) II:544–545 East Wind, West Wind (Buck) I:194 Easy Rawlins series (Mosley) I:347–349, II:917, 918, III:1436 Eat a Bowl of Tea (Chu) I:263, 264, 392–394, III:1422 Eaton, Edith. See Sui Sin Far Eaton, Winnifred. See Watanna, Onoto Echo House (Just) II:705, 706 Edgar Huntly (C. B. Brown) I:187

Edge of Sadness, The (E. O’Connor) II:982 Edgerton, Clyde I:244, 394–395 Edith’s Diary (Highsmith) II:600 Edmonds, Walter D. I:395–396 Education of Henry Adams, The (H. Adams) I:9, 344, 345 Education of Oscar Fairfax, The (Auchincloss) I:85 Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer (Millhauser) II:883–884 18th-century America in Brown’s (C. B.) work I:187 Charlotte Temple (Rowson) and I:244–247, 456, III:1124, 1125 in The Coquette (Foster) I:295–298, 456, 457 and The Female American (Winkfield) I:431 novels of I:vi–vii in Ormond (C. B. Brown) II:1000 popular novels in I:244–247, 456, 457 in The Power of Sympathy (W. H. Brown) III:1070–1071 in Roberts’s (K.) work III:1113–1114 in Wieland (C. B. Brown) III:1355, 1357 Eighth Day, The (Wilder) I:182, III:1360, 1361 Eighth Moon: The True Story of a Young Girl’s Life in Communist China (Lord) II:791 Eight Million Ways to Die (Block) I:156 El Bronx Remembered: A Novella and Other Stories (Mohr) I:396–397, II:901 elderly in As We Are Now (Sarton) I:78–79 in East of the Mountains (Guterson) II:544–545 in The Spectator Bird (Stegner) III:1196–1197

in Tell Me a Riddle (Olsen) III:1249–1250 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (T. Wolfe) I:163, II:715, III:1381 Eliot, George I:154, II:977, III:1166 Eliot, T. S. I:106, 291, II:928, 967, III:1353 and Barnes II:967, 968, III:1129 and Ellison I:400, II:657 The Wasteland II:518, 532, 793, 820, 968, III:1129, 1237, 1372, 1373 Elizabeth Appleton (O’Hara) II:987 Elkin, Stanley I:397–399, II:484, 544, 879, 908 The Franchiser I:398, 460–462 Ellen Foster (Gibbons) II:491, 492 Ellery Queen series II:821, III:1434, 1435 Ellis, Bret Easton I:182, II:678 American Psycho I:48–50 Ellison, Harlan I:202 Ellison, Ralph Waldo I:vii, 399–401, 400, III:1340, 1354, 1397 comparisons to I:172, II:701, 849, 1008, III:1040, 1420 Invisible Man I:399, 400, II:657–660, III:1091, 1419–1420 Juneteenth I:399, 400, II:701–702 Elmer Gantry (Lewis) I:365, 402–404, II:769, 770 El Salvador I:134 Embezzler, The (Auchincloss) I:85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo I:19, 154, 226, 288, II:526, 562, 568, 683, 714, 880, 999, III:1292 Emmeline (Rossner) III:1119 Empire of the Senseless (Acker) I:6, 375 Empress of the Splendid Season (Hijuelos) II:601, III:1431–1432 Enchanted Night: A Novella (Millhauser) II:884

1471

End of the Hunt, The (Flanagan) I:449 End of the Primitive, The (Himes) II:604 End of the Road, The (Barth) I:109 End Zone (DeLillo) I:337 Enemies: A Love Story (Singer) III:1175 English Creek (Doig) I:370, 371 Enormous Room, The (Cummings) I:312, 401–402 environmentalism II:515, 516, 904–905. See also nature epistolary novel I:vi, viii in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:280–282 Equal Affections (Leavitt) II:759 Equality (Bellamy) I:127, 128 Erdrich, Louise I:36, 377, 378, 404–406, III:1439, 1440 The Antelope Wife I:67–68, 404 The Beet Queen I:121–123, 404, 405 Love Medicine I:67, 404, 405, II:801–803, III:1439 Tracks I:403, 404, III:1275–1277 Erie Water (Edmonds) I:395 Esmond in India (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Estampas del valle y otras obras (Sketches of the Valley and Other Works) (HinojosaSmith) II:605, 606, 732, III:1108 Estate, The (Singer) III:1175 Esther: A Novel (H. Adams) I:9, 344 Ethan Frome (Wharton) I:179, 406–407, III:1342, 1343 Etherege (Hawthorne) II:569 “Ethics of Living Jim Crow, The” (R. Wright) I:148 Eugenides, Jeffrey I:407–408, II:879 Middlesex I:407, 408, II:878–880 Eugenie Grandet (Balzac) III:1332

1472

INDEX

Europe. See also France; Italy Americans in in The Ambassadors (H. James) I:38 in The American (H. James) I:41–42, II:673 in Dodsworth (Lewis) I:366 in Hemingway’s novels II:585–586 in James’s novels I:38, 42, II:672–674 in The Light in the Piazza (Spencer) II:777–778, III:1198 in The Portrait of a Lady (James) II:673, III:1064 in Prose’s novels III:1079 in The Reef (Wharton) III:1101–1102 in Wharton’s novels III:1342–1343 Europeans, The (H. James) II:673 Eustace Chisholm and the Works (Purdy) III:1081 Evangeline (Dixon) I:361 Evangeline (Longfellow) II:679 Evans, Walker I:16, 330 Eva’s Man (G. Jones) II:693, III:1420 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Robbins) III:1111–1112 Evening (Minot) II:885 Evening in Byzantium (Shaw) III:1162–1163 Evenings at Five (Godwin) II:509 Evening Star, The (McMurtry) II:865, III:1254 Evening Wolves, The (Chase) I:247–248 Everlasting Story of Nory, The (Baker) I:97 Everything That Rises Must Converge (F. O’Connor) II:983 Evidence of Love (Grau) II:529 Executioners, The (J. MacDonald) II:809 Executioner’s Song, The (Mailer) I:408–410, II:814, 815

Executive Orders (Clancy) I:268 “Exegesis” (Dick) III:1306, 1307 Exit Wounds (Jance) II:676 Exorcist, The (Blatty) I:151–152 expatriate writers Baldwin as I:98 Boyle, Kay as I:170–171 Hemingway as II:585–586 James as I:38, 42, II:672–674 late 20th-century II:847 Stein as III:1207–1208 Theroux as III:1257–1258 Wharton as III:1342–1343 Wright as III:1398 Expensive Habits (Howard) II:633 Expensive People (Oates) I:410–412, II:977 experimental novel(s). See also postmodernism by African Americans III:1420 Cane (Toomer) I:221–223, III:1274, 1418, 1420 Dictee (Cha) I:240, 356–358, III:1425 by Glancy III:1082 The Making of Americans (Stein) II:818–819, III:1207–1208 Monster (Myers) II:905–906 Nightwood (Barnes) I:105–106, II:967–968 by Nin II:968–969 The Pastures of Heaven (Steinbeck) as III:1023–1024 by Purdy III:1081 Pushing the Bear (Glancy) II:498, III:1082–1084 by Pynchon III:1085 Ryder (Barnes) I:105, 106, III:1129 Snow White (Barthelme) I:111, III:1184–1185 by Stein III:1207 Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) as III:1275 A Woman of Genius (Austin) as III:1383 Exposure (K. Harrison) II:561 expressionism I:322

F Fable, A (Faulkner) I:425, 426 Face (Liu) III:1422 Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:248, 413–415 Face of a Stranger (Yamaguchi) III:1423 Factotum (Bukowksi) I:196, II:552 Facts, The (P. Roth) I:53, III:1053 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) I:174, 415–417, II:805, 843 Faint Perfume (Gale) II:477 Fair, A. A. See Gardner, Erle Stanley Fair, Ronald III:1420 Fair and Tender Ladies (Smith) III:1183–1184 Fair Game (Johnson) II:687 Fair Warning (R. O. Butler) I:204 Fairy Tale of New York, A (Donleavy) I:374 fairy tales, retellings of I:111, 294, III:1110, 1111, 1184–1185 Faith and the Good Thing (C. R. Johnson) II:686 Faithful Are the Wounds (Sarton) III:1140 Falconer (Cheever) I:250–251, 417–418 Fall & Rise (Dixon) I:361 Falling in Place (Beattie) I:119 Fall of the House of Usher, The (Poe) II:671 Falls, The (Oates) II:979 False Entry (Calisher) I:213–214 Familiar Heat (Hood) I:418–419 Families and Survivors (A. Adams) I:7 family. See also marriage; patriarchy in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:1–4 in American Appetites (Oates) I:43 in American Son (Roley) I:50–51 in As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) I:73–75

in At Weddings and Wakes (McDermott) I:83–84 in Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison) I:112–114 in Bee Season (Goldberg) I:120 in The Bluest Eye (Morrison) I:158–159 in Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159–161 in Bone (Ng) I:161–162 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179 in Brown’s (R.) work I:190, 191 in The Corrections (Franzen) I:462–463 in Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323 in Howard’s work II:632–633 in Losing Battles (Welty) II:791–793 in The Making of Americans (Stein) II:818–819 in Miller’s (S.) work II:882 in Minot’s work II:885 in The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty) II:996–997 in Pembroke (Freeman) III:1030–1031 in Penhally (C. Gordon) III:1032–1033 in Phillips’s work III:1043 in Plains Song (Morris) III:1048–1049 in Rabbit, Run (Updike) III:1090–1091 in Smiley’s novels III:1182 in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) III:1193–1194 in Taylor’s novels III:1248, 1249 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1265–1266 in Tyler’s (A.) novels III:1292–1293 in Wells’s novels III:1337 in Welty’s novels III:1338 in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Dorris) III:1403 Family (Leavitt) II:758 Family Affair, A (Stout) III:1435 Family Arsenal, The (Theroux) III:1258

INDEX Family Happiness (Colwin) I:283 Family Life (Banks) I:103 Family Linen (Smith) III:1183 Family Moskat, The (Singer) III:1175 Family Pictures (S. Miller) II:882 Family Trust, A (Just) II:705 Fanatics, The (Dunbar) I:387 Fancy Strut (Smith) III:1183 Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (Jong) I:419–421, II:695 Fanny Ford (Ferber) I:436 Fanny Herself (Ferber) I:435 Fanshawe (Hawthorne) II:568 fantasy. See also science fiction by Bradley I:175 in Coover’s work I:294 in Crichton’s work I:308 in Lansdale’s work II:746–747 by Le Guin’s II:764 by Lovecraft II:796–797 in Millhauser’s work II:884 in The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster) III:1039 Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You (Chappell) I:244 Farewell My Lovely (Chandler) I:242 Farewell Symphony, The (E. White) I:172 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway) I:421–422, II:545, 582, 585, 586 Farm, The (Bromfield) I:184 Farmer (J. Harrison) II:559 Farming of Bones, The (Danticat) I:320, 422–423 farm life. See frontier; migrant farmers; rural life Farrell, James T. I:vii, 306, 424–425 Studs Lonigan I:424, III:1224–1228 writers compared to I:11, 27, 196–197, III:1152 Far Side of Victory, The (Greenberg) II:535 Farthest Shore, The (Le Guin) II:764 Far Tortuga (Matthiessen) II:847

Fasting, Feasting (A. Desai) III:1425 Father Melancholy’s Daughter (Godwin) II:509 Father of the Four Passages (Yamanaka) III:1400 fathers and fatherhood. See also incest in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:3 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179, III:1407 in The Invention of Solitude (Auster) II:656, 657 in Save Me the Waltz (Z. Fitzgerald) III:1142 in Tender Is the Night (F. S. Fitzgerald) III:1252 in Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) III:1363 Father’s Kisses, A (Friedman) I:469 “father-son trilogy” (Shaara and Shaara) III:1161 Faulkner, William I:vi, 187, 425–428, II:564, 852, 928, vii Absalom, Absalom I:1–4, 55, 426, II:514, 671, 812, III:1194, 1299 and Anderson I:58, 425 As I Lay Dying I:73–75, 389, 426, II:491 and The Big Sleep (Chandler) I:145, 242 Go Down, Moses I:426, II:505–507 Light in August I:426, II:650, 775–777, 1010 and Loos II:790 on The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) II:990–991 on the past III:1164 Sanctuary I:73, 426, III:1137–1139 Snopes Trilogy I:426, II:508, 790 The Sound and the Fury I:1, 4, 73, 426, 427, II:597, 651, 938, III:1193–1195 on Twain III:1289 The Unvanquished I:426, III:1298–1299 writers compared to I:31, 404, II:484, 491, 553, 554, 857, 865, 908, 978,

III:1021, 1053, 1073, 1198, 1209, 1274, 1275, 1318, 1338, 1420 writers influenced by I:133, 228, 384, 454, II:563, 657, 715, 748, III:1353 Yoknapatawpha novels I:1, 73, 75, 425, 426 Fauset, Jessie Redmon I:428–429, III:1418 The Chinaberry Tree: A Novel of American Life I:258–260, 428 Fear of Flying (Jong) I:420, 429–431, II:695 Feast of All Saints, The (Rice) III:1103 Feast of Love, The (Baxter) I:115, 116 Feather Crowns (Mason) II:846 Female American, The (Winkfield) I:431–433 Female Man, The (Russ) I:433–434, III:1127, 1128 feminism. See also patriarchy; women’s independence of Alcott I:20 in Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:29 in An American Brat (Sidhwa) I:45 in Austin’s novels I:87 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:282 Continental literary I:434 in Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:346–347 in detective novels III:1435 and Fear of Flying (Jong) I:429–430 in The Female Man (Russ) I:433–434, III:1127, 1128 in French’s work I:467, 468 of Gilman II:493, 494 in Herland (Gilman) II:493, 494, 589–590 in Housekeeping (Robinson) II:621–622 in Le Guin’s work II:764 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:773, 774 in Lovingkindness (Roiphe) II:803–805, III:1116 and McCarthy (M.) II:543

1473

in Minot’s work II:885 in The Mists of Avalon (Bradley) II:894 and Roiphe’s novels III:1115–1116 in Russ’s novels III:1127, 1128 in science fiction I:434, III:1127 in Smiley’s novels III:1182 in So Big (Ferber) III:1186 in Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) III:1419 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1265 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) III:1297 in Wife (Mukherjee) III:1359 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383, 1384 in Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384 in The World According to Garp (Irving) III:1393 in ¡Yo! (Alvarez) III:1410 Fenkl, Heinz Insu III:1424 Ferber, Edna I:434–435, III:1187 Giant I:434, II:489–491 Show Boat I:434, III:1168–1170 So Big I:435, III:1186–1187 Fer-de-Lance (Stout) III:1219, 1435 Fergusson, Harvey II:613 Fermata, The (Baker) I:97, III:1062 Fern, Fanny I:435–437 Fernhurst (Stein) III:1207 Ferris Beach (McCorkle) II:855 Feud, The (Berger) I:136, 137 Fidelity (Glaspell) II:501 Fielding, Henry I:vi, 11 Field of Vision, The (Morris) I:437–438 Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Robbins) III:1112 Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:438–440 The Fifth Son (Wiesel) III:1358 Fight Club (Palahniuk) I:440–442, III:1016

1474

INDEX

Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday (Settle) III:1159 Figures of Earth (Cabell) I:205 Filipino-American novel(s) III:1422–1423. See also Bacho, Peter; Brainard, Cecilia Manguerra; Bulosan, Carlos; Hagedorn, Jessica; Roley, Brian Ascalon Filipino Americans in America Is in the Heart (Bulosan) I:40–41, 196, 197 in American Son (Roley) I:50–51, III:1116–1117, 1423 in Bacho’s work I:96, III:1423 and Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159, III:1401 in Bulosan’s work I:196, 197 in Cebu (Bacho) I:96, 238–239, III:1423 in Hagedorn’s work II:547, III:1423 novels by and about III:1422–1423 Filipinos. See Philippines Fille de Chambre, The (Rowson) III:1124 film industry II:752, 753–754, III:1126–1127. See also Hollywood Final Payments (M. C. Gordon) I:285, II:519 Financier, The (Dreiser) I:383 Finding a Girl in America (Dubus) I:384–385 Fine and Private Place, A (Queen) III:1435 Fine Dark Line (Lansdale) II:746 Finishing School, The (Godwin) II:509 Firebrand, The (Bradley) I:175 Fire in the Flint (W. White) III:1418 Fire in the Morning (Spencer) III:1198 Fireman’s Fair, The (Humphreys) II:640, 641 Fire on the Mountain (A. Desai) III:1425

Fires of Spring, The (Michener) II:877 Firm, The (Grisham) I:442–444, II:540, 541 First George Mills, The (Elkin) I:398 First Light (Baxter) I:115, 116 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield I:444–445 Fisher, Rudolph III:1418 Fisher, Vardis II:613 Fisher King, The (Marshall) II:840, 841 Fisher King myth II:955, III:1372–1373 Fitzgerald, F. Scott I:vii, 115, 445–447, II:926. See also Great Gatsby, The (F. S. Fitzgerald) on The Day of the Locust (N. West) I:327 and Fitzgerald (Z.) I:445, 447, 448, III:1141, 1142 The Last Tycoon I:446, II:752–754 Tender Is the Night I:445–446, III:1141, 1142, 1251–1254 This Side of Paradise I:379, 445, III:1129 writers compared to I:7, 256, 340, II:859, 928, III:1302 writers linked to I:454, II:790, III:1208, 1379 Fitzgerald, Zelda I:445, 447–448, II:926, III:1252 Save Me the Waltz I:447–448, III:1141–1143 Five Years on a Rock (Murayama) I:30, II:936, III:1423, 1424 Fixer, The (Malamud) II:819–820 Fixer Chao (Ong) III:1423 Flag for Sunrise, A (Stone) I:82, III:1215–1216 Flags in the Dust (Faulkner) I:426 Flaming Corsage, The (Kennedy) II:713 Flanagan, Thomas I:448–449 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary II:679, 817 Fleeced (C. H. Clark) I:269

Flesh and Blood (Cunningham) I:314, II:618 Flesh and Blood (Hamill) II:548 Flight to Canada (Reed) I:346, III:1420 Flint (L’Amour) II:739 Flivver King, The (Sinclair) III:1173 Floating Opera, The (Barth) I:109 Floating World, The (Kadohata) I:449–451, II:707, III:1424 Floatplane Notebooks, The (Edgerton) I:394 Florida II:598, 718–719, III:1094, 1401 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Dick) I:354 Flutie (Glancy) I:451–453, II:498 folk culture. See also myth and legend in African-American novels III:1420 in Ansa’s work I:66 in Hurston’s work II:645 in Mexican-American novels III:1429 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:915, 916–917 in Reed’s novels III:1100 in So Far from God (Castillo) III:1188 in Song of Solomon (Morrison) III:1190, 1191 Folks, The (Suckow) III:1231 Follow Me Down (Foote) I:453 Folly (Minot) II:885 Fong and the Indians (Theroux) III:1258 Fools Crow (Welch) III:1336 Fools Die (Puzo) III:1084 Foote, Mary Hallock I:61 Foote, Shelby I:453–454 Ford, Ford Madox II:509, 517 Ford, Richard I:454–455 Foregone Conclusion, A (Howells) II:634 Foreign Affairs (Lurie) II:806–807 Foreign Student, The (Choi) I:260, III:1425

Forerunner, The II:493, 494, 590 Forerunners of American Fascism (Swing) II:667 Forest Life (Kirkland) II:729 Forever (Hamill) II:548 The Forgotten (Wiesel) III:1358 For Love (S. Miller) II:882 For Love of Imabell (Himes) II:605 For Love of the Game (M. Shaara) III:1161 Forms of Water, The (Barrett) I:108 Forrey, Carolyn I:150 Fort, Charles III:1308 For the Major (Woolson) III:1392 For the New Intellectual (Rand) I:80–81 Fortress in the Plaza (TyCasper) III:1423 Fortress of Solitude, The (Lethem) II:768, 769 Fortunate Pilgrim, The (Puzo) III:1084, 1085 Fortune’s Daughter (Hoffman) II:608 42nd Parallel, The (Dos Passos) I:27, 379, III:1301–1303 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) I:455–456, II:585–586 Foster, Hannah Webster I:456–457 The Coquette I:vii, 295–298, 456, 457 Foundation (Asimov) I:75 Foundation’s Edge (Asimov) I:75 Founder’s Praise (Greenberg) II:535 Found in the Street (Highsmith) II:600 Fountainhead, The (Rand) I:457–459, 459, III:1093 Four-Chambered Heart, The (Nin) II:968, 969 Four Souls (Erdrich) III:1439 Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O’Brien (Hijuelos) II:601 Fourth Hand, The (Irving) II:664, 665 Fourth K, The (Puzo) III:1084

INDEX “four-woman form” III:1324–1325 Fox, Paula I:459–460 Foxes of Harrow, The (Yerby) III:1405, 1406, 1419 Fox Girl (Keller) II:712, III:1424 France. See also Europe in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein) I:88 in The Custom of the Country (Wharton) I:315–316 in Le Divorce (Diane Johnson) II:759–760 in Johnson’s (Diane) work II:687–688 Matthiessen in II:847 in My Next Bride (K. Boyle) II:939–940 Nin in II:969 in Plagued by the Nightingale (K. Boyle) III:1045–1046 Stein in I:88, III:1207 in Tender Is the Night (F. S. Fitzgerald) III:1251–1252 in Tropic of Cancer (Miller) III:1282, 1283 Wharton’s novels in III:1342–1343 Wright in III:1398 Franchiser, The (Elkin) I:398, 460–462 Frank, Anne II:487, 488, 489, 855, 963 Franklin, Benjamin I:24, 25, III:1223, 1285, 1286 Franzen, Jonathan I:462–463, II:879 The Corrections I:299–301, 462–463 Frazier, Charles I:463–464 Cold Mountain I:27, 463–464, II:545 Freddy’s Book (J. Gardner) II:481 Frederic, Harold I:243, 464–465 Free Air (Lewis) II:770 Freed, Lynn I:465–466 Freedomland (Richard Price) III:1075 Free-Lance Pallbearers, The (Reed) III:1100 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins I:vii, 79, 466–467, II:677 Jane Field I:466, II:677–678

Pembroke I:466, III:1030–1032 French, Marilyn I:467–468 Frenchman Must Die, A (K. Boyle) I:170 Freudianism I:vii, 58, 376, 382, 442, II:574, 593, 811, 898, 964 Friedman, Bruce Jay I:468–469 Friend of the Earth, A (T. C. Boyle) I:172 friendship, women’s. See women’s friendships Friends of the Family (Freed) I:465–466 Frog (Dixon) I:361 Frog, The (Hawkes) II:567 Frolic of His Own, A (Gaddis) I:469–471, 471, II:474 From Bondage (H. Roth) III:1120 From Here to Eternity (J. Jones) I:471–472, II:582, 693–694, III:1328 From the Realm of Morpheus (Millhauser) II:884 From the Terrace (O’Hara) II:898, 987 frontier. See also rural life; West in At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Matthiessen) I:82 in Davis’s (H. L.) work I:324 in The Great Meadow (E. M. Roberts) II:533–534, III:1112–1113 in Killing Mister Watson (Matthiessen) II:718 in Kirkland’s work II:729 in The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper) II:750, 757 in The Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper) II:755–756, 757, 1010 in My Ántonia (Cather) II:938–939 in Roberts’s (E. M.) work III:1112–1113 in World Enough and Time (Warren) III:1395 Frugal Housewife, The (Child) I:254 Fruit of the Tree, The (Wharton) III:1342

Fugitive’s Return (Glaspell) II:501 Fuller, Margaret I:19, 154, II:569, 836

G Gabriel Conroy (Harte) II:562 Gaddis, William I:viii, II:473–474, 484 A Frolic of His Own I:469–471, 471, II:474 JR II:697–699 Gaines, Ernest J. I:91, II:474–478, III:1420 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman I:91–93, 346, II:474, 475, III:1327 A Lesson Before Dying II:765–767 Gaitskill, Mary II:476–477 Galapagos (Vonnegut) III:1320 Galarza, Ernesto III:1427 Galbraith, John Kenneth II:982 Gale, Zona II:477, 502, 643, 892 Miss Lulu Bett II:477, 891–892 Gallegher and Other Stories (R. H. Davis) I:326 Galloper, The (R. H. Davis) I:326 Galton Case, The (R. Macdonald) II:810 Gandía, Manuel Zeno III:1430 Gangster of Love, The (Hagedorn) II:547, III:1423 Garbage (Dixon) I:361 Garcia, Cristina I:35, II:477–479, 962, III:1427, 1428, 1431 Dreaming in Cuban I:380–382, II:477, 478, III:1431 García-Ramis, Magali III:1427, 1430 Gardener’s Son, The (C. McCarthy) I:256 Garden of Adonis, The (C. Gordon) II:518 Garden of Eden, The (Hemingway) I:400, II:586 Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel (Silko) III:1171

1475

Garden State (Moody) II:908 Gardner, Erle Stanley II:479–480, III:1435–1436 Gardner, John, Jr. I:viii, II:480–482, 686 Grendel II:481, 537–538 Garies and Their Friends, The (Webb) III:1417 Garland, Hannibal Hamlin I:vii, 306, II:482–484, 769, 973 Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly II:482, 483, III:1117–1118 Gass, William H. I:110, 294, II:484, 484–486 Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife III:1366–1368 Gates, Henry L., Jr. II:544, 637, 1004–1005, III:1417 Gates of the Forest, The (Wiesel) III:1358 Gathering of Old Men, A (Gaines) II:475 Gather Together in My Name (Angelou) I:60 Gaudy Place, The (Chappell) I:243–244 gay themes in Baldwin’s work I:98, 99 in A Boy’s Own Story (E. White) I:172–173 in Capote’s work II:1003 in Chabon’s work I:37–38 in The City and the Pillar (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 in Delany’s (S. R.) work I:335 in detective novels III:1436 in Fixer Chao (Ong) III:1423 in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) II:520–521 in Gurganus’s work II:543, 544 in Harris’s (E. L.) work II:556, 557 in Highsmith’s work II:599, 600 in Leavitt’s (D.) work II:759 in McCullers’s work II:858 in Narrow Rooms (Purdy) II:950, 951 in Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote) II:1003–1004 in Purdy’s novels III:1081

1476

INDEX

gay themes (continued) in White’s work I:172 in Williams’s (T.) work III:1364 Geek Love (Dunn) II:486–487 gender roles. See also manhood; women’s roles in Gilman’s work II:493–494 in The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) II:762–763, 764 in A Lost Lady (Cather) II:793–794 in The Mountain Lion (Stafford) II:924 in Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) III:1281 in The World According to Garp (Irving) III:1393 General Is Up, The (Nazareth) III:1425 General’s Daughter, The (DeMille) I:343 Generation of Vipers, A (Wylie) II:828 Generation without Farewell (K. Boyle) I:170 Generous Man, A (Reynolds Price) III:1073 “Genius,” The (Dreiser) I:383 Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (K. Boyle) I:170 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Illuminating Diary of a Professional Lady (Loos) II:790 George Mills (Elkin) I:397, 398 George’s Mother (Crane) I:306 Georgia Boy (Caldwell) I:212 Gerald’s Party (Coover) I:294 Germany, Nazi II:667, III:1413 Geronimo Rex (Hannah) II:553 Gertrude and Claudius (Updike) III:1300 Gesture Life, A (C.-R. Lee) II:761, III:1424 Ghose, Zulfikar III:1425 Ghost Riders (McCrumb) II:856 Ghosts (Auster) I:86, II:960–962

Ghostway, The (Hillerman) II:603 Ghost Writer, The (P. Roth) I:54, II:487–489, III:1053, 1121, 1122, 1123, 1416 Giant (Ferber) I:434, 435, II:489–491 Gibbons, Kaye II:491–492 Gibson, William, Neuromancer II:958–960 Gideon’s Band: A Tale of the Mississippi (Cable) I:206 Gift, The (Hamill) II:548 Gift of Asher Lev, The (Potok) III:1067 Gilbert, Julie Goldsmith II:490, 491 Gilchrist, Ellen II:492–493 Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, The (Twain and Warner) I:14, III:1289 Gilead (Robinson) II:620, III:1114, 1115 Giles Goat-Boy; or, The Revised New Syllabus (Barth) I:109 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins I:87, II:493–494, III:1342, 1435 Herland I:433, II:493, 494, 589–591 The Yellow Wallpaper I:323, II:493–494, III:1404–1405 Gilmore, Gary I:408–410 Ginger Man, The (Donleavy) I:374, 375, II:494–496 Ginsberg, Allen I:168, 199, 352, II:547, 714, 880, 946, 995, III:1285, 1337 Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin) I:98, II:849 Girl, The (Le Sueur) II:496–497, 767, 768 Girl in Landscape (Lethem) II:769 Girls (Busch) I:201 Girls, The (Ferber) I:435 Girls at Play (Theroux) III:1258 girls’ books I:24, III:1040, 1058 Girls in Trouble (Leavitt) II:758 Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The (King) II:723

Give Birth to Brightness: A Thematic Study in Neo-Black Literature (S. A. Williams) III:1363 Giver, The (Lowry) II:805 Glance Away, A (Wideman) III:1353 Glancy, Diane II:497–499, III:1082 Flutie I:451–453, II:498 Pushing the Bear II:498, III:1082–1084 Glasgow, Ellen I:vii, 85, II:499–501, III:1095 Virginia II:499, 500, III:1313–1315 writers compared to I:79, 212, II:492, 835 Glaspell, Susan II:501–502 Glass, Julia II:502–503 Glass Key, The (Hammett) II:550, 551 Glass People (Godwin) II:509 Glimpses of the Moon, The (Wharton) III:1343 Gloria Mundi (Frederic) I:465 Glorious Cause (J. Shaara) III:1160 Glorious Ones, The (Prose) III:1078 Glory (Wouk) III:1396 Glory of Hera (C. Gordon) II:518 Glory of the Conquered: The Story of a Great Love, The (Glaspell) II:501 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; or, Pearls before Swine (Vonnegut) III:1320 Godfather, The (Puzo) II:503–505, III:1084 God Knows (Heller) II:582 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) I:426, II:505–507 Gods and Generals (J. Shaara) III:1160, 1161 Gods Arrive, The (Wharton) III:1343 God Sends Sunday (Bontemps) I:164 God’s Grace (Malamud) II:820 God’s Little Acre (Caldwell) I:212, II:507–508 God’s Pocket (Dexter) I:351 Gods Themselves, The (Asimov) I:75

Godwin, Gail I:viii, II:508–510 Godwulf Manuscript, The (R. B. Parker) III:1435 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von III:1282 Go in Beauty (Eastlake) I:388 Going After Cacciato (O’Brien) II:510–511, 981 Goldberg, Myla II:511–512 Bee Season I:120–121, II:511 Gold Coast, The (DeMille) I:343 Golden Apples (Rawlings) III:1094, 1095 Golden Bowl, The (James) I:38, II:512–513, 672, 673–674 Golden Pasture, The (Thomas) III:1264 Golden Spur, The (Powell) III:1069 Golden States (Cunningham) I:314 golem I:37, II:548 Gone Fishin’ (Mosley) II:918 Gone for Good (Coben) I:278 Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War (J. Shaara) III:1160 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) I:101–102, II:513–514, 896 Gonzalez, N. V. M. III:1422–1423 Good as Gold (Heller) II:582 Goodbye Columbus (P. Roth) I:53, III:1122, 1123 Goodbye without Leaving (Colwin) I:283 Good Day to Die, A (J. Harrison) II:515–516, 559 Good Earth, The (Buck) I:193, 194, II:516–517, 708 Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America (Bausch) I:115 Good Harbor, The (Diamant) I:353 Good Hearts (Reynolds Price) III:1074 Good Husband, The (Godwin) II:509 Good Man Is Hard to Find, A (F. O’Connor) II:983 Good Mother, The (S. Miller) II:881

INDEX Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, A (R. O. Butler) I:203 Good Soldier, The (F. M. Ford) II:509 Good Will (Smiley) III:1182 Good Woman, A (Bromfield) I:184 Goose on the Grave, The (Hawkes) II:566 Gordon, Caroline II:517–519, III:1059 Penhally II:517, III:1032–1033 Gordon, Mary Catherine II:519–520 The Company of Women I:284–285, II:519 Gospel According to the Son, The (Mailer) II:815 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) I:98, 99, II:520–521, III:1419, 1420 gothic novel(s) I:vi, viii, 187. See also horror fiction; psychological novel(s) American III:1355 by Brown (C. B.) I:187, II:1000 by Chappell I:243, 244 by Dickey I:355 by McCullers II:857 Moby Dick (Melville) as II:868, 897, 898 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Poe) II:796–797, 948–950, III:1054 by Oates II:978 by O’Connor (F.) II:983 Ormond (C. B. Brown) I:187, II:1000–1003 by Poe III:1054 Set This House Afire (Styron) I:285 Southern I:243, 285, 355, II:852, 857, 983 by Spofford III:1200 Wieland (C. B. Brown) I:187, III:1355–1357 by Woolson III:1391 The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) as III:1404, 1405 Go to the Widow-Maker (J. Jones) II:694

Gould: A Novel in Two Novels (Dixon) I:361 Grace Abounding (Howard) II:633 Grafton, Sue Taylor I:298, II:521–523, III:1435 Grandissimes, The: A Story of Creole Life (Cable) I:206, 207 Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book (Allen) I:29 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck) I:389, 392, II:523–527, III:1209, 1210, 1211, 1275 graphic novel II:906 Grass Dancer, The (Power) II:527–528, III:1069 Grass Harp, The (Capote) I:228 Grass Roof, The (Kang) II:708 Grau, Shirley Ann II:528–529 The Keepers of the House II:529, 710–711 Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities, A (Bradbury) I:174 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) II:529–532, III:1085–1086 Gray, Paul I:137 Great American Novel, The (P. Roth) I:53, III:1122, 1131 Great American Novel, The (W. C. Williams) III:1365 Great Circle: The Mayfield Trilogy, A (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Great Depression in Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara) I:69–70 in The Girl (Le Sueur) II:496–497 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) and II:514 in Light in August (Faulkner) II:775 novelists of I:vii in Olsen’s work II:992 in The Postman Always Rings Twice (Cain) III:1066 in Tobacco Road (Caldwell) III:1269 West (N.) and III:1341

Great Expectations (Acker) I:6 Great Gatsby, The (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:43, 445, 446, II:532–533, III:1237, 1251 novel influenced by III:1072–1073 novels compared to I:162, 163, 179–180, 182, 208, 340 novels influencing I:154, II:544, 664 Great Jones Street (DeLillo) I:337 Great Meadow, The (E. M. Roberts) II:533–535, III:1112–1113 Great Santini, The (Conroy) I:290–291 Great Son (Ferber) I:435 Great Tradition, The (Leavis) I:38, II:787 Great Train Robbery, The (Crichton) I:308 Great World and Timothy Colt, The (Auchincloss) I:84–85 greed. See materialism Greek mythology II:591, 592, 593, III:1309, 1310 Greeley, Andrew II:564 Green, Anna Katharine III:1434 Green Bay Tree, The (Bromfield) I:184 Greenberg, Joanne Goldenberg II:535–536 Green Centuries (C. Gordon) II:518 Greene, Graham I:82, II:548, 706, 883 Green Grow the Dollars (Lathen) III:1436 Green Journey, A (Hassler) II:564 Greenlanders, The (Smiley) III:1182 Green Mile, The (King) II:536–537, 723 Green Ripper, The (J. MacDonald) II:809 Grendel (J. Gardner) II:481, 537–538 Grey, Zane II:483, 538–540, 613, 715, III:1315 grief in Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:160

1477

in The Lovely Bones (Sebold) II:799–800, III:1148 in Pet Sematary (King) III:1038–1039 in The Shawl (Ozick) III:1164 Griever: An American Monkey King in China (Vizenor) III:1317 Griggs, Sutton E. III:1418 Grimes, Martha III:1436 Grisham, John I:442–443, II:540–542 The Firm I:442–444, II:540, 541 grok (term) III:1223 Group, The (M. McCarthy) I:7, II:542–543, 853, 854 “group man” theory III:1209, 1275 Groves of Academe, The (M. McCarthy) II:854 Growth Trilogy (Tarkington) III:1246 Guardian Angel (Paretsky) III:1020 Guard of Honor (Cozzens) I:210, 304, 305 Guided Tours of Hell (Prose) III:1079 Gunga Din Highway (Chin) I:257 Guns of Heaven, The (Hamill) II:548 Gun, with Occasional Music (Lethem) II:768 Gurganus, Allan II:543–544 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All II:543, 544, 989–990 Guterson, David II:544–545 Guthrie, A. B., Jr. II:613

H Ha Jin II:546–547 Waiting II:546, III:1322–1324, 1422 Habitations of the Word (Gass) III:1367 Hacienda: A Story of Mexico (K. A. Porter) III:1059–1060 Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (Hopkins) II:615, 616

1478

INDEX

Hagedorn, Jessica T. I:143, II:547–548, III:1401, 1423 Dogeaters I:369–370, II:547, III:1423 Hahn, Gloria. See Kim Ronyoung Haitians I:126, 422–423 Hale, Janet Campbell III:1440 Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (Robbins) III:1112 Half-Life of Happiness, The (Casey) I:231 Half Moon Street (Theroux) III:1258, 1259 Halliday, Brett III:1435 Hall of Mirrors, A (Stone) III:1215 Hamill, Pete II:548–549 Hamilton, Jane II:549–550 Hamilton Stark (Banks) I:103 Hamlet, The (Faulkner) I:426 Hammett, Dashiell I:196, 242, II:550–552, 585, 810, III:1341, 1435 The Maltese Falcon II:550, 551, 810, 821–823, III:1435 The Thin Man III:1261–1262 writers compared to I:155, 347, II:605, 810, III:1288 Ham on Rye (Bukowksi) I:196, II:552–553 Hand I Fan With, The (Ansa) I:66 Hanging Tree, The (Dorothy Johnson) II:688, 689, 826 Hangsaman (Jackson) II:670, III:1335 Hannah, Barry I:112, II:553–554 Hansen, Joseph III:1436 Hansen, Ron II:554–555 Happy All the Time (Colwin) I:283 Happy Days, Uncle Sergio (García-Ramis) III:1430 Happy Island, The (Powell) III:1069 Happy Man, The (Lethem) II:768 Hapworth 16, 1924 (Salinger) III:1133 Harcourt, Alfred I:71–72 Hard Blue Sky, The (Grau) II:529

“hard-boiled” detective II:821, 822, 929, III:1435 Hard Laughter (Lamott) II:738 Hard Time (Paretsky) III:1020 Hardy Boys series I:24 Harlem II:605, 611–612, III:1036, 1037, 1223. See also New York City Harlem Book of the Dead, The (Van Der Zee) II:681 Harlem Renaissance. See also under specific writers Bontemps and I:164 Ellison and I:400 Fauset and I:258, 428 forerunners to I:253, III:1418 Hughes and III:1333 Hurston and III:1255 Larsen and II:747, III:1022 McKay and II:861 in Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) II:934–935 novels of I:89, III:1418–1419 patronage and II:975–976 Toomer and III:1274 West (D.) and III:1340 writers of I:vii, II:861, III:1274, 1418–1419 Harlot’s Ghost (Mailer) II:815 Harold of Orange (Vizenor) III:1317 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins I:vii, II:555–556 Iola Leroy I:102, II:555, 556, 660–661, III:1368, 1418 Harper’s, Howells at II:633, 634 Harp of a Thousand Strings (H. L. Davis) I:324 Harris, E. Lynn II:556–557, III:1421 Harris, Thomas, Red Dragon III:1098–1100 Harrison, Chip. See Block, Lawrence Harrison, Colin II:557–558, 561 Harrison, Jim I:112, II:558–560 A Good Day to Die II:515–516, 559

Harrison, Kathryn II:558, 560–561, III:1144–1145 The Seal Wife II:560, 561, III:1144–1146 Harry and Catherine (Busch) I:201 Hart, Ellen III:1436 Harte, Bret I:79, II:561–563 Haruf, Kent II:563 Plainsong II:563, III:1046–1048 Hassler, Jon II:563–565 Staggerford II:564, III:1203–1205 Haunted Bookshop, The (Morley) II:911 Haunted Mesa, The (L’Amour) II:740 Haunting of Hill House, The (Jackson) II:565–566, 670, 671, III:1335 Havana Room, The (C. Harrison) II:557, 558 Hawaii in House without a Key (Biggers) II:630–631 in Murayama’s work I:30–31, II:935–936, III:1424 in Yamanaka’s work I:159–161, III:1362–1363, 1400, 1424 Hawaii (Michener) II:877 Hawkes, John Clendennin Burne, Jr. I:viii, 106, 110, II:484, 566, 566–568, 907, III:1328 Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western, The (Brautigan) I:177 Hawthorne, Nathaniel I:vi, 9, 19, 21, 133, 187, II:568–571, 999, III:1214, 1355 The Blithedale Romance I:154–155, II:569 The House of the Seven Gables I:154, II:568, 569, 628–629 The Marble Faun II:569, 832–835 and Melville I:146, 288, II:568, 869, 898, III:1044 and romanticism I:vii, II:568, 628 The Scarlet Letter I:154, 155, 243, II:568, 569,

628, 684, III:1031, 1143–1144 novels influenced by III:1072, 1073, 1091, 1300 on sentimental novels I:313, II:614 and short story I:58 writers compared to I:4, II:519, 714 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells) II:571–573, 633, 634 H. D. I:vii, II:573–574, 593 Bid Me to Live I:141–143, II:573 HERmione II:573, 591–593 Nights II:574, 964–965 Heading West (Betts) I:140 Heads by Harry (Yamanaka) III:1400, 1424 Healing, The (G. Jones) II:693 Health and Happiness (Johnson) II:687 Heart Change (Freed) I:465–466 Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The (McCullers) II:574–576, 857 Heart of a Woman, The (Angelou) I:60 Heart of Aztlán (Anaya) I:56, 152 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) I:126, 368 Heart of Hyacinth, The (Watanna) II:576–577, III:1422 Heart’s Highway: A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, The (Freeman) I:466, 467 Heart’s Kindred (Gale) II:477 Heartsong of Charging Elk, The (Welch) III:1336 Heat and Dust (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Heat’s On, The (Himes) II:605 Heaven’s My Destination (Wilder) III:1360, 1361 Hedylus (H. D.) II:573 Heilbrun, Carolyn G. (Amanda Cross) II:577–579, III:1436

INDEX Heinemann, Larry II:579–580 Paco’s Story II:579, III:1013–1014 Heinlein, Robert A. I:75, 202, II:580–582 Stranger in a Strange Land II:580, 581, III:1221–1223 Heirs of Columbus, The (Vizenor) III:1317 Helen Ford (Alger) I:24 Heller, Joseph I:vii, 110, II:546, 582–583 Catch-22 I:210, 234–235, II:582, 583, 593, III:1328 Heller with a Gun (L’Amour) II:740 Hellman, Lilian II:551, III:1341 Hello to the Cannibals (Bausch) I:115 Helprin, Mark II:583–584 Hemingway, Ernest I:vii, 306, 400, II:584–588, III:1253 “Big Two-Hearted River” II:516, 518 A Farewell to Arms I:421–422, II:545, 582, 585, 586 For Whom the Bell Tolls I:455–456, II:585–586 “hero” of II:585 “iceberg theory” of I:422, II:585 literary allusions to III:1268–1269, 1285, 1286 A Moveable Feast II:586, 926–927 The Old Man and the Sea I:231, II:584, 586, 990–992 The Sun Also Rises II:585, 586, 926, III:1129, 1237–1238 novels compared to I:169, 421, 437 To Have and Have Not II:585, 586, III:1270–1271 writers compared to I:112, 195, 384, II:475, 550, 552, 558, 559, 563, 1010, III:1073, 1209, 1260, 1274, 1382

writers influenced by I:209, 400, 454, II:563, 585, 715 writers influencing I:58, 422, II:585, III:1289 writers linked to I:88, 232, 422, II:790, III:1129, 1208 Henderson the Rain King (Bellow) I:131, II:588–589 Henríquez Ureña, Camila I:36 Herald, The (M. Shaara) III:1161 Her Infinite Variety (Auchincloss) I:85 Heritage of the Desert, The (Grey) II:539 Herland (Gilman) I:433, II:493, 494, 589–591 HERmione (H. D.) II:573, 591–593 Her Mother’s Daughter (French) I:467, 468 Heroic Slave, The (Douglass) III:1297, 1417 Hero with a Thousand Faces (J. Campbell) I:339 Herr, Michael II:593–594 Hersey, John II:594–595 A Bell for Adano I:128–129, II:594–595 Hershman, Marcie II:595–596 Herzog (Bellow) I:130, 131, II:596–598 He Sent Forth a Raven (E. M. Roberts) III:1113 Hesper (Garland) II:483 Hey Jack! (Hannah) II:553 Hiaasen, Carl I:332, II:598–599 Hibben, Paxton I:403 Hiding Place (Wideman) III:1354 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth III:1200 High Hearts (R. M. Brown) I:190 Highsmith, Patricia II:599–601 High Window, The (Chandler) I:242 Hijuelos, Oscar II:601–602, III:1427, 1431–1432 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love II:601, 825–826, III:1431

Hillerman, Tony I:57, II:602–604, III:1033–1034, 1436 People of Darkness II:602–603, III:1033–1035 Himes, Chester B. I:vii, 348, II:604–605, III:1419, 1436 Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando II:605–608, 732, III:1108, 1427, 1429 Klail City II:606, 732–733 Hippodrome, The (Colter) I:282 Hiroshima (Hersey) II:594 His Human Majesty (K. Boyle) I:170 His Little Women (Rossner) III:1119 Hispanic (term) III:1426 historians I:8–9, II:998 historical novel(s) I:vi by Alvarez I:36 Black Thunder (Bontemps) I:164, III:1418 Cloudsplitter, A Novel (Banks) I:276–277 The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) I:276, 285–287, 346, III:1229 by Connell I:289–290 by Cooper I:292–293 by Doctorow I:364 by Edmonds I:395 by Flanagan I:448–449 by Harrison (K.) II:561 Libra (DeLillo) I:337, II:771–773, III:1041 by Michener II:876–877 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus) II:543, 544, 989–990 Philadelphia Fire (Wideman) III:1040–1041, 1353, 1354 The Plot against America (P. Roth) II:668, III:1052–1053 The Prince and the Pauper (Twain) III:1075–1077, 1289–1290 Pushing the Bear (Glancy) II:498, III:1082–1084 Ragtime (Doctorow) III:1092–1093 The Red Tent (Diamant) I:353

1479

by Roberts (K.) III:1113–1114 The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) as III:1143–1144 by Settle III:1158–1159 by Shaara (J.) III:1160 The Slave (Singer) III:1175, 1179–1181 from slave’s perspective (See neo-slave narrative(s)) by Twain III:1289–1290 by Vidal III:1310, 1311 War and Remembrance (Wouk) III:1327–1329, 1396 The Winds of War (Wouk) III:1327–1328, 1370–1371, 1396 World Enough and Time (Warren) III:1394–1395 history/the past Doctorow on III:1092 Faulkner on III:1164 in Ragtime (Doctorow) III:1092–1093 in Roth’s (P.) work I:53 in The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) III:1143–1144 in The Shawl (Ozick) III:1164 in The Shipping News (Proulx) III:1167–1168 in U.S.A. Trilogy (Dos Passos) III:1302 in V. (Pynchon) III:1304–1306 Hitler’s Niece: A Novel (Hansen) II:555 H. M. Pulham, Esquire (Marquand) II:836 Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times (Child) I:254 Hocus-Pocus; or, What’s the Hurry, Son? (Vonnegut) III:1320 Hoffman, Alice II:608–609 Hogan, Linda I:452, II:609–610, III:1439 Holden Caulfield (character) I:232–233, III:1133 comparisons to I:104, 250, II:491, 714, 728 Hole in Texas, A (Wouk) III:1396

1480

INDEX

Holley, Marietta II:610–611, 790 Hollywood. See also Los Angeles in The Day of the Locust (N. West) I:327–330, II:754, III:1341 in The Last Tycoon (Fitzgerald) II:752–754 in Play It as It Lays (Didion) III:1050–1051 Hollywood (Bukowksi) I:196 Holmes, Oliver Wendell I:466, III:1316 Holocaust. See also Jewish experience in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon) I:36, 37 in Begley’s work I:123 in Hershman’s work II:595 in Maus I and II (Spiegelman) II:850–851, III:1199 in Night (Wiesel) II:963–964, III:1357, 1358 in Ozick’s work II:1011, III:1163–1164 in The Shawl (Ozick) III:1163–1165 in Singer’s work III:1175 in Sophie’s Choice (Styron) III:1229 in War and Remembrance (Wouk) III:1328 in Wiesel’s work III:1357–1358 Holte, Tess Urriza III:1423 Home (Sedgwick) III:1149 Home Across the Road (Peacock) III:1026 Home at the End of the World, A (Cunningham) I:314, II:618 Homebase (S. H. Wong) III:1391, 1422 Home Ground (Freed) I:465, 466 Home-Maker, The (Fisher) I:444–445 Homer II:525–526, III:1112 Home to Harlem (McKay) II:611–613, 861, III:1418, 1419 Homewood Trilogy (Wideman) III:1354

homosexuality. See gay themes; lesbianism Hondo (L’Amour) II:739 Honest Doubt (Heilbrun) II:578 Honey in the Horn (H. L. Davis) I:324, II:613–614 Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and the Love of Women (Just) II:705 Hood, Mary, Familiar Heat I:418–419 Hoop Roots (Wideman) III:1354 Hope, The (Wouk) III:1396 Hope Leslie (Sedgwick) II:614–615, III:1149 Hope of Heaven (O’Hara) II:987 Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth II:615–616, III:1418 Hopkinson, Nalo III:1420 Hoppenstand, Gary I:151 “Horatio Alger hero” I:23, 37, 51, II:783 horror fiction I:151. See also gothic novel(s); suspense novel(s) Carrie (King) I:229–231, II:723 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) II:653, III:1103 by King II:536, 723–724 by Lovecraft II:796–797 Pet Sematary (King) II:723, III:1037–1039 by Poe III:1054 by Rice III:1102–1103 Horse Heaven (Smiley) III:1182 Horseman, Pass By (McMurtry) II:863, 864, 865, III:1254 Hospital Sketches (Alcott) I:19 Hotel New Hampshire, The (Irving) II:616–618, 663, 664, 665 Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (Vizenor) III:1317 Hound of the Baskervilles, The (Conan Doyle) II:821 Hour of the Hunter, The (Jance) II:676 Hours, The (Cunningham) I:314, 454, II:618–619

House behind the Cedars, The (Chesnutt) I:252, 253, II:619–620, III:1418 House Divided, A (Buck) I:194, II:516 Houseguest, The (Berger) I:137 Householder, The (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Household Saints (Prose) III:1078–1079 Housekeeping (Robinson) II:620–622, III:1114, 1115 House Made of Dawn (Momaday) II:622–624, 901, 902, III:1438, 1439 House of Blue Mangoes, The (Davidar) III:1425 House of Earth (Buck) II:516 House of Fiction, The (C. Gordon) II:517 House of Leaves (Danielewski) II:624–625 House of Light (Thomas) III:1264 House of Mirth, The (Wharton) II:625–628, 678, 679, III:1342, 1343 House of Sand and Fog (Dubus III) I:385, 386 House of the Seven Gables, The (Hawthorne) I:154, II:568, 569, 628–629 House of the Solitary Maggot, The (Purdy) III:1081 House of the Winds (Yun) III:1424–1425 House of Women (Freed) I:465, 466 House of Women, The (Bromfield) I:184 House on Coliseum Street, The (Grau) II:529 House on Mango Street, The (Cisneros) I:266, II:629–630, III:1400, 1429 House Without a Key, The (Biggers) I:143, II:631–632, III:1434 Howard, Maureen II:632–633 Howe, Irving I:74, III:1063 Howells, William Dean II:633–636, 885 and Aldrich I:21 Annie Kilburn I:63–66 at Atlantic Monthly II:633, 634

and Cahan I:208 and Crane (S.) I:306 and Dunbar I:386 and Freeman I:466, 467 on Garland III:1118 and Harte II:562 A Hazard of New Fortunes II:571–573, 633, 634 on inequality I:64 and James (H.) I:41, 42, 64, II:633, 673, III:1331 and Jewett II:683 The Landlord at Lion’s Head II:633, 634, 742–744 on literature I:77, 93, 307, 333, II:634 on The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) II:838 A Modern Instance II:571, 633, 634, 899–900 and realism I:vii, II:633, 634, III:1107 The Rise of Silas Lapham II:633, 634, III:1105–1107 and Stoddard III:1214 and Wister III:1316, 1378 “How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank” (Steinbeck) III:1374 How Stella Got Her Groove Back (McMillan) II:863 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez) I:35, 36, II:636–637, III:1324, 1409, 1428 How to Read a Novel (C. Gordon) II:517 How to Save Your Own Life (Jong) II:695 Hubbard, L. Ron III:1308 Huck Finn (character) I:13–14, 15, III:1091 comparisons to I:58, 104, 118, 324, II:491, 701, 714, 728, 983, III:1076, 1117–1118, 1227, 1285 Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians (Twain) III:1290 Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Collaboration (Twain and Stewart) III:1290 Hud (McMurtry). See Horseman, Pass By (McMurtry)

INDEX Hudson River Bracketed (Wharton) III:1343 Hughes, Langston I:vii, 164, 400, 428, II:612, 637–639, 645, 849, III:1332, 1340, 1418, 1419 Not Without Laughter II:637–638, 974–976 The Ways of White Folks II:638, III:1332–1334 writers influenced by II:657, 918, III:1100, 1327 Hulabaloo in the Guava Orchard (K. Desai) III:1425 Human Being (Morley) II:911 Human Comedy, The (Saroyan) II:639–640, III:1139 human condition Hawthorne’s view of I:vii, II:568 in The Human Comedy (Saroyan) II:639, 640 in Moby-Dick (Melville) II:897–899 in The Moviegoer (Percy) II:927–928 in The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) II:991–992 in Seize the Day (Bellow) III:1151–1152 in The Temple of My Familiar (Walker) III:1250, 1251 in Wiesel’s novels III:1357 Human Stain, The (P. Roth) I:53, 54–55, II:489, III:1122, 1123 Humboldt’s Gift (Bellow) I:131 Humphreys, Josephine II:492, 640–641 Hundred Secret Senses, The (Tan) II:697, III:1243, 1422 Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Rodriguez) II:641–642, III:1427–1428 Hungry Hearts (Prose) III:1079 Hunter, Evan II:808, III:1436 Hunters and Gatherers (Prose) III:1079 Hunter’s Horn (Arnow) I:70, 71, 371

Hunt for Red October, The (Clancy) I:267, 268, II:642–643 Huo, T. C. III:1426 Hurry Home (Wideman) III:1353–1354 Hurst, Fannie II:643–644, 645 Hurston, Zora Neale I:vii, II:643, 645–646, III:1325, 1340, 1419 and Hughes II:645, III:1332 Jonah’s Gourd Vine II:645, 691–693 Moses, Man of the Mountain II:645, 915–917 Their Eyes Were Watching God II:645, 863, III:1255–1256, 1419 writers compared to I:428, II:747, III:1333 writers influenced by II:918, III:1100 Hutchisson, James I:72 Huxley, Aldous II:790 Brave New World I:415, II:788, 805

I I Am Charlotte Simmons (T. Wolfe) III:1381 I Am Elijah Thrush (Purdy) III:1081 I Am One of You Forever: A Novel (Chappell) I:244 I Am the Clay (Potok) III:1067 I Cannot Get You Close Enough: Three Novellas (Gilchrist) II:493 “iceberg theory” I:422, II:585 Iced (C. H. Clark) I:269 Ice Palace (Ferber) I:435 Ice Storm, The (Moody) II:908 Ida: A Novel (Stein) III:1207 identity in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:3–4 African-American I:90–91, II:690, 1006–1008, III:1234–1235 (See also mixed-race people; passing)

in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:64–65 in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (J. W. Johnson) I:90–91, II:690 in Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) II:530, 531 in HERmione (H. D.) II:573, 591–593 in In Memoriam to Identity (Acker) I:6, II:650–653 in Invisible Man (Ellison) II:658–660 in Latino literature III:1427, 1429 in Light in August (Faulkner) II:775–777 in Marshall’s work II:840 in Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) II:902–904 in Native American novels III:1437, 1439 in The Outsider (R. Wright) II:1006–1008 in Passing (Larsen) III:1023 in The Plot against America (P. Roth) III:1053 in Song of Solomon (Morrison) III:1190–1191 in Sula (Morrison) III:1234–1235 in Summer (Wharton) III:1235–1237 in Tracks (Erdrich) III:1276–1277 in Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) III:1280–1281 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1350–1351 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) III:1386–1388 in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Allen) III:1388–1389 Ides of March, The (Wilder) III:1360, 1361 If Beale Street Could Talk (Baldwin) I:98, 99, III:1420 If Blessing Comes (Bambara) I:101 If He Hollers Let Him Go (Himes) II:604, III:1419 If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (O’Brien) II:981

1481

If Morning Ever Comes (A. Tyler) III:1292 If This World Were Mine (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557 “If We Must Die” (McKay) II:766–767 If You Knew Me (Roiphe) III:1116 I Hear America Swinging (De Vries) I:350 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou) I:59–60, 387 I’ll Take Manhattan (Krantz) II:736 Illumination Night (Hoffman) II:608 Imaginary Friends (Lurie) II:806 Imani All Mine (C. Porter) III:1058 I Married a Communist (P. Roth) I:53, 54, 55, III:1123 Imitation of Life (Hurst) II:643, 644 Immaculate Man (M. C. Gordon) II:519 immigrant experience in All I Asking for Is My Body (Murayama) I:30–31, III:1424 in Alvarez’s work I:35–36 America is in the Heart (Bulosan) I:40–41 in An American Brat (Sidhwa) I:44–45 in American Son (Roley) I:50–51, III:1116–1117, 1423 in Asian-American novels III:1421 in Bacho’s work I:96 in The Barbarians Are Coming (D. W. Louie) I:104 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179, III:1406–1407 in Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:186, III:1420 in Cahan’s novels I:207–208 in Call It Sleep (H. Roth) I:215–217, III:1120 in Cebu (Bacho) I:96, 238–239 in Choi’s novels I:260, III:1425

1482

INDEX

immigrant experience (continued) in Christ in Concrete (di Donato) I:262–263, 359 in Clay Walls (Kim) I:273–274, II:719, III:1425 in Divakaruni’s work I:360, III:1425 in Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia) I:380–382, II:477, 478, III:1431 in El Bronx Remembered (Mohr) I:396–397 in Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:438–440 in Filipino-American novels III:1422–1423 in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez) I:35, 36, II:636–637, III:1428 in Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez) II:641–642, III:1427–1428 in Jasmine (Mukherjee) II:679–680 in Kang’s work II:708 in Korean-American novels III:1425 in Marshall’s work II:840–841 in Middlesex (Eugenides) I:408, II:878–879 in The Mistress of Spices (Divakaruni) II:893–894 in Mohr’s work II:900 in Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) II:902–904 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Far) II:932–933 in Mukherjee’s work II:933, III:1425 in My Ántonia (Cather) II:938–939 in The Namesake (Lahiri) II:947–948 in Native Speaker (C.-R. Lee) II:954 in Ng’s work II:962 in The Promised Land (Antin) III:1077–1078 in The Rise of David Levinsky (Cahan) III:1104–1105 in Salome of the Tenements (Yezierska) III:1134–1135

in South Asian–American novels III:1425 in Southeast Asian–American novels III:1425, 1426 in Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1226 in Sui Sin Far’s work III:1232 in Typical American (Jen) III:1295–1296 in White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349, 1366 in Wife (Mukherjee) III:1359–1360 in Williams’s (W. C.) work III:1365, 1366 in Yezierska’s novels III:1406–1407 Imperfect Spy, An (Heilbrun) II:578 Imperial Woman (Buck) I:194 Imported Bridegroom, The (Cahan) I:208 In a Brown Mantle (Nazareth) III:1425 In a Shallow Grave (Purdy) III:1081 In a Yellow Wood (Vidal) III:1311 incest in Ada or Ardor (Nabokov) II:943 in Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison) I:113, 114 in The Kiss (K. Harrison) II:560, III:1145 in Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald) III:1252 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1182 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) I:91, 102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 In Cold Blood (Capote) I:228–229, II:649–650, 789 In Country (Mason) II:846 Incredible Brazilian, The (Ghose) III:1425 In Custody (A. Desai) III:1425 Indemnity Only (Paretsky) III:1020, 1435 indentured servitude, in Our Nig (Wilson) II:1005–1006, III:1368

Independence Day (R. Ford) I:454 India in The Death of Vishnu (Suri) III:1238 in Jhabvala’s work II:684, 685 in Mukherjee’s work II:933 novels set in III:1425 partition of III:1170 in Wife (Mukherjee) III:1359–1360 Indian-American novel(s). See South Asian–American novel(s) Indian Americans in Divakaruni’s work I:360, II:948, III:1425 in Jasmine (Mukherjee) II:679–680, 933 in The Mistress of Spices (Divakaruni) I:360–361 in Mukherjee’s work II:933–934, 948, III:1425 in The Namesake (Lahiri) II:947–948 novels by and about III:1425 in Wife (Mukherjee) II:933, III:1359–1360 Indian Killer (Alexie) I:22 Indian Lawyer, The (Welch) III:1336 Indian Summer (Howells) II:633 Indian Summer (Knowles) II:733–734 Indifferent Children, The (Auchincloss) I:84 In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck) II:984, III:1209, 1275 industrialization. See also capitalism; urbanization in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–65 in Davis’s (R. B. H. ) work I:325 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:773–774 in Sinclair’s novels III:1173 I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (Greenberg) II:535 Infants of the Spring (Thurman) III:1418 Inferno (Dante) II:778, 968

Ingels, Beth III:1023–1024 In Her Day (R. M. Brown) I:190 Inkling, The (Chappell) I:243 Ink Truck, The (Kennedy) II:712 In Memoriam to Identity (Acker) I:6, II:650–653 In Memory of Junior (Edgerton) I:394 In My Father’s House (Gaines) II:475 Innocents, The (Lewis) II:770 In Nueva York (Mohr) I:396, II:901 In Pharaoh’s Army (Wolff) III:1263, 1382 In Search of Love and Beauty (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (A. Walker) III:1325 Inside Out (Wouk) III:1396 “international theme” I:38, 42. See also Europe, Americans in Internet III:1428 interracial relationships. See miscegenation Interruption of Everything, The (McMillan) II:862, 863 Interstate (Dixon) I:361 Interview with the Vampire (Rice) II:653–654, III:1103 In the Beauty of the Lilies (Updike) III:1300 In the Beginning (Potok) III:1067 In the City of Fear (Just) II:705 In the Country of Lost Things (Auster) I:86 In the Fog (R. H. Davis) I:326 In the Heart of the Valley of Love (Kadohata) II:707, III:1424 In the Lake of the Woods (O’Brien) II:981 In the Last Analysis (Heilbrun) II:578 In the Money (W. C. Williams) III:1365, 1366 In the Name of Salomé (Alvarez) I:35, 36, III:1432

INDEX In the Palace of the Movie King (Calisher) I:214 In the Penny Arcade (Millhauser) II:884 In the Pond (Ha) II:546 In the Slammer with Carol Smith (Calisher) I:214 In the Tennessee Country (Taylor) III:1249 In the Time of the Butterflies (Alvarez) I:35, 36, II:654–655, III:1432 In the Valley (Frederic) I:464 In This Our Life (Glasgow) II:499 In This Sign (Greenberg) II:535 Into Thin Air (Leavitt) II:758 Into Your Tent I’ll Creep (De Vries) I:349, 350 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner) I:426 Invention of Solitude, The (Auster) II:655–657 Invisible Life (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557, III:1421 Invisible Man (Ellison) I:399, 400, II:657–660, III:1091, 1419–1420 comparisons to I:172, II:701, 702, 849, 1008, III:1040 Invisible Mending (Busch) I:201 Invisible Monsters (Palahniuk) III:1014 In Watermelon Sugar (Brautigan) I:177 Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (Harper) I:102, II:555, 556, 660–661, III:1368, 1418 Ireland I:448–449 Irish Americans in McDermott’s work II:858–859 in O’Connor’s (E.) work II:982 in Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1226–1228 Irish Eye, An (Hawkes) II:567 Iron Heel, The (London) II:783 Ironweed (Kennedy) I:137, II:661–663, 712, 713 Irrawaddy Tango (Law-Yone) III:1425–1426

Irving, John II:509, 563, 663–665, III:1392 The Cider House Rules I:264–266, II:663, 664, 665 The Hotel New Hampshire II:616–618, 663, 664, 665 A Prayer for Owen Meany II:663, 664, 665, III:1071–1073 The World According to Garp II:664, 665, III:1273, 1392–1394 Irving, Washington I:58, II:999, III:1149 Isaacs, Susan II:666–667 Isidro (Austin) I:87 Islands in the Stream (Hemingway) II:586 Islas, Arturo III:1427, 1429 The Rain God III:1429–1430 Isn’t It Romantic: An Entertainment (Hansen) II:555 Israel III:1396 Israel Potter (Melville) II:869 “is” thinking I:224, III:1024 Italian Americans in di Donato’s work I:262–263, 359–360 in Puzo’s work II:503–505, III:1084–1085 Italy II:585, 673, 777–778, 832, 833, III:1198, 1229 It Can’t Happen Here (Lewis) I:402, II:667–669, 770 I, the Jury (Spillane) III:1436 I, Robot (Asimov) I:75 I, Roger Williams (Settle) III:1159 It Is Time, Lord (Chappell) I:243 Ivory Tower, The (James) II:674 I Wanted a Year without Fall (Busch) I:201

J Jack Glance (Just) II:705 Jackson, Shirley II:670–671, 769, III:1335 The Haunting of Hill House II:565–566, 670, 671, III:1335

“The Lottery” I:116, II:670 We Have Always Lived in the Castle II:670, 671, III:1334–1336 Jacobs, Harriet II:671–672 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl I:91, 102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 Jacob’s Ladder (Rawlings) III:1094–1095 Jailbird (Vonnegut) III:1320 Jailing of Cecelia Capture, The (Hale) III:1440 Jalamanta: A Message from the Desert (Anaya) I:57 James, Alice II:672–673, III:1064 James, Henry I:38, 77, 154, 187, II:672–676 The Ambassadors I:38–39, 42, II:673–674 The American I:38, 41–42, II:673, 760 The Aspern Papers I:77–78, II:673 and Auchincloss I:84, 85 The Bostonians: A Novel I:154, II:673 characters of II:533 Daisy Miller I:38, 42, 169, 318–319, II:672, 673, 793 and Freeman I:466, 467 The Golden Bowl I:38, II:512–513, 672, 673–674 and Howells I:41, 42, 64, II:633, 673, III:1331 “international theme” works I:38, 42 on love I:93 as modernist I:306, II:672 narrative techniques of I:77, II:672, III:1345–1346 The Portrait of a Lady I:38, 42, 318, 366, II:673, III:1063–1065, 1332 The Princess Casamassima I:38, II:673 as realist I:vii The Turn of the Screw II:672, 673, III:1286–1288 Washington Square I:318, II:673, III:1331–1332 What Maisie Knew I:38, II:673, III:1344–1346

1483

The Wings of the Dove I:38, 41, II:673, 674 writers compared to I:84, 366, II:777–778, 977, III:1053 writers influenced by II:678, 885, III:1392 James, William I:39, II:672, 889, III:1207 James Joyce Murder, The (Heilbrun) II:578 Jance, Judith Ann II:676–677 Jane Eyre (Brontë) II:680, 910, III:1203, 1404 Jane Field (Freeman) I:466, II:677–678 Janowitz, Tama I:182, II:476, 678–679 Japanese-American novel(s) III:1423–1424. See also Kadohata, Cynthia; Murayama, Milton; Okada, John; Sone, Monica; Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Japanese Americans in All I Asking for Is My Body (Murayama) I:30–31, II:936, III:1424 in Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159–161, III:1400–1401, 1424 and Chinese Americans III:1280 in The Floating World (Kadohata) I:449–451, II:707, III:1424 internment of II:970–973, 989, III:1190 in Kadohata’s work II:707–708, III:1424 in Murayama’s work II:935–936, III:1424 in Nisei Daughter (Sone) II:970–971, III:1190 in No-No Boy (Okada) II:971–973, 989, III:1190, 1424 novels by and about III:1423–1424 in Sone’s work III:1190 in Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) I:160, III:1362–1363, 1424 in Yamanaka’s work III:1400–1401, 1424

1484

INDEX

“Japanese” romances II:576–577, III:1422 Jasmine (Mukherjee) II:679–681, 933, III:1425 Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership as Written by Himself (Berry) I:140 Jazz (Morrison) I:132, II:681–682, 795, 912, III:1018, 1420 jazz novel(s) I:400, II:657–658, 681, 682, III:1418, 1420 Jefferson, Thomas I:102–103, 192, III:1417 Jen, Gish I:450, II:682–683, 953 Mona in the Promised Land II:682, 902–904, III:1422 Typical American II:682, III:1295–1296, 1422 Jennie Gerhardt (Dreiser) I:383 Jeremy’s Vision (Purdy) III:1081 Jerome, A Poor Man (Freeman) I:466 Jewels of Aptor, The (S. R. Delany) I:335 Jewels of Tessa Kent, The (Krantz) II:736, 737 Jewett, Sarah Orne I:vii, II:683–684, III:1031, 1200 The Country of the Pointed Firs I:302–304, II:683–684 Deephaven I:332–334, II:683 Jewish experience. See also Holocaust; Judaism in American Pastoral (P. Roth) I:47, 53 in Apple’s work I:68 in Bee Season (Goldberg) I:120, II:511 in Bellow’s work I:131 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179 in Cahan’s work I:207–208 in Call It Sleep (H. Roth) I:215–217, III:1120 in Chabon’s work I:37, 38 in The Chosen (Potok) I:261–262 in Diamant’s work I:353

in Fear of Flying (Jong) I:429, 430 in Ferber’s work I:434, 435 in Friedman’s work I:468–469 in The Ghost Writer (P. Roth) II:487–489 in Hurst’s work II:643, 644 in I Married a Communist (P. Roth) I:54 in Lovingkindness (Roiphe) II:803–805 in Malamud’s work II:820, 956 novelists of, after World War II I:vii in Ozick’s work II:1011 in The Plot against America (P. Roth) III:1052–1053 in Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth) III:1062–1063 in Potok’s work III:1067 in The Promised Land (Antin) III:1077–1078 in Prose’s work III:1078–1079 in The Rise of David Levinsky (Cahan) III:1104–1105 in Roiphe’s work III:1115, 1116 in Roth’s (H.) work III:1120 in Roth’s (P.) work III:1121–1122 in Salome of the Tenements (Yezierska) III:1134–1135 in Singer’s work III:1174–1175 in The Slave (Singer) III:1179–1181, 1180 in Wiesel’s work III:1357–1358 in Wouk’s work III:1395, 1396 in Yezierska’s work III:1406–1407 Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer II:684–686 “J” Is for Judgment (Grafton) II:522 Jitterbug Perfume (Robbins) III:1112 Job, The (Lewis) II:770 Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel (Stegner) III:1206 Joe Jones (Lamott) II:738

John Andross (R. B. H. Davis) I:325 John Barleycorn (London) II:783 John March, Southerner (Cable) I:206 Johnson, Charles I:viii, 346 Johnson, Charles R. I:346, II:686, 686–687 Johnson, Diane II:687–688 Le Divorce II:687, 759–760 Johnson, Dorothy II:688–689, 826–827 A Man Called Horse II:688–689, 826–827 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance II:689, 826, 829 Johnson, James Weldon I:164, 386, 400, II:689–691, 934, III:1340 The Autobiography of an ExColoured Man I:89–91, II:689, 690, III:1418 John’s Wife (Coover) I:295 John Wood Case, The (Suckow) III:1231 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston) II:645, 691–693 Jones, Dewey II:612 Jones, Gayl II:693, III:1274, 1420 Corregidora I:301–302, II:693 Jones, James I:vii, II:693–694, III:1311 From Here to Eternity I:471–472, II:582, 693–694, III:1328 The Thin Red Line I:210, 471, II:694, III:1328 Jong, Erica I:430, II:695–696, III:1282 Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones I:419–421, II:695 Fear of Flying I:420, 429–431, II:695 Jo’s Boys (Alcott) I:20, II:780 Joss and Gold (Lim) III:1426 Jour, Le (The Accident) (Wiesel) III:1357, 1358 Journal from Ellipsia (Calisher) I:214 Journey (Thomas) III:1264

Journey of Simon McKeever, The (Maltz) II:823 Joyce, James I:106, 400, II:897, 926, III:1120 Dubliners III:1225 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man I:16, 129, 401, II:475, III:1129 Ulysses I:321, 401, II:529, 793, III:1166, 1226, 1227, 1279 writers compared to I:170, 256, II:484, III:1226, 1420 Joy Luck Club, The (Tan) II:696–697, 730, III:1243, 1324, 1422 Joyner, Nancy Carol III:1158 JR (Gaddis) I:469, II:473, 697–699 Jubilee (M. Walker) II:699–701, III:1327 Judah the Pious (Prose) III:1078 Judaism. See also Jewish experience in Bee Season (Goldberg) I:120, II:511 in The Chosen (Potok) I:262 in Lovingkindness (Roiphe) II:803–805 in Night (Wiesel) II:963–964 in Wiesel’s novels III:1357, 1358 Judd Rankin’s Daughter (Glaspell) II:501, 502 Judges, The (Wiesel) III:1358 Judgment Day (Farrell) III:1224, 1225 juges, Les (The Judges) (Wiesel) III:1358 Julian (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 Julip (J. Harrison) II:559 July 7th (McCorkle) I:249, II:855 Juneteenth (Ellison) I:399, 400, II:701–702 Jung, Carl II:783, III:1024, 1092 Jungle, The (Sinclair) II:702–704, III:1172, 1173 Jungle Lovers (Theroux) III:1258 Junky (W. S. Burroughs) I:198, II:704–705

INDEX Jupiter Lights (Woolson) III:1392 Jurassic Park (Crichton) I:308 Jurgen (Cabell) I:205 Just, Ward II:705–706 Just above My Head (Baldwin) I:98, 99, III:1420 Just and the Unjust, The (Cozzens) I:304 Just as I Am: A Novel (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557 Juster, Norman, The Phantom Tollbooth III:1039–1040

K Kadohata, Cynthia II:707–708, III:1424 The Floating World I:449–451, II:707, III:1424 Kafka, Franz I:137, II:495, III:1120, 1286, 1420 Kang, Younghill II:708 Kate Fansler series (Heilbrun) II:577, 578 Kate Vaiden (Reynolds Price) II:708–710, III:1073, 1074 Kavanaugh, Paul. See Block, Lawrence Keeper of the Keys (Biggers) I:143 Keepers of the Earth (Bruchac) III:1440 Keepers of the House, The (Grau) II:529, 710–711 Keller, Nora Okja II:711–712, III:1424 Comfort Woman I:283–284, II:711–712, 761, III:1424 Fox Girl II:712 Kelley, William Melvin III:1420 Kennedy, William I:viii, 103, II:662, 712–713 Ironweed I:137, II:661–663, 712, 713 Kennedy assassination II:771–773 Kentucky. See also Appalachia in Arnow’s work I:70–71, 371 in The Great Meadow (Roberts) II:533, III:1112–1113

in Mason’s work II:846 in World Enough and Time (Warren) III:1394–1395 Keres culture III:1388, 1389 Kerouac, Jack I:viii, 6, 27, 137, II:713–715, 995, III:1091, 1139 and Burroughs (W. S.) I:199, II:995 Dharma Bums I:27, 352–353, II:714 On the Road I:27, 104, 352, II:713, 714, 993, 994–995, III:1091 writers compared to I:168, 176, II:552, 707, 880 Kesey, Ken I:viii, 139, 177, II:715–717 as character I:163, III:1381 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest II:715–716, 993–994 Kidd, Sue Monk II:717 Kierkegaard, Søren I:116, II:656, 749, 1008, III:1035 Sickness Unto Death II:927, 928 Killens, John O. III:1420 Killer Angels, The (M. Shaara) III:1160, 1161 Killer Diller (Edgerton) I:394 Killing for Christ, A (Hamill) II:548 Killing Ground, The (Settle) III:1158, 1159 Killing Mister Watson (Matthiessen) II:717–719, 847 Killing Orders (Paretsky) III:1020 Killing Time (Berger) I:137 Kim (Kipling) I:307 Kim, Helen III:1424–1425 Kim, Patti III:1425 Kim, Richard E. III:1424 Kim Ronyoung II:719 Clay Walls I:273–274, II:719, III:1425 Kincaid, Jamaica I:62, II:719–720 Annie John I:62–63, II:719, 720 Kindred (O. E. Butler) I:202, II:720–722, III:1327, 1420

Kinds of Love (Sarton) I:79, III:1141 King, Stephen I:187, II:536, 723–726, 796 Carrie I:229–231, II:723 The Green Mile II:536–537, 723, 724 Misery II:723, 724, 887–888 Pet Sematary II:723, III:1037–1039 King, Thomas III:1439 King, The (Barthelme) I:111 King Coal (Sinclair) III:1173 King in the Tree, The (Millhauser) II:884 King of the Fields, The (Singer) III:1175 King of the Gypsies (Maas) II:808 King, Queen, Knave (Korol’, dama, valet) (Nabokov) II:942, 943 King Rat (Clavell) I:272 Kings and Planets (Canin) I:223–224 Kingsblood Royal (Lewis) II:770 King’s Indian, The (J. Gardner) II:481 Kingsley, Mary I:115 Kingsolver, Barbara II:726–727 The Bean Trees I:118, II:726 The Poisonwood Bible II:726, III:1055–1058 King’s Persons, The (Greenberg) II:535 Kingston, Maxine Hong I:viii, 438, II:727–729, III:1401 and Chin I:258, III:1281 Tripmaster Monkey II:727–728, III:1279–1282, 1422 The Woman Warrior I:36, 438, II:727, 728, III:1386–1388, 1422 writers compared to III:1243, 1295 Kirkland, Caroline II:729–730 “K” Is for Killer (Grafton) II:522 Kiss, The (K. Harrison) II:560, III:1145

1485

Kiss of Kin, The (Settle) III:1158 Kiss of the Bees (Jance) II:676 Kit Brandon (Anderson) I:58–59 Kitchen God’s Wife, The (Tan) II:730–732, III:1243, 1422 Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (Russ) III:1128 “Kitty Brown” books (Phelps) III:1040 Kitty Foyle (Morley) II:911 Klail City (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606, 732–733 Klail City y sus alrededores (Hinojosa-Smith) II:732, III:1427, 1429 Klein, Joe I:344 Knights and Dragons (Spencer) III:1198 Knock on Any Door (Motley) III:1419 knowledge. See truth Knowles, John II:733–734 A Separate Peace II:733, III:1156–1158 Know Nothing (Settle) III:1158, 1159 Korea I:283–284, 356, 357 Korean-American novel(s) III:1424–1425. See also Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung; Choi, Susan; Kang, Younghill; Keller, Nora Okja; Kim Ronyoung; Lee, Chang-rae Korean Americans in Choi’s work I:260, III:1425 in Clay Walls (Kim) I:273–274, II:719, III:1425 in Comfort Woman (Keller) I:284 in Dictee (Cha) I:240, 356–358, III:1425 in Kang’s work II:708 in Keller’s work II:711–712, III:1424 in Lee’s (C.-R.) work II:760–761, III:1424, 1425 in Native Speaker (C.-R. Lee) II:761, 953–954, III:1424 Korean Love Songs from Klail City Death Trip (HinojosaSmith) II:606

1486

INDEX

Korean War II:827, III:1067, 1424 Korean women I:283–284, 356–358, II:761, III:1424 Korzybski, Alfred III:1222–1223 Kosinski, Jerzy II:734–736 Being There I:124–126, II:735 The Painted Bird I:124, II:734–735, III:1014–1016 Steps II:735, III:1212–1214 Kramer Girls, The (Suckow) III:1231 Krantz, Judith II:736–737 Krause, Herbert II:613 Künstlerroman I:viii. See also artist(s) The Ghost Writer (P. Roth) as II:487–489, III:1416 Roth’s (P.) novels as III:1416

L Ladder of Years (A. Tyler) III:1293 Ladders to Fire (Nin) II:968, 969 Ladies’ Almanack (Barnes) II:967 Ladies’ Man (Richard Price) III:1075 Lady Baltimore III:1378 Lady in the Lake, The (Chandler) I:242 Lady of Situations, The (Auchincloss) I:85 L’Affaire (Diane Johnson) II:687–688 Laguna people III:1170, 1171, 1440 Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Namesake II:947–948 Lake, M. D. III:1436 Lamb, Wally II:549 Lamott, Anne II:738–739 L’Amour, Louis II:613, 739–741 Lamplighter, The (Cummins) I:313 Lancelot (Percy) II:741–742, III:1035 Landlord at Lion’s Head, The (Howells) II:633, 634, 742–744

Land of Little Rain, The (Austin) I:87 Land of Smiles (Huo) III:1426 Langton, Jane III:1436 Lanny Budd series (Sinclair) II:744–745, III:1172, 1173 Lansdale, Joseph Richard Harold II:746–747 La Nuit (Night) (Wiesel). See Night (Wiesel) Larsen, Nella I:vii, 428, II:747–748, III:1022, 1207 Passing II:747–748, III:1022–1023, 1418 Quicksand II:747, 849, III:1087–1088, 1418 Lasher (Rice) III:1103 Last Adam, The (Cozzens) I:304, 305 Last Days of Louisiana Red, The (Reed) III:1100 Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed, The (Smith) III:1183 Last Don: A Novel, The (Puzo) III:1084, 1085 Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby) III:1152 Last Full Measure, The (J. Shaara) III:1160, 1161 Last Gentleman, The (Percy) II:748–749, 798, III:1035 Last Girls, The (Smith) III:1184 Last Good Time, The (Bausch) I:115 Last Go Round (Kesey) II:716 Last Hurrah, The (E. O’Connor) II:982 Last Juror, The (Grisham) II:541 Last of the Breed (L’Amour) II:740 Last of the Conqueror (Smith) III:1419 Last of the Menu Girls, The (Chávez) I:248 Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, The (Cooper) I:187, 292, 334, 335, II:749–751, 755, 756–757 Last of the Savages, The (McInerney) II:860

Last Picture Show, The (McMurtry) II:863, 864, III:1254 Last Precinct, The (Cornwell) I:299 Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The (Erdrich) I:403, 404, III:1275 Last Resort: A Novel, The (Lurie) II:806, 807 Last Seen Wearing (Waugh) III:1436 Last Thing He Wanted, The (Didion) I:358 Last Time They Met, The (Shreve) II:751–752 Last Trolley Ride, The (Calisher) I:214 Last Tycoon, The (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:446, II:752–754 Late Child, The (McMurtry) II:865 Late George Apley, The (Marquand) II:836 Lathen, Emma III:1436 Lathe of Heaven, The (Le Guin) II:764 Latin America I:232, II:919 Latino (term) III:1426 Latino autobiographies III:1427–1428 Latino novel(s) III:1426– 1433. See also under specific ethnic groups and writers audience and language of III:1427–1428 Cuban-American III:1427, 1431–1432 Dominican-American III:1427, 1432 literary criticism on III:1432–1433 Mexican-American (Chicano) III:1108, 1427, 1428–1430 Puerto Rican III:1427, 1430–1431 themes of I:36, III:1426–1427, 1428 by women I:35, III:1428 L’Aube (Dawn) (Wiesel) III:1357, 1358 Laughing Matter, The (Saroyan) III:1139 La ville de la chance (The Town beyond the Wall) (Wiesel) III:1358

Law for the Lion, A (Auchincloss) I:84 Lawrence, D. H. I:141, 142, 212, 334–335, II:573 Laws of Our Fathers, The (Turow) III:1288–1289 Lawton Girl, The (Frederic) I:464 Law unto Herself, A (R. B. H. Davis) I:325 lawyers I:469–471, II:474. See also legal thriller(s) Lazarus story III:1038 Leap Year (Cameron) I:218 Leatherstocking Tales, The (Cooper) I:vii, 187, 292, 293, 334, II:755–757, 852, 1010 The Deerslayer I:293, 334–335, II:755, 756 The Last of the Mohicans I:187, 292, 334, 335, II:749–751, 755, 756–757 Leatherwood God, The (Howells) II:633, 634 Leavenworth Case, The (A. K. Green) III:1434 Leaving Cheyenne (McMurtry) II:863, 864, 865, III:1254 Leavitt, Caroline II:758 Leavitt, David II:758–759 Lee, Chang-Rae II:760–761, 954–955, III:1424, 1425 Native Speaker II:761, 953–955, III:1425 Lee, Gus III:1422 Lee, Harper I:31, 229, II:649, 761–762 To Kill a Mockingbird II:555, 761, III:1271–1273 Lee, Manfred III:1435. See also Queen, Ellery Lee, William. See Burroughs, William S. Left Hand of Darkness, The (Le Guin) II:762–763, 764 Legacy (Michener) II:877 legal thriller(s) The Firm (Grisham) I:442–444, II:540, 541 by Grisham II:540–541 Perry Mason series (E. S. Gardner) II:479–480 by Turow III:1288–1289 Legend of Duluoz (Kerouac) II:713–714

INDEX Legends of the Fall (J. Harrison) II:558–559 Legion (Blatty) I:152 Legs (Kennedy) II:662, 712 Le Guin, Ursula K. I:175, 202, 433, II:762, 764–765 The Left Hand of Darkness II:762–763, 764 Leila (Donleavy) I:374, 375 lesbianism in Allison’s (Dorothy E.) work I:31–32 in Brown’s (R. M.) work I:189, 190 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:281, 282 detective novels III:1436 in Freeman’s work I:466, 467 in H. D.’s work II:573, 574 in Highsmith’s work II:600 in Passing (Larsen) III:1023 in Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) III:1125, 1126 in Sarton’s novels III:1140, 1141 in On Strike Against God (Russ) III:1127, 1128 in Venus Envy (R. M. Brown) III:1309, 1310 in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Allen) III:1389 Lesser Lives (Johnson) II:687 Lessing, Doris II:726 Lesson Before Dying, A (Gaines) II:765–767 Less Than Zero (Ellis) I:182 Le Sueur, Meridel I:vii, II:496, 497, 767–768 The Girl II:496–497, 767, 768 Lethem, Jonathan II:768–769 Motherless Brooklyn II:768, 769, 920–922 Let It Come Down (P. F. Bowles) I:169 Let Me Count the Ways (De Vries) I:350 Letters (Barth) I:109–110 Letting Go (P. Roth) III:1122, 1131 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans) I:16, 330 Leviathan (Auster) I:86

Lew Archer series (R. Macdonald) II:810–811, 928–930, III:1435 Lewis, Sinclair I:71–72, 383, II:502, 564, 769–771, III:1117, 1379 Arrowsmith I:71–73, 365, II:769, 770 Babbitt I:71, 95–96, 365, 403, II:769 characters of I:365, 402–403 Dodsworth I:365–367, II:770 Elmer Gantry I:365, 402–404, II:769, 770 It Can’t Happen Here I:402, II:667–669, 770 Main Street I:71, 72, 365, II:564, 769, 770, 816–818, III:1117 writers compared to II:835, III:1061, 1230 Libra (DeLillo) I:337, II:771–773, III:1041 Lie Down in Darkness (Styron) I:285, III:1228, 1229 Life (magazine) I:128 Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated California Bandit, The (Rollin) III:1438 Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The (Defoe) I:89, 431, II:679 Life and Gabriella: The Story of a Woman’s Courage (Glasgow) II:499, 500 Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) I:325, II:773–775 Life without Water (Peacock) III:1026 Light in August (Faulkner) I:426, II:650, 775–777, 1010 Light in the Piazza, The (Spencer) II:777–778, III:1198 Lights of Earth, The (Berriault) I:139 Lily White (Isaacs) II:666 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin I:451, III:1426 Lime Twig, The (Hawkes) II:566–567 Lincoln (Vidal) III:1310, 1311

Lincoln, Abraham I:24, 40, II:634, III:1220, 1298 Lindbergh, Charles III:1052, 1053 Linden Hills (Naylor) II:778–779, 957 Lindsey, Vachel I:58 Lingeman, Richard I:72 Linmark, R. Zamora III:1423 Lin McLean (Wister) III:1378 Lion’s Game, The (DeMille) I:343 Listening to Billie (A. Adams) I:7 literary canon African Americans and I:132, 133 Latino III:1428 Modern Library best novels list I:180, II:494, III:1178, 1224 “Literature of Exhaustion, The” (Barth) I:109 Little Altars Everywhere (Wells) III:1337 Little Big Man (Berger) I:136, 137 Little Duke (Young) III:1075–1076 Little Kingdoms (Millhauser) II:884 Little Men (Alcott) I:20, II:780 Little Norsk; or Ol’ Pap’s Flaxen, A (Garland) II:483 Little Sister, The (Chandler) I:242 Little Steel (Sinclair) III:1173 Little Women (Alcott) I:19–20, II:779–780, III:1324, 1329, 1334 Little Women, The (Weber) III:1334 Little Yellow Dog, A (Mosley) II:918 Liu, Aimme III:1422 Lively Lady, The (K. Roberts) III:1113–1114 Living at Home (M. C. Gordon) II:519–520 Living End, The (Elkin) I:398 Living Is Easy, The (D. West) III:1340 Living Other Lives (Leavitt) II:758 Living Reed, The (Buck) I:194

1487

Locke, Alain II:645, 917, III:1418 Locked Room, The (Auster) I:86, II:960–962 “Locked Room” puzzle III:1435 Lockridge, Frances III:1435 Lockridge, Richard III:1435 Lockwood Concern, The (O’Hara) II:987 Locusts Have No King, The (Powell) III:1068 Log from the Sea of Cortez, The (Steinbeck) III:1027 Lolita (Nabokov) II:781–782, 942, 943 Lolly-Madonna War, The (Grafton) II:522 Lomokome Papers, The (Wouk) III:1396 London, Jack I:vii, 87, 112, II:783–785, III:1348 The Call of the Wild I:217–218, II:783, III:1347, 1348 Martin Eden II:783, 844–845 The Road I:27 The Sea-Wolf II:783, III:1146–1148, 1347 White Fang II:783, 852, III:1347–1349 writers influenced by I:41, II:499 Lonely Crusade (Himes) III:1419 Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The (Alexie) I:22 Lonesome Dove (McMurtry) II:863, 864, 865 Long, Huey P. I:32, II:667 Long and Happy Life, A (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Long Day and a Short Life, A (Maltz) II:823 Long Dream, The (R. Wright) III:1398 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth I:21, II:679 Long Goodbye, The (Chandler) I:242 Long Love, The (Buck) I:194 Long March, The (Styron) I:285, III:1229 Long Naked Descent into Boston, The (Eastlake) I:388, 389

1488

INDEX

Long Season of Rain (H. Kim) III:1424–1425 Long Time No See (Isaacs) II:666 Long Valley, The (Steinbeck) III:1209 Long Way from Home, A (Busch) I:201 Long Way from Home, A (McKay) II:861 Look at the Harlequins! (Nabokov) II:943 Look Back All the Green Valley (Chappell) I:244 Look Homeward, Angel (T. C. Wolfe) II:785–786, III:1379 Looking Backward (Bellamy) I:127, 128, II:786–788 Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Rossner) II:788–790, III:1118–1119 Looking Within (J. W. Roberts) II:788 Loon Lake (Doctorow) I:364 Loos, Anita I:229, II:790–791 Lord, Bette Bao II:791 Lords of Discipline, The (Conroy) I:291 Los Angeles. See also California; Hollywood in Mosley’s work I:349, II:917, 918 Losing Battles (Welty) II:791–793, III:1339 “lost generation” I:421, 445, II:585, III:1237. See also Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Hemingway, Ernest; Stein, Gertrude Lost Lady, A (Cather) I:235, 236, II:793–794 Lost Language of Cranes, The (Leavitt) II:759 Lost Man’s River (Matthiessen) II:847 “Lottery, The” (Jackson) I:116, II:670 L’Oubli (The Forgotten) (Wiesel) III:1358 Louie, Andrea III:1422 Louie, David Wong, The Barbarians Are Coming I:104–105, III:1422 Louisiana II:474, 475, III:1337. See also New Orleans in Grau’s work II:529

in A Lesson Before Dying (Gaines) II:765–767 Love (Morrison) II:794–796, 912 Love Always (Beattie) I:119 Love and Friendship (Lurie) II:806 Love and the Soul Maker (Austin) I:87 Love and Work (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Lovecraft, H. P. II:796–797 Love Eaters, The (Settle) III:1158 Love Hunter, The (Hassler) II:564 Love in a Dry Season (Foote) I:453 Love Insurance (Biggers) I:143 Love in the Ruins (Percy) II:798–799, III:1035 Lovely Bones, The (Sebold) II:799–801, III:1148 Lovely Lady, The (Austin) I:87 Love Medicine (Erdrich) I:67, 404, 405, II:801–803, III:1275, 1439 Love of Landry, The (Dunbar) I:386–387 Love of My Own, A (E. L. Harris) II:557 Lovers (Krantz) II:737 Lover’s Almanac, A (Howard) II:633 Loves of Pelleas and Etarre, The (Gale) II:477 Love, Stars, and All That (Narayan) III:1425 Love Wife, The (Jen) II:683 Loving Hands at Home (Johnson) II:687 Lovingkindness (Roiphe) II:803–805, III:1116 Loving Pedro Infante (Chávez) I:248–249 Loving Women: A Novel of the Fifties (Hamill) II:548 Lowell, James Russell I:466, II:757, III:1200 Lowell, Robert III:1202, 1203, 1249 Lowry, Lois II:805–806 Lucas, Curtis III:1419 Luce, Clare Boothe III:1268 Lucid Stars (Barrett) I:108

Luck and Pluck (Alger) I:23–24 “Luck of Roaring Camp, The (Harte) II:562 Lucky (Sebold) II:800, III:1148 Lucky Starr series (Asimov) I:75 Lucky You (Hiaasen) II:598 Lucy (Kincaid) II:719, 720 Lucy Crown (Shaw) III:1162 Lucy Gayheart (Cather) I:236 Luhan, Mabel Dodge I:87, 88 Lullaby (Palahniuk) III:1014 Lummox (Hurst) II:643, 644 Lumumba, Patrice III:1055–1056 Lunch at the Gotham Cafe (King) II:723 Lurie, Alison II:806–807, 909 Lydia Bailey (K. Roberts) III:1114 Lying Low (Johnson) II:687 Lynchers, The (Wideman) III:1354

M Maas, Peter II:808–809 Mabel Vaughan (Cummins) I:313 MacDonald, John I:155, II:809–810 The Deep Blue Good-by I:331–332, II:809 Macdonald, Ross I:155, II:810–811, 929, III:1435 The Moving Target II:810, 928–930, III:1435 MacGuffin, The (Elkin) I:398 Machine Dreams (Phillips) III:1043 Mackerel Plaza, The (De Vries) I:350 Maclean, Norman, A River Runs Through It III:1108–1110 Madame Bovary (Flaubert) II:679, 817 Madame Delphine (Cable) I:206, II:811–812 Madame de Treymes (Wharton) III:1342 Made in America (Maas) II:808

Madelon (Freeman) I:466–467 Mafia II:503–505, III:1084–1085 Magdalena (Brainard) I:176 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) I:305, 306, II:774, 812–814 Maggie Cassidy (Kerouac) II:714 Magic Barrel, The (Malamud) II:819 Magic Hour (Isaacs) II:666 Magician of Lublin, The (Singer) III:1175 Magician’s Assistant, The (Patchett) III:1025 Magic Kingdom, The (Elkin) I:398 Magic Mountain, The (Mann) I:57 Magic Wagon, The (Lansdale) II:746 Magnificent Ambersons, The (Tarkington) III:1246 Magnificent Spinster, The (Sarton) III:1141 Mahatma Joe (Bass) I:112 Mailer, Norman I:vii, 229, II:542, 593, 649, 814–816, III:1084, 1311 An American Dream I:45–46, 408, II:815 character based on III:1084 The Executioner’s Song I:408–410, II:814, 815 on Miller (H.) III:1282 The Naked and the Dead I:409, II:582, 814, 815, 944–945, III:1328 on Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1225 Main Street (Lewis) I:71, 72, 365, II:769, 770, 816–818 novels compared to I:289, II:564, III:1117 Major, Clarence III:1420 Making of Americans, The (Stein) II:818–819, III:1207 Making of Ashenden, The (Elkin) I:398 Malamud, Bernard I:vii, II:819–821 The Natural II:820, 955–957 writers compared to I:68, 208, III:1238

INDEX Malcolm (Purdy) III:1081 Male Cross-Dresser Support Group, The (Janowitz) II:679 Malefactors, The (C. Gordon) II:518 Malfrena (Le Guin) II:764 Malin, Irving I:183 Maltese Falcon, The (Hammett) II:550, 551, 810, 821–823, III:1435 Maltz, Albert II:823 Mama (McMillan) II:862, 863 Mama Day (Naylor) II:824–825, 957–958 Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, The (Hijuelos) II:601, 825–826, III:1431 Manassas (Sinclair) III:1172–1173 Man Called Horse, A (Dorothy Johnson) II:688–689, 826–827 Manchurian Candidate, The (Condon) II:827–829 Manhattan Music (Alexander) III:1425 Manhattan Nocturne (C. Harrison) II:557, 558 Manhattan Transfer (Dos Passos) I:379, III:1302 Man in Full, A (T. Wolfe) III:1381 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick) I:354 Mann, Thomas I:57, 295, II:484 Man of Promise, The (W. H. Wright) III:1308 Manor, The (Singer) III:1175 Mansion, The (Faulkner) I:426 Man’s Woman, A (Norris) II:973 Mantrap (Lewis) II:770 Manual Labor (Busch) I:201 Man Who Gave Up His Name, The (J. Harrison) II:559 Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz, Constructive and Nordic Citizen, The (Lewis) I:365, II:770 Man Who Lived Underground, The (R. Wright) III:1398

Man Who Made Friends with Himself, The (Morley) II:911 Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (Dorothy Johnson) II:689, 826, 829 Man Who Thought He Looked Like Robert Taylor, The (Santos) III:1422 Man Who Was Late, The (Begley) I:123 Man with the Golden Arm, The (Algren) I:26, 27, II:830–831, III:1152 Mao II (DeLillo) I:337–338, II:832 Map of the World, A (Hamilton) II:549 Marble Faun, The (Hawthorne) II:569, 832–835 March Hares (Frederic) I:465 Marching Men (Anderson) I:58 Mardi (Melville) II:869 Margaret Howth: A Story of To-Day (R. B. H. Davis) I:325 Mariage, Le (Diane Johnson) II:687 Marie Laveau (Prose) III:1078 Mariette in Ecstasy (Hansen) II:554, 555 Marilee (Spencer) III:1198 Marjorie Morningstar (Wouk) III:1370, 1396 Marked by Fire (Thomas) III:1263, 1264 Market-Place, The (Frederic) I:465 Marne, The (Wharton) III:1343 Marquand, John P. II:835–837, 885, III:1436 marriage in Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:28–29 in Babbit (Lewis) I:95–96 in The Custom of the Country (Wharton) I:315–316, III:1343 in Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323 in Dubus’s (Andre) work I:384–385 in Gentleman Prefer Blondes (Loos) II:790

in The House of Mirth (Wharton) II:625–627 in Johnson’s (Diane) work II:687 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730, 731 in The Light in the Piazza (Spencer) II:777, 778 in Married or Single? (Sedgwick) II:837–838 in The Member of the Wedding (McCullers) II:872 in Miller’s (S.) work II:882 in Miss Lulu Bett (Gale) II:891–892 in Quicksand (Larsen) III:1087–1088 in The Reef (Wharton) III:1101–1102 in The Robber Bridegroom (Welty) III:1111 in The Spectator Bird (Stegner) III:1196–1197 in The Story of Avis (Phelps) III:1216–1218 in Suckow’s novels III:1230–1231 in Tell Me a Riddle (Olsen) III:1249–1250 in Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) III:1255 in Virginia (Glasgow) III:1314–1315 in Waiting (Ha) III:1322–1324 in Wife (Mukherjee) III:1359–1360 Marriage Playground, The (Wharton) III:1343 Married or Single? (Sedgwick) II:837–838, III:1149 Marrow of Tradition, The (Chesnutt) I:252, 253, II:838–840, III:1418 Marshall, Paule I:viii, 60, II:840–841, III:1420 Brown Girl, Brownstones I:185–187, II:840, III:1420 Marsh Island, A (Jewett) II:683 Martí, José III:1431 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury) I:174, II:841–843

1489

Martin, John I:195–196 Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing (Leavitt) II:759 Martin Dressler (Millhauser) II:843–844, 884 Martin Eden (London) II:783, 844–845 Martyred, The (R. E. Kim) III:1424 Marxism I:vii, 441, II:783 Mary (Mashen’ka) (Nabokov) II:942 Marya (Oates) II:979 Mask-Maker, The (Glancy) II:498 Mason, Bobbie Ann I:viii, 218, II:492, 846 Mason, Charlotte II:975 Mason, F. Van Wyck III:1436 Mason and Dixon (Pynchon) III:1086 mass media III:1350, 1351 Master of the Crossroads (Bell) I:126 Masters, Edgar Lee I:58 Masters of Atlantis (Portis) III:1061 Mathews, John Joseph III:1369, 1438 Sundown III:1240–1242, 1438–1439 Matthiessen, Peter II:846–848 At Play in the Fields of the Lord I:81–83, II:847 Killing Mister Watson II:717–719, 847 Maud Martha (Brooks) I:185, II:848–850 Maugham, W. Somerset I:69 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History (Spiegelman) II:850–851, III:1199 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II, and Here My Troubles Began (Spiegelman) II:850–851, III:1199 McBain, Ed III:1436. See also Hunter, Evan McCarthy, Cormac I:255, 256, II:851–853 All the Pretty Horses I:33–35, II:852

1490

INDEX

McCarthy, Cormac (continued) Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West I:157–158, 256, II:852, III:1041 Child of God I:255–256, II:852 Suttree I:255, II:852, III:1239–1240 writers compared to II:545, 852, III:1117 McCarthy, Mary II:519, 853–855 The Group I:7, II:542–543, 853, 854 McCarthyism I:415, II:551, 827, 917 writers blacklisted under I:170, 197, II:497, 767, 768, 823 McCorkle, Jill II:855–856 The Cheer Leader I:249–250, II:855 McCrumb, Sharyn II:856–857 McCullers, Carson I:168, 180, 228, 285, II:769, 857–858 The Ballad of the Sad Café I:100–101, II:857, 858 The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter II:574–576, 857 The Member of the Wedding I:100, II:857, 871–873 writers compared to I:243, II:492, 528, 857, III:1292 McCunn, Ruthanne Lum III:1422 McDermott, Alice II:799, 858–859 At Weddings and Wakes I:83–84, II:859 McGuane, Tom I:112 McInerney, Jay II:678, 859–861 Bright Lights, Big City I:182–183, II:859 McKay, Claude I:vii, 400, 428, II:861–862, III:1340 Home to Harlem II:611–613, 861, III:1418, 1419 “If We Must Die” II:766–767 McKenney, Ruth, My Sister Eileen III:1341

McMillan, Terry II:862–863, III:1420, 1421 Waiting to Exhale II:862, 863, III:1324–1325, 1421 McMurtry, Larry I:viii, II:863–866 Terms of Endearment II:863, III:1254–1255 McNickle, D’Arcy II:866–867, III:1240, 1369, 1438, 1439 Wind from an Enemy Sky II:866, III:1369–1370, 1438 McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norris) II:774, 867–868, 973 McWhorter, Lucullus Virgil I:280, II:925 Mean Spirit (Hogan) II:609, 610 meatpacking industry II:702–703, III:1173 Medicine Men (A. Adams) I:8 Meeting Evil (Berger) I:137 Mehta, Gita III:1425 Melanctha (Stein) III:1207 melodrama II:832. See also romance novel(s); romanticism; sentimental novel(s) Melville, Herman I:vi, vii, 3, II:568, 868–871, 999, III:1285, 1355 Benito Cereno I:135–136, II:869 Billy Budd, Sailor I:145–147, II:869–870 The Confidence-Man I:287–289, II:869 and Hawthorne I:146, 288, II:568, 869, 898, III:1044 Moby-Dick I:135, II:868, 869, 897–899, 999 novels compared to I:71, II:529, 621, 686, 716, 994, III:1054 Pierre I:135, II:869, III:1043–1045 writers compared to I:416–417, II:657, 714, III:1053, 1112, 1308, 1420 Member of the Wedding, The (McCullers) I:100, II:857, 871–873 Memnoch the Devil (Rice) III:1103

memoir(s). See also autobiographical novel(s); autobiography(ies) by Angelou I:59–60, 387 vs. autobiography II:648–649 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein) as I:88 The Kiss (K. Harrison) II:560, III:1145 Maus I and II (Spiegelman) II:850–851, III:1199 A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) II:926–927 A River Runs Through It (Maclean) III:1108–1109 The Things They Carried (O’Brien) as III:1259–1260 by Wiesel III:1358 by Wolff III:1382 Memoir from Antproof Case (Helprin) II:584 Memoirs of Herculine Barbin (Foucault) II:879 Memories of My Ghost Brother (Fenkl) III:1424 Memories of the Ford Administration (Updike) III:1300 Memory of Old Jack, The (Berry) I:139–140 Memory of War, A (Busch) I:201 men. See also gender roles; manhood African-American, in Wright’s work III:1397 in Harrison’s (J.) work II:558–559, 560 in Native American novels III:1372 in Rabbit, Run (Updike) III:1091 Men and Angels (M. C. Gordon) II:519 Men and Brethren (Cozzens) I:304 Mencken, H. L. on Anderson I:58 Cain and I:209 Davis (H. L.) and I:324 and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Loos) II:790 and Lewis’s work I:95, 367, 402, 403, II:769

on The Man of Promise (W. H. Wright) III:1308 on Three Soldiers (Dos Passos) I:379 and Wright (R.) III:1397 writers compared to III:1061 Men of Brewster Place, The (Naylor) II:957, 958 mental illness. See also How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accent (Alvarez); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) in The Bell Jar (Plath) I:129–130 of Fitzgerald (Z.) III:1140, 1141 in Jackson’s writings III:1335 “neurasthenia” II:493, III:1404–1405 in The Sheltering Sky (P. Bowles) III:1165 in Tender Is the Night (F. S. Fitzgerald) III:1141, 1142, 1252 in Valis (Dick) III:1307, 1308 in We Have Always Lived at the Castle (Jackson) III:1335–1336 of Wharton III:1342 of Wister III:1378 in Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384–1386 in The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) II:493, III:1404–1405 Mercy of a Rude Stream (H. Roth) III:1120 Meridian (A. Walker) II:873–874, III:1326 Mermaid Chair, The (Kidd) II:717 Merrivale books III:1435 Merry Men (Chute) I:264, II:874–875 Merry Month of May, The (J. Jones) II:694 Meshugah (Singer) III:1175 Messiah of Stockholm, The (Ozick) II:1011 metafiction III:1366. See also postmodernism Metalious, Grace II:875–876

INDEX Mexican-American novel(s) III:1108, 1427, 1428–1430. See also Anaya, Rudolfo; Castillo, Ana; Chávez, Denise; Cisneros, Sandra; Hinojosa-Smith, Rolando; Mireles, Jovita González de; Rivera, Tomás; Rodriguez, Richard Mexican Americans in Anaya’s work I:56–57, III:1108 in Benítez’s work I:134–135 in Bless Me, Última (Anaya) I:56, 152–153 in Chávez’s work I:248–249 in Cisneros’s work I:266–267, III:1427, 1429 in Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:248, 413–414 in Hinojosa-Smith’s work II:605–606, 732, III:1108, 1427, 1429 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) I:266, II:629–630, III:1400, 1429 in Hunger of Memory (Rodriguez) II:641–642, III:1427–1428 in Klail City (HinojosaSmith) II:606, 732–733 in Mireles’s work II:886 novels by and about III:1428–1430 in Rivera’s work III:1107–1108, 1429 in So Far from God (Castillo) III:1187–1188, 1429 in Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) III:1209, 1274–1275 in Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384–1385 in Y no se lo tragó la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) (Rivera) III:1107, 1108, 1408–1409, 1429 Mexican-American women. See also Benítez, Sandra in Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:248, 413–414 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) II:629–630

in So Far from God (Castillo) III:1187–1188 Mexican Village (Niggli) III:1429 Mexico, novels set in by Benítez I:134 by Doerr I:367 The Pearl (Steinbeck) III:1027–1030, 1210 by Porter (K. A.) III:1059–1060 Mezzanine, The (Baker) I:97 Michener, James I:229, II:876–878, III:1328 Mickelsson’s Ghosts (J. Gardner) II:481 middle class. See also AfricanAmerican middle class; suburbia in American Appetites (Oates) I:42–43, II:978 in Babbit (Lewis) I:95 in A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole) III:1273 in Didion’s novels I:165 in Lurie’s work II:806–807 in Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge (Connell) I:289, II:930–931 “neurasthenia” in III:1404 in Oates’s work I:42–43, II:977, 978 in Rabbit Redux (Updike) III:1089–1090 in Taylor’s novels III:1248, 1249 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1350–1351 Middle Kingdom, The (Barrett) I:108 Middle Passage (C. R. Johnson) I:346, II:686 Middlesex (Eugenides) I:407, 408, II:878–880 Midlander, The (Tarkington) III:1246 Midwest. See also rural life; small-town life Baxter on I:115 in The Corrections (Franzen) I:300 in Hamilton’s work II:549 in Not Without Laughter (Hughes) II:974–975 in Smiley’s novels III:1182

in So Big (Ferber) III:1186 in Suckow’s novels III:1230–1231 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1265 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383 writers from I:115 migrant farmers in The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) II:524–525, III:1210 in Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) II:984–986 in Steinbeck’s novels III:1209, 1210 in Y no se lo tragó la tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) (Rivera) III:1408–1409, 1429 Mike Hammer series III:1436 Mildred Pierce (Cain) I:209 military. See also war; specific wars in The Barracks Thief (Wolff) I:106–108, III:1382 in A Bell for Adano (Hersey) I:128–129, II:594–595 in The Caine Mutiny (Wouk) I:210–211, III:1396 in Catch-22 (Heller) I:210, 234–235, II:582 in DeMille’s work I:343 in From Here to Eternity (J. Jones) I:471–472, II:582, 693–694 in The Long March (Styron) I:285, III:1229 in The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) II:944–945 in The Red Badge of Courge (Crane) I:210, III:1097 in The Young Lions (Shaw) III:1412–1413 Millar, Kenneth. See Macdonald, Ross Miller, Arthur II:790 Miller, Henry I:430, II:880–881, 969, III:1282 and Nin II:880, III:1201, 1284 Tropic of Cancer II:880–881, III:1282–1283

1491

Tropic of Capricorn II:880, III:1283–1285 writers compared to I:195, III:1282 Miller, Ross III:1123 Miller, Sue II:881–882 Miller, Walter M., Jr. II:882–883 A Canticle for Leibowitz I:226–228, II:883 Miller of Old Church, The (Glasgow) II:499–500 Millett, Kate III:1284 Millhauser, Steven II:883–884 Martin Dressler II:843–844, 884 Milroy the Magician (Theroux) III:1258 Minatoya, Lydia III:1424 Mind of My Mind (O. E. Butler) I:202 minimalist writers I:119, 126, 218, 454 Minister’s Wooing, The (Stowe) III:1220 Minnie’s Sacrifice (Harper) II:555 Minot, Susan II:884–885 Mi Querido Rafa (Rivera) III:1427 Miracle Cure (Coben) I:278 Miracle in Seville (Michener) II:877 Mireles, Jovita González de II:886 Mirror, The (Freed) I:466 miscegenation. See also mixed-race people; race/racism; Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, The (Cooper); Light in August (Faulkner); Song of Solomon (Morrison); Passing (Larsen) in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:2, 3–4 in Baldwin’s work I:98–99 in Hope Leslie (Sedgwick) III:1149 in Hopkins’s novels II:615 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) II:619–620 in The Narrows (Petry) III:1037

1492

INDEX

miscegenation (continued) in Show Boat (Ferber) III:1169 in The Slave (Singer) III:1180 in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1195, 1196 in Two Men (Stoddard) III:1215 Misery (King) II:723, 724, 887–888 Miss Lonelyhearts (N. West) II:888–891, III:1341 Miss Ludington’s Sister: A Romance of Immortality (Bellamy) I:127–128 Miss Lulu Bett (Gale) II:477, 891–892 Miss Nume of Japan (W. Eaton) III:1422 Mistler’s Exit (Begley) I:123 Mistral’s Daughter (Krantz) II:736 Mistress of Spices, The (Divakaruni) I:360, II:892–894, III:1425 Mists of Avalon, The (Bradley) I:175, II:894–895 Mitchell, Margaret I:vii, 212, II:514, 896–897 Gone with the Wind I:101–102, II:513–514, 896 Mitchell, S. Weir III:1342, 1378, 1404–1405 mixed-race people. See also miscegenation; passing in American Son (Roley) I:50, III:1116–1117 in Fauset’s work I:428–429 in Hopkins’s work II:615, 616 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) I:252, II:619–620 in Larsen’s work II:747–748 in Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, III:1087–1088 in Rice’s work III:1103 in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1195, 1196 in Sui Sin Far’s work III:1232 in Sundown (Mathews) III:1241

in Tracks (Erdrich) III:1276–1277 “tragic mulatta” figure I:102, 253, 274–276, II:555, 620, 660, III:1023 in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Allen) III:1388–1389 in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Dorris) III:1402–1403 M’liss: An Idyll of Red Mountain (Harte) II:562 Moby-Dick (Melville) I:135, II:868, 869, 897–899, 999 novels compared to I:71, II:529, 621, 686, 716, 994, III:1054 Modern Instance, A (Howells) II:571, 633, 634, 899–900 modernism I:vii. See also Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Fitzgerald, Zelda Anderson and I:58 of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein) I:88–89 The Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne) and I:154 in Bowles’s (J. A.) work I:167 Boyle (K.) and I:170 of Dos Passos III:1302 early writers of I:vii, 305–306 of The Enormous Room (Cummings) I:401 epic III:1085 Faulkner and I:425 James and II:672 and love I:376, III:1237, 1238 Moby-Dick (Melville) and II:897 in Roberts’s (E. M.) work III:1112, 1113 Stein and III:1207, 1208 in The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) III:1237, 1238 Modern Library, 100 best novels of 20th century I:180, II:494, III:1178, 1224 Modern Utopia, A (H. G. Wells) II:787

Mohr, Nicholasa II:900–901, III:1427 El Bronx Remembered I:396–397, II:901 Moise and the World of Reason (T. Williams) III:1364 Momaday, N. Scott I:viii, II:901–902, III:1240, 1439 House Made of Dawn II:622–624, 901, 902, III:1438, 1439 Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) II:682, 902–904, III:1422 Monday Night (K. Boyle) I:170 Monday Voices, The (Greenberg) II:535 Money Magic (Garland) II:483 Monkey Bridge, The (Cao) III:1426 Monkey Hunting (Garcia) II:478 Monkeys (Minot) II:884, 885 “Monkey’s Paw, The” (W. W. Jacobs) III:1037, 1039 Monkey Wrench Gang, The (Abbey) II:515, 904–905 Monster (Myers) II:905–907 Monster, The (Crane) I:306 Montage of a Dream Deferred (Hughes) II:849 Montalbano, William D. II:598 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat Baron de I:26, 433 Month of Sundays, A (Updike) III:1300 Moo (Smiley) II:907, III:1182 Moods (Alcott) I:19 Moody, Rick II:907–909 Moon Cakes (A. Louie) III:1422 Moon-Calf (Dell) I:340 Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The (Heinlein) II:580, 581 Moon Is Down, The (Steinbeck) III:1210 Moon Palace (Auster) I:86 Moore, Lorrie II:909 Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? II:909, III:1352–1353

Moore, Michael II:774 morality. See also materialism in Deephaven (Jewett) I:332 Gardner on II:481, 538 in The Landlord at Lion’s Head (Howells) II:743–744 in The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) II:832–835 in A Modern Instance (Howells) II:900 in Monster (Myers) II:905–906 in The Pearl (Steinbeck) III:1027–1030, 1210 in Play It as It Lays (Didion) III:1051 in Rice’s novels III:1102–1103 in A Separate Peace (Knowles) III:1156 in Steps (Kosinski) III:1213, 1215 in Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) III:1275 in Wiesel’s novels III:1358 in The Winter of Our Discontent (Steinbeck) III:1373–1376 Moran of the Lady Letty (Norris) II:973 More Die of Heartbreak (Bellow) I:131 Morgan, Clare. See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan’s Passing (A. Tyler) III:1292 Morgesons, The (Stoddard) II:909–911, III:1214–1215 Mori, Kyoko III:1424 Morley, Christopher II:911–912 Morning in Antibes (Knowles) II:733 Morning Is Near Us, The (Glaspell) II:501, 502 Morning, Noon and Night (Cozzens) I:305 Morning Watch, The (Agee) I:16 Morris, Wright I:437 The Field of Vision I:437–438 Plains Song: For Female Voices III:1048–1049

INDEX Morrison, Toni I:viii, 36, 132, II:549, 648, 912–914, III:1018, 1136, 1420 Beloved I:132–134, 346, II:662, 795, 912, 913, III:1018, 1327, 1420 The Bluest Eye I:158–159, 185, II:911 Jazz I:132, II:681–682, 795, 912, III:1018, 1420 Love II:794–796, 912 Paradise I:132, II:795, 912, III:1018–1019 Song of Solomon II:911, 912, III:1190–1191, 1420 Sula II:849, 911, III:1233–1235 Tar Baby II:913, III:1244–1246 writers compared to III:1037, 1243, 1263, 1279 Morte D’Arthur (Malory) III:1290, 1373, 1374 Morte D’Urban (J. F. Powers) II:914–915 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:645, 915–917 Mosley, Walter II:917–918 Devil in a Blue Dress I:347–349, II:918, III:1436 Mosquito (G. Jones) II:693 Mosquito Coast, The (Theroux) I:82, II:919–920, III:1258, 1259 Mosquitoes (Faulkner) I:425–426 Mother, The (Buck) I:194 Mother and Two Daughters, A (Godwin) II:508, 509 mother-daughter relationship in Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:28–29 in Annie John (Kincaid) I:62–63, II:720 in Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:186 in Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:413–414 in The Floating World (Kadohata) I:449 in The Joy Luck Club (Tan) II:696–697, III:1243 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730–731, III:1243

in The Light in the Piazza (Spencer) II:777, 778 in Lovingkindness (Roiphe) II:803–805 in Meridian (A. Walker) II:873 in The Mother’s Recompense (Wharton) II:922–923 in The Night Travellers (Spencer) II:966–967 in The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty) II:997–998 in Phillips’s work III:1043 in Tan’s novels III:1243 in Terms of Endearment (McMurtry) III:1254–1255 motherhood in The Awakening (Chopin) I:93 in The Girl (Le Sueur) II:496 in The Group (M. McCarthy) II:542–543 in Herland (Gilman) II:590, 591 in Lamott’s work II:738 in Le Sueur’s work II:497 in The Mother’s Recompense (Wharton) II:922–923 in The Story of Avis (Phelps) III:1217, 1218 in Virginia (Glasgow) III:1314 in The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) II:493–494, III:1405 Motherkind (Phillips) III:1043 Motherless Brooklyn (Lethem) II:768, 769, 920–922 Mother Night (Vonnegut) III:1320 Mother’s Kisses, A (Friedman) I:468–469 Mother’s Recompense, The (Wharton) II:922–923, III:1343 Motley, Willard III:1419 Mountain Lion, The (Stafford) II:923–925, III:1202, 1203 Mountain Path (Arnow) I:70, 71, 371 Mountain Time (Doig) I:370–371

Mourning Dove I:vii, II:925–926, III:1438 Cogewea, The Half-Blood I:278–280, II:925, III:1438 Moveable Feast, A (Hemingway) II:586, 926–927 MOVE organization III:1040–1041, 1354 Moviegoer, The (Percy) II:748, 798, 927–928, III:1035 Moving On (McMurtry) II:864, III:1254 Moving Target, The (R. Macdonald) II:810, 928–930, III:1435 Moving the Mountain (Gilman) II:493, 494 Mr. Bridge (Connell) I:289, 290, II:685, 930–931 Mr. Field’s Daughter (Bausch) I:115 Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India (Crawford) I:307 Mr. Moto (character) II:836, III:1436 Mr. Potter: A Novel (Kincaid) II:719, 720 Mr. Sammler’s Planet (Bellow) I:130–131 Mr. Vertigo (Auster) I:86 Mrs. Bridge (Connell) I:289, 290, II:685, 930–931 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf) I:314, II:618–619 Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Sui Sin Far) II:931–933, III:1232, 1422 Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (Sarton) I:79, III:1140–1141 Mrs. Ted Bliss (Elkin) I:397, 398 Mucho Mojo (Lansdale) II:746 muckraking II:703, 774, III:1172, 1173 Muhammad, Elijah III:1308 Mukherjee, Bharati II:933–934, 948, III:1425 Jasmine II:679–681, 933, III:1425 Wife II:933, III:1359–1360, 1425

1493

mulatta. See also mixed-race people “tragic” I:102, 253, 274–276, II:555, 620, 660, III:1023 Muller, Marcia III:1435 Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) II:934–935, III:1100, 1420 Murayama, Milton II:935–936, III:1423 All I Asking for Is My Body I:30–31, II:936, III:1424 murder. See also crime novel(s); gothic novel(s); murder mysteries; violence in American Psycho (Ellis) I:48 in Child of God (C. McCarthy) I:255 in The Executioner’s Song (Mailer) I:408–410 in Monster (Myers) II:905–906 in Red Dragon (T. Harris) III:1098–1100 in Steps (Kosinski) III:1213–1214 in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) III:1335 in Wieland (C. B. Brown) I:187, III:1356, 1357 “Murder in the Rue Morgue” (Poe) II:821 murder mysteries III:1434. See also detective novel(s) by Alexie I:22 by Clark (M. H.) I:270–271 by Coben I:278 by DeMille I:342, 343 by Gilman III:1435 by Highsmith II:599–601 by Isaacs II:666 by Jance II:677 by Lansdale II:746 by McCrumb II:856 Thunder Horse (Bowen) III:1266–1267 Murder of Aziz Khan, The (Ghose) III:1425 Murdoch, Iris I:7 Music Lesson, The (Weber) III:1334 Music of Chance, The (Auster) I:86, II:936–938

1494

INDEX

Mustian (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Mustian trilogy (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Mutual Friend, The (Busch) I:201 My Ántonia (Cather) I:235, 236, II:938–939 Myers, Walter Dean, Monster II:905–907 My Heart and My Flesh (E. M. Roberts) III:1112 My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (Cherry) I:251 My Life as a Man (P. Roth) I:53, III:1122 My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (Beattie) I:119 My Losing Season (Conroy) I:291 My Mortal Enemy (Cather) I:236 My Name Is Asher Lev (Potok) III:1067 My Next Bride (K. Boyle) I:170, II:939–941 My Nine Lives (Jhabvala) II:685 My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet’s (Holley) II:610 My Other Life (Theroux) III:1257 Myra Breckinridge (Vidal) III:1310, 1311 My Secret History (Theroux) III:1257, 1258 mysteries. See murder mysteries Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The (Chabon) I:241 Mysteries of Winterthurn (Oates) II:978 Mysterious Stranger: A Romance, The (Twain) III:1290 mysticism, in An American Dream (Mailer) I:45–46 My Summer with George (French) I:467, 468 myth and legend. See also biblical references; folk culture in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon) I:37

in The Grass Dancer (Power) II:527–528 in Grendel (J. Gardner) II:481, 537–538 in HERmione (H. D.) II:591, 592, 593 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:916–917 in The Natural (Malamud) II:955–956 in Prose’s novels III:1078–1079 in The Robber Bridegroom (Welty) III:1110–1111 in Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) III:1209, 1275 in Tracks (Erdrich) III:1275–1277 in Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) III:1279, 1280, 1281 in Venus Envy (R. M. Brown) III:1309, 1310 in Vizenor’s novels III:1317 in Winter in the Blood (Welch) III:1372–1373 in The Winter of Our Discontent (Steinbeck) III:1373, 1374, 1376 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) III:1386, 1387 in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Allen) III:1388–1389 My Year of Meats (Ozeki) III:1424

N Nabokov, Vladimir I:viii, 36, II:546, 678, 879, 942–944 Lolita II:781–782, 942, 943 Pale Fire II:781, 942, 943, III:1017–1018 Naipaul, V. S. II:519, III:1258 Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer) I:409, II:582, 814, 815, 944–945, III:1328 Naked Lunch, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:198, II:705, 946–947 Names, The (DeLillo) I:337

Namesake, The (Lahiri) II:947–948 Nampally Road (Alexander) III:1425 Nancy Drew series I:24 Narayan, Kirin III:1425 Narrative (Douglass) I:149, II:722 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, The (Poe) II:796–797, 948–950, III:1054 Narrow Rooms (Purdy) II:950–951, III:1081 Narrows, The (Petry) III:1036, 1037 Nathan Coulter (Berry) I:139 Native American novel(s) I:viii, III:1437–1440. See also specific novels and writers history of III:1438–1440 Renaissance of III:1170, 1240, 1336, 1369, 1372, 1438 themes and plots of III:1372, 1438–1439 by women, first II:925 Native Americans in Alexie’s work I:22–23, III:1439, 1440 in Allen’s work I:29–30, III:1440 in The Antelope Wife (Erdrich) I:67–68, 404 in The Beet Queen (Erdrich) I:121–123, 404, 405 in Ceremony (Silko) I:29, 56, 96, 239–240, III:1439 in Child’s work I:254 in Cogewea, the Half-Blood (Mourning Dove) I:278–280, II:925, III:1438 in detective stories II:602–603, 676, III:1033–1034, 1436 in Dorris’s work I:377–378, 404–405, III:1440 in Eastlake’s work I:388 in Erdrich’s work I:404–406, III:1439 in The Female American (Winkfield) I:431–432, 433

in Flutie (Glancy) I:451–453, II:498 in Glancy’s work II:497–499, III:1082 in A Good Day to Die (J. Harrison) II:515–516 in The Grass Dancer (Power) II:527–528, III:1069 in Hillerman’s work I:57, II:602–603, III:1033–1034, 1436 history of III:1437–1438 in Hogan’s work II:609–610, III:1439 in Hope Leslie (Sedgwick) II:614–615, III:1149 in House Made of Dawn (Momaday) II:622–624, 901, 902, III:1438, 1439 in Jance’s work II:676 in Johnson’s (Dorothy) work II:688, 689 in Killing Mister Watson (Matthiessen) II:718 in Kingsolver’s work I:118, II:726 in The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper) II:749–750, 751, 755, 756, 757 in The Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper) II:755–756, 757 legends of II:527–528, III:1275–1277, 1317, 1388–1389 in Love Medicine (Erdrich) I:67, 404, 405, II:801–803, III:1439 in A Man Called Horse (Dorothy Johnson) II:827 in Mathews’s work III:1240, 1369, 1438 in McNickle’s work II:866–867, III:1240, 1369, 1438, 1439 in Momaday’s work II:901–902, III:1439 in Mourning Dove’s work II:925–926, III:1438 in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) II:993–994 in The Oregon Trail (Parkman) II:999 in Power’s work III:1069–1070

INDEX in Pushing the Bear (Glancy) II:498, III:1082–1084 in Silko’s work III:1170–1172, 1240, 1439 in Sundown (Mathews) III:1240–1242, 1438–1439 in Thunder Horse (Bowen) III:1266–1267 in Tracks (Erdrich) III:1275–1277 Trail of Tears II:498, III:1082–1084 in The Vanishing American (Grey) II:538, 539 in The Virginian (Wister) III:1315–1316 in Vizenor’s work III:1317–1318, 1439 in Welch’s work III:1240, 1336–1337, 1439 in Wind from the Enemy Sky (McNickle) II:866, III:1369–1370, 1438 in Winter in the Blood (Welch) III:1336, 1372–1373 in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, The (Allen) I:29, III:1388–1389, 1440 in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Dorris) I:377, 378, III:1402–1403 Native Son (R. Wright) I:148, II:849, 952–953, 1008, III:1397, 1419 Native Speaker (C.-R. Lee) II:761, 953–955, III:1425 Native Tongue (Hiaasen) II:598 Natty Bumppo (character) I:vii, 137, 292, 334–335, II:749–750, 755, 756, 757, 811 Natural, The (Malamud) II:820, 955–957 Natural History (Howard) II:633 naturalism I:vii, 51, III:1176 of Adams I:345 in The Adventures of Augie March (Bellow) I:11, 51 in African-American novel III:1418, 1419

in Appointment in Samarra (O’Hara) I:69, 70 of Dos Passos III:1302 of Dreiser I:382, III:1176 in From Here to Eternity (J. Jones) I:471 of Himes II:604 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) I:325, II:774 in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) I:305, II:812 in The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren) II:830 of Norris II:867, 973 in The Red Badge of Courage (Crane) I:305 in Sister Carrie (Dreiser) III:1177 in White Fang (London) III:1348 Wrightian school of III:1419 nature. See also land in The Call of the Wild (London) I:217–218, III:1347, 1348 in Cooper’s novels I:vii in Deliverance (Dickey) I:338–339, 355 in A Good Day to Die (J. Harrison) II:515–516 in The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) II:526 in Harrison’s (J.) work II:559 in The Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper) II:756 in London’s work II:783 in White Fang (London) III:1347–1348 Nature of Passion, The (Jhabvala) II:685 Navajo people I:388, II:602, 603, III:1033, 1388 Naylor, Gloria II:957–958, III:1037, 1263, 1420 Linden Hills II:778–779, 957 Mama Day II:824–825, 957–958 Nazareth, Peter III:1425 Nazi Germany II:667, III:1413 Neely, Barbara III:1436 Nehru, Jawaharlal II:982

Neighbors (Berger) I:137 Nelson’s Run (Bacho) I:96, III:1423 Neon Bible, The (Toole) III:1273 neo-slave narrative(s) I:346, III:1420 The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Gaines) I:91–93, 346, II:474, 475 Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:345–347, III:1363 first III:1327 Jubilee (M. Walker) II:699–701, III:1327 Kindred (O. E. Butler) I:202, II:720–722, III:1420 Roots (Haley) II:721–722 Nephew, The (Purdy) III:1081 Nero Wolfe series (Stout) III:1218, 1219, 1435, 1437 Neruda, Pablo I:36 Net of Jewels (Gilchrist) II:493 Neuromancer (W. Gibson) II:958–960 Never Come Morning (Algren) I:26–27 Never Die (Hannah) II:553–554 Neveryona (S. R. Delany) I:336 New Critics III:1330 New England in Banks’s work I:103–104 in Freeman’s work I:466–467 in Hawthorne’s work II:568, 569 in Jewett’s work II:683–684 in Lovecraft’s work II:796–797 in Wharton’s work I:406, III:1235, 1342, 1343 New England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character and Manners, A (Sedgwick) III:1149 Newfoundland III:1167, 1168 A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (Kirkland) II:729 New Hope (Suckow) III:1231

1495

New Journalism II:593, 594, 659, 783, 814, III:1061, 1381 New Life, A (Malamud) II:820 Newly Born Woman, The (Cixous and Clement) I:434 New Negro, The (Locke) II:645, III:1418 New Orleans I:206, II:653, 812, III:1103 in The Moviegoer (Percy) II:927 New School-ma’am; or, A Summer in North Sparta, The (Alger) I:23 New Southern Woman II:499–500 New York City. See also Harlem in Auchincloss’s work I:84 in Begley’s work I:123 in Bell’s novels I:126 in The Bonfire of the Vanities (T. Wolfe) I:162–164 in Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney) I:182 in Hamill’s work II:548 in A Hazard of New Fortunes (Howells) II:571–573 in The House of Mirth (Wharton) II:625–627 in Hurst’s work II:643, 644 in Janowitz’s work II:678–679 Latino novels in III:1427 in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) II:812–814 in McInerney’s work II:859, 860 in Mohr’s work II:900–901 in Motherless Brooklyn (Lethem) II:920, 922 of 1980s, novels on I:182 in Price’s (Richard) work III:1074, 1075 Puerto Rican novels in III:1430–1431 in The Rise of David Levinsky (Cahan) III:1105 West (N.) and III:1341 in Wharton’s work I:17, 18, II:625–628, III:1343 in White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349

1496

INDEX

New Yorker, The I:110, 111, 170, 209, 349, 430, II:670, 987, III:1300 New Yorkers, The (Calisher) I:214 New York state I:395, 464 New York Trilogy, The (Auster) I:86, II:960–962 Nexus (H. Miller) II:880, III:1282 Nez Percé people II:515 Ng, Fae Myenne II:962–963 Bone I:161–162, II:962, III:1422 Nicholson at Large (Just) II:705 Nickel Mountain (J. Gardner) II:481 Nietzche, Friedrich II:783, 945, 1007–1008, III:1092–1093, 1167, 1348 Niggli, Josephina III:1429 Night (Wiesel) II:963–964, III:1357, 1358 Night Inspector, The (Busch) I:201 Night of the Radishes (Benítez) I:134 Night Rider (Warren) III:1330 Nights (H. D.) II:574, 964–965 Night Studies (Colter) I:282 Night Travellers, The (Spencer) II:965–967, III:1198 Nightwatchmen (Hannah) II:553 Nightwood (Barnes) I:105–106, II:967–968, III:1201 Nightwork (Shaw) III:1163 Nilda (Mohr) I:396, II:901 Nin, Anaïs I:106, II:857–858, 880, 968–970, III:1202, 1282 A Spy in the House of Love II:968, 969, III:1201–1202 Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid (Rossner) III:1119 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) I:174, 415, II:805 1919/Nineteen Nineteen (Dos Passos) I:379, III:1301–1303

1960s counterculture II:494, III:1026, 1089, 1091, 1221, 1381. See also Beat writers 1939 (K. Boyle) I:170 Nisei Daughter (Sone) II:970–971, III:1190 Nixon, Richard III:1374 No. 26 Jayne Street (Austin) I:87 Noble House: A Novel of Contemporary Hong Kong (Clavell) I:272, 273 Noble Norfleet (Reynolds Price) III:1074 None Shall Look Back (C. Gordon) II:518 nonfiction novels. See also autobiographical novel(s) In Cold Blood (Capote) I:228–229, II:649–650, 789 Looking for Mr. Goodbar II:788–790, III:1118–1119 by Maas II:808 by Mailer II:814, 815 No-No Boy (Okada) II:971–973, 989, III:1190, 1424 Noon Wine (K. A. Porter) III:1059, 1060 No Place for an Angel (Spencer) III:1198 No Reck’ning Made (Greenberg) II:535 Norma Ashe: A Novel (Glaspell) II:501, 502 Norman, Howard, The Bird Artist I:147–148 Norris, Frank I:vii, II:973–974 McTeague: A Story of San Francisco II:774, 867–868, 973 writers compared to I:11, II:507, 598 Northern Lights (O’Brien) II:981 North of Hope (Hassler) II:564 Northwest Passage (K. Roberts) III:1113, 1114 No Second Chance (Coben) I:278 Not a Day Goes By (E. L. Harris) II:556, 557

Not a Word about Nightingales (Howard) II:632 Notebooks of Lazarus Long, The (Heinlein) II:580, 581 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin) I:98 Not Without Laughter (Hughes) II:637–638, 974–976 Nova (S. R. Delany) I:335 Nova Express (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 novel American, history of I:vi–viii definition of I:vi Novellette, A (W. C. Williams) III:1366 Novel: What It Is, The (Crawford) I:307 Nowhere (Berger) I:137 Nowhere City, The (Lurie) II:806 Nowhere Else on Earth (Humphreys) II:640, 641 Nuclear Age, The (O’Brien) II:981 “Nuestra America” (“Our America”) (Martí) III:1431

O Oasis, The (M. McCarthy) II:854 Oates, Joyce Carol I:viii, 7, II:797, 977–979 American Appetites I:42–43, II:977, 978 Expensive People I:410–412, II:977 on others’ novels I:70, II:509, III:1066 them II:977, III:1256–1257 writers compared to I:277, II:492, 977, 978 You Must Remember This II:979, III:1410–1412 O Beulah Land (Settle) III:1158–1159 “objectivism” I:457–458, III:1093 Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (Weber) II:979–981, III:1334

O’Brien, Howard Allen. See Rice, Anne O’Brien, Tim I:viii, II:981–982 Going After Cacciato II:510–511, 981 The Things They Carried II:981, III:1259–1261 O’Casey, Sean I:41 O’Connor, Edwin II:982–983 O’Connor, Flannery II:748, 769, 983–984 The Violent Bear It Away II:983, III:1312–1313 Wise Blood II:983, III:1376–1378 writers compared to I:7, 31, 243, II:492, 519, 553, 554, 564, 798, 852, 978, III:1021, 1204, 1308 October Light (J. Gardner) II:481 Octopus, The (Norris) II:973–974 Odds On (Crichton) I:308 Odd Woman, The (Godwin) II:509 Odyssey (Homer) II:525–526, III:1112 Odyssey of a Nice Girl, The (Suckow) III:1230 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck) II:984–987, III:1209, 1210, 1211, 1275 Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (Hopkins) II:615, 616 Of Such Small Differences (Greenberg) II:535 Of the Farm (Updike) III:1300 Of Time and the River (T. C. Wolfe) III:1379 O’Hara, John I:vii–viii, 156, 223, 229, II:564, 987–989 Appointment in Samarra I:69–70, II:987 Oil: A Novel (Sinclair) III:1173 “O” Is for Outlaw (Grafton) II:522 Okada, John II:989, III:1391 No-No Boy II:971–973, 989, III:1190, 1424 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus) II:543, 544, 989–990

INDEX Old Maid, The (Wharton) III:1343 Old Man and the Sea, The (Hemingway) I:231, II:584, 990–992 Old Mortality (K. A. Porter) III:1060 Old New York (Wharton) III:1343 Old School (Wolff) III:1382 Old-Town Folks (Stowe) III:1220 Olive, or, The Weight of the Past (Rossner) III:1119 Oliver Wiswell (K. Roberts) III:1114 O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life (T. C. Wolfe) III:1379 Olsen, Tillie I:vii, 325, II:981, 992–993 Tell Me a Riddle II:992, III:1249–1250 writers compared to I:212, 371, II:477, 767, 768 Omensetter’s Luck (Gass) II:484 Omerta (Puzo) III:1084–1085 Omoo (Melville) II:869 On a Darkling Plain (Stegner) III:1205 On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (Gass) II:484 “On Burroughs’s Work” (Ginsberg) III:1285 On Distant Ground (R. O. Butler) I:203, 204 One Clear Call (Sinclair) II:744–745 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) II:715–716, 993–994 One Hundred and One Ways (Yoshikawa) III:1424 158-Pound Marriage, The (Irving) II:664 One Man in His Time (Glasgow) II:499, 500 One Man’s Initiation—1917 (Dos Passos) I:379 One of Ours (Cather) I:235, 236 Ong, Han III:1423 On Glory’s Course (Purdy) III:1081 Onion Eaters, The (Donleavy) I:374

On Keeping Women (Calisher) I:214 Only Children (Lurie) II:806 Only Piece of Furniture in the House: A Novel, The (Glancy) II:498 On Moral Fiction (J. Gardner) II:481, 538 On Strike Against God (Russ) III:1127, 1128 On the Makaloa Mat (London) II:783 On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (Gibbons) II:491–492 On the Road (Kerouac) I:27, 104, 352, II:713, 714, 993, 994–995, III:1091 Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (Lamott) II:738 Operation Shylock (P. Roth) I:53, III:1053, 1121 O Pioneers! (Cather) I:235, 236, II:995–996 Opportunity III:1340, 1419 Oprah Winfrey Book Club, and Franzen I:300–301 Optimist’s Daughter, The (Welty) II:996–998, III:1339 Oracle, The (E. O’Connor) II:982 Oral History (Smith) III:1183 Orchard Keeper, The (C. McCarthy) I:255, II:852 Ordinary Love and Good Will (Smiley) III:1182 Oregon Trail, The (Parkman) II:998–1000 Origin of the Brunists, The (Coover) I:294 Orlando (Woolf) I:377, 420, II:879 Ormond; or the Secret Witness (C. B. Brown) I:187, II:1000–1003 Orrie’s Story (Berger) I:137 O’Ruddy: A Romance, The (Crane and Barr) I:306 Orwell, George III:1282 Osage people III:1241 O Shepherd, Speak! (Sinclair) II:745

Oskison, John Milton III:1438 Oswald, Lee Harvey II:771, 772–773 Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (Mailer) I:408, II:815 Other, The (Tryon) I:151 Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Owens) III:1241 Other Side, The (M. C. Gordon) II:519 Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote) I:228, II:1003–1004 Other Wind, The (Le Guin) II:764 Otsuka, Julia III:1190 Our Father (French) I:467, 468 Our Gang (P. Roth) III:1122 Our House in the Last World (Hijuelos) II:601, III:1431 Our Lady of the Forest (Guterson) II:545 Our Mr. Wrenn (Lewis) II:770 Our New Home (Kirkland) II:729 Our Nig, or Sketches of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (Wilson) II:1004–1006, III:1368, 1417 Ourselves to Know (O’Hara) II:987 Outerbridge Reach (Stone) III:1215, 1216 Outer Dark (C. McCarthy) I:255, II:852 Outsider, The (R. Wright) II:1006–1008, III:1398 Overshadowed (Griggs) III:1418 Owl, The (Hawkes) II:566 Oxbow Incident, The (W. V. T. Clark) I:271, 272, II:554, 1008–1011 Oxford American, The (magazine) II:541 Oxherding Tale (C. R. Johnson) II:686 Ozeki, Ruth III:1424

1497

Ozick, Cynthia II:1011–1012 The Shawl III:1163–1165

P Paco’s Story (Heinemann) II:579, III:1013–1014 Page, Thomas Nelson II:499 Page Turner, The (Leavitt) II:759 Painted Bird, The (Kosinski) I:124, II:734–735, III:1014–1016 Painted House, A (Grisham) II:541 Paint It Today (H. D.) II:573 Pakistan I:44, 45, III:1170 Pakistani-American novel(s). See South Asian–American novel(s) Pakistani Americans I:44–45, III:1170 Palace Thief, The (Canin) I:223, 224 Palahniuk, Chuck III:1016–1017 Fight Club I:440–442, III:1016 Pale Fire (Nabokov) II:781, 942, 943, III:1017–1018 Pale Horse, Pale Rider (K. A. Porter) III:1060 Paley, Grace I:459, II:543 Palimpset (H. D.) II:573–574 Pal Joey (O’Hara) II:987 Palumbio-Liu, David I:439–440 Paperboy (Dexter) I:351 Parable of the Talents (O. E. Butler) I:202 Parachutes and Kisses (Jong) II:695 Paradise (Castedo) I:232 Paradise (Morrison) I:132, II:795, 912, III:1018–1019 Paradise Gate (Smiley) III:1182 Paradise Lost (Milton) II:898, III:1024 Paragon, The (Knowles) II:733, 734 Paretsky, Sarah I:298, II:522, III:1019–1020, 1435 Paris. See France Paris Review II:847

1498

INDEX

Paris Trout (Dexter) I:351, III:1020–1022 Park, Frances III:1425 Parker, Dorothy I:366, 367, II:782 Parker, Robert B. III:1435 Parkman, Francis, The Oregon Trail II:998–1000 Parnassus on Wheels (Morley) II:911 Parsis I:44, 45, III:1170 Partisans (Matthiessen) II:847 Partner, The (Grisham) II:541 Partners in Crime: A Rafe Buenrostro Mystery (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606 Parton, Sara Payson Willis. See Fern, Fanny passing. See also miscegenation; mixed race in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (J. W. Johnson) I:89–91, II:690 in The Bluest Eye (Morrison) I:158 in Clotel (W. W. Brown) I:275 in Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley) I:348 in Fauset’s novels I:258, 428–429 in Harlem Renaissance novels III:1418 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) I:253, II:619–620 in The Human Stain (P. Roth) I:54 in Iola Leroy (Harper) II:660–661 in Juneteenth (Ellison) II:701 in The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) II:839 in Passing (Larsen) II:747–748, III:1022–1023, 1418 in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain) III:1278 Passing (Larsen) II:747, III:1022–1023, 1418 Passion Artist, The (Hawkes) II:567 past, the. See history/the past Past All Dishonor (Cain) I:210

Pastures of Heaven, The (Steinbeck) III:1023–1025, 1209 Patchett, Ann III:1025–1026 Patchwork Planet, A (A. Tyler) III:1293 Pathfinder: or The Inland Sea, The (Cooper) I:293, II:755, 756 Patience Sparhawk (Atherton) I:79 patriarchy. See also women’s independence in The Ballad of the Sad Café (McCullers) I:100–101 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179, III:1407 in Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323 in Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:346 in Dictee (Cha) I:357–358 in Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (Acker) I:376–377 in Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:248, 413–414 in Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. S. Wong) I:439–440 in French’s work I:467, 468 in Holley’s work II:610–611 in Housekeeping (Robinson) II:621–622 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) II:629–630 in The Keepers of the House (Grau) II:710–711 in The Kitchen God’s Wife (Tan) II:730, 731 and language I:356–358, 376 in The Light in the Piazza (Spencer) II:777, 778 in Miss Lulu Bett (Gale) II:891–892 in The Mists of Avalon (Bradley) II:894–895 in The Mother’s Recompense (Wharton) II:922–923 in Paradise (Morrison) III:1019 in Penhally (C. Gordon) III:1032–1033 in The Reef (Wharton) III:1101–1102

in The Robber Bridegroom (Welty) III:1111 in The Temple of My Familiar (A. Walker) III:1250 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1265–1266 in Walker’s (A.) work III:1325, 1326 in Washington Square (James) III:1331–1332 in Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384–1386 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) III:1386–1387 Patrimony (P. Roth) I:53, III:1053, 1121, 1123 Patriot, The (Buck) I:194 Patriot, The (Connell) I:289 Patriot Games (Clancy) I:267, 268 Patron Saint of Liars, The (Patchett) III:1025, 1026 Patternmaster (O. E. Butler) I:202 Pavilion Women (Buck) I:194 Peaceable Kingdom, A (Prose) III:1079 Peace Breaks Out (Knowles) II:734 Peacock, Nancy III:1026–1027 Pearl, The (Steinbeck) III:1027–1030, 1210 Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine, The (Stowe) III:1220 Peckham’s Marbles (De Vries) I:350 Peep At “Number Five”; or, A Chapter in the Life of a City Pastor, A (Phelps) III:1040 Pekar, Harvey II:851 Pelican Brief, The (Grisham) II:540, 541 Pellucidar series (E. R. Burroughs) I:197 Pembroke (Freeman) I:466, III:1030–1032 Penhally (C. Gordon) II:517, III:1032–1033 Peninsulars, The (Ty-Casper) III:1423 Pennsylvania II:987–988 Penrod series (Tarkington) III:1246

Peony (Buck) I:194 People of Darkness (Hillerman) II:602–603, III:1033–1035 People of the Abyss, The (London) II:783 Pequod people II:614–615 Perch of the Devil (Atherton) I:79 Percy, Walker I:viii, II:492, 748, 798, 928, III:1035–1036, 1273 Lancelot II:741–742, III:1035 The Last Gentleman II:748–749, 798, III:1035 Love in the Ruins II:798–799, III:1035 The Moviegoer II:748, 798, 927–928, III:1035 writers compared to I:454, II:640, 748, 798, 883, 928 Percy, William Alexander III:1035 Perelman, S. J. I:339, III:1341, 1886 Perfectionists, The (Godwin) II:509 Perfidia (Rossner) III:1119 Perkins, Maxwell I:212, III:1379 Perry Mason novels II:479–480, III:1436 Persian Letters, The (Montesquieu) I:26 Persian Nights (Johnson) II:687 Personal Injuries (Turow) III:1289 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (Twain) III:1290 Peters, Elizabeth III:1436 Pet Food (Hagedorn) II:547 Petry, Ann I:vii, III:1036–1037 The Street III:1036, 1037, 1223–1224, 1419 Pet Sematary (King) II:723, III:1037–1039 Peyton Amberg (Janowitz) II:679 Peyton Place (Metalious) II:875, 876 Phantom Tollbooth, The (Juster) III:1039–1040 Phases of an Inferior Planet, The, (Glasgow) II:499

INDEX Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart I:467, III:1040 The Story of Avis III:1216–1218 Philadelphia III:1040–1041, 1354 Philadelphia Fire (Wideman) III:1040–1042, 1353, 1354 Philip Marlowe (character) I:144, 155, 242, 243, II:917, 929, III:1435 Philippines in America Is in the Heart (Bulosan) I:40 in Bacho’s work I:96 in Dogeaters (Hagedorn) I:369–370, II:547, III:1423 novels set in III:1422–1423 in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) I:176, III:1346–1347, 1423 Phillips, Jayne Anne I:viii, III:1042–1043 Philothea: A Romance (Child) I:254 Philo Vance stories (Van Dine) I:220, 221, II:821, III:1308, 1309, 1434, 1435 Picasso, Pablo III:1207, 1333 Picnic on Paradise (Russ) III:1128 Picture Bride (Uchida) III:1423 Picture Palace (Theroux) III:1258 Pictures of Fidelman (Malamud) II:820 Picture This (Heller) II:582–583 Picturing Will (Beattie) I:119 Piece of My Heart, A (R. Ford) I:454 Pierce, Franklin II:569 Piercy, Marge, Woman on the Edge of Time III:1384–1386 Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (Melville) I:135, II:869, III:1043–1045 Pigs in Heaven (Kingsolver) I:118, II:726 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan) I:20, 401, II:780 Pilot, The (Cooper) I:292 Pinocchio in Venice (Coover) I:294–295

Pioneers: Or the Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale, The (Cooper) I:292, 334, II:750, 755 Pistol, The (J. Jones) II:694 Pit: A Story of Chicago, The (Norris) II:973, 974 Pitch Dark (Adler) I:10 Place of Dead Roads, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 Place on Earth: A Novel, A (Berry) I:139 Place Where the Sea Remembers, A (Benítez) I:134 Plagued by the Nightingale (K. Boyle) I:170, III:1045–1046 Plains. See West Plainsong (Haruf) II:563, III:1046–1048 Plains Song: For Female Voices (Morris) III:1048–1049 Plan B (Himes) II:605 Planet of Exile (Le Guin) II:764 Planet Savers, The (Bradley) I:175 Plantation Boy (Murayama) I:30, II:936 Plant Dreaming Deep (Sarton) III:1141 Plath, Sylvia I:429, III:1049–1050 The Bell Jar I:129–130, 420, III:1049–1050 Platte River (Bass) I:112 Playback (Chandler) I:243 Play Dead (Coben) I:278 Player Piano (Vonnegut) III:1320 Players (DeLillo) I:337 Play It as It Lays (Didion) I:358, III:1050–1052 Plays Well with Others (Gurganus) II:543 Pleading Guilty (Turow) III:1288 Plexus (H. Miller) II:880, III:1282 Plot against America, The (P. Roth) II:668, III:1052–1054 Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (Fauset) I:258, 428, III:1418 Plum Island (DeMille) I:343 Pnin (Nabokov) II:943

Pocahantas story I:431–432 Pocho (Villareal) III:1429 Podhoretz, Norman II:889, III:1063 Poe, Edgar Allan I:vi, vii, II:729, 781, 999, III:1054–1055, 1394 influences on I:187, III:1355 and The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) II:842, 843 “Murder in the Rue Morgue” II:821 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket II:796–797, 948–950, III:1054 and short story I:58, III:1434 writers compared to I:229, 416–417, II:671, 714, 796, 843, 978, III:1258, 1404 Poet and Dancer (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Poganuc People: Their Lives and Loves (Stowe) III:1220 Point of No Return (Marquand) II:836 Point of Origin (Cornwell) I:299 Points in Time (P. F. Bowles) I:169 Poison (K. Harrison) II:561 Poisonwood Bible, The (Kingsolver) II:726, III:1055–1058 Pokagon, Simon III:1438 Poland III:1175, 1179–1180 police novels. See also crime novel(s); detective novel(s) by DeMille I:342, 343 by Hillerman II:602–603, III:1033–1034, 1436 by Jance II:677 police procedural III:1098, 1434, 1436 political themes. See also proletarian fiction; socialism in Adams’s work I:345 in Apple’s work I:68 in The Book of Daniel (Doctorow) I:166–167 in Just’s work II:705–706 in Kingsolver’s work II:726, III:1056

1499

in Lanny Budd series (Sinclair) II:745 in The Last Hurrah (E. O’Connor) II:982 in Looking Backward (Bellamy) II:786 in The Manchurian Candidate (Condon) II:827–828 in The Plot against America (P. Roth) III:1052–1053 in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) III:1056–1058 in Rand’s work III:1093, 1094 in A Son at the Front (Wharton) III:1189 “polyphonic discourse” I:50 Ponder Heart, The (Welty) III:1338–1339 Poodle Springs (Chandler) I:243 poor. See working class/poor Poorhouse Fair, The (Updike) III:1300 Poor White (Anderson) I:58 Popped (C. H. Clark) I:269 pornography I:5, 6, 97, 336, III:1284 Porter, Connie III:1058–1059 Porter, Katherine Anne I:vii, III:1059–1061 Ship of Fools III:1059, 1060, 1166–1167 Portion of Labor, The (Freeman) I:466 portes de la forêt, Les (The Gates of the Forest) (Wiesel) III:1358 Portis, Charles III:1061 Portnoy’s Complaint (P. Roth) I:469, III:1052, 1062–1063, 1122, 1123, 1131 Port of Saints (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 Portrait in Brownstone (Auchincloss) I:85 Portrait of a Lady, The (James) I:38, 42, 318, 366, II:673, III:1063–1065, 1332 Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (Eastlake) I:388 Portrait of a Romantic (Millhauser) II:884

1500

INDEX

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) I:16, 129, 401, II:475, III:1129 Possessing the Secret of Joy (A. Walker) III:1326 Possession (Bromfield) I:184 Postcards (Proulx) III:1080 postcolonial novel(s) I:45, III:1241, 1369, 1427 postindustrialism II:830 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Cain) I:209, III:1065–1067 postmodernism in Acker’s work I:5, 6, 375, 376 Adler and I:10 in Apple’s work I:68 in Auster’s work I:86 in Baker’s work I:97 Barth and I:109, 110 in Barthelme’s work I:110–111, III:1184 Bell and I:126 in Catch-22 (Heller) I:234 in Coover’s work I:294 in The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon) I:310 in Dictee (Cha) I:356 in Dixon’s work I:361 in Elkin’s work I:397 (I:397–399) in Gaddis’s work II:473 in Gaitskill’s work II:476 in Gardner’s (J.) work II:481 in Gass’s work II:484–485 in The Ginger Man (Donleavy) I:374 in Hawkes’s work II:566–567 in House of Leaves (Danielewski) II:624–625 in In Memoriam to Identity (Acker) II:652–653 in JR (Gaddis) II:697–699 in Mao II (DeLillo) II:832 in Mumbo Jumbo (Reed) II:934 in The Music of Chance (Auster) II:936–938 in Neuromancer (Gibson) II:958, 959 in The New York Trilogy (Auster) II:960–962 in O’Brien’s work II:981, III:1260

in Philadelphia Fire (Wideman) III:1041 in Pynchon’s work III:1085 in Reed’s work III:1100 in Roth’s (P.) work III:1122, 1123, 1131 in Sent for You Yesterday (Wideman) III:1154 in Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) III:1178–1179 Stein and III:1207, 1208 in Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston) II:727–728, III:1279 in Vonnegut’s work III:1319, 1320 in Weber’s work III:1334 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1350 in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (Gass) II:484–485, III:1366–1367 in World War II novels III:1328 writers of I:110, 336, II:484 Postmortem (Cornwell) I:298 Post Office (Bukowksi) I:196, II:552 post-World War II era. See also postmodernism I:vii–viii, III:1410–1412 Potok, Chaim III:1067–1068 The Chosen I:261–262, III:1067 Pound, Ezra I:106, 383, 422, II:573, 926 Powder Burn (Hiaasen) II:598 Powell, Dawn III:1068–1069 A Time to Be Born III:1068, 1267–1269 Power (Hogan) II:609 Power, Susan III:1069–1070 The Grass Dancer II:527–528, III:1069 Power of Sympathy, The (W. H. Brown) I:vi, 456, III:1070–1071 Powers, J. F., Morte D’Urban II:914–915 Practical Magic (Hoffman) II:608–609 Prague Orgy, The (P. Roth) III:1123 Prairie: A Tale, The (Cooper) I:292, 334, II:755, 756

Prairie Nocturne (Doig) I:370 “prairie realists” II:482 Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall) II:840, III:1420 Prather, Richard S. III:1435 Prayer for Owen Meany, A (Irving) II:663, 664, 665, III:1071–1073 Preacher and the Slave, The (Stegner) III:1206 Precaution (Cooper) I:292 pre-Civil War novels I:vii Presbyterianism III:1108–1109 Presidential Agent (Sinclair) II:744 Presidential Mission (Sinclair) II:744, 745 Presumed Innocent (Turow) III:1288, 1289 Pretty Boy Floyd (McMurtry) II:865 Prettyfields: A Work in Progress (Eastlake) I:389 Prey (Crichton) I:308 Price, Reynolds I:viii, II:640, III:1073–1074 Kate Vaiden II:708–710, III:1073, 1074 Price, Richard III:1074–1075, 1152 Price of Salt, The (Highsmith) II:600 priests II:914–915, 982 Primary Colors (Klein) I:344 Primer for Combat (K. Boyle) I:170 Primitive People (Prose) III:1079 primitivism I:322, II:975, III:1248 Prince and the Pauper, The (Twain) III:1075–1077, 1289–1290 Prince of Tides, The (Conroy) I:291 Princess Casamassima, The (James) I:38, II:673 Princess Daisy (Krantz) II:736 Princess of Mars, A (E. R. Burroughs) I:197 prison. See also In Cold Blood (Capote); Lesson Before Dying, A (Gaines) in Falconer (Cheever) I:417–418

in The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren) II:830–831 Prisons (Settle) III:1158 Private Life of Axie Reed, The (Knowles) II:734 private schools in The Rector of Justin (Auchincloss) III:1095–1096 in A Separate Peace (Knowles) II:733, III:1156–1157 Prodigal Summer (Kingsolver) II:726 Profane Friendship (Brodkey) I:183 Professor of Desire, The (P. Roth) III:1122 Professor’s House, The (Cather) I:235, 236 proletarian fiction I:vii, 215–217, III:1120, 1302. See also socialism; working class/poor Promise, The (Buck) I:194 Promise, The (Potok) III:1067 Promised Land, The (Antin) III:1077–1078 Promise of Rest, The (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Pronzini, Bill III:1436 propaganda II:744, 745, III:1189 Property Of (Hoffman) II:608 Propheteers, The (Apple) I:68 Prose, Francine III:1078–1080 Prosser, Gabriel III:1418 protest novel(s) I:vii African-American I:98, 192, 386, II:839, III:1100, 1419, 1420 Ceremony (Silko) as I:239 environmentalist II:515 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) as III:1210 by Maltz II:823 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) as III:1297 Proud Heart, The (Buck) I:194 Proulx, E. Annie II:865, III:1080–1081 The Shipping News III:1080, 1167–1168 Proust, Marcel I:6, 181, II:484, 714

INDEX psychological novel(s). See also gothic novel(s); suspense novel(s) by Jackson II:670–671, III:1335 by James I:vii, II:672 Lancelot (Percy) II:741–742 Lolita (Nabokov) as II:781–782 Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Rossner) II:788 The Manchurian Candidate (Condon) II:827–829 The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) II:832–835 Misery (King) II:887–888 The Naked Lunch (Burroughs) II:946 Nights (H. D.) II:964–965 The Outsider (R. Wright) II:1006–1008 Pierre (Melville) I:135, II:869, III:1043–1045 What Maisie Knew (James) III:1346–1347 by Woolson III:1392 after World War I I:vii The Yellow Wallpaper (Gilman) I:323, II:493–494, III:1404–1405 Public Burning, The (Coover) I:294 Puerto Rican novel(s) III:1427, 1430–1431. See also Mohr, Nicholasa Puerto Ricans I:396–397, II:901, III:1427 Puerto Rico III:1430 Pulp (Bukowksi) I:196 pulp fiction I:326, II:888, III:1435–1436. See also detective novel(s); western(s) punk literature I:5, 375–376, II:958–960 Puppet Masters, The (Heinlein) II:580, 581 Purdy, James III:1081–1082 Narrow Rooms II:950–951, III:1081 Purple America (Moody) II:908 Purple Noon (Highsmith) II:600 Pursuit of Happiness, The (Roiphe) III:1116

Pursuit of the Prodigal (Auchincloss) I:85 Pushing the Bear (Glancy) II:498, III:1082–1084 Pussy, King of the Pirates (Acker) I:6 Puttermesser, The (Ozick) II:1011 Puzo, Mario I:137, III:1084–1085 The Godfather II:503–505, III:1084 Puzzled Heart, The (Heilbrun) II:578 Pylon (Faulkner) I:426 Pynchon, Thomas I:viii, 294, III:1085–1086 The Crying of Lot 49 I:310–312, III:1085 Gravity’s Rainbow II:529–532, III:1085–1086 V. III:1085, 1304–1306 writers compared to I:171, II:484, 832, III:1085, 1308

Q Q.E.D. (Stein) III:1207 Queechy (Warner) III:1329 Queen, Ellery (pseudonym and character) II:821, III:1434, 1435 Queenie (Calisher) I:214 Queen of the Damned (Rice) III:1103 Queen of the Underworld (Godwin) II:509 Queen of the Woods (Pokagon) III:1438 Queer (W. S. Burroughs) I:199, II:705 Question of Max, The (Heilbrun) II:578 Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, 849, III:1087–1088, 1418 Quiet Days in Clichy (H. Miller) II:880, 881 Quinn’s Book (Kennedy) II:712 Quintasket, Christine. See Mourning Dove

R Rabbi of Lud, The (Elkin) I:398

Rabbit (Harry Angstrom) (character) III:1090, 1091 Rabbit at Rest (Updike) III:1300 Rabbit Is Rich (Updike) III:1300 Rabbit Redux (Updike) III:1089–1090, 1300 Rabbit Run (Updike) III:1090–1092, 1300, 1301 Rabble in Arms (K. Roberts) III:1113 race/racism. See also miscegenation; mixed-race people; passing; slavery in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:3, II:812 in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain) I:13–14 in American Son (Roley) I:50 in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (J. W. Johnson) I:90–91, II:690 in Baldwin’s work I:98–99 in Band of Angels (Warren) I:102–103 in Bell’s novels I:126 in Benito Cereno (Melville) I:135, 136 in Black Boy (R. Wright) I:148–149, III:1398 in Blu’s Hanging (Yamanaka) I:159, 160 in The Bonfire of the Vanities (T. Wolfe) I:163 in Cable’s work I:206, 207 in Campbell’s work I:219 in Chesnutt’s work I:252–253 in The Chinaberry Tree (Fauset) I:259 in The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) I:286, III:1229 in Devil in a Blue Dress (Mosley) I:347, 348–349 in Fauset’s work I:428–429 in The Floating World (Kadohata) I:450 in Gaines’s work II:475 in God’s Little Acre (Caldwell) II:507, 508 in Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) II:514 in The Green Mile (King) II:537

1501

in The Heart of Hyacinth (Watanna) II:576–577 in Himes’s work II:604–605 in Home to Harlem (McKay) II:611–612, 861 in Hopkins’s work II:615–616, III:1418 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) II:620 in The Human Stain (P. Roth) I:54 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) II:671 in Invisible Man (Ellison) I:400, II:658–660 in The Keepers of the House (Grau) II:710, 711 in To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) II:761, III:1272 in Larsen’s work II:747–748 in A Lesson before Dying (Gaines) II:765–767 in Light in August (Faulkner) II:775–777 in Madame Delphine (Cable) II:812 in Mama Day (Naylor) II:824–825 in The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) I:252–253, II:838–839 in Morrison’s work II:912–913 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:917 in Native Son (R. Wright) I:148, II:952–953, III:1397, 1419 in Not Without Laughter (Hughes) II:975 in Our Nig (Wilson) II:1005–1006 in Paris Trout (Dexter) III:1020–1021 in Petry’s work III:1036, 1037 in The Poisonwood Bible (Kingsolver) III:1057 in Quicksand (Larsen) II:747, III:1087–1088 in Sent for You Yesterday (Wideman) III:1155 in Show Boat (Ferber) III:1169

1502

INDEX

race/racism (continued) in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1195–1196 in Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1226–1227 in Sula (Morrison) III:1235 in Sundown (Mathews) III:1241 in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, The (Twain) III:1277–1279 in Twain’s novels III:1290 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) III:1297 in The Virginian (Wister) III:1315–1316 in The Voice at the Back Door (Spencer) III:1318–1319 in Warren’s work I:102–103 in The Ways of White Folks (Hughes) III:1333 in Wideman’s work III:1353–1354 in The Woman Warrior (Kingston) III:1386–1387 in Wright’s (R.) work III:1397 Race Rock (Matthiessen) II:847 Radio Free Albemuth (Dick) III:1307 Raditzer (Matthiessen) II:847 Rage to Live, A (O’Hara) II:987 Ragged Dick (Alger) I:23–24 Ragtime (Doctorow) I:364, III:1092–1093 Railway Police, The (Calisher) I:214 Rainbow Six (Clancy) I:268 Rainbow Trail, The (Grey) II:539 Rain God, The (Islas) III:1429–1430 Rainmaker, The (Grisham) II:541 Rain of Gold (Villaseñor) III:1427 Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India, The (Bromfield) I:184 Raj (Mehta) III:1425 Rampling, Anne. See Rice, Anne

Rand, Ayn II:476, III:1093–1094 Atlas Shrugged I:80–81, 457, III:1093 The Fountainhead I:457–459, III:1093 philosophy of I:80–81, 457–458, 459, III:1093 Random House III:1428 Raney (Edgerton) I:394 Rangel-Ribeiro, Victor III:1425 Ransom (McInerney) II:860 Ransom, John Crowe III:1249, 1330 rape. See also Blues & Eye, The (Morrison); Color Purple, The (A. Walker) incest; violence in Bastard Out of Carolina (Allison) I:113, 114 and Jacobs II:671, 672 in Jones’s (G.) work II:693 in The Lovely Bones (Sebold) II:799, 800, III:1148 in Native American novels III:1439 in Oates’s work II:978 in Sanctuary (Faulkner) III:1138 in Steps (Kosinski) III:1213 Rapture (Minot) II:885 rational egoism. See “objectivism” rationalism II:531, III:1093, 1356 Ratner’s Star (DeLillo) I:337 Ravelstein (Bellow) I:131 Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan III:1094–1095 The Yearling III:1094, 1095, 1401–1402 Ray (Hannah) II:553 Raymond, Alex II:551 reader response theory II:911 Reading for Survival (J. MacDonald) II:809 Real Cool Killers, The (Himes) II:605 realism I:vii, viii. See also Drieser, Theodore; Norris, Frank in African-American novel I:vii, III:1418, 1419

in Aldrich’s work I:21 in Alice Adams (Tarkington) I:28 American dream in I:28 in Crane’s work I:305, 306 in detective novels III:1435 in Ethan Frome (Wharton) I:407 Howells and I:vii, II:633, 634, III:1107 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:773, 774 in Married or Single? (Sedgwick) II:837, 838 in The Morgesons (Stoddard) II:910, 911 of 1920s I:28 and regionalism I:302–303 in The Rise of David Levinsky (Cahan) I:208 vs. romanticism I:vii, II:568 and Stoddard III:1214 in Waiting (Ha) III:1322 in World War II novels III:1328 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The (Nabokov) II:943 Real People (Lurie) II:806 Real Presence, The (Bausch) I:114 Realuyo, Bino III:1423 Rebecca (du Maurier) II:671 Rebel Powers (Bausch) I:115 Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution, The (Child) I:254 Recapitulation (Stegner) III:1206 Recessional (Michener) II:877 Reckless Eye-balling (Reed) III:1100 Recognitions, The (Gaddis) II:473 Reconstruction II:514 Rector of Justin, The (Auchincloss) I:85, III:1095–1096 Red, White, and Blue (Isaacs) II:666 Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, The (Crane) I:210, 305, 306, III:1096–1098 novels compared to I:210, II:593

Redburn (Melville) II:869 Red Death, A (Mosley) II:918 Red Dragon (T. Harris) III:1098–1100 Redeye: A Western (Edgerton) I:394 Red Harvest (Hammett) II:550 Red Matters (Krupat) III:1440 Red One, The (London) II:783 Red Pony, The (Steinbeck) III:1209–1210 Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Yezierska) III:1407 Red Rover, The (Cooper) I:292 Red Storm Rising (Clancy) I:267 Red Tent, The (Diamant) I:353 Redwood (Sedgwick) III:1149 Reed, Ishmael I:viii, 346, III:1100–1101, 1420 Mumbo Jumbo II:934–935, III:1100, 1420 Reef, The (Wharton) III:1101–1102, 1342–1343 Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling (Helprin) II:584 Reflections in a Golden Eye (McCullers) I:285 Regester, Seeley III:1434 Regiment of Women (Berger) I:137 regionalism I:302–303, 332, II:729, III:1230, 1384 Reinhart in Love (Berger) I:137 Reinhart’s Women (Berger) I:137 Reivers, A Reminiscence, The (Faulkner) I:425, 426, 427 Relation of My Imprisonment, The (Banks) I:103 religion. See Catholicism; Christianity; Judaism in Christ in Concrete (di Donato) I:263 in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) II:520, 521 in The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) II:832–835

INDEX matriarchal, in The Mists of Avalon (Bradley) II:894–895 in Miss Lonelyhearts (West) II:888–889 in Mona in the Promised Land (Jen) II:903 in A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving) III:1071, 1072 in A River Runs Through It (Maclean) III:1108–1109 in On the Road (Kerouac) II:995 in So Far from God (Castillo) III:1187 in Stone’s novels III:1215, 1216 in Stowe’s novels III:1220 in Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) and III:1222 in The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) III:1238 in Valis (Dick) III:1306, 1307 in The Violent Bear It Away (F. O’Connor) II:983, III:1312–1313 in Wieland (C. B. Brown) I:187, III:1355–1356 in Wise Blood (F. O’Connor) II:983 Remembering: A Novel (Berry) I:140 Remembering Laughter (Stegner) III:1205 Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) I:6, II:714 Requiem for a Dream (Selby) III:1152 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner) I:426 Reservation Blues (Alexie) I:22 Rest of Life: Three Novellas, The (M. C. Gordon) II:519–520 Resurrection, The (J. Gardner) II:481 Return of Lanny Budd, The (Sinclair) II:745, III:1173 Return of Little Big Man, The (Berger) I:137 Return of the O’Mahony, The (Frederic) I:465 Return to Peyton Place (Metalious) II:876

Reuben (Wideman) III:1354 Revenge (J. Harrison) II:559 Revenge (Millhauser) II:884 Reversible Errors (Turow) III:1289 Revista Chicano-Riqueña (magazine) III:1427 “revolt from the village” II:502, 769 Rhetoric of Fiction, The (Booth) I:39 Rice, Anne III:1102–1104, 1289 Interview with the Vampire II:653–654, III:1103 Rice, Craig III:1435 Rich, Virginia III:1436–1437 Richardson, Dorothy II:965 Richardson, Samuel I:456 Rich in Love (Humphreys) II:640–641 Rich Man, Poor Man (Shaw) III:1162, 1163 Rich Rewards (A. Adams) I:7 Richter, Conrad II:613 Ricketts, Edward F. III:1024, 1027, 1029, 1210 Rider of Lost Creek, The (L’Amour) II:740 Riders of the Purple Sage (Grey) II:538, 539 Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (Doig) I:370 Riding Shotgun (R. M. Brown) I:190 Right Stuff, The (T. Wolfe) III:1381 Rimbaud, Arthur I:6, II:651–652 Rinehart, Mary Roberts III:1434 Rio Grande Fall (Anaya) I:57 Ripley’s Game (Highsmith) II:600 Rise of David Levinsky, The (Cahan) I:207, 208, III:1104–1105 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells) II:633, 634, III:1105–1107 Rise to Rebellion (J. Shaara) III:1160 Rising Sun (Crichton) I:308 Rite of Passage (R. Wright) III:1398

Rites and Witnesses (HinojosaSmith) II:606 Ritter, William Emerson III:1024, 1275 Riven Rock (T. C. Boyle) I:172 Rivera, Tomás III:1107–1108, 1427, 1429 Y no se lo Tragó la Tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) I:152, II:732, III:1107, 1108, 1408–1409, 1427, 1429 River King, The (Hoffman) II:608 River Runs Through It, A (Maclean) III:1108–1110 Rivers of Eros, The (Colter) I:282 River Sutra, A (Mehta) III:1425 River to Pickle Beach, The (Betts) I:140 Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck, The (Cabell) I:205 Rizzuto, Rahna Reiko III:1424 R.L.’s Dream (Mosley) II:918 Road, The (London) I:27 Road Home, The (J. Harrison) II:559 “road novel” I:27 Road Through the Wall, The (Jackson) II:670 Road to Wellville, The (T. C. Boyle) I:172 Roadwalkers (Grau) II:529 Robbe-Grillet, Alain I:6 Robber Bridegroom, The (Welty) III:1110–1111, 1138, 1338 Robbins, Tom I:177, III:1111–1112 Robert Crews (Berger) I:137 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox III:1112–1113 The Great Meadow II:533–535, III:1112–1113 Roberts, Kenneth III:1113–1114 Robinson, Marilynne II:620, III:1114–1115 Housekeeping II:620–622, III:1114, 1115

1503

Robinson Crusoe (character) I:137, 431, II:679 Robots of Dawn (Asimov) I:75 Rocannon’s World (Le Guin) II:764 Rock Wagram (Saroyan) III:1139 Roderick Hudson (H. James) II:673 Rodriguez, Abraham, Jr. III:1432 Rodriguez, Richard III:1427–1428 Hunger of Memory II:641–642, III:1427–1428 Roger’s Version (Updike) III:1300 Roiphe, Anne III:1115–1116 Lovingkindness II:803–805, III:1116 Roley, Brian Ascalon III:1116–1117 American Son I:50–51, III:1116–1117, 1423 Rollin, John III:1438 Romance Island (Gale) II:477 Romance of a Plain Man, The (Glasgow) II:499 Romance of the Republic, A (Child) I:254 Roman Hat Mystery, The (Queen) III:1435 Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, The (T. Williams) III:1364 Romantic Comedians, The (Glasgow) II:499, 500 Romantic Egoist, The (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:445 romanticism I:vii. See also sentimental novel(s) in Crawford’s work I:307 in early American novels I:vii Hawthorne and I:vii, II:568, 628 in Hopkins’s work II:615 in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Johnson) II:829 in The Marble Faun (Hawthorne) II:832–835 in The Morgesons (Stoddard) II:910, 911 vs. realism I:vii, II:568 in westerns II:613, 827, 829

1504

INDEX

romantic novel(s). romanticism; sentimental novel(s) Rome Haul (Edmonds) I:395 Romero, Sophia G. III:1423 Rookery Blues (Hassler) II:564 Room, The (Selby) III:1152 Room Temperature (Baker) I:97 Roosevelt, Franklin D. I:197, II:667, 668 Roosevelt, Theodore III:1077, 1189, 1218, 1316, 1378 and The Jungle (Sinclair) II:702, 703, III:1173 Roots (Haley) II:721–722 Roqué, Ana III:1430 Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Rosa (Ozick) II:1011 Rosca, Ninotchka III:1423 Roscoe (Kennedy) II:713 Rose Clark (Ferber) I:436 Rosemary’s Baby (Levin) I:151 Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (Garland) II:482, 483, III:1117–1118 Rosie (Lamott) II:738 Rosinante to the Road Again (Dos Passos) I:379 Rossner, Judith III:1118–1120 Looking for Mr. Goodbar II:788–790, III:1118–1119 Rosy Crucifixion, The (H. Miller) II:880, III:1282 Roth, Henry III:1120–1121 Call It Sleep I:215–217, III:1120 Roth, Philip I:vii, 53, 208, 229, II:820, 879, 1011, III:1062, 1121–1124 American Pastoral I:46–47, 53, 54, 55, II:668, III:1121–1122 The American Trilogy I:46, 53–56, II:489, III:1123, 1131, 1416 The Ghost Writer I:54, II:487–489, III:1053, 1121, 1122, 1123, 1416 on Herzog (Bellow) II:596, 597

The Human Stain I:53, 54–55, II:489, III:1122 I Married a Communist I:53, 54, 55 Nathan Zuckerman character I:47, 53, 54–55, II:487–489, III:1121, 1122–1123 The Plot against America II:668, III:1052–1054 Portnoy’s Complaint I:469, III:1052, 1062–1063, 1122, 1123, 1131 Sabbath’s Theater (P. Roth) I:53, III:1121, 1123, 1131–1133 Zuckerman Unbound III:1122–1123, 1414–1416 Rough-Hewn (Fisher) I:444–445 Rounds (Busch) I:201 Rowson, Susanna Haswell I:26, III:1124–1125 Charlotte Temple I:vi–vii, 244–247, 456, III:1124, 1125 Roxanna Slade (Reynolds Price) III:1074 Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) I:189, 190, III:1125–1127, 1309, 1310 Rule of the Bone, The (Banks) I:104 Rumble Tumble (Lansdale) II:746 Runaway Jury, The (Grisham) II:541 Runaway Soul, The (Brodkey) I:183 Run, Man, Run (Himes) II:605 Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (McNickle) II:866, III:1438 Running Dog (DeLillo) I:337 Run, River (Didion) I:358 Ruppersburg, Hugh I:33 rural life. See also frontier; small-town life in As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) I:73–75 in The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Chute) I:116, 264 in Caldwell’s work I:212–213

in The Country of the Pointed Firs (Jewett) I:303–304 end of (See urbanization) in Haruf’s work II:563 in Merry Men (Chute) II:874–875 in Plainsong (Haruf) II:563, III:1046–1048 in So Big (Ferber) III:1186 in A Thousand Acres (Smiley) III:1265 in Tobacco Road (Caldwell) III:1269–1270 in The Yearling (Rawlings) III:1401–1402 Rushdie, Salman II:519 Russ, Joanna I:175, III:1127–1129 The Female Man I:433–434, III:1127, 1128 Ruth Hall (Ferber) I:436 Ryder (Barnes) I:105, 106, II:967, III:1129–1130

S S (Updike) III:1091, 1300 Sabbath’s Theater (P. Roth) I:53, III:1121, 1123, 1131–1133 Sabbatical: A Romance (Barth) I:110 Sacco-Vanzetti case III:1302, 1303 Sacred Fount, The (James) I:38, II:673 Saddest Summer of Samuel S, The (Donleavy) I:374 Safe in America (Hershman) II:595 Sailor Song (Kesey) II:716 St. Dale (McCrumb) II:856 Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (W. Miller) II:883 Saint Maybe (A. Tyler) III:1292–1293 Salem’s Lot (King) II:723, 724 Salinger, J. D. I:viii, III:1091, 1133–1134 The Catcher in the Rye I:232–234, III:1133 work compared to I:129, 182, II:553, III:1049

Holden Caulfield character I:104, 232–233, III:1133 comparisons to I:104, 250, II:491, 714, 728 writers compared to I:256, II:885 Salome of the Tenements (Yezierska) III:1134–1135, 1406, 1407 Salt Eaters, The (Bambara) I:101, III:1135–1137 Salt Line, The (Spencer) III:1198 Samantha novels, the (Holley) Samantha among the Brethren II:611 Samantha at Saratoga II:611 Samantha on the Race Problem II:610 Samaritan (Richard Price) III:1075 Sam Spade (character) I:155, II:550, 821–822, III:1435 Sanctuary (Faulkner) I:73, 426, III:1137–1139 Sandburg, Carl I:27, 58 San Francisco I:161, II:867–868 Santa Lucia (Austin) I:87 Santiago, Esmeralda I:35, III:1427, 1430 When I Was Puerto Rican III:1428, 1430–1431 Santos, Bienvenido III:1422 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather) I:236 Sappho’s Leap (Jong) II:695 Sarah, or The Exemplary Wife (Rowson) III:1124 Saratoga Trunk (Ferber) I:435 Saroyan, William I:41, 59, III:1139–1140 The Human Comedy II:639–640, III:1139 Sarton, May I:77, 79, III:1140–1141 As We Are Now I:78–79, III:1141 Sartoris (Faulkner) I:426, III:1298 Sartre, Jean-Paul I:282, II:538, III:1398 Sassoon, Siegfried II:510 Satan in Goray (Singer) III:1175

INDEX Satan Never Sleeps (Buck) I:194 Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Yamanoka) III:1400 Saul and Patsy (Baxter) I:115, 116 Savage Holiday (R. Wright) III:1398 Savage Season (Lansdale) II:746 Save Me, Joe Louis (Bell) I:126 Save Me the Waltz (Z. Fitzgerald) I:447–448, III:1141–1143 Sayonara (Michener) II:877 Scapegoat, The (Settle) III:1158, 1159 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne) I:154, 155, II:568, 569, 628, 684, III:1143–1144 novels compared to I:243, II:628, III:1031 novels influenced by III:1072, 1073, 1091, 1300 Scarlet Thread, The (Betts) I:140 Schmidt Delivered (Begley) I:123 Schultz (Donleavy) I:374 Schuyler, George III:1418 science fiction I:75, II:580. See also fantasy by African Americans I:202, 335, III:1420 Asimov and I:75–76 by Bradbury I:173–174 by Bradley I:175 by Burroughs (E. R.) I:197 by Butler (O. E.) I:202, II:719 A Canticle for Leibowitz (W. M. Miller) I:226–227, II:883 by Delany (S. R.) I:335–336, III:1420 by Dick I:354, 363 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) I:355, 362–363 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) I:174, 415–417, II:805, 843

The Female Man (Russ) I:433–434, III:1127, 1128 feminist I:434, III:1127 by Heinlein II:580–581 Kindred (O. E. Butler) I:202, II:720–722, III:1420 The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) II:762–763 Le Guin and II:762, 764 by Lethem II:768–769 by MacDonald (J.) II:809 The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury) I:174, II:841–843 by Miller (W.) II:883 Neuromancer (Gibson) II:958–960 by Russ III:1127–1128 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) II:580, 581, III:1221–1223 Valis (Dick) I:363, III:1306–1308 by women I:175, 434, III:1127 Scott, Walter I:vi, 292, II:750, 757 Scrambled Yeggs (Prather) III:1435 Scruples (Krantz) II:736 Scruples Two (Krantz) II:737 Scum (Singer) III:1175 Seagull on the Steps, The (K. Boyle) I:170 Seal Wife, The (K. Harrison) II:560, 561, III:1144–1146 Searches and Seizures (Elkin) I:398 Searching for Caleb (A. Tyler) III:1292 Sea Runners, The (Doig) I:370 Seasoned Timber (Fisher) I:444 Season of Delight, A (Greenberg) II:535 Season of Grace, The (Gonzalez) III:1423 Sea-Wolf, The (London) II:783, III:1146–1148, 1347 Sebold, Alice III:1148–1149 The Lovely Bones II:799–801 Second Chances (A. Adams) I:7

Second Coming, The (Percy) II:798, III:1035 Second Growth (Stegner) III:1206 Second Skin (Hawkes) II:566 Secretary (Gaitskill) II:476 Secret Harmonies (Barrett) I:108 Secret Life of Bees, The (Kidd) II:717 Secrets of the City (Roiphe) III:1116 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria I:313, II:757, III:1149–1150 Hope Leslie II:614–615, III:1149 Married or Single? II:837–838, III:1149 Seduction of the Minotaur (Nin) II:968, 969 Seize the Day (Bellow) I:131–132, III:1150–1152 Selby, Hubert, Jr. II:831, III:1152–1153 self-reflective fiction I:viii. See also postmodernism Seminole people II:718–719 Sense of the Past, The (James) II:674 Sent for You Yesterday (Wideman) III:1153–1156, 1353, 1354, 1420 sentimental novel(s). See also romance novel(s); romanticism Band of Angels (Warren) as I:102 Charlotte Temple (Rowson) I:244–247, 456, III:1124, 1125 Clotel (W. W. Brown) as I:274 The Coquette (Foster) I:295–298, 456, 457 by Cummins I:313 Deephaven (Jewett) as I:333 The Female American (Winkfield) I:431–433 first III:1149 by Hopkins II:615 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) as II:648, 671 Iola Leroy (Harper) as II:556, 660

1505

Life in the Iron Mills (R. H. Davis) as II:773, 774 Our Nig (Wilson) as II:1004, 1005 The Power of Sympathy (W. H. Brown) III:1070–1071 by Rowson III:1124 by Sedgwick III:1149 Separate Peace, A (Knowles) II:733, III:1156–1158 September, September (Foote) I:453 Seraph on the Suwanee (Hurston) II:645 Serenade (Cain) I:209 Serenissima: A Novel of Venice (Jong) II:695 Serpico (Maas) II:808 Servant’s Tale, A (Fox) I:459–460 Seth’s Brother’s Wife; A Study of Life in the Greater New York (Frederic) I:464 Set This House on Fire (Styron) I:285, III:1228, 1229 Setting Free the Bears (Irving) II:664 Settle, Mary Lee III:1158–1160 Seven Keys to Baldpate (Biggers) I:143 Seven-Ounce Man, The (J. Harrison) II:559 Seventh Heaven (Hoffman) II:608 sexuality. See also gay themes; lesbianism; pornography; women’s sexuality in Baker’s work I:97 in Eugenides’s work I:407, 408 in Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin) II:520–521 in H. D.’s work II:573, 574 in In Memoriam to Identity (Acker) II:651, 652–653 in Krantz’s work II:736 in Lolita (Nabokov) II:781–782 in McCullers’s (Carson) work II:858 in The Member of the Wedding (McCullers) II:872, 873 in Middlesex (Eugenides) I:408, II:878–879

1506

INDEX

sexuality (continued) in Miller’s (H.) work II:880 in Miss Lonelyhearts (West) II:889 in Nin’s work II:968, 969 in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus) II:989–990 in Peyton Place (Metalious) II:875, 876 in Purdy’s novels III:1081 in Sabbath’s Theater (P. Roth) III:1132 in Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) III:1222 in Tropic of Capricorn (Miller) III:1284, 1285 in The Turn of the Screw (James) III:1288 in Women (Bukowski) III:1390 in The World According to Garp (Irving) III:1393 Sexual Politics (Millett) III:1284 Sexus (H. Miller) II:880, III:1282 Sexy (Oates) II:978 Shaara, Jeff III:1160–1161 Shaara, Michael III:1160, 1161–1162 Shadow Knows, The (Johnson) II:687 Shadow Play (Baxter) I:115, 116 Shadows on the Hudson (Singer) III:1175 Shadows on the Rock (Cather) I:235 Shakespeare, William and Acker’s work I:6 King John II:571 King Lear III:1182, 1265 Macbeth III:1193 and Mama Day (Naylor) II:824, 957 Richard III III:1375–1376 The Tempest II:824, 957, III:1041 Shaman Winter (Anaya) I:57 Shards of Memory (Jhabvala) II:685 Sharp Teeth of Love, The (Betts) I:140–141 Shattered Chain, The (Bradley) I:175

Shaw, George Bernard II:745 Shaw, Irwin I:vii, II:847, III:1162–1163 The Young Lions I:210, III:1162, 1163, 1328, 1412–1413 Shaw, Joseph T. II:550 Shawl, The (Ozick) II:1011, III:1163–1165 Shawshank Redemption, The (King) II:724 Shelley, Mary I:vi, III:1103 Shelter (Phillips) III:1043 Sheltered Life, The (Glasgow) II:499, 500 Sheltering Sky, The (P. F. Bowles) I:168–169, III:1165–1166 She Walks These Hills (McCrumb) II:856 Shields, David I:97 Shigekuni, Julie III:1424 Shiloh (Foote) I:453 Shine on, Bright and Dangerous Object (Colwin) I:283 Shining, The (King) II:536, 723 Shining Through (Isaacs) II:666 Ship Me Home (O’Brien) II:981 Ship of Fools (K. A. Porter) III:1059, 1060, 1166–1167 Shipping News, The (Proulx) III:1080, 1167–1168 Shipwreck (Begley) I:123 Shogun: A Novel of Japan (Clavell) I:272, 273 Shooting Star, A (Stegner) III:1206 Short History of a Prince: A Novel, The (Hamilton) II:549 Short Reign of Pippin: A Fabrication, The (Steinbeck) III:1210 Shosha (Singer) III:1175 Shoulders of Atlas, The (Freeman) I:467 Show Boat (Ferber) I:434, III:1168–1170 Shreve, Anita, The Last Time They Met II:751–752 Sicilian, The (Puzo) III:1084, 1085 Sick and Full of Burning (Cherry) I:251

Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard) II:927, 928 Sick Puppy (Hiaasen) II:598 Sidhwa, Bapsi III:1170, 1425 An American Brat I:44–45, III:1170, 1425 Sights Unseen (Gibbons) II:491 Silko, Leslie Marmon I:viii, 29, 36, III:1170–1172, 1240, 1279, 1439 Ceremony I:29, 56, 239–240, II:623, III:1170, 1171, 1439, 1440 Sillitoe, Alan I:167 Silver Stallion, The (Cabell) I:205 Simon’s Night (Hassler) II:564 Simon Wheeler: Detective (Twain) III:1290 Simple Habana Melody: From When the World Was Good (Hijuelos) II:601, III:1431 Sinclair, Upton I:vii, 27, 371, III:1172–1174 The Jungle II:702–704, III:1172, 1173 Lanny Budd series II:744–745, III:1172, 1173 Singer, Isaac Bashevis I:vii, III:1174–1176, 1179, 1238 The Slave III:1175, 1179–1181 Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (Angelou) I:60 Singing in the Comeback Choir (Campbell) I:219 Single Hound, The (Sarton) III:1140 Singular Man, A (Donleavy) I:374 Sioux people II:527–528, III:1069 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut) III:1320 Sir Rohan’s Ghost (Spofford) III:1200 Sister Carrie (Dreiser) I:382–383, III:1176–1177 novels compared to I:162, II:686 Sister of My Heart (Divakaruni) I:360, III:1425

Six of One (R. M. Brown) I:190 Six to One: A Nantucket Idyl (Bellamy) I:127 Sketches of the Valley and Other Works (Estampas del valle y otras obras) (Hinojosa-Smith) II:605, 606, 732 Skinny Legs and All (Robbins) III:1112 Skin Tight (Hiaasen) II:598 Skinwalkers (Hillerman) II:602, 603, III:1033 Skipping Christmas (Grisham) II:541 Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, The (Bass) I:112 Slaughterhouse-Five; or, the Children’s Crusade: A DutyDance with Death (Vonnegut) III:1177–1179, 1319, 1320, 1328 Slave, The (Singer) III:1175, 1179–1181 Slave Dancer, The (Fox) I:459 slave narrative(s) III:1417–1418. See also neoslave narrative(s) The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (J. W. Johnson) as I:90–91 Barbary I:26 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) I:102, 254, 346, II:647–649, 671, 672 Morrison and I:133 Narrative of William W. Brown (W. W. Brown) I:192 slavery African-American novels in era of III:1417–1418 in The Algerine Captive (Tyler) I:26, III:1294 in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (Gaines) I:91–93, 346, II:474, 475 in Band of Angels (Warren) I:101–103 in Beloved (Morrison) I:132–133 in Benito Cereno (Melville) I:135–136 in Bontemps’s work I:164, III:1418

INDEX in Brown’s (W. W.) work I:192 in Clotel (W. W. Brown) I:102, 192, 274–276, III:1417–1418 in The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) I:276, 285–287, 346, III:1229 in Corregidora (G. Jones) I:301–302 in The Dahomean (Yerby) I:318 in Dessa Rose (S. A. Williams) I:345–346, III:1363 first African-American novels on III:1327, 1417–1418 in Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) II:505–506, 507 in Home across the Road (Peacock) III:1026 in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) II:647–649, 671 and Jacobs II:671–672 in Johnson’s (C. R.) work II:686 in Jubilee (M. Walker) II:699–700, 699–701, III:1327 in Kindred (O. E. Butler) I:202, II:721–722 in Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurston) II:916–917 in neo-slave narratives I:346, III:1420 in Porter’s (C.) work III:1058 in Roots (Haley) II:721–722 in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (Cather) I:236 in Slaves in Algiers (Rowson) I:26 in Stowe’s novels III:1220 in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (Twain) III:1278 in Twain’s work III:1290 in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) III:1220, 1297–1298 in Warren’s work I:102–103

Slaves in Algiers, or a Struggle for Freedom (Rowson) I:26 Slipping-Down Life, A (A. Tyler) III:1292, 1293 Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (De Vries) I:350 Small g: A Summer Idyll (Highsmith) II:600 small-town life. See also rural life in Babbit (Lewis) I:95 in Hassler’s novels II:564 in The Human Comedy (Saroyan) II:639 in Lewis’s novels II:769, 770 in Main Street (Lewis) II:769, 816–817 in Staggerford (Hassler) III:1204–1205 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383 Smedley, Agnes III:1181–1182 Daughter of Earth I:323, III:1181 Smiley, Jane III:1182–1183 Moo II:907, III:1182 A Thousand Acres III:1182, 1183, 1265–1266 Smith, Lee I:viii, II:492, III:1183–1184 Smith, Sydney I:vi Smith, William Gardner III:1419 Smoke (Auster) I:86 Smoke Signals (Alexie) I:22, III:1440 Snagged (C. H. Clark) I:269 Snare, The (Spencer) III:1198 Sneaky People (Berger) I:137 Snow Falling on Cedars (Guterson) II:544, 545 Snow in August (Hamill) II:548 Snow White (Barthelme) I:110, 111, III:1184–1185 Snyder, Gary I:103, 139, 352, II:714 So Big (Ferber) I:435, III:1186–1187 socialism Christian, in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:64, 65 and The Jungle (Sinclair) II:703

in The Landlord at Lion’s Head (Howells) II:743 in Le Sueur’s work II:768 of London III:1348 in Martin Eden (London) II:845 in Native Son (R. Wright) II:952 Rand on I:80–81 in Sinclair’s work III:1172–1173 social protest novel(s). See protest novel(s) Society of Friends, The: Stories (Cherry) I:251–252 So Far from God (Castillo) III:1187–1188, 1429 Soft Machine, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 Sojourner, The (Rawlings) III:1094, 1095 Solar Storms (Hogan) III:1439 Soldier of the Great War, A (Helprin) II:584 Soldier of the Revolution, A (Just) II:705 Soldier’s Joy (Bell) I:126 Soldiers of Fortune (R. H. Davis) I:326 Soldiers’ Pay (Faulkner) I:425 Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (Brautigan) I:177 Somebody in Boots (Algren) I:26–27 Somebody’s Darling (McMurtry) II:864 Some Came Running (J. Jones) II:694 Some Can Whistle (McMurtry) II:865 Something About Eve (Cabell) I:205 Something Happened (Heller) II:582 Something in the Wind (Smith) III:1183 Something Wicked This Way Comes (Bradbury) I:174 Sometimes a Great Notion (Kesey) II:716 Sometimes I Live in the Country (Busch) I:201 Somewhere in France (R. H. Davis) I:326 Son, The (Berriault) I:139

1507

Son at the Front, A (Wharton) III:1189–1190, 1343 Sone, Monica III:1190 Nisei Daughter II:970–971, III:1190 Songcatcher, The (McCrumb) II:856 Song of Solomon (Morrison) II:911, 912, III:1190–1191, 1420 Song of the Lark, The (Cather) I:235, 236, III:1191–1193 Song of Yvonne (Brainard). See When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) Son of the Circus, A (Irving) II:663, 664 Son of the Morning (Oates) II:978 Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn (Connell) I:289, 290 Sons (Buck) I:194, II:516 Sons of Heaven (Cheng) III:1422 Sophie’s Choice (Styron) I:123, III:1229 Sot-Weed Factor, The (Barth) I:109 Soul Clap Hands and Sing (Marshall) II:840 Souls (Russ) III:1128 Souls of Black Folk, The (DuBois) I:91 Souls Raised from the Dead (Betts) I:140 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner) I:1, 4, 73, 426, 427, II:597, 651, 938, III:1193–1195 Source, The (Michener) II:877 Source of Light, The (Reynolds Price) III:1073 South. See also Appalachia; Civil War; Kentucky; Louisiana; slavery; Southern novel(s); Southern women; Texas in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:2–3, 426 in As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) I:73–75 in The Ballad of the Sad Café I:100–101, II:857, 858 in Black Boy (R. Wright) I:148–149, III:1398

1508

INDEX

South (continued) in Cable’s work I:206, 207 in Caldwell’s work I:212–213, II:507 in Cane (Toomer) I:222 in Capote’s work I:228 in Chappell’s work I:243–244 in Chesnutt’s work I:252–253 in Conroy’s work I:290–291 in Deliverance (Dickey) I:338–339 in Delta Wedding (Welty) I:341–342 in Familiar Heat (Hood) I:418–419 in Faulkner’s work I:vii, 425–426 in Foote’s work I:453 in Gibbons’s work II:491–492 in Gilchrist’s work II:492–493 in Glasgow’s work II:499–500 in Go Down, Moses (Faulkner) I:426, II:505–507 in God’s Little Acre (Caldwell) I:212, II:507–508 in Godwin’s work II:508–509 in Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) I:101–102, II:513–514, 896 in Gordon’s (C.) work II:517–518 in Grau’s work II:528, 529 in Gurganus’s work II:543, 544 in Hannah’s work II:553–554 in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (McCullers) II:574–576 in The House behind the Cedars (Chesnutt) I:252, 253, II:619–620 in Humphreys’s work II:640–641 in The Keepers of the House (Grau) II:529, 710–711 in Lee’s (H.) work II:761

in A Lesson before Dying (Gaines) II:765–767 in Light in August (Faulkner) I:426, II:650, 775–777, 1010 in Losing Battles (Welty) II:791–793 in Mama Day (Naylor) II:824–825 in The Marrow of Tradition (Chesnutt) I:252–253, II:838–840 in Mason’s work II:846 in McCarthy’s (C.) work II:851–852 in McCullers’s work II:857, 858 in O’Connor’s (F.) work II:983 in Paris Trout (Dexter) III:1020–1021 in Penhally (C. Gordon) III:1032–1033 in Price’s (Reynolds) work II:640, III:1073–1074 in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) III:1193–1194 in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1195 in Spencer’s work III:1198–1199 in Styron’s work I:285 in Suttree (C. McCarthy) II:852, III:1239–1240 in Taylor’s work III:1248, 1249 in The Unvanquished (Faulkner) III:1298 in The Violent Bear It Away (F. O’Connor) III:1312–1313 in The Voice at the Back Door (Spencer) III:1318–1319 in Warren’s work III:1331 in Wells’s work III:1337 in Welty’s work III:1338–1340 in Williams’s (T.) work III:1364–1365 writers of, late 20th-century I:viii South Africa I:465–466 South Asian–American novel(s) II:679, III:1425. See also Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee; Lahiri, Jhumpa; Mukherjee, Bharati; Sidhwa; Suri, Manil

Southeast Asian–American novels III:1425–1426 Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) I:190, III:1195–1196 Southern Exposure, A (A. Adams) I:8 Southern Family, A (Godwin) II:508, 509 Southern gothic novel(s) I:243, 285, 355, II:852, 857, 983 Southern novel(s). See also specific novels and writers gothic I:243, 285, 355, II:852, 857, 983 Southern Renaissance II:517, III:1112, 1248 Southern Review III:1113 Southern women; See also Welty, Endora in Gibbons’s work II:491–492 in Gilchrist’s work II:492–493 in Glasgow’s work II:499–500 in Godwin’s work II:508 in The Keepers of the House (Grau) II:710–711 in McCorkle’s work II:855 in The Member of the Wedding (McCullers) I:100, II:857 in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Gurganus) II:990 in The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty) II:996–998 in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) III:1193–1194 in Spencer’s work III:1198 in The Voice at the Back Door (Spencer) III:1319, 1320 in Wells’s work III:1337 South Moon Under (Rawlings) III:1094, 1095 Southwest in Anaya’s work I:56–57, 152 in Austin’s work I:87 in Bless Me, Última (Anaya) I:56, 152–153 in Ceremony (Silko) I:240 in Chávez’s work I:248 Chicano novels in III:1429 in Eastlake’s work I:388

in Hillerman’s work II:602–603 in Jance’s work II:677 in The Monkey Wrench Gang (Abbey) II:904–905 in Silko’s work III:1171 in So Far from God (Castillo) III:1188 Sowing and Reaping (Harper) II:555 Space Cadet (Heinlein) II:580, 581 Spanish civil war I:232, 455–456, II:585–586 Spanish-language writers I:232, III:1427 Spanking the Maid (Coover) I:294 Spartina (Casey) I:231 Speak Now (Yerby) III:1406 Spectator Bird, The (Stegner) III:1196–1197, 1206 Speedboat (Adler) I:10 Spence + Lila (Mason) II:846 Spencer, Elizabeth II:492, III:1198–1199 The Light in the Piazza II:777–778, III:1198 The Night Travellers II:965–967, III:1198 The Voice at the Back Door III:1198, 1318–1319 Spencerville (DeMille) I:343 Spender, Stephen II:759 Sphere (Crichton) I:308 Spider’s House, The (P. F. Bowles) I:169 Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (Allen) I:29 Spiegel, Alan I:331 Spiegelman, Art III:1199–1200 Maus I and II II:850–851, III:1199 Spillane, Mickey III:1436 Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott III:1200–1201 Spoil of Office, A (Garland) II:483 Spoils of Poynton, The (James) II:673 Sport of the Gods, The (Dunbar) I:386, 387, III:1418 Sportswriter, The (R. Ford) I:454

INDEX Spreading Fires (Knowles) II:734 Spring Collection (Krantz) II:736, 737 Spring Moon (Lord) II:791 Spy, The (Cooper) I:292 Spy in the House of Love, A (Nin) II:968, 969, III:1201–1202 Squirrel-Cage, The (Fisher) I:444 Stafford, Jean III:1202–1203 The Mountain Lion II:923–925, III:1202, 1203 Stage Fright (Hart) III:1436 Staggerford (Hassler) II:564, III:1203–1205 Stand, The (King) II:536, 723 Standard Dreaming (Calisher) I:214 Stanley Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom (Elkin) I:398 Starcarbon: A Meditation of Love (Gilchrist) II:493 Starry Adventure (Austin) I:87 Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A (H. Roth) I:216, III:1120 Starship Troopers (Heinlein) II:580, 581 State of War (Rosca) III:1423 Steele, Danielle I:223 Steffens, Lincoln I:87, II:774 Stegner, Wallace II:613, III:1205–1207, 1288 Angle of Repose I:60–62, III:1206 Crossing to Safety I:309–310, III:1206 The Spectator Bird III:1196–1197, 1206 Stein, Gertrude I:vii, 106, 168, II:926, III:1207–1209, 1237, 1333 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas I:88–89, II:475, III:1207 The Making of Americans II:818–819, III:1207 writers influenced by I:400, 422, II:715 Steinbeck, John I:vii, III:1209–1212 Cannery Row I:223–226, III:1029, 1209, 1210

East of Eden I:226, 389–392, III:1209, 1210 The Grapes of Wrath I:389, 392, II:523–527, III:1209, 1210, 1211 “group man” theory of III:1209, 1275 “is thinking” concept of I:224, III:1024 Of Mice and Men II:984–987, III:1209, 1210, 1211 The Pastures of Heaven III:1023–1025, 1209 The Pearl III:1027–1030, 1210 Tortilla Flat III:1209, 1210, 1274–1275 The Winter of Our Discontent III:1210, 1373–1376 writers linked to I:59, 197, 212, II:564 Steps (Kosinski) I:124, II:735, III:1212–1214 Stern (Friedman) I:468–469 Still, William Grant II:555 Still Life with Woodpecker (Robbins) III:1112 Stoddard, Elizabeth Drew Barstow II:910, III:1214–1215 The Morgesons II:909–911, III:1214–1215 Stoic, The (Dreiser) I:383 Stolen Past, A (Knowles) II:733 Stone, Robert I:viii, 82, III:1041, 1215–1216 Dog Soldiers I:368–369, III:1215 “Stone Boy, The” (Berriault) I:139 Stone Field, True Arrow (Mori) III:1424 Stone Heart: a Novel of Sacajawea (Glancy) II:498 Stones for Ibarra (Doerr) I:367 Stopover: Tokyo (Marquand) II:836 Story of a Bad Boy, The (Aldrich) I:21 Story of Avis, The (Phelps) III:1216–1218 Story of My Father, The (S. Miller) II:882 Story of My Life (McInerney) II:860 story paper serial III:1434

Storyteller (Silko) III:1171 Story-Teller, The (Highsmith) II:600 Story-Teller’s Story, A (Anderson) I:58 Stout, Rex III:1218–1219, 1435, 1437 Stowe, Harriet Beecher III:1220–1221 Uncle Tom’s Cabin I:135, 192, III:1220, 1297–1298, 1329 Straight Cut (Bell) I:126 Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg, The (Bromfield) I:184 Strange Children (C. Gordon) II:518 Strangeness of Beauty, The (Minatoya) III:1424 Stranger, The (Camus) III:1066 Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein) II:580, 581, III:1221–1223 Stranger Is Watching, A (M. H. Clark) I:270 Strangers on a Train (Highsmith) II:599–600 Stratemeyer Syndicate I:24 stream-of-consciousness narration I:379, III:1302–1303 Street, The (Petry) III:1036, 1037, 1223–1224, 1419 Streetcar Named Desire, A (T. Williams) I:180, III:1364 Street Lawyer, The (Grisham) II:541 Streets of Laredo (McMurtry) II:865 Streets of Night (Dos Passos) I:379 Stringer (Just) II:705 Strip Tease (Hiaasen) II:598 Strong Heart Society, The (Power) III:1069–1070 Strong Motion (Franzen) I:462 Student and Schoolmate I:24 students, college I:44–45, II:873–874, III:1170, 1425 Studs Lonigan (Farrell) I:424, III:1224–1228 Styron, William I:137, 285, II:847, III:1228–1230 The Confessions of Nat Turner I:276, 285–287, 346, III:1228–1229

1509

Subterraneans, The (Kerouac) II:714 suburbia. See also middle class in American Appetites (Oates) I:42–43, II:978 in Cheever’s work I:250 in Expensive People (Oates) I:410–412 in Linden Hills (Naylor) II:778–779 in Moody’s work II:908 novelists of I:vii–viii in Oates’s work I:42–43, II:977, 978 in Updike’s work III:1300 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1350–1351 Suckow, Ruth III:1230–1231 Sudden Death (R. M. Brown) I:190 Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) II:931–932, III:1231–1233, 1391, 1421–1422 Mrs. Spring Fragrance II:931–933, III:1232, 1422 Sula (Morrison) II:849, 911, III:1233–1235 Summer (Wharton) III:1235–1237, 1343 Summer in Maine, A (Gilchrist) II:493 Summons, The (Grisham) II:541 Summons to Memphis, A (Taylor) III:1248, 1249 Sum of All Fears, The (Clancy) I:268 Sun Also Rises, The (Hemingway) II:585, 586, 926, III:1129, 1237–1238 comparisons to I:169, 421, 437 Sunday Jews (Calisher) I:214 Sun Dogs (R. O. Butler) I:203 Sundog: The Story of an American Foreman, Robert Corvus Strang, as Told by Jim Harrison (J. Harrison) II:559 Sundown (Mathews) III:1240–1242, 1438–1439 Sunlight Dialogues, The (J. Gardner) II:481

1510

INDEX

Sunny Side; or, the Country Minister’s Wife, The (Phelps) III:1040 Superior Women (A. Adams) I:7 Surface of Earth, The (Reynolds Price) III:1073 Suri, Manil III:1238–1239, 1425 Surrounded, The (McNickle) II:866, III:1369, 1438, 1439 Survivor (O. E. Butler) I:202 Survivor (Palahniuk) III:1014 Suspects (Berger) I:137 suspense novel(s) III:1434. See also horror fiction; psychological novel(s); thriller(s) by Clark (M. H.) I:270–271 by Dexter I:351 The Haunting of Hill House (Jackson) II:565–566, 670, 671 by Jackson II:670–671 The Turn of the Screw (James) III:1286–1288 We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) II:670, 691, III:1334–1336 Suttree (C. McCarthy) I:255, II:852, III:1239–1240 Sweet Hereafter, The (Banks) I:104, II:799 Sweet Thursday (Steinbeck) III:1210 Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse (Hawkes) II:567 Swift, Jonathan II:946, 947, III:1273 Swing, Raymond Gram II:667 Sybil (Auchincloss) I:84 Symmes, John Cleves II:949 Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery (Symmes) II:949

T Taft (Patchett) III:1025 Tai-Pan: A Novel of Hong Kong (Clavell) I:272–273 Take Me Back (Bausch) I:114–115 Take This Man (Busch) I:201 Talbot Odyssey, The (DeMille) I:343

Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Highsmith) II:600 Tale of One January, A (Maltz) II:823 Tale of the Body Thief, The (Rice) III:1103 Tales of Burning Love (Erdrich) I:403, 404 Tales of the Master Race (Hershman) II:595 Tales of the South Pacific (Michener) II:876 Tall Houses in Winter (Betts) I:140 Taltos (Rice) III:1103 Tama (W. Eaton) III:1422 Tambourines to Glory (Hughes) II:638 Tan, Amy I:viii, II:696, 697, 726, 730, III:1243–1244, 1401 The Hundred Secret Senses II:697, III:1243, 1422 The Joy Luck Club II:696–697, 730, III:1243, 1324, 1422 The Kitchen God’s Wife II:697, 730–732, III:1243, 1422 writers compared to I:450, III:1295 Taoism I:226 Tar: A Midwest Childhood (Anderson) I:58 Tar Baby (Morrison) II:913, III:1244–1246 Tarkington, Booth III:1114, 1246–1247 Alice Adams I:28–29, III:1246 Tarzan of the Apes (E. R. Burroughs) I:197–198, III:1247–1248 Tate, Allen II:517, 518, III:1059 Tattered Tom (Alger) I:23–24 Taylor, Peter III:1248–1249 technology II:958–960, III:1085, 1350 techno-thriller(s). See also thriller(s) by Brown (D.) I:188 by Clancy I:268 by Crichton I:308 The Hunt for Red October (Clancy) I:267, 268, II:642–643

Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (Le Guin) II:764 Telling, The (Le Guin) II:764 Tell Me a Riddle (Olsen) II:992, III:1249–1250 Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (Baldwin) I:98, 99 Temple House (Stoddard) III:1214, 1215 Temple of My Familiar, The (A. Walker) III:1250–1251, 1326 Tenants, The (Malamud) II:820 Tenants of Time, The (Flanagan) I:449 Tender Is the Night (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:445–446, III:1141, 1142, 1251–1254 Tender Mercies (R. Brown) I:190 Tending to Virginia (McCorkle) II:855 Ten Indians (Bell) I:126 Tennis Handsome, The (Hannah) II:553 Ten North Frederick (O’Hara) II:898, 987 Tents of Wickedness, The (De Vries) I:349, 350 Terkel, Studs III:1225 Terms of Endearment (McMurtry) II:863, 864, 865, III:1254–1255 Terrible Hours, The (Maas) II:808 Terrible Twos, The (Reed) III:1100 terrorism II:832, 904–905 Testament, The (Grisham) II:540, 541 Testimony and Demeanor (Casey) I:231 Test of Honour, The (Rowson) III:1124 Texas in Ferber’s work I:435 in Giant (Ferber) II:489–491 in Hinojosa-Smith’s work II:605–606, 732 in Lansdale’s work II:746 in McMurtry’s work II:863–865 in Mireles’ work II:886 in Porter’s (K. A.) work III:1059, 1060

Texasville (McMurtry) II:864–865 Texier, Catherine II:476 Textures of Life (Calisher) I:214 Thalberg, Irving II:752, 753 Thanatos Syndrome, The (Percy) II:798, III:1035 That Affair Next Door (A. K. Green) III:1434 That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman (Donleavy) I:375 That Night (McDermott) II:859 That Old Ace in the Hole (Proulx) III:1080 Theft, A (Bellow) I:131 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) II:645, 863, III:1255–1256, 1419 Their Wedding Journey (Howells) II:634 them (Oates) II:977, III:1256–1257 Theophilus North (Wilder) I:182, III:1361 There Is Confusion (Fauset) I:258, 428, III:1418 Theroux, Paul II:919, III:1257–1259 The Mosquito Coast I:82, II:919–920, III:1258, 1259 They Stooped to Folly (Glasgow) II:499, 500 They Whisper (R. O. Butler) I:204 Thicker Than Water (K. Harrison) II:561 Thief of Time, A (Hillerman) II:603, III:1034 Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (Block) I:155 Things as They Are (Stein) III:1207 Things They Carried, The (O’Brien) II:981, III:1259–1261 Thin Man, The (Hammett) II:550–551, III:1261–1262 Thin Red Line, The (J. Jones) I:210, 471, II:694, III:1328 Third Life of Grange Copeland, The (A. Walker) III:1326 Third Violet, The (Crane) I:306

INDEX Third Ward Newark (Lucas) III:1419 Thirty: Pieces of a Novel (Dixon) I:361 This Boy’s Life (Wolff) III:1262–1263, 1382 This Crooked Way (Spencer) III:1198 This Mad Ideal (Dell) I:340 This Side of Paradise (F. S. Fitzgerald) I:379, 445, III:1129 This Sweet Sickness (Highsmith) II:600 This Woman (di Donato) I:359 Thomas, Joyce Carol III:1263–1265 Thomas, Piri III:1427 Thompson, Dorothy II:667, 770 Thoreau, Henry David I:226, 288, II:999, III:1285 Walden I:177, II:518, 526, 880, III:1282 writers compared to I:139, 416–417, II:568, 714 Those Bones Are Not My Child (Bambara) III:1136 Those Extraordinary Twins (Twain) III:1277 Thousand Acres, A (Smiley) III:1182, 1183, 1265–1266 Thousand Pieces of Gold (McCunn) III:1422 Thousand Wings, A (Huo) III:1426 Three Circles of Light (di Donato) I:359 Three Continents (Jhabvala) II:684, 685 Three-Cornered Sun, The (Ty-Casper) III:1423 Three Junes (Glass) II:502, 503 Three Lives (Stein) I:89, III:1207 Three Pigs in Five Days (Prose) III:1079 Three Roads, The (R. Macdonald) II:810 Three Soldiers (Dos Passos) I:210, 379 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The (Dick) I:354, 363

thriller(s). See also legal thriller(s); suspense novel(s); techno-thriller(s) by DeMille I:342, 343 by Harrison (C.) II:557, 558 by Hiaasen II:598 by Price (Richard) III:1075 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll) II:781 Thunder Horse (Bowen) III:1266–1267 Thunder on the Left (Morley) II:911 Thurman, Wallace III:1418 Ticket That Exploded, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 Ticket to the Boneyard, A (Block) I:156 Tidewater Tales: A Novel, The (Barth) I:110 Tie That Binds, The (Haruf) II:563 Tiger’s Daughter, The (Mukherjee) II:933, III:1425 Till We Meet Again (Krantz) II:736–737 Time Is Noon, The (Buck) I:194 Time of Man, The (E. M. Roberts) III:1112 Time of Our Time, The (Mailer) II:815 Timequake (Vonnegut) III:1320 Time to Be Born, A (Powell) III:1068, 1267–1269 Time to Kill, A (Grisham) II:540, 541 Tin Can Tree, The (A. Tyler) III:1292 Titan, The (Dreiser) I:383 Tivolem (Rangel-Ribeiro) III:1425 To a God Unknown (Steinbeck) III:1024, 1209 Tobacco Road (Caldwell) I:212–213, II:507, III:1269–1270 To Have and Have Not (Hemingway) II:585, 586, III:1270–1271 To Kill a Mockingbird (H. Lee) II:555, 761, III:1271–1273 Toklas, Alice B. I:88, 168, III:1207

Tokyo-Montana Express, The (Brautigan) I:177 Tokyo Woes (Friedman) I:469 Tolstoy, Leo I:36, 41, 64, II:879, III:1073, 1328 Tombs of Attuan, The (Le Guin) II:764 Tom Jones (Fielding) I:11 Tom Sawyer (character) I:14, 15, 21 Tongues of Angels, The (Reynolds Price) III:1074 Too Late (Dixon) I:361 Toole, John Kennedy III:1273–1274 Toomer, Jean I:vii, 164, 428, III:1274 Cane I:221–223, III:1274, 1333, 1418, 1420 Top of the Hill, The (Shaw) III:1163 Torrents of Spring, The (Hemingway) II:585 Tortilla Curtain, The (T. C. Boyle) I:172 Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck) III:1209, 1210, 1274–1275 Tortuga (Anaya) I:56–57, 152 Tory Lover, A (Jewett) II:684 To the Precipice (Rossner) III:1119 To the White Sea (Dickey) I:355, 356 Toughest Indian in the World, The (Alexie) III:1439 “tough guy” hero I:209 Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Mailer) II:815 Tourist Season (Hiaasen) II:598 Tournament (Foote) I:453 Toward the End of Time (Updike) III:1300 To Whom She Will (Jhabvala) II:684 Town, The (Faulkner) I:426, II:790 Town and the City, The (Kerouac) II:714 The Town beyond the Wall (Wiesel) III:1358 Townsman, The (Buck) I:194 Track of the Cat (Barr) III:1436 Track of the Cat, The (W. V. T. Clark) I:272

1511

Tracks (Erdrich) I:403, III:1275–1277 Tracy’s Tiger (Saroyan) III:1139 Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, The (Twain) III:1277–1279, 1290 Tragic Ground (Caldwell) I:212 “tragic mulatta” I:102, 253, 274–276, II:555, 620 Trail of Tears II:498, III:1082–1084 Trail of the Hawk, The (Lewis) II:770 Train (Dexter) I:351 Translator, The (Just) II:705–706 Transparent Things (Nabokov) II:943 Trap Line (Hiaasen) II:598 travel narratives I:192, II:919 Travesty (Hawkes) II:567 Travis McGee series (J. MacDonald) II:809 Treasure Island (Stevenson) I:6 Treat, Lawrence III:1436 Tree Bride, The (Mukherjee) II:933 Trial and Triumph (Harper) II:555 Tribal Secrets (Warrior) III:1439 trickster II:728, 802, III:1276, 1280, 1317 Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Vizenor) III:1317 Trilogy of Desire (Dreiser) I:383 Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Kingston) II:727–728, III:1279–1282, 1422 Tristessa (Kerouac) II:714 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) II:879, 897 Triton (S. R. Delany) I:336 Tropic of Cancer (H. Miller) II:880–881, III:1282–1283 Tropic of Capricorn (H. Miller) II:880, III:1283–1285 Troubled Air, The (Shaw) III:1162 Trouble in July (Caldwell) I:212

1512

INDEX

Trout Fishing in America (Brautigan) I:176–177, III:1285–1286 True Grit (Portis) III:1061 Trust (Ozick) II:1011 Truth about Lorin Jones, The (Lurie) II:806, 807 Tryon, Thomas I:151 Tunnel, The (Gass) II:485, 486 Tunnel of Love, The (De Vries) I:350 Tunnel Vision (Paretsky) III:1020 Turmoil, The (Tarkington) III:1246 Turner, Frederick Jackson II:718 Turner, Nat. See Confessions of Nat Turner, The (Styron) Turn, Magic Wheel (Powell) III:1069 Turn of the Screw, The (James) II:672, 673, III:1286–1288 Turow, Scott III:1288–1289 Turtle Moon (Hoffman) II:608 Twain, Mark I:vii, III:1289–1291. See also Huck Finn (character) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I:13–14, 167, II:684, III:1075, 1289, 1290 comparisons to I:21, 104, II:701, 714, III:1076 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I:13, 14–16, 21, III:1289, 1290 and Anderson I:58 on Cooper II:750, 757 and Harte II:562 and Howells II:633 literary allusions to III:1285, 1286 posthumous novels of III:1290 The Prince and the Pauper III:1075–1077, 1289–1290 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson III:1277–1279, 1290 writers compared to I:79, 419, II:495, 518, 707,

831, 995, III:1061, 1298, 1308 writers influenced by I:41, II:657 writers influencing I:21, II:729 Twanged (C. H. Clark) I:269 Twenty-four Hours (Bromfield) I:184 Twenty-seventh City, The (Franzen) I:462 Twice Blessed (Rosca) III:1423 Two-Bear Mambo (Lansdale) II:746 Two Cities (Wideman) III:1420 Two Faces of January, The (Highsmith) II:600 Two Girls, Fat and Thin (Gaitskill) II:476 Two Men (Stoddard) III:1214, 1215 Two of Them, The (Russ) III:1128 Two Serious Ladies (J. A. Bowles) I:167, 168 Two Weeks in Another Town (Shaw) III:1162, 1163 Ty-Casper, Linda III:1423 Tyler, Anne I:7, II:727, III:1292–1294 The Accidental Tourist I:4–5, III:1292, 1293 Tyler, Royall III:1294 The Algerine Captive I:25–26, III:1294 Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville) II:868 Typical American (Jen) II:682, III:1295–1296, 1422

U Uchida, Yoshiko III:1423 Ugly Rumours (Wolff) III:1382 Ugly Ways (Ansa) I:66 Ulsch, Don I:188 Ultimate Good Luck, The (R. Ford) I:454 Ulysses (Joyce) I:321, 401, II:529, 793, III:1166, 1226, 1227, 1279 Umbrella Country, The (Realuyo) III:1423

Uncalled, The (Dunbar) I:386 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) I:135, 192, III:1220, 1297–1298, 1329 Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas (R. Wright) III:1397, 1419 Underground Stream, The (Maltz) II:823 Underground Woman, The (K. Boyle) I:170 Under the Volcano (Lowry) I:169 Underworld (DeLillo) I:337, 338 Unfinished Season, An (Just) II:706 Unholy Loves (Oates) II:977 Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop. (Coover) I:294 Universe of Time cycle (Farrell) I:424 Unnatural Exposure (Cornwell) I:299 Unpunished (Gilman) III:1435 Until Proven Guilty (Jance) II:676 Unvanquished, The (Faulkner) I:426, III:1298–1299 Up Above the World (P. F. Bowles) I:169 Up Country (DeMille) I:343 Updike, John I:viii, 7, 110, 430, III:1300–1301 Rabbit Redux III:1089–1090, 1300 Rabbit Run III:1090–1092, 1300, 1301 writers compared to II:907–908 Upfield, Arthur W. III:1033 upper class in The Age of Innocence (Wharton) I:17 in Fitzgerald’s (F. S.) novels I:445–446 in Southern Discomfort (R. M. Brown) III:1195 in Tender Is the Night (F. S. Fitzgerald) III:1251–1252, 1253 in To Have and Have Not (Hemingway) III:1270–1271

in Wharton’s novels III:1342–1343 in What Maisie Knew (James) III:1346 Up the Sandbox! (Roiphe) III:1116 urbanization. See also industrialization in The Dollmaker (Arnow) I:371–372 in Morris’s (Wright) work I:437 in Pierre (Melville) III:1044–1045 in Sister Carrie (Dreiser) III:1177 urban life in Drown (Díaz) III:1432 Latino novels on III:1432 in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) II:812–814 in The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren) II:830–831 in McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norris) II:867–868 in Porter’s (C.) work III:1058 in Price’s (Richard) novels III:1074 in White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349–1350 Ureña, Salomé I:36 U.S.A. Trilogy (Dos Passos) I:354, 379, II:525, III:1301–1303 Useless Servants, The (Hinojosa-Smith) II:606 utopian novel(s) II:787–788 Herland (Gilman) II:493, 494, 589–590 Looking Backward (Bellamy) I:127, II:786–788 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384, 1385

V V. (Pynchon) III:1085, 1304–1306 Valachi Papers, The (Maas) II:808 Valis (Dick) I:363, III:1306–1308 Valley of Decision, The (Wharton) III:1342

INDEX Vampire Lestat, The (Rice) III:1103 vampires II:653, III:1103 Van Der Zee, James II:681 Van Dine, S. S. III:1308–1309, 1434–1435 The “Canary” Murder Case I:220–221, III:1308 Van Doren, Carl I:17, II:816, 891 Van Doren, Mark II:534 Vandover and the Brute (Norris) II:867, 973, 974 Van Gogh’s Room at Arles: Three Novellas (Elkin) I:398 Vanishing American, The (Grey) II:538, 539 Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education (Kerouac) II:714 Van Vechten, Carl I:88, 150, II:502, 915, 975 V as in Victim (Treat) III:1436 Veblen, Thorstein II:774, 786 Vein of Iron (Glasgow) II:500 Vein of Riches, A (Knowles) II:734 Venus Envy (R. M. Brown) I:190, III:1309–1310 Venus in Sparta (Auchincloss) I:84, 85 Veronica (Gaitskill) II:476 Very Old Bones (Kennedy) II:712–713 Victim, The (Bellow) I:11–13, 131 Victor, Metta Fuller. See Regester, Seeley Victoria (Rowson) III:1124 Vidal, Gore III:1310–1312 Williwaw I:285, III:1311 Vietnam War in The Barracks Thief (Wolff) I:106–108, III:1382 in Dog Soldiers (Stone) I:368–369 in Going After Cacciato (O’Brien) II:510–511, 981 in Heinemann’s work II:579 in Herr’s work II:593 in Mailer’s work II:815 in The Night Travellers (Spencer) II:965–967, III:1198

novelists of I:viii in O’Brien’s work II:981 in Paco’s Story (Heinemann) II:579, III:1013–1014 in A Prayer for Owen Meany (Irving) III:1072 in The Things They Carried (O’Brien) III:1259–1261 Wolff’s work on III:1382 Viking II:523–524, 526 Villages (Updike) III:1300–1301 Village Voice II:735 Villareal, José III:1429 Villaseñor, Victor III:1427 Vineland (Pynchon) III:1086 Vine of Desire (Divakaruni) III:1425 violence. See also murder; rape in Child of God (C. McCarthy) I:255–256 in Fight Club (Palahniuk) I:440–441, 442, III:1016 in Hannah’s work II:552, 553 in Jones’s (G.) work II:693 in The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) II:763 in Narrow Rooms (Purdy) II:950, 951 in Native Son (R. Wright) II:953, III:1397 in Oates’s work II:978 in Paris Trout (Dexter) III:1021 in Purdy’s novels III:1081 in Selby’s novels III:1152 in Steps (Kosinski) III:1212–1214 in Theroux’s work III:1257–1258 in White Noise (DeLillo) III:1351 in Wife (Mukherjee) III:1360 in Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1385–1386 Violence (Bausch) I:114, 115 Violent Bear It Away, The (F. O’Connor) II:983, III:1312–1313 Violet Clay (Godwin) II:509 Virginia (Glasgow) II:499, 500, III:1313–1315

Virginian, The (Wister) III:1315–1316, 1378 Virginie: Her Two Lives (Hawkes) II:567 Virgin Suicides, The (Eugenides) I:407, 408 Virtuous Woman, A (Gibbons) II:491 Visioning, The (Glaspell) II:501 Visions of Cody (Kerouac) II:713, 714 Visions of Gerard (Kerouac) II:714 Vital Parts (Berger) I:137 V. I. Warshawsky (character) III:1019–1020, 1435 Vizenor, Gerald III:1317–1318, 1439 Voice at the Back Door, The (Spencer) III:1198, 1318–1319 Voice of the People, The (Glasgow) II:499 Voices from the Moon (Dubus) I:384, 385 Voices in the House (Buck) I:194 Voices of a Summer Day (Shaw) III:1162 Vollman, William T. I:68 Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. II:509, 664, III:1319–1321 Slaughterhouse-Five III:1177–1179, 1319, 1320, 1328 Vox (Baker) I:97 Voyage of the Narwhal, The (Barrett) I:108 Voyage to Pagany, A (W. C. Williams) III:1365–1366

W Wabash (R. O. Butler) I:203–204 Wagner-Martin, Linda II:500 Waiting (Ha) II:546, III:1322–1324, 1422 Waiting for the End of the World (Bell) I:126 Waiting for the Verdict (R. B. H. Davis) I:325 Waiting Period (Selby) III:1152

1513

Waiting to Exhale (McMillan) II:862, 863, III:1324–1325, 1421 Walden (Thoreau) I:177, II:518, 526, 880, III:1282 Waldo (Theroux) III:1258 Walker, Alice I:viii, II:645, III:1325–1327, 1420 The Color Purple I:280–282, III:1251, 1325, 1326, 1420 Meridian II:873–874, III:1326 The Temple of My Familiar III:1250–1251, 1326 writers compared to I:36, II:648, 747, III:1263 Walker, David III:1297 Walker, Margaret III:1327 Jubilee II:699–701, III:1327 Walking across Egypt (Edgerton) I:394 Walking Drum, The (L’Amour) II:740 Walkin’ the Dog (Mosley) II:918 Walk on the Wild Side, A (Algren) I:27 Wall, The (Hersey) II:594 Wallace, David Foster I:68, 300, II:511 Walls of Jericho, The (Fisher) III:1418 Walsh, Ernest I:170 Walter Winchell: A Novel (Herr) II:593–594 Wambaugh, Joseph II:649 Wanderers, The (Richard Price) III:1075 Wapshot Chronicle, The (Cheever) I:250 Wapshot Scandal, The (Cheever) I:250 war. See also Civil War; military; Vietnam War; World War I; World War II American Revolution III:1113–1114 in Catch-22 (Heller) I:210, 234–235, II:582 in Eastlake’s work I:388–389 in The Enormous Room (Cummings) I:401–402

1514

INDEX

war (continued) in A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) I:421–422 in For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway) I:455–456, II:585–586 in Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) III:1085–1086 in Hersey’s work II:594–595 Korean II:827, III:1067, 1424 in Lanny Budd series (Sinclair) II:745 in The Red Badge of Courge (Crane) III:1097 in Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) III:1178–1179 Spanish civil I:232, 455–456, II:585–586 in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Kingston) III:1281 World War I I:vii, 421, III:1189, 1343 War and Peace (Tolstoy) III:1328 War and Remembrance (Wouk) III:1327–1329, 1371, 1395, 1396 War between the Tates, The (Lurie) II:806 Warlock (J. Harrison) II:559 War Lover, The (Hersey) II:594, 595 Warner, Charles Dudley I:14, III:1289 Warner, Susan Bogert III:1329–1330 Warren, Robert Penn I:229, III:1059, 1330–1331 All the King’s Men I:32–33, III:1330–1331 Band of Angels I:101–103, III:1330 World Enough and Time III:1331, 1394–1395 writers compared to II:857, III:1112 Warrior, Robert Allen III:1439 Wartime Lies (Begley) I:123 War Trash (Ha) II:546 Washington Square (H. James) I:318, II:673, III:1331–1332

Washington Square Ensemble, The (Bell) I:126 Wasteland, The (Eliot) II:518, 532, 793, 820, 968, III:1129, 1237, 1372, 1373 Watanna, Onoto (Winifred Eaton) II:933, III:1421–1422 The Heart of Hyacinth II:576–577, III:1422 Water Girl (Thomas) III:1263, 1264 Water Is Wide, The (Conroy) I:290, 291 Water-Method Man, The (Irving) II:664 Water Music (T. C. Boyle) I:171 Waterwork, The (Doctorow) I:364–365 Waugh, Hillary III:1436 Waves, The (Woolf) II:597 Ways of White Folks, The (Hughes) II:638, III:1332–1334 Way Some People Live, The (Cheever) I:250 Way to Rainy Mountain, The (Momaday) II:901, 902 wealth III:1253. See also materialism; upper class Weather in Berlin, The (Just) II:706 Weaver, Raymond I:145 Web and the Rock, The (T. C. Wolfe) III:1379 Webb, Frank III:1417 Weber, Katharine II:980, III:1334 Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear II:979–981, III:1334 We Can Still Be Friends (Cherry) I:252 Wedding, The (D. West) III:1340, 1419 We Don’t Live Here Anymore (Dubus) I:384–385 Weedkiller’s Daughter, The (Arnow) I:71 Weekend, The (Cameron) I:218 We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson) II:670, 671, III:1334–1336 Weight of All Things, The (Benítez) I:134

Welch, James I:viii, III:1240, 1336–1337, 1439 Winter in the Blood III:1336, 1372–1373 Welcome to Hard Times (Doctorow) I:364 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall) III:1126, 1201 Wells, Carolyn III:1434 Wells, H. G. I:383, 416, II:580, 787 Wells, Rebecca III:1337–1338 Welty, Eudora I:vii, II:564, III:1338–1340 Delta Wedding I:341–342, II:791–792, III:1338 Losing Battles II:791–793, III:1339 The Optimist’s Daughter II:996–998, III:1339 The Robber Bridegroom III:1110–1111, 1138 writers compared to II:857, III:1338 writers influenced by I:112, 228, III:1292 Wescott, Glenway II:502 West. See also California; frontier; Texas; western(s) in Angle of Repose (Stegner) I:61 antiromantic view of II:613, 728, 1008, 1009, 1010, III:1205 in Blood Meridian (C. McCarthy) I:157 in Clark’s (W. V. T.) work I:271–272 in Davis’s (H. L.) work I:324 in Doig’s work I:370–371 in Garland’s work II:482, 483 in Harte’s work II:561–562 in Haruf’s work II:563 in Honey in the Horn (H. L. Davis) II:613–614 in Kingsolver’s work II:726 in A Lost Lady (Cather) II:793 in McCarthy’s (C.) work II:851–853 in O Pioneers! (Cather) II:995–996

in The Oxbow Incident (W. V. T. Clark) II:1008–1010 in Plainsong (Haruf) II:563, III:1046–1048 in A River Runs Through It (Maclean) III:1108, 1109 in Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (Garland) III:1117–1118 in The Song of the Lark (Cather) III:1192 in Stegner’s novels III:1205–1206 in Thunder Horse (Bowen) III:1266 in Trout Fishing in America (Brautigan) III:1285, 1286 in The Virginian (Wister) III:1316 and Wister III:1378 West, Dorothy I:428, III:1340–1341, 1419 West, Nathanael I:68, III:1285, 1341–1342 The Day of the Locust I:327–330, II:754, III:1341 Miss Lonelyhearts II:888–891, III:1341 western(s). See also West All the Pretty Horses (C. McCarthy) as I:34–35 by Grey II:538–539 by Hansen II:554–555 by Johnson (Dorothy) II:688–689, 826–827 by L’Amour II:739–741 Little Big Man (Berger) I:137 A Man Called Horse (Dorothy Johnson) II:688–689, 826–827 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Dorothy Johnson) II:689, 826, 829 by McMurtry II:863–865 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey) as II:993 The Oxbow Incident (W. V. T. Clark) I:271, 272, II:554, 1008–1011 parody of III:1100 by Portis III:1061 romanticism in II:613, 827, 829 The Virginian (Wister) III:1315–1316, 1378

INDEX Western Coast, The (Fox) I:459 Western Lands, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 westward expansion II:533, 998–1000. See also frontier Westward the Tide (L’Amour) II:739 We the Living (Rand) III:1093 We Were the Mulvaneys (Oates) II:978 We Who Are About To ... (Russ) III:1128 Wharton, Edith I:vii, 184, II:502, 532, 790, III:1189, 1342–1344 The Age of Innocence I:17–19, II:625, III:1342, 1343 and Auchincloss I:84, 85 The Custom of the Country I:315–316, 366, II:760, III:1343 Ethan Frome I:179, 406–407, III:1342, 1343 The House of Mirth II:625–628, 678, 679, III:1342, 1343 The Mother’s Recompense II:922–923, III:1343 The Reef III:1101–1102, 1342–1343 A Son at the Front III:1189–1190, 1343 Summer III:1235–1237, 1343 writers compared to I:10, 79, 84, 366, II:733, 734, 835, 977, III:1046, 1243 writers influenced by II:532, 678 What Becomes of the Brokenhearted: A Memoir (E. L. Harris) II:556 Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (Coover) I:294 What I Lived For (Oates) II:977 What Maisie Knew (James) I:38, II:673, III:1344–1346 What the Body Remembers (S. S. Baldwin) III:1425 What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco (Santos) III:1422

What You Owe Me (Campbell) I:219 When Elephants Dance (Holte) III:1423 When I Was Puerto Rican (Santiago) III:1428, 1430–1431 When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon (Park) III:1425 When She Was Good (P. Roth) III:1122 When the Emperor Was Divine (Otsuka) III:1190 When the Nightingale Sings (Thomas) III:1264 When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) I:176, III:1346–1347, 1423 When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (Block) I:156 When Trouble Sleeps: A Novel (Edgerton) I:394 When We Were Grownups (A. Tyler) III:1293 Where Are the Children? (M. H. Clark) I:270 Where the Road Goes (Greenberg) II:535 Where the Sea Used to Be (Bass) I:112 Where You Once Belonged (Haruf) II:563 While England Sleeps (Leavitt) II:759 While I Was Gone (S. Miller) II:882 Whilholmville Stories (Crane) I:306 Whirlwind (Clavell) I:272, 273 Whistle (J. Jones) I:471–472, II:694 White, Edmund, A Boy’s Own Story I:172–173 White, Walter III:1418 White Butterfly (Mosley) II:918 White Fang (London) II:783, 852, III:1347–1349 White Horses (Hoffman) II:608 White Jacket (Melville) II:869 White Lotus (Hersey) II:595 White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349–1350, 1365, 1366

White Noise (DeLillo) I:337, III:1350–1352 White People: Stories and Novellas (Gurganus) II:542, 543 White Terror and the Red, The (Cahan) I:208 Whither (Powell) III:1068 Whitman, Walt II:714, 880, 954, 999, III:1280 and Miller (H.) III:1282 Who Is Teddy Villanova? (Berger) I:137 Whole Family, a Novel by Twelve Authors, The (Freeman) I:467 Whom She Will (Jhabvala) II:685 Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (Moore) II:909, III:1352–1353 Why Are We in Vietnam? (Mailer) II:815 Why She Left Us (Rizzuto) III:1424 Wicked Pavilion, The (Powell) III:1069 Wickford Point (Marquand) II:836 Wide Is the Gate (Sinclair) II:744 Wideman, John Edgar III:1153, 1274, 1353–1355, 1420 Philadelphia Fire III:1040–1042, 1353, 1354 Sent for You Yesterday III:1153–1156, 1353, 1354, 1420 Wide, Wide World, The (Warner) III:1329 Widow for One Year, A (Irving) II:664, 665 Widow’s Children, The (Fox) I:459 Wieland; or the Transformation, an Americal Tale (C. B. Brown) I:187, III:1355–1357 Wiesel, Elie III:1357–1359 Night II:963–964, III:1357, 1358 Wife (Mukherjee) II:933, III:1359–1360, 1425

1515

Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, The (W. S. Burroughs) I:199 Wilder, Thornton III:1360–1362 The Bridge of San Luis Rey I:180–182, III:1360, 1361 Wildlife (R. Ford) I:454 Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (Yamanaka) I:160, III:1362–1363, 1400, 1424 Wild Palms, The (Faulkner) I:426, II:491 Wild Seed (O. E. Butler) I:202 Will, George II:772 Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (Brautigan) I:177 Williams, John A. III:1420 Williams, Sherley Anne III:1363–1364, 1420 and The Confessions of Nat Turner (Styron) I:346, III:1229 Dessa Rose I:345–347, III:1229, 1363, 1420 Williams, Tennessee I:168, II:492, III:1364–1365 and McCullers II:858, 871 A Streetcar Named Desire I:180, III:1364 Williams, William Carlos I:vii, II:573, 888, III:1365–1366 White Mule III:1349–1350, 1365, 1366 Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (Gass) II:484–485, III:1366–1368 Williwaw (Vidal) I:285, III:1311 Willow Tree, The (Selby) III:1152 Wilson, Edmund I:327, 446, III:1065, 1066, 1287 Wilson, Harriet E. Adams I:91, II:1004–1005, III:1368–1369 Our Nig II:1004–1006, III:1368, 1417 Wind from an Enemy Sky (McNickle) II:866, III:1369–1370, 1438 Wind Shifting West, The (Grau) II:529

1516

INDEX

Winds of Morning (H. L. Davis) I:324, II:613 Winds of War, The (Wouk) III:1327–1328, 1370–1372, 1395, 1396 Windy McPherson’s Son (Anderson) I:58 Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson) I:58, 322, II:816, III:1023, 1209 Wings of Stone (Ty-Casper) III:1423 Wings of the Dove, The (James) I:38, 41, II:673, 674 Winkfield, Unca Eliza, The Female American I:431–433 Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (Hopkins) II:615, 616 Winter (Gilchrist) II:493 Winter in the Blood (Welch) III:1336, 1372–1373 Winter of Artifice (Nin) II:969 Winter of Our Discontent, The (Steinbeck) III:1210, 1373–1376 Winter’s Tale (Helprin) II:584 Wise Blood (F. O’Connor) II:983, III:1376–1378 Wish You Were Here (R. M. Brown) I:190 Wister, Owen II:483, 613, III:1378–1379 The Virginian III:1315–1316 Witches of Eastwick, The (Updike) III:1300, 1301 Witching Hour, The (Rice) III:1103 Witherington, Paul I:187 With Shuddering Fall (Oates) II:977 With the Middle Heart (Lord) II:791 Wizard of Earthsea, A (Le Guin) II:764 Wolf, The (Norris) II:974 Wolf: A False Memoir (J. Harrison) II:515, 559 Wolfe, Thomas Clayton I:58, II:508, III:1379–1380 character modeled on III:1396 and Kang II:708 Look Homeward, Angel II:785–786, III:1379

writers compared to II:857, 995, III:1112 Wolfe, Tom II:593, III:1061, 1381–1382 The Bonfire of the Vanities I:162–164, III:1381 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test I:163, II:715, III:1381 Wolff, Tobias I:105, 106–107, 454, III:1382–1383 The Barracks Thief I:106–108, III:1382 This Boy’s Life III:1262–1263, 1382 Womack, Craig S. III:1440 Woman in the Dark (Hammett) II:551 “womanist” III:1325 Woman Lit by Fireflies, The (J. Harrison) II:559 Woman of Andros, The (Wilder) III:1361 Woman of Genius, A (Austin) I:87, III:1383–1384 Woman of Means, A (Taylor) III:1248, 1249 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) III:1384–1386 Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, The (Kingston) I:36, 438, II:727, 728, III:1386–1388, 1422 Woman Who Owned the Shadows, The (Allen) I:29, III:1388–1390, 1440 women in academia II:577, 578 African-American (See African-American women) biblical I:353 Chinese-American (See Chinese-American women) detectives I:298, II:522, 577, 578, III:1019–1020, 1435, 1436 feminist view of (See feminism) in Ferber’s work I:435, II:490 “four-woman form” III:1324–1325 in Freeman’s work I:466–467 friendships of (See women’s friendships)

on frontier II:534, 729, 938–939, 995–996, III:1112–1113 in Gordon’s (M. C.) work II:519 in The Group (M. McCarthy) II:542–543, 854 in Holley’s work II:610–611 in Housekeeping (Robinson) II:621–622 independence of (See women’s independence) in James’s (H.) work I:318 Japanese III:1423 Korean I:283–284, 356–358, II:761, III:1424 in Lamott’s work II:738 lesbian (See lesbianism) and marriage (See marriage) Mexican-American (See Mexican-American women) in Miller’s (H.) work III:1283, 1284 in Miller’s (S.) work II:881, 882 as mothers (See motherdaughter relationship; motherhood) Native American, in The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (Allen) III:1388–1389 oppression of (See patriarchy) in The Optimist’s Daughter (Welty) II:996–998 in Plains Song (Morris) III:1048–1049 in Rossner’s work III:1119 sexuality of (See women’s sexuality) in Smiley’s work III:1182 Southern (See Southern women) in Spofford’s work III:1200 in A Spy in the House of Love (Nin) III:1201–1202 in Stafford’s work III:1202–1203 traditional roles of (See gender roles; patriarchy; women’s roles)

in Wharton’s novels III:1342–1343 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383–1384 working-class (See workingclass women) writers (See women writers) Women (Bukowksi) I:196, II:552, III:1390–1391 Women of Brewster Place, The (Naylor) II:778, 957, III:1420 Women on the Porch, The (C. Gordon) II:517, 518 women’s friendships in As We Are Now (Sarton) I:78–79 in A Book of Common Prayer (Didion) I:165–166 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:280–281, 282 in Diamant’s work I:353 in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells) III:1337 in McMillan’s work II:862, 863 in My Next Bride (K. Boyle) II:939–940 in Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (Weber) II:979–980 in Passing (Larsen) III:1022–1023 in The Secret Life of Bees (Kidd) II:717 in Sula (Morrison) II:912, III:1234 in Waiting to Exhale (McMillan) III:1324–1325 women’s independence. See also patriarchy in Atherton’s work I:79, 150–151 in Black Oxen (Atherton) I:150–151 in Bread Givers (Yezierska) I:178–179 in Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall) I:186 in Chopin’s work I:260, 261 in The Color Purple (A. Walker) I:280, 281, 282 in Face of an Angel (Chávez) I:248, 413–414

INDEX in The Female American (Winkfield) I:431–433 in Fern’s work I:436 in Foster’s (Hannah Webster) work I:457 in Jong’s work II:695 in Krantz’s work II:736–737 in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Rossner) II:789–790 in Married or Single? (Sedgwick) II:837–838 in McMillan’s work II:863 in Miss Lulu Bett (Gale) II:891–892 in The Morgesons (Stoddard) II:909–910 in The Mother’s Recompense (Wharton) II:922–923 in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Far) II:932 in The Portrait of a Lady (James) III:1064 in Rowson’s work III:1124 in Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) III:1126–1127 in Russ’s novels III:1128 in Show Boat (Ferber) III:1168, 1169 in Suckow’s work III:1230–1231 in Summer (Wharton) III:1236–1237 in Virginia (Glasgow) III:1313–1315 in Washington Square (James) III:1331–1332 in Wharton’s novels III:1342 women’s oppression. See patriarchy women’s roles in The Ballad of the Sad Café (McCullers) I:100–101 in The Bell Jar (Plath) I:129–130 in Fanny, Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (Jong) I:419–421, II:695 in Fear of Flying (Jong) I:429–430, II:695 in Gone with the Wind (Mitchell) II:514 in Little Women (Alcott) II:780

in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (Far) II:932–933 in The Power of Sympathy (W. H. Brown) III:1070 in Rose of Dutcher’s Coolly (Garland) III:1117–1118 in The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) III:1193–1194 in Stowe’s novels III:1220 in Tell Me a Riddle (Olsen) III:1250 in Virginia (Glasgow) III:1313–1315 in The Voice at the Back Door (Spencer) III:1319, 1320 in A Woman of Genius (Austin) III:1383–1384 Women’s Room, The (French) I:467, 468 women’s sexuality in Acker’s work I:5, 6 in The Awakening (Chopin) I:93–94 in Barnes’s work I:105–106 in Daisy Miller (James) I:318–319 in Fear of Flying (Jong) I:429, 430, II:695 in Gaitskill’s work II:476 in The Group (M. McCarthy) II:542 in Harrison’s (K.) work III:1144–1145 in Jong’s work II:695 in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Rossner) II:788 in Quicksand (Larsen) III:1087–1088 in Sister Carrie (Dreiser) III:1177 in A Spy in the House of Love (Nin) III:1201–1202 in Stoddard’s novels III:1214, 1215 women writers African-American III:1417, 1419, 1420 Asian-American I:450 Chinese-American I:438, 439 early American I:vi–vii late 19th-century I:vii, 77 Latina I:35, III:1428 Native American, first II:925 postmodernist II:476

realist I:vii science fiction I:175, 434, III:1127 Wonder Boys (Chabon) I:241 Wonderland (Oates) II:978 Wong, Jade Snow II:708 Fifth Chinese Daughter I:438–440 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia I:450, II:731 Wong, Shawn Hsu I:439, III:1391, 1422 Woodward, William I:403 Woolf, Virginia I:78, 170, II:534, 597, 965, III:1345 and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (Acker) I:376, 377 Mrs. Dalloway I:314, II:618–619 Orlando I:377, 420, II:879 The Waves II:597 Woolson, Constance Fenimore III:1391–1392 Word for World Is Forest, The (Le Guin) II:764 Word of Honor (DeMille) I:343 working class/poor. See also class conflict in Allison’s novels I:31, 112 in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–65 in As I Lay Dying (Faulkner) I:73–75 in The Beans of Egypt, Maine (Chute) I:116–118, 264 in Caldwell’s work I:212–213 in Call It Sleep (H. Roth) I:215–217, III:1120 in Christ in Concrete (Di Pietro) I:262–263 in Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323 in Ford’s novels I:454 in Freeman’s work II:677, 678 in The Girl (Le Sueur) II:496–497 in The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck) II:524–525 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) II:629–630

1517

in Le Sueur’s work II:767, 768 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:773–774 in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) II:812–814 in The Man with the Golden Arm (Algren) II:830–831 in McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Norris) II:867–868 in Norris’s work II:973 in Oates’s work II:977 in The Pearl (Steinbeck) III:1027–1030, 1210 in Porter’s (C.) novels III:1058 in Price’s (Richard) novels III:1074 in Rivera’s novels III:1107 in Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) III:1126–1127 in them (Oates) III:1256–1257 in Tobacco Road (Caldwell) III:1269–1270 in To Have and Have Not (Hemingway) III:1270 in White Mule (W. C. Williams) III:1349–1350 working-class women in Annie Kilburn (Howells) I:63–65 in Daughter of Earth (Smedley) I:323 in The Girl (Le Sueur) II:496–497 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) II:629–630 in Le Sueur’s work II:496–497 in Life in the Iron Mills (R. B. H. Davis) II:773–774 in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane) II:812–814 in Rubyfruit Jungle (R. M. Brown) III:1126–1127 World According to Garp, The (Irving) II:664, 665, III:1273, 1392–1394 World Below, The (S. Miller) II:882

1518

INDEX

World Enough and Time (Warren) III:1331, 1394–1395 World’s End (T. C. Boyle) I:171–172 World’s End (Sinclair) II:744, 745, III:1173 World’s Fair (Doctorow) I:364 World to Win, A (Sinclair) II:744 World War I. See also War in A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway) I:421 novels and novelists after I:vii in A Son at the Front (Wharton) III:1189, 1343 World War II. See also Holocaust; military; war in A Bell for Adano (Hersey) I:128–129, II:594–595 in The Caine Mutiny (Wouk) I:211, III:1396 in Catch-22 (Heller) I:234–235, II:582 era after (See post-World War II era) in From Here to Eternity (J. Jones) I:471–472, II:693–694 in Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) II:529–532, III:1086–1087 internment of Japanese Americans in II:970–973, 989, III:1190 in Jones’s (J.) novels II:693–694, III:1328 in Lanny Budd series (Sinclair) II:744–745 in Lee’s (C.-R.) work II:761 in The Naked and the Dead (Mailer) II:944–945, III:1328 in No-No Boy (Okada) II:971–973 novels and novelists of I:vii, III:1328 in The Painted Bird (Kosinski) II:735, III:1014–1015 in Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) III:1178–1179 in War and Remembrance (Wouk) III:1328, 1371, 1396

in When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (Brainard) I:176, III:1346–1347, 1423 in The Winds of War (Wouk) III:1327–1328, 1370–1371, 1396 in The Young Lions (Shaw) III:1412–1413 Wouk, Herman I:vii, III:1370, 1395–1397 The Caine Mutiny I:210–212, III:1370, 1395, 1396 War and Remembrance III:1327–1329, 1371, 1395, 1396 The Winds of War III:1327–1328, 1370–1372, 1395, 1396 Wreckage of Agathon, The (J. Gardner) II:481 Wright, Richard I:vii, III:1340, 1397–1399, 1419, 1420 Black Boy I:148–149, III:1397–1398, 1419 Native Son I:148, II:849, 952–953, 1008, III:1397, 1419 The Outsider II:1006–1008, III:1398 and Stein III:1207 on Studs Lonigan (Farrell) III:1225 and Walker (M.) III:1327 writers influenced by I:40, II:657, 917, III:1419 writers linked to I:400, II:847, 857, III:1037 Wright, Willard Huntington III:1308–1309. See also Van Dine, S. S. Wrightian schools III:1419, 1420 writer(s) in Absalom, Absalom (Faulkner) I:3, 4 in The American Trilogy (P. Roth) I:53–55 in Fear of Flying (Jong) I:429, 430 in The Ghost Writer (P. Roth) II:487–489 in The House on Mango Street (Cisneros) II:629–630

in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Alvarez) III:1409 in Mao II (DeLillo) II:832 in Martin Eden (London) II:844–845 in Misery (King) II:887–888 in Miss Lonelyhearts (West) II:890–891 in Morley’s work II:911 in A Moveable Feast (Hemingway) II:926–927 in The New York Trilogy (Auster) I:86, II:961–962 in Nights (H. D.) II:964–965 in The World According to Garp (Irving) III:1393 in ¡Yo! (Alvarez) III:1409, 1410 in Zuckerman Unbound (P. Roth) III:1414–1416 writing “iceberg theory” of I:422, II:585 Kingsolver on III:1056 in Misery (King) II:887–888 Wrong Thing, The (Gaitskill) II:476 Wynema: A Child of the Forest (S. A. Callahan) III:1438

X Xenogenesis series (O. E. Butler) I:202

Y Yamaguchi, Yoji III:1423 Yamanaka, Lois-Ann III:1400–1401, 1424 Blu’s Hanging I:159–161, III:1400–1401, 1424 Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers I:160, III:1362–1363, 1400, 1424 Year before Last (K. Boyle) I:170 Yearling, The (Rawlings) III:1094, 1095, 1401–1402 Year of Silence, The (Bell) I:126 Year of the French, The (Flanagan) I:448–449

Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (Cahan) I:207, 208 Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Reed) III:1100 Yellow Raft in Blue Water, A (Dorris) I:377, 378, III:1402–1404 Yellow Wallpaper, The (Gilman) I:323, II:493–494, III:1404–1405 Yerby, Frank I:vii, III:1405–1406, 1419 The Dahomean I:317–318, III:1406 Yezierska, Anzia III:1406–1408 Bread Givers I:178–179, III:1406–1407 Salome of the Tenements III:1134–1135, 1406, 1407 writers compared to II:643, III:1243 Y no se lo Tragó la Tierra (And the Earth Did Not Part) (Rivera) I:152, II:732, III:1107, 1108, 1408–1409, 1427, 1429 ¡Yo! (Alvarez) I:35, 36, III:1409–1410, 1432 Yonder Stands Your Orphan (Hannah) II:554 Yonnondio: from the Thirties (Olsen) II:992 Yoshikawa, Mako III:1424 You Can’t Go Home Again (T. C. Wolfe) III:1379 You Know Better (Ansa) I:66 You Must Remember This (Oates) II:979, III:1410–1412 Young, Charlotte, Little Duke III:1075–1076 Youngblood Hawke (Wouk) III:1370, 1396 Young Lions, The (Shaw) I:210, III:1162, 1163, 1328, 1412–1413 Young Lonigan (Farrell) III:1224, 1225 Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan, The (Farrell) III:1224, 1225, 1228 young people’s fiction. See also bildungsroman (coming-of-age novel)

INDEX The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain) as I:14 by Alger I:23–24 boys’ books I:23–24, 75 The Call of the Wild (London) I:217–218 girls’ books I:24, III:1040, 1058 by Lowry II:805 The Member of the Wedding (McCullers) as II:872–873

Monster (Myers) II:905–906 by Price (Richard) III:1074–1075 by Prose III:1078–1079 A Separate Peace (Knowles) II:733, III:1156–1157 The Story of a Bad Boy (Aldrich) and I:21 by Thomas III:1264 A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Dorris) as III:1402

Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (Campbell) I:219 Yun, Mia III:1424–1425

Z Zeke and Ned (McMurtry) II:865 Zia Summer (Anaya) I:57 Zip: A Novel of the Left and Right (Apple) I:68

1519

Zola, Émile I:162, II:477, 507, 973 Zombie (Oates) II:977, 978 Zuckerman Bound (P. Roth) I:47, 54, II:489, III:1122, 1416 Zuckerman Unbound (P. Roth) III:1122–1123, 1414–1416